Blood on blood

I don't bleed much these days, not like I used to. In high school I would run myself ragged at lunchtime playing basketball, the hot asphalt beying for the blood of anyone who didn't quite manage to land right. A couple spills I took are fresh in my mind, one in particular had me going head over heels, and arms, shoulders and knees all took a beating, those scars are still evident if you know where to look.

The blood gets drawn from diving into a situation too enthusiastically, it seems like the older we get the better we are at avoiding the scrapes; I'm more likely to cut myself with a kitchen knife or shaving than I am from a missed lay-up. And the cuts and bruises we used to wear with pride get hidden away in shame instead of laid out for the world to see as the badges of honour they once were.

As I am fond of saying, we should jump for the sun. We may not reach it, but at least we get off the ground.

Get out your battle scars, and go in search of more.

Money for nothing

Reminds me very much of the Scrabble piece also from JWT, though in Chile as opposed to Frankfurt where the above arrived from.

Via the always delightful bad banana blog.

This is the great adventure

Every time I play a gig, people ask me if I'm nervous, which I almost always am. And I think that is the way it is supposed to be - if I'm not nervous then nothing is at stake. If nothing is at stake then why am I here? What am I going to learn I don't already know? What will the audience experience if I'm not pushing myself to some place I haven't been before; if I know I'm not going to fall, there is simply no elation in flight.

Your friend and mine Sean Howard touches on these points in a recent post, The Scariest Thing I've ever Done. In it heleverages an eBook he published called The Passion Economy (rockstars Gavin Heaton and Katie Chatfield contribute as well). It's a candid assessment of his work, and he's honest about fis failings. More to the point though, he makes a case for purposefully putting yourself into those awkward and unknown territories. He's preaching to the choir with me, and, I hope, you as well.

If he's not, then why are you here?

Appetite for destruction

(best blog post title ever!)

Watch: the below TED Talk by Clay Shirky from 2005 where he talks about the ideas that went on to coalesce in handy book form, disguised as his popular work Here Comes Everybody (or put it away for later and just keep reading, you'll get the point).



[caption id="attachment_652" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="The trouble starts in the wide open spaces"][/caption]

Here's the thing about disruption: it doesn't happen by someone releasing a better product, it happens by someone releasing a simple product that caters to your least demanding customers (aka the people in the long tail, aka the wide open spaces). From there, it is easy to move up the tail a) as your product improves, and b) as people learn what features they can actually do without. This is why arguments like Google Docs isn't as feature-rich as Word don't work; the people using Google Docs aren't playing on the field that makes Word a better choice.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the long tail is all well and good, but you need a strategy for the head because that is where the money is. And he is right. What Clay gets at in his talk though, and what I am proposing, is your strategy can be to work your way up the tail, co-creating with your audience to the point where you are impinging on the head.

Bet your ass you will have the attention of everyone in the room at that point.

Let's push things forward

While thinking about Balloonacy the other day, I watched a TED talk from Scott McLoud who has authored several books on comics. Scott, whose approach to comics is equal parts advocate, raging super-fan and passionate academic gives a great overview of where the medium has been, intertwined with his own personal history.

In discussing the move of comics from print to online, he refers to it as "a classic McLuhan-esque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of the new technology" (about 11 minutes in).



Marshall McLuhan who he is referring to, is famous for saying "the medium is the message", the idea being whatever you're saying is impacted and altered by the medium it is delivered in. As a tangible example, this piece in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times carries more weight than it being on my blog, even though the content could be exactly the same...but I digress.

In the move online we found the tangible points to make sense. Email was DM, banners were billboards, video initially wasn't even possible. While email hasn't moved that far, banners (thanks to Banner Blog) are staring to find their own uniquely digital place as more and more people question what we can actually do in this space. It is of course too easy not to ask the question and just get the work out, but that isn't going to push things forward, or ultimately retain your clients.

With all this in mind, I'm trying to pull together a list of campaigns or ideas that could only have been digital. Balloonacy, Nike +, what else? It sounds like something interesting is in the works for Killzone 2, the possibilities of this medium are only limited by our ability to conceive them. To think there are still people who only want to make TV spots - they can have them!

Do you remember?

When Firefox 3 launched last year, I said to Scott Drummond "There goes the URL!" and thank God. While it still recognised the cumbersome string of letters aligned for a seemingly ancient protocol, it also now recognised the names of sites. So after closing the tab containing a story on Bit.ly raising $2 million in funding, I decided I wanted to reference it and ponder in some fairly semantical and tangential fashion about these further steps away from URLs. I forgot what site the story was on though, and so just typed in "bit". Lo and behold:

[caption id="attachment_642" align="aligncenter" width="540" caption="Bit.ly raises a round of funding and I find my way back"][/caption]

We're seeing the same thing on our phones, where we no longer dial numbers, we call people. I don't know the phone numbers of any of my friends, hedging my bet on always being able to find them in some fashion. Skype takes this one step further with the complete absence of numbers. I can imagine explaining to children one day how you once needed a number to find someone, and having them say back to me "Why didn't you just call their name?"

In one simple update, amidst what were I'm sure hundreds of more important features, Firefox 3 relegated the URL to history. The phone number is well on its way, and I'm wondering what other staples of life are due for a swift Darwinian exit from our technological lives?

Up where we belong

Since the demise of social media (in my head) I've been struggling to get excited about something again. I was sitting thinking about opportunities for a client this morning, and I was reminded of the enthusiasm I talked about the potential of browsers with. This stems from a beautiful execution last year by Poke London on behalf of Orange called Balloonacy, which purported to be (and who is going to argue) the first Internet balloon race (I just noticed they won an award for it too, as it should be!).

The (thoroughly sexy) idea here is Balloonacy didn't quite exist anywhere, rather it played out over the pages of people who took part, and, flying left to right over the screen you would land on new web pages when you went off the right-hand side. It was an app that didn't require Facebook or an iPhone, it was a campaign that didn't require a media buy. It was in fact an execution that could only have been done online, and there is so little work out there we can really say that about.

I don't know if I'll actually be able to get something in the browser off the ground for this client, let's be honest there's a barrier to entry, not to mention compatability issues, but in the same way processing is getting faster, the walls around technology are getting lower, which means more people participate, which means we get where we're going faster than we did before.

As I said over at Socialized when the web was abuzz with Skittles nonsense, we're all leveraging each other's work, and getting there together.