hello, so i’ve been thinking about some things beyond swine flu this week . . . but i’m only going to post about one – data, i love it, we all love it, we are all going to talk about it a little more over the coming weeks and months . . . looking forward to it

1) so, question one i ask you – are you the algorithm?

http://tinyurl.com/db79vo

2) The Guardian came to see me the other day, and we ended up talking about data not about media, so it was actually a meeting i enjoyed . . . they are doing some frankly fascinating stuff . . .

Now, I’ve never massively been into the Guardian as a paper but as a brand i find it interestingly plays into john grant’s bubbles thing - from the long term deep investment in festivals through this move into open source and all the way to their linked datablog  . . .  http://tinyurl.com/qgo8j3 . . . some people (including themselves) are already doing some ace stuff with this including this mash-up of google maps and mp travel expense claims

http://tinyurl.com/dcu3ng

and this for the footie fans amongst you  http://tinyurl.com/d94mjy

for me, the thing this raises is about what story you tell with the data (and in a nod to team zen, how), because the data itself is neither useful nor interesting, its what you do with it that counts (as they say)

which takes me to where i will start with those of you in planning teams as we go on this whole data + deniro = success tip . . .  we tell stories for a living, those stories are the stories of how to change consumer behaviour for sure, but to steal from 1964 “the medium is the message” (maybe we’ll post next week on 60′s and 70′s cultural theorists, a lot things are coming full circle/into our line of sight now) – treat data as a spreadsheet or a bar chart and we’re all in trouble, treat it as one of the narrative voices in your story and we are getting interesting . . .

3) it seems the emeritus mr hollis has posted about something similar overnight -

http://tinyurl.com/o6mj5k

oh, and just because i quite like razorfish (always have done) an added extra

4) Razorfish’s annual client summit http://tinyurl.com/c5v5b7

there is some really interesting stuff in here (props walshy) – i like the reinvention of consumer research as community and influence research thought, but there is loads of other stuff hidden under a wealth of twitter nonsense

much like the rhythm,  data is gonna get you . . . watch out