2007

Guide to social networks for creativity (or ‘I finally found a use for LinkedIn’)

This lengthily-titled (and length) post is about two things – creativity and social networks. Like many of my peers (and other self-proclaimed digital experts), social networks are both an intrinsic part of ‘building your online brand’, but also a neat thing to play around with, whether you’re a cyberspace digital geek, or a real-world social networker (who would have thought digital technology could connect two such diverse groups?).

So here’s my subjective take on the three I’ve used the most – LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace – and how they work (or not) for me to promote the different strands of my business.

Particularly since the meteoric rise of Facebook, I’ve come to question, what exactly is the point of LinkedIn? It is designed to: ‘strengthen and extend your existing network of trusted contacts’. When I first used it in 2004 it seemed well cool – freelancers or job-hunters could sponge up thousands of new contacts to boost their work, working on the ‘bow tie’ theory that it’s not your ‘inner circle’ of immediate friends, colleagues and family that get you work, it’s the much bigger grouping on the ‘outer circle’.

The problem is, LinkedIn doesn’t really DO anything – other social networks are about learning, connecting, joking and sharing – whereas the interactions of LinkedIn seem to be quite limited to just linking and…well that’s it. At least you don’t need to submit your ‘links’ work email now to connect (thus defeating the point of having a network which sits outside of your current job and transcends to past and future). You can pay to ‘get connected’ to the CEO of Sony Entertainment or whoever – but why would he/she want to read your email any more than if you’d sent it through their corporate website?

I conclude, LinkedIn is off the boil, its time has past. Even people I know who are very well connected tend to stick at 100-150 contacts. Mine is a mere pathetic 50 and no more people I know are using it. A network needs common identity and shared purpose, it can’t exist for its own sake. I guess the main problem with LinkedIn is it doesn’t feel very…well..friendly. It’s all about making ‘connections’, but not strengthening the human interaction behind those connections. I’d rather respond to a ‘thanks for the add’ friend request than a request to ‘get linked in’ – the call is not compelling. That said, it’s the most private of social networks and a great way to store all your email contacts in one place.

However lately I had a new revelation: you can use LinkedIn Answers to ask all your network, or indeed the whole community, a question – which is superb from a focus group/user-testing perspective. The questions tend to be quite highbrow, of the ‘How do we solve the problems of the Middle East?’ type or ‘Do CEOs of European VC backed technology companies get the necessary support, resources and time to succeed?‘ (hmm..axe to grind?). It’s useful for the question poser, but also a good brain-sharpener on those moments of downtime for CEOs of European VC-backed technology companies. Expect on average 15-20 answers from the global community within the week.

I answered an interesting question posed by James Stuart: What does creativity mean to you? Global answers ranged from:
“Creativity is the blending of imagination with reality.” (Marc Aniballi, Creative Technology Strategist)
“Creativity is an outcome of simple space and courage. The space that one needs to imagine, and then the courage to do.” (Abe Kasbo, CEO Versoni Worldwide)
“The ability to see things that can’t be seen yet and may never be” (Stephane Mot, Author and Chief Propagandist)
Through to…
“Creativity is what you do when your fly won’t zip up and your first-date is at the door.” (Edwin Hung, COO Utopia Printing)

I think what was interesting was the varied interpretations of the word creativity – some saw it as a force for innovation in business, some self-expressionism and an intrinsic part of the soul, others as a unique activity in itself (e.g. as in the ‘creative’ industries).

And look who won the swot prize for best answer

Anyway, here’s my LinkedIn profile – please become ‘linked’ to me as I need some more links/friends!

Facebook

I got into Facebook a few week back and, like many new converts, am hooked. The premise is, it’s like MySpace for students and (not really quite) grown-ups, where you link with your real life college friends and share photos, news, entertainment recommendations and sometimes turn them into a zombie (in the form of 1000s of games and silly plug-in applications you can install with one click for maximum goofing around).

What’s most amazing about how Facebook’s technology influences the community, is that every action you take, you send out a slug trail (or feed) to all of your Facebook friends (aka your real friends) telling them you’ve joined a group, made a new friend, posted an announcement etc. This is an amazingly intuitive way of sharing fun, light bits of transient knowledge (a bit like Twitter, which I see as being part and parcel of the Facebook type of social networks) – particularly as the feeds only stay live for a couple of days – thus the need to log back in regularly to see what’s happening in your personalised community.

Rather than write a formal email requiring a formal response, I can post a ‘hows tricks?’ email to a friend or colleague through their Facebook email or write on their ‘wall’ (which will be visible to all, but you can only see the reply if you’re friends with both people corresponding), making communication more light, fluid, informal and fun. Of course, living your life so publicly can have big repercussions in protecting your identity (one in five employers admit to using Facebook to vet potential employees’ suitability).

Today, I found out that one friend in my locality is going to my local for Sunday lunch (handy if I wasn’t stuck 300 miles away due to the floods), some guys I used to be in a band with are doing a gig, and an old friend is ‘no longer married’ and a work contact is ‘now single’ (the latter may be a result of a change to their profile as oppose to a final decree.). So here are my five tips tips for using Facebook:

If you value your privacy very highly, don’t use it
If you value privacy quite highly, don’t use a photo or join a regional network, and only link with people you really know and trust
Don’t put up anything you aren’t proud of doing, especially photos, or write about places or things (like work) you don’t want some people to know you’ve been to – i.e. keep it light!
Learn how to delete stuff off your mini-feed (grey cross) if you change something (like joining the Patridge Family Appreciation group) but you don’t want everyone to know.
Try and create an identity where you are around open people and can be open about the kind of person you are and the live you lead (desirable, but obviously not always possible).

The language, tone and main user groups for Facebook is under 25s US college students and alumni (e.g. how to I say I’ve worked as a contact/associate with someone but not at the same company?) – so how does it work as a business tool? As well as the ‘light touch’ informal contact, you could download the Happy Hour application and buy your real life contact a virtual drink – handy if you’re 100s of miles away! You could also pose a question to your group, as you can in LinkedIn, but it’s better to keep it more of the fun and frivolous rather than deep and meaningful (I was bitten by a zombie by a digital media colleague!) – and be careful you can guess your contacts share a similar humour. You can gain a deeper, richer idea of your clients/contacts through learning what they are up to – what their hobbies are, what films they like etc. It’s legal snooping! As a business tool, it’s better for younger people as oppose to more traditional colleagues or formal relationships, although, the Vice Chancellor of University of Bristol tells me he has a Facebook profile, and the recent contest for Deputy Leader of the Labour Party was described in the press as a ‘facebook off’ for popularity. For me, there needs to be more critical mass among my business contacts and more business-focused applications for it to be more useful, but it is growing.

Here’s my Facebook profile (or ‘I am not a number’).

MySpace

The mother-ship of all social networks, MySpace (aka MurdochSpace) is not just a website, it’s a terms used to describe a whole generation – the previous Generation X. But you’re not included. Except maybe you are. It accounts for 80% of all social networks traffic, is rumoured to have over 100 million worldwide users (though typically only 20% may be active at one time) , and was valued at $580 million when bought by NewsCorps in 2005. It’s total value could reach $15 billion within years, though on paper (or should that be wires?).

Money aside – what’s it for? Think: the social network with multimedia. You create a profile or identity (typically a pseudonym) and start off with a friend they give you called Tom (ditch him quick or he’ll skew your number of connection profiles). Then you search and hit ‘add to friends’ to connect with your real friends – and if you like, the bands, actors or people you admire (sometimes run by their labels, sometimes by fans or as parodies) and even make friends will people the world over you don’t yet know. You can upload, share and comments on videos, pictures and music and ‘tag’ your profile (like a teenager would their bedroom) with multimedia badges of interest, or ‘pimp my myspace‘ with some extra colour, backgrounds and HTML.

But where MySpace has come into its own is as a means of promoting new music – Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen claim to have been ‘created’ by MySpace, but remember they both had significant record deals at the tim. The website provided a good platform for promoting their music, cheaply, to an international audience.

I’m a musician and have a profile for my music on MySpace. As a musician, it’s indispensable. I like it because I know I can check out a band and always get the same ‘ingredients’ – four songs, pictures, a list of influences and friends, and a means of getting in touch – I can add or read comments if I want. (Although I wish people didn’t abuse their profiles with nasty background images and bad design – there’s no accounting for people’s tastes ) It saves going through a hard to navigate band website to find all that. I can ‘re-discover’ musical artists from the past, and new ones. It’s enabled me to hook up with ‘friends of friends’ and meet old bands I’ve played with or know from before in London. The downside is, lots of requests from people with tenuous connections musically, and I do like to check out all the requests I get to see whether I think they’re suitable or related enough to be a friend – I have my own ‘brand’ to consider and it becomes a time-consuming activity which may be distracted from me doing more direct forms of marketing.

From a commercial point of view, I haven’t found MySpace great for upselling music – I’ve only sold one CD through a MySpace contact. It tends to be a bit of a ‘free lunch’ scenario where people want it all for free. And the ‘rot’ has already set in with opportunistic pluggers using ‘friends’ profiles to post adverts (often dubious porn type content too) or general meaningless self promotion or the ubiquitous ‘thanks for the add’ message (post one of these and I will delete it!).

MySpace is much more about the mass connectivity than the more intimate experience of Facebook, it’s about a sense of playfulness, parody, and what I’d glibly call ‘youth’. But what’s the business benefit? I think it’s limited for most – if you have a youth brand (music venue, band, T-Shirt manufacturing, photographer) it’s an invaluable way of making links but the connection isn’t ‘deep’, it’s very surface level. The commissioning editors of Channel 5 all have MySpace profiles and other business figures – but it can be hard to control – competitors could post negative comments on your message board. If you can work the network and build up a significant volume of ‘leads’, you can message them through MySpace in a less intrusive way than email – but you’ll need extra software to navigate MySpace’s crumbling, poor and sluggish interfaces (it’s stuck in Web 1.9 rather than 2.0 and above as an online experience – frustrating). You can’t control your brand through the platform (one reason big advertisers have stayed away), but others can abuse it – my friends include Prince Harry and Cillit Bang man (from the advert), who has more friends than Gordon Brown (tag line: ‘don’t you wish your MP was hot like me?). Use MySpace as a platform if you have a product to showcase or you just want to use it as a means of ‘bookmarking’ interesting stuff.

Social networking: make it work for you

So these are my experiences – what about you? Let me know how you find these sites for your own business connections. Of course, I’m not being remiss by missing out YouTube, Flickr or Last FM etc. – while these are major social network sites, I see them more as platforms than communities – you go to YouTube to watch a video, not make a friend or business lead.

I don’t think the perfect tool is yet how there for business – but perhaps there never will be. Web 2.0 to 3.0 is much more about forming niche communities of interest, and perhaps that will be through existing portals and brands – e.g. Internet Movie Database (IMDB) builds a community around the existing names in its catalogue.

To make a social network effective for you, remember it is not ‘free’, like all contacts, you have to put in significant time into searching, seeking, cajoling and mining your friends’ friends contact to increase your network. But there’s no point in having 50,000 ‘friends’ as many MySpacers do (mainly through software like Badder Adder), each connection has to be meaningful and regularly nourished with extended contact – on and off line.

Not all social websites are for you – decide your goals, maybe as a means to ‘bookmark’ some work colleagues (they may stay with the network longer than their job) that is as fine as using one to announce your next divorce…

Worktech North: Digital cities and the future of work conference, June 29th 2007, Salford

This one day event, Unwired’s Worktech North, brought to the shores of Salford Quays, Manchester c/o the North West Development Agency and MediaCity:UK, explored a futurologists and near futurologists vision of how digital technologies will evolve cities, and specifically our workplaces. Speakers from world-leading digital city projects in Spain, Finland, USA and UK gave us an insight into the workplace technologies of the near-future and new digital design for work and living.

Michael Joroff, a guru among many from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, started off by telling us:

A city is a city.
A ‘second city’ is a city in Second Life.
A ‘third city’ is a connection between the physical and virtual, like a phone call connects the physical using virtual technology. A world of ‘bricks and clicks’ – both are needed, yet some things you can only do in one and some things only in both places.

‘Media city’ becomes not physical but a place in your mind.

Ambient technology, or pervasive technology, is experienced any time, any place. Wifi allows you to respond to your environment – in the future broadband/wifi will become the norm, cities without it will be disadvantaged.

What the media city will look like:

Digital cities will have experimental street lighting – bright for single women, playful colours when the pubs close.

Responsive buildings with “skins” will respond to their inhabitants – depending on volume, density, time of day etc.

Interactive transport – delivery based on demand rather than a rigid timetable.

Interactive kiosks – build around communities of interest.

Also permeable walkways, interactive buildings with interactive display screens.

Then let’s all have a ‘flash mob party’ – it happened in Feb 07 when 300o people arrived through a bluetooth message in Paddington to come down to the station, tune in to a channel and dance, silently, listening to the DJ playing on their iPods.

Zaragoroza digital mile

Jose Carlos Arnal told us about the Digital Mile project.

Zaragoza is Spain’s 6th largest city. Spain’s ambition is for 50Mb connectivity – the ‘digital divide’ in the future will be between not the ‘have’s’ and the ‘have not’s’ but between high and low speeds of connectivity – everyone will need to be digitally literate in the 21st century.

The Digital Mile, developed with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, incorporates pervasive media into all parts of the public realm in an experiment to enable technology to make the space more useful, enjoyable, playful, and colour the user’s mood.

Permeated by a central digital walkway, virtual waterfalls and interactive fountains are triggered by commands. Intelligent street lighting adjusts according to time, day and artistic expression. Street furniture pratically displays timetables, menus, parking availability.

Kari Raina then talked about another future city in Arabianranta (Helsinki Virtual Village), a residential area which the Helsinki authorities want to transform into a leading centre for design and industry before the decade end. Then there will be 10,000 residents, 8,000 jobs and 6,000 students there. It is part of a European network of living labs. Raina claims there is a need for political and business leaders to have buy in and believe in the benefits of investing in the digital city.

Each household appoints an eHousemanager prior to moving onto the site and six universities and technical colleges in the city worked together to produce content. Apartments all have 10Mb broadband installed, there is a household of mentally disabled people – it’s a true social experiment in an inclusive, digital community. People are inspired to come here to share the experience.

Philip Vanhoette from Plantronics and Philip Ross from Cordless Group talked about “Technology in the Digital Age”.

Vanhouette argues that broadband is essential – like hot water…or loo roll.

Terrifyingly, email represents 40% of all our communications, taking up a minimum of 2 hours a day (10 years a lifetime!). Of which 1/3 are irrelevant, 1/3 are important, 1/3 are essential.

Microsoft’s Powerpoint is 20 years old – some sectors (like sales) spend 50% of their time reading, preparing and presenting with it.

Hard rules (from Ross’s 2006 book “Space to Work – Space Strategies for Knowledge Workers” – Jeremy Myerson and Phillip Ross):

Presentations sent to everyone 24 hours before meeting

Bonuses for short meetings

Red light messenger – switch off more regularly, don’t be ‘always on’

Comprising of a wheel in 4 quadrants, put simply, spaces to work break down into:

Academy (colleagues) HIGH VISIBLE Agora (customers)

Lodge (family) live/work LOW VISIBLE Guild (peers) collaborative

The UK has too many ‘landscape’ open plan offices – too many distractions and too loud.

A nomadic worker’s dream: cheap/free wifi and a quiet lounge.

Philip Ross continued. MySpace has 480 million users, but Murdoch is a digital immigrant not a digital native.

Work is changing:

1 in 4 children have a web page

1 in 2 people have worked for their company less than 5 years

A new blog is created every second

2.7 billion google searches performed daily

The number of SMS sent daily exceed population of the planet

Reading The Times for one week contains more knowledge than a 16th century person learnt in their lifetime

The speed of knowledge doubles every 72 hours

Half of what you are taught on your degree is out of date by the end of 1st year

33 million in US use mobile to surf web

By 2011 there will be 4 billion mobile phones

By 2050, a £500 computer will be more powerful than the entire human species

Not to scare you or anything.

The solution?
The semantic web – FUSE – Find, Use, Share, Expand

You cannot control, only improve. Life and work is a continual Beta (like Google, everything in perpetual Beta). Google is the most valuable brand in the world at $80 billion.

Digital cities are about interconnecting objects – in the future devices will talk to each other.

Pervasive internet/ubiquitous computing/machine-to-machine communications – all terms for “the internet of things”.

RFID – they now build 1.7 billion units a year, at just 4 cents a piece

RFID – digital mousetrap in Wembley Stadium

RFID – food products, log on to web to see what’s in your fridge

RFID – your washing machine – knows what clothes you’ve put in, the machine does washing automatically

RFID – Walmart replace the barcode with RFID tags

Clive Wilkinson, one of the world’s leading workplace architects, took the mantle with his talk on “Creative Space at Work”.

Workplace needs to be fit for the IDEA, to advance the PRODUCTION economy.

Small company = extended family
Large company = a community, with complex problems

Planning ideas he helped to deliver:

WIRED magazine – ‘slinky planning’ – ‘leaking’, creates neighbourhoods

Chiata – advertising ‘village’ – 500 people on one floor, creatives next to ‘central park’, basketball court, ‘main street’

Palotta – office made of used shipping containers

Mother (London) – started as 6 people at the kitchen table, which grew and grew… now UK’s No. 1 ad agency, big planks of kitchen tables. 4 week ‘random rotation’ of desks.

Google HQ project
Objectives:

1 – Circulation

2 – Enclosed meeting space

3 – Network learning

4 – Work/life balance

“hot” areas – community, louder, social

“cold” areas – private, studious

They created permeable spaces/zones:

Meeting tree – permanent

Slinky zone – temporary

Service zone – on demand

Club house – always there

Frank Duffy from DEGW (author of “The New Office”) chaired the concluding panel discussion on “Creating the Digital Workplace”.

Duffy gave an insightful overview of the history of workplace design. Workplaces are ‘mini cities’.

21st century office = security, sustainability, serendipity – the networked office – modular

20th century Taylorist Office – destroying guilds and workplace, creating the production line. Control – people in their place. Towerblocks – hierarchical – developer led

Social Democratic Office (post WWII) – shared spaces

19th century, Bank of England – a walled ‘fortress’ but with public places for clients to walk which became an attraction

Business imperatives drive design – potential exceeded by measurables (the easiest things to measure are usually the least important?)

In the future, patterns of work and usage of cities/places will become more variable (varying density) and more permeable.

Chris Kane, Head of Workplace at BBC and leading the BBC’s input into MediaCity:UK talked more about the project and showed a rather overblown video about how great it will all be when it’s finished. Kari Raina earlier told us Salford was port of England, MediaCity will be the portal of England.

A Media City needs to holistic and mix A grade with B, C and D office space. It needs to be comfortable, in variance to its inhabitants, from luxury to rugged depending on what/whom.

Buildings should be ‘future proof’, to change in the future, internal more important than external architecture.

In conclusion, many of the ideas and designs discussed today were futuristic, dazzling and almost unbelievable – were it not for the fact that they are already happening. It seems a long way from reality that media cities and advanced workplace technologies will be implemented by anything but the most leading edge companies and most progressive (and wealthy) town planners. Despite a recent trade mission by Arts Council West Midlands, Linz is still a long way from Coventry. And when it comes to civic design on a grand scale, the political buy-in and funds need to be in place – a hard battle for many British cities tackling great needs in housing, education and economic change.

South West Creative Summit, 27th June 2007

This week, the Creative Industries team at South West Regional Development Agency (where I’m currently working) hosted an event called the South West Creative Summit in Bristol. The event was due to co-ordinate with the launch of the Department of Culture Media and Sport‘s Creative Economy Programme, but, as a week in politics goes, it was all change. The expected Green Paper has been delayed until the autumn, but instead a weighty doorstopper tomb called “Staying Ahead: The Economic Performance of the UK’s Creative Industries” by Will Hutton and the Work Foundation came out on June 25th – which of course no one (including guest speaker Phil Clapp from DCMS) had read yet.

The report has eight recommendations for developing the UK’s as the leading global hub for Creative Industries. Read a 3-minute potted summary and points. More on this when I’ve read the tomb myself, currently guiltily sitting on my desk. It’ll be interesting to see how much is taken into the Green Paper (a discussion proposal), which is rumoured will never become a White Paper (policy recommendation) – but at least we’ve had a good debate about our own vision for the creative industries in the meantime.

The other change of player was the throning of Gordon Brown as PM on 27th June – which gave an interesting slant to the preceedings and, in my mind, asks more questions about how long Creative Industries will be a key priority for government – the new broom and all that. Still, Hutton’s report claims that the UK Creative Industries are as important to the economy as the finance sector, clearly talking the former-Chancellor’s language.

So against this backdrop, 150 delegates, mainly from the South West region’s public sector partners, with some leading business directors, met up to get all ‘gun-ho’ about the potential for the creative economy of the region. A number of the partners had been curious/confused about what the event’s purpose was. Assuming the main target was impressing the powers-that-be at the Development Agency itself (with speeches by its Chief Executive, Jane Henderson, and Chair, Juliet Williams) – the event was a tour-de-force. Secondly, it was an opportunity to draw together all the partners to think about strengthening and morale building ‘Team South West’ and putting this ‘weird shaped’ (to quote Tom Fleming) region on the map, and to celebrate was The Guardian have called ‘the cool, creative South West’.

The night before, a welcome reception was held at the sumptous surroundings of the Royal West of England Academy, where 50 years of the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol were celebrated, with speeches by department head Neil Nightingale (yes, really!) and its co-founder and first producer Tony Soper. Through their anecdotes and an impressive showreel, it was amazing to see how much the wildlife film industry had changed since the 1950s when novice nature enthusiasts took out camera to shoot hours of grainy black and white footage. Now, shows for international audiences like Planet Earth, are produced for a multi-platform, multi-media world (with multi-million pound budgets!) with the latest cutting-edge technologies, making images that would have been unthinkable in 1957. As Bristol is home to 25% of the world’s natural history tv output, and significant events like Wildscreen Festival and ARKive (education archive), it shouldn’t be underestimated how such a significant ‘hub’ can have an impact on Bristol – both in terms of influencing content and themes, creating spin-out companies, and the use of digital technology in TV production.

The main day featured many impressive keynote speakers:

David Kester (Director of the Design Council) told us South West businesses invested above the average in design, with 70% using design for communications, and 40% for digital. Prince Albert had a vision for the Great Exhibition, linking the superb Victorian designers with manufacturing. The Design Council’s Designing Demand programme seeks to build these links to teach business how to maximise on design. Today, the design industry employs 185,000 people and contributes £11.5 billion to the UK economy. 90% of the environmental impact of a product is determined at design stage, so creativity can have an impact on both sustainability and productivity.

Andrew Curry (Director of the Henley Centre HeadlightVision) showed us a vision of the coming shape of the creative economy. In the 1980s, media was about consumption, in the 1990s it was about choice, and in the noughties it’s about creation. There are new means of exploring content through digital media and the media itself is becoming more valueless – Metro is the fastest growing international newspaper and it’s given away free.

What futorologist Alvin Toffler in 1980 called the ‘prosumer’ is now User-Generated Content. According to the 1999 book The Cluetrain Manifesto, Markets are now ‘conversations’ between society, business and consumers. Curry showed us the errors of putting the brand in the hands of the consumer to mash-up via a misguided Chevy Tahoe advert. The gas-guzzling superbrand’s open platform became a protesting environmentalists’ wet dream.

Web 1.0 was about connecting desktop to desktop, Web 2.0 browser to browser, and Web 3.0 connecting the virtual with the physical. ‘Fan fiction’ – engaging before, after and during the event (most significantly through TV web forums) – fan responses, mash-ups and parodies will become more commonplace, which will have implications for copyright and ownership for brand and content owners. If you ‘ban’ fan fiction, you will alienate your audience. Andrew showed us a fab Harry Potter, parody video – ‘the mysterious ticking noise‘.

Anthony Lilley (Chief Executive, Magic Lantern Productions) talked about when public service meets interactive media. Today, a 14-year-old doesn’t know a world without internet, tv without remote controls, or a world without console games. Second Life has 25,000 users in it at one time, which isn’t yet a force for change but is a useful ‘focus group’ for testing ideas. The drivers for change are choice, control, conversations, community (and anything else beginning with c). Innovators needs to build risk into the start of production – quality is better than meeting delivery deadlines (Windows Vista case in point) and work out how to measure impacts not outputs.

Jane Henderson (Chief Executive of South West RDA), presented her vision for ‘changing the world a bit by changing this bit of the world’. Overall, emphasing how commited the Agency is to supporting the infrastructure and change needed to grow the South West’s creative industries, even though it challenges the usual government ways of working. (At this point, I realised my efforts to ‘sex up’ her speech may have not quite hit the mark. ‘Hot Fuzz’s post-modern mash up’ may have sounded better on paper!).

Chris Powell (Chair of NESTA) rounded of the keynote speeches. Although the UK ‘s creative industries employs 1 million directly and 800,000 creative people are within non-creative businesses, the weakness is that their growth links to the overall strength of the economy – in good times, people buy creativity, in bad times they don’t, so the industry can yo-yo. The iPod is 4% design and manufacture, and 96% experiential. Creative industries sell experiences and lifestyle, but every other country in the world now see them as a key to their success and think they are good at it too, so our global competition is fierce!

The Afternoon was taken by workshop sessions on creative places, knowledge transfer, skills, new markets, and digital media, for which there are some interesting supporting papers online and some summaries to follow (when I pull my finger out )

Finally, Nick Capaldi (Chief Executive of Arts Council England, South West) roused and caroused the ‘pledges’ from all partners and businesses as to what they would contribute to the region’s creative economy. Most were generic rather than specific or transformational, but it was a good means of drawing the spirit of everyone together among the collective branding and vision of the event – ‘create, engage, transform’.

Worktech North: Digital cities and the future of work conference, June 29th 2007, Salford

What the media city will look like:

South West Creative Summit, 27th June 2007

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