Category Archives: History

Disney and the Pleasure Principle

I admire Walt Disney. It is sad that he died at a comparatively young age  the year I was born while working on plans for Disney World in Florida. His plans came to fruition five years later under the guidance of his brother Roy – who in turn died before his time in 1971 on the day he was to open the first Christmas Parade at the recently opened and renamed Walt Disney World. In all, quite a tragic beginning for the Disney family for a creation that has become the most visited theme park in the world.

I have visited this ‘world’ three times now and, much to my surprise, I don’t get bored of it. In fact, I found this last visit even more pleasurable than the previous ones. In part it is because I am in awe of a place that is almost as old as I am now and how they manage to keep it all in such good condition and running so smoothly. The logistics of the operation are immense and I didn’t, until this visit, appreciate just what is happening under the Magic Kingdom. It is also because I have great respect for those with vision and those who can inspire amazing creations that are ahead of their time. Continue reading →

Revisiting 'The Wall' – 30 years on…

1979 – the end of a tough decade in the UK which was bringing a lot of change. It’s the year I feel I became broadly self-aware and the start of a tortuous period of confused adolescence and angst ridden young adulthood.

It’s also the year that Pink Floyd released The Wall – a powerful ‘rock opera’ written by the band’s then leader Roger Waters.

One of the main tracks that gained immediate notoriety was ‘Another Brick in The Wall’ – As a teenager the lyrics ” We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control – Teacher leave them kids alone” was a powerful anthem. I still remember watching the video and performances on Top of the Pops when that track reached number one.

As a keen fan of punk music at that time, my previous knowledge of Pink Floyd was the T-shirt John Lydon of the Sex Pistols was famed for wearing – an iconic punk image of a torn Pink Floyd shirt with the words ‘I hate’ added to it. So I was predisposed to not liking the band at that time.

The more I listened to The Wall though, the more it resonated with me. Roger Waters wrote it when he felt most alienated from those around him, including his own bandmates. It was a very personal statement at the time and one that no doubt contributed to the subsequent splits in the band, with Waters and Gilmore frequently expressing that they are very different personalities. Continue reading →

Technology for Marketing and the Holy Grail

Going round in circles. Marketing gets reinvented with the frequency of the seasons...

Looking at the pattern of posts on this blog over the last few years, I would appear to be a bit of a ‘Winter blogger’. I have a couple of theories for this…

The first is that I am a bit SAD – by that I mean being prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder – but other meanings could be equally applicable 😉 – and therefore presumably I feel the need to rant and rave during the winter months and then start to lighten up a bit when the sun finally decides to appear again.

The second is that my rants and raves during the long winter months set the brain cells working furiously and by the spring I have figured out how I wish to spend the rest of the year and remain focused on that until the nights draw in again and the dull winter weather reappears.

Now that the days are getting longer again and the sun is making an occasional appearance, I feel my need for winter ranting subsiding but I can’t let spring arrive without at least another big rant 🙂 … Continue reading →

Information Management and the Theory of Everything

Information Theory was fundamental to NTL's work on digital compression in the early 1990s and also key to me being able to design and produce this industry guide using the early versions of Photoshop and Quark

The first time I became aware of the work of Claude E. Shannon and the landmark paper on Information Theory he published while working at Bell Labs in the 1940s was when I worked for NTL’s Advanced Products Division and had to try to understand the principles of digital video compression to promote the company’s innovations in digital broadcast technologies.

Shannon’s Information Theory was absolutely fundamental to the encoding, transmission and decoding processes used to make digital broadcasting a reality. It also became clearer to me at that time that Information Theory sat at the heart of everything I was involved in following the transition from analogue content creation and publishing processes to digital processes, that had begun, for me, with the desktop publishing revolution in the late 80s/early 90s and continued with the arrival and growth of the web.

Information Theory however is concerned with the mechanics of communication and the quantity and readability of the information transmitted. It is not concerned with the quality of that information, its meaning or its importance. For those processes we have what has become known as Information Management – as defined here by AIIM – a practice that has been going on in shifting forms for many decades now.

Continue reading →

I predict a riot!

I had an interesting blog debate with an ex-colleague and friend the other day about the role of social media in the events that have been playing out in the Arab countries of North Africa. The debate centred on social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, being a catalyst for these events. My view is that social media’s role is being overstated, as many of us have seen this type of thing happen before in our lives and a long time before social media became prominent. I remember the world watching in amazement as a similar domino effect played out in Eastern Europe in the late 80s and early 90s at a time when the web was just a twinkle in Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. More recently, it has been recognised that social media has been turned against the Iranian people following the Green Revolution a couple of years ago, so I really think we need to assess the catalysts and aftermath of these events with the benefit of hindsight. (note:- here is a very good ‘middle ground’ perspective on this found by John Goode, my sparring partner in this debate and also an interesting BBC piece on ‘How revolutions happen’ )

I get a sense though that even within the next couple of years, the spiritual home of the social media behemoths, like Twitter and Facebook, will experience such a degree of change that the current events in the Arab world will pale in comparison. What will be interesting is how the US people, empowered, as it is believed, by social media, react to the events as they unfold around them.

Continue reading →