Some time back I heard of a group of people on the internet who were spending their time creating graphs of songs titles and lyrics and posting them online – in fact there was a whole song chart pool on Flickr that was collecting them all. As a closet geek with a passion for music, the idea appealed to me hugely and I found myself laughing out loud at a couple. Some stood out for me particularly – here are two:
(if you don’t get them, then feel free to choose another exciting post on this blog to read, the rest won’t make that much sense to you!)
Anyway, at the time I thought it would be fun to create a couple, and I promised myself that when I had time I would give it a stab. That was a year ago, and I finally got round to doing it. So here are a couple of my own:
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Tags: graph, meme, microsoft, music, powerpoint, song lyrics
Posted by Tony on Oct 29, 2008 in
Thought Leader blogs
Every time you turn the television on these days you get more talking heads crunching numbers about the US Elections – whispering urgently about who is going to win which states and why. I’m feeling a little left out, so I thought I would do my own analysis.
In the internet age buzz is everything. Heroes are made and broken online, and those who breathe the rarefied air at the top of the social media stratosphere are the kingmakers.
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Tags: barack obama, britney spears, elections, john mccain, polling
Posted by Tony on Oct 26, 2008 in
Thought Leader blogs
It is either slightly disconcerting or enormously flattering when you arrive at a hotel for the first time and the receptionist greets you by name. In the case of my arrival at the Rapid Waters Hotel (and I use all three of those words advisedly) 29km outside of Potchefstroom, it could only be the former. The whole place has an air of being somewhere that no one has stayed at for weeks. Getting there involves a slow crawl along a pockmarked, gravel road that winds through a trail of rusty farm debris and dilapidated houses. In anticipation of my arrival, the staff have probably been gazing at the sole entry in their booking register every morning, lovingly running a finger over the inked curves of my name, mouthing each syllable, tasting the delicious prospect of, well, a guest. And so it was, after a long and dusty drive from Johannesburg, that I stepped across the threshold. A flicker of relief across the lady’s face. I hadn’t let her down. “Anthony Lankester” she told me as I pushed open the jangly door, stepped over two mangy poodles and tried to decipher her outline from under a cloud of smoke (hers, not mine).
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Tags: arts, festivals, marketing, music, sponsorship, travel
Posted by Tony on Jun 1, 2008 in
Thought Leader blogs
I don’t know if you saw this recently — but it’s an actual screen capture of President Mbeki’s diary, as published on government’s own website. I wish I was making it up, but I’m not:
(Source: http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/diary.asp?show=President%20Mbeki)
No, you nerd, the important thing here is not that he only scored a Google pagerank of 4/10 for importance (relative to Jacob Zuma whose Wikipedia page scores 6/10, making him 20% more important). It’s the fact that his official diary is telling us what we’ve all known for years. He’s not doing anything.
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Tags: al gore, green, politics, thabo mbeki
Posted by Tony on Jan 16, 2008 in
Thought Leader blogs
What if we could represent South African politics visually? What if we could take a snapshot of M&G investigative reporter Stefaans Brümmer’s brain? Would it look like a plate of multicoloured spaghetti? A box of rubber bands? Or would it look like this
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Posted by Tony on Jan 6, 2008 in
Thought Leader blogs
Spare a thought for the family of Andrew Olmsted. You may not know him, or even have heard of him, but you’re about to. This is what was posted on his blog site over the weekend:
“This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits … I’m dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.)”
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Tags: 2008, andrew olmstead
Posted by Tony on Nov 8, 2007 in
Thought Leader blogs
On Wednesday night I went to see Jethro Tull in concert. Not because I’m a fan, but because my wife is and one of my favourite things to do is go to live concerts. Another is to keep my wife happy, so this worked all round.
In fact, even saying I’m not a big fan of theirs is a bit disingenuous. I’m a complete non-fan who would have been hard pressed to hum a single Tull tune. I don’t actively dislike them; they have just never featured on my radar. I dimly recall my parents owning an album, and I think I saw a video of theirs on Pop Shop in the early 1980s, but that’s the extent of my contact with the band.
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Posted by Tony on Oct 21, 2007 in
Thought Leader blogs
I’m tired of hearing how I need to play a role in fighting crime. In the wake of Lucky Dube’s shooting last week, President Mbeki said we should “act together as a people to confront this terrible scourge of crime”. The Ministry of Arts and Culture said in a statement that “crime is a South African problem and every one of us in this country must play our role in fighting it”.
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Tags: crime, spin, thabo mbeki
