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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
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"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
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Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 02, 2006
London Dreamworld
Advertising in the UK is extraordinarily powerful. I've gotten chills from a poster on the Tube -- it was posing as a concert poster for a beautiful hip-hop star called Vanessa, with a small sticker apparently affixed to it reading 'Cancelled -- because Vanessa was killed crossing the road, age 11. Don't die before you've lived.' And today I bought a disposable sonic vibrating toothbrush merely because I was alerted to the existence of this cool new consumer gadget by a (not particularly clever, but far from offensive) TV ad. If this product had been launched in the States, the TV ad would probably have insulted my intelligence in some way, and set my mind against buying said toothbrush.
Advertising is treated as a kind of vast cultural mirror here, and standards of creativity are enforced by the Great British public. The end result is that walking through tunnels in the Tube for fifteen minutes can tell you a heck of a lot about the cultural temperature of the country, especially since so many posters derive from London's leading cultural institutions. I love being bombarded with endlessly clever ideas, like the one for the British Museum that posed as a yoga ad, advising practitioners to visit an Indian sculpture that's been sitting in lotus pose for 200 years rather than some girl at the local gym who got bored of teaching aerobics.
In my perfect world, the only place advertising will be encouraged to exist is in the underground public transit. Standards will be enforced by the Consumer's Critic Council, art nouveau aesthetics will prevail, and all ads, no matter what for, will contribute to the sense that you've descended into society's collective dreamworld.
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