Experience Economy
Posted by goodmind on January 26th, 2009
We came across this presentation and, just like the author, experienced a zen moment about two minutes in (but for somewhat different reasons).
Joseph Pine, via Ted Talks, says “experiences are becoming the predominant economic offering.” Because of this, there is more of a desire on the part of consumers, for authenticity. And it is the job of the business to provide that authenticity.
Do you understand your users’ experiences? Are you shaping your experiences to match their expectations through design?
Ted Talks: Joseph Pine – What do Consumers Really Want?
What Your Halloween Costume Says About You
Posted by goodmind on October 27th, 2008
When you’re too old to go trick-or-treating, selecting an appropriately ironic Halloween costume can be difficult and time consuming – not to mention stressful. No need to resort to the pregnant nun this year. Dear Jane Sample has suggested ten simple, yet elegant Halloween costume ideas, inspired by the advertising agency.
You can see the entire list here, but these are our personal favorites;
1. Brief – This one is simple, wear some briefs and nothing else. If you have a less then perfect body (or a realist self-perception and know you have a less then perfect body) or you live in a cold climate wear a skin-toned body suit underneath the briefs.
2. The Revised Layout – For this one, you can just wear a flattened cardboard box with an ad layout on it, with mark ups and comments. Common revisions to include are:
- Bigger logo
- Starburst
- longer copy
- more legal
- comments like “I don’t like blue” or “my 2 year old could do better”
- Addition of bad stock photography
9. Web 2.0 – Dress all in white, attach some webs on to your clothes and stick a “2.0″ on your forehead. Add a “kick me sign” to your back and explain that Print stuck it on you when you weren’t looking.
10. Bad Advertising ideas – Think of yourself as a collage and randomly stick “bad advertising ideas” on yourself. If you are lazy you can just stick the words on yourself, but if you are a keener add the actual campaign names and visual. Some examples:
- Viral
- Consumer Generated
- The recent Microsoft campaigns
The Dieting Game: Manage Your Resources Online
Posted by goodmind on August 21st, 2008
She must be on weight watchers
Awhile back, we wrote a post on how multi-player online role playing games, like World of Warcraft, have become their own economies thanks to practices such as gold farming (paying someone else to rack up points and virtual items for your character). These virtual games have real world implications, and now it seems that real world concerns (like losing weight for example) can be solved with a virtual game interface;
Weight Watchers is an RPG.
Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers’ points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you’ve used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren’t apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I’ll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat! (via Wired)
Gold farming wont work in this instance, and paying someone else to use your points for you wont help you “level up.” However, Wired makes the Weight Watchers interface seem like so much fun. The “elegant online tool” allows you to easily calculate points for pretty much any food, or ingredient, so you can easily budget your resources for the day. Maybe the financials could learn a thing or too…
Mapping Our Social Media Usage
Posted by goodmind on August 8th, 2008
As promised yesterday, here is our social media usage map;
We found that in trying to create this map, the process was actually more enlightening than the final product. Before producing the above, we first made a list of the applications we use on a regular basis, then sorted them into categories. The categories we came up with reflect how we use the applications, or more accurately, why we use them;
Interestingly, there is significant overlap between many network based applications, such as Twitter, FriendFeed, etc, because they have more than one function, and span several categories of use. FriendFeed in particular is actually an aggregate organizer; it organizes the organizing applications. However, we realized that we don’t use FriendFeed for this purpose as much as we should. Currently, it’s just another account, but it could potentially function as sort of an umbrella dashboard to directly manage our other accounts, adding FriendFeed to the “Organizer” and “Production” columns respectively.
So in a sense, the best way to manage sprawling social media usage is with an application that spans all categories of social media use in the first place. This is not to suggest that the best solution is to create a centralized hub for all social activity (ahem, Facebook), but rather, the next generation of web applications need to be multi-purpose and portable.
A Mapmaking Social
Posted by goodmind on August 7th, 2008
Visualizing a complex process is typically the best way to understand it. By the same token, visualizations can also reveal a greater degree of complexity than expected. This appears to be the case with mapping social media usage;
Andrew Shuttleworth, a social media junky living in Japan, thought it might be helpful to try to map his social media usage. The result is a staggering view of how information we put on the web flows (via ReadWrite Web).
On his blog, Shuttleworth reflects on the endeavor and concludes that;
Overall, it was very helpful to see an overview of how my online information flows…[it shows] the complexity consumers are dealing with in the Web 2.0 world, and it will be interesting to see how the leading services help us deal with this. Facebook is of course the best example to date.
But why wait to see how it all turns out? Maybe if more people map and share their own social media usage, similar to Shuttleworth, someone with a programming background will be able to take this behavioral data, and develop an acceptable solution sooner rather than later.
We’ll be playing cartographer over on Dabbleboard, a free online whiteboard, and we’ll try to post our own map by the end of the day. Feel free to create and send us your visualization as well, and we’ll add it to the collection.
Better Than CliffsNotes?
Posted by goodmind on July 31st, 2008
McSweeney’s now offers Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition). It’s not written in iambic pentameter, but it’s still pretty good. Here’s Act III for your enjoyment;
Polonius says Hamlet’s crazy … crazy in love!
Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.
Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.
Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.
Ophelia removed “moody princes” from her interests.
Hamlet posted an event: A Play That’s Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family
The king commented on Hamlet’s play: “What is wrong with you?”
Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.
Polonius is no longer online.
Hamlet's Facebook Picture
Navigating the News
Posted by goodmind on July 21st, 2008
DoodleBuzz is a “typographic news explporer,” an interesting blend of art therapy and aggregator worth checking out, if only for the novelty of the experience. In order to see the results of a search query, you have to actually doodle. The relevant headlines populate your artistic expression, and story excerpts may be viewed by scribbling a new design right next to the results.
DoodleBuzz started life as a series of simple sketches in a notebook, originally looking at how to create an interface system that as much as possible moved away from the ubiquitous “click here” that seems to pervade the web.
It’s kind of a poor man’s touch screen interface, but it’s a navigational model we might be seeing more of in the near future. Apple has already made a “tactile user experience” the industry standard, and some analysts even predict the computer mouse will be extinct within the next 5 years, in favor of technologies that leverage existing motor skills. At least DoodleBuzz is a technology we can afford…
Post Modern Political Commentary
Posted by goodmind on July 17th, 2008
Of late, there have been some interesting discussions in Congress (no really). Texas Rep. John Culberson started a new social media scandal by using Twitter, and a video site called Qik to post his commentary on the legislative process in real time. Culberson believes that these platforms give constituents the opportunity to participate in discussions, and sees his constant Twittering as a dialogue. He’s able to hold spontaneous “Town Hall” meetings over the internet, by posting to Twitter mere minutes before the actual event.
Unfortunately, current House rules ban “work-related activities on non-House Web sites,” which has resulted in a bit of tension on the House floor. This rule exists to separate the commercial (campaign) content from the actual political issues online. Basically, information available on any official House of Representatives website (a “.gov”) is certifiable political content. Anything ending in a “.com” is personal marketing. That’s how Congress sees it anyway.
Then how do consumers voters see it? Well, Culberson’s dynamic Twitter feed is far superior to C-SPAN’s static camera feed, since followers of the former are actually engaged. Plus, there’s the rise of the Obama “brand,” which continues to evoke highly emotional reactions from all sides.
We’re not trying to be cynical here, but it’s pretty difficult to preserve any sort of distinction between personal marketing and politics when social media is the easiest way to reach a sizeable, yet targeted audience, and the most cost effective way to produce and distribute a message. As long as it’s authentic, Personal Punditry can even be biased, but still be effective. Just think of the Federalist Papers as an 18th century blog network, and you’ll see the political potential for social media in the 21st century.
(via FOXNews.com, as posted on Twitter by John Culberson)
Another Mayday for Terrestrial Radio
Posted by goodmind on July 15th, 2008
Forget the potential impact of the SIRIUS-XM Satellite Radio merger, Mashable has an interesting post on how the iPhone threatens the future of terrestrial radio. Or more accurately, the working relationship between Apple and AT&T spells trouble for broadcasters. Historically;
[T]he software engineers and the mobile carriers literally conspired together to prevent streaming radio from becoming a serious contender on Internet ready mobile devices. Now, they have no such compunctions, and while streaming radio is dead in its old form, like Jarvis observed, there are many new competitors like Last.FM, Pandora, and a bevvy of podcasting DJs. The portable, Internet-enabled entertainment portal is a thing of the present.
Of course, this is all contingent upon the good will of the cell phone companies to keep costs low, and services net neutral. As Mashable correctly points out, “there’s plenty of money to be made being the band provider without inhibiting those out there with their own content to push.”
While selling bandwidth isn’t as sexy as selling a high tech indulgence, we’d stand in line for a reasonable data plan…
Like Fine Wine, Chumby Improves With Age
Posted by goodmind on June 24th, 2008
Chumby is basically a clock radio with the passive functionality of a laptop. It’s also;
internet-connected, runs on Linux software and is extremely hackable. In other words, it is a thoroughly open-source device. But alpha geeks are a small customer base, and Chumby Industries is betting that those early, tinker-mad consumers will transform its product into something more compelling to the rest of us…the alpha-geek development model proposes a revision of a gadget’s life cycle: As creative people keep hacking into what a Chumby can be, the device theoretically becomes more useful the longer you own it. (Rob Walker, Consumed)
Is this the “upgrade economy” described in Blur, almost ten years ago? Maybe. We’re certainly open to the possibility that co-rendering can make nifty tech gadgets more like a fine bottle of wine, rather than an expensive brick.
