Velcro

Russell suggested I look for this image of Velcro online. It's great.

I think of Velcro as an analogy for how Web 2.0 works by allowing for lots of little connections. Viewed one way, it's messy. Viewed another it's rather beautiful. And offers the possibility of a lot of grip...

Accountability...

Jack/Zen makes a good point:

In many of the organizations I work in, the overperforming criticize the underperforming and ultimately call for what’s considered the ultimate cure: “holding people accountable.” Just saying the words in a pathetically stern tone warms the hearts of vindicators. What’s curious is how the question is never, “How can we get better at helping these people succeed?”

It takes a comedian...

I'm watching Jon Stewart on Bill Moyers. It's pretty compulsive viewing. It's very rare for a comedian to do serious without it feeling all wrong. Not this guy.

Petticoats showing

I had a lovely lunch today with Russell "Interesting" Davies. Something he said made me wonder if there was a special word to describe the phenomenon where someone says something which starts to reveal a subtext saying a lot about their world view. Like a subset of irony.

Russell's instance was a guy who complained that Russell didn't really have any ideas but was just lucky enough always to be present when good ideas happen.

I come home to find that Jimmy Cherkoff is back from hols with two quite delightful examples from the world of marketing, as follows:

From Claire Beale in the Independent

There's no doubt that for most big brands, advertising's still the cake. Have you seen the full-length version of Carlsberg's Old Lions TV ad, featuring the best crusty former footballers playing in a pub team? Check it out on YouTube.

From Naresh Ramchamdani in The Grauniad

There are tech-heads who criticise Google as offering an incoherent ragbag of cobbled-together products. I don't know if that's right or not; what I do know is that, sonically, Google joins so nicely to words like "images" and "video" and "maps" and "earth" that its products sound like a family even if they're not.

News Anchor? or Millstone?

Jeff Jarvis is on particularly good form at the moment. I love his ornery challenges to MSNBC's clumsy (and mean) management of its US presidential debate footage.

Today, he has a great post saying TV news is about to sink under its own infrastructure. He looks at the $14m cost of a network news anchor and makes it sound like a millstone.

Management tools

Matt Moore spotted the Bain survey of Management Tools.

I'm repressing a snicker at a different interpretation of the term. Slightly more seriously, I dislike the term tools used to refer to a way of working with human beings. I think it perpetuates the mechanistic myth of organisations.

Anyway, having cleared my throat, it's interesting that newcomers to the survey are corporate blogs and collaborative innovation (oh and consumer ethnography).

I read the Bain description of blogs which was reasonable enough though tinged with a command-and-control sensibility (Ensure consistency with corporate image and product branding; Establish the blog's focus and mission; blogs can strengthen relationships with targeted customer groups and position CEOs and other employees as industry experts).

Social marketing 101

Want to understand the new marketing? Here's the iPod page from amazon, brilliantly analysed by Joshua Porter, showing 16 - count 'em - social features.

Hat tips: Brian Oberkirch, Debbie Weil and Katie Ledger. Katie adds a final point: Of course - lets not forget its about creating great products or services that people actually WANT to talk about.. Yay.

Picasso quote

Picasso:

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Hat tip: Dave Snowden

Gee, thanks...

Ton Zjilstra reports: Katrina: Foreign Aid 95% Unclaimed

Ton makes a great point here:

The Washington Post uses the word 'allies' where I would write neighbours, friends and/or empathizing and sympathetic strangers. Allies to my mind is war rethoric: it divides the world in allies and enemies, which is a rather simplistic picture of the world. It also feels as if it obscures the reason and motive behind the offered aid. Allies are/feel duty-bound to give it, friends and neighbours help because they want it, because they're human.

Is it just me...

...or is anyone else getting p****d off with the Captcha check on Typepad blogs? It never seems to recognise my first effort.

Control

I'm glad that my friend, Matt Moore, has resumed blogging. Here's his take on control:

There are two lies. One that we are not in control of our own destiny - what happens to us is the responsibility of others. Now this can be true - if you are a new-born infant. The other is that we are solely responsible for the outcomes of our lives. And this is true for no one - unless you gave birth to yourself (which I know to be physically impossible - I have diagrams). The truth is that whilst we are not wholly in control of our lives, no one else is either and we have the biggest stake in looking after ourselves. And the other thing to remember is that everyone else is in this position as well. So welcome to the club - treat the other members nice.

Well said. I think a lot of trouble gets caused when we slide to an either/or position on this!

Last FM

I've just succumbed to curiosity and signed up to LastFM. So far I like it a lot, though early indications are that I don't share the musical tastes of my web-friends... Here's my page there.

Retirement

I got home this afternoon to find a little envelope. It looked like a greeting card from someone, but closer examination revealed the address was printed - although it was stamped not franked. My original little excitement was immediately replaced by caution.

Inside was a card. The front is shown at the top of this post. "Happy Retirement". Hmmm, that's planning ahead a little, I thought.

Then I opened it, to find this cheery greeting:

Well, thanks a lot Fidelity (for that's the company behind this nasty piece of work). Maybe it's time for someone in your marketing department to take early retirement. (That's a slightly politer version of my original, two word, response.)

Tom Tomorrow

Just discovered Tom Tomorrow. I'm laughing, but I could be crying.

Must resist, must resist

My name is Johnnie, and I am a Warcraft-aholic.

I've been sobre (US readers: sober) for 4 months, 2 weeks and 3 days. I have not set foot in Azeroth. My Mage remains a mere, pre-extension level 60. My guild has probably forgotten me.

But now this has just arrived in my email:

I am trusting in a higher power. And I don't mean a level 70 Warrior.

Stumbling on happiness

I've just finished Dan Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness. It's chockful of psychological experiments, wittily narrated, with a general message that things are not quite what they seem. When we remember things, apparently only part of our memories are real, and our brains make the rest up. The way we feel at the moment hugely colours how we expect the future to turn out. There are a variety of other ways in which we confuse ourselves about the utility of various choices before us.

I quite like that Gilbert doesn't have the almost-obligatory list of what you should do as a result of his insights. I think that's because his research suggests very strongly that we're just not well equipped to rationally manage ourselves for happiness.

It left me with the comforting thought that I could be wrong about an awful lot of things... so why get into a state about stuff over which I don't have that much control anyway?

Fairness and monkey business

The Frontal Cortex: Inequality and the Perception of Fairness. I love the experiments psychologists come up with.

One of the more powerful examples of this behavior comes from Franz Waals and Sarah Brosnan, who trained brown capuchin monkeys to give them pebbles in exchange for cucumbers. Almost overnight, a capuchin economy developed, with hungry monkeys harvesting small stones. But the marketplace was disrupted when the scientists got mischievous: instead of giving every monkey a cucumber in exchange for pebbles, they started giving some monkeys a tasty grape instead. (Monkeys prefer grapes to cucumbers.) After witnessing this injustice, the monkeys earning cucumbers went on strike. Some started throwing their cucumbers at the scientists; the vast majority just stopped collecting pebbles. The capuchin economy ground to a halt. The monkeys were willing to forfeit cheap food simply to register their anger at the arbitrary pay scale.

Creativity and straining

Mark McGuiness has a good post about what poetry illuminates about creativity. (The title of the post refers to advertising, but don't let that put you off.)

I get tired of hearing creativity equated simply with idea generation, when that’s often the easiest and least interesting part of the creative process. Shakespeare wasn’t interested in creating ‘original’ plots, but his execution was pretty good - he was so intent on “getting every detail right, getting the structure and rhythm and balance right” that the originality took care of itself.

In my own humble way, I know that when I’ve made a conscious effort to write an original or new kind of poem, the strain shows in the writing - the most interesting things happen when I’m focused on something else, on trying to capture something accurately or tease out the little animating goblin in a word or phrase.

I'm not a poet myself, but I resonate with this. Creativity is constantly associated with the generation of novelty and I've long felt uncomfortable with that. It seems to go with a mindset that suggests it can run to a timetable, and all we need to do is get ourselves sufficiently stimulated and brainstorm.

Trying to be different usually leads to stuff that is rarely engaging. Brainstorming often leaves me feeling strained rather than inspired. So many efforts to support innovation end up feeling like a kind of Victorian potty training.

We use the word "original" to mean novel but what if we think of it as meaning "from the origin" - being true to ourselves rather than trying to be different. In improvisation, the truly inspiring moments are often the connecton of ordinary ideas, where the comedy is not apparent to the actors as they speak. It's not effortful or contrived, but feels natural and spontaneous.

Update: Synchronicity? I just spotted this in Paul Robinson's blog Vagueware:

The problem with innovation in this field, is it tends to not look very interesting at first glance - it might be the smallest of changes in a UI, or a weird library that re-implements something interesting discussed in an academic paper a couple of decades ago.

Innovation strategy?

Earl Mardle takes a swipe at the notion of innovation strategy. I tend to agree.

Sig's blog

I've started reading Sig's blog as it's engaging and suitably quirky. For instance, in this post, he takes on people who ask these questions

"Who's your market", "how will you enter the market?", "how will you reach the decision makers?", "what's your go-to-market strategy?" and "what's the value proposition for your target market?"

Here's how he visualises his experience of this approach...

... before giving some pithy alternatives which I recommend reading in full. For me, the best insight was this:

Neither I nor you is the market!

I think that captures lots of wisdom about how marketing really works in a networked economy. What if we're all tiny pieces of a bigger picture? Not the masterful geniuses tasked with finding the lever to make everyone else bend to our purpose.

Interesting tickets

Russell Davies has released the last 100 tickets for Interesting 2007. At the moment, the Wiki for the event has this to say about the speakers:

There will be some

Everything about this event makes it seem like the anti-conference: lack of hype, lack of absurd pricing, lack of dismal underground windowless meeting space in velvet-wallpaper hotel... I'm gonna be there, but don't let that put you off.

Update: All tickets sold now

A deeper hum..

Chris Corrigan:

There is a kind of deeper hum within every organization - call it the culture if you like - that supports the work, generates the working environement and connects to the purpose of each person. People who are highly satisfied with their jobs and organization will often feel connected to this deeper field. They resonate with the bass note, the fundamental note of the chord. When this note isn’t present, it feels like work is not connected into a deeper pattern. Understand here that I am talking not about organizational purpose - it runs below that.

I wonder how many organisations manage to be silent for long enough to hear it ?

Twittering

Since installing Twitteroo, I've started to enjoy Twitter a lot more. I only spend a few moments updating Twitter or reading it, but I like the sense of connection it gives me to my circle of friends there. It's nano-blogging.

Here's Rob Paterson's take:

I can see what is going on in my Twitter world and yet it takes no effort to be there or to participate... It's like being in a local cafe that has many of your friends in it and you can hear snatches of what they say and vice versa.

So I can work and yet be wrapped in a very supportive social environment that I can drop into or out of any any time at no ebergetic cost.

As David Weinberger says, Twitter sounds like it must be dumb but it isn't. Those who sneer at the triviality of its content are missing something important about the significance of small connections. Think Velcro.

(Here's my twitter account.)

Burst or busy?

Excellent piece by Anne Zelenka in Web Worker Daily.

The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement, strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous productivity.

Here are some of the polarities she suggests:

Busy: Immediate response to email required.
Burst: Use better ways to communicate when available including blogs, wikis, IM, chat rooms, SMS, and RSS.

Busy: Always available during working hours.
Burst: Declarative availability.

Busy: Long-term planning rules.
Burst: Try agile experimentation and fast failure instead.

As Anne says at the end, we need both busy and burst approaches - and many of us will work somewhere in-between.

Ability

I'll simply quote Karl Fisch and recommend his advice:

First, please download and watch this movie (18.4 MB, 11:36).

Then think about how often we stamp "can't" on somebody's forehead.

Network effects...

Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?, asks Duncan Watts in the New York Times magazine. His research suggests that market success is hugely affected by a network effect, where people's preferences are a product of the preferences of others rather than being independent.

He did an experiment in which people were asked to evaluate unknown music tracks under different conditions. Some did this without any information about their peers' choices. The rest were told what tracks other people were downloading. In the latter circumstances, songs polarised more strongly into popular and unpopular than in the first group. More intriguingly, the second group was subdivided into eight subgroups and each subgroup had quite different favourite songs. Here's some of Watts' analysis of this:

The impact of a listener’s own reactions is easily overwhelmed by his or her reactions to others. The song “Lockdown,” by 52metro, for example, ranked 26th out of 48 in quality; yet it was the No. 1 song in one social-influence world, and 40th in another. Overall, a song in the Top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50 percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success.

In our artificial market, therefore, social influence played as large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality. It’s a simple result to state, but it has a surprisingly deep consequence. Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictably is inherent to the nature of the market. It cannot be eliminated either by accumulating more information — about people or songs — or by developing fancier prediction algorithms, any more than you can repeatedly roll sixes no matter how carefully you try to throw the die.

I was intrigued by Scott Karp's interpretation of this:

All of a sudden it’s crystal clear what Web 2.0 really is — the greatest platform ever for harnessing randomly imitative social behavior. Before Web 2.0, achieving utterly arbitrary results took time and effort. Now, with platforms like Digg, we can get nowhere in a fraction of the time it used to take.

WOW — I am humbled and awestruck by the power of technology, and the power of randomly socialized human beings to snuff out each others’ critical faculties and personal tastes.

I don't agree with that interpretation. I think it rests on a certain assumption that our intelligence is individual and not social. Karp appears to regard imitation as a mark of dumbness.

But if you think of the eight sub-communities as forms of collective intelligence, they each come up with distinctive preferences from each other: so at that level, they do not imitate each other... so I wonder if Karp would then admit that these subgroups demonstrate a kind of collective intelligence?

I also suspect there's a distinction to be drawn between unpredictable and random but my brain hurts too much this morning to try and explore that one. If Dave Snowden's listening, maybe he could help?

Big Hat tip to AdPulp for spotting both items.

(There's lots of interesting comments on Scott's blog... pity the NYT has missed the chance to host any kind of online discussion, though it does flag an item about colourful men's underwear)

Not trying too hard

James Governor and Euan have both picked up on this post by Andrew McAfee, generally challenging the protestant work ethic and busyness. Euan's anecdote captures the potential blindness that an obsession with efficiency brings.

Everyone likes to bemoan the uselessness of most meetings. I wonder what it would be like if we really embraced the likely uselessness of a meeting, right at the start. If we could then let go of agendas and the pursuit of action points. Just relax and see what happens, without expectation.

Often, our efforts to make meetings effective make them ineffective... usually because the call for efficiency is actually a demand for obedience. And obedience is a bit 20th century.

Happiness and stumbling

Browsing the new TED website, I was led to this video of a 20 minute talk by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert. He explains some fascinating insights into happiness and what he calls "synthetic happiness". That's basically shorthand for the happiness we generate when we don't get what we want. Apparently, we're surprsingly good at making it, so that both getting big things we want, or big things we don't, have much less impact on our lives than we expect.

He also describes an experiment where subjects are given a choice of two pictures. In one group, they're told they can change their minds over four days. The other group are told their choice is irreversible. Guess what: the one's who don't get the flexibility end up liking their pictures a lot more. An interesting sidebar on the value of freedom of choice.

For me, this supports the idea of obliquity: getting things in indirect ways. We seem to be less-than-expert at predicting what will make us happy... and probably therefore put ourselves through too many false hoops trying to bring it about. This thought has now triggered me to order Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness to find out more.

Now I'm off to the pub for a drink with Alex Kjerulf who I dare say will have views on all this...

A tale of two CEOs

The egonomics blog contrasts two responses by CEOs to the question: what did you first do on getting to the Executive Suite?

First, Mulally (Ford): “I always keep a camera around. So I had someone take my picture against one window where you could see GM headquarters in the distance, and out another window where Chrysler’s headquarter is in the distance. And then I e-mailed them to my family.”

By the way, Mulally’s compensation for his first four months of work in 2006 was$39.1 million, a year whenFord posted a $12.7 billion loss.

Next, Kindler: “I promptly agreed to meet with everyone who has Outlook calendar capabilities–most of the free world, it seemed–but more to the point, I ate lunch in the cafeteria with employees and met with people in their offices instead of having them come to my office.”

Egonomics concludes

Who would you bet will be the CEO that leads their company from good to great? My money’s on Kindler.

A week in the spotlight

Tom Guarriello has a fascinating post on his week in the YouTube spotlight (after being chosen as the featured video). Some of his reflections:

The experience of being featured is not unlike that of being in a car wreck, as depicted in recent ads. You're driving along chit-chatting and are suddenly blindsided by something you absolutely don't see coming. All I can say is, thank goodness for "airbags," in this case, the ability to shut down the hate speech in comments.

If this is the reaction one gets from an inconsequential two-minute YouTube video, I cannot imagine what it would be like to be a celebrity, routinely in the public eye. There is no substitute for experience in creating understanding and empathy.

And here's his YouTube update with more reflections.

Bohemian Blogwalk

I'm going to attend the Blogwalk Amsterdam on 17 18 May. The theme is Digital Bohemians, which sounds like fun. I like the format which is very informal. It's also my policy to support events which are cheap and self-organised. And it's been too long since I caught up with Ton Zjilstra, who's helping organise it.

Space Invaders

I had dinner with Nancy White and some friends on Saturday. I picked up a nice bit of jargon from Nancy, who (like me) is a big practitioner of Open Space facilitation. Open Space is an approach to meetings that puts the agenda firmly in the hands of participants on an equal basis.

This concept freaks some people out. Often in the run-up to an Open Space, these folks try to suggest little "improvements" to the process (eg "to make sure actions happen") which nearly always are ways to remove time from participants and replace openness with predicatability. They claim they are introducing more structure, but really they are preventing the emergence of organic structure. This is usually on the unconscious assumption that they know better than everyone else what should happen.

Nancy's term for these folks is "space invaders". Having a name for them feels like a good thing.

Enough marketing

What do they know of England, who only England know? Kipling

My friend, Steve Moore, is fond of this quote, and so am I now.

I thought of it reading Twitter at the weekend and seeing Russell Davies say he was deleting marketing blogs from his aggregator. Russell's post today puts that in context.

I'm not reading many marketing blogs these days because I find the undiluted diet of marketing analysis boring. I think if we spend too much time talking marketing, we probably become less and less good at engaging with the rest of the world... and thus worse at marketing.

links for 2007-04-15

• Fuzzmail
  Fuzzmail lets you send a "live action" of your email, showing all the corrections you make as you type it. Found via Stumbleupon
  (tags: funny technology email tools)
• The Death Clock - When Am I Going To Die?
  There's something strangely grounding about "disovering" a certain day when you're going to die!
  (tags: death funny motivation)

The gamers love song

For game obsessives and their enablers.... This made me laugh. From Google Video (be patient for the first minute...)

links for 2007-04-14

• How many schooldays are wasted?
  New Jersey teacher wonders about teachers "not having enough time"; asks how many days are wasted (via Karl Fisch
  (tags: time education)
• B School bloggers do a better job than the pro marketers
  "Positioning is a marketing facade that paints a picture idealized by the marketer, not necessarily the customer." Jackie Huba on how a B School gets promoted by its students
  (tags: marketing opensaucelive opensourcemarketing blogging)
• Mexico City Earthquake, reported on Twitter first
  Scoble has the details
  (tags: twitter earthquake mexico technology socialsoftware)
• Kryptonite starts a blog
  Shel Israel takes note
  (tags: blogging kryptonite opensourcemarketing opensaucelive)
• Freakonomics Blog » How the Crack Dealer Became a Chef
  Freakonomics reviews "Cooked" - sounds a good read
  (tags: book transformation prison redemption)
• Londonist: Join The Mass Lone Protest
  Londonist on an inventive challenge to a stupid law requiring protests near Parliament to be approved in advance.
• George W Bush Speechwriter
  See if you can do better than the man himself
  (tags: funny politics bush speechwriter)

The best toilet humour, ever

On this YouTube:

Friction is a good thing

... when you consider the consequences of losing it...

Hat tip: Stumbleupon, where I've spent hours today seeing all manner of great stuff.

Branding: time for a bit of rough trade

Branding used to be about polishing and smoothing, to make shiny images of products and services that we'd all admire.

These shiny things would have USPs, propositions and such. There'd be manuals to try and make sure everyone kept to the script, to achieve perfection.

But shiny things have a problem: they don't generate much friction. They're hard to hold onto. And you don't want people's fingerprints to spoil the look. The laminate on the glossy brochure is like a glass case at the museum: look, but don't touch.

Now branding needs to celebrate the rough... the inconsistent... different people saying different things about different bits of you.

It's not as pretty and easy to control... but it's how you create friction, how you create more and more places where your product or service can get a bit of traction with the rest of us.

Quotes for the day

Both of these are lifted from Dave Snowden's presentation on contextual complexity.

Nasrudin found a weary falcon sitting one day on his window-sill. He had never seen a bird like this before. "You poor thing", he said, "how ever were you to allowed to get into this state?" He clipped the falcon’s talons and cut its beak straight, and trimmed its feathers. "Now you look more like a bird", said Nasrudin Shah, Idries (1985) The exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin

It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed. Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

Enough moralising, already

In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland says

The revolutionary public space that online debate represents is in danger of becoming stale and claustrophobic

It's a longish piece that is a bit like one of my terrible college essays, on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand, but the overall message comes out, sort of, at the end:

Right now, the internet is too often like a stuffy meeting room on a bad night. It needs to change if it's to live up to its democratic potential.

Oh for crying out loud.

This seems a ludicrous generalisation that bears no relationship at all to the extraordinary diversity of material available to me online.

But this kind of vapid generalisation provides the step for others to clamber onto the moral high horse, and say that "something must be done". To which I say (not to Freedland but to the code-of-conduct bores generally), bollocks. If you want to indulge in control freakery, go cover up some piano legs with doilies.

If you want to change the way you manage your own tiny piece of the wonderfully vast net, go right ahead. If you want to host a party for all the other neurotic control freaks who share your dismal view I can't stop you. You know what? After a while, even your polite civility-fest will break down into disorder, thank God.

It's like watching the feeblest presentations to the Dragons Den. I hate that show, but on this occasion, I'll pinch their catchphrase and offer it to the code-of-conduct brigade: I'm out.

Fun

AdPulp spotted (via Josh Spear's blog) this bit of fun marketing for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: scenes projected directly onto a 25 storey building in Brazil. Here's the YouTube:

Twitteroo

I'm still playing with Twitter to see if I like it. I've installed Twitteroo which certainly makes a difference. So far, I'm quite enjoying the little connections to people I know. Small pieces, loosely joined etc.

Here's my twitter page if you want to add me.

Compare and contrast

As the internet distributes information and intelligence, it gets easier and easier to do a bit of pattern spotting and identify mismatches... and then share them with the world. Jeff Jarvis recently highlighted this example of it being done to John McCain:

Alan Moore picked up another of these contrasts from Christopher Elliott's Customer Service blog:

Two facts. Number one: The latest Airline Quality Rating (PDF download) finds that US Airways ranks dead last, when it comes to customer service. No surprise, considering the tumultuous past year in which it was assimilated into America West as it withered away on life support.

Number two: US Airways Chief Executive Officer Doug Parker's compensation package totaled $5.68 million last year (in fairness, he did turn down a $770,000 bonus). That's more than four times the $1.25 million total he earned in 2004, according to reports.

If you google "US air sucks", you'll get a pretty interesting perspective on that airline.

The power of a smile?

Dave at Cognitive Daily reports on a new scheme to deter bank robberies.

Instead of responding passively to suspicious individuals, bank staff are being encouraged to walk right up to them and shake their hands. The theory is that overtly friendly behavior will disorient potential robbers before they become aggressive.

Apparently, Apple store employees are trained in similar tactics for dealing with shoplifters.

Posted by Johnnie Moore at 15:46 in Miscellaneous (everything is)
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A celebration?

I see that two weeks today, on the 26 April, we'll have a chance to celebrate World Intellectual Property Day.

WIPO, the inventors of this, says this year's theme is encoraging creativity. So I'm disappointed by the lack of it in their list of proposed celebrations. In the UK these are the publication of a survey (sigh), two information booklets (yawn), a teach-yourself intellectual property book (enough books, ed) and an e-newsletter (zzzz). Oh and a propaganda site for kids, which is "coming soon".

Oh dear how dull.

How come Woolworth aren't stocking TM bunting? Where are the greeting cards with silly rhymes like "An Intellectual Property Day wish for you, You stole my ideas so I'm going to sue")? Where are the jolly Santa-like characters going round cheerfully slapping copyright stickers on stuff?

Why do I have a sneaking feeling that the real celebrations will be among wealthy lawyers in exclusive restaurants?

I'm free that evening and I'd like to find a fitting way to mark the day. Something jolly. All suggestions welcome.

Shift

A few startling facts in this little video:

Hat tip: Steve Hardy, who also points to this very contrasting - and comforting - use of visual communication by fridge and stove.

UPDATE: I like Earl's comment re the Shift video: 'm a bit cautious of predicting exponential change in the same direction, I have this nasty feeling that just when we think we are about to go through the roof, chaos has a way of opening up the floor. Discontinuity is nature's way of saying "Gotcha"

UPDATE 2: I've revised the link to the YouTube created by Scott McLeod - there are some interesting comments there. The original presentation was created by Karl Fisch. A further hat tip to Ryan Lanham whose comment below revealed the the ancestry of this video. All three have gone into my feedreader.

De-coded

Tim O'Reilly's proposal for a bloggers code of conduct is looking increasingly forlorn. Over at gapingvoid, Kathy Sierra rejects it. And Tristan Louis gives it a well-deserved fisking (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan).

Podcast: The impact of images

Last week, I recorded an interview with Tom Guarriello in Connecticut and Thomas Madsen-Mygdal in Copenhagen. We were talking about the impact of the rise of digital imagery on society and organisations. Tom's been following YouTube with close interest since it started and is a regular video blogger. Thomas is a serial entrepreneur as well as the founder of Reboot. His latest business is photo sharing service, 23.

Download the Podcast - 24m - MP3 (8.3 MB)

Podcast RSS feed for iPodder etc.

It was a suitably non-linear conversation. Here are some notes. Not a transcript but a rough idea of the content.

0:00 Introductions Theme: images, especially digital, are becoming more important - what's the impact on how we think and how society works. I reference Alan Moore's post about the book, The Alphabet versus The Goddess. This contends that the arrival of the alphabet led to the demise of the feminine in society... but that the revival of image-based thinking, first with television and then online, is leading to a resurgence of feminine values and changes to the way we think. I ask Tom and Thomas to share their experiences.

1:22 Thomas talks about 23 and how it has grown. He's started to see weird photosharing accounts, for example of lettuceheads, suggesting more was going on than just people sharing private photos. Images and photos are undervalued as a communication tool in our culture, and we're now seeing an explosion in direct, authentic, visual communication.

2:40 Tom talks about how he got into video blogging and how he finds it more interactive than text blogging.

4.15 Tom talks about the organisational use of images. Organisational speech is often devoid of emotion; images allow people in organisations to bring emotional power to the stories they tell. Designers have always worked this way but found the rest of the organisation speaks in words and numbers devoid of emotion ("powerpoint hypnosis")

5.30 Thomas: we shape our tools and our tools shape us. The possible impact of image sharing on product development. How a CEO blog photo page changes how people see the organisation. Could visual blogging overtake text blogging?

7.20 Johnnie: opening the visual channel adds texture and bandwidth in our relationships with each other, getting away from the dessicated way businesses communicate. Using "animal bandwidth" that would never appear in a transcript.

8.34 Thomas tells about the impact of a CEO photoblog on a potential employee's understanding of how the company worked - how she deconstructed the culture from about 500 photos. Making meaning from the weak signals in the pictures. Small signals set the context for understanding organisations.

10:24 Tom thinks a whole new set of skills are needed to cope with these trends. Johnnie says most people already have the skills to understand images - are organisations ready to cope with the impact?

12:00 Thomas: (as a species, historically) we communicated visuallly before having text. We experienced the world visually on a daily basis. In that sense, this is nothing new. What is new is the distribution and ability to capture images.

12:54 Tom: while the everyday use of these skills is natural to us, legitimising them in business is a whole other matter. Johnnie: if businesses don't embrace the conversation, it will carry on around them.

13:40 Johnnie gets into the iconography of events in Iran/Iraq. Compare orange jumpsuits vs business suits for prisioners. Tom/Thomas/Johnnie: what the conflict shows about the US's skill in communicating with images outside the commercial sphere.

16:19 Johnnie: production values are being turned on their head, so that lower production values are more synonymous with authenticity. Tom gives an example of a client he's advising not to overdo the slickness of imagery.

17:25 Johnnie references Hugh Macleod on Dinosaurspeak - there's an equivalent "dinosaur look". Corporate imagery has been a bit like the underwear models in old-fashioned mail order catalogues. We can spot the fakeness at a hundred paces.

18:15 Thomas talks about how excessive editing contributes to the sense of fakeness of corporate imagery. Also, he notes how we can process a great quantity of visual imagery. Ensuing discussion of how massive sharing opens up businesses to stakeholders.

21.25 Tom talks about the impact of user-generated images on US presidential politics - how it has disadvantaged Hillary Clinton.

22:07 Thomas explains about the lettuceheads...

23:58 Farewells...

World of Warcraft meets Python.

You may have spotted the gratuitous Monty Python references in this blog lately, as I spent part of the Easter weekend watching Holy Grail / Life of Brian / Meaning of Life.

Couldn't resist passing on this very silly YouTube mashup: World of Warcraft meets Monty Python.