I really look forward to watching this series of videos on planning, created by Redscout and hosted by PSFK.
I especially like this quote from the trailer, by Paul Woolmington from Naked Communications:
If you’re a passionate practitioner, then the business of planning, the business of marketing, the business of ideas, intellectual pursuit, culture, consumer – that needs to be your hobby as much as your day-to-day job.
A few very interesting presentations I came upon recently that I thought would be nice to share all round.
The last one I thought was especially interesting because it is about time through the ages, not your usual social media/advertising spiel (though I don’t mean to take away from the other two presentations), and it is explained beautifully by Matt Jones.
If you use Gmail and haven’t looked at Gmail Labs lately, do. There are a number of interesting features listed which you may consider enabling (default mode is disabled), such as the Forgotten Attachment Detector and Got the Wrong Bob (where you are prodded if you type in the wrong Bob’s email, if you have more than one friend with the same name), both of which I enabled recently.
Also, here’s an interesting quote from back in 2005 by Larry Page, about Gmail’s constant ‘beta’ tag at the time:
“We could take beta off all of our products tomorrow, and we wouldn’t actually have accomplished anything…If it’s on there for five years because we think we’re going to make major changes for five years, that’s fine. It’s really a messaging and branding thing.”
And by the way, though Google’s taken Gmail’s ‘beta’ tag off, for people who find the ‘beta’ tag soothing, Labs has a way of letting you put it back on!
So aren’t Labs’ constant new feature additions an indication of a continuing beta state, then? I found this comment in a piece that came out when Google shed the beta tag on a lot of its products earlier this year:
Google thinks there are a number of CIOs that will find Google Apps easier to sell to their bosses if it’s not formally known as a “beta” product. “It’s something that does send the wrong message,” Glotzbach said, referring to the historical definition of the word beta as a not-ready-for-prime-time piece of software.
It’s funny because though the term ‘beta’ does literally mean something that is not yet 100% ready, in my mind, it signifies something that is always innovating and preparing to change for the better. Am I the only one who thinks that? I’m sure it’s a tech thing, largely motivated by Google. Is that good or bad?
From a TED interview with Rory Sutherland:
Is your advice to Obama that he should sit and have a talk with Paul Romer?
Yes, exactly that. I think so.
It’s a fundamental question about making change happen. In truth, much as people in central government love to issue strategy because it’s what they’re there for, a lot of important change happens from the bottom up. Where Britain’s conservatives have been quite good is in looking round the world for good ideas, in the sense that there are some very good Swedish ideas on education involving starting your own school that they’re currently looking at.
I felt a bit kicked because I just blogged about Paul Romer and charter cities a couple of weeks ago!
If you read the full interview, he mentions a lot of very simple yet through-provoking things about the web – like how face-to-face communication brings some amount of awkwardness to situations, which communicating through the web eliminates, and also how sometimes you just don’t want personal interaction, such as when you’re checking into a hotel in the night after a long flight. I just had that experience myself recently, so completely identified with that bit. All you really want at times like those is your room key, with details to be dealt with later.
On that note if you haven’t seen Rory’s talk at TED Oxford in July, you should. Very inspiring.
I should have posted this to spread awareness about climate change on World Blog Action Day, 15th October, but better late than never. I think Hopenhagen, a petition to the world’s leaders to act on climate change in the run-up to the UN Climate Change Conference in December, is an important initiative in this regard. I’ve signed it, and if you believe in the cause, you should give it a go too.
Hopenhagen is a movement, a moment and a chance at a new beginning. The hope that in Copenhagen this December – during the United Nations Climate Change Conference – we can build a better future for our planet and a more sustainable way of life. It is the hope that we can create a global community that will lead our leaders into making the right decisions. The promise that by solving our environmental crisis, we can solve our economic crisis at the same time.
Hopenhagen is change – and that change will be powered by all of us.
I was talking to a couple of friends over the weekend about how the internet has made celebrities out of nobodies. I was put in the spotlight because I work in the general digital/social media space, and was absolutely ashamed when they asked me to name a few famous people who blog and what exactly they do. I realized that so many people on the web today (I don’t want to name names) who claim to specialize in ‘social media research and consultancy’ or something along those lines, have effectively built their reputations on the basic abilities to use e-mail, blog, tweet, use Facebook – or a combination of these. And they in turn advise businesses on how best to use these web spaces. Isn’t that a bit sad? Where is actual knowledge being created? It’s like the joke about management consultants in the old days: management consultants are people you pay good money to tell you that you messed up and how to run your business. (If you don’t see how that is ironic, this post is not for you).
Are social media consultants the management consultants of today?
Doesn’t the whole social media business model need to be re-vamped? How sustainable a model is it, because at some point aren’t all industries going to be web 2.0-compliant, so to speak? I mean, we have a whole generation of kids being born right now, for whom blogging, Facebook and Twitter will be like breathing air.
Are ‘social media consultants’ essentially people whom nobody would pay to do a proper full-time job, as my non-geek friends said? My first reaction was that that comment was rather harsh. Every industry has consultants, doesn’t it? Technology consultants, investment consultants and so on. Why NOT social media consultants then?
The truth is, the entry barrier to becoming a technology or an investment consultant is reasonably high. The entry barrier to becoming a digital/social media consultant is very low, on the other hand. Your kids are probably going to be better digital consultants than you in a few years’ time. Scary, isn’t it?
Is there a way where to raise the entry barrier for social media consultants, like making it mandatory to pass certain exams in order to lay claim to being an expert in the field so that clients are guaranteed a certain minimum level of expertise? You know, to minimize the amount of junk being spewed into the internet. I’m sure there are clients who are just not aware that the spiel from any particular social media expert is just hot air. When they hire them, those experts produce, or are key advisors in the production of, social media rubbish.
I’m just throwing some ideas around. Thoughts welcome.
Image credit: Hugh MacLeod
Very entertaining music video directed by Keith Schofield for the Justice and Lenny Kravitz song Let Love Rule. It starts out with credits rolling, which is different in itself, but the fun starts mid-way so don’t be impatient! YouTube video embedding has been ‘disabled by request’. THAT’s not cool.
[via It’s Nice That]
I am tremendously excited about the Demo Graphic Replicator project. Remember Dolly the sheep? This project takes that one step (many, actually) further. Using open APIs from social tools like Twitter and We Feel Fine, ag8 in collaboration with artist Rob Myers have created this experimental bot that develops its personality as a reflection of what others are saying about it on the web. Essentially, as their website says ‘internet publishers (blogger and microbloggers) are informing the development of a fictional character in real time.’ Currently, the project is using re-tweets on Twitter to build the bots’ personality:
The DGR builds up a persona through small amounts of information – at present – by using Retweets. It’s about maximizing a character’s development through the generation of the smallest amount of addition – specifically – the ‘RT’ prefix.
Bit by bit they begin to create a character’s possible motives, direction and purpose.
One of them is called Felix Freeman. (@Felix_Freeman). Using MindMeister, a mind mapping application, Marcus Brown (who’s done quite a few cool things on and related to the internet including the Tweet Readings I attended earlier this year), created a personality for Felix, replete with avatar.
Marcus has even used Google Street View to create a video that visualizes Felix’s commute to Liverpool Street, London, where he works, to make the character more real. Check it out:
As David Bausola from ag8 says on the blog, it’s a very useful experiment if we keep an augmented reality future in mind. The ultimate aim is to enable the creation of characters for entertainment and education.
The project will publish the full source code and a wiki soon. In the meantime, Felix and his fellow bot-characters @krankychloe, @igguggogg, and @ohlaylala will slowly be formed by us, the general public.
One step closer to a rather spooky and simultaneously, ridiculously exciting future as far as technology is concerned. It was actually a relief for me to read that the DGR’s aren’t passing any Turing Tests yet – but who knows what the future will hold?
Another illustration of how bands today are adopting a new social business model quickly. I signed up for e-mail updates from Vampire Weekend a while ago – and now, on the eve of the release of their new album, they are offering their fans a free MP3 download of Horchata, a track from the album. Here it is. (They’ve even made it embeddable. I’m impressed, and can’t wait to see them live):
Horchata from http://tine07.vox.com/
Update: I got tickets for their gig next week. Sold out in a few minutes I believe.
As Neil says, I’m not sure if this sort of a thing really makes a difference, but I’m putting my hat in the ring nevertheless because I’m a believer in the power of mass action.
Started in October 2007, Blog Action Day aims to get bloggers the world over to write a post about the same cause on a selected date. The first year, it was the environment, last year it was poverty, and this year it is climate change. As I write this, 3,895 blogs have signed up to be a part of Blog Action Day – October 15th.
One Size Fits One 