We want to be known

I remember being pointed to Post Secret a little while ago and then re-found it more recently. Its a service run by a guy called Frank who invites people to post in their deepest secrets anonymously using postcards as a medium of choice. He then scans a selection of them and puts them on the blog linked above.

Many are funny, many are sad, and many are heart breaking. The video above explains in a lovely way what motivates people to take part and send in their secrets to Frank. Ultimately.. we want to be known and we want to know that we aren't alone in facing the problems that life throws at us. What isn't mentioned is that many of the people who take part are desperately lonely. Not necessarily meaning that they have no friends or family, but much of the time that they feel disconnected from those around them and desperately want to change their situation and either learn how to connect to those around them, or find people who provide them with a stability and peace of mind that they're able to function as 'normal' people and accept that life is how it is.

Its a lovely video - have a watch - the up-front bit is quite eloquent about our new media landscape and how it affects our behaviour (within this context) and be sure to check out the blog about once/week.

Also sorry for the lack of blogging recently - work has been crazy busy. I need to have down time at work to be able to spend enough time looking around for good shit on the Internet (bizarre considering my occupation I know).

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Faking 'Viral'

This ugly thing is what is called a 'proof of concept' banner. It does what it says on the tin.

A while ago I was having a chat with someone from FlashTalking who are a company which like making online banner ads a bit exciting and sexy when at all possible as well as charging advertisers reasonable bandwidth costs for the pleasure of using their internet pipes to make the banners come to life in vivo. With glazed eyes, I spoke at length about how funny it would be if we could make an online banner ad that actually pulls in a YouTube video dynamically, so when people click on the ad/hover over it, it begins to play.

"So whut? I seen videos in banners before" - The key thing isn't the video. Its the +1 count on YouTube that's good - and also the fact that you don't pay for Rich Media adserving as the bandwidth being used is YouTube's (Snootch)

The trends on YouTube are subject to many factors ranging from genuine WOM generated by things like Britain's Got Talent, to the 'featured videos' to simply watching what other people are watching. The 'most viewed' list being a bit of a holy grail for advertisers in the knowledge that if you manage to hit the top results on 'most viewed', that you've achieved the video equivalent of reaching positions 1 to 3 in Google (a.k.a you're going to increase your site traffic/views a lot for the time that you can hold that position).

The effect of popular stuff getting more popular by being popular in the first place (concise no?) has been named by someone else more cleverer than me. It is called 'Cumulative advantage' and you can read more about it here (thanks Faris for the tip).

This type of ad format will no doubt only work a couple of times (if at all) as YouTube/Google reserve the right to cease certain services/charge for bandwidth costs if people send high amounts of traffic to their services for commercial reasons.

As video ads need to be rollover/click to initiate - we're subject to digital banner interaction rates (approx 5%) for the success of the campaign. However if you buy a Yahoo! and MSN homepage takeover - you should get about 1 million video views (in a day) which should see your video firmly in the 'most viewed' list on YouTube for about a month which should in turn generate another couple of million 'natural' views. I'm not saying you should go out and buy homepage takeovers just to try this out - but if you ARE going to be buying them anyway, why not maximise your ROI in this age of 'where the money at?' by using this type of ad format? 

This isn't a replacement for creating genuinely good content which may in turn spread virally across the internets - its just a cheeky way of making bog standard video go nuts on YouTube for a while.

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I Made This™

Help Needed: What's the point of Wired UK?

In my mind, Wired Magazine has always had a global appeal. Perhaps this is the route of the problem..'in my mind' doesn't count for much. I did ask Google to see if they knew the answer, but they didn't. So 'in my mind' is all I have to go with at the minute.

So if we assume that Wired had a global appeal - what additional value is created through the localisation of this publication in the UK? Wired Italia I understand because of the language barrier - but Wired UK?

To me, one of the best things about Wired is that it does an amazing job of capturing interesting stuff from around the world and bringing it to my attention. Not just any interesting stuff, but interesting stuff with history, context and substance above and beyond the rules of the 'Natural Selection of Interesting'. These rules of selection which govern how content in the digital broth rise to the top of our attentionsphere are tailored to the environment of online where long form written content often doesn't win. For this reason I still rely on Wired (and occasionally the Discovery Channel) to fulfill my deeper curiosities which need those things I mentioned above like history, context and substance. 

So! If in a globally connected and already mainly English speaking context - what benefit can be had from localising a magazine which draws on trends from around the world and already has a global appeal? 

Am I supposed to have a subscription to both magazines? If I just get the UK magazine will I miss out on all the exciting stuff in the US magazine which isn't being covered in the UK edition?

What am I supposed to do? Its more confusing than the really tricky levels of Portal.

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Grown Up Digital

We all need something to grow
Originally uploaded by Pablo Barra

Back in November '08, a lovely lady from Edinburgh Business School asked me to write a book review for the International Journal of Advertising. It was for a book called "Grown Up Digital", written by Don Tapscott who also authored Growing Up Digital and Wikinomics amongst other nice books.

Having grown up digital myself, I thought it sounded like a good thing to do so I said yes. This month the review was published in the IJA - you can read it here. I hope you like it.

p.s. I wrote it before it became apparent that people who work at Google in fact don't really like it all that much unless they are amongst the chosen few who work in the Mountain View paradise in California. Shame really - but something you learn to live with when you grow up digital... anything you write tends to become irrelevant, or simply bettered in a very short space of time.

p.p.s the p.s. won't make sense unless you read the book review. So here it is again, just incase.

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If you search for...

I loled

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How to ensure marketing content goes viral

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F**k my life

I found this little gem of a site through Twitter not long ago. Essentialy its a sounding board for anyone and everyone who's having a really really bad day to share whats happened that has caused them to think "F**k my life".

Here's a nice example or 2.

"Today, I ran out of underwear and so I went into my mom's drawer to borrow a pair from her. It was then that I found out my mom uses the same vibrator as I do. FML"

and 

"Today, we had some family over. A nasty need to wank seized me when I saw her : my 17 year old cousin. I went to my unoccupied parents’ bedroom. My sister's baby walkie talkie was on and the whole family heard me. FML"

All hilarious stuff. Today I tried to post my own FML.

One of my bosses called me by my brother's name - and didn't realise his mistake for a good few minutes. My brother has never worked here and I've worked here for 6 months. FML etc.

Unfortunately - FML rejected my submission. FML

Geekmented Reality

Faris talks quite a bit about augmented reality over on his blog. Its pretty interesting stuff really - overlaying digital invormation over the real world through some handy display or even an eyeball implant (yum..), and in doing so making the real world a more connected place where the infinite information available on the internet can enrich peoples' lives in new and unexpected ways. If and when it becomes a commonplace reality, I have no doubt that the endless applications it will have will mimic the growth and development of the Internet, both surprising us and changing our lives forever.

Some really smart people at MIT (those guys are always up to some clever stuff) - have "developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they're done." 

Have a look at this pretty cool video which they've made, demonstrating the life hacking ability of their gizmo.

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How to make e-mail work on the T-Mobile G-1

If there are any other owners of the T-mobile G1 in the UK who have contacted the T-mobile customer support folk for help regarding their mobile e-mail settings... then you too know my pain. The first few times I called, I was informed that they had not actually yet received the manual for this specific handset (you know... the one with their name on it), despite me calling them over a month after the phone's launch. The first few times I got nothing better than "Try calling back in a couple of weeks - we might know then" lol.

Over the weekend I decided to invest some good time and effort in explaining to the person on the other end of the phone who should supposedly know more than me about how mobile stuff works - that in fact I didn't need settings which were specific to the G1. 

All I needed was T-mobile's UK outbound e-mail settings (which don't change despite the handset make/model). After I explained as much - and held the person's hand for about 20 minutes guiding him through his manuals - I finally got the answer that many of us have been waiting for.

So for anyone who has been able to receive their work e-mails on their G-1 but hasn't been able to respond to them - the information you need is below:

SMTP server: smtp.t-email.co.uk

Port: 25 

Security type: None

Require sign-in: Tick box unticked

I hope this helps :-)

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Image from C4's Fonejacker

Snow on my street

Just a pretty picture I took of my street on my G1. I thought the blue aura that everything has was worth sharing here.

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Kangaroo: Its time to say goodbye

And now, the end is here... and so we face... a huge delay in a dramatically improved VoD offering in the UK. The UK Competition Commission said that Project Kangaroo "has to be stopped" and that viewers would benefit if the three were "close competitors" rather than allies.

In the long term, this may be the case (I'm still not convinced though), but in the short term this definitely isn't true. 

Neither 4oD or ITV's Player have seen any substantial improvements since they were first launched, many many months ago. 

ITV's Player is so infuriating that as a user I get a better consumer experience by downloading their programs over Bit Torrent rather than using their on demand service. Their pre-roll advertising loops endlessly, showing the same adverts 2 or 3 times back to back - the video quality isn't amazing - and their menu for finding relevant programming is complete shite. 

4oD is, although much better than ITV's offering, is not able to compete with the BBC's iplayer in terms of user experience both in terms of navigation and video/audio quality. Its good enough however to use over and above downloading C4 shows through Bit Torrent.

BBC's iPlayer is an amazing service. I don't use its download now, watch later option because I'm not a fan of the software that this comes with - however it doesn't matter as their streaming option is the best VoD solution I've ever seen on the web [bear in mind I've never been able to use Hulu as I'm UK based]. Its not just the best service we have, but its also the only one which looks like it is testing new technologies, and then releasing them at incremental stages to let us enjoy the benefits as soon as possible. These include - "watch in pop-out player" which is VERY handy, "watch in high quality", and various in-screen sizes to let people with bigger screens enjoy a larger display without having the negative side affects of full-screen pixelation.

It is upsetting that Kangaroo will have to be panned as the technology/backend side of the business was being spearheaded by the BBC which offered a lot of hope that ALL of the programming would enjoy the superb quality that the iplayer has to offer - and it means that ITV and Channel4 who have evidently been sat on their haunches for well over a year thinking that it was pointless to improve their technology when they would be using the BBC's as soon as Kangaroo launched. Now the poor bastards are almost 2 years behind, and are deeply gripped by the effects of the Credit Crunch making it even less likely that they'll be able to play catchup with the BBC any time soon.

Verdict: Fail

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Christian Bale goes (American) Psycho on set of Terminator 4

****NSFW****

I loled - and if anything - makes me want to go watch the film more when its released. Perhaps it IS a cunning marketing plan Millhouse, perhaps it is. 

In other news Christian Bale's personal brand tracker survey has shown that his likeability has gone down 6 points since The Dark Knight. Why... so... SERIOUS? 

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I loled

Forget the year of the mobile: 2009 is all about 3D gaming

It seems that 3D stuff is making a comeback – and this time without the nausea inducing headaches which we’ve experienced in the past. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, there was enough chat about 3D gaming/video hardware to create quite a buzz on Engadget, and last week I noticed that my computer downloaded a new patch for World of Warcraft which made the game compatible with Nvidia’s new hardware and software which should bring my Loatheb kills to life. I thought to myself – “Is 3D gaming going to become a reality, or is this the HD-DVD format of 2008?”

I’m sitting on the fence for now despite Sony showing off a functioning demo of a Playstation 3 running games in 3D. But my scepticism won't stop me from dreaming about flying around Northrend, almost being able to feel the wind in my face.

via HyperBlog

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Star Wars being summed up.. by someone who hasn't seen it

Awesome... or whatever.

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