“The interface of a cheeseburger” is one of these Blog entries that validate those 30 Million other blogs with random noise in one simple swoop. If you ever contemplated to create anything that get’s used by a human, be it nuclear power plant, condom or breakfirst table for your dearest one, you could find some great insight in this text from Oliver Reichenstein. At least I think it’s by him. While content and form of the text are pretty nice it seems almost a relief that ‘Information Architects Japan’ messed up the branding for themselves. Sticking Lego’s on business cards won’t help either. Die Kinder des Schuhmachers tragen immer kaputte Schuhe.
Category: communication
Conceptually it was a well intended follow up: Sony’s Bravia commercial using exploding paint instead of many balls.
Execution wise there certainly are amazing explosions. There are few good camera angles. But most of them are, well, uninspired. The idea of using an abandoned housing project is interesting. Somewhat. I have just seen to many of them being blown up. Somehow you expect them to sink together once they become the object of the camera. But it was not this non delivering on the expectation that broke the spot. It was the unispired music choice together with that I call dismal editing. I can only write this, since I have not looked up yet who did it. It’s easier that way. And I am sure it was the usual clusterfuck of decission making or pure lack therof that pushed this brilliant idea of a follow up into the lower ends of mediocricy. The sport lives from the real Bravia. Not more, not less. A typical sequell that can’t deliver. Too bad they blew it.
If you enjoy people getting at each others throats and like geek subjects (that’s all four of you) then you could follow the discussion between Joel and David.
I think it’s about Ruby on Rails. I didn’t read it. Although Joel writes usually nice, and David really loves Ruby. He is the one that came up with the Quicktime screen capture movies that show how to do things with Rails. Better get over there quickly, usually smart people ( they both certainly are ) realize very quickly that fighting is not the smartest thing to do. I think they will find a peaceful agreement, or at least will leave each other alone pretty quickly. Then you have to turn to politics again for a good fight. Actually those are not as good, since they are deeply rooted in stupidity.
Few weeks ago lots of people wrote that somebody had hacked a MacBook via Wifi.
There were never much details or example code available. But the need for the story was there, so felt the people, and everybody repeated it. It seems as if the hackers installed 3rd wireless soft- and hardware on the Macbook and then hacked this software.
Which renders the whole thing to a non issue.
Of course all computers can be hacked in theory. Including Macs. But as long it did not happen, it did not happen. I am sure lots of people read the first (non true) part of this ‘hack’ story, and will miss this conclusion. Those will argue in a year from now “Mac’s aren’t safe either” based on this misinterpreted news story.
Getting down to the truth becomes increasingly complex it seems. Much of the communication surrounding people has been made with an intention. Truth comes second. Which IS a big deal, since it invalidates the whole reason for communication. It was communication that got us of the trees. If we break it, since it seems not to matter, then we might have trouble getting back up into the trees. “Sabletooth tiger!” “Where?” “Just kidding, want to buy a coconut?”
Microsoft likes more people to develop games for their consoles. In their press release it sounds like a Windows XP machine is all you will need to develop games for their consoles.
The range of impact goes from ‘flash in the pan’ to ‘Sony is finished’. It all depends on the details of the implementation and capabilities. Nobody has ever opened game consoles to a wider development community. It might or might not take off. Trying it is a bold and innovative move.
Microsoft is a funny companies these days: Some of their divisions do all the right things, while others are as stupid as the Ottoman empire in 1907.
Trolltech makes a phone now. Trolltech got big with a toolkit for graphical user interfaces called “Qt”. I used it years ago, and it is not bad. Now they make a phone that runs embedded linux, and their user interface on top of it. In other words it is an open source phone.
From the pure aspect of technology these developments had to happen. The very interesting question is, what will come out of it. Content is a very tricky thing to predict. Hollywood survived despite constant failures in this area. As long the movie industry existed they tried to mechanize and control creativity and content creation, so that they can churn out products like a nuts and bolts manufacturer. And it never worked.
One the other side of the argument one could see Microsoft and Trolltech shipping typewriters to a million monkeys.
And, of course reality will fall somewhere in between. And once the revolution happened, it will be so clear why it did. Same in the other outcome.
Games could really use some injection of innovation. Roaming the show floor of what was the last E3 of it’s kind I was pretty surprised how alike most games looked. I don’t play. But I care about the technology and business side of this industry. There are racing games and first person shooters. Lot’s of those.
With production costs high new content development is tricky. That’s why I liked Rockstar’s Table Tennis.
Tetris was written by a russian programer when there was still a country called “Soviet Union”.
The situation with phones is similar. They don’t suck, but I never saw a phone that made just sense. Of course all Apple fan boys hope that Steve Jobs will come down Moses like with a phone on his arm. They hope so, since phones are ok, but definetely not as useful as we want them to be. And as they could be. If open software can fix this is to be seen.
1400 music videos from the 80s.
Haven’t counted them. Flash encoded. Which -of course- sucks. Ripped from various source it seems. Hardly legit. Nenne Cherries “Man child” I missed back then. Interesting how motion-control + green screen was enough back then to be concept. It is a shame that it is not MTV that does make this work acessible. I hope they kept copies of things they did broadcast. Probably on “D2” tape. Over the last 30 years society has accumulated a huge amount of so called ‘pop’ culture. That video wasn’t cheap. It is not entirely rubbish either. There is just no way to really access it. I am sure as I write this somebody is deleting unknowingly a rare copy of something that will be missed.
Just crossed the thirty Million weblog mark at BlogsNow tracks. Jason installed new memory, CPU and motherboard on the machine eight hours ago. I hope that the random crashes (MCE …4 ) it had are now a thing of the past. But it still could be the raid controller that causes the troubles. We will see.
Thirty million blogs! It’s online since almost two years, ran on three different machines in three different hosting situations.
There are about a quarter million web-pages in google with the term BlogsNow. popurls has roughly the same number. I think popurls started two weeks ago.
I find it very interesting to compare BlogsNow and popurls. The later one shot to internet fame instantly while BlogsNow only caters to a small and very slowly growing audience. Popurls is better than what I wrote in many many hours. The actual implementation of popurls would have taken me a week. Of course I did BlogsNow and not popurls. And also obviously I have hoped for instant internet fame when I wrote the fastest memetracker possible.
Technically I achieved my goal. BlogsNow’ performance is unsurpassed: It will reliably track _everything_ that people talk about. I still like it better than all others.
But let’s have a look why popurls got what BlogsNow wanted so badly and could never get. Popurl’s author is the first to say that the concept of a meta meta tracker is hardly new: diggdot.us paved the way into the mainstream, but I think there have been others.
The implementation of popurls works, it’s simple and nothings gets in the way. The design is what matters. It turns out that the idea of a meta-meta-track added with decent-design adds up to go over the threshold to become a meme in itself.
In the new attention economy you have to raise the interestingness of something above an imaginary threshold. It is almost impossible to push something there. Not even the biggest media buy will get you there. If your concept is not worthy then every person in the chain works against your piece (work, meme whatever it is). The resistance will become infinite. Many companies have wasted millions of ad dollars in the last years by ignoring this simple fact. If your idea raises above this threshold then it will attract more multipliers along the way. It’s too bad that ‘viral marketing’ became such a bad rep, since all agencies attached it to their failing attempt. Real meme’s do indeed work very much like a virus. The big difference is that every ‘host’ has the ability to alter the ‘virus’. We give those links, files and words new meaning when we pass them on. We comment them and make them our own. I could not say that from that last cold I got from someone and also probably gave to somebody else. The term ‘viral’ already contains the arrogance of agencies: They think they just can ‘infect’ the audience and then save their client some money in the media buy. Of course that’s now how it works: Most of their ideas are simply not good enough to compete with what is out there. There were some single incidences where commercials got some viral traction. None of them made room for a follow up. ‘Viral Campaigns’ by their definitions are one hit wonders. With the broadening of the tools and people getting more connected every day the odds move against the traditional marketers use of viral campaigns. Does this have anything to do with a BlogsNow vs. popurls comparison? Hardly. How did we get here?
Popurls became an instant ‘meme’, BlogsNow did not. I think in very simple terms I think it comes down to the fact that design matters. Popurls is an instant hit since it instantly communicates. The natural reaction is :”this is nice. I want to use this.” Within those 2 seconds a website has with a new visitor it is able to convey what is different about it. It tells it’s story well. The ‘elevator pitch’ of the internet must be over before the user blinks another time. There are always ten real and hundreds of potential other sites comparing with the one you are looking at.
My son is seven. He wants to write a computer game. He found google, and was very frustrated, that could not find ANY instructions how to make a computer game for seven year olds after he entered his request into google. I never told him to google it, or even to research it on the internet. His experience is that the internet might as well contain all the answers to everything. It’s this unprecedented amount of instantly available content that is the evolutionary pressure on every meme out there. The pace in that online (media) experiences grow in their quantity, variety and maybe even quality is equally unprecedented. So is the spread of the audience and their level of engagement: 1 person, 1 computer with internet connection, 1 hour. To say that the range of experiences is huge would be an understatement. It is awing. And spreading. We have the user on dial with internet explorer trying to get some news about balinesian dancing to the CEO on a laptop playing WOW while being on a plane. These are not the two extremes. These are two random points in an infinitely complex cloud of usage patterns. Hundred people watch a movie in the cinema. Their experience is pretty similar, they don’t even need to have seen it the same place or at the same time. Watching an old black white movie is almost a time travel experience. Hundred people what the movie on TV and the possibilities broaden. It used to be that the whole country watched the same stuff. There was the concept of a “Straßenfeger” in Germany in the 60s. It meant that a specific radio or TV series had such a big draw that it would ‘clean the streets’ (from people). There are only few events left that can obtain this mass attraction. Hundred people watching the same movie on TV might do so from a DVD, on the seventieth rerun, because their Tivo thought they should be watching it, or just because they are waiting for the show that follow this program. These hundred people might pay attention or might not. Since TVs tend to everywhere and just run after you turned them on, it is also one of the most ignored media outlets there is. Hundred people watching a clip that they got on a computer one way or another will have the most diverse media experience.
It is in this jungle of possibilities that the ability to communicate your idea between two blinks becomes mandatory. The idea needs to be decent, and then it needs to be easy to understand. Popurls instantly tells you that it’s a decent looking meta-meta tracker. Just when you think, ah so many links it kicks some pretty pictures your way. Your peaking ‘into it’ will be rewarded. By the time you have seen the entire page (2.5 seconds into your visit) you will have glimpsed over nine headlines, at least three or four are known items. popurls is a good mix of known and the new. All known is boring and will be clicked over quicker then you can say ‘boring’. All new is confusing. People are usually not curious enough to give new things the time to understand them.
The good design of popurls makes it work. As an engineer I thought that people would understand the aspect that BlogsNow is faster and more comprehensive than anything else. Even though it is, I did not manage to communicate this. And maybe it does not even matter. The first meme trackers got the webs attention, because they were a new concept. The fastest one is not a big deal. It’s functional difference needs repeated use an comparative analysis to understand. Memetrackers are not that important that people would do this sort of analysis. BlogsNow is a classic example for the fact that people and projects overestimate their own importance. Many web 2.0 startups think that they are Moses coming down from the mount Sinai. BlogsNow first goal was that it would keep me up to date with what is going on on the internet. And BlogsNow I can trust and, if needed, even tweak to let it behave better. Enough reason to let it keep going for next thirty million blogs. Popurls is not the first too and certainly not the last tool that will surpass BlogsNow in the amount of web attention it gets. It just is such a clear case that engineering does not really matter. The upside is that it was and is fun to code the fastest Memetracker there is. That, my constant use, and the fact that I have a neat copy of what mattered on the web in the last two years is enough reasons to keep it going. Despite the fact that nobody cares 😉
mandyc19 seems to be online about 320 hours a day.
She certainly does allot of posting.
First Sony tries to ‘rootkit’ people, then the german BMW website get’s banned from google for spamming and now Nvidia gets in trouble for fake postings.
Oh, I forgot all those wikipedia edits by people working for the US Congress.
It all comes down to this:
Dear stupid-big-company-or-institution IF you decide to go out into these internets and try to do some bad stuff, please don’t act as if you would be a stupid-big-company-or-institution. If you act stupid there will be people finding you. And yes, BMW, Sony or Nvidia: The internet will make you common laughing stock within 72 hours.
You will not have enough marketing billions to recover from that. The gullible you still can buy. But not the next generation: Those people know better and will not forget.
The headline reads that there will be a 5th TV network. “That’s odd” me thought, after all wasn’t TV mass media. Wasn’t mass media the part of our surroundings that would give up attention space to the onlsaught to personal communication?
Reading into this release it turns out that UPN and “The WB” will be merged into a new TV channel. So yes, there is one less. It all makes sense. Funny how they spin the story though.