Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

This year, with the release of Apple's Safari browser along with the latest releases of iTunes, the Windows-based browser eco-system got quite a shake up. Yesterday, along came Google Chrome. Based on the same rendering technology as Safari, Google Chrome will change many things in the land of web browsers and the way people access the Internet.

There are three significant experiential changes in Chrome: 1) a single "do everything" box that searches, browses, and navigates; 2) web page isolation in processes (so web page crashes don't take out your whole browser); and 3) a lightning fast JavaScript engine that actually complies code and manages memory efficiently (one of the major bugbears with the complex JavaScript that is possible today). Of those three things, the first is very much inline with the latest release of Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3. The second element is most intriguing. It focuses primarily on the poor memory management and bad behavior of browser components. This may just be the single biggest reason for PC users to switch or at least try Chrome. The third element will make a big difference for highly interactive sites and significantly improve performance of Javascript libraries.

One more point to note, setting up Flash, QuickTime, Windows media playing in browsers has always been complicated. The Google Chrome browser "just works". All of those types and pieces came integrated and working right out of the box, no complicated additional downloads, no extra setup steps. All in all, I think Google Chrome will be an interesting change for folks. It will complicate web application development, as we will now have another browser specification to build to, but ultimately it will streamline the web browsing experience for the Windows user. Will it surpass Firefox? Will it overtake IE? Will it be as revolutionary on the Mac? How will Android and mobile browsers use Chrome? These are questions only time can answer. I for one, welcome our new Google overlords to the browser party.

Dean McRobie

2001: A Space Odyssey introduced us to artificial intelligence gone wrong. Ever since then, self-aware technology has been part of mass culture, from science fiction to horror to even an episode of the X-files. It's become cliché. But, however much we try and shake it away as the 21st century boogeyman, each of us wonders deep down inside, could that really happen?

In part two of this three-part series, I am going to be looking at is this notion that future interfaces will be more intelligent.

Artificial intelligence isn't something we should be totally scared about. It is already part of our daily lives. Amazon guesses what products you'd like to buy and those are the first things you see when you visit the site. The primary way Netflix displays ratings is not by what everyone else things, but what they think you'd think based on what everyone else thinks.

Real artificial intelligence is based on watching user behavior over time, watching community behavior over time, and guessing the preferred result to an action. It's not that different than the way any living creature learns over time, only that we have the option to change that action into a non-preferred result. So until Google starts sending me bad results on purpose, because they are holding a grudge that I'm still using Hotmail, I don't think we have anything to worry about

Continue reading "Part 2 of 3: Future Interfaces Will Be More Intelligent" »

 
Like so many of us, John Batelle (of Wired, Industry Standard and FM fame) noticed as cell phones replaced the lighter as the ubiquitous expression of enthusiasm in the hands of the concert crowd.   But John went one step further and set out to take advantage of this shift to change the concert experience.  

His vision was to create a "place where all of us can share and produce our experiences: a many to many celebration of live music, in real time, as well as an ongoing, living archive of what has happened, and what might happen next."  

The official "About Us" seems even more ambitious: "Created by Outside Lands and Federated Media, and presented by Windows, CrowdFire is an online and onsite destination where music, culture and technology enthusiasts participate in a massive, crowdsourced act of digital media creation."

Now CrowdFire.net is beta.  The inaugural live event, the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco has come and gone.  There are now videos, photos and a smattering of comments on the site.  The site promises more features to come.  But so far it's not as exciting as I'd hoped.  Maybe it's just early days.  Or maybe it's hard to get real community going around an ephemeral event.  

Maybe when the new features are added, it will become more engaging. Maybe it will gain momentum as more events are queued up and a stable community can start to gather around it.  Maybe they'll be able to create opportunities between events to keep the conversation going.  Or maybe it'll be another well-intentioned casualty at the intersection of music and technology.  

Any bets?

David Lewis

Since we're all already drawing or gesturing all day on our iPhones, Palms, WinMos, (and Newtons), perhaps this is a good time to introduce the gesture as a way of navigating the web. Sure its been attempted before, but Hello Monday (hellomonday.com), who developed the site, really makes it all very seamless and quite intuitive. Draw a right arrow to go right, a left arrow to go left, and 'M' for menu. It's fun. It's easy. Check it out. Draw it out.

Oh, and buy some nifty clothes while you're at it.

http://www.red-issue.com/

.lau ardelean

image credit: johilton (Flickr)

We've seen it in the movies, future interfaces that leave us amused and yet enthralled. As science fiction as they seem, how would the people of the past feel if they had somehow stumbled upon an iPhone? It might have looked like an alien device, but the concepts of what it does might not have seemed so foreign. They had, after all, predicted online shopping and bill paying back in 1969. But, it's those interfaces that seem so... future-y.

In a three-part series, I will examine interface technology that is just poking through the surface of technology culture and separate science fact from science fiction.

The first trend I am going to be looking at is this notion that future interfaces will be more natural.

Ever since that monkey picked up that first bone and used it as a weapon (if we are going off of the documentary film, 2001: A Space Odyssey), we have been moving towards a culture of tools. We use hammers to build houses. We use pens to write. And we use a keyboard and mouse to enter the virtual world. But a strange and fascinating thing has been happening. For the first time, we're evolving beyond tools.

Am I now getting too sci-fi? Think about this. For the children of tomorrow there will be no more wires. There will be no more "input devices". It will be natural gestures in front of a virtual world. Will they understand how data gets from one place to the next? Will they even understand this as a "tool"? Or for them will it be simply another way to communicate, another language deeply connected and rooted in their physical world?

Continue reading "Part 1 of 3: Future Interfaces Will Be More Natural" »

image credit: GraphJam

August has ended. Technically, fall is upon us. We won't have another holiday off until Thanksgiving. I figured for the first ThreeMinds post back from Labor Day weekend, we all could use a laugh. And one form of data visualization that has really came into its own in the past few years is graph humor.

The king of the graph humor is Demetri Martin. Demetri is famous for his contributions to the Daily Show and he has appeared on everything from Conan O'Brien to Flight of the Concords. But it was back in his 2004 Comedy Central special where his unique brand of graph humor really shined.

Of course, there are many other varieties of graph humor...

Continue reading "10 Humorous Data Visualizations" »

What's Been Happening This Week...

Finally a week where I don't have to talk about Twitter or Facebook. It was an interesting newsweek for some other online players, namely Twitter-competitor FriendFeed, and the elder statesmen of the online world, Amazon.

FriendFeed Evolves
FriendFeed launched a new design this week. The new design makes it easier to organize and manage your friends, share photos, and find new friends. In addition, FriendFeed launched a series of widgets that hopes to attract new users, and to prep the floodgates, they are enhancing their RSS capabilities to be more realtime.

And in another wise move that sets them apart from Twitter, Friendfeed's redesign added a way for you to pretend to follow your friends with out really getting their updates. It's a way to be courteous with those who you feel obligated to "follow".

Amazon Goes To School
Amazon announced it's intention to release a new version of the Kindle aimed at the college textbook market. But disappointment came as people discovered the changes weren't so revolutionary and it wouldn't release until next year. Definitely not in time for back to school.

How Social Media Is Changing This Election
Just in time for the Democratic National Convention, there was a whole series of articles on how social media has been implemented for this election season. Digg allowed users to submit and rate questions for the Convention. C-SPAN's Convention Hub featured live Twitter coverage that has now reached nearly 12K posts, making it one of the biggest "news meets social media" success stories and completely overshadowing CNN's announcement that they will now make their video service more viral.

But it isn't just about changing the way the election is covered, it is also about changing the outcome. Kevin Beckner claims that his use of Facebook helped him win in the County Commissioner primaries. The use of social networks are going to become a vital part of the grassroots, get out the vote efforts for both parties come November. And even though McCain doesn't use the internet, apparently someone who works for him does and decided they needed to relaunch their social network and actually have it work this time around.

Finally, there was actually some news about Twitter and Facebook this week, and coincidentally both centered around lack of understanding by traditional media. AMC finds out fans have been twittering in the guise of characters from their hit show Mad Men and puts out, then retracts cease and desist notices. Aaron Sorkin, the real one this time, joins Facebook in an attempt to understand it better for an upcoming movie project about the social network. People are debating whether that is a bad idea or a really bad idea.

Marta Strickland

Current conventional wisdom: How do you create ad revenue on sites that repurpose television content? With interstitials. With the longer content you don't have to be constrained by file size or viewing time like you do with a banner. And in many ways it's a lot like a commercial - with one crucial difference. People hate interstitials way more. Way, way more.

We're trained to be passive viewers with TV (TiVo and clickers aside), but online everybody expects a lot of control. That's probably why brands that have simply repurposed their TV commercials have seen dismal click through rates. Online viewers don't like feeling hijacked.

Generally we advertising types try to circumvent this with interactivity, so that viewers become participators. Games, avatars, interactive storytelling and user-generated content are the usual tactics - concept, style, content, and design all effect whether each instance is successful.

Rarer is an entirely passive interstitial that manages to compel click throughs. You have to offer something else to foster a sense of active engagement. Sometimes just a "what-the-hell-was-that?" quirkiness will do the trick.

AdGabber had a few thoughts about an unusual ad that Organic did for the Chrysler Town & Country on abc.com: Lots of Words, and Something About a Pony.

Dave Sylvestre

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo

Mozilla Labs announced today that it has released a new experimental solution called Ubiquity. Ubiquity is a method for non-developers to create mashups out of the pages and content they are already surfing.

This is dramatically different that what is already out there. Solutions like Yahoo Pipes! requires you to set up 'plumbing' before you can get output. Ubiquity let's developers make little snippets of code that users easily access data. Think of it like creating very human readable APIs.

The experiment has been provoking some thoughtful conversation around Organic:

"I've always felt somewhat ambivalent about RSS feeds of marketing/product news. Same goes for branded widgets, because you still have to 'go to' them. They require consciously calling them up or else allowing them to clutter your screen/dock until the moment you may need them.

"But the opportunity to provide branded utility via ubiquity commands, which have the potential to become an integral part of the browsing experience? My head's about to explode with the possibilities, like... select items from throughout the web and save them to a merchant-agnostic shopping list that constantly pings for comparable items and best available prices."
Sam Cannon

James Vreeland

Unscrew America is the brainchild of An Inconvenient Truth producer Lesley Chilcott and Austin's SG&M Idea City. The site's goal is to increase awareness of more energy-efficient ones in the form of CFLs and LEDs. But it is their Monty-Python-meets-social-responsibility approach that makes this an exceptional experience...

This is the type of interface that could have gone horribly wrong. Sure, it's fun, but that's not usually enough to keep me on any site for very long (especially one that's supposed to be informative). So, as I was getting sucked into the goofy nav, I asked myself "Why am I still clicking on things?".

I think it's because:
- It's a subject I care about
- I was learning something
- They labeled everything so I knew what I was getting into before I
   clicked. They didn't rely solely on a graphic/icon and my desire to
   discover Easter eggs
- They used humor that was just bizarre enough to make me
   interested and not so bizarre to leave me thinking "huh?"

Make sure you click "I hate music" at the bottom right. Thanks to Scott Brennen for the find.

Sandy Marsh

The Twitterverse was a-twitter yesterday due to AMC issuing take down notices to a series of fan-created accounts for the characters of their hit series Mad Men. When the accounts went up a few months ago, the characters were embraced by Twitter users, who probably skew on the side of an advertising/marketing/consulting tech-savvy audience. They didn't care whether they represented AMC or not. No, this was a new and exciting form of fan-fiction.

Twitter playing nice, upheld to the notices and temporarily took down the accounts. What came after was a series of protests from blogs, but especially from Twitter users:

stjohn Wow AMC way to hate on your Mad Men fans http://is.gd/1Wt2

pheezy @martastrickland AMC gets lumped in with Hasbro for not realizing what their digital fan-base has already done for them.

mzkagan Why has Twitter hijacked my beloved @don_draper (and friends)? Looks like i'll be drinking alone 2nite.

slange70 @martastrickland sounds to me that AMC was bummed out that they didn't think of that first.

bryanfuhr it's a shame that a show which celebrates innovation in advertising cannot embrace innovation in advertising

The irony was too much to bare and apparently Deep Focus, the web marketing group for AMC, convinced them, "Better to embrace the community than negate their efforts." And so the accounts have returned, and no worse for the wear.

don_draper Doing what I do best - moving forward with my life like today never happened.

Marta Strickland