unicorns, ideas & nextness

July 18, 2011

Thanks to the STW group’s head Curator Of Awesome, and all-round entertaining tweeter @dailydoseofjess, I got an excuse to go sploshing round the internet collecting a list of Top Ten Inspiring Things for Nextness, the STW blog.

It was an interesting exercise, because (especially working in an office where every few minutes someone loads a new bit of can’t-miss entertainment on Youtube) it increasingly feels like there’s so many interesting ideas out there, than any attempt to be exhaustive is doomed before it begins.

It all makes me think of a story book I had as a kid, entitled ‘You Can’t Keep a Unicorn.’ I can’t really remember the details, other than that it involved a terminally ill puppy and other tragically worthy young adult fiction issues, but it was about the futility of trying to hold on to things that are essentially temporary. Ideas online are a bit like unicorns, in this respect; they’re a little bit mysterious, they tend to be immaterial; they flash past for a week or so and then they’re gone. So in an effort to hold on to these moments of inspiration, here is my list of Top Ten Unicorns:

1) Every Country is the Best at Something

I love a good infographic, and this one does both the info- and the -graphic bit brilliantly. Data designer David McCandless has crunched stats from the CIA World Fact Book into a map that reveals the kind of International Number Ones that never appear in geography textbooks. My favourite so far? That the world champion of Brazil Nuts is, um, Bolivia.