Synchronicity

To set the scene, before work this morning I was on the recline exercise bike in Virgin Active, Kindle Paperwhite in hand, reading Catherine Mayer's notorious biography of Prince Charles.

At "location 2615" I came across:

There are dedicated teams assigned to the main royal brands; the Queen personally approved a slick royal website and separate feeds on social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr that seem to dovetail nicely with her mantra of being seen to be believed.

The "I have to be seen to be believed" quote is from Andrew Marr’s "The Diamond Queen" BBC documentary, and is trotted out earlier in the book to explain Elizabeth II's fortitude in staying on the prow of the Jubilee Barge for hours, as it travelled along the Thames in 2012 in a freezing downpour, so that she could acknowledge the spectators who had gathered on the river's banks.

This then is praise indeed for the tone of the site and the feeds as they were originally conceived. Kindle location 2615 is in the book's much discussed chapter 5 "Wolf Hall" in which positive sentences are few and far between.

I am giving myself an anniversary pat on the back, for - coincidentally - we launched the website exactly six years ago today in 2009.

That was before internet strategy was decided by people like Shingy:

Shingy believes in storytelling—more story, less telling. A story can be anything—text or image, six seconds or thirteen hours. According to Shingy, we are no longer living in the age of information; it’s the age of social, and social is all about conversations. How does Shingy know? Because he is a digital prophet. Literally. His business card has a microchip embedded in it, and it reads “Digital Prophet, AOL.” ... read the whole hilarious thing in the New Yorker.

In this brave new world, we won't be involved in the next iteration.