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Vote for our SXSWi panel suggestions
Made by Many has an opportunity — actually, three — to host panel discussions at South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March 2011, but we need your votes to make it happen.
We attended SXSWi 2010 en masse and absolutely loved it — the people, the networking, the keynotes, the panels and the tequila. By bringing together a huge number of creative, freakishly intelligent people SXSWi acts as a sort of ideas incubator for our industry.
The sessions delegates attend set the tone of the year to come: they raise the issues we talk about and tease out the problems we try to solve. The best sessions kick off conversations that lead to technical innovations, new ways of working, unexpected collaborations and all kinds of general awesomeness. Hosting a panel discussion is an opportunity to start some of those conversations.
Here are the things we want to talk about
Good News: Apps, Paywalls, Publishers and Content
News organizations and publishers are walking backwards into the future carrying the cultural and business baggage of 200 years of mass media. Most will die; new models will arise. In the next half decade we expect a wholesale change in the way news is produced and consumed and by the end of this period we’ll know the answer to the question: “If we had never had mass media, what would journalism look like today?” A panel of individuals involved in news innovation looks at the issue from all sides and plots a path from old to new models of sharing what we need to know.
Daddy, You Should Tweet That: Parenting Goes Digital
The parenting web is on fire, with more parents tweeting and more family sites and services launching every month. Social media is fast becoming a huge part of modern parenting, but to what end? Is it here to wreck or revolutionize family time? Is there money to be made in this market, or are savvy parents marketing-proof? A panel of agencies and service designers will explore a series of projects to identify mistakes made, lessons learned, and future directions for the parenting web.
The Last of the Launch-and-Leave ‘Ems
Negotiating the new handover. Agencies are building fewer static campaign-oriented sites and more platforms, communities and services. Cutting the apron strings between agency and digital product immediately after launch doesn’t make practical sense, but maintaining the relationship indefinitely is costly for the client and creatively stifling for the agency. This panel will explore solutions that are most likely to be beneficial to both parties as well as the members of the service they are trying to build: a new plan for launch, propagation and perpetuation.
Your vote will get us to the next round
All of these panels are in the panel picker right now, just waiting for you to register or sign in (free! easy!) and vote for them. If you think these things are worth talking about, please spread the word and rally the troops to make it so. Please also use the comment space on this post or on the panelpicker to share any ideas or links that you think would make these sessions more valuable.
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Wikileaks, news, and the stories within the story
At the start of this month I suggested that Rolling Stone’s McChrystal expose was the story of the year. I was wrong. Whistleblowing website Wikileaks’s release of more than 75,000 classified military documents — collectively referred to as the Afghanistan war logs — is now the story everyone is talking about, and it is unlikely this will change anytime soon.
A security breach/freeing of information (as you like) such as this is pretty much unprecedented, although many are comparing it to the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers (including Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind that leak).
Just as with the Pentagon Papers, the leak and the subsequent publication of previously classified information are just part of a complex knot of stories. Who leaked this? What do we make of what we read? What next for Afghanistan, for the US military and indeed for ISAF as a whole? — these are only the immediate questions.
Last night I attended the Frontline Club’s sell-out Q and A with Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. I wanted to get closer to the story and explore a few of my own questions, specifically — How does a leak like this affect the life cycle of a story and the role of the press? What next for news and investigative journalism if Wikileaks steps in as the official sourcer of unofficial facts? Further, what are the ethics around what Wikileaks is doing — both Assange as an individual and the organisation as a whole?
I don’t believe in censorship and I do believe in freedom of information, but no matter how I look at this, none of it is black and white.
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News, publishers, print and digital: an update
A couple of weeks ago I had a little rant about the three things I think publishers need to do if they want to thrive in a beyond-print era. The survival of news media is a big issue right now, and so it should be — the quality reportage of news is critical to the health of our society.
In the time since posting my argument, I’ve spotted a few new developments I think are worth sharing. Unsurprisingly, they all have a lot to do with content and the contradiction of digital content: expensive to produce (or at least, the good stuff often is) but more often than not, free to consume. Highly valuable, then, but cursed with a changeable value.
Revisioning an economy around forces like these isn’t going to be easy, but I believe it can be done. Here’s what’s happening, and why I think it matters.
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Somewhere over the paywall: 3 predictions for news media
Two weeks ago, some colleagues and I attended a Frontline Club talk on apps, paywalls and the future of journalism (for a recap, see William Owen’s excellent post). I found the experience very interesting but also very frustrating. I should say up front that this post is deliberately provocative: I am heartsick at the state of the news industry (one I respect and value to no end) and I want to do something about it — or at least start a discussion that does.
Publishers are erecting paywalls all over the place — The Times last week, The New York Times next year — but to what end? By throwing their content behind paywalls, publishers are indulging themselves in a knee-jerk reaction that — I think — will decimate their market share and brand value, ultimately to fatal consequences.
Publishers should be rethinking digital as a universe of potential profit. They should be embracing change and changing with it, but instead they’re freaking out and locking up the content. This just won’t work.
The internet has irrevocably — and nearly globally — democratised information. Content as content is free, and content producers cannot ask consumers to change their behaviour or expectations to meet a bottom line. That’s just not how it works. There is so much good content out there, people will simply decline to pay and move on to a free content source — and there are many.
In order to survive, publishers must change the way they approach the business of content, newspapers, and digital news platforms. Here are my three predictions for the industry.
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We love awesome stuff: Vote for Policies
Earlier this week, Stuart wrote about viewing our competition as allies. This probably feels a little uncomfortable for a lot of people — businesses want to succeed, and a big part of succeeding is making money, which comes from getting work, which normally happens at another business’s expense.
But who says it’s a zero-sum game? The Web is changing and the world is changing. The biggest gains — monetary and otherwise — are to come from being a part of that change, and influencing the direction of that change so that we — and our industry — become smarter, kinder, and just, well… better.
Today, through the serendipity engine that is Twitter, I found a really clever, thought-provoking site. It’s called Vote for Policies and in addition to being beautifully designed and very useable, it’s also really timely. (Thanks must be given to @RKTweets, who tweeted this little gem in the first place.)
The site helps users compare the policies of the six main political parties. It removes the party branding so people can get straight to the content and make informed decisions based on the policies they want to live with, rather than be nudged this way and that by the faces, rhetoric and theme songs those policies usually hide behind. By pulling out the meaningful content and putting it in a usable interface framed by clean, instructive copy, this site does something really important: it makes powerful information accessible to more people.
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Too many tweets, but who’s the twat now?
The past five days have contained two of the more epic social media fails in recent history. Most of us remember last year’s Skittles fail — the one where the brand reworked their homepage to display a live and unmoderated Twitter stream of every tweet hashtagged #skittles.
It was a bold act, but an epic fail — as soon as the public realised what was going on, they started hashtagging all sorts of things #skittles… and all sorts of non-rainbow of fruit flavours content landed on the Skittles homepage. It was a brave move, but a foolish one, and the brand quickly took the tweet stream down.
Nestle’s big social media don’t
Last week, Nestle opened themselves up to goofy comments, vitriolic — if comedic –criticism and ultimately, brand slaughter with an unmoderated, totally public Facebook page. Unsurprisingly, the brand page (fan page?!) very quickly turned into a Wall of Hate. It’s not the smartest move for a brand that has attracted its share of criticism from some very outspoken groups. It’s even less intelligent given the whole Skittles fiasco. So what gives, Nestle? Did you think they wouldn’t find you? That greenies and breastfeeding advocates don’t use Facebook? Lo, they do, and they’re as happy to speak up here as they are in rallies and on their own blogs:
“It’s not ok for people to use altered versions of ur logos, but it’s ok for u to alter the face of Indonesian rainforest”
To their credit, the brand did post that it was ‘learning social media as we go’… but with an angry audience kicking forth gems like the above, it shouldn’t have taken long for the message to sink it. Alas, no: the site is still live and attracting flak.
Along comes Cash Gordon
If you’ve been under a rock or off the grid for the past few hours, you may have missed Cash Gordon, a Conservative fail so epic, so swift, and likely so catastrophic as to qualify as a nuclear fail. Read full post
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The gang’s back on home turf
One cowboy hat, four flights, six blog posts, dozens of sessions, hundreds of tweets and waaay too many tequila shots later, Made by Many is home from Austin and over the jet lag (well, some of us are doing better on that one than others).
There are a few blog posts in the pipeline about the various things we saw/heard/did at SXSW and the Deep Thoughts touched off thusly. But before we get all serious, here’s something a little more playful — an insight into the Made by Many culture, if you will.
Before we went to Texas we discussed the importance of having a gang sign to demonstrate a) belongingness to MxM and b) just how dangerously cool we really are. Below, Simon demonstrates the clever Made by Many (hands make Ms, then cross your wrists for the X) gang sign:
Ideally, the sign is executed with a lunge — that sort of ups the awesomeness ante.
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When blogging met Twitter: meet Ready for Ten
We’re now the proud parents of a site for, well, parents. Ready for Ten is a conversation space for mums and dads of 6-9 year olds. We built it for Fruit Shoot, which is the UK’s top brand for kids of this age group, and as such, wanted to create a resource for parents. Ready for Ten is a website that brings together the best of the web — blog posts, links and tips — for parents of kids in this age group.
All the content on the site is generated by the parents who use it: by the mummy bloggers who write regular blog posts on parenting, by the parents in the Ready for Ten Twitter stream, and by the people who comment on these posts and tweets. We refer to Ready for Ten as being parent-powered because the conversation on the site is steered by these parents, rather than an editorial board somewhere, without a parent in its ranks.
The site has been live for just over a month now but it only came out of private Beta this past week. Take-up has been good thus far, with more and more people following on Twitter, reading and commenting. We’re excited about the site as it’s a real departure for an FMCG brand to use Twitter this way — we think it’s pretty forward-thinking of Britvic, the company behind Fruit Shoot, to connect with their audience like this.
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SXSW countdown: one day!
At long last… tomorrow morning we’re off to Austin!
Stu and Antonica, Made by Many’s de facto cat herders, are limbering up even as we speak to corral the lot of us from Heathrow to Dallas Ft Worth on to Austin. Assuming no one offends Homeland Security on the way in (you know who you are…), we should all be ensconced in our Texan digs by tomorrow evening.
Our departure is big news for our website, as it means our super-dynamic, sex-on-Twittter-toast* SXSW special homepage will be live. We’re kind of excited about this page. As well as all our latest tweets and links to our Twitter accounts, it shows off the latest Made by Many blog post and the most recent addition to our Flickr account. It offers a smooth user experience, too, as everything updates dynamically and in real time.
The page will be live the whole time we’re away, which means you can keep (non-creepy, please) tabs on us and get a sense of what the SXSW experience is like. You’re also heartily invited to @ or DM us with suggestions, feedback, jokes etc while we’re gone — this is, after all, a conversation.
For those who missed the earlier posts on this project, we took this page as an opportunity to open up our creative process and design in public. Here’s the first vision of the page. We followed this with a post on the idea’s evolution before whipping the curtain back for the big reveal.
Thanks very much to everyone who offered feedback on this work — and of course, if you want to do so now, you are more than welcome.
So on that note… have a great week and, um, watch this space!
*not my words but damn do I love ‘em
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SXSW countdown: one week
And lo, ready to roll a full week before we take off for Texas, here it is — our Twitter-powered SXSW people-tracker:
For those who haven’t been following the posts and discussions around this project, here’s the story…
Just about all of Made by Many is heading to Austin, Texas for SXSW interactive. Several weeks ago, we decided to build something onto our website to bring our SXSW experience to life for the people who aren’t going to be there with us. We thought this project would also be the perfect occasion to throw the doors open on our creative process and actually share the journey we go through as we work an idea through to a final execution.
This series of posts started with shots of our original approach. We then showed how this idea was refined a few different ways. The third and final instalment in this design journey is above.
The idea for the page is very simple: all of our most recent tweets on one page, updated in real time as it happens.
The design started out as a series of coloured panels, one for each person, laid out on a very regimented grid. However, we all felt that this was a bit strict – it neither reflected our personality nor the event we’re going too.
So we loosened the design up, taking the hand drawn style of our avatars as inspiration. The page is a series of speech bubbles, laid out in a seemingly random and slightly haphazard way. Connected by lines, doodles and graffiti, the speech bubbles change colour with time: the freshest tweets are dark, the stalest white. The page will be darkest when the conference sessions are going on and we’re tweeting non-stop, but completely white in the middle of the night when we’re all sleeping. Except for @malbonster’s bubble. He never stops.
As well as pulling in our tweets, the page also pulls in the latest photo in our Flickr stream, our latest blog posts, even twitpics. You’ll be able to see more tweets from each person by clicking on their avatar or simply going through to their Twitter stream.
The idea for the page is very simple: all of most recent tweets on one page, updated in real time as it happens.The design started out as a series of coloured panels, one for each person, laid out on a very regimented grid. However, we all felt that this was a bit strict – it neither reflected the personality of us or of the event we’re going too.So we loosened the design up, taking the hand drawn style of our avatars as inspiration. The page is a series of speech bubbles, laid out in a seemingly random and slightly haphazard way. Connected by lines, doodles and graffiti, the speech bubbles change colour with time: the freshest tweets are dark, the stalest white.We imagine that the page will be dark red whilst the conference sessions are going on and we’re tweeting virtually non-stop, but completely white in the middle of the night when we’re all sleeping. Except for @malbonster’s bubble. He never stops tweeting.As well as pulling in our tweets, the page also pulls in the latest photo in our Flickr stream, our latest blog post, even twitpics. You can see more tweets from each person by clicking their avatar or simply going through to their twitter stream.We like the sketchy style and the playful execution. We also think the design has some dynamism to it, that it tells a story and carries your eye through that story fairly easily. All in, we think this is really close to who we are.
This whole ‘designing in public’ thing felt a little strange at points (sort of like being naked in front of a lot of people, I reckon) but we got some interesting feedback here and on other blogs, which was cool. And it’s practice for us to be more open in the future — something we are really committed to doing.
Our SXSW special will be live on Made by Many as of Thursday 11 March.
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