Under one roof

Short note to say I have pulled all blogs under one roof - http://davidgillespie.com - I decided continuing to segregate my thoughts into distinct buckets was becoming too hard, and more time was being spent deciding where a post belonged as opposed to just writing it. There’s a chance the technology folk will tire of hearing about music, and vice-versa, but continuing to be a version of myself in places was just taking the fun out of the whole thing.

So, please head here and follow that Tumblog (RSS subscribers can just click here and grab the feed). As always, I appreciate you being here, and will do my best not to waste your time.

Cheers,

David

Stunning use of Chat Roulette for promotional purposes. Asks much less of the audience than FCUK’s attempt and rewards in spades.

Those in feed readers and on email, it is worth clicking through to see the video.

Enjoy

tigs:

The Chat Roulette Killer Viral (via DigitalBuzzBlog

) Nice one Martin.

Value for you, value for me

Deriving value from an activity, product or service is entirely contextual. If I purchase an iPod, Apple don’t get to deliver value, they get to deliver a product for a price point they hope is compelling. I, by thinking about what the product does and how it does or does not enrich my life decide if it is valuable.

Money doesn’t have to be exchanged for value though, time is just as capable of being the currency. When we look at brand interactions, we’re looking at the time someone is asked to invest and what they get out of it. Value here can go both ways, depending on your perspective.

If you’re the consumer, you might watch a 5 minute video and derive a tremendous amount of value from the content. Nobody on the brand side is going to argue that isn’t a valuable interaction for the brand. But if the person watches the video and then goes off to do something else, there’s limited value for the brand as the message fails to spread.

Conversely, a site visitor simply choosing to “like” something on Facebook doesn’t engage on nearly as deep a level, but that interaction potentially offers a lot more awareness value for the brand as the “like” is broadcast to that person’s network.

In the same way Apple don’t get to decide if a product delivers value or not, consumers don’t get to dictate what a brand values. We’ve gotten so caught up in engagement, we’ve lost sight of simple mechanics and how they help a message to spread. Creating more value than you capture should always be the aim, but not every campaign can be a home run.

Sometimes, just a little bit of “like” goes a long, long way.

Interesting play from Google. I don’t know enough about Google TV, but I’d love to learn why another piece of hardware for the home was the path that was needed. Actually I wrote that then went to Wikipedia where there is already an entry on it. The hardware has been developed with Sony, Intel and Logitech, while the software is based on Google’s Android operating system, which also powers phones.

Web content showing up on TV makes a lot of sense to me, but I say that as someone who by and large doesn’t watch TV. I do however, watch TV shows via the web, the issue being the timing, and the conspiracy theorist in me despises the idea of population control via TV scheduling.

This weekend I’m planning on installing Boxee, another web TV play, on a laptop at home and seeing how it pulls content together. The exciting thing for me here is, Boxee or Google TV, the lounge room being opened up to the same development community that is already driving innovation in mobile channels and in the wider web.

Web services in media have become the norm, I can see a new batch of innovation being driven as people gain the ability to hack and enhance (via software) their actual homes.

davemorin:

Congrats to Brit and the Google TV team. It is high time that the web comes to TV in a meaningful way. I am looking forward to seeing more of Google in the living room.

brit:

At long last, introducing Google TV. This project has been near and dear to my heart over the last six months. I’m so excited to finally share what we’re building with the world. 

More updates coming over the next few months, but for now, take a look at this video to see how Google is working to enhance the traditional TV set. 

I’m spending a lot of energy at the moment thinking about ways to help my team not only collaborate more but get to better ideas faster. Via Twitter this morning I found this link to Edistorm, a product that allows online collaborative brainstorming from the comfort of an individual’s desk. You would no doubt have heard lots of chatter about the merits of brainstorms versus independent ideation, this it would seem, helps to bridge that gap.

I’m going to try and find a moment to try it out on an actual project this week, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Apple, the market cap, and the elephant in the room

There’s no shortage of chatter today about Apple’s market capitalisation surpassing Microsoft’s. It is note-worthy for sure, but a bigger deal is being made of it than I think it warrants. For a few reasons.

Wired Magazine notes market caps can fluctuate wildly, but in this same article Wired also notes a string of product releases.

iMac (Bondi Blue) – 1998

iBook (clamshell) – 1999

iPod with scroll wheel – 2001

Mac OS X – 2001

iTunes Store – 2003

MacBook (switch to Intel) – 2006

iPhone – 2007

App Store + iPhone SDK – 2008

iPad – 2010

The Macbook Air strikes me as strangely absent from this list. You know, the thin-as-can-be, light-as-they-come laptop Steve pulled out of a manilla envelope that came to market and went, well, largely nowhere. Odd that that product isn’t in this list, as I think (and I’m quite happy to be proven wrong) that’s the product the iPad is going to follow. Not the iPhone, it’s slim, sexy and properly revolutionary little brother, but the Air, a rare triumph of style over substance from Apple.

You wouldn’t know it with all the media hype of course. Tom Wallace, the Editorial Director of Conde Nast, Wired’s parent company is in the New York Times as having said of Wired’s iPad edition “This is the beginning of a revolution”. Tom’s quote can be held to be absolutely true if one considers the ability of traditional media companies to keep pace with the changing times; 15 years late seems about right.

I’ve been stunned by the absence of negative press in the iPad’s launch, but it is actually starting to make sense. The publishing industry, bereft of ideas when it comes to how they might save themselves, are banking on Apple’s latest creation to do it for them.

Why would they write negative reviews when its the only thing on the horizon they’re taking for a saviour?

I’m sure Wired have taken their time and done a great job in creating the iPad edition of their magazine. A much better job than their stable-mates GQ did who managed to shift a paltry 365 copies of their Men of the Year edition. But beginning of a revolution? As I tweeted at the time, give me a break. The revolution started years ago, some people just never heard the call.

Found this thanks to your friend and mine Bud. He’s changing jobs soon and moving across the US, we at Swei Industries wish him nothing but the best of luck.

I’ve been feeling recently that TED talks themselves were becoming almost a parody of themselves, that we’d been to the show and seen the dance and now the DJ was just pressing repeat.

How wrong I was.

The chord this talk struck for me is entirely a personal one, and little to do with any sort of marketing or technology, except to say I am thankful I live in these times and have the opportunity to open my laptop as I make dinner and watch a talk like this. I struggle though to keep the self that thinks about technology and how things are changing and the self that writes music and muses on life separate. I’m not naturally built like that, but I recognise most of you are here for a discussion about things to come, not a chat about my Spingsteen-esque pop music. And that’s OK. For now anyway.

The key quote in this talk, if you haven’t watched it (and I really hope you will), is this:

And so I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and that I was going to have to change. You know, we can do it. I was going to have to change. And I was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who only just walked. I was so used to that person that I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t know who I would be if I changed. But I know I needed to. I know I needed to change, because it would be the only way that I could be here today. And I know that a lot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we’ve gotten to, but there’s another place for us to go. And we kind of have to leave behind the security of who we’ve become, and go to the place of who we are becoming. And so, I want to encourage you to go to that next place, to let yourself out of any prison that you might find yourself in, as comfortable as it may be, because we have to do something now.

I guess it’s time we were about doing that something.

The only thing you need to know about public vs. private online

Jeff Jarvis has a fantastic summation of the debate surrounding online privacy and Facebook up at Buzz Machine. I’m going to quote liberally, but I really recommend you read the whole thing:

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem to assume that once something is public, it’s public. They confused sharing with publishing. They conflate the public sphere with the making of a public. That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private.

This is an important distinction, the idea that we can create spaces among a group that still houses a private discussion. The notion, in hindsight, seems an obvious one, but I feel it’s something we’ve forgotten in the race towards the bright and shiny future.

…(In) Twitter, even though we are publishing to the world, we still have a measure of control; we decide whom to follow—that is, which publics to join.

…In Facebook, we get to create our publics. In Twitter, we decide which publics to join. But neither is the public sphere; neither entails publishing to everyone. Yet Facebook is pushing us more and more to publish to everyone and when it does, we lose control of our publics. That, I think, is the line it crossed.

This idea of curating our own “publics” is interesting - Business Insider likened it to programming a VCR 25 years ago; it’s a completely new behaviour being asked of us, no wonder we’re struggling with it.

Jeff aso makes reference to a group of academics from Montreal who created a project titled Making Publics. Their ideas are as follows:

…the public sphere—the counterweight to the state as heard through public discussion and opinion— (arguably) did not emerge until the 19th century. …prior to the Renaissance and the 16th century, “public” (generally) referred to people with public standing in the social hierarchy—the elite—rather than to all of us. But then the Making Public team saw that during the 16th and 17th centuries, the printing press, theater, art—that is, the means to publish and present—as well as markets enabled people to create and join their own publics.

So the notion or our own publics is not a new one, but we’ve likely had to deal with no more than half a dozen in life before now; a work public, a home public, a family public, a church or community group public. Contrasted now with the variety of publics created based on how you choose to alter privacy settings depending on who you’re friends with on Facebook, the iterations are almost limitless.

I don’t believe Facebook has gone evil—or gone rogue, as Wired insists. The problem for Facebook is more likely that it never defined evil—as in “don’t be evil.” Google is aware of its line, which is about losing value if it loses trust. Facebook seems almost unaware of its line and perhaps that’s because its is harder to find. I suggest they study 16th century history and the origins of the public as they reinvent the public.

Facebook is breaking this ground for a host of services still to come. That doesn’t make them right or wrong, but I think notions of quitting Facebook ignore a basic fact.

Sooner or later, someone is going to need to sort this shit out.

(See a post form earlier this week looking at the changes to Facebook’s privacy policy over time.)

I love a good meme. They’re giving an otherwise blissfully unaware net generation a first-class education in viral communication. As Seth says, the important part is not having the idea, it’s spreading the idea.

whatconsumesme:

Over 50 Awesome T-Shirt Designs

The evolution of privacy on Facebook. A lovely piece of data-visualisation from Matt McKeon. Click through to see it animate with each year passing.

Obviously it begs the question “Where does it end?”.

And I don’t know what the answer to that is.