The future of the newspaper from 1981

I found this video on techcrunch here about the future of newspapers seen back in 1981 and wanted to share it with you all – it’s quite funny

My favourite part is that it takes over 2 hours to receive the whole newspaper and back then the hourly use charge of the telephone was $5 which makes this newspaper 10 bucks – pretty hefty

Fake Virals, Social Objects and Naked.

Today I presented at the 6th Annual Future of Digital Advertising for the IAB and AIMIA (#foda09 on Twitter). I talked about a few things, shared some insight on what I thought (hopefully) could help the digital industry further itself this year.

The main body of my preso was on the digital consumer and how brands need reconsider their approach, especially when using social as a tool. I discussed social objects – good ones, bad ones, great ones. I talked about Digital Brand DNA- something that Joe Crump our Razrofish NY Creative Director has pioneered with his ‘Digital Darwinism’ presentations.

In the last year I have come to believe strongly that great digital creative usually contains 7 digital brand genes that Joe Crump identified. See his full preso and video from Cannes (here):

- AUTHENTIC
- ADAPTIVE
- RELEVANT
- TRANSFORMATIVE
- FRESH
- IMMERSIVE
- SOCIAL

OK, so what about that Naked / Witchery Viral? (I’ve embedded their YouTube campaign in case you missed it). It’s clearly a bigger story than I realised (the SMH and Naked have both been in touch with me today as a result). The thing is, I like Naked as an Agency  – I like the way they challenge, stand up, break things, and do things that are counter intuitive. I know the guys well and we’ve worked with them many times on probably 6 or more different clients. In fact they’re one of the best agencies in town to collaborate with especially when it comes to their open approach to digital.

So what’s wrong with the above and why bother raising it, especially in a public forum? Well as you may have gathered my problem is not with Naked at all, it is with fake viral in general. In fairness, Naked were one example of a few I showed. QLD Tourism and Nike were both raised. We have a mountain to climb to be accepted (as advertisers and brands) into the new consumer landscape and these social channels are theirs, not ours. I know that consumers genuinely welcome cool clever intelligent advertising – but I cannot see any evidence that they like being deceived routinely. Comments below the videos often do the talking, especially when the deception is revealed.

Fake Viral for Nike feat Taylor Momsen

I’m a big believer in being able to make mistakes in the search for progress (digital is a tough gig, and there are new things we learn every day so mistakes do happen), but why the same mistake over and over? I also can’t understand why the elements of risk associated with generating negative brand sentiment in consumer channels are not better understood. As I tried to point out today, the 2.5m tweets per day, 915,000 blogs per day are heavily indexed by Google and can quickly produce negative organic search results. Let’s face it – search is very important, especially if you are a digital ROI client. Why would any company want to see their first page of Google results polluted with negative blog posts about their brand? The reality is that the social media sword cuts both ways.

Unfortunately the knock on effect is that negative news like the above often impacts other agencies, especially digital ones. I’ve seen brand managers get nervous when they see things like this in the news and subsequently make rapid judgement that the social medium is too volatile and uncontrollable. Budgets get withdrawn. We all start to lose – and that’s where I have a problem, because we know enough about social now to start doing things differently, and do it right.

What’s the solution?
So here’s the thing – Fake Viral is completely possible, and without deception. There have been some great examples from the US. Here’s one from Coors:

Here’s another ad for Coors, deliberately designed to breed consumer imitations (of which there are many). Great use of Social Object Theory:

Rolling Rock ran a hilarious campaign on Moonvertsing (here) which although potentially controversial produced a great digital response. Again completely Fake but with full disclosure from day one. I could go on, but it’s late and I think you get the picture right?

 

In Conclusion:
There are better, bigger, broader opportunities to engage consumers using social media that can still be authentic, mysterious, realistic. Yes it’s a creative challenge but if we can start to get this right there are big wins for consumers, clients and agencies alike. Naked aren’t the first, and won’t be the last to feel the heat on this issue – but they’re a great agency and will rise above it. I do hope that in the future the industry will adopt some of Joe’s 7 digital brand genes, it’s a good place to start.

@eunmac

Windows 7 fight Vista and XP

As I stated in my previous post here, Win 7 seems to be more stable and faster than Vista.

I now found this very in depths article on infoworld that is taking it to the next level of testing for Multicore systems.

According to the article, Microsoft’s new OS has a clear multicore scalability advantage over both Windows XP and Windows Vista, especially on less I/O-bound tasks like our multiprocess database workload.

In the meantime, you certainly won’t lose anything by moving from Vista to Windows 7, and you may even gain a few seconds here and there, thanks to its better kernel tuning.

Like Vista, Windows 7 chews up a lot more CPU cycles per transaction loop than XP. It also uses more RAM than XP when it just sits there waiting for something to happen, but honestly, these days RAM is so cheap and most machines come with 4GB anyway.

I still stick to testing it a bit more – my experience so far is definitely positive (might be because I am on Vista) but if you want to read the full article, click here.

Kung Hei Fat Choy

Happy Chinese New Year.  eCard from our China offices in celebration.  We wish you the same from Australia

The coming year is the Year of Ox in Chinese calendar, it’s a sign of prosperity through fortitude and hard work.  Hope we all have the wisdom and persistence to create another great year.  And take this chance to wish you and your family have a healthy and prosperity year!  Kung Hei Fat Choy!  – Venus Lee – MD of razorfish China.

http://chinesenewyear09.e-crusade.com/ 

Internet population passes 1 billion

Australia should be there at approx 15 million and is in Internet World stats.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm

Figures below are Comscore December 2008

Top 15 countries, by Internet population:

1. China: 179.7 million
2. United States: 163.3 million
3. Japan: 60.0 million
4. Germany: 37.0 million
5. United Kingdom: 36.7 million
6. France: 34.0 million
7. India: 32.1 million
8. Russia: 29.0 million
9. Brazil: 27.7 million
10. South Korea: 27.3 million
11. Canada: 21.8 million
12. Italy: 20.8 million
13. Spain: 17.9 million
14. Mexico: 12.5 million
15. Netherlands: 11.8 million

Worldwide Internet Audience

• Asia Pacific: 416 million (41.3%)
• Europe: 283 million (28.0%)
• North America: 185 million (18.4%)
• Latin America: 75 million (7.4%)
• Middle East & Africa: 49 million (4.8%)

Comscore: December 2008

Your brand should be on Twitter too…

Thanks to Mashable.com for this really in-depth article on: 40 brands on Twitter and the People Behind Them.
A follow up to their article last year on Why Brands ABSOLUTELY do belong on Twitter, Mashable gives us insight into exactly why Twitter is so super useful and effective for getting in touch with customers and being a part of the Groundswell, not just a spectator.

My Windows 7 experience

I installed a pre-beta of Windows 7 a while back in a Virtual machine and back then I already had the impression of it being more stable and faster then my host environment.

now I recently got my laptop back which had some issues with its display and needed repair and I decided to install Windows 7 on it to give it a bit of a closer look.

Here I will be talking about Installation, User Experience, things I like and things I don’t like.

Your TweetEffect!

TweetEffect.com is a quick and easy way to monitor your impact on the Twitter community, and more importantly your followers! If you are wondering which tweets attracted followers and/or which tweets lost you followers, then this little site might help you out.

Check it out at TweetEffect.com 

Mattypeee

Mouse Clicks Heat Map application

In case you were wondering what you were really doing all day… this tracker app creates a nice heap map of your desktop clicks recording every little interaction for you to see visually. Uh-oh – from the look of it seems I spend way too much time in PowerPoint… groan.

http://www.anappaday.com/downloads/2006/10/day-18-mouse-heat-map.html

Shepard Fairey On The Colbert Report

Shepard Fairey, from Obey to Obama. Some may say that because he’s been working for coin the label of street artist is false. Well surely it is all forgiven if his work helped Obama across the line right? That IS public service.

Talk like a monster

Everyone’s done the helium thing, but have you done this? Witness the Sulfur hexafluoride effect.

Promise not to try this at home … ok?

Thanks @einspruch.

Such A Thing As Too Viral?

It appears there is indeed such a thing as too viral…especially when it concerns free food.

It seems as though a Carl’s Jr. online promotion for a free $2.75 “Famous Star” hamburger coupon went a little too viral.

The Carpenteria-based chain promptly stopped honoring the coupons
for their franchise burger after what seemed like a harmless online
promotion was supersized by the net.

During a promotion at a recent Los Angeles Lakers-New Orleans
Hornets game at the Staples Center in L.A., the 276 winning contestants
were texted a passcode and a 48-hour-only URL on the Lakers’ website,
showing where they could download their free red meat.

A day later, the URL and passcode spread faster than a Paris Hilton homemade porno. Hundreds
of bargain-hunting websites posted the URL and passcode — prompting
the hamburger outlet to discontinue honoring them amid fears of a run
on their burgers.

“We’re wanting things to go viral, just not free offers,” said Beth
Mansfield, a Carl’s Jr. spokeswoman. She said that was the first, and
likely the last, time the chain would give out free burgers that way.

From: Wired News

blellow – Community for Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds

 

blellow

 

 

I just signed up for the blellow beta, looks like fun. Ever had a great idea that might be a little bigger than ‘a one person’  or ‘a weekend’ DIY project … like building a great new website? or a new social media solution? or anything at all? or better still are you looking for a great idea or a fun project to work on? then this little site looks like something that might interest you. It is all about networking with other ppl really, and finding ppl who can help make things happen. 

In their words: “Whether you’re a buyer or a freelancer, a hobbyist or just wanting to help out a good cause – whether you’re a blue or a yellow, Blellow is a better way to get together and help each other out.”

Time to pull those ideas and skills out and put them to use! check it out at blellow.com 

 

Mattypee

Always chasing the latest in digital so go and Follow me on Twitter

Jaiku vs. Twitter cont.

Hey guys,

Some might remember my post a few weeks ago about Jaiku… well as some of you may know already, Google had announced 2 days ago that they will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase; and are now currently in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. Shortly Google will “release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License”.  

So this seems a little obvious that Google is dropping Jaiku and hoping that the community will bring it back.

Check out more info here: Google code updates

Previous post about Jaiku

Mattypee

Introducing Ubiquity

A new prototype browser plug in from the Mozilla Labs is promising to help connect different web services using natural language. They state the goals as:

Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)

Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

Extend the browser functionality easily.

Check the video out.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Thanks to Reyn for the link.

Put Advertising in your own videos

Researchers from Stanford University have developed new artificial intelligence software called ZunaVision, which can place a still image or video on almost any surface inside a video clip. For example, in a video displaying a painting of the sea hanging on the wall in a living room, the picture on the wall can be edited and replaced by a video of Barak Obama giving a speech.

New SSD hard drives that you can shake

Check out the video below. This guy is shaking his SSD with a force of up to 800Gs and is still playing video of it at the same time:

Today’s “normal” hard drives usually give up at about 100 G.

i can’t wait to get my hands on one of those and shake things up

interesting

Info found from a friends blog  – I will keep identity secret! BUT;

Myspace secretly building webmail product

Hot off the press and all secret squirrels at this stage but Myspace are building a webmail product to rivel hotmail, Yahoo! mail, gmail etc. It’s a big step given that only 6% of users spend time with social networks mail products. But if users were to migrate to use their Myspace mail as their main account this would be huge for Myspace. Traffic would increase to perhaps double / trebble the current numbers and also increase dwell time massively giving them a huge advantage over Facebook.

xkcd comic

Another cool little quick-sketch comic site, and good one to add to the dashboard for Mac users.

For more check out http://xkcd.com/

mattypeee

Windows 7 – Tips and Tricks

I have been playing with Windows 7 since it was Pre Beta and every time I play with it I am impressed.

For example I ran the pre-beta in a virtual machine on my Vista PC and it ran faster and more stable than my Vista computer – go figure.

Anyway one of my developers found a blog post of Tim Sneath who is talking about Windows 7 Secrets.

You can check it out here but I wanted to share my favorites with you.

The Problem Steps Recorder

As a System Admin I always run into the issue that when somebody come to me with a problem that they can’t explain to me how to replicate it.

The Problem Steps Recorder provides a simple screen capture tool that enables you to record a series of actions. Once you hit “record”, it tracks your mouse and keyboard and captures screenshots with any comments you choose to associate alongside them. Once you stop recording, it saves the whole thing to a ZIP file, containing an HTML-based “slide show” of the steps.

This will make my life a lot easier

Specialized Windows Switching

Another feature that power users will love is the ability to do a kind of “Alt+Tab” switching across windows that belong to just one application. For example, if you’ve got five Outlook message windows open along with ten other windows, you can quickly tab through just the Outlook windows by holding down the Ctrl key while you repeatedly click on the single Outlook icon. This will toggle through each of the five Outlook windows in order, and is way faster than opening Alt+Tab and trying to figure out which of the tiny thumbnail images relates to the specific message you’re trying to find.

ISO Burning

Windows is finally able  to burn .iso images straight out of the box – you can double-click on any DVD or CD .ISO image and you’ll see a helpful little applet that will enable you to burn the image to a blank disc.

 

there are heaps of other pretty cool tips – so check it out here.

I personally can’t wait for the final release.