will lion | blog

the fish with the transparent head

2009-03-01T09:50:00.000Z

quality adwords

2009-01-15T10:39:00.003Z

(click to enlarge)

and generally quality campaign: TV, site, facebook & twitter.

like glowing ants

2009-01-08T14:17:00.006Z

This is global air traffic in a 24 hour period as captured by satellite (and they all seem to be going to London.)

google new year

2009-01-07T13:28:00.006Z

The genius of Google’s advertising is that it doesn’t look like advertising while probably doing a better job than most advertising. It’s so functional, so straight-up. It doesn’t even feel like false altruism where you know that your wallet will have to appear at some point. It’s just lovely, simple and it perpetuates the use of Google.

what's digital and why you should apply

2008-12-11T18:06:00.029Z

Something I did for the folks over at AdGrads.

It might be overstated (there’s probably always going to be the “‘bed, bog, bath’ element”) but Mr Billingsley’s comment is almost certainly right: we’re going to be digital advertisers because the world is now digital, and getting more so.

What does all this digital malarkey mean for people looking to get into the communications business and, before we look at that, what does digital mean anyway?

One of the lovely insights of Dare’s grad video – where the parents of Dare folk gloriously fail to define what their children do – is that pinning it down is tricky.

Part of its slipperiness is that things just keep shifting. Facebook was born in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, the App Store in 2008 etc. The only constant is change.

The other thing about ‘digital’ is that it’s polysemous – it has multiple meanings.

It’s used to refer to electronic media (web, screens, mobiles, ipods, nike+ shoes etc) but also, and more importantly, the behaviours those media have unleashed and fed: interaction.

There’s an important difference there that Jeremy Bullmore expressed perfectly in Campaign when he said,

There are two important things there for grads trying to get into the industry. The first is, “whose roof”?

Most of you will have been concentrating on the big above-the-line ones. That’s a good bet for a digital future as long as that ATL agency gets digital, which means they aren’t just talking about it, they’re doing it (hmm, a black sheep has just popped into my head.)

On the other hand, another good bet are the agencies whose best is yet to come: the digital ones, primed as they are to thrive in the coming digital ecosystem.

And now for the second important bit of Mr Bullmore’s quote: if you’re worried about applying to a digital agency because it’s got the word digital in it, don’t be: as he says, it’s not really about tech, it’s about interactivity.

And what's that? It's spreading the intelligence more evenly between people who make stuff and people who consume it. Sometimes it’s only a little, sometimes it’s a lot.

This interactivity let’s you do a lot more than you can at your typical traditional ATL agency. Or to reunite that idea with its owner:

I think that's really exciting (and Mr Tait has 9 more great reasons digital is better for those interested). In digital you’re unshackled from just doing TV, print and radio to all sorts of exciting things like sites, applications, blogs, games, branded content, widgets, podcasts, social things and experimental stuff. And a lot of this (not all) is actually useful to people; it's additive rather than interruptive.

In my experience grads tend to think of digital as something on-the-sidey and techy. Maybe it once was. Now it ain’t. Technology is so ubiquitous, so ‘ready-to-hand’, that it’s becoming invisible and when that happens it gets socially interesting. In other words, technology and culture used to be separate, increasingly they are the same (look what you're doing now.)

It’s a brilliant time to get into an industry that’s only going to grow (even in these tough times) and that’s much more about interesting interactive ideas than it is about tech.

Go on, apply!

Obviously I am biased but this would be a good place to start...

(For those wanting more, I suggest you have a play in here, read this, canoe back up this and maybe watch this. That should be enough to be getting on with.)

a good, good guide

2008-11-10T16:02:00.006Z

matthewfch/flickr

GoodGuide is great. It helps you find healthy, safe and green products. And - most importantly - it's now available on the iPhone. The fact that it's on the iPhone isn't the important bit. It's that it can be used at the point of purchase, which I'd imagine impinges much more on buying decisions than the memory of the site from home or work.

50,000

2008-11-08T00:02:00.004Z

Hit 50,000 hits today on Flickr for digitalbites and not much else happened so I thought it was worth a post. Good times.

getting creepy

2008-11-07T23:01:00.009Z

New technologies can look like magic. That's Douglas Adams speaking.

But magic comes in two shades: black and white (which if the last posts are anything to go by seems to be a minor obsession at the moment).

The black stuff indicates some dark intention; the white stuff a benevolent effect.

New tech goes the same way. Phorm looks black. Genius looks white. But, in essence, they both do the same thing: use our data to sell more effectively.

And there's going to be a load more black technologies as the web breaks out and evolves into an Internet of Things.

Throw into the mix that data capture will get a whole lot smarter not only because of new ways of getting it (through GPS, RFID, accelerometers and the like [SPIME devices]) but because our increasing desire for personalisation means absolute transparency (that's Kelly), and you have some really quite creepy tech around the corner.

Stuff that knows about YOU. Where YOU are. What YOU like. Maybe even why YOU like it - and tense changes of all those. It's gonna get freaky.

The challenge is to tweak and present these technologies from having a perceived dark purpose (I don't really think Phorm does) to being understood as benevolent. We need to fuzz them up.

art from code

2008-11-07T22:52:00.001Z

from here

unfinished swan

2008-10-30T16:48:00.000Z

The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

clients paying agencies to advertise agencies

2008-10-17T22:43:00.005+01:00

So the FT will shortly be running ads to warn against slashing ad budgets. Says Frances Brindle, FT's Global Marketing Director, "There is considerable evidence to suggest that companies that continue to invest in advertising in tough times emerge stronger than those that don't."

It's all correct but there's just something lovely about clients paying an agency to advertise agencies.

turn left where the telephone box used to be

2008-10-17T15:20:00.009+01:00

storem/flickr

Thought it might be nice to record the Stage 1 IPA talks for selfish future referencing and for anyone else interested. They are a series of talks that aim to cover some of the essential truths of the communications industry. My posts will be pithy and I'll add bits in sometimes, esp. if there's a jump-off to psychology.

The first one was by industry legend Jeremy Bullmore. Here's his talk, triple-distilled:

A man asks for directions to a shop in a small town. The postman tells hims to go up the road and turn left where the telephone box used to be.

Why has the postman failed in his communication? Because he makes the assumption that the listener knows what he knows. Or rather, he fails to appreciate the listener's knowledge is not the same as his. This lacks a word in English but it's something like empathy. Psychologists, however, do have a term for this faculty, theory of mind. Using clever methods - like the Sally/Anne task - it is possible to see this mental trick coming online around the age of four in developmentally typical children. Autistics never master this. The point: communicators need a theory of mind - or the ability to see events through the eyes of those they are communicating to - in order to be successful.
Passive audiences were never passive. Audiences have always actively understood communications, it's just that before digital they never had a way to express it; digital makes stuff that has always happened explicit.
There are no such things as messages. There are stimuli and responses.
The best creativity elicits the best contribution from the receiver (the artist rules his subjects by turning them into accomplices)
There is no dichotomy between creativity and effectiveness in communications. Effectiveness is the end; creativity is the means.
Advertising creativity makes client's money go further. Anything outside of that definition is not creativity.
Brand body language is what people read. When the body language doesn't match the communication, there's a problem.
Good brands make you feel safe, they release you from anxiety (mostly likely because of problems with information in market economies)

digital britian

2008-10-17T13:44:00.003+01:00

"Our ambition is to see Digital Britain as the leading major economy for innovation, investment and quality in the digital and communications industries. We will seek to bring forward a unified framework to help maximise the UK's competitive advantage and the benefits to society."

Stephen Carter, UK Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting

clarity crunch

2008-10-17T13:41:00.002+01:00

"My favorite time to manage is during a bust. It brings more clarity about what your customers need and what your priorities should be."

Sergey Brin

i love data layering

2008-10-16T13:46:00.001+01:00

...especially if it's in 3D.

believing real

2008-10-10T17:22:00.007+01:00

One of the first things I think when I see something online, and one of the first things that gets banded about on comment lists, is whether or not something is genuine, rather than set-up, faked, CGed etc. If it's genuine, interest soars; if not, interest dwindles (usually).

With this in mind here's a variation on Kelly's idea:

When content is faked, it becomes emotionally worthless.
When content is faked, stuff which isn't fake becomes scarce and valuable.
When content is faked, you need to show people things which are not faked.

I'd add on that some stuff that's great is faked (e.g. Cadbury's Gorilla; clearly that's not a real ape drumming away). It's when stuff is faked and needn't have been (or could have been done for real) that the emotional bottom drops out.

rebel selling

2008-10-10T12:12:00.015+01:00

This is a screen grab from LastFM before they ruined their design. Putting that to one side for the moment, the interesting thing about it is that, after 'rock', 'alternative' came in as the second most popular tag. A screen grab from today shows much the same pattern.

[Aside: It's interesting how 'seen live' is a major label too. Like Kevin Kelly has said when stuff gets superabundant it gets cheaper to the point of being free. When this happens things that can't be copied become more valued by both the ordinary people, hence the tag's popularity, and record companies, hence the money in music now being in touring.]

There is more than a strong whiff of irony about one of the most popular tags being 'alternative': 'popular' and 'alternative', at first blush, cannot operate in the same place in a Gaussian distribution.

Now, it could be something particular about LastFMers: they might be alternative sort of folk. There's that. It's part of the reason the 'alternative' tag is so big. But, there's a greater truth too: 'alternative' is the driver of capitalism and culture.

Bakunin, Nietzsche, Sombart and Schumpeter all saw capitalism not for the homogeneity it created but as a fundamentally creative (and thus destructive) system. Capitalism and culture can be stated as the effort to escape sameness.

But you get information problems here. There are too many alternatives. Just like brands are there to help solve this problem, so certain things become pin-ups for 'alternative' to avoid the crippling effects of having too many alternative things. These things are then popular for being alternative. Here, then, 'alternative' and 'popular' can operate the same place on a Gaussian distribution: everyone is trying not to be mainstream.

(Another irony here: counterculturalists believe they are rebelling against 'the system' when they are most probably contributing towards it, because rebellion is in the very spirit of capitalism. This could be problematic: "Not only does it distract energy and effort from the sort of initiatives that lead to concrete improvements in people's lives, but it encourages wholesale contempt for such incremental changes [The Rebel Sell])

why psychology is so important

2008-10-07T13:04:00.007+01:00

The mind has evolved to solve certain problems that kept cropping up in evolutionary history. Part of that is a general intelligence to work stuff out (be flexible) that history hasn't prepared it for. However, there are lots of other things that are more specific and muddy general intelligence.

When I say psychology is not the same as philosophy now but vital to it, what I mean is that without an understanding of the mind, we cannot get a good understanding of reality. We have to know the mud to remove it.

All knowledge gathering without an awareness of the mind's natural biases is the straight line in the diagram below. Knowing how the mind works allows you to travel along the bendy line, circumventing the mud, and obtaining unfettered knowledge. Close eyes, deep hum....

buy-product

2008-09-17T18:55:00.004+01:00

thomashawk/flickr

The short version of this post is:

Selling on social networks can only be a by-product (hence the title 'buy-product'. Geddit? Oh dear, I am sorry) of the activities occurring on those sites, never a primary activity.

The long version is this:

In market economies there are two big problems with information: it's (occasionally)* inadequate and it's superabundant.

Why is information inadequate? Because you only know how good something is after you have bought it, so how do you choose between alternatives?

Why is there too much information? Because everyone wants a slice of the pie making those alternatives and the market gets flooded with products or services and thus information about those. (How do you choose between one-hundred types of olive oil ? You don't for the most part. It's crippling. You move on.)

Add in the fact that this competition strips profits to the bone and you have three pretty good reasons for why brands should (and do so successfully) exist: to remove doubt about quality and ease the process of otherwise crippling choice for people who want to buy stuff, and pump scarcity (and thus juicer profits) back into things for people who want to sell stuff.

However, in the spirit of several recent books, solutions to the problem of inadequate and superabundant information can also be solved by [dramatic pause] other people. And more effectively because trust in other individuals is second only to personal experience itself.

Other people can literally 'test' products and services for you before you buy them yourself (by buying them themselves) and help narrow down the choice for you (by having had to narrow down the choice for themselves.)

People have probably been doing this since information in markets got to be doubly-dodgy. Nothing new in the behaviour. It even has a 5-syllable name: recommendation.

However, what might be new is that hitherto implicit recommendation could be made explicit and more useful with a dash of digital. Making stuff explicit seems to me to be the formula of the successful things in recent web (Facebook makes social relationships explicit, blogs records thoughts that would otherwise only exist in conversation or the mind, LastFM records the wake of your audio, StumbleUpon ossifies your digital discoveries etc.)

How would this work? Social networks would allow self-expression at a much finer level of detail allowing libraries of music, films, books, clothes**, etc that people have honed (not harvested automatically, which was the problem with Beacon). (Eventually content could be brought within such networks, so they operates as hubs of digital content.)

This in itself could present recommendations based on content (like iTunes Genuis) but also those made by other people in your group of friends. These recommendations wouldn't really be recommendations but comments/ratings tagged onto things by people. 'This track is awesome' could be really useful from someone who you (or your computer) knows you share taste with.

Picture time:

One of the nice things about such a system is that it's lovely for people, providing stuff they might be interested in. However, there is also an opportunity here for social networks.

Another picture first:

And now I am going to quote myself, which is probably a bit wanky but here we go from a few posts back:

"When people use Google, they're looking for information. When they use Amazon, they're buying (or researching). The ads are working here because people want information, it's welcome if its good enough.

When they use Facebook (or any other social media) they're expressing, communicating and interacting with others (being social not being cognitive). The same ads aren't working here for the same reason you'd be a bit miffed if someone marched into the pub, dropped a sausage in your pint, yaddered on about how delicious they are and, by the way, how they are half-price at the moment."

The point is that in the social space clumsy selling (ads) is not welcome: the communication gets tarnished by it, so it's ignored and disliked. But, that is not to say that selling as a by-product is out of the question. Links to things - and charging the producers a little for those links - suits everyone.

* I put 'occasionally' in brackets because as soon as information is partially inadequate it gets perceived at wholly inadequate.
** Self-generated recommendations will probably work for clothes; other-generated recommendations won't work as well. People like their clothes to be different (but not too different) from their peers.

negroponte's predictions

2008-09-11T08:24:00.010+01:00

Prediction is usually a dubious business: things are way too uncertain and we just don't know what we're going to know in the future ('unknown unknowns' in NNT's terms). That's why Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, which came out in 1995, is all the more freakish in its prescience.

Here's a smattering of things I liked, with the occasional few words after each from the perspective of now.

The tidiest way I have seen the 'receive -> interact' paradigm change articulated.

Basically, Apple's strategy and success.

RSS, Google Reader...

Creeping in more and more. He also talked about "the tiny hole or two in plastic or metal, through which your voices access a small microphone" (p.159). This is still proving difficult.

Things like Google Reader's Top Recommendations, Amazon's recommend emails and iTunes' Genius represent this one quite nicely. Although still some way to go here.

Hulu, BBC iPlayer and all the underground antecedents to these.

This idea - communication as well as information - is rephrased a lot by pundits. What's impressive about this is that it saw the value of social online before it was made explicit with, sorry, nasty phrase coming up, Web 2.0.

Blogging seems the best example.

Radiohead is my favorite example of this at the mo. (Also see here for what bitcasting - another of Negroponte's babies - is all about and how Radiohead's House of Cards 'video' is likely to have been the first example of this).

Very broadly gets to the nub of all the legal issues bouncing around online.

And a few others that didn't make it into digital bites:

"Clipping bits is very different from clipping atoms" p.59

"On the net each person can be an unlicensed TV station" (p.176)

One word. YouTube

"...bits that describe other bits...will proliferate in digital broadcasting. These will be added by humans aided by machines, at the time of release...or later (by viewers and commentators). The result will be a stream with so much header information that your computer really can help you deal with the massive amount of content" (p.179)

tags, labels etc

"automobiles will enjoy another very particular benefit of being digital: they will know where they are" (p.216)

SatNav.

"The important point is to recognise that the future of digital devices can include some very different shapes and sizes from those that might naturally leap to mind from our current frames (sic) of reference. Computer retailing of equipment and supplies may not be limited to Radio Shack and Staples, but include the likes of Saks and stores that sell products from Nike, Levis and Banana Republic."

Basically, the web breaking out from behind screens, which I have thought about here. Nike+ is the golden example of this right now. A continuation of this idea:

"When this happens in a tiny format, all "things" can be digitally active. For example, every teacup, article of clothing, and (yes) book in your house can say where it is. In the future, the concept of being lost will be as unlikely as being "out of print"

I like the nod to long tail stuff at the end there with "as unlikely as being out of print"

(Skepticism: the book, being widely read, could have prompted people to work on the things Negroponte predicted ('invented'), giving the impression that the book is farsighted when it may have been prescriptive to future-makers)

digital uses more neurons

2008-08-22T15:54:00.008+01:00

rizzato/flickr

There is a lot frothing up on how the Google Generation (which is actually a very misleading idea) is full of a bunch of cognitively myopic and depthless individuals just skimming from one digital distraction to another. And somewhere in that there is probably some truth for some people.

But the assumption that the endpoint of new web behaviours is neuromush is wrong. History teaches us that any new technology brings with it a grimly predictable cohort of detractors. It also teaches us that for every game-changing innovation - the alphabet, writing, printing - humans didn't end up mentally crippled but enriched, seriously enriched, in fact.

That's why - in the same spirit as Everything Bad is Good for You - it's nice amid all this gloom to know there are some historically alert digital optimists. Digital culture is such a massive improvement in many aspects to 'receive' culture*. As Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams put it in Wikinomics (p.47),

Rather than being passive recipients of mass consumer culture, the Net Gen spend time searching, reading, scrutinizing, authenticating, collaborating and organising.

So in that respect, Google is not really making us stupid. Perhaps, quite the opposite: all this new media may cause more cognitive sweat than the media before it.

Rewind ten years, people would read a book or an article and that was that. A few might make notes. Only a handful would write about it and publish, and typically on a professional basis. Back to today, and the same book or article generates way more thought than it would have done a decade earlier. Digital culture uses more neurons.

Added to that, what is also omitted from the view that the new represents a mental downgrade is that while we are outsourcing certain brain functions to silicon we are gaining literally superhuman abilities in the process. The critics focus on what is lost and ignore what is gained, like memory.

As Faris has neatly put it,

I think increasingly, our brains are less like databases and more like index servers

And it's better that way because actually I can store more, not less. My memory isn't atrophied by the internet, it's augmented. And that's the mark of some of the most transformational technologies: they extend our ability to keep information alive by outsourcing it.

*This is clumsy. Some digital stuff is obviously sit-back too.

aquajelly and airjelly

2008-08-22T15:35:00.002+01:00

more fragments

2008-08-21T23:26:00.001+01:00

blentley/flickr

Why is advertising in social media not really working out? Because of a silent assumption that got forgotten in the move from trad to new media.

You can deploy car and beer spots during football matches; ads for age-defying cream and Heat during How to Look Good Naked; stuff for DIY during Grand Designs...I could go on.

And this makes a lot of sense. By knowing what your audience is like you can be more selective and hope your ad is hitting a bigger group for whom it is more relevant, rather than just splattering it randomly across the schedule.

This model has been carried across to the Internet, with superb success for Google who worked out how to automate the process with AdSense.

However, one of the things the traditional model never had to worry about was what the audience were doing. It didn't have worry because it knew: they were listening to something, or watching a show, or standing on the Tube, or whatever.

Because the model had this silent assumption when it was transferred to the new medium it got forgotten. The hidden fragment got left behind.

What are the audience doing online?

When people use Google, they're looking for information. When they use Amazon, they're buying (or researching). The ads are working here because people want information, it's welcome if its good enough.

When they use Facebook (or any other social media) they're expressing, communicating and interacting with others (being social not being cognitive). The same ads aren't working here for the same reason you'd be a bit miffed if someone marched into the pub, dropped a sausage in your pint, yaddered on about how delicious they are and, by the way, how they are half-price at the moment.

So what people are doing online is probably as important for click-through rates as who they are.

I haven't thought about specific examples yet for social networks, but essentially companies selling in this space should assist with communication and expression, not clutter it.

The Internet isn't one medium, it's fragmented media - and not just by who, but why what.

smarter reviews

2008-08-20T10:21:00.005+01:00

Once mobile internet gets properly off the ground, lots of shopping in the real world will change. It will change because prices and reviews - things normally all the way back at home - will suddenly be at your fingertips in stores. The buying decision is going to get another brain contributing.

But reviews have their problems.

Say I am swotting up on a new book I have heard is rather tasty or investigating a new camera so I don't have to mashup (read, lazily appropriate) others' photos on Flickr. I read a load of book reviews on various sites. For the camera, I come up against some sites wanting my money for their opinions, others with more reviews than I can possibly read and perhaps a couple of blog posts from some real keenos.

Here's my beef with all of this.

'Old' media stuff is dense and long but trustworthy and rich. It's also one person's view normally.

Customer reviews are helpful because they are likely to tell it like it is; they have no reason not to. Except some people can't tell it like it is even if they want to, making a chunk of customer reviews unhelpful by being unreadable, like this beauty from the BBC's gleefully entertaining Have Your Say (distilled here).

And even when people can get their thoughts in order, how do you know that what they like you are going to like? So you look at quite a few of these, try to average across opinion. That's a bit time-consuming. One quick way to do this is to look at things like the 5 stars on Amazon.

This is beautifully quick but often rather unhelpful: it doesn't tell you all that much. Added to that, fans swarm in and leave in their slaver pages of universally positive reviews. In its most extreme form this sort of review takes binary form.: thumbs up or down, cool or not, rotten or fresh. Essentially, the problem with taking lots of data and reducing them, is that it can only provide a dirty average.

Basically, the problems of reviews are that we have work hard to find them, when we do there is too much information overall and there is a poor summary of it. We need something that combines the best bits. Basically, something that is quick but rich:

So all the power of collaboration is used. All the time spent reading and cogitating is stripped away. The in-depth, expert stuff is there if you want it. And, most importantly, the reviews become a whole lot more powerful by taking into account who has left them.

This has probably been thought up somewhere before. All the same, I don't see this kind of thing anywhere. And it is the perfect sort of review system for mobile: lightweight, powerful, visual, personalised and genuinely useful.

transactive digital memories

2008-08-13T10:40:00.005+01:00

kendrak/flickr

"Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."

Samuel Johnson had the idea of transactive memory down before Wegner, Giuliano, and Hertel formally brought it to the table in 1985.

What it acknowledges is that there's memory in our heads, and memory that's elsewhere, usually other people's heads. Transactive memory is the smearing of a reality to a number of different minds to lighten the load on one.

Swap out the 'other people' in this arrangement and swap in the Internet. Feel familiar? As Clive Thompson said in Wired, "Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us."

Just as the nature of transactive memory in relationships or groups is only conspicuous by someone's absence, so it is when we are away from the Internet. Our memories are now neuronal and digital. Sounds rather cyborgish, doesn't it? But a hefty chunk of my memory - names, numbers, dates, addresses, quotations - are all outsourced.

Wegner and his mates should broaden their research to see what's going on with transactive digital memories.

early twitter

2008-08-13T00:14:00.000+01:00

circlesquare - sub-reminisce

2008-08-10T21:57:00.003+01:00

Circlesquare - Sub-Reminisce from Bienvenido Cruz on Vimeo.

facebook and fireworks

2008-08-10T21:35:00.001+01:00

Facebook: the social equivalent of watching the fireworks in the park on TV.

anxiogenic tv

2008-08-10T20:45:00.007+01:00

bbaltimore/flickr

There is a lot on how the Google Generation (which is actually a very misleading idea) is full of a bunch of cognitively myopic and depthless individuals just skimming from one digital distraction to another. And somewhere in that there is probably some truth for some people.

But the assumption that the endpoint of all these new web behaviours is neuromush for everyone is wrong. That's why it's nice when you hear something that says, actually all this new media causes more cognitive sweat than the media before it. It might even be making some of us a bit smarter.

It's the same with TV shows. They are getting more complicated and we are having to be better decoders to understand them. Even 'rubbish' like Big Brother forces us to track a large number of relationships, which have to be continually updated. If this example is fatuous, shows like The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire, Prison Break, 24, Lost and so on are most certainly feistier than their antecedents.

As usual, someone else has thought about this a lot more and got it down on paper. Everything Bad is Good for You by Stephen Johnson argues that "that popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years" (xv). I agree.

But there's something else that I have been feeling in the last five years when I watch television, which is increased anxiety. The reason for this is that I can no longer trust writers.

Somewhere things changed.

For me, this point came with Season 1 of 24. With everything I had watched up to that point it was a fairly good assumption that by the end of a film or season everything would be nicely tied up - the baddies dispensed, the objective achieved, the romance consummated. More than anything, writers brought their characters close to death but pulled them back again at the last moment.

Then audiences got bored of this, the assumption was so strong that it started to dilute the experience because the outcome could be predicted. The reaction was for writers to start being ruthless and, to a certain extent, inconsistent when it came to dispensing with characters.

Now audiences were never really sure who was going to live or not because instead of pulling all major characters back from death they started popping them off left, right and centre.

I believe Keifer Sutherland is the only major cast member remaining on the television show 24 after its 7 seasons. Prison Break in its third season is considerably thinner on characters than when it started.

This has the effect of pulling you deeper into shows, because you face the confusion and uncertainly the characters feels instead of being able to watch the show with the saftey net below you.

As Johnson has noted, things like multiple-threading in TV shows have forced us to sharpen up cognitively. But, increasingly this and other devices are coupled with wanton disregard for nearly all of a show's major characters, which has sharpened our anxiety.

solution to the prosumption dilemma

2008-08-08T00:34:00.004+01:00

Solution is in the middle ground. Companies should try to build platforms that open the door to prosumers without knocking down their own walls.

I think Apple has got this right. When its lead users started hacking the iPod with Podzilla, PodQuest and Encylopodia and jailbroke the first version of the iPhone, it did a bit of of commercial Jitsu, taking the force of the demand and turning it to its advantage with the SDK and iPhone apps store.

Here is perhaps the best example of the prosumption dilemma solved: Apple keeps control, appears open and adds value to its product way beyond what it could achieve alone through vast collaboration.

mixin

2008-08-07T19:01:00.012+01:00

Two things.

One. Vodafone should be doing something like this.

They could have a whole arsenal of apps to turn their positioning - make the most of now - into a something valuable for people and link it up in lovely ways to mobile and social platforms.

Two. It's so helpful when you come across a new site not to have to explain it in your blog but just embed the code for a video they provide, which does the job for you, thank you very much.

spencer higgins

2008-08-07T18:47:00.003+01:00

There's just something very intriguing about this. You need to see it big.

crime mashup

2008-08-06T18:41:00.011+01:00

"It is simply unacceptable at this point in history that a citizen can use Web services to track the movies he is renting, the weather around his house, and the books he's recently purchased but cannot as easily monitor data regarding the quality of his drinking water, legislation, or regulations that will directly impact his work or personal life, what contracts are currently available to bid on for his state, or what crimes have recently occurred on his street."

James Willis, director of eGovernment for the Rhode Island Office, 2005

It is.

Or it was.

Now there's ZubediPI which tells me the West End is a bit dodgy when it comes to theft and violence amongst a whole host of other rather useful stuff.

i am

2008-08-06T17:25:00.017+01:00

If an alien arrived on earth one of the first things it would note about our species was how much time we spent with each other. 'Humans are social creatures' it might jot down (see Cartwright and Zander, 1953).

If it had been around for a while, it might have added 'but this has been decreasing in the last few decades' (Putnam, 2000). And, maybe if it had been paying special attention, it might scribble something like 'increasingly people have fewer others with whom to discuss their most intimate thoughts and feelings' (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Brashears, 2006).

As Ybarra et al (2008) sum up,

"Our society appears to be in a state of social decline, not one in which the environment is chaotic and people fear for their lives, but one in which people have fewer interactions and relations with others."

The success of the social networks is probably in no small part because they strengthened and made explicit these withering social connections we all naturally crave.

Orange's new campaign, which orbits around the strap line ‘I am’, mines this too.

What does 'I am' mean?

Simply, you are better off working together than you are by yourself, thus necessitating communication technology. You are the sum of the people you communicate with.

One of the nice things about this strategy is that it is actually true. It's not that staple of advertising - myth-making - but a statement of something fundamental about human interaction and that makes it fresh.

For one, you are smarter working together. Ybarra et al (2008) writing in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that social interaction (as little as 10 minutes) improved intellectual performance.

More social contact is correlated with well-being (Sinha & Verma, 1990; Triandis et al., 1986) and its absence is marked by depression (Gladstone, Parker, Malhi, & Wilhelm, 2007).

There is even some evidence to show that after controlling for level of health, fewer social connections are linked to an increased risk of death (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988). Yikes!

Orange is in the relationship business, not the mobile phone business any more.

And not only the relationships between each other but the relationships between all our different digital identities.

'I am' Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, Amazon, Vimeo, Google, Dopplr, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Stumble Upon the list goes on....

This unruly mass of services exists and yet there is nothing to tie them all together.

That is, until Orange’s offering, My Social Place, hits the scene in the autumn soldering all our online identities into one ball.

So ‘I am’ is a strategy that is timely in two ways. It fosters and facilitates being social, something we all need but aren't getting enough of. And it is digitally prescient, preparing for communicative life beyond simple mobile. More evidence of marketing and service dancing together so fast you can tell who's who.

But there is a final bit of cleverness in here. The social thing and the digital thing, as well as being two separate but rather nifty uses of the same strategy for ordinary people, are also commercially adroit when holding hands. As Cory Doctorow, in a speech at Cambridge last month, explains,

"The thing that the Internet is even better at than providing universal access to all human knowledge is nuking collaboration costs, getting rid of the cost of getting people together to do stuff…[This is] what allows us to be literally superhuman. That is to say that if you and someone else can do something that transcends that which you could do alone, then you have done something that is more than one human can do and is superhuman." (around 19 mins in)

'I am' in this sense perhaps acknowledges that what's around the corner is really big collaboration online and on-phone. And Orange is going to be a company to help out with all of that in its services, the branding seed of which is being planted now.

Pity the execution isn't more exciting and less pretentious. Still, early days.

search for 'i am'

2008-08-06T00:57:00.003+01:00

Been waiting for to get a pic of the new Orange print campaign, but everywhere I seem to be at the moment the damned ad sneaks off somewhere.

Anyway.

I might be wrong - I'm probably wrong - but, isn't this the first big campaign in the UK to jettison URLs in favour a search term?

In case it has passed you by, the ad suggests you

search for 'I am'

in the spot normally reserved for a URL.

[Aside: 'I am' has to be the shortest sentence in English?]

This is a great improvement for the interested. Much better than having to remember "www.i-am-everyone.co.uk".

Of course, the Japanese have been doing this sort of thing for a bit, probably because their mobile market is so much more mature than ours.

But there doesn't appear to have been any SEO. Instead Google, Yahoo et al. seem to have profited rather nicely from this campaign (any of the Fallon people currently dating people at the search engines?)

People search for everything, sometimes even if they have the site in their bookmarks. No one really types in a whole web address any more. It's good to see brands acknowledge this.

ipint + the global spirit level

2008-07-28T22:01:00.007+01:00

The iPint, the stonkingly popular download for the iPhone. Apparently "the best example to date of mobile advertising" according to Clare Beale. I'm inclined to agree, even though, according to Faris, the idea seems to be lifted from here:

Although fun, it is quite shallow. It needs more depth to win my vote.

The next best example of mobile advertising from Carling would be if you could add some sort of value in beyond a neat trick, like actually having your pint waiting for you at the bar or brought to you if you order on your iPhone so you can avoid a ten-deep human barrier between you and your cool, refreshing beverage. Probably would get more Carling sold too, which would "stretch the definition of what advertising is" even further.

[It's the accelerometer in the iPhone that Carling has exploited. The accelerometer is the interesting bit. And for no reason other than it's possible it would be cool to know the tilt of every iPhone user on the planet. Making the half-decent assumption that facing up and moving a bit equals movement and down flat equals inactivity it would provide an interest peek into people's activity.]

pulse

2008-07-28T21:44:00.004+01:00

According to the blurb, "pulse is a live visualisation of the recent emotional expressions written on the private weblogs of blogger.com". It's interesting because stuff online is being used to create art offline.

It's kind of a mashup of Julius Popp's intriguing Bit.Fall (below) and and also the 'feel map' that I blogged about here.

Also reminds me a bit of the plant in E.T. which seems to respond to E.T.'s health.

I really, really want time and location to be factored into these things, especially as mining the emotions gets better. It would be such an interesting insight into people's expressed emotions as news stories ripple through a population or more generally what a particular population is feeling in a year.

gardens and the human condition

2008-07-27T23:39:00.009+01:00

uiruriamu/flickr

Insomnia and the BBC World Service coupled up to draw my attention to this beguiling, offbeat little essay, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.

It's not a book about gardens; it's a book about humans through the lens of gardens.

One of its most interesting ideas is the paradox that while we consider gardens cocoons of respite they are, of necessity, also places of care, places where "longing for repose is pitted against a deep restlessness".

It is, in horribly bland modern terms, an idea about work/life balance. The metaphorical garden must be a place where neither continuous labour nor wanton abandon can exist but instead a rich combination of the two.

brainbow

2008-07-27T23:16:00.003+01:00

This stunning image comes from the inside of a transgenic mouse's head (hippocampus I think). Each neuron is expressed as a different colour. More here.

the girl effect

2008-07-27T22:55:00.002+01:00

Incredible work from W+K & Grow Interactive.

cloud anxiety

2008-07-27T16:27:00.004+01:00

ancawonka/Flickr

"despite my head being firmly convinced that my data belongs in the clouds, my heart just doesn't feel quite right scribbling into a browser window."

Michael Parsons | Times Online

The whole cloud thing just means moving your data from the box sitting by your legs to a box probably somewhere in California. Both places are vulnerable to attack and both places can be secured. It's just about having it tucked away behind your walls that feels safer in an odd way. I wonder when banks first started if people felt weird handing over their cash to be looked after?

loving novelty, craving depth

2008-07-27T16:19:00.004+01:00

steelcityhobbies/flickr

“I feel that much of my life is ebbing away in the tide of minute-by-minute distraction . . . I’m not certain what the effect on the world will be. But psychologists do say that intense close engagement with things does provide the most human satisfaction.” The psychologists are right. McKibben describes himself as “loving novelty” and yet “craving depth”, the contemporary predicament in a nutshell.

Bryan Appleyard | Times Online

What a great way of nailing down that very modern way of operating, 'loving novelty' but 'craving depth'.

What's most annoying about this duality of motivation is that the former usually comes without the latter. The new attracts us and the emptiness of its reality sets us hunting again, more sullied and poorer of time.

(Or in T.S. Eliot's better words the new arrives “Filled with fancies and empty of meaning / Tumid apathy with no concentration”.)

This is almost certainly due to the dopaminergic system in the brain. Newness and the promise of reward fire up areas of the brain rich in dopamine (Knutson, Westdorp, Kaiser, & Hommer, 2000).

When expected reward fails to arrive dopamine levels plunge - and the pleasure drains away - but the brain wants its hit so carries on seeking. It carries on trying to find the new. (Read Panksepp's great book on this sort of thing for more)

Digital experiences are very much like this. Newness. Excitement. Reality. Disappointment. Seeking newness again. 30 minutes on YouTube should be enough to elicit this gamut of emotions in anyone with an intact dopaminergic system. And it leaves you feeling grubby.

We can't help but be magpies to novelty. It is hardwired. We can, however, try to build digital experiences that supply real depth that don't feel like cheap distractions.

This is one reason why I think gaming should be bigger in advertising. And others do too.

More depth please.

beatbearing demo

2008-07-27T02:09:00.000+01:00

I like.

reflections

2008-07-27T01:08:00.004+01:00

In the 15 minutes it took me to write the last post, the idea inside - that fitting rooms should be digitised - hadn't really crystallised. It was a sloppy half thought and blogging about it helped it grow a little beyond that. That's one reason I really like blogging because it forces me to get my untidy slew of thoughts neatly bottled.

Another reason is that at weird times (it's 1am) ideas will pop into my head that I want to get down. So the post was written in a vacuum, save for the various links out to supporting stuff. I didn't check to see if such a thing existed beforehand. That's bad because it could have been and I would have possibly wasted some time and it's good because I am - as we all are - infected by the thoughts of others. It was fresh.

Since writing it, I have had a look around and similar ideas do exist. It's hard being original.

the digital fitting room

2008-07-26T22:35:00.011+01:00

the_moog/Flickr

What is the point of a fashion model? Aren't they there to help present clothes in their best aesthetic and proportions and ultimately elicit the reaction 'ooh, I would like that' or 'that brand'?

I think so.

After desire comes pragmatics. Does it fit? Does it look good?

If everyone were the same size as the models then all you would do is go and buy the item in that size.

But, of course, everyone isn't the size of a model. Dove niftily profited from that insight with their Campaign for Real Beauty.

Plus, it is one thing to see a model wearing something, another to imagine yourself in it and quite another still to see yourself in it.

It is for this reason fitting rooms exist: so people can test clothes in front of mirrors while trying to look effortlessly blasé about it all (this most bizarre of states is in desperate need of a label. Do the Germans have one, they normally have wonderful words for things like this?)

I would argue that if it weren't for the liberal return policies that e-retail sites have, (which are roughly double the shop rates) clothing would be no way near the second most purchased item online after books. The internet just turns people's homes into their fitting rooms.

Now, no digital experience can recreate the real thing, but I think clothing companies haven't quite got it right online yet.

Just from having a browse around the sites of H&M, Diesel and TopShop it is clear that their digital spaces are sparkly brochures, nothing more.

Even Uniquo's Grand Prix winning Uniqlock - as fresh and tasty as it is - doesn't add a whole lot of value on for their customers. It is not useful to actually buying clothes. Maybe it's not supposed to be. But I think it should.

What would be better? I reckon if people are interested in how clothes look and if they'll fit then all that's needed is a digitisation of the place this happens in: the fitting room.

The Digital Fitting Room can be online, on-phone or on-wall. It simply takes a high-res avatar of you based on either a scan or supplied key dimensions and matches it to the known dimension of clothes. I think the technology is good enough to do this and the demand is certainly there if virtual communities are anything to go by:

"I've also been fascinated to discover how important fashion is within virtual worlds, in which people can dress up their digital avatars and enjoy the benefits of a new outfit or hair-do at a fraction of the cost of the real thing. This is a kind of theatre of virtual consumption, which works in exactly the same way as consumption in the real world – people lust after objects, save up to buy them, and display them with the same pride they would an analogue object....trying on outfits and shopping is one of the great pleasures the world affords its residents, and one of the reasons why Second Life is used by so many women."
Michael Parsons | Times Online

And it opens up whole new swathes of applications for things like the iPhone (e.g., point it at an item's bar/QR code in-store and see what it would look like on you) or gaming where you get to dress yourself digitally inside of an interesting little game.

The first steps don't have to be as grand as these. They just create engaging and useful interfaces for people to dress themselves and ride off the back off the the popularity of personalisation in the marketplace.

I'd find it useful anyway.

more radioheadness

2008-07-26T12:15:00.009+01:00

Just discovered this beautiful little baby created by flight404 and midwifed by the Radiohead/Aniboom video competition. Everywhere I look Radiohead is innovating, which includes getting other people to be innovative for you. Check out the high res version here.

muphry's Law

2008-07-26T11:17:00.004+01:00

hanuman/flickr

Muphry's Law, yep you read that right, states “if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written” and, futhermore, "the stronger the sentiment expressed...the greater the fault".

knol

2008-07-24T12:37:00.005+01:00

Knol is Wikipedia with three important differences.

1. It adds reputation/authorship more fully into the mix, which improves reliability and drives motivation.

2. It pays you, again, providing more motivation.

3. It is much, much easier to edit unlike that horrible Wikipedia editing interface:

Good move Google.

the future is streaming, not downloading

2008-07-24T10:46:00.008+01:00

januszbc/Flickr

The news that major ISPs in the UK have agreed to smack the wrists of hardcore file-sharers is, ultimately, not really news.

This is because film, tv and music - the most popular shared content - is increasingly available in streamable form obviating the need to download at all. It's all going to be in the cloud.

The likes of LastFM and Pandora could take care of the music. iPlayer is already taking care of the BBC's output phenomenally well. Other places like TV Shack, Videostic and, legally, Hulu, are providing the rest.

It does tickle me a bit that just as the industry catches up, the ways in which we can consume music has moved on. Instead of owning content - and all the problems that brings if you have acquired it illegally - you just own links to that content and get served with ads or pay a small subscription fee for it.

This shouldn't be a new problem for the entertainment industry, it's a better solution.

local cloud dj

2008-07-24T02:18:00.007+01:00

In this interesting AdAge article Steve Rubel talks about how new media do not usually supplant old media, they add to it. That is, with the possible exception of mobile internet and the radio. The radio has a few problems, some summed up in The use of conventional and new music media: implications for future technologies;

"Due to its broadcast nature, the only way to control the mix of music played on the radio is to change stations. Participants came to know what shows would be likely to play music they might like, and not have heard, but found it difficult to fit their time around these programs. Moreover, they might miss or forget the name of the song or band before remembering to buy the music."

That is all magically fixed by 'Cloud Music':

"With a number of websites offering [music] free (chiefly LastFM from my usage but also Songza, BoomShuffle, Imeem, SpiralFrog, Qtrax and Pandora), iTunes may even become redundant and the idea of owning a track may be history. Instead, all your music would be within the LastFM (or equivalent) 'cloud', accessible and streamable on whatever your hardware, whenever you want, as long as you are plugged in."

In February - when I wrote that - there wasn't really a way to do this. Not easily anyway. However, with typical Apple aplomb democracy has been brought to a previously difficult task with the iPhone 3G. As I went on to say,

"I think 'cloud music' spearheaded by LastFM and others amounts to nothing less than a quiet revolution in the way we consume music and lays down a first draft for the future of music."

Sounds a bit grand but I think the shift will be quite grand. Radio might be one of those things that goes, a medium that is replaced by something genuinely better.

Still that leaves the problem of what to listen to; choice can be crippling.

From experience (and research in this paper) it seems most of the new music people get comes their way from a few seriously keen musicologists in their group of friends.

The tyranny of choice places like LastFM offer up may be solved by people like this, as they become curators of the massive databases with constantly morphing playlists, which their friends can tune into. Of course big DJs will still exist - and should move into places like LastFM now and get curating - but the rise of the 'local cloud dj' should happen if 'on-demand' music with 'effectively infinite choice' goes ahead.

As Steve Rubel has said in another article:

Aye to that.

digital bites

2008-07-23T22:33:00.007+01:00

I like making pictures. And anything to do with digital. So I married the two together in a Flickr group.

It started off as just a personal stash of interestingness for someone entering the world of digital to get their head around things.

Then I wondered if (and how) it would spread on the Internet without me promoting it at all. It was an interesting wee experiment just watching various links organically popping up all over the place, the odd twitter/friendfeed/blog mentioning it.

Anyway, people seem to like it. So now I'm moving onto the second part of the experiment: promoting it, which starts with this, a playful little app where all the 'digital bites' can be explored:

www.will-lion.com/digitalbites

Let's see what happens now.

futureworld 1

2008-07-20T00:49:00.004+01:00

14th January 2009: A couple breaks up because Google Street View reveals he is seeing another woman.

that's how I roll

2008-07-19T00:39:00.007+01:00

From the rut.

shoes

2008-07-18T23:56:00.004+01:00

Pink Shoes | aswirly.

"Online shoe sales surge 17% ahead of Sex and the City premiere" (IMRG)

radioheadness

2008-07-14T23:59:00.013+01:00

Radiohead seems bigger than the sum of its parts. I happen to think their music is fantastic but I have just got this niggle that their music alone shouldn't be so big. Isn't it too drony for most people?

With The Tipping Point still kicking about in my mind from a recent re-read I can't help but feel some of their success can be attributed to their seriously innovative activity away from their instruments, like the video above where instead of capturing light bouncing off them (like a camera does) they have captured something else bouncing off and played around with the data. Then there's the web-only free album and all the remixing possibilities they create, like the video above, which comes with Google Code to make your own visualisations. This remix property is something Kevin Kelly predicted:

"Once music is digitized it becomes a liquid that can be morphed and migrated and flexed and linked. You can filter it, bend it, archive it, rearrange it, remix it, mess with it." Radiohead seem to be pushing people into this stage; other bands are still coming to grips with stage two, freeness.

Perennially operating on the edge lends a serious ding to the band's cachet. For one, it acts to get the attention of early adopters. It also may create a 'Coke effect'. In blind taste tests most people rate Pepsi as tasting better. When they see the labels Coke is preferred. Brand associations literally change taste perception. Radiohead's associations might literally change music perception or force people to give it 'more of a try' because cool early adopters, people who are serious about music, are serious about Radiohead.

Or maybe the slightly drony alienated sound is just what people like.

(Thanks very much to Faris who mentioned this post on his blog)

Using the space

2008-06-22T00:33:00.005+01:00

When digital media space is snapped up on a page by the same brand what usually happens is that two identical ads are shoehorned into their respective spaces after a bit of resizing. That's filling the space. In the Mac ad above the two spaces speak to each other in a meaningful way making the whole ad more engaging. That's using the space.

Digital is different

2008-06-13T23:32:00.003+01:00

jellymon/Flickr

In this article in AdAge (Google cache version here), Robert Rosenthal, former president of TBWA/Chiat/Day Latin America, is highly skeptical of what "online advertising [is] actually delivering...." He notes that there is no proper Internet branding to speak of, "[c]an you think of even one "Just do it"...that came from advertising on the web?"

I think this makes the error of thinking about new media by the standards of the old media. It's the view that expects brands to be announcing what they are about the whole time, instead of, well, just doing it. Simply put, it's the expectation of messages where services are more appropriate (and appreciated).

So, there may not be a "Just do it" but there is a Nike+.

As the NYT says, "Behind the shift is a fundamental change in Nike’s view of the role of advertising. No longer are ads primarily meant to grab a person’s attention while they’re trying to do something else — like reading an article. Nike executives say that much of the company’s future advertising spending will take the form of services for consumers, like workout advice, online communities and local sports competitions.

"“We want to find a way to enhance the experience and services, rather than looking for a way to interrupt people from getting to where they want to go,” said Stefan Olander, global director for brand connections at Nike. “How can we provide a service that the consumer goes, ‘Wow, you really made this easier for me’?”"

TV may be the major place for yaddering on about brands and what they stand for but digital offers other ways of making businesses grow - and growth is what 'advertising' has to be aiming to engender.

jelly on black III

2008-05-23T01:22:00.000+01:00

mrfeesch/flickr

jelly on black II

2008-05-23T01:18:00.001+01:00

coda/flickr

Relentless

2008-04-24T16:37:00.007+01:00

Relentless have a slick new site and viral vid. At the moment I can't find out whose work it is (Obviously Coke, but I am talking about the digital agency).

I just like the way it's dressed up as some dark medieval potion for the elite operator requiring of more energy than the average serf. The logo font looks fresh off the Gutenberg press. The whole feel reminds me a bit of the Thief games.

The video is a beautiful blend of modern (the clothes, the freerunning, the architecture) and the old (the classical artwork, the end shot of the columns, the black rearing horse statue and Mozart's Requiem).

I also really love the vid's focus on the empty morning. This little look into an unexplored time of the day reminds me of VW's Night Driving ad, where the focus is a few hours earlier:

(Dylan Thomas read by Richard Burton and Don't Blow It by Cliff Martinez. By DDB)

Binaural beats

2008-04-23T12:23:00.001+01:00

burnblue @ Flickr

When two sounds with two different frequencies are played in stereo (i.e. to each ear), binaural beats are heard. These aren't real but equal to the difference between the stereo frequencies. You can listen to one here (headphones needed, toggle between each ear to see the effect vanish).

There are several companies that claim such binaural beats improve mental functioning and memory by reverse engineering brain frequencies via the audio. Naturally, the combined simplicity and complexity of this idea caught certain people's imagination, to the point that a musician-physicist mate of mine wondered it there was anything to it last year during exams.

There isn't. In this recent study binaural beats had zero effect on brain frequencies and, what is more, participants in the experimental group were more forgetful and more depressed than controls.

Cognitive neuroscience, one. New Age monkeys, nil.

(If you want to see more on music and mind, see this post.)

Now

2008-04-19T22:57:00.004+01:00

I think technology should be about about manipulating space (by making it negligible - e.g., cars, planes etc) and time (by giving us more of it - e.g., microwaves, washing machines etc). In one sense, then, I admire Vodafone's newish strategy - to make the best use of your time - because mobile communication frees up otherwise dead time. This is the essence of their recent TV spot:

As Judy Dench tells us it's "the hanging around time, the A-B time" that could be better spent.

In another sense though, it just stretches the time when we need to be connected and available. This is further time in which to be interrupted by bosses or diverted by the non-linear attractions of the Internet.

Making the most of 'now' also means being in a permanent state of 'now'; time for reflection is suspended by the tyranny of being constantly 'on'. "The hours not really spent doing anything" are assumed to be bad in the ad. But the hours not really spent doing anything are important.

With the growth of hyper-connectivity the need for independence and quiet reflection amid this 'now' state are going to be every more important as technology (and thus bosses) encroach ever more on this time. We need may need digital holidays.

How to sell evolution

2008-04-18T18:38:00.004+01:00

Darwin probably had the best idea any one has ever had. His main theory is so elegant, explaining so much with so little. (His other theory, sexual selection, is also pretty hot stuff.)

I'm not getting into the evolution/creationist debate because a debate needs two sides, and, in purely scientific terms, this 'debate' doesn't have that.

Worryingly, despite the vast importance of this account of life there is a staggering level of ignorance about it.

In my experience with children, teenagers, undergrads and adults:

some know nothing about it;
some hold a Lamarckian view (the idea that acquired characteristics can be passed on);
some have a really weird version where frequency of use begets a trait (my favorite example is that smokers' children will be born with their index and middle finger as one uber-finger with a hole in it for the cigarette);
lots think in terms of the Great Chain of Being, where there is a linear progression from things like amoeba up to us, stopping off at monkeys along the way. This idea is probably given legs because of Rudy Zallinger's much parodied "The March of Progress" in paleoanthropologist F. Clark Howell's book, Early Man.

This is wrong because, as Pinker says, "evolution did not make a ladder; it made a bush" [p. 343]. That is, we did not evolve from chimpanzees: chimpanzees and humans both evolved from a common ancestor.

I was never taught about evolution at school. I taught myself at University. This is the biggest betrayal of my education. Now, I don't know about how it's being done in schools now but if the children I know are representative, it's not being done well.

One thing that might be really, really useful is computational modelling of evolution (like Paegel, B.M. & Joyce, G.F. (2008). Darwinian evolution on a chip. PLoS Biol.) This brings natural selection to life, in a way that when made a wee bit simpler should wipe away all the misconception in a lovely interactive, tamagotchi-like way.

Evolution - and all complex scientific ideas - should be sold in the digital space. It's where children can interact with, test and better understand such ideas. Given a choice between a dull classroom lecture by a teacher, who will likely be worse than the top teachers used to develop a videogame, and such a videogame, the choice is obvious.

GTA Coke

2008-04-18T02:40:00.003+01:00

This I like. Excellent work by Wieden + Kennedy and Nexus.

BBC Penguins

2008-04-11T20:30:00.010+01:00

Seriously good work from RKCR Y&R (ergh, so many letters and, quick aside, who still has an entry page on their website?) and Passion Pictures for promotion of the Beeb's iPlayer. David Bainbridge, BBC head of marketing communications and audiences for future media and technology (his business card must comes as roll) said on BR: "It is also hoped that this creative device will not only celebrate what BBC iPlayer can deliver, but will also say something quite profound about the BBC's overall appetite for creative risk-taking and innovation." It does. (Although strictly speaking the innovation was out-sourced).

Trucks

2008-04-08T01:31:00.011+01:00

Trucks from Cadbury and Fallon is not as good as Gorilla. I think that's the early consensus; some of the comments on YouTube are nasty though. (Aside: Why do people like to rub it in the face so fiercely when something is not as good as a previous performance?) Here it is:

The most interesting thing about it is a comment it invited on YouTube made by a certain funkymonkey86, "i just -chose- to watch an advert. that's weird". Cadbury and Fallon would smile at this I'd imagine: their ad is anticipated entertainment and hunted down for that.

Gliding about Earth

2008-04-07T00:47:00.011+01:00

I commented on Photosynth - the very cool little app swallowed by Microsoft - a while back. Viewfinder is similar except it tacks on to Google Earth, adding an elegant new dimension.

I think if it takes on the multi-shot nature of Photosynth (as opposed to single shot shown in the vid above), it will be better.

The software clearly has a slew of uses but I think simply being beautiful is one. Software becomes art.

Tube paranoia

2008-04-05T23:41:00.009+01:00

(ferro_ud @ Flickr)

I'm a little bit fascinated by The Underground. The visual language always gives me satisfaction. Then there is the strangeness to being underneath everything. I love this ad for making explicit what I always imagine (in slightly less pristine visuals) is going on above my head on the tube.

Transparente. Agency: Contrapunto Madrid

Most of all, the tube is intriguing because of the people on it. There's all the covert reading over shoulders, the seat politics, proximity negotiations, the conspicuously empty seats around a nutter and the wilful avoidance of making eye contact to the point where the mundane transmutes into the sublime.

In one of the most massively artificial places humans are forced to congregate, everyone wants their own cocoon; even Tony Blair was ignored on the tube. The only thing that punctures everyone's individual seals is a collective comedy or tragedy, like when someone's shopping or afro is pinched in the door. The valence of the emotion depending on which side of the doors the person is when this happens.

Simmel said in The Metropolis and Mental Life that "[t]he deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces...." One result of this struggle is the urban blasé, an indifference to much of the stimuli of the city.

This deadening of the senses though may not be entirely accurate. A nifty virtual reality experiment published in the British Journal of Psychiatry this month has shown a large proportion of tube travellers felt paranoia - a sharpening of the senses - where eye contact is misconstrued for something more malignant.

Being human and the future

2008-04-05T12:08:00.020+01:00

Visions of the future of technology are always desperately void of any human element. That's one reason why I like Diesel's knowing 2007 winter ads: they admit that humans are at the centre of all this technology.

This isn't a new idea. People building things got interested in the users at the centre of their systems mostly to safeguard against that human propensity to mess up. For this they needed people who understood or could find out how humans tick: psychologists.

Although there is a history of psychologists and engineers occasionally getting into bed with each other before WW2, the relationship became serious after its start because as early computer scientist Grace Hopper said, "after that, we had systems". The systems they were dealing with were primarily airplanes and the ecosystem that went with that (e.g. radar monitoring). User-centred design became a necessity: lives were at stake.

Since then the relationship between psychologists and engineers has properly ossified. The marriage is called Human Factors (HF), although Ergonomics, Cognitive Engineering and Human Computer Interaction are other terms banded about.

No longer is it about simply making complex systems more tolerant of that human habit of making mistakes. Instead, it aims to create the best fit between the human mind and all the things it has built. More than ever, this is vital as technology becomes ubiquitous.

This includes things like making things easier to learn and use, promoting efficiency, tolerating and guarding against errors and promoting enjoyment. As Noyes (2000, p.63) (my old professor) has said, the role of HF is “to design to enhance human abilities, to support human limitations and the meet the subjective, affective component…of humans”.

This last bit, about "subjective, affective" stuff is getting more and more important. In fact, in a big sit down last month of clever people in this area, the question was asked "what will Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) be like in the year 2020?"

As I said at the outset, visions of the future of technology are always desperately void of any human element. Not in the answer to HCI2020: Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020 reduces the answers down into a digestible form (in widescreen, which joyously fills my 22 inches of screen real estate) where the central focus is on "the embodiment of human values at the heart of computing."

Here is a summary:

Part 1 - timeline of major changes over last 20 years and beyond in computing, living and society

Changing Computers

1960s - Mainframe: one machine, many users
1980s - Personal computer: one computer, one user
2000s - Mobility era: many computers, one user
2020s - Ubiquity era: thousands of computers, one user
(I think this may have missed out the possibility of returning full circle, to a mainframe which supports many users. The mainframe or cloud will be the Internet.)

Interfaces
Replacing WIMP with more natural gesture, pen, multi-touch, speech, eye and mind control

Displays
All materials could be digitised as screens become flexible and part of the fabric of life (e.g. Animated textiles)
Hybrid digital-biological displays

Mobile
A very large part of all computing will be in the palm of our hands
Act as extension to our hands, shifting from communication devices to interaction devices (e.g. Apple's plans for the iPhone)

Robotics
Robots become semantic learners and can make inferences about the world (e.g. attractiveness or if now is a good time to be interrupted)

Life caching
When space is no longer an issue more and more of life can be recorded (e.g. MyLifeBits and see this Sci.Am. article)

More home brews
Just as content is no longer created centrally, application creation is decentralised so amateurs can freely mash-up more relevant and personalised applications (e.g. Feel Map or BabyNameMap)

Always on
Simply, that communication channels will be permanently open, everywhere and all the time.

Changing Lives

Learning differently
Learning, using and testing of material will change as new technologies are deployed in the classroom (e.g. podcasts, digital classrooms, Ubi-Learning etc). Home, school and play will be blurred.

Living differently in the family
More digital connections between family. This is not just communication, but also sharing of media and even events (e.g. grandma being 'at' the party whilst being 100 miles away). One issue may be surveillance by parents over children using technology developed for peace of mind.

New ways of growing older
Medical sensors are decentralised to allow better monitoring of health. 'Silver' social networks will be useful in health respects as well as assuaging social isolation. Increases in the amount of games for older populations.

Changing Societies

Computing and government get closer
Government will change the way they work because of computers; public will change the way government operates because of computers.

Part 2 - transformation of interaction

Human Values in the Face of Change

The changes in Part 1 are summarised:

The end of interface stability - they'll be everywhere and in everything
The growth of techno-dependency - we wont be able to cope without it
The growth of hyper-connectivity - being connected to family, friends and society
The end of the ephemeral - desire to be digital magpies, collecting as much as we can
The growth of creative engagement - "the proliferation and appropriation of new kinds of digital tools by people from all walks of life

These are then evaluated in human terms. "People will still wish to be part of families, to stay connected with friends, to educate their children, to care for each other when they are unwell, and to grow old safely and in comfort. Technology, digital or otherwise, is the enabler for all of these things rather than the focus. Shifts in computing are therefore not at the forefront of people’s concerns. What does concern them is how technologies can support the things that matter to them in their daily lives – the things they value."

The end of interface stability
- the issues raised by "the shifting boundary between computers and humans", like personal space, defining features of an individual if technology is part of us,
-the issues raised by "the shifting boundary between computers and the everyday world", like opting in and out of invisible interaction
- the issues raised by "living in a computational ecosystem", like the emergent effects of multiple systems working together, trusting them and problems of accountability.

The growth of techno-dependency
- what happens when systems fail and when there is a digital outage (e.g. YouTube in February)?
- what kind of basic skills will atrophy (c.f. calculator and mental arithmetic)

The growth of hyper-connectivity
- with everyone connected to everyone there are issues of etiquette. "For example, students feel it is perfectly acceptable to email their professors with excuses for late assignments using informal text slang. Professors, however, may feel differently."
- The need for independence and quiet reflection amid the constantly 'on' state.
- Work and home blurring, and the effect this has on life.
- The difference between digital crowd and mob, and whether the former reflects opinion accurately or just extreme and offensive views

The end of the ephemeral
- How digital footprints and privacy work
- Authentication, security and personal identification to protect the digital footprint
- Human memory is selective and constructive, digital memory is stable; how do these play out? Should we be able to delete digital memories (like completely removing a Facebook account, which is notoriously difficult)
- How will identity be shaped if such (unwanted) digital memories persist?
- People's awareness of when data are collected about them
- The possibility of geo-aware systems being used for surveillance by friends, family, society or state

The growth of creative engagement
- Is more automation a good thing?
- "How can the interaction and design of new computational tools be structured so they do not impede creative engagement?"
- "What new toolkits can be developed to enable scientists, and others to create tools for themselves to solve their own problems and explore new avenues?"
- How will new tools affect expertise?

Part 2, 3 & 4 - a desirable HCI agenda

I wont go into this in detail. See the paper for more.

Lots to be thinking about.

Pixels and Colour

2008-04-05T11:41:00.010+01:00

Having been nowhere before computers, pixels are now everywhere.

They rarely get noticed because their sum is greater. Christian Zuzunaga - apart from having a great surname - has created a really strong visual language of lushly coloured pixels across his work.

One example that is doing the digital rounds, after being in Design Week, is the sofa above; I wouldn't want this in my house but I'd love it on my wall (as I pic, I'd add quickly).

His other work is exciting too. You'll find them on his website, which I would also class as a piece of art in itself, although I am a sucker for bright colours on black.

Cocoon

2008-04-04T23:02:00.009+01:00

Hanging from a branch is Cocoon, O2's latest phone.

Name

I like it for lots of reasons, one of them is that it's called Cocoon and not the RX400 or something similarly cold. Engineers should be allowed to design things, they should not be allowed to name them.

Like Apple's operating systems, imaginatively named products are better because they slice off the bland and replace it with a useful communication moment.

Writing in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Miller and Kahn (2005) found, at least in colour labels, more imaginative and unusual names beget more favourable perceptions and rates of purchase than functional ones. See their paper for why they think this happens.

Added to the various cognitive dynamics that bring about this effect, the nature of the label will cause a cognitive Litchenberg figure to branch out activating all sorts of potentially interesting and positive associations. There's something snug about a cocoon, something exciting about what's inside, and, of course, something natural.

Nature crops up again in a nice bit of 'ornimorphism' (attributing bird features to inanimate objects - yes, I made the word up), where the dock is called a nest, which lends it further cutesy charm.

More imaginative naming for bits in technology ecosystems please.

Design

It's clearly white, but the design doesn't end up tripping over itself to imitate Jonathan Ive; it has a sleekness and freshness of its own. I particularly like the LED lights on the outer shell that spell out messages, callers and the time.

Marketing

Anyway, that's the product; the marketing's is also good example of something done well because digital is used for digital, not as some lame TV follow up or place to stick JPEGs of posters.

VCCP discovered the 40 most influential bloggers, gave them a Cocoon and no formal instructions to do anything in particular. I believe similar blogger outreach was done with the Nokia N95.

The result of shirking the need to be perfect has payed off. According to Revolution, "72 per cent of the bloggers who took part said they would not have expected a brand such as O2 to do something like this, while 80 per cent would now recommend Cocoon/O2 to a friend." So impressive were the results on early sales that a TV spot was not commissioned, saving considerable money.

And engaging bloggers means a denser network of links that then exploits the algorithms of the Google ranking system to get higher within it. Such organic seeding obviates the need for specialists to artificially get it ranked higher, again saving money. All in all, good job O2 and VCCP.

Blowtorch

2008-03-31T01:26:00.009+01:00

(from chunyang @ Flickr)

How do you produce quality in new media and all the participation it offers without suffering the rubbish that is most user-generated content. One answer might be Blowtorch. It's co-create with high standards exclusively for 18-24 year olds. That is, audiences get a say in the creative output - the soundtrack, the editing, the cinematography etc. I can see this sort of thing being eminently attractive to certain people.

Set up by a satisfying mix of entertainment, technology and advertising pros, this gets me excited because it's progressive. Unlike the rest of Hollywood whose nerves about damaging their precious DVD sales have meant congealment, Blowtorch's new rules of participation and using all the different media pipes to engage is new and needed.

Litchenberg, Memory & Brands

2008-03-29T01:05:00.017Z

This is a vid of Litchenberg figure being created. It comes about by injecting a piece of insulating material with a high speed beam of electrons.

I like it because it is a natty metaphor for the way memory works.

The electrons are the start of a thought. This can be engendered by by external factors, like sound and light bouncing off things and hitting our receiving dishes (retinas or eardrums) or by internal factors.

Next a branch of activity spreads out rapidly. Neurons get excited and excite their connected neighbours. A pattern is made. And the pattern is memory.

Heraclitus wasn't talking about the brain when he said 'the cosmos speaks in patterns' but his epigram is apt for the way in which it works (this is von Oech's more accessible translation; for those who care, the literal translation, according to Robinson is 'all things happen according to the logos').

Such patterns of activation build up from repeated activation. As the father of this idea, Hebb, put it, "any two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become 'associated', so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other." (Hebb, 1949, p.70). Or in other words, neurons that fire together, wire together.

That makes the prediction that if you activate a certain thought, access to a related thought will be zippier because it's already partly activated.

And this is true. Flash up the word 'bird' and 'robin' will be recognised more quickly than an unrelated word (e.g. 'arm', see Neely, 1977 for more. Plus if you care how the 'recognised more quickly' bit is measured have a look at what a lexical decision task is.)

This extends to thoughts about groups of people, also known as stereotypes (e.g. Germans, bankers, the elderly). Information about groups is built up over time (probably in the neocortical system [McCelland et al, 1995] and deployed to lubricate the whole process of person perception.

Where it gets really interesting is how these activated information bundles affect the rest of what the brain is up to. That is, how perception affects action. Lovely examples abound; here are six:

People primed with politeness stereotypes are less likely to interrupt an ongoing conversation.
The African American stereotype makes people more aggressive in response to slight provocation.
The elderly stereotypes makes people walk more slowly and more forgetful.
The professor and football hooligan stereotypes once activated affect the marks people get on general knowledge tests.
The neuropsychological patient stereotype makes people score poorly on an executive function test.
Primed with religious stereotypes people behave more pro-socially

(See Bargh et al., 1996, Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg 1998; Dijksterhuis et al., 2001; Dijksterhuis et al., 1998; Turner et al., 2005; and Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007 for more).

Brands are patterns of activation too. This is evident in the crisp, if less neurocognitively explicit, definitions of brands by planners.

Paul Feldwick has said “A brand is simply a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer.” John Grant has even more pithily dubbed a brand the "sum of the ideas associated with it".

The ideas associated with a brand are built up over time by interaction with it and messages about it; firing together and wiring together the brand and it's associated ideas.

The logo of a brand, as its paragon symbol, should therefore act as a Litchenberg electron beam, causing an immediate pattern of activation to spread, bringing alive the ideas and concepts most closely associated with the brand.

Added to that, if the link between perception and action in stereotyping is anything to go on, presentation of the logo should affect behaviour in measurable ways.

It does. According to this great paper, published in next month's Journal of Consumer Research. After being presented with either the Apple logo or IBM logo (so fast as to be below conscious awareness), people behaved in ways consistent with the brand's associated ideas.
People who has seen the Apple logo were more creative than those exposed to the IBM one, as measured in a task thinking up different uses of a brick and as determined by independent judges.

This makes the Apple slogan self-fulfilling: 'Think different' really does make you think different.

Medium-rare ads

2008-03-27T12:42:00.020Z

(from splorp)

Media companies or algorithms decide how we get our ads served up. Hulu, one of the most promising legit video-on-demand sites, is giving its users more of a say in how they get their ads.

(from CNET)

Its inevitable that all TV viewing will be done online in the future because the choice is better (although something will need to be done about choice paralysis) and time and space are no longer constraining factors.

Time is irrelevant because shows can be called up on-demand, making the 'old' system of programming look as silly as everyone being served up with the exact same meal in a restaurant. Space - or location - is irrelevant because although TVs are stationary, screens are mobile. Content can be picked up anywhere as long as you have access to the cloud.

Online TV also has the chance to be interactive. People are already using traditional TV and online together to enhance the experience (and here). Online TV will just remove the space between laptop and TV, packing it down into one device.

Because of this inevitability, the move by Hulu to exploit the interactivity of the medium is a good thing.

If online TV is going to be free, it's going to have to be ad supported. It could be charged but when you have free vs paid, free will win out as long as the 'costs of free' aren't too great.

The 'cost of free' being advertising and the 'too great' bit being when the ads subtract significantly from the experience by being intrusive and/or irrelevant.

By adding choice to the ad serving process the costs are lessened because people will feel they have some choice in the matter and - now going beyond what is happening at Hulu - choice might improve relevance, the nirvana of advertising that has allowed Google to make billions.

I've got a few ideas about how more choice can be added into the mix to make people feel more in control and to give them better (more relevant) ads.

The first thing to note is the gulf between products on a show and buying them. The Internet could close this gap to a few centimeters. Take for example House's leather jacket, something that keeps him both "warm and cool" and something that was probably just chosen by the show's wardrobe people rather than any money changing hands for its use.

Yet, there is demand for his jacket; people are asking where to buy one. It would be fairly simple to have an overlay with a tagging system similar to Facebook's (below), except rather than being static, it would be dynamic; hypervideo. The tags would be put in place by the production team or automatically once the technology gets good enough at object recognition.

The lovely Kate, tagged on Facebook

Everything in a show becomes a clickable object. Links out to products could be collected on a little 'shelf' which you could sift through at the end of the show. The transient nature of things in video becomes irrelevant. Clothes worn, gadgets used, songs played could all be put on the 'shelf' for later inspection and possible purchase. People could chose a specific type of ad (like clothing, gadgets or music) depending on their whim. I would find this much more useful than interupting messages or even a pre-show ad.

For some, this might seem rather unpleasant because of the risk of corrupting artistic output. This is as naïve as the idea of the sentimentalist idea of the noble savage because creativity has always used the oxygen of commerce. John Hegarty, BBH's creative supremo, uses Titian's The Annunciation as an example: "In the bottom right-hand corner you will see a decanter. Why? Well, the Venetians had developed clear glass and they wanted it in there as an advert. So the connection between culture and commerce is hundreds of years old." (source)

Titian's The Annunciation (click to enlarge)

Second, I agree with Hegarty's other point that the only problem with such placement is when it is done badly, when it is perpendicular to the story. It reminds me of the deliberately obtuse faux product placement in the Truman Show by Truman's synthetic wife:

In this situation both show and brand come off looking bad. As Hegarty says, "It doesn't satisfy the viewer, so it doesn't work for the advertiser" (also see this paper by Nigel Hollis, Chief Global Analyst at Millward Brown for more on this). Put differently, corrupting artistic output is not in the interests of either the people making the shows or the advertisers.

I would much rather have something like this, where I get to chose the ads in a more ecologically valid environment than have my viewing experience lacerated by the tyranny of jingles and over-enthusiastic voice overs. And with the long tail this could be very profitable for shows and films.

Advertising is here to stay. The more useful we can make it the better it will be for all involved. And one way to do this is let people have more choice about the ads they consume.

jelly on black

2008-03-23T00:25:00.000Z

tasteful_tn/flickr

I find jellyfish endlessly intriguing, I do.

That is all.

London Transport Aesthetic

2008-03-22T12:21:00.003Z

Transport for London gave me one of these the other day. Inside was a bike light. It has no batteries but in Trevor Baylis style is wind-up. I think it was part of a campaign of caring for cyclists, because I also read they were giving out Fresnel lenses, which let truckers see cyclists more easily and there has been quite a bit of TV advertising, including a moonwalking gorilla.

Anyway, I like the box. Although on this occasion it's minimalism is probably borne out of frugality, it made me wonder about the the whole aesthetic of Transport for London, something I have long loved.

The original red, white and blue roundel and font (Johnston Sans) by Edward Johnston has remained largely unchanged since he designed it in 1918. It's arguably the logo most synonymous with London (in fact most of the main images of London are to do with the transport system: the street names, the taxi, the buses...) and has spawned all sorts of lovely sister logos as the network expanded:

(from Wikipedia)

Then there's the electrical circuit style map designed by Harry Beck in 1933 (inspired by George Dow). This is a masterful piece of work which despite jettisoning geographical truth (probably as a result) enables the most effortless understanding of its contents.

The design coherence of the London transport system was directed under the keen and meticulous eye of Frank Pick. He is rumoured to have travelled the entire network, often at night, to ensure high standards (reminds me of another design fanatic, Steve Jobs, who is reputed to have had fine Italian marble for a New York first Apple store to be sent to California first so he could check the veining).

Pick visited Europe and returned under the influence of "European modernism" which prompted the installation of then achingly modern architecture, including "sweeping curves with geometric detailing, exposed brickwork and concrete" (Design Museum). Even in new designs this exposed, progressive spirit is still part of the visual language, like the recent and industrially beautiful Westminster Tube Station.

(from stollerdos')

Choice and the Fishbowl

2008-03-21T23:57:00.018Z

(from turbojoe)

My sister, an artist, has become enamoured with the new Whole Foods Store in Kensington High Street. Not as a place to buy food though. Rather it's a food gallery to her, a place for loving shots of shiny aubergines, forests of broccoli and piles of proud lemons. I was told I had to see it. So I did.

It's beautiful; the newest museum to open in the area. Everything is plentiful. There are more than one hundred types of olive oil. Too much olive oil really. Too much to take in. As the Guardian commented there is a "tyranny of choice". This is something that I am experiencing beyond olive oil.

Choice is a very modern problem born out of a perceived modern benefit, namely that it affords personal freedom. On a personal level, I find it has a very demotivating effect. A few choices are good. My willingness to engage with those choices is healthy at this small number. Beyond that I get more and more despairing, dizzying almost, until my attention packs its bags and moves on to something else.

As usual with things like this I wanted to see what was out there in the psychological literature (this is a hangover from my experimental psychology degree and generally uncontrollable curiosity). Sure enough, the decision malaise afforded by over-choice has been empirically documented. The best place to read about it would be in this book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, or in this fun talk by the author, Barry Schwartz, at TED.

One example in the book is particularly striking. It comes from a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2000 and involved jam. Either lots of it (24 types) or a few jars (6 types) on a two tables, to be precise. Despite the 24 jams having more of a magpie effect (Ooh, look at all that jam...) it was debilitating to the decision making process (Ahh! There's too much. I can get jam some other time) selling a tenth less than the smaller collection.

Russell Brand, in his own sexually honest way, is in touch with that too: in one of his shows on TV, I remember him bemoaning how the combination of the truly vast quantities of pornography available on the Internet and tabbed browsing literally crippled his ability to 'finish', restraining because the next girl might 'just be a little better'.

One can imagine how if this sort of logic is applied to less solitary sexual pursuits, people can put off securing a partner because the choice is too large and the thought that a better one could come along is too alive in people's minds. The result is probably a growing single population. Information from the Office for National Statistics might support this: marriages are at a 110 year low (although there could just be less explicit acknowledgement of relationships).

In more commercial areas, I think that, apart from wonderful design and effortless functionality, there is significant benefit to Apple's slim number of choices both between and within products. Steve Jobs claims that Apple has less than 30 major products (and amazing this produces a $30 billion company). More specifically, for the iPod, the choice is between Shuffle, Nano, Classic and Touch and then there is usually only a binary choice when it comes to size (80Gb or 160Gb for the Classic at the time of writing this). You're not even going to break a cognitive sweat there.

In another example altogether, I have noticed how top restaurants have small menus; lesser places have tomes indexing all manner of available foods. Gordon Ramsay in his rescue-an-ailing-restaurant TV show normally always suggests trimming the menu down. Now, it's very possible that both in the Apple and menu cases, fewer options means more focus for the people behind the scenes on the creative output; nevertheless, I still think that a small choice is actually wonderfully inviting for consumers because it is so delightfully easy.

Indeed, the empirical work uncovers another great insight. After having chosen from a small number of options you are happier with your choice than had you chosen from a bigger pool. This is because of what you might call post-decision anxiety, the worry that the choice you have made is correct given all the other options available.

Schwartz explains: with so many choices it is "easy to imagine up a choice that would have been better" thus inducing regret for the choice made, which has the ultimate effect of subtracting from the satisfaction in the decision, even when the decision is a good one. This is compounded by having more factors with more choice to compare your particular decision to and more chance of being dissatisfied with that decision, so called opportunity costs.

Schwartz introduces a really lovely metaphor as way of ossifying all this: the fishbowl. The walls of the bowl are the boundaries of choice. It's not good if they are too small; there is no freedom. However, if they are too big it's, in Schwartz New York patter, "a recipe for misery and...disaster".

Cognocomputer Science

2008-03-21T13:39:00.011Z

(from Daadi)

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Two areas have seen the most massive growth in recent years. The internet is the headline one. Everyone knows about that. Less well known is cognitive neuroscience.

I think these two juggernauts will collide soon because if Tim Berners-Lee's vision of Semantic Web (or Web 3.0 as some dub it) is to come true the next generation of computer scientists are going to need to be trained in cognitive (neuro)science as well.

This is because if the Internet is to assuage the pressure on, and extend the power of, our mental faculties by replacing, and enhancing, their functions, it makes sense that the functions be known.

And right now the best people to ask about how the brain and mind operates are the cognitive neuroscientists. They have their computer already built and are trying to work out how it operates. Computer scientists, the architects of the future Internet, are trying to build something that does something like the mind. They should talk to each other more.

More than this though it will pay to be expert in both. The mind will give insights to better computer systems as it is backwards engineered. Cognocomputer scientists will be needed in a Semantic Web future.

Photoslop

2008-03-21T11:32:00.006Z

Photoshop Disasters is a fun little blog with a keen eye for sloppy Photoshop. Some recent ones:

Either the model met with a nasty accident or someone forgot to digitally reattach her index finger

Warping tiles - she's been Liquified. Her little line of gab about confidence takes on an errie meaning after the glitch too.

The freaky severed hand

Now without cancer!

2008-03-21T01:05:00.006Z

(from ArtWerk)

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.

from Woody Allen's Sleeper

Researchers for smoking giant Philip Morris are trying to genetically modify tobacco to be non-carcinogenic. See the paper here in the Plant Biotechnology Journal. Amazing what the profit motive can do. In a subtle change to Woody's nod to the capricious nature of knowledge, genetics could mean instead of avoiding the bad, the bad is just removed.

Revenge

2008-03-19T20:46:00.006Z

(from adrimagyar @ Flickr)

Why would genes want to promote the welfare of other unrelated genes? Thanks to Trivers we know this happens because it is indirectly selfish. The bat with food that offers it to the bat without stands a greater chance of living when the tables turn. He'll live, find a sexy lady bat, have bat babies and so his genes multiply (including that/those responsible for that behaviour).

This explanation works well for non-human animals but it loses its potency when it comes to humans. All sorts of explanations have been put forward. One interesting area within all this is 'altruistic punishment', where someone will incur a cost to punish freeloaders. This is theorised to have cooperation-enhancing effect.

The authors of a paper in Science wondered whether the people who were punished would later take revenge against their punishers. The nature of the results depended on the society you were from. The USA, UK, Germany, Denmark, Australia and Switzerland all seem content to shun revenge. Oman, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Belarus, Istanbul, South Korea and the Ukraine all showed high levels of revenge for being punished.

As Prof. Simon Gaechter, explains “Our results correlate with other survey data in particular measures of social norms of civic co-operation and rule of law in these same societies. The findings suggest that in societies where public co-operation is ingrained and people trust their law enforcement institutions, revenge is generally shunned. But in societies where the modern ethic of co-operation with unrelated strangers is less familiar and the rule of law is weak, revenge is more common." (source)

Speak without speaking

2008-03-19T20:19:00.010Z

Technology has been developed to turn nerve signals on their way to the vocal cords into computer-generated voice. Impressive.

Techno-ideology

2008-03-19T18:29:00.003Z

(from stuant63)

What drives the adoption or avoidance of consumer technology? Based on consumer interviews, Robert Kozinets, writing in the Journal of Consumer Research, has suggested four major ideologies.

Techtopian Ideology - technology = social progress
Work Machine Ideology - technology = economic progress through greater efficiency
Green Luddite - technology = a destructive force to the 'authentic'
Techspressive Ideology - technology = a source of pleasure, fun, and style.

Crystal Ball 2.0

2008-03-19T17:05:00.010Z

Martin Wolf Wagner Photography

Advertising Age asked 150 power bloggers about what to expect from digital advertising in 2008. Some of my favorites:

1. Branded content - more services, less messages (Tom Martin & Joe Pulizzi)

2. Local search - digital microbiology not digital astronomy. (Andy Wibbels)

3. Simple mobile apps - splitting the bill, pre-ordering coffee, knowing that song on a TV program (Marie Lena Tupot)

4. Sociosemantics - culture into data into culture (e.g. LastFM music recommendations) (Jay Moonah)

5. SEO - cheap and powerful. Getting search right is gonna be important (Joost de Valk & Martin Calle)

6. Online TV - Real-time video ad-matching + droves of people flocking to digital TV rooms (Paul Cheney)

7. Social media - Facebook (Mike Volpe)

I would add:

8. Location-aware stuff

9. Games

10. Behavioural targeting (for an interesting take on this see Mindset Media, who have developed a personality periodic table)

Touching taste

2008-03-19T15:11:00.007Z

(Meredith Farmer @ Flickr)

Packaging is peripheral by definition. Nevertheless, I like it and probably like the thing it houses a bit more if it is good.

This is true of flavour. According to a new study, The Perceptual Transfer of Product Container Haptic Cues in next month's Journal of Consumer Research, the feeling of packaging affects taste. Specifically, increasing firmness brought about better taste perception.

Wolf stream

2008-03-18T21:59:00.006Z

China is good at making fakes. They are so good, they have stepped beyond human things and are taking on nature. Like fake eggs, for which assembly instructions can be found here. I have even heard of fake apples.

Cai Guo-Qiang has exploited this mastery in faking for Head On, a brilliant installation where 99 wolves, made in Chinese factories from sheep coats ('a wolf in sheep's clothing'!), are frozen like they are part of a bullet time sequence as they stream through the air and crash into a screen.

I am sure there is some lesson in here about the potentially negative outcomes of blindly following the crowd but I just think it is a real visual treat.

He likes floating things. Like these from Inopportune: Stage Two:

The Technology Rollercoaster

2008-03-18T21:29:00.008Z

I like Gartner's Hype Cycle. It's meant to describe the adoption of technology on a wide level. I can almost feel it happening on a personal level with new products and services. Also thought that it has relevance beyond technology: it can be quite easily appropriated for anything new that is marketed, like politicians.

(data from YouGov)

Contravesy, truth and experts

2008-03-18T21:00:00.008Z

Had another thought about experts and the media.

In the last post, Rethinking Expertise (here), I said the "media forged and perpetuated a scientific controversy [about MMR and autism] where none existed".

Sadly, this is good business. It is in the interests of commercial news outlets to perpetuate (and even serve up) illusory controversy.

Fox, ever reliable for being unreliable, admit to this. Although they may be operating ideologically as well here, Murdoch says there are business reasons for his network's radical stance on climate change.

Another reason why experts must be allowed to shout louder than ordinary people.

Rethinking Expertise

2008-03-17T18:43:00.011Z

Who's better? An expert or many ordinary people?

As scientists observe the universe and its contents other academics observe the scientists. Prof. Harry Collins is one of these scientific voyeurs who peers through the crack in the ceiling of knowledge-building and records how it is done. My girlfriend and I went to a little talk of his in the Exeter quays last week.

Having spent a long time with gravitational-wave physicists he has given man-birth to Gravity's Shadow (2004), the sort of book you could knock an ox out with, running to some 870 pages. During his experience with these experts he started thinking about the nature of expertise. This is the subject of his (and Robert Evans') most recent (pithier) offering, Rethinking Expertise (2007).

His talk was a summary of one of the book's points. In his forthright, laddish way he sketched a quick and basic history of the philosophy and sociology of science. Without technical labels, which I add back in here, he covered falsification (Popper, 1959, esp. pg. 27–48) and the problems with it (Kuhn, 1977; Lakatos, 1970, 1974; Maxwell, 1972; Meehl, 1978, 1990; Putnam, 1974) including the problem of facts (who is to know if it is the fact or the method to get to that fact that is wrong?). With this breakdown in philosophical robustness so trust in experts dwindled.

In a nod to Feyeraband’s (1975) Dadaistic 'anything goes' idea, the suggestion was that all trust was lost. In a Feyerabandian world science is no different to other things like Jade Goody's opinions or reading the future by dropping fruit on the floor and examining the patterns. Peer-reviewed science has no great difference in terms of methodological soundness to that of personal experience in this scenario. I strongly agree with Collins that a society like this is "not one you would like to live in"; hell is Feyeraband's world.

His concern is that despite the intellectual repugnance of this scenario, it is gaining some currency under the idea that "ordinary people are wiser than experts in some technical areas". For an example he cited the case of MMR and autism where a dodgy paper (Wakefield et al, 1998) and the media forged and perpetuated a scientific controversy where none existed. In his words, the link between these two on the available evidence is "zero" (he is right). To this one woman in the audience shouted "That's not true"; she knew someone whose child had both MMR vaccine and autism.

The whole force of Collins' point was evident in this little bit of heckling. It is stunningly simple (as basic as common-sense gets some might think), but no less important for that: All else being equal we should listen to "those who know what they are talking about". In this case, the evidence said there was no link, the co-occurrence of the MMR vaccine and autism in this child she knew was irrelevant. If she had retorted, "What, it is just coincidence that the child has autism and had the vaccine?", the answer can only be "Yes, precisely that: a coincidence."

I was reminded of an episode of House where House lambasts a junior for choosing the a treatment option on personal factors despite the fact it saved the patient's life. This is because statistically more people would be killed using that particular treatment over time than the evidence-based option.

Had the junior doctor used the evidence-based (correct) option the patient would have died. Nevertheless, it would have been the right option. Experts must be allowed to be experts, even if they are wrong occasionally because the cost of having no experts is far too great. In the case of MMR, lives are at risk.

Collins and Evans call expertise "the pressing intellectual problem of the age". It's certainly a biggie. And as the number of opinions on technical issues froth up with more user-generated content online I think their point, although simple, is very important. No one is cleverer than everyone. But that does not mean everyone is cleverer than experts.

9,581,206 abortions

2008-03-17T01:48:00.005Z

The World Clock. Real-time data (well, statistically predicted data) on all sorts of things, abortions, marriages, divorces, oil pumped, bikes produced and so on. Also check out The Food Clock - that's a lot of chickens.

Stealing a gorilla

2008-03-17T00:56:00.008Z

Ad agency WCRS didn't worry about ripping off Simons and Chabris (1999) (paper available here and original video here) when they made this:

(if the link goes down here is the campaign website)

After a bit of Internet detective work, it turns out the authors never gave permission (I found out from this great little blog where plagiarists are named and shamed, youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com).

Ok, it's for public safety and its making a point for a good cause, but apart from the obvious plagiarism, which is bad enough for a supposedly 'creative' agency, this smacks more of stupidity by failing to appreciate that the Internet is the world's most sophisticated plagiarism program. And their Gorilla suit wasn't as good. Tut.

Things to see

2008-03-16T23:42:00.011Z

Nabbed from here

In the "Find businesses" bit on Google maps typing 'things to see' in the 'What' box and a location in the 'Where' box loads up a mix of Google and user-created content of interesting places in the specified location.

It's very useful. It will probably get even more useful when location-aware mobile web is chucked into the mix (see also Socialight and TagMaps).

It's also very Google and, along with other things like 'I'm feeling lucky' button, it is what makes the Google brand special. 'Things to see' adds in something magical and yet so functional.

Google has no brand guidelines (although I did find some principles in the pic above) and no silly, vapid slogan, it just gets on with the job and in places where there is no cost to functionality it is happy to be playful.

It does; it doesn't just say what it does. More of this from other brands please.

spEak You're bRanes

2008-03-07T14:04:00.006Z

Dodginess abounds in Web 2.0. I have posted about it here and here. One of the worst locations for this on the BBC's Have Your Say page which is a playground for the permanently outraged and confused.

Someone has catalogued all this on spEak You're bRanes (a nod to Iannucci-Morris satire gem, The Day Today). They have even organised it into categories, like Armchair Generals, Curtain Twitchers, Unfocused Rage, Permanently Bewildered and Werthers Original Imperialists to name a few. Makes for great reading.

Music by mood

2008-03-07T13:29:00.005Z

Burst is interesting. Instead of just taking the genre approach to tagging music, you can browse tag clouds of moods and instruments. Nice clean design too.

Scanning light

2008-03-07T13:23:00.008Z

This is what happens when you scan in your desklamp. Click to enlarge.

Viscosity: modern art generator

2008-03-07T13:06:00.006Z

Click to enlarge

Viscosity is a playful little Flash app, where you start of with a shape and using various brushes fashion your own art.

Ficlets: narrative quilts

2008-03-07T12:35:00.005Z

Sony seem to be operating a strategy of 'technology with character' especially with their laptops and MP3 players. This comes through in their digital efforts (by Dare). Things like the Walkman Project and the Malkovich Vaio site scream a more refined appreciation of music and creative approach to computing than your average punter. I suppose directing your efforts at early adopters and people who pride themselves on doing their own thing (people like.no.other you could say) is sensible when you are up against the ubiquity of the iPod because the exclusivity and creative associations of Sony will ensure later trickle down.

Anyway, Sony isn't what I wanted to talk about, it's just the premise of the Malkovich site, namely to continue on a script he started, that chimes with this other site I came across called Ficlets. Here, rather like those children's games, you get to continue on someone else's story (or indeed write a prequel to it). Narratives are stitched together by the many. In all likelihood this will create some horrible quilts but power of the Internet means that the occasional gem will appear. Anyway, I like.

Who had my milk?!

2008-03-07T12:17:00.007Z

Passive Aggressive Notes is one of my favorite niche blogs. Self-described as the home for "painfully polite and hilariously hostile writings from shared spaces the world over", it provides a gleeful repository of thinly veiled threats, deftly controlled anger and cranky politesse. (See also the ranting and raving on the Best of Craig's List)

The Singing Ringing Tree

2008-03-07T12:11:00.003Z

By architects Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu.

Happy Maps

2008-03-01T11:10:00.009Z

In 2006 Adrian White, a social psychologist at the University of Leicester, compiled this, a world happiness map. You can get the full version here. The redder, the happier.

In a similar spirit, this little gem maps out 'feelings' from around the user-generated web and mashes it up with Google Maps:

It's not particularly powerful at the moment but is nevertheless a really interesting idea. I love the possibility of analysing subjective content over geographical location like this. If time were to be added in as well it would become even more interesting because you could potentially track the emotional wake of a certain news story after it breaks. Nice simple and playful interface too.