November, 2011 Archive

Stephen Fry Interview for Pioneers of Digital

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Personal and career highlights collided last week as I was lucky enough to spend a whole 45 minutes with actor, writer, presenter and digital commentator, Stephen Fry, interviewing him for the book I’m co-writing called Pioneers of Digital.

I’ve been a monumental fan since the Fry & Laurie and Blackadder days, and have met him a couple of times (see Steve Clayton’s memories of one such occasion here) through his dapper business partner, Andrew Sampson.

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We met at the Groucho Club in Soho’s Dean Street, all for the book I’m writing with Paul Springer called Pioneers of Digital.

Chatting about his first memories of the internet, Stephen shared some personal stories about the early days of the web. We learned about how his site www.StephenFry.com came about and this history of his foray into social media with his blog “blessays”, and how he got into Twitter and changed the media landscape forever in the UK with one photo from a stuck lift.

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Extremely knowledgeable, frank and passionate, Stephen drove our discussion into areas perfect for profiling him in the book as a definite Pioneer of Digital.

We’ll be releasing some of the excerpts early next year.

Worth waiting for……….believe me!

Maggie’s First Laugh…..at her Daddy!

Getting Maggie ready for bed the other day in Cambridge, she just started cracking up.

Not the last time she’ll be laughing “at” her father methinks! Let’s hope there’s a good measure of “with” smattered in with all those priceless giggles over years to come!

Winking smile

Photo: Seattle Skyline at Sunrise

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As we set off for our trip to Victoria BC on the Clipper, I ran upstairs on deck and took these dramatic photos of the Seattle skyline.

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Quite by chance, I managed to get the entire vista just as the sun was peeking over the top of the buildings with my Panasonic Lumix G2 camera.

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I also whipped out my Windows Phone and snapped the above…

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….using the fab Apict App to create the above.

So many people who don’t live here seem to think Seattle is a dreary, rainy city. These photos show it’s not!

Book Review: The Changing MO of the CMO

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I first met MaryLee Sachs in 2009, when she brought Twitter’s Biz Stone to the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.

Working for PR giant Hill and Knowlton at the time, her team kindly let me chat to Biz about Twitter’s dizzy rise to success (worth a retrospective look at now given their current ubiquity), and then I got a few minutes with  MaryLee to get her thoughts on PR and social media, and how public relations was being seen more and more part of the marketing mix.

Fast-forward two years and MaryLee is back in Cannes launching her new book The Changing MO of the CMO which seeks to explain how, “the convergence of brand and reputation is disrupting the marketing function.”

Pioneers of Digital Book Contract Signing!

So we got the final contracts through for the book I’m writingPioneers of Digital – with Paul Springer.

It just happened to be my 40th birthday when I signed next to my name, so Ashley helped capture the moment on video with the wriggly help of little Maggie.

Posterity aside, now the actual work begins. We have a deadline of 29th of February to deliver the tome.

Anyone know any good  online touch-typing courses? Winking smile

P.S. Follow Pioneers of Digital on Twitter.

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