Blonde is five years old today.

We shall be partying tonight (#nopartyforoldmen).

Meanwhile, there is barely contained anticipation for the pre-party speech that Blonde MD, Pete, will be giving to celebrate this important anniversary and to fire us all up for the evening.

Pete is best known as a caring husband, a loving father, a talented musician, and a digital heavyweight. But he is also a great orator.

We share herewith the contents of this morning’s internal all-staff email thread. (Which was NOT an attempt to wind Pete up).

Phil : Don’t know about you but I can hardly concentrate because I’m looking forward to Pete’s pre-party speech so much.

Rob : Been looking forward to it for weeks.

Andy : Heard it was amazing. Really can’t wait.

Phil : 96 Karma on EdTwinge (Tearjerker league table). Good job he’s not childish enough to pick on people who try to wind him up eh?

Emma : How is he going to top last christmas?

Ricky : Rumour has it, it’s much better than this:

Nick : I reckon it will be as powerful and inspiring as this:

Rob : Might be a little more shouty, I’d say.

Matt : More like this I reckon….

[Embedding of *that* Gwyneth Paltrow speech "disabled by request" unfortunately.]

Ricky : I’d rather it was like this:

Nick : We’ll be so psyched up afterwards the the bar tab will be destroyed in under an hour!!

Nick (again) : I think we’ll have a change of tack from Pete today actually. Usually funny and caring, I reckon we’ll see a new approach to motivation:

[Embedding of *that* Full Metal Jacket sequence also disabled by request.]

Jen : My maiden name is Pyle. This scene has always had a particular resonance with me, particularly as I used to get bullied for having such a silly surname. I really hope Pete doesn’t ask me to choke myself on his hand on front of everyone tonight.

So no pressure then Pete.

And, no, we won’t be sharing Pete’s speech in public. It will barely be safe for our work. Which means it certainly won’t be safe for yours.

When our pals at The Leith Agency decided to create their own Leith beer brand we jumped at the chance to wade in and lend our support. The result of months of late nights and extra hours is the Maid of Leith – a beer brand based around the soon-to-be famous daughter of Leith. She’s a feisty little minx that stands for everything known and loved about Leith – she’s tough, she’s irresistible and she’s got mare charm than you can shake a Water of Leith fish at.

Designed by Charlie and built by Paul, we created a website that concentrates on the beautiful label design – a large bottle that you scroll down to view, caressing every inch of the Maid in all her glory. Using some nice CSS styling touches along the way to bring her to life. We also set up a Twitter and Facebook pages for the Maid’s fans.

So, next time you’re out and about in the Leith locals grab yourself a bottle of our delicious ‘Maid in Leith’ brew and get yourself acquainted to the Maid’s treasure chest for yourself. You’ll be seeing it popping up in numerous reputable drinking establishments including The King’s Wark, The Shore, Fishers, Sofi’s, Beets and Valvona & Crolla.

TED Global has set up shop here in Edinburgh.

And if that’s not cause for celebration in geeky circles then we’d like to know what is.

So celebrate is what we decided to do.

We’re celebrating TED with TED Yourself.

TED Yourself does what it says on the tin.

It augments the reality of your LinkedIn profile to create a spoof, spurious and pseudo-intellectual TED speaker version of you. With a couple of clicks you’re the charismatic and riveting guru you always wanted to be.

The real speaker profiles for TED Global 2011 include a “privacy artist”, an “undercover economist” and a “digital preservationist”.

And for TED Yourself we just dialled things up a bit. This correspondent is a “philanthropical fetishist” for instance.

The site was designed by Elaina Jumper.

Copy was written by Lauren Sudworth.

Coding and LinkedIn api jiggery pokery by Tane Piper.

Further details on this “hobby” project and the open source code behind it can be found here.

We were surprised and delighted to recently receive a gigantic jar of miscellaneous sweeties from a happy and generous client as reward for our hard work on a recent project. ADMS are officially the loveliest bunch ever!

We thought we’d monitor and document how fast the sweetie jar was emptied as the swarm of Blonde locusts descended upon it. I knew we were greedy but the results were shocking! A 2.7kg jar lasted a mere 2 working days. Check out the photographic evidence!

We’re hoping that we may be sent another jar after completion of some other large projects we have in the studio at the moment so we can try and beat our own gluttonous record! That’s officially a challenge and gratuitous blag to other lovely Blonde clients!

Blonde is delighted to announce the launch of our latest creation – a great new website for Mint Hotel. We earned the opportunity to work with Mint Hotel (formally City Inns) across their extended digital strategy after a competitive pitch at the beginning of the year and have been beavering away creating the best possible boutique hotel website possible. Phase 1 went live yesterday with more nice functionality and content to follow soon. We’re really proud of the site – check it out at www.minthotel.com

Jack Henderson is six years old and he will draw anything to raise money for The Sick Kids Friends Foundation.

We love the initiative. And we are big fans of The Sick Kids Hospital. Those of us who have had children treated there know how lucky we are to have such a world class facility on our doorstep.

So we had a whip round, made a donation, and asked Jack to draw us a robot that we could frame and add to our collection.

He duly obliged with the picture above, with which we’re delighted.

At the time of writing Jack is 75% of the way to achieving his target of raising £10,000. You can help him cross the finishing line by making a donation on his JustGiving account, and asking him to draw you a picture.

What a star!

Thursday’s child is Charlie, one of our creative team.

Charlie is obsessed with Thursdays and apparently has a wardrobe full of identical Thursday T-shirts, which, to be fair to him, he only ever wears on Thursdays.

Unlike the pack of colour-coded and day-of-week-monogrammed socks I was once given. Making the effort to wear Monday’s socks on Mondays was always a bit too anally retentive for my liking.

According to the rhyme, Thursday’s child “has far to go.” And certainly we told Charlie that he would go far when we were at the phase of more or less saying anything to get him to join Blonde.

According to Google, there are lots of other interesting things about Thursday’s Child.

It is a song by David Bowie.

It’s also an American organisation (with a slightly disturbing website) that provides support for endangered teens.

It remains to be seen whether Charlie will name a child after his favourite day of the week. But in the meantime he has dedicated his blog to it.

Yay it’s Thursday.

We love robots at Blonde.

They’re the useful, friendly, (almost) human face of technology.

And we have a small and growing collection of them in our reception area.

If we were an American digital agency we might go as far as to say that robots are “sick”.

Instagram, the photo sharing app that makes iPhone images look cool, is pretty sick too.

Robots versus Instagram…

We’ve just finished a game of 52 card pick-up with our internal systems.

Out have gone the over-specced electronic trafficking applications that gave people fewer reasons to talk to each other.

In have come a couple of distinctly analogue whiteboards that are the focal points for a weekly meeting involving the entire agency, and which give 100% transparency on who’s doing what for when.

The first board shows what each individual in creative, development, planning and new business is up to for the week ahead, with deadlines and, where appropriate, the number of hours/days due to be spent on a given task. Each individual is responsible for populating their section of the board.

Who's doing what for when.

The second board (aka The Shipping Forecast) focuses on deadlines. What is being “shipped” when. This can be things going live, creative work being delivered for presentations, strategy ready for a client meeting.

The Shipping Forecast

On Monday mornings we all talk through the work that’s going through the agency, plus work which we anticipate coming in over the next couple of weeks. Potential log-jams are identified, discussed, and worked around.

Then we get on with it.

And we talk about it on an ongoing basis. Everyone can see with 100% transparency where the pressure points are and this makes for a constructive, collaborative environment in which to do the day to day tweaking and negotiation around resource allocation.

It’s early days but hopefully we’ll achieve the appropriate balance between robustness and rigour on the one hand, and that start-up feeling on the other.

HP went back to the garage. We’ve gone back to our boards.

Back to the garage.

A few clicks on from another excellent Mashable update and we’re demonstrating and debating our own variance in social behaviour with chat show style banter on Google Buzz. Here’s the discussion thread…

Following an email around the office this morning, investigating what our individual thoughts were on Google Buzz, I received a few pretty cynical responses. To be fair, many people are still recovering from Google Wave: asking where and what now?

For me, it’s a bit different. Google is half my social equation. I have a Gmail account and am also a member of Tech Meet Up, Mobile Monday Edinburgh and Girl Geeks. TMU is a Google group, as is Mobile Monday and for Girl Geeks we organise information around Google Sites. I have a number of files in Google Docs, plus I’m in and out of Google Maps all the time. It’s fair to say I like Google.

Not everybody feels the same though. Here were a few thoughts from other Blondes about Google Buzz, starting with our tech team:

“It’s like twitter, but without any clients and unable to tie into any other of the microblogging/social media things…

It does follow the two people I have set up in googlemail already though.

Sadly, until they create some reason for it to exist my thoughts are:
“Just what the world needs, another twitter-clone.”

Oh it has “like” from facebook, which twitter haven’t managed to add yet.”

The bandwagon of Buzz bitchin’ rolls on…

“If everyone starts using it then it becomes really relevant. Haven’t seen a killer feature yet…

Google have been, shall we say, intermittent in their marketing of services so the jury is out about how big it will become.”

Having said that the current debate (going on around me while I’m typing this) is that if you are a heavy gmail user (I am) then it does appeal -as long as the take up is good.”

And then the rest of the planning team jump in….

“Google Buzz – initial reaction = “groan”.

Groan because as a digital marcomms professional I’ve got no option but to try it out, when my gut feel and the input (via Twitter) from people I trust are telling me that it’s going to be no great shakes.

Groan because I resolved this year to add more depth to my social graph (more emphasis on RSS, blog writing and commenting), and this feels like more breadth. That’s my personal take on the whole signal to noise issue.

Groan because there’s this stool called RSS, and there’s this other stool called Twitter, and I can’t see a valid role for anything between those two stools.

Groan because I only ever use Gmail for opening Twitter accounts. I really really can’t be arsed to have another following mouth to feed.

So I’ll watch with interest how it develops but at the moment it’s not even coming out of the box for me. “

And the tech team is still going….

“It just seems way to complex and unfocused.

Twitter
Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.

Facebook
helps you connect and share with the people in your life.

Simple. I get it.

Buzz
Go beyond status messages
Share updates, photos, videos, and more.
Start conversations about the things you find interesting.

Try Buzz in Gmail. (why do I have to do it in gmail by the way?)

You lost me at “Go beyond status messages”. Er.. not so sure I get it.

Really bad design as well. I find it really hard to scan. Twitter is so easy to just fly through and pick what’s interesting. Buzz is a mess and feels horrible to read.

Google seems to have forgotten their design roots. A million miles away from one input box to search shit.

Social network app fail.

A lot cleaner in t’iPhone though. Bordering on being useful.”

Before finally concluding…

“My friends are on Facebook (for the most part)
My friends aren’t on Gmail (for the most part) and if they are they’re not updating their status there.

So, for social/picture sharing stuff = Facebook.

I get interesting web/marketing/wotsit links by following people and searching on twitter.
I don’t get that from Buzz (yet, since there’s noone on it)

So for interesting links/finding out what random “famous” people are upto/whatever = twitter.

Buzz is only as good as the people using it – and currently noone is.

I expect it to go the way of Google Lively, to be honest. “

It appears I am the lone voice of Google Buzz support here.  I don’t think this product… this service… from Google is anywhere near complete and of course I’m aware of the privacy issues, which have been flagged up; but I need something that bridges the gap(s) between LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Social networking online isn’t this simple. I don’t want my engagement with professional communities to be confined to LinkedIn. I want meaningful, human-to-human knowledge sharing, which goes beyond the offering of Twitter and I certainly want a richer experience than Farmville updates on Facebook. I’m not arguing that Google Buzz is the solution, but given the incredible insight Google now has into our online behaviour, I’m holding out for some improvements first, before I search for a conclusion. Here’s to growing out of Facebook and Twitter…