Tag : london

As one of the new recruits to the many, I thought I would introduce myself with a wee snap shot of what I have been up to in my first 2 months in the city.

London’s a great city to be working in digital/social/whateveryouliketocallit. There are lots of interesting events happening all the time, like the Clay Shirky talk we went to at the RSA a couple of days ago. 

The problem is that these events aren’t easy to keep track of. There’s always Twitter but with the real-time nature of the thing, you’re likely to miss announcements if you aren’t on the service at that particular time. I’ve also heard a few people asking around on Twitter for a calendar that lists events related to our industry, and haven’t found a suitable one yet. So I put together a list of one, which you can access here. 

Tim recently pointed me in the direction of a Facebook group called Secret London. It currently has 188k members. This isn’t entirely surprising until you realise that it was only created 2 weeks ago. The grou is for “… Londoners to inspire Londoners by sharing the secrets of the city”. There’s a very nice London-for-Londoners feel to it. Of course there’s a load of spam but the group’s creator Tiffany Philippou is working hard to keep it clean. Tiffany is now crowdsourcing the development and design of a new site from a temporary blog.

I’ve been thinking about why it has become so successful so quickly, especially considering the enormous glut of travel-related sites that exist. For me there are four things that make it work.

This morning I took part in a transatlantic blogger meet-up in the Martini Lounge (alas, not a one in sight, though it was 9am) at the new Arch Hotel.

The event was organised by our friend Jeremy at Transatlanticism, a New York-based organisation we’ve gotten to know through our work on Metrotwin.

Metrotwin is about creating connections, through people and places, between New York and London. This morning’s chat delivered hugely on that premise, so much so that I thought I would introduce some new additions to my transatlantic universe.

Today, London saw its first snowfall of this winter season. As the white powder from the sky changed into sizable, more distinct flakes of snow, everyone in our office got excited and many (including me) moved to the windows for a few minutes to witness it. Now, on one level, it isn’t anything special, but on another much more wide-ranging level, there’s something about Nature’s magic that draws everyone to it – that makes people go ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah!’.

British Airways wanted to follow up on what Metrotwin started by extending the concept of twinning to their second most popular route after London-New York, namely London-Mumbai. Except we decided to go with a blog this time, for various reasons, the most significant of which is that India’s blogosphere is an extremely active, growing place and a blog would be a great way to document the best of both cities while attracting the right audience at the same time.

So, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may recall that a bunch of us from Made By Many went to see Seth Godin speak in London a short while ago.

A fellow typographer has created a great series of postcards that show the subliminal messages sent out when using different typefaces.

With tongue firmly in cheek, some of the postcards are absolutely spot on. Who can doubt that Comic Sans isn’t the hand of God or that the typeface Stencil isn’t Rambo 4?

Okay, this is the third and almost the last of my posts about who I met in NYC. Not for Tourists is an independent publisher of guidebooks. They do a whole load of US cities in addition to the one that doesn’t sleep, including LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Washington, Atlanta and Philadelphia and more. They’re launching the London edition in October. They are the very epitome of an indie NY publishing company and they get the Web. They get it to such an extent that they give all the content away – as in, you can get a PDF of everywhere they cover. As founder Rob Tallia says, “You either pay in money or printer cartridges and paper”. We had a really fun time with Rob and Craig and I look forward to steak and booze next time. ;-)