I may be incredibly complicated when it comes to everything else (life, random allergies, how I drink my tea, curious neuroses, superpowers, musical preferences etc), but when it comes to sandwiches, I just want things to be simple.

I want my sandwich to consist of:

• some bread (not too stodgy and not too stale)
• a little lubricating spread
• a single filling (not too soggy and not too fatty, and probably fairly boring)

And optionally:

• a portion of accompanying vegetable (or fruit, if you’re one of those weirdos that insists a tomato is a fruit but wouldn’t DREAM of putting it in a fruit salad)
• and/or a dollop of some form of condiment (to add flavour)

and preferably, I’d like the whole thing wrapped up in not too much packaging (recycled or recyclable if poss), costing a reasonable sum (£2ish?) and freshly made.

Containing or conveying matter could be bread, a baguette, a roll or bap (Which do you say? Is there a difference?) a wrap, a fork or chopsticks. Principal filling could be cheese, ham, chicken, tuna, salmon…something else involving simple, strong flavours. The rest is entirely optional: lubricant (Spread? Butter? Olive oil?), additional filling (something else from the first list, or lettuce, cucumber, tomato, etc) and condiment (Mustard? Mayo?) I can take or leave depending on taste, season or availability. Just keep it simple, dammit.

Is that too much to ask?

Well, apparently, yes.

For the last few years, I’ve noticed a creeping obsession among the sandwich-vendors of our nation’s capital and high street to add all sorts of random stuff to their lunchtime staples, turning what might otherwise be a simple, beautiful, tasty thing into something utterly fussy and overcomplicated.

Some sandwiches I spotted today and jotted down in my trusty go-everywhere notepad:

• Oak-roasted Wiltshire ham and mature English Cheddar cheese on multigrain white bread with tenderleaf lettuce and English mustard mayo dressing
• Chicken, mango, fruit chutney, roasted almonds, mayo and rocket leaves on wholemeal bread
• Sustainably-sourced Scottish salmon and fresh watercress with lime dressing on soft wheat tortilla
• Brie, grape and cranberry sauce with mixed salad leaves on white bloomer
• Marinated chicken breast mixed with Caesar dressing, Italian matured cheese, tomatoes and salad leaves on wholegrain bread

Forget about preservatives and flavourings - I just want a sandwich with no added verbs and nouns.
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Fantastic article (via kottke) about noticing things, and the way noticing can be helpful in design and innovation.

“But once I’d noticed something and photographed it, chances were good that I’d notice it again—as if that click of opening the shutter coincided with the creation of a new info-capture zone in my brain.

This process of noticing once and then noticing again is how you start finding patterns and uncovering themes…”

This is similar to what I was getting at a couple of months back when I wrote about being receptive while on a commute (especially, but elsewhere too), and finding patterns, similarities, in the seeming chaos. It’s a key skill in anthropological and ethnographic fieldwork, and one which yields rewards in other areas, too.

The article takes the form of a conversation between two men working in the field of design, customer insight and research. It’s a great interaction, and a lovely way of exploring the theme:

Soltzberg: Which really supports what we were talking about earlier, that it all begins with noticing. There’s another classic Zen concept that everything you need to know and experience is already happening and present, but you need to get your old ways of thinking out of the way so you can experience it.Doing contextual research is like using “super-noticing power” to peel back those layers of preconception, culture and habit. When you do that you get to something fundamental and then you’ve got a really solid platform for developing new concepts.

Portigal: Super-noticing power really is a strong cultural idea. The enhanced human with awesome noticing and synthesizing powers crops up regularly in science fiction (e.g., the Mentats in the Dune series or the neurachem from Richard Morgan’s books).

Soltzberg: Right, sort of like a super-charged version of William Gibson’s Cayce Pollard character in Pattern Recognition.

Noticing definitely draws on a set of skills that these kinds of characters embody and amplify, but at the heart of it you have to genuinely be interested in the world around you and in other people.

Super-noticing is something which happens a lot if you’re trained to be receptive and observant, but also if you’re thinking about a particular thing.

Years ago, in 1990, I won a scholarship to go and study for two years at an international college in western Canada. Having never been to Canada before, I became hyper-aware of the mention of anything Canadian, so all of a sudden there seemed to be holiday offers to Canada and visits by minor royals to Canada and singers from Canada releasing new albums and documentaries about wildlife in northern Canada and books set in Canada and Canada Canada Canada Canada Canada everywhere I looked.

Was there really a sudden surge in True North (strong & free)-related promotions and media in the spring and summer of 1990, or had that stuff been there all along, only now I was more attuned to it and therefore noticed it more than previously?
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I’ve got a number of friends who work in the same sort of industry as me (broadly: online media) and who blog eloquently and frequently about topics relevant to their work on their personal sites. In fact, some of them blog only about such things, to the point that the personal gets completely parked.

In a way, I envy them.

While I’ve been known to make the odd blog-type flutter in the direction of something professionally interesting (my musings on Facebook, for example), that’s ultimately not what this blog is about. See, this blog pre-dates (mostly) my professional involvement in digital strategy and social media (though my academic interest in online community pre-dates this blog (and any professional affiliation) by several years), and unlike blogs these days which need to be about something, this blog isn’t about anything (my stock answer when asked this question is that it’s about eight and a half years old), but is a filter for whatever’s going on in my head at the time: a Megafilter, an outboard brain. Sometimes that’s work stuff, sometimes it’s not.

Clearly, there’s a lot more going on relating to work than I ever talk about in these pages: partly because I’ve never really done so, and partly because it’s not really that relevant for the readers of this site. But for instance, in the last few months I’ve done presentations at the Don’t Panic Guide to Social Media event in London and the Association of Booksellers annual event at the De Vere Grand hotel in Brighton (thoughts and jokes about Norman Tebbit’s muscles kept dashing through my head during that one, but I resisted the temptation to share with the audience), as well as a seminar at the Online Media and Marketing show and two at the Arts Marketing Association’s annual conference at The Sage in Gateshead - an experience which was a blinder, both from a participation and location perspective (The Sage building is fantastic), and also because I got an ocular migraine towards the end of my second session, and consequently couldn’t actually see half the audience, or the stairs to the stage, or my presentation. Still managed to get through without issue, though I did have to go and lie down in a dark car for several hours afterwards, and then late the same afternoon went and bought an iPhone, which I must assume was some sort of delusional side-effect of the affliction.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time over the last few months locked in small rooms with technologists and whiteboards, which has been very fun, but rather draining and quite difficult to talk about or document in my usual social media ways. So I haven’t.
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Once upon a time, I’d pack days ahead of any journey. I’d start thinking about what to take a week before setting off, and be mentally piling things and considering outfits and options.

Those days have gone.

These days, I’m more likely to have a vague idea what I’ll be taking, and then throw it all together the night before I go, because there is such a thing as leaving it too late.

Once, in Bolivia, I was living in La Paz and had planned to spend a week in a city in the south of the country. The trouble was, the plane was due to leave at 7am, it was an hour to the airport from my house (though only a mile if you could somehow go directly up the cliff at the edge of the canyon, and over the lip across El Alto) and I had to be at check-in at six.

The other small issue was that it was a friend’s birthday the day before, and as a result, we went out to celebrate.

Alcohol consumed at 4,000m above sea level does funny things to the body. It creeps up on you and smashes you in the back of the head when you’re not looking, and then lingers for ages. It conspires with the thin air to leave you feeling simultaneously wrecked and euphoric, and as usual, it messes up your sense of judgement.

And so it was that at 3am before the flight, my friend and I reeled back to the apartment in Sopocachi, solemnly promising to wake each other up ninety minutes later so we could pack and get on the plane.

Naturally, when the eight alarm clocks went off at 4:30, and again at 4:45, 5:00 and 5:15, we didn’t manage to rise. The thumping of the irate neighbour on the wall at 5:30 got our attention though, and so, half drunk and half hungover and horrified by the lateness of the hour, we set about packing in a panic for the days ahead.

Things shoved in bags, water splashed on faces, feet shoved in shoes and a quick sprint out to the street to cajole a sleeping cab driver into wakefulness and speedy delivery with the promise of a waved 20Bs note.

Cut to: several hours later, a city in the south of Bolivia, on the edge of the jungle. Two girls, cradling bottles of water and squinting into the hot sun, feeling like they’ve licked the road. They are waiting to check into the hotel.

When we got into our room, we discovered that L had managed to pack:
– three pairs of shoes
– a jumper
– six pairs of trousers and
– three books

While I’d somehow ended up with:
– eighteen pairs of knickers (straight from the dirty laundry basket)
– a copy of Jagged Little Pill
– two coca teabags
– a shortwave radio and
– a miniature screwdriver set.

With the memory of that long, strange week in mind, and still slightly unsure about what I’d been intending to do with the contents of my suitcase, I think it’s wiser if these days I make an attempt to pack a little in advance. So since I’m off for a week on a small island in an hour or so, I’d better get packing.

Now, where did I leave that alum key?

I don’t usually write a lot about work on this, my personal site, but I read Derek’s musings about commenting on newspaper sites with interest, and felt moved to share this, a single slide from my communities and media presentation, which I’ve given to a number of audiences over the last 18 months or so. It’s relevant here, so I hope it bears repeating.

When media organisations think about community development and management, or dealing with potential problems, they need to consider the holy trinity of community management and not just one part of it.

Human (or organisation) solutions include anything which involves throwing more people or organisational muscle at a challenge: policies, procedures, hiring armies of moderators (or external teams to do it for you), extending rotas, writing community into people’s job descriptions and responsibilities. All of these are important, but they’re not necessarily scalable. Human solutions can be a lot like that game you play at the fairground, whack-a-mole, except it’s probably more like whack-a-troll. Employing people to bop away problems isn’t efficient, and ultimately rewards bad behaviour with attention.

Technical solutions are things which allow technology to help with the management of the community. This can include powerful moderation tools and filters which can be applied (like StupidFilter or disemvowellment, but can also include reputation management, recommendation, user hierarchy and/or associated weighting, rate-limiting, peer moderation, pre- and post-moderation and the like. Technology can very powerful in helping to manage a community, but it’s not very effective when used on its own.

Editorial solutions are often overlooked, and are crucial to community development on media sites. They might include journalist (and other staff) participation and highlighting/featuring valuable comments or users, as well as informing the more general editorial approach to community - how does it reinforce or complement content? What is the value or proposition behind user interaction? Why are people there? And what do you expect (or hope) from their interaction? What is the quality expectation? How do active community users reflect your readership, or not? How do you use conversations to address (or reinforce!) power imbalances between you and your readership? Is the role of the journalist to start conversations or to provide platforms for conversations to occur? Thinking about how community participation is influenced by, impacts on and interacts with other kinds of content on the site is key.

The point of this diagram - this whole concept - is simple: you can’t do one of these bits and expect everything to work out great. You have to think about what can and needs to be done in each bucket - quantities and blends vary wildly depending on the kind of content and kind of community - but they’re all important.

This is something I’ve been working hard to make a reality within guardian.co.uk’s community activity over the past 15 months (all three aspects, but with a big focus on organisation and technology, the fruits of which are ripening now) and also in all future community strategy, development and management. It’s definitely starting to make a difference.

While m’colleague Neil and I have been whinging about the temperature* in our office for a few weeks, we haven’t, until today, been able to do so with statistical verification.

I brought a cheap thermometer into work this morning and we’ve established that - even with a portable A/C unit blowing through the open door - the climate in our fifth floor cubbyhole is balmier than Bankgkok, Harare, Bermuda, Mexico City, Calcutta, Athens and Istanbul, to name but a few.

As I write, the mercury has just reached 36°C (97°F), which I think must make it one of the hottest offices around.

Unless you know different?

I invite you to head to your nearest purveyor of temperature recording devices (most hardware stores, some bigger newsagents and supermarkets, pretty much all DIY emporia) and plonk your thermometer somewhere for a bit, before taking a photo of it and uploading to flickr (we’ll make a pool if we get enough). We need photographic evidence because otherwise you could just say your office was 60°C, couldn’t you?

Post a link to it in the comments here, or let me know via flickr or something. The inhabitant of the hottest office will win something suitably cool.

[No cheating, now: I don’t want to think of you clamping a thermometer between your thighs to get it up to a suitably impressive level, y’hear?]

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The other day, while sorting through some old paperwork, I found a document I’d written in 2004, while working on a project team for a groundbreaking new product, within a big global internet company which shall remain nameless. I left that company a while ago and the project ownership was shifted stateside the year before (as most juicy projects were), but the product itself finally launched late last year.

It wasn’t the groundbreaking, game-changing thing I’d dreamt up with a few people in 2004 and shepherded through the early stages of the political, business and technical badlands of a large and complex organisation with a growing identity crisis. But there were some resemblances.

The initial idea creation, proposition development and project validation had been done by a small group led by me for a year or so, working on this first as a side project with the blessings of the senior leadership team, and then full-time.

But soon enough, the project got senior-level sponsorship (the CEO of the entire global shebang said “There is no more exciting project within this company at the moment”, which either said a lot about the project or the company…) and as a result, everyone and their dog wanted to get on board and hop on board the glorytrain. I was swiftly relegated to “project visionary” and consumer experience lead - the spiritual owner of the product, with significant influence over what and how we should deliver, a license to interfere in all sorts of areas but no real power - and the message from The Powers That Be was clear: get it done. Fast.

So, in absence of the power to slap people and structure how we should work and exactly what we should deliver, this document was intended to unite a global team (working across five geographic locations and in disciplines from design to development and marketing to business planning) around a common set of values - an operating approach statement. The idea was that anyone on the team should understand that these points would inform and influence every decision which was made around the project, and anyone not on the team would understand why we might be doing things or asking to do things in a different way.

I present it below without commentary, mainly as a historical artifact showing how much things like this become unfortunately necessary when you’re working in a diverse, distributed organisation and struggling to change the way it worked.

I still believe that sometimes a team operating statement can be a very useful way to align people’s approaches - the end result might be very well understood, but sometimes the process can be very bumpy.

In work, as in Fun Boy Three and Bananarama collaborations, It Ain’t (just) What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It (and That’s What Gets Results).

Or, to remix it slightly: the way that you do it can often affect (in both good and bad ways) what you do. Sometimes the journey is as important as the destination.
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As I’ve posited in these pages before, the main reason for having a blog and keeping it going for nearly nine years (!) is to be able to track the annual cavalcade of winged whimsy which is Flying Ant Day.

As in previous years, the date seems to be geographically clustered (which makes sense, I guess) and after an early misfire on Wood Lane a couple of weeks back, I can now confirm that it does, indeed, appear to be Flying Ant Day in London.

So we can see that the slight anomolies of early sightings we experienced in the last few years have now been corrected, and we’re back in the range of 2004.

This year has been notable not for the number of reports, but for the fact that so many people IMed/twittered/emailed me directly to let me know when they saw the little flying feckers, because (in the words of one) they now associate FAD with me. Bless.

But on a relevant note, Twitter has made it easier to track sightings.

For example, we can see that there have been 26 mentions of “flying ant” and 39 of “flying ants” (many mentioning London) in public twitter streams since lunchtime today. Before that, the previous mention was a week ago, then nothing much until three weeks back. So not only can we tell it’s FAD in London, but we can be reasonably sure that it started at lunchtime. How cool is that?

I’ve also noticed that I get a sense of flying ant season from looking at my site analytics. Over the past month there have been nearly a thousand searches resulting in a visit to my site from people looking for information about flying ants, and there are definite peaks in there (peak ant?): June 22, July 2, July 7, July 14. And today.

Dear Twitter Friend,

There’s no easy way to say this, no sugar coating that can make this pill easier to swallow: It’s over. I’m breaking up with you.

When we got together, it was fun. The medium was young and we were playful; trading confidences and sharing snapshots of experience with our social groups via the constraint of 140 characters.

Offline, we met for drinks and events and our conversations spilled over into IM, email: You had my phone number, like I had yours, but we used Twitter to send D messages instead of texts - so much easier to type than thumb-fumble.

We lived in the fragile familiarity of the overlapping Venn of our friends. Life was good.

And then things changed. The site became popular. You grew with it, started to gather contacts and acquaintances until they began to multiply of their own accord, like copper coins by the end of a day. Soon, your Twitter contacts list was made up of more followers than friends - people with whom you had a string of casual textual encounters.

The intimacies we’d once shared, ambient and otherwise, were gone. I was still private, protected, placing trust in those I’d selected to belong to my community, but you had opened up, and it had all become a game. You had no time for mere status updates now, when you could be interfacing with the world; broadcasting, gaily @ting in public with the masses (where a quick D would have done just as well), flaunting public displays of affectation.

But still I clung to the relationship. I wanted to believe that the connection we had was personal, special; that you valued what I had to say as much as what you put out there; that like me, you were listening and speaking from the perspective that ours was a shared social space, that what we said needed to be relevant or at least interesting to everyone else forced to listen.

I was wrong.

You began to use our relationship as a way to bombard me with stuff. You carried on conversations with others in front of me (and everyone else).

You used our personal connection instead of a blog; instead of a search engine; instead of an IM client; instead of a loudhailer; instead of an RSS feed.

You mistook my lack of constant interaction for receptive listening and overshared the minutae of your day; that conference; the gig you were at. The platform became more important to you than the people on it. It became important to you that #everything #you #said #was #findable.

You blurred personal with public, and friendship with frequency. You used tools to interface with The Community (and me, somewhere in it) which aped IM clients or blogging extensions.

Or if you weren’t spreading it on thickly, you were silent: watching, listening, taking more than you gave, letting my candid confessions of everyday existence hang pregnantly in the ether between us without sharing your own experience of life, or what it is like in words. Silence sounds a lot like judgement: feels unbalanced when we’re down at the pub and is no more comfortable online.

The discomfort of the relationship became the elephant in the room; the moose on the table; the failwhale in the jamjar. When I found myself gritting teeth when you flooded a page (especialy when there was no “older” link) or @ted at people instead of IM, I knew it was time to do something bold.

So I searched for a pause button. I hunted for ways to stem the torrent of trivia, the bombardment of your broadcast persona loud in my browser. I wanted to find a way to keep the closeness we’d once had while also making you realise that I valued our relationship but I couldn’t carry on like this.

But there’s no pause button. And so I’m breaking it off. If you don’t see me in your contact list anymore, this is why: I’m a friend, not one of your followers.

I’m sorry - I wish there was another way - but it’s clear that our connection means something different to me than to you. There have been too many small irritations or lapses of what passes for reasonable social behaviour for this to be ignored.

It’s time to call it a day.

I still value your friendship - you must remember that - and we’ll still have pints in the pub, emails, and the occasional IM. There are loads of ways we can communicate comfortably again - I’ll still be reading your blog, looking out for you on my buddy list, subscribed to your RSS. I’ll look forward to you tumbling into my browser, full of the youness of your life and passions. Maybe you’ll be reading my online stuff, too. I hope we can hold onto something of what once brought us together.

Maybe at some point in the future, your Twitter stream will split and you’ll have different streams and modes of communication for different kinds of people depending on relevance and relationship. Maybe, one day, I hope.

But until then, until we can share the same social space without it feeling like a burden or an infringement or a chore, it’s time to make the break. It’s for our own good.

Until that day, I remain, forever, your friend,

Meg
x

(PS I’m not breaking up with Twitter, the app. I’ll still use it, and still see other people on it. I’m just pruning my community, is all; This isn’t about Twitter. This is about you and how you use it.)

… which are probably best avoided but for which there should definitely be some sort of “get out of jail free” card which you could just wave at people and then walk away.*

1. Bumping into your boss when sweaty at the gym
2. Getting into the same revolving door cubicle as someone else because you didn’t realise it was too small for two people, and having to do that awful, intimate shuffle around
3. Bumping into an ex while out with your current paramour
4. Sitting next to a talkative person on the plane when you really, really don’t want to engage
5. Spotting a colleague hasn’t done up his flies
6. Realising that the unearthly stench assaulting your nostrils comes from your friend/colleague/parent’s breath/BO/arse
7. Calling someone confidently by the wrong name when you don’t have the excuse of having just met them (e.g. friend, colleague, lover)
8. Being very underdressed at a smart function because you didn’t read the invitation carefully enough
9. Realising you’ve just bitched about someone who is related to/very dear to/married to the person you’re talking with
10. Being aurally assaulted by a racist cab driver
11. Sitting at a table at a wedding where you don’t know anyone and running out of small talk
12. Making what you thought was a funny comment, but which was actually massively inappropriate - a complete clanger - which leaves everyone staring at their fingernails

There must be more. Are there more?

* In fact, here you are: print, cut out and carry this about your person - use when you really need it.