Message For Future Generations

Mark Earls and Domenico Vitale have created Message For Future Generations a depository of planners' wisdom about Account Planning.

Guilty Pleasure: Big Ideas, Don't Get Any/Radiohead "Nude"

Radiohead held an online contest to remix "Nude" from their album - "In Rainbows". I found this (late) entry to be particularly fascinating and breakout. It takes a bit to get to the "beat" but well worth it as it builds and mashes the music utilizing Sinclair ZX Spectrum Guitars, Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer, HP Scanjet 3c, and Hard Drive arrays. Of particular note is his savvy working of the social net touchpoints to get the work slippy.

Ignorance of Crowds, too

Murray and I are in an ongoing tug of war about the Wisdom/Ignorance of Crowds. Found this interesting counterpoint (Murray's side) at Strategy+Business magazine about the limits of peer production and some case examples. And to the question of rightful "creators" in a participatory/UGC environment, the conclusions drawn in this article helps guide us.

Some excerpts:

The bottom line is that peer production has valuable but limited applications. It can be a powerful tool, but it is no panacea. It’s a great way to find and fix problems, to collect and categorize information, or to perform any other time-consuming task that can be sped up by having lots of people with diverse perspectives working in parallel. It can also have the important added benefit of engaging customers in your innovation process, which not only allows their insights to be harnessed but also may increase their loyalty to your company.

-First, peer production works best with routine or narrowly defined tasks that can be pursued simultaneously by a big crowd of people. It is not well suited to a job that requires a lot of coordination among the participants. If members of a large, informal group had to coordinate their efforts closely, their work would quickly bog down in complexity. The crowd’s size and diversity would turn from a strength to a weakness, and the speed advantage would be lost.

-Second, because it requires so many “eyeballs,” open source works best when the labor is donated or partially subsidized. If Linus Torvalds had had to compensate all his “eyeballs,” he would have gone broke long ago.

-Third, and most important, the open source model — when it works effectively — is not as egalitarian or democratic as it is often made out to be. Linux has been successful not just because so many people have been involved, but because the crowd’s work has been filtered through a central authority who holds supreme power as a synthesizer and decision maker.

But if peer production is a good way to mine the raw material for innovation, it doesn’t seem well suited to shaping that material into a final product. That’s a task that is still best done in the closed quarters of a cathedral, where a relatively small and formally organized group of talented professionals can collaborate closely in perfecting the fit and finish of a product. Involving a crowd in this work won’t speed it up; it will just bring delays and confusion.

via Strategy+Business Magazine

Lonelygirl15 Season 01 Recap

Been a long time since we checked in on LonelyGirl15 since the expose. Nice recap video here:

Still doesn't make me want to tune in...but interesting to see they've managed to milk it. Nice work if you can get it.

Web 2.0: WidgetCon 2007

Postcards from Second Life: Alternate Virtual Worlds

Found this great compile of alternate virtual worlds.

AlphaWorld - “SW City Revolution”:

From the website:

AlphaWorld, is the oldest collaborative virtual world on the Internet, and home to millions of people from all over the world. Since it’s birth in 1995 AlphaWorld has rapidly grown in size and is roughly as large as the state of California, and now exceeds 60 million virtual objects!

Furcadia

This has been open since 1996

Entropia Universe (aka “Project Entropia”)

The Sims Online - “”Sims Online” - game commercial”

PlayStation Home - “GDC ‘07: Playstation Home Debut Trailer”

Sony has officially and vehemently disqualified PlayStation Home as an alternative to Second Life. Here’s a quote from a recent Phil Harrison interview on the flog:

PH: I think you’re way oversimplifying by suggesting Second Life and Home are the same. In Home, you get a character and a 3D world, and that’s where the similarity ends. Second Life does some brilliant things but with Home, we’re providing a service. Therefore, the tone of voice is what will differentiate it – Home is about entertainment, it has a game focus, and it’s about sharing with a like-minded community. We don’t give users the level of influence over the environment, behaviour and object definitions that Second Life does – it’s as secure as any other PS3 game. With some of the operating system protocols that are built into the Cell chip, it’s about as secure as you can be on a consumer device.

Kaneva - “Kaneva - A Worldly Vision”

There - There.com First Virtual Steps

HiPiHi - “hipihi Newest test video frequency”

There’s no Chinese port of Second Life, but somebody decided to build something just like it. (The claim here is that they didn’t even know about SL when they started.)

Pre-Beta

Areae Inc. - They’re being very secretive, but seem determined to create a space that marries Web 2.0 (social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube) with immersive user-created environments like Second Life. They have an all-star cast of advisers, but so far we know very little else.

Outback Online - Promises to be just like SL but also with multiple planets.

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Other Neat Worlds

Whyville - A 2D world for 8-15 year olds. It’s been around since 1999 as a safe and educational social environment. Players interact in environments where they learn about science, math, art, civics, and economics.

Cyworld - A huge hit in South Korea and a newer phenomenon in the west.

Check out this quote from Wikipedia:

Korea’s Internet culture has embraced the Cyworld model, which differs from the blog culture of the United States. The simplicity of buying items to decorate one’s minihompy, without needing to learn HTML or Photoshop, has attracted many young women who had not previously used the Internet. This item-based business model has also bolstered Internet community sites that had previously struggled as free services. Many renowned Korean socialites and celebrities have been known to possess a cyworld account in which details of their upcoming tours and works are posted, such is the case with korean icons such as Duk-In Joo, poet and author of the bestselling meaning of meanings novel.

The corporate world has also embraced Cyworld, with examples of companies creating minihompies to accompany product launches. Celebrities and politicians have also increasingly opted for minihompies, rather than homepages, to gain closer contact with the population.

Worlds.com - A collection of themed worlds commercially created. Free to play (although there is a premium account option), insanely low system requirements, and lots of music-band themed worlds.

See Habbo Hotel, Webkinz and Club Penguin for three more fun and monstrously popular social spaces… but I’ve got to stop somewhere here.

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via Second Life Games Blog

Brave New Media:Surface Computing

Microsoft has debuted a new touchscreen computer—a coffee table "surface" that will permit its user to actually manipulate the information hands-on - no keyboard, no mouse.

Go inside its top-secret development with PopularMechanics.com.

Oh, expect to see it at retail and hotels and casinos THIS YEAR.

Get more at http://www.microsoft.com/surface

State of the Blogosphere/Live Web:Maps

Nielsen's Matthew Hurts recently drafted a graphic map showing the blogosphere in links. This picture is based on an examination of six weeks of blogosphere data.

Each little white dot represents a blog. The bigger white dots represent blogs with more incoming and outgoing links, while the smaller dots are blogs with fewer links.

The green lines represent one-way links from one blog to another, and the blue lines show reciprocal links, or blogs that link back and forth to one another regularly.

-The biggest white dots are popular blogs like Boing Boing and the Daily Koz.
-That isolated streak of green in the upper right hand (by the number three) shows LiveJournal blogs. LiveJournal users tend to link heavily to other LiveJournal blogs, but don't communicate as frequently with the outside world.
-The blue spots show bloggers who frequently link back and forth, possibly writing responses on their own blogs to items they've read on other sites and vice versa.
-Number 5 shows the fringe community of bloggers who share pornographic images and write about adult industry news and gossip.
-Number 6 sports enthusiasts who are a bit more linked into the rest of the mainstream blogosphere than the pornography enthusiasts or LiveJournal bloggers. But it's still a distinct community with users communicating primarily amongst themselves.

Similarly, here is Brian Shaler's Map of the Digg Universe


And Opte Project's massive Map of the Internet and animation.

Brave New Media: Evolution of Games

I was asked by a few here to give a "tour" of Second Life. I pulled out an insert from Wired magazine and we went to some of the better known 2L ventures. The recurring comment was "where are the people"? All these corporate constructs, but no people. Our visit to a sex dungeon revealed the people on a Monday afternoon and points to where all the real action is on the burgeoning 2L...Today.

The experience reminded me of 1994 when I went to the internet and looked up some random sites to visit. I had an insert from Wired magazine then, too, to guide me to the better sites. And I wandered into some chat rooms and sex dungeons to check out where the real action was on the burgeoning world wide web. Most of the sites I visited then were lame and not much use at all. However, users created eBays and Amazons and Netscapes and Googles and YouTubes to channel all that potential into profitable ventures beyond banal twittering.

If you impose Second Life onto this familiar framing of the 'evolution of games', the possibilities become clear. Or rather, the usefulness of Second Life is still not so clear, but the potential for users to eventually create previously unfathomable, yet fiercely ubiquitous uses becomes very clear.

Second Life, for the moment, is analogous to the internet circa 1995, or gaming circa 1974. Now: a banal waste of time, crude and choppy...tomorrow: perhaps a daily standard for us all.

State of the Blogosphere/Live Web

Technorati posts the latest State of the Blogosphere :

-70 million weblogs
-About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or...
-1.4 new blogs every second
-3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
-Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
-1.5 million posts per day, or...
-17 posts per second
-Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
-22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 - up from 12 in the prior quarter
-Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
-English second at 33%
-Chinese third at 8%
-Italian fourth at 3%
-Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
-English the most even in postings around-the-clock
-Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
-35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
-2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February

Slowing in the doubling of the size of the blogosphere. This shouldn't be surprising, as we're dealing with the law of large numbers - it takes a lot more growth to double from 35 million blogs to 70 million (which took about 320 days) than when it doubled from 5 million to 10 million blogs (which took about 180 days).

Slowing in growth in the rate of posts created per day; while there are spikes in blog posts during times of significant world crisis -- for instance, last summer's conflict between Israel and Hezbollah -- the overall trend is that posting volume is growing more slowly, at about 1.5 million postings per day. That's about 17 posts per second. In October 2006, Technorati was tracking about 1.3 million postings per day, about 15 posts per second.



Get more here

Event: "What Web 2.0 Means for Advertising Agencies"

Ad2/Ad Federation Minnesota Event: "What Web 2.0 Means for Advertising Agencies"

If human behavior is changing, advertisers need to adjust their strategies.

Planning Director Aki Spicer and Interactive Production Manager Paul Sanders from Fallon will identify some trends that have brought us to Web 2.0, and why advertisers need to pay attention if they are to remain relevant. Web 2.0 is a convergence of technology and social trends impacting media consumption beyond the internet.

@ 7p (5:30p socializing starts)
O'Gara's Bar & Grill
651-644-3333
164 North Snelling Avenue
St Paul, Minnesota

Mass Interactive: Wanted Poster on MySpace UPDATE

UPDATE: Homie is NOW APPREHENDED! Thank you MySpace for keeping the streets safe!
*Note the subtle change in music tracks since he's been caught (b4 it was "Bad Boys, Whatcha Gonna Do?"). Oh, Ponch and John, you clever-clever cops...Cue the freeze frame, theme music and roll titles.

Previous episode: Police created a MySpace account for a serial bank robber hoping to enlist the millions who use the popular social networking site as a cyber posse to help track down the fugitive.

The account has already collected over 1800 "friends", other MySpace users who have joined the unnamed robber's social network.

via MIT AdLabs and Smart Mobs

Brand Cult: 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google

How elastic is your brand?

Google's mashable interface is unique in that it is intentionally opened to all users for mass hacking and improvement.

One believer has uncovered at least "55 Ways to Have Fun With Google" including the Google Snake Game, Googledromes, Memecodes, Googlesport, The Google Calculator, Googlepark, Google Weddings, Google hacking, fighting and rhyming?

Download PDF to start having fun with Google.

FallonLabs: Striegel's Wall Writer

Our own Jason Striegel and the interactive team is in the laboratory cookin' up some new interactive experiments. This homebrew "wall writer" is intended to eventually project onto a large wall or side of a building and allow the user to draw an image using the building as a canvas and the laser pointer as a pencil.

It's still in the early stages of development and is currently being rigged from a computer, photoshop, a standard web camera and a simple laser pointer.