stealing ideas

Net Neutrality at it’s worst. Thanks to @danbuczaczer for...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:26:00 -0600

Net Neutrality at it’s worst. Thanks to @danbuczaczer for the discovery.

I saw this once before, a little while back, but was reminded of...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:53:54 -0500

I saw this once before, a little while back, but was reminded of it again today thanks to Rishad Tobaccowala. Good motivator.

Blueprint III $4.99 on imeem. That’s undervalued if you...

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:34:00 -0500

Blueprint III $4.99 on imeem. That’s undervalued if you ask me. Buy! Buy! Buy!

Watched most of this 80 minute video from Google’s...

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:24:34 -0500

Watched most of this 80 minute video from Google’s developer conference earlier this year on Monday and applied for an invitation, of course with all the talk today about the first “wave” (no pun intended) going out I thought I’d throw out my two cents:

1) My first thought was, “Man, this is starting to look a lot like Facebook,” followed up by “Facebook is in a much better position to do this and succeed than Google.” Why? Well, because they already are. Facebook has almost always been about real-time, personal collaboration. Whether it’s sharing, tagging, organizing, and commenting on photos, posting status updates, or sending invites, the 300MM+ users of Facebook have been enjoying a lot of the Wave features for a while.

2) I agree with the talking heads that this is a leap forward, but more of a symbolic leap, not a material leap. It’s another sign post, and significant simply because it’s Google, that all personal data, relationships, communications, content will be universally linked, organized and accessible. It is another step towards the irrelevancy of terms like “online” as there will soon be no such thing as offline.

3) This affirms that Google is scared about the real-time, personal data that Facebook has in droves and Google covets. But I don’t think Wave will get them there as I think it will be widely viewed and used as an email enhancement rather than a real-time social tool. Some of the advancements, however should have gotten Facebook’s attention and I assume they’ve been looking at this since March/May (whenever it was originally announced) and have engineers working on tweaks to its existing service making collaboration easier and richer. Once they do, Facebook, though pushed by Google as they often are, will not lose too much ground on this front.

4) Bigger picture: This isn’t about Google trying to become like Facebook. Hell, I don’t think Facebook even cares about being Facebook anymore. The aim of both companies has to be much loftier if they’re to succeed, and that is, namely, to own all of your real-time personal data. Period. And if Wave does, as is assumed, become the bridge that merges Gmail, Docs, Voice, Blogger, etc. and do so elegantly and in a way that doesn’t seem like a new service or tool but rather just sort of sits in the background and enables all of these intertwined, cross-platform, cross-service personal connections while on the backend mining all of that data to be sliced and diced and served up to marketers… then all of a sudden the whole notion of online social networks becomes irrelevant. Ultimately Wave is about one thing: laying pipe. In the information age whoever owns the pipes and keeps the data flowing, wins.

“Media Fast”, an audio version hastily done in the...

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:17:24 -0500

“Media Fast”, an audio version hastily done in the form of my personal hero, Ira Glass.

Media Fast

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:48:10 -0500

Last weekend I decided to fast, to abstain from, media - all media - for a week. A funny thing happened, namely, my wife an artist and teacher knows media better than I do, a media professional.

In my first day of the fast I was home all day with my son, it was too quite and I was fasting from media - which obviously means no TV. So I turned the radio on to NPR without hesitating, not even having a tinge of guilt that I was breaking my fast. Radio, especially the nearly commercial-free NPR, did not seem like media to me.

Neither did books (e.g. the Bible, the first form of mass media?) or facebook or tumblr or flickr or vimeo. In fact, anything that I could control and didn’t overwhelm me with advertising fell squarely in my ‘not media’ bucket and was therefore permissible.

It didn’t take long before my media-sensitive wife (whom I would never have said of before this accidental personal ethnography experiment) called me out on everything I was doing. She even called me out for using apps on my iPhone. And I couldn’t turn on the Wii. Anything that transmitted data in digital or analog form was off limits as far as my wife was concerned - all of it was media. And she’s right, technically it is all media.

But what I found interesting was that it all didn’t feel like media. Without knowing, I had some pretty clear subconscious assumptions of what media is and isn’t:

Media Is vs Isn’t

* Mass (Magazine) not personal (Tumblr)

* Controls me (TV) rather than controllable (iPod, streampad)

* Professionally produced or mass produced video of any kind regardless of distribution means (TV, Hulu, DVDs)

* Advertiser saturated (101.9FM) versus advertising-free (NPR)

(Side-note here is that honestly all of radio didn’t feel like media to me, for the above to be true it means I would have felt okay watching WTTW the local public broadcast station. I didn’t because it was on TV and anything displayed on the TV is instantly “media”.)

* Impersonal (Mass) as opposed to personal/social (Facebook, Twitter)

Other Observations

* Newspaper’s truly didn’t feel like media, which is fascinating because you can’t get much more old school, mainstream media than a local daily, so they were recycled.

* Fasting from media in the information age is nearly impossible just as fasting from industrial produced goods in the industrial/post-industrial age is

* It’s an interesting excercise and had unexpected outcomes - something anybody interested in this merging of people, technology, content, brands should try for themselves and see what happens

* This idea of what feels like or doesn’t feel like media is something I had no idea existed in me (and safe to assume everybody) and is powerful in that it shapes the way I interact with the information, alters my mindset and expectations… my feelings, misguided or not, dictate the rules of engagement for me, peers, content-producers and advertisers. And I’m sure what feels like media to me is very different to the guy down the street, my mom, my brother, a co-worker… etc.

fred-wilson: Rave On (Buddy Holly cover) - M Ward - Hold...

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:47:00 -0500

fred-wilson:

Rave On (Buddy Holly cover) - M Ward - Hold Time

its friday, its cover day

Good chill song this Friday, compliments of my DJ Fred Wilson.

Twitter's 90/10 Rule

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:55:53 -0500

After examining my own Twitter account (721 days old) this holds true - 90% of tweets are from 13% of people I follow. More painful is that 70% of tweets are contributed by 4% of my followers. And if you break that 70% down, 36% are from 3 automated sources (news sources) and the other 34% is by one human who has tweeted over 200 times in the past 8 days. I am unfollowing that 4% now.

vastandgrand:

“After examining some 300,000 Twitter accounts, a Harvard Business School professor reported last week that 10 percent of the service’s users account for more than 90 percent of tweets.”

—

Orphaned Tweets: When people sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return.
Slate By John Swansburg and Jeremy Singer-Vine

vastandgrand: What The Trend seems like it will be really...

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:43:00 -0500

vastandgrand:

What The Trend seems like it will be really helpful:

Find out what’s trending on Twitter and why. For each trend, we give you a quick explanation of WHY it’s trending.

"Our new technologies do not retire our old responsibilities."

Tue, 05 May 2009 12:01:54 -0500

“Our new technologies do not retire our old responsibilities.”

- Paul Starr, The New Republic, “Goodbye to the Age of Newspaper (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)”

I’m a big fan of Vimeo right now so recently switched me...

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:43:12 -0500

I’m a big fan of Vimeo right now so recently switched me family video sharing to them from YouTube. Just a cleaner site, better quality video and easier to use.

This is a video of my son Eli and I getting ready for bed when he was 5-6 months old.

Philips spot shot for cinema promoting new 21:9 LCD TV. Watch...

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:41:00 -0500

Philips spot shot for cinema promoting new 21:9 LCD TV. Watch in full screen

Agency: Tribal DDB Amsterdam
Production: Stink Digital London
Director: Adam Berg
VFX: Redrum, Stockholm

Today’s my birthday. And 27 years ago when I was born...

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:51:51 -0500

Today’s my birthday. And 27 years ago when I was born this animation/video would have blown our collective minds. Doubtful that the Commodore 64, which came out in 1982, could have even handled these high-tech graphics.

Heck, hamster dance blew our minds and that came out in 1998. Look how far we’ve come…

Not just a newspaper dilemma.

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:08:52 -0500

Must read: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Further reading: Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News

"We’re all living in and moving through an increasingly dense data cloud — one that..."

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:58:58 -0500

“

We’re all living in and moving through an increasingly dense data cloud — one that treats “news” in a rather undifferentiated fashion (e.g., breaking news about a plane crash gets juxtaposed with a friend’s Facebook update).

The media companies that survive will be the ones that help us find our way through that cloud.

”

- Simon Dumenco Advertising Age, “News Delivery Needs Mobile Optimization, Not Hearst Hardware”

Jinx! 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8...

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:30:07 -0600

I enjoyed reading what Freddie Laker had to write in today’s Digital Next. It reflected much of what I’ve been saying [to myself on this sorry excuse for a blog] over the past year here and here.

However I’m not sure I completely agree with everything he had to say about how this approach will influence the future of website strategy, information architecture, usability and design. From what I gathered he basically said this: it won’t.

“In a nutshell, I think the novelty will wear off for a lot of consumers.”

and

”[…]brands will keep in mind that consumers also like their sites to be nicely packaged. Moving forward, businesses will create sites with a far higher level of aesthetic value[…]”

In response to the “novelty wearing off” - it already has - the novelty of brand sites wore off years ago. Which is why you see brands like Modernista! and Skittles innovating and redefining what a brand site is. They took a step back and realized that a brand site doesn’t require an old-school agency controlling every aspect of the site from leading to color palette to trademarked fonts that require another agency to take it and make it web-friendly…

They realized, in contradiction to Freddie’s other assertion, that “consumers [don’t] like their sites to be nicely packaged,” and that they don’t care about, “higher level of aesthetic value.” They answered the question that every brand should start with and almost all ignore - what role does a website have in my brand’s broader marketing/communications strategy?

Most brands don’t stop to think about if they actually need a website or what it’s role should be - they assume they need a website (because you have to have a website!?!!) and then start dreaming about what it should look like or if it should have a widget. A bread widget. So people can get information on your 12 varieties of bread, on their desktop, all the time.

Awesome.

Lastly, they realized that it doesn’t and shouldn’t require millions of dollars to build a brand site for a sugar-coated sugar candy and millions more to get people to visit it… for 2 pageviews and 35 seconds of “brand engagement”. That it’s more valuable to go where people are already engaging with each other and join the conversation than to interrupt them by flailing your 30k Flash arms and begging click here, only to send them to your brand’s version of Walley World.

This site execution isn’t for every brand, that’s not what I’m suggesting. What I am suggesting is that every brand should adopt the strategic approach that Modernista! and Skittles applied to their sites. Every brand should take a good hard look at their brand, their marketing objectives/strategies, the people that use their product/service and ask themselves: What role does a website play in all of this? Why do we need a website?

The answer may surprise you and, more importantly, delight others.

Post-It drum kit

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:34:08 -0600

Post-It drum kit

Fun. By design reaktor berlin.

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:57:33 -0600

Fun. By design reaktor berlin.

Jonathan Jarvis » Crisis of Credit Visualized

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:14:00 -0600

Jonathan Jarvis » Crisis of Credit Visualized:

This is the most elegant explanation, visual or otherwise, I’ve found that makes sense of our current global financial situation.

What’s just as, if not more, interesting than the Credit Crisis video is the thesis behind the project:

“The Crisis of Credit Visualized distills the economic crisis into a short and simple story by giving it form. It is also argues that designers have the ability to see a complex situation, then turn around and communicate it to others. By giving graphic form to the credit crisis, it becomes comprehensible. Not only do economic activities take shape, but new relationships can emerge between these shapes.”

We’ve started to see advertisers use this approach to the :30 spot, as brands try to communicate a lot of information in a simple, meaningful, memorable way. The most recent example of motion design that comes to mind:

#skittles & modernista!

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:09:46 -0600

What do Skittles candy and the ad agency Modernista! have in common? They’re both letting “the cloud” act as their website as opposed to creating their own site. Why do all the work when hundreds/thousands/millions are doing it for you?

—> Skittles
—> Modernista!

I wrote a love/hate post a while ago about Modernista!s approach, now about a year later Skittles has followed suit. Way to steal a good idea Skittles.

How would this look if some major media company took the same approach to reporting the news? I’d like to see that…

Note: I would defend this idea as ‘good’ regardless of the critics who will, and fairly, point out that they’ve opened themselves up to and may seem to be endorsing a lot of trash - like the post by scoutxxor on their YouTube channel. God help us if scoutxxor is really 23 years old.