test post to rickwilliams.wordpress.com
16
Apr
08
Test post
18
Feb
08
5 core principles for digital
These are the 5 guiding principles I believe need to be implemented by companies moving into digital:
- Trust
- Identity
- Openness
- Innovation
- Simplicity
Each piece of work should strive to touch each of these 5 principles.
18
Feb
08
urban light art
AgencySpy reports AKQA is 48th most innovative company globally, with Google in pole position followed by Apple.
From the website:
#48 AKQA
Most interactive-ad shops master either the creative or the technical; AKQA is expert at both. Whether building a Pixar-quality interactive online universe for Coke’s breathtaking “Happiness Factory” campaign (below), or masterminding a multimedia “alternate reality game” for Microsoft’s Halo 3, the digital powerhouse doesn’t just dream up mind-bending ideas, it actually writes the code that brings them to life. Which is why, after five consecutive years of profitability, AKQA is one of the most dangerous global forces in the ad industry. While ad holding companies and tech firms spent billions in 2007 to snap up digital shops, AKQA fended them off, opting instead for a $250 million investment from private-equity firm General Atlantic. In the meantime, the 700-person agency boosted revenues 39% to $100 million and added new clients such as Unilever, DoubleClick, and Cadbury Schweppes — on top of existing accounts with Nike and McDonald’s.
More about AKQA can be found here.
15
Aug
07
Continuous Partial Attention
As we take on more and more information at the same time – watching TV whilst writing an email for example, our attention – or lack of – is becoming more important.
Particls is a new desktop ticker which displays headlines and snapshots of all the RSS feeds you subscribe to. I just started using it at the beginning of last week and it’s brilliant, so I subscribed to their blog…
Here’s a post from their blog on Continuous Partial Attention:
Stowe has recently written about his ideas of ‘Flow’ and Continuous Partial Attention (CPA).
His premise is that we are not necessarily information saturated – that our brains are evolving to a point where we can let the information flow over us and stay continuously partially attentive to many things at the same time. He claims that this is a perfectly natural change in our concentration and mental abilities.
He writes about Linda Stone – an expert in CPA.
“Linda and many others will tell us it will rot our teeth, disrupt family life, and lead to hair on our palms. I for one am not eager to turn off my devices and pay all my attention to one thing at a time, one moment at a time. There are too many targets on the horizon, too many members of the tribe, and too many jaguars lurking in the shadows for that. In my tribe, we don’t do things that way.”
I’m young – my brain can handle it for now – so I agree with Stowe (to a point). Information (particularly news) should flow – not pool. An information flow (river of news, news ticker, popup alerts) is typically more effective than reading news in a folder/item email style metaphor.
An Attention Profiling markup language has been created APML similar in principle to OPML which is used to list all the RSS feeds I subscribe to.
31
Jul
07
Ambient Intimacy
Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy Creative Director, has written an article on Brand Republic’s website about Facebook and brands.
Rory describes Facebook’s newsfeed and status Twitter-like functionality as ‘semi-addressable’, where ‘the message is not addressed to specifically named individuals.’
I prefer to describe this form of communication as Ambient Intimacy, as coined by Leisa Reichelt on her blog back in March.
In and of itself, a single Twitter feed is meaningless and mundane, but as a continuous ambient trickle of statements about a person’s daily life it can be initimate, personal and insightful. It’s one of the main reasons everyone had such an affinity to Princess Diana. So many column inches were filled with her daily life that we all felt we knew her and had an affinity towards her despite never having physically met her.
This level of communication will become very important, but only as part of a larger set of social communication tools. Were you to have an important sporting event such as a tennis Grand Slam, and have a selection of athletes taking part in the event utilizing Ambient Intimacy in the run up to it, you’d get a very personal view of those people’s fears and hopes which would generate interest into the lead up to that bigger event and an affinity with those athletes.
There have been a number of conversations concerning Attention, Engagement, Influence and Social Media measurement in general. I wrote about one here.
Sixty Second View has attempted to measure your social media footprint via the Social Media Index and it’s another good effort with some reasonable assumptions. Whilst there’s no golden bullet at present – much like search – there’s a set of criteria of sorts to measure against and then the 5% that’s human perception.
The continuing success of Facebook cannot be ignored and it will continue to have mass user adoption at a consumer level for many months, even years, to come. As I mentioned in another post, BooksOnCampus is a website that requires you to login before being able to access the site.
When Facebook starts using this identity system as a widget the potential will be for it to become what Microsoft Passport never was. For further insights into Facebook be sure to check out the Inside Facebook blog.
The implication is that Facebook could eclipse OpenID adoption and become the online identity solution. There’s just one problem…currently Google can’t search inside Facebook.
Facebook = Blackhole, Whirlpool, Vortex.
Facebook is a closed garden with one way doors. Data in, but no data out. It’s true that Facebook have opened up their API to developers, but none of the content produced within Facebook’s pages can get out and be indexed or referenced by another company or social network. With so many companies, startups, ecommerce companies building widgets for this platform did anyone stop to consider that they’re not letting data flow out? Matt Dickman agrees, watch his video. Here’s what we should be concerned about:
1) My non-Facebook friends can’t see what I’m doing. If I link to Facebook, you have to register and sign up. That sucks.
2) After I’ve setup my profile, I should have the ability to make my profile public and let folks see the elements I want.
3) What about my network? data? Profile? I want to export those. (Same thing to LinkedIn). The rolodex of today has an important field “friends”. I want to be able to export my network to other systems and applications.
4) As far as I know Facebook doesn’t have RSS…
Facebook (and whichever network follows suit) has a huge opportunity to not just be an application platform, but to be a true identity system for the entire network. Before we start jumping up and down, giving Facebook all of our data, and building our company widgets in Facebook should we first think about whether this is a black hole?
The smaller, more niche social networks or services such as Plaxo and others are building as open a platform as possible, enabling import, export and inter-change across the entire internet and enabling any search engine to find the content you’ve chosen to make public…will the long tail of competitors to Facebook eventually provide a better system to Facebook’s?
As Jeremiah Owyang notes:
“Facebook is a closed garden with one-way doors.
This means that data comes in, but it’s not coming out – yet.”
The Inside Facebook blog suggests that Google is not relevant to Facebook since it has it’s own news and feed ranking indexes and systems, its own search tool and its own social network to find information:
“Future information finding systems will evolve to use data from your social network, yielding results based upon your trusted peers” – Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO.
This concept of ‘trust’ is tied to identity and also to the belief that word of mouth advice between friends, families and colleagues is by far the strongest form of marketing around – crucially, it also flies in the face of Google’s current search algorithm which is based on popularity, not accuracy or trust.
If search evolves, will we rely on personal social network features (what do my friends think and recommend) over search? Will we evolve to smaller network based searches?
In many ways, this is what Mahalo was trying to overcome, the problem with that is that I don’t know (and therefore don’t trust) the editors creating the Mahalo data. This is why so many thought leaders are already thinking about their Facebook strategy.
Although Google continues to evolve it’s AI to build better search tools, trust continues to be the leading factor in finding information. Google’s search results have much to be desired: popular is not the same as correct.
The future of search will contain human elements in addition to algorithms.
rick williams 