Adrian Trenholm

Adobe acquires Macromedia

I have had my eye off the ball design-wise for a couple of months now as I expand the content side of the business, so this one took me by surprise:

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) .

The press release spins this as a merger, but it reminds me of the BP Amoco merger a few years ago. A contact of mine in Amoco said to me:

Merger? BP merged with Amoco the way I go to the store and merge with my groceries.

Adobe almost certainly wanted Flash.

Via Mom at Home

2 comments April 19th, 2005

Categorise and conquer

To prevent paralysis by analysis, I started this blog with just one category: “General.” Now, two weeks and eight posts in, I think it’s a good time to put some categories in place. The four top line categories are:

1. Communicate better
2. Doing business
3. New perspectives
4. Personal

I have chunked each main category into four or five sub categories. There are a few “empty” sub-categories right now. Creating categories ahead of content is considered to be bad practise by some web usability experts , but I pray your indulgence . There are lots of things to write about and I want to make sure that I cover them all, rather than spend all my time blogging about blogging . Also, it’s great motivation to keep writing, when I know there are slots to fill. In the meantime, this post also serves as a placeholder for any empty category.

Communicate better is the place where I will post about listening, speaking, writing, blogging and design.

Doing business is for marketing and sales talk, and workflow, and anything else related to what my friend Mark Lloyd calls “the business of doing business.”

New perspectives is really a catch all category, for when my thinking shifts on any given issue. I meet a lot of inspiring people and read a lot of stuff which doesn’t fit readily into any other category, so I plan to post about all that here, and possibly restructure this section in the future, depending on how well it works.

Personal : self explanatory. I know some people don’t like off-topic posts, but I find lots of fun stuff in , so I plan to speak about hobbies and family stuff here. Long term, I plan to set up multiple RSS feeds so that those who want nothing to do with cooking, cycling or City of London Toastmasters Club can subscribe to a “business only” feed, while the rest of you can get both.

Next - the About page.

Add comment April 18th, 2005

How to bake your own bread

Off topic, but it’s the weekend, so why not? Besides, after The fabulous baker boy generated so much interest, I semi-promised Rosa some bread recipes . There’s a lot of nonsense talked about how difficult it is to make bread, but really there is nothing to worry about. This post contains bread making basics, and my next post will contain a simple bread recipe.

Bread basics

Bread dough is a pretty simple mix of yeast, flour and water. Typically you use 60 ml of water to 100 g of flour; the amount of yeast depends on your recipe. Usually, you put some salt and oil in there, and sometimes other flavourings, but it really is that simple. You knead your ingredients together, which gets the yeast going and spreads it evenly thoughout the dough, then you leave the whole lot to rise.

Once your dough has doubled in size - an hour at room temperature - give it another quick knead, shape it so it looks like a loaf or put it in a tin and let it rise again. Then stick it in a very hot oven until the crust is nicely brown and it sounds hollow when you tap the bottom of the loaf.

The two keys to successful home baking are (1) get good flour and (2) look after your yeast.

Get good flour

My thinking on flour is: go the whole hog. Get strong, stoneground, unbleached, organic flour. If you are only going to buy the bleached, white, roller milled stuff, you may as well buy the nasty supermarket bread in the first place.

The main thing is to buy strong flour, otherwise known as hard flour or bread flour. Basically, strong flour is made from hard wheat, giving it a higher ratio of protein to starch than other flours. More protein means more gluten will be developed during kneading. Gluten is good - it makes for a lighter loaf.

As well as buying strong, try, if you can, to get stoneground. This traditional milling method gives a much better texture and flavour than the industrially milled stuff.

If you are in the UK, you cannot go far wrong with Doves Farm organic flour. This is pretty widely available from supermarkets. In the US, I hear that Hudson Cream Flour is the way to go, although I don’t know how widely available it is. If you are really keen, you can get really fantastic flour by mail order from small traditional milling companies - feel free to recommend your favourite miller in the comments.

Look after your yeast

Yeast is a living organism, which, with warmth and possibly some sugar or honey, multiplies within the bread dough, giving off carbon dioxide. This causes the dough to rise, and ultimately forms the bubbles within the loaf.

While you are making the dough, you have to be careful not to overheat the yeast or you will kill it before it has had a chance to create any carbon dioxide. This is where I used to go wrong until I learned that warm is good; hot is not. Once your dough is in the oven, then you do want to kill your yeast quickly to stop the bread rising any further - which is why you preheat the oven to a high temparature for baking bread.

I use fresh yeast, which you can buy in Sainsbury’s and beg, borrow or steal in Tesco. You can get dried yeast pretty much anywhere. I don’t know about yeast availability outside the UK, so feel free to share your yeast buying tips in the comments.

Further reading

The only book you will ever need on bread making is called simply The Bread Book. It’s by Linda Collister and Anthony Blake and you can buy it at or . It covers the basics in greater depth and has loads of great recipes, from the most basic to the most luxurious special occasion breads.

Part 2 next week.

4 comments April 17th, 2005

Stop Continue the Feedster madness

Useful insight from Johnnie Moore this week. Here’s what happened.

At 173 Drury Lane , I had linked to half a dozen Sainsbury’s-related blog posts which I had picked up from Feedster. Johnnie picked up the thread with a couple more links . We were having fun. At which point, I thought, “OK, Adrian, enough of the funny stuff, time to get serious again. Haven’t got all day.” I emailed Johnnie to that effect, with the subject line “Stop the Feedster Madness.” Johnnie’s response was:

Well, maybe we should actually do more.

I’m serious. It will almost certainly lead to more readers and it might engage some good debates.

I think this is a place for us to play, unsupervised by a client. It would be cool if we became the hosts for lively conversations with real customers…

Of course! Trust a professional facilitator to remind me about the importance of conversation. Quirky posts, funny posts, serious posts - they are all legitimate, because people are quirky and funny and serious in equal measure. This is real conversation, not the sterile stuff you get in focus groups. I am starting to understand Johnnie’s passion for Improv . Improv’s “Yes, And” idea clicked into place for me:

Yes, And : Finding ways to build upon the events that come our way and to include different perspectives. This is not a simple injunction to agree, but rather to acknowledge what happens and incorporate its lessons in our response.

Thanks, Johnnie. Stop Continue the Feedster madness.

Add comment April 16th, 2005

JWT and Carat: big firms taking baby steps

Change is afoot in at the big advertising and media buying agencies. JWT , it seems, believes:

Advertising has a future, but only if we stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in. We need to create work that people choose to spend time with.

Meanwhile, Carat is launching blog starter kits for its big name clients. Carat’s vice-president and national media director, John Cate says on Marketing Vox :

We want our clients to take part in a productive dialogue with serious, like-minded consumers that will be beneficial to both.

No more interuptions. Conversation. Dialogue. Could it be that the big name agencies are beginning to see the light? Maybe. Maybe not.

You see, if JWT want people to spend time with them, where’s their RSS feed? I take no credit for that question - just go and see James Governor’s latest post on Monkchips . Reminding us of Nick Wreden’s analysis at FusionBrand , James says this:

JWT does have a couple more steps to take in understanding and driving the attention economy from what I can see at a glance, and if you know more about the company’s decision to become more conversational please let me know. Authentic or not?

And what about Carat? Back in February, in the John Cate said:

Ads can cheapen and compromise a blog.

Yet, barely six weeks later, Mr Cate is in Brand Republic , saying:

For advertisers, blogs offer a number opportunities…

It’s good to see the big agencies going in the right direction, but one wonders why they have to make such a meal of it. There is such a contrast between the big agency approach and that of new blogger and regular commenter on 173 Drury Lane, Mark Pinkerton , or that of James and Steve at RedMonk .

Mark’s advice: forget the “blog starter kit,” just get a TypePad subscription. Redmonk offers:

Quick and dirty consultation on how RSS can put [conversational] strategy on steroids.

There, I think, is the problem for the big agencies: conversational marketing tools are light and cheap, they are “quick and dirty.”

The challenge for JWT and Carat et al is going to be making sufficient money out of an approach to marketing which does not, at first sight, fit the big agency mould. Do the big agencies have to rely on the “no-one ever got fired for buying IBM” factor? And will their clients pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for what I created in five minutes with WordPress?

The big agencies have woken up. They are taking baby steps. What are they going to do next?

3 comments April 15th, 2005