Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-08-27 - 6:16 a.m.

Peter Chatterton mailed me � he has been slaving over a report and so has had less time for www.kwaze.kwasa.org. I asked him for some feedback on the line I have been developing with news items on the site. He is particularly interested in the way Nelson Mandela is using his celebrity to push a more humane stance in South Africa on AIDS treatment� it looks as if one of his favourite niece�s has died of the disease and this has galvanised him.

We are both fascinated by the way that big companies are beginning to react. If a company is quoted on the stockmarket then it has to coomunicate a view on its future � that is part of investor relations and an important factor in determining its share price. Some companies have concluded, I think, that they need to convince investors that they are actively trying to manage their future as far as HIV and their workforce are concerned. I was amazed to see two different costs per ounce of gold quoted by a mining company � the higher one was where the company didn�t have an active AIDS-HIV policy for its workforce.

I was part of the generation which had to work through the swing to the right in the 1980s. I can remember when Keith Joseph was a minister and there was talk of a right-wing reading list he had set civil servants � he wanted us to revise our assessment of how much good the market would generate if left to operate. I got some kind of bonus around this tine and I spent some of the money on Adam Smith � not The Wealth of Nations but the Theory of Moral Sentiments. My little joke and in fact I always maintained my interest in left leaning Continental social thinkers � especially Habermas and then subsequently Adorno.

However I can remember in the early 1980s saying to a colleague that I couldn�t see how �freedom� in society had much to do with the freedom of investors to put their money wherever they want � and that I didn�t see that this view of freedom would hold sway for very long. The anti-globalisation movement has moved into this political space � its members don�t see what capital market liberalisation has done for the world�s poor.

The investor relations example is an ironic example of capitalism�s logic with enlightened self interest pushing social change particularly for corporations located in a country whose leader was educated as a postgraduate in Moscow. But I think this example mostly reflects the fascinating status of South Africa � I can remember a conversation in a beautiful lodge there last year where the proprietor explained that SA was both a first world and a third world country.

I think this also probably behind the puzzling posture the Government adopts � to manage the tensions between the first and third world elements in the society the Government is desperate for economic growth. It sees a mushrooming health budget as a major threat to its economic objectives. Mandela�s stance is much more fundamental and to do with the value of life itself. In that sense he is much closer to say John Ruskin�s values in 19th century England � this may sound anachronistic but Ruskin was fantastically successful in influencing social development � say between 1850 and around 1960. Ruskin was probably the most effective �aesthetic� thinker ever in terms of changing the world.

Just today I see that on the kwase-kwaza.org webstats we are beginning to get some search query information. Nothing has been happening here for a long while and I was going to ask Peter if we ought to raise our profile with search engines in some way. There are about 10 or 12 queries listed � one about Jon Cole and the Movies for example. I look forward to getting more feedback from this source. Our strategy for the site needs to develop � my current approach is to build content and I am sure that has to be right. The HIV-AIDS issue is so fast-moving that there is quite a lot of potential value in being explicitly up to date in a focused way. I don�t think it will be enough on its own � and these extra elements in the strategy will take time to put in place. Another important leg is with some cost-effective realworld publicity which is what I am working on with Derek Ridgers � something catchy in the real world which provides people with a reason to look at the site and a reason to tell other people about it.

From this perspective it is amazing how successful we were with www.autoindustry.co.uk which climbed from a standing start to nearly 60,000 visitors in July 2002 up from 384 in July 1999. Of course we had money to spend and we spent a lot on content � but we also had an active stakeholder strategy eg with UK universities and a cost effective awareness campaign. The surprise is that we so quickly got into the a �repeat business� positive feedback loop. In fact there�s a graph of volume and targets at: https://secure.autoxperience.co.uk/users/graph.html

I won a game of Scrabble with my family yesterday evening � this was not a popular outcome. I don�t think of myself as being any kind of Scrabble-master. I was just lucky with my letters eg SAUSAGE.

I started a piece � wrote quite fast � maybe its just a sketch. It seems to reflect the Alice Coltrane CD I have been listening to � acoustic piano and harp, medium paced heavy swing, loosely structured.

Barnet Newman rules � Mark is hits the nail on the head in Washington DC. I am so envious. (Back to work today).

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