Archive for the ‘Great Stuff’ Category

  • Paxo on Chatroulette

    Thank Jehovah that the Web is still capable of generating the kind of super-retarded moral panic and outrage that characterised Newsnight’s piece on Chatroulette last night.

    It was brilliant to be reminded of how subversive and mad the Web is. In our increasingly settled, sanitised and locked down Web era Chatroulette is a timely warning to us all that we must hold on to the crazy stuff, because what it really represents is the Internet’s culture of freedom and culture of innovation.

    With the exception of Danah Boyd, the so-called ‘experts’ they brought onto Newsnight last night, and the report itself, were shockingly ill-informed and reminiscent of Chris Morris’ 2001 Brass Eye Special ‘Paedogeddon’. It was like a parody.

    Culture correspondent Stephen Smith was sent off to a casino in Knightsbridge to play some roulette to the strains of Frank Sinatra singing “Luck Be A Lady Tonight…“. The show’s producers must have thought this was very clever. But it wasn’t. Stephen linked from the casino to the piece itself, with the question on absolutely nobody’s lips:

    “Are we to imagine that the etiquette of the green baize will transfer to the webcam and the new craze ‘Chat Roulette’?”

    Uh-oh.

    “I span the wheel on Chat Roulette”

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    10th March 10

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     Great Stuff

    Social Web

    Uncategorized

  • Online > offline: we still love paper goods

    Last Tuesday night, I went to the preview for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition (aka the Oscars of the design world) at the Design Museum in Shad Thames.

    The exhibition

    (Photo credit: Luke Hayes, from the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year blog)

    It was a fluorescent evening, buoyed up by free-flowing champagne and ebullient design types larging it in hats, big hairdo’s, bright lipstick and serious specs.

    The exhibition covers the gamut of design: architecture, furniture, product, graphics, interactive and fashion. One of my favourite pieces was a bit of folly with a serious message: ‘Panda Eyes‘ a crowd of WWF Panda collecting tins, wired up to a camera in the sky to detect human movement and shift in sync as you walk around them. Its intention is to raise awareness of pandas’ plight in the wild. I think.

    What I found interesting is that some of the graphic entries were really all about the relationship between online and print (and therefore arguably candidates for the interactive category). These three entries all had online generation in common: the articles, images, comment and opinion are all drawn from the crowd, using twitter, blogs and data to bring a concept to life.

    Newspaper Club (which for some reason has a bit of an ugly website, but produces beautiful papers) allows anyone to create and print their own newspaper, without the need to be a multi-millionaire media mogul.

    Here’s a particularly cool example that’s both useful and will please anyone who likes a bit of data visualisation loveliness. The Postcode Paper was an experiment from the Newspaper Club themselves that took information from data.gov.uk such as local services, crime stats and other useful stuff you need to know when you first move somewhere, like TFL transport links, and republished it in one handy, paper format.

    The Postcode Paper

    (Photo credit: Newspaper Club)

    It’s Nice That brings together the best of the creative industry in one place. As well as existing online, they also produce “a bi-annual printed publication, monthly talks and videocast, an online shop selling exclusive products as well as regular interviews and features with current practitioners.” I haven’t seen the print publication, but they feature some mighty nice stuff online.

    Tyler Askew's brand identity for Music HDTV channel RAVE

    And having recently received an extremely dull pre-conference magazine for SXSW, I can appreciate how something like The Incidental would be refreshingly interesting and bring the good stuff to your attention when wading through the programme at a conference. Essentially, it’s “a community-generated news pamphlet and website at international design events which offers debate, reviews, news updates and recommendations by tapping into what everyone is talking about.”

    This has given us some ideas for SXSW…

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    Charlotte Hillenbrand By Charlotte Hillenbrand

    24th February 10

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     Great Stuff

  • Grow a spine you wimps

    Are you as tired as I am of these people who whinge on about the Web being too big and free and open and rich for their fragile little brains to cope with?

    After centuries millenia of restricted access to knowledge being something every hipster should be heard moaning about, it’s now suddenly cool to complain that there’s just ‘too much information‘ out there and that you can’t cope. Yeah man, it’s just too heavy. It’s like you could spend all day every day online, but you still can’t take it all in and it’s completely ruining your life, and making you feel worthless.

    To be fair, it’s the same type of people now complaining that there’s just too much knowledge who always tell you – unprompted – about the the unearthly hour they got up as a way of asserting their moral superiority over anyone who got up at a more sensible time. They’re the same people who never miss an opportunity to tell you how many days they’ve had without any sleep because they are SOOO busy, and how little they’ve eaten… ever. Now, the Web offers these idiots a new opportunity to demonstrate self-worth – through another melodramatic and yet pointless piece of self-denial. But it’s better than that, the Web also provides a massive new audience of gullible fools people to bore on to.

    I had to check to see if this article from the NY Times website was some sort of hoax – it’s called “Stop Your Search Engines” (headline writer possibly suffering from Continual Partial Attention disorder). In it, they describe an Apple Desktop App called Freedom -  created for people who feel the need for a “strategy” to help them deal with the temptation of the modern world’s super-abundance of knowledge.

    It works like this.

    I can’t believe anyone wasted any valuable moments of their lives programming Freedom. Your modem and your system preferences will both do this. You do not need an App. And there is also this button on all computers that just turns them off. If you that’s not good enough for you but you live inside the M25, then why not DM and I’ll come round your house with a baseball bat to smash your equipment up.

    I call this programme of self-realisation ‘Total Freedom’ and it costs £50 a pop. Drop me a line.

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    26th October 09

    15 comments

     Great Stuff

    Social Web

    innovation

    opinion

  • I’ve had a baby. What have you all been up to?

    (or 10 things that have changed on the web since November '08)

    In the time I’ve been away and had a baby (she’s 10 months old this week…), a lot has happened.

    My baby

    The internet being a many-splendoured and rapidly changing thing, I hesitate to attempt any coherent summary of all that’s gone on.

    Instead, I’ll just pick out a few things that have sprung up on my radar as significant changes between November ‘08 and September ‘09. Broadly speaking, I see them as these:

    1. digital as support act > digital as headliner
    2. semantic web frenzy > real-time web frenzy
    3. slow fade of shiny 2.0 aesthetic > upsurge of big type mobile-friendly aesthetic
    4. Twitter as geekorama > Twitter as mainstream
    5. Google primacy > Google supremacy
    6. 43 white, analogue US presidents > 1 black, digital US president
    7. banner ads and buttons > social, shared content
    8. state control of ISPs (Iran, China) > online social mobilisation and subversion
    9. stream of rubbish reality TV on iPlayer and 4OD > demise of Keith Floyd
    10. Plus, of course the launch of Spotify, Facebook Connect, a proliferation of Twitter clients and more iPhone apps than you can shake an accelerometer-enabled stick at.

    You’re more than welcome to plug the gaps on the things I’ve missed whilst I was lost in the apparently endless cycle of feeding, sleeplessness, nappy-changing and washing.

    Please, tell me: what other important stuff have I missed?

    P.S. As I was writing this, I found a couple of Trend Blend maps via Ross Dawson’s blog which suggest that between 2008 and 2009, life has gone from being an ordered train journey through society, politics, technology et al…

    Trend Blend map 2008

    Trend Blend map 2008

    …to a more scary-looking hydra, beset by ominous little red demons. Perhaps I should have stayed at home, offline, with the curtains closed.

    Trend Blend map 2009

    Trend Blend map 2009

    2 Comments

    2
    Charlotte Hillenbrand By Charlotte Hillenbrand

    30th September 09

    2 comments

     Great Stuff

    Social Web

  • Climate Squad: from social media to social movement

    Made by Many is pleased as punch to announce the launch of climatesquad.org.uk, a platform for joining and organising actions to halt climate change that’s also the first of a series of initiatives by V to change the way youth volunteering works in the UK.

    climatesquadhome1

    V is an organisation funded by the Office of the Third Sector to promote and fund volunteering for 16-25 year olds. V came to Made by Many 8 months ago, asking us to create a vision for future volunteering with the expectation that digital engagement would reduce barriers to young people joining in voluntary action. In May we started working on Climate Squad, joint funded by V and Bank of America, as the first implementation of the strategy we defined with V.

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    By William Owen

    11th September 09

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     Clients

    Climate Squad

    Great Stuff

    Social Web

    Uncategorized

  • Case study: Amnesty UK ‘Campaigning with Social Media’

    Made by Many has worked with Amnesty UK since January ‘08, and helped them design and build ProtectTheHuman.com – their digital activism community. ProtectTheHuman.com is a social platform that asks users to carry out a range of online actions in support of Amnesty’s campaigns, and to upload video and photos and bookmark content from all over the Web.

    You can read more about it here – in Charlotte’s blog post when the site launched. And you can also read about how Amnesty have used Protect The Human to campaign against the proposed extension of detention without trial to 42 days, and in support of US death row prisoner Troy Davis.

    Since just before Christmas we’ve been working with Amnesty UK’s web team on a project to optimise the use of external social media services. This involved an audit, mapping and optimisation exercise of all official (Amnesty-run) and supporter-run groups and pages on Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and blogs. We then followed this with planning for specific campaigns: Obama’s First Hundred Days and End Violence Against Women.

    The case study below provides some real data (often missing in social media case studies) that shares what we all did and how well it worked. Please take it, share it, use it, re-tweet it and spread it all over the place. We also have some exciting new releases to make to the main Protect The Human website in the next few weeks, and another case study (Obama’s First 100 Days) to share.

    Campaigning with social media

    View more presentations from madebymany.

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    31st March 09

    4 comments

     Great Stuff

  • Crowdsourcing Examples

    Crowdsourcing is something that keeps coming up in our work at Made By Many, and I’m sure in a lot of other places as well, given that the power of the internet is growing ever stronger. It’s always useful to see and learn what other people are doing in terms of harnessing the power of online communities. So I’ve created a wiki that lists all the examples of crowdsourcing that I could find listed across the internet. Here it is.

    There were a number of places that were very useful as I went about the process of collecting this information, such as Peter Kim’s wiki of social media marketing examples and the Mobile Youth blog. There’s a full list of these on the wiki itself, so go and check it out. And keeping in the spirit of crowdsourcing and wikis, if anyone here is interested in contributing examples that aren’t already listed, give me a shout and I’ll set you up as a contributor.

    For more about crowdsourcing, check out Jeff Howe’s blog – the guy who is credited with creating the term ‘crowdsourcing’.

    4 Comments

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    Anjali Ramachandran By Anjali Ramachandran

    24th March 09

    4 comments

     Great Stuff

  • “Twitter: What’s all the fuss about?” presentation

    Despite the promotion of Twitter to the ranks of “the great issues of our day”, and 24/7 coverage of new Twitter stories via TV, radio and newspapers, some people (normal, well-adjusted people) still need that basic introduction. What is it? How do I use? and What’s all the fuss about?

    So Made By Many, along with BBH Labs, put have put together a presentation that we dusted off today at BBH’s London office to a crowd of excited advertising folks. We’d like to put this presentation out there for the rest of the world, under an Attribution Creative Commons license, for anyone who wants to explain Twitter to colleagues, clients, friends, relatives and their spouse – including the illustrations. Please use them (just give us a credit). We couldn’t find any attractive Twitter iconography – so we made our own: the first in what we hope will become a series.

    Credit goes out to Mel Exon and Ben Malbon of BBH Labs, Anjali at Made By Many, and especially to Tom Harding at Made By Many for creating the the charming illustrations and presentation style. You can find the presentation on SlideShare.

    Twitter… what’s all the fuss about?

    View more presentations from madebymany. (tags: twitter made)

    8 Comments

    8
    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    6th March 09

    8 comments

     Great Stuff

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