Sunday, August 12, 2007

The Power of Dreams

David aged 8 with sisters


Since developing viewmagazine.tv, it's grown beyond anything I could have thought.

The blog's the same. So thank you for your company.

I write about topical, often even obscure issues that would interest my friends, peers and people around me.

I'm not as active a journalist/content person as I used to be, but things like working with Lennox Lewis on his fight with Tyson, diving with an expedition team to find WWI subs, discovering new areas of comms. on the web and what other people are doing is the sort of thing that I'd read on other blogs and I regularly do, so if any of this has caught your fancy, well, thank you.

A lot of what catches my eye is an idea about an idea, then finding its historical nuance, then looking at some form of trend extrapolation.

All this stuff we're doing has been done before, in some Victorian or should I say Darwinian guise or in a manner which wasn't clear until a critical mass of us became participants.

Then all of a sudden: the right place, right time, right everything happens. This is what Thomas Kuhn referred to as the Paradigm Shift.

You might have been the first to do video online 10 years ago, but it was way before its time and then someone else did it three years ago and presto.

Sometimes this blog is about the day's events. Isn't that what a blog is supposed to be, someone just muttered. That might have been the case, but there are now an infinite number of blogs for anything. This really is publishing made simple.

BTW I'll blog the Rugby with some footage later, plus the issue of info architecture content design.

Growing Pains
As we grow we need new shoes and clothes. Viewmagazine suffers from the same creep ( yes I get the double entendre :) ). One minute you're a size 10, next. Good Lord, you're a 14.

So it's time to make adjustments. For Viewmag, I hope will mean cleaner lines, wider pieces, more exacting video, like the recut promo on the front page, and new ways of engaging content and you.

I hope it also means at some point the idea behind Viewmag, which is: take a popular mag idea and try out hopefully good content that you'd find interested and has a bent towards the new new thing that we do, will grow much, much further beyond the concentric circle of friends.

I often recollect the skinny boy, aged 8, with the big art pad drawing pictures of planes, space ships and aliens, thinking when I grow up I'm going to buy all the chocolates in the world and fly to the moon.

My teachers report that came back said: "David is a lively child and ( blah blah blah) but has a tendency to day dream.

Not sure I'll make it to see the "man in the cheese", but dream?

That's what we have, what we do. It's what provides a bridge from the impossible world to the plausible, a streak of hope for what we might want ( Gosh David you're being a little bit too profound, loosen up) and the ability often not to take ourselves too seriously. ( Doc, I keep fallin, what does that mean?)

And the one thing we should not attempt to take from an 8 year old, or much less, is the power of dreams.

Hope you can stay around for us to dream up some new ideas.

p.s Chocolate Mmmmmm !

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