Links for 2007-08-31
Posted August 31, 2007 1:50 AM.
- Via Dan Hill, I come across Jossip's list of the amount of advertising in magazines. Only 13% of Vogue's last issue was editorial. I post this mainly to suggest that for the moment at least there's a fair amount of money in the advertising industry and that we don't have to worry too much about the Internet collapsing for lack of money in the short-term at least...
- Absolutely insane image resizing and editing video from the Guardian Technology blog Israeli scientists identify paths through a an image that contain the least information and then allow you to resize the image while retaining the most significant proportions of the information rich bits. Hard to explain. Must see!
- A beautiful Flickr set of typesettings from the past Astonishingly gorgeous, pre-digital books of type.
- Should 'UGC' as a term be replaced by 'Indigenous content'? Clay's post on this is highly entertaining and I love the idea. I may start using it in meetings and see what kinds of eyebrows I get.
- I'm a bit frustrated by the trailers for BBC Four's Comics Britannia season It's all Bash Street Kids and I'm not sure I even see the connection between that stuff and things like 2000AD or the British comics creators working in the American idiom.
- Search Engine Land's article "The Impending Social Search Inflection Point" borderline convinces me that there is no such thing as 'Social Search' in any meaningful way I swear that social search is basically a way to explain to people why search engines buy social stuff, by explaining it in terms that their shareholders understand, without it actually referring to anything real in the world...
- Bruce Nussbaum says, "CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them" and I think he's right. The problem-solving, find a user need and fill it as close to perfectly as you can is where the future is, particularly in technology... "In today's global marketplace, [the key skills are being] able to understand the consumer, prototype possible new products, services and experiences, quickly filter the good, the bad and the ugly and deliver them to people who want them..."
- I think I'm obsessed with Mark Titchner. His work seems to describe the honourable goal of my industry while savagely satirising it. I like that. It's good to have some dark perspective. Slogans like, "We want answers to the questions of tomorrow", "The Future demands your participation" and "We want to make dreams a reality" all resonate with me very strongly even as I know how political or messianic they sound.
- 'Things' is a beautiful looking GTD application that's supposed to be launching relatively soon in competition with OmniFocus Could I make one suggestion. The name of your product can only result in no one being able to find it online. I stumbled upon it once and then had to wait until I stumbled upon it again by accident to post a link to it. Not good, I'm thinking.
- A relatively old interview with Tim O'Reilly from Wired News declares Web 2.0 is about ownership of data.. The only slight proviso I'd make is that it's about access to or ownership of data. One of the main interesting territories in social media is how to work with your audience to create a repository of value to everyone. Good piece though.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
I do like the idea of shared repositories of social data, but what O'Reilly is describing sounds more like expropriation of data - what he says about Google 411 is positively creepy. Which resonates with a line on that 'social search' page about "collaborative content harvesting" (if content's being harvested, can the process possibly be collaborative?) Which in turn brings us to Seth Finkelstein's comments on Clay's 'indigenous' line - we know what happens to indigenous peoples...
My take on Web 2.0 (not that you were asking) is that there is a lot of very cool stuff going on out there, much of it clearly born under the sign of WELL-esque collective net libertarianism. Which is great. The trouble is, there's also a strong drive to carve all this up and make money out of it - and that, too, is Web 2.0.
→ Posted by: Phil at August 31, 2007 11:04 AM
Clearly people are trying to make money with this stuff online, but there's nothing wrong with making money particularly when the value created for the company is in tune with value created for the individual. Flickr's a really good example here. It makes money, but no one is angry or pissed off at then. Flickr owns none of the content on its servers but it still is the place that people go to in order to find and explore and enjoy photography.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at August 31, 2007 2:07 PM
Actually Flickr provides good examples both of how to make money out of social media and of how not to. They're providing a service which people are willing to pay for, supplemented by a cut-down service which they provide free as a taster/loss-leader: this is fine. But this treats the content as completely neutral: people could be using Flickr to store black squares or pages of handwritten text or their favourite prime numbers, the basic model would work just as well. What's more iffy is making money out of the aggregated content itself, as Virgin Mobile effectively did when they mined Flickr for images to use in their advertising. This is what 'content harvesting' suggests to me (even collaborative ditto) - and if Flickr themselves were doing this, rather than providing a paid-for service, I think people would be pissed off with them.
→ Posted by: Phil at August 31, 2007 10:17 PM
Did you see Comics Britannia? What did you think?
Our TV magazine billed the programme as something to do with "British Comedians". Hmmm.
I'm hoping the non-Beano/Dandy stuff will be covered in the next 2 episodes.
→ Posted by: Paul Morriss at September 13, 2007 3:54 PM