Happy Friday Saturday, one and all.
It’s been one crazy week, so let’s get it on!
The past week
Each year on the rooftop of the tenement across from ours, we watch in huddled joy and amazement the early growth of a seagull family. It is a story of many twists, turns, ups and downs. This year's story has already been tinged with tragedy; we started with 2 chicks now we're down to one. We have no idea what happened to the other chick, but it was a moment of sadness when we realised that one had gone.
The parenting of seagulls is special. The attentive dedication is something to behold. The chick is never left alone; it always has at least one guardian looking over it, swooping at potential attackers and tag team feeding the chick. It's become a yearly event that, from early spring, we start anticipating and looking forward to.
Last week my partner highlighted a tweet (screenshot below) that chimed with me for many reasons, one being it brought to mind a question that I seem to be asking a lot to anyone who will listen 'What the fuck is this thing called leadership?'. It is something that I'm still trying to work out, but I think I do know a few things that leadership shouldn't be:
It shouldn't be divisive
It shouldn't monitor the tone of others
It shouldn't unilaterally impose on others
What I'm listening to
Released 30 years ago last week, Gold Against The Soul by Manic Street Preachers has always had a special place in my musical soul. When it came out, my taste in music was changing from being an out-and-out mental head towards being more alternative indie 'hipster' type. This album nearly encapsulates this change, still very rock, but the lyrics' vulnerability and the band's painful self-awareness were something that I found enticing and captivating.
We are in the midst of the Glastonbury Festival overwhelm. It's everywhere. I just caught up with yesterday afternoon's Foo Fighters surprise set. It was a joyous watch/listen.
Stop it, please!
Unpopular opinion alert!
Can content designers please stop being distracted by SEO?
Whenever a content designer's focus gets distracted by SEO, there is only one loser: the user. I genuinely believe that good content is good SEO, and if you do all the good things a content designer should do, your content will get found and used.
And yes, there is a load of technical SEO caveats to this, but what I'm really saying is, let's not skip the basics, do your discovery, do your social listening, identify what your user wants and write to that before thinking about anything else.