Feeding the Puppy

Twitter trend map searchery type thing...

I just came across this, as it started sending traffic to Feeding The Puppy...

...it's called Trendsmap, and it lets you look at Twitter Trends by location on a map of the world.  Oh yes, yes indeedy...

  

...then if you click on one of the words hovering over the area you're looking at, it will bring up the box on the left with the most recent tweets from that area on that subject.

Well worth a look, could be useful for a lot of things...

The Future, Xplane'd

I'd seen this video around in a few places (including Rosie's, Fiona's and Simon's blogs), and I wasn't going to re-post it here... but I now have:

It's promoting the Economist's Media Convergence Forum in October in NYC, and it's a treasure trove of facts, stats and info on the things that, when you piece them altogether, help build a picture of how the world is changing. 

(Steve, in his endearingly grumpy way, points out that some of the stats might be a little shaky...)

So, why did I repost when I wasn't going to? 

I saw that it was actually created by Xplane, the visual thinking company.  Their mission is to 'create understanding' by helping their clients find simple, clear ways to visualise things

I've got a book written by founder Dave Gray called Marks and Meanings I'm a big fan of, and generally think they've got a great approach to simplifying complicated things to explain them well.

So the Xplane video above is a great example of using a mix on minimal words and illustrative visuals to make points quickly and simply.  Make one simple point at a time, and build up the story sequentially.

It's something I try to do with my own work, and encourage a culture of at PHD.  

I guess I'm on the right track; Ted at The Conversation Group took the first half of this 'Future of Advertising' presentation (didn't listen to the audio) and presented it to a University class over in California... which I guess means it must be pretty self explanatory.

The Future of Advertising, APA, 17/02/09

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

So yes, I think we've all slept through enough presentations where people read the 50 words they've written on a chart off the screen. 

Let's keep it simple.

Post Divisionalist Thinking

Mark at PHD in San Francisco posted this up that he found... a chart of predicted media split up to 2020.

It's a good chart, and handy for presentations (though in my opinion a little too optimistic that by 2020 people will still be spending more time watching TV than using the internet).

But the box in the top corner for me is telling the real story; by 2020 80% of the hours we spend with media will be 'digital'.  Which, let's be honest, might as well be all of it.

Faris pointed out the other day that even if a medium isn't digital, people will use digital things to 'augment' it themselves anyway.  Sharing their thoughts on the X Factor through facebook, twitter, forums etc.  They take non-'digital' media and make it 'digital'.

And he also pointed out, rightly, that it's increasingly irrelevant to keep using the term 'digital'.

We need more 'Post Divisionalist Thinking'.  It's not 'digital' and 'traditional'.  You can't separate the two on a media plan, or indeed for the people you're trying to reach out to. 

At the risk of sounding trite, it's all just stuff.  Things that you, as a meadja person, use to try and connect people with companies.

We didn't group the old stuff together because it was all made of atoms, or all broadcast over radio waves.  So we shouldn't group the new stuff together because it's all made of digital bits.

Guardian Activate Redux: Werner Vogels (Amazon)

I liveblogged the Guardian Activate Conference in July.  Now that the videos of the speeches are online, it's a good time to revisit some of my favourite things from the day... I'll post up one video every few days or so...

Werner Vogels, Amazon - "Your worst nightmare on the web... you throw a party, and a MILLION people come... how do you cope with that?"

The area of cloud computing is increasingly fascinating... people are creating things around computers that they may need a phenomenal amount of storage space and processing power... but only for a brief period of time.

For instance, the Google Monopoly game which launched over the last week needed a lot more server power than they expected it to... and as such crashed on and off for about a week.  They've just had to restart the whole thing all over again today...

I found Werner's talk huge interesting, because of the comparison he draws between computing nowadays, and electricity in days of yore.

Companies in those days needed electricity to do whatever it is that they made money from.

Werner's example is a brewer in Belgium, but we have our very own relic of this age in the Gym breakout area in our building...

(It's a particularly rare example controlled by table football...)

Think how mad it would be nowadays to run your own generator for a resource that comes out the wall, on tap, whenever you want it.

That's essentially the proposition for 'cloud computing'... computing that becomes a resource to be scaled when needed, and switched off when it's not.

It touches on a previous post about working spaces I wrote a while ago... when computing becomes as free and easy as electricity to access, it'll be interesting to see how we all work together.

Gadgets, Spotify, and more nails in the coffin

Once upon a time, everyone presumed that content was king.

Recently though, I've been wondering about that... content is only king if you have some way of extracting value from it...

Let's think about the music industry.  Of course, it's been a while since I posted anything on the massive changes the music industry is having thrust upon it unwillingly.  I guess I thought I'd leave it alone for a bit...

Anyway, I was maintaining my previous stance on buying CDs... being in a band with lots of musician friends, I liked to think that people still valued music, that it was still worth something to people.

But a few things of late have made me see that the actual value of music has plummeted so far that... well, I don't know how much longer we'll see anyone making money out of recorded music.  And if that happens, I guess we'll wave goodbye to record labels too...

So what's tipped me over the edge?

Well, the first thing is that the CDs that occupy the corner of our living room, all five hundred or so, aren't really worth anything any more...

Helen decided she was going to divest herself of some of her CDs.  I (being the hoarding, collecting type) would never countenance such a thing, but their Helen's CDs, and she decided that since she never listened to them any more their stay in the Willshire household had come to an end.

So she went onto Music Magpie, a site that offers to buy your old CDs if you are done with them.  Their offer for Helen's 15 CDs?  £5.76. 

Yes, less than two pints of beer.  A Charlatans album, apparently, is worth about 30p.

So the music that we own already is of value to us, but not really anyone else it seems. 

It seems kind of foolhardy to keep adding to this pile in the corner, especially given the other routes opening up where you can legally get music...

Which brings me to the second thing that's changed my world lately; the Spotify iPhone app.

Spotify as a computer-based application didn't really do anything for me; it's not really where I listen to much music, and so played around for a while before I got bored.

The iPhone app is a completely different kettle of fish; it allows you to download and cache up to 3,333 songs onto your iPhone, and take them with you wherever you go, for as long as you like.

It costs £9.99 a month.  So roughly the same as an album.  I've only had it for 3 weeks, yet I've downloaded around 20 albums, listened to them, and then stopped listening to the ones I didn't like that much (once upon a time, I'd have been stuck with a purchase...).

It's basically like having a library card for a record shop, and you can borrow things for as long as you like.  

All very well, you may think, that sorts the commuting music... but what about when you listen to music at home? 

Well, a package from Amazon arrived today that sorts that... a new Sony mini hi-fi system with an iPhone docking station on top...

(yes, perhaps with a child on the way it's not the time to be buying gadgets, but it was only £120 which we paid for by selling an old amp and mobile phone on eBay...)

What's so good about it?  Well, because we've got a decent wi-fi signal around the house, the iPhone can play any of the songs directly from Spotify, through the system, into the house.

It's very nearly replacing the need for CDs at all... sure, Spotify isn't an all inclusive service yet (though it does have six million songs, which will keep us going for a while...).

But what the whole set-up has done has turned my mobile device into something that moves with me wherever I go, allowing access to music via either internal storage or straight from the cloud. 

It's beginning to sound very close to the delightful technological future we've been promised for years.  So, what does it all mean?

Well, firstly, things aren't looking great for the recorded music industry... 

If someone like me, who was until three weeks ago still buying CDs, is now listening to three times as much music at a fraction of the cost I used to pay, then whilst Spotify's claim that their main target is piracy, in fighting that battle the collateral damage may just be to wipe out the little money the record labels were still making from selling folk like me CDs.

It's sad to see it, but it's more nails in the coffin of an increasingly defunct business model.

The second thing I think is important, possibly much more so than the music thing, is scaling this behaviour change into the future.

What is the media landscape going to look like when people carry around the 5th generation, 160Gb iPhone that plays BBC iPlayer content from the cloud...

...and plugs straight into their TV system at home? 

If this sort of behaviour shifts into the TV model, the changes in that sector will undoubtedly mirror those that the record industry is facing now.

And the thing about TV content is of course that it's a lot more expensive to make than recording music.  Content creators are going to have to think very cleverly indeed to work out how they're going to make money from it.

Content may have been king, but it's increasingly facing a future living like a pauper...

Adidas, iPhones and all those photos you take

I bought a new pair of trainers yesterday.  Like five of the last six pairs I've bought, they were a pair of 'classic' style adidas.  I took this picture with a blog post in mind...

But what was the blog post to be about? 

It might have been a discourse on brand loyalty, of course. 

In a market of such wide and varied choice, to stick dogmatically to one brand shows a really well developed relationship between myself and Adidas, surely? 

Well, kind of.  I just so happen to think the soles are better than Converse, and they tend to be discounted heavily in sales at show stores like Offspring.  The latest pair cost me £35 down from £65.  Being Scottish, it would appear the only thing I'm loyal to is a good bargain.

Or indeed it might have been about apps replacing objects in our lives. 

I used the QuadCamera app to take this shot, which I found out about from Iain.  It takes four (or eight) sequential shots, much like the Lomo Action Sampler:

Whilst the Lomo camera does one thing, uses film, and costs £25, the app costs £1.19 and of course shoots onto digital, meaning you can snap away happily as often as you like until you get the shot you want.

What I think we're increasingly seeing is the digital world continuing to replace things from the physical world; it started with music, of course, then after CDs it'll be DVDs... but the long term effect is that an app can be created to replace what a physical object used to. 

Skimming through my iPhone, I see you can get apps to replace cameras, diaries, notepads, pens, pencils, business cards, books, newspapers, torches, four-track recording devices, maps, dictaphones, percussive instruments, guitar tuners...

Good for me in the short term, of course.  But if no-one is selling this stuff anymore, and no one is making stuff either... then surely there's a big whole in the economy opening up somewhere?

But maybe the post wasn't about that either.


Maybe it was going to be about the sheer amount of stuff we make and share. 

I have hundreds and hundreds of snaps like this that live on my iPhone.  

Matt Jones coined a very nice phrase for it at the PSFK Good Idea conference earlier this year; the phone in your pocket is like a remembering machine that whispers to you constantly 'that's really interesting... you should take a photo of that'.

So I do, and you probably do as well.  If you think about how much stuff (specifically digital photos but other stuff too) we create, save and keep... and then never get a chance to look through again... it's amazing we actually remember about any of it.

We are surrounded by the digital detritus that we constantly create for ourselves, and send to each other.

Which would help explain why I can't really remember what I was going to blog about when I took this photo yesterday...

The iPhone, the white screen of death, and Youtube

I had an awful experience this morning, one of those real 'punch in the guts' moments where you see stretching out in front of you a road of high cost, endless customer service conversations, and all through no fault of your own...

...because when I switched on my iPhone, it looked like this:

 

Just a bright, white screen.  THE WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH.

Nothing I did would get rid of it.  At all.

I swore quite a lot.  For about five minutes.

Then...

...rather than trying to find the instruction manual, or head to Apple's site or whatever, I just searched for 'iPhone White Screen'.

 

That top search result was pretty appealing... a solution?  Really?  Brilliant...

I click through, and get a video of RichyRich7777... an American fella filming on his webcam, telling you how to fix the 'White Screen of Death'...

The solution worked, perfectly.  Thanks RichyRich7777.  The sense of relief... words can't capture it

Anyway, it got me thinking.  There's three things at play here which are characteristic of how the internet is changing the customer service model for companies.

Firstly, there's me, the customer.  For whatever reason, I didn't feel that even a company like Apple is going to provide an easy to find solution on their own website.  I didn't search for 'Apple helpdesk' or 'iPhone problem'.  Experience with the internet has clearly taught me that the quickest route to things is to use Google to search on my precise self-diagnosis.

Then there's RichyRich7777, who's the service.  He had the same problem I did, and found a solution.  Presumably he didn't find it on someone else's video, because he felt compelled to save people the hassle of going through the same pain he did and filmed a video himself.

Finally there's Apple, the company.

 

On the search results, they just about manage to sneak onto the first page with a solution on their forum... to a different problem.

RichyRich7777 is providing the service, and has done so for free.  And it works, it's simple.

So what should the company do?  Point people to it?  Recommend it?  Embed it on their own website with the creator's permission?  Or just leave people to their own devices like they're doing now.

What would you do if you were Apple?

Samsung move Minority Report one step closer

Josh & Thaer at PHD just sent this around... Samsung have used their face recognition technology to create outdoor advertising sites that change message according to who sees them...

"Samsung has developed an outdoor digital advertising system that tailors ads based on its audience.

There are three main components of the system: an LCD display panel, a dual lens camera and a processing computer, which runs the company's proprietary facial recognition software.

When you first see it the system looks like a vertically oriented LCD display running an advertisement, but upon closer inspection two cameras are mounted on top of the LCD.

They continuously captures images of passersby and the PC processes those images to figure out how many people are in watching, their gender, if they're an adult or child and how long they're looking at the advertisements."

Full piece here at PCWorld

So once again Sci-Fi films are laying down the path for real life...

...how long before they recognise you, find out what you like via Facebook Connect, and serve up ads based on that information?

Mattress Dominoes

As Tristan who just sent it round PHD said, 'most charming'...

WAY more fun than the Guinness domino ad, innit?  Probably because it feels like real folk making it with a handycam... that must have been a fun day at work :)

Anyway, some numbers for perspective;

I can't find a version of the Guinness spot on youtube that has more than 119k views.  Altogether, I think it scrapes about 250k views.

The Pot Noodle spoof is up at 334k views.

But the winner in Youtube terms is clearly Benson for Beds, as the above video has only been up since 26th July (less than a month), and it's had 594k views.

Nice work, bed fellows.

Tumblr: a blog for all seasons

Well hello there... I'm back from honeymoon (thank you very much for all the kind messages) and so consequenty am trying to get back to grips with... well, everything.

But whilst I left the digital realms by and large untouched for two weeks (no twitter, no facebook, no google reader, no email...), there was one thing that both my wife and I used whilst we were away.

(I like typing the word 'wife', it's all new and exciting)

We decided that it'd be nice to capture some of the things we did as a family as we went along... we wanted to share our experiences with our family & close friends. 

So we set up a simple Tumblr site, and downloaded the Tumblr App to my iPhone... so we could just quickly capture a quick photo and a bit of text to a central site.

(I've not linked through to it, there's only so many pictures of Cornwall you'd want to see...)

Rather than the more traditional form of 'blog', Tumblr is an example of a tumblelog which Wikipedia describes as "a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging".

Even though I'd been aware of Tumblr and it's ilk before (Mark & Ed at PHD NYC were singing it's praises before I left too), I'd never thought of starting one at all... possibly because I'm more used to long-form blogging like this.

Having used it for two weeks, I think it's absolutely perfect for several things:

i) Informality -  If you're intimidated by 'BLOGGING', but just want somewhere to capture your idlings through photos, text, short video, links etc

ii) Mobility - I was never much of a diary keeper, mainly because whenever I started one I kept it at home and forgot to update it.  But using the Tumblr/iPhone combination on the move means you can quickly capture things in the moment, post it, and forget about it.

iii) Simplicity - If you're in any way 'technologically hesitant' and are put off the thought of blogging because it might be 'a bit techy', then something as simple as Tumblr is probable an ideal introduction.

As with all technology, of course, it's only proved itself of use because there's a clear objective at the end... we wanted to share our family experiences with the rest of our family.  But I can see how it would also facilitate that need to share for project teams here at PHD, or introducing clients to blogging, or so on and so forth.

Have a play and see how easy it is to set one up here.

Anyway, there you go, a blog about a blog.  How very meta...