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Big Society – a new opportunity for brands and the arts?
It’ll be a while before the full impact of the coalition’s swingeing cuts in the Arts world are realised, but one thing is clear: it’s forcing artists’ hands. There will be little choice but to seek patronage from sources other than the Arts Council, NESTA or the British Film Institute.
Of course, brands have been supporting the arts for ages and there have been some great examples of this, although some backfire as seen recently with BP’s sponsorship of The Tate. And there are those in the arts community who feel that corporate sponsorship has no place, that it sullies the purity of art. But the harsh reality is that the arts need funds, and the most ready source is going to come from the private sector.
At Camp Bestival last weekend, in amongst the fun and wonder, I was struck by how much harder brands are going to have to work to engage with people, and how this has potential to benefit artists.
One of the best things I experienced at the festival was ‘The House of Fairytales’ field which was made up of a whole range of family activities.
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What Customers Want
(or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Obvious)
(also know as ‘The empty hamburger dilemma’)
Most new products and services fail. This is a depressing reality to swallow, however I am amazed by how few people ask why this happens. Or worse still all the people who have an in-built assumption and acceptance that most new things should fail. This shouldn’t be the case.
Here is a sad graph showing total product failures.
Why all this failure? Read full post
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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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Antennagate: Can Schopenhauer Help?
Ever since the media eruption over the iPhone 4’s antenna design, I’ve been thinking about how we assign meanings and experience real emotions in response to representations, or illusions.
Adapted from a photo by Jamais CascioTake the bars on your mobile phone. We are completely used to telling the person on the other end of the line that we “don’t have many bars”. Yet “bars” are just a way that mobile phones have of indicating how good a signal they have, not an actual measure of anything real. But by now we’re so used to them that we use them as though they were the actual thing rather than a representation of it, and we can have furious arguments about “dropping bars”.
Think about the way that Steve Jobs presented the way that the iPhone 4 and other smartphones suffer from signal attenuation when gripped in specific ways. He compared the upper limit of the number of bars displayed when gripped as recommended by the manufacturer against the lower limit of bars displayed when held “wrong”. Never did he mention the actual signal degradation in dBm, only ever the way that the phone manufacturer had chosen to represent them in terms of bars displayed. In one telling moment, he pointed out that the Android phone only used four bars, and yet he didn’t take the next logical step and conclude that we can say nothing meaningful about actual signal loss by looking at an abstract representation.
There was a storm of protest (from me too, I confess) when Apple published a “letter” explaining that the algorithm they used to calculate the number of bars to display was flawed and exaggerated the level of signal. We complained that this was simply deckchair rearrangement: the problem was a loss of signal, we insisted. What were Apple going to do about that? And yet the only evidence we had for the “loss of signal” was the representation – the bars themselves! That reaction occurred because we couldn’t handle the idea that the representation had been unhelpful because we do not see it as representation.
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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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Hacking Safari Reader For Even Less Distraction
If you’re on a Mac an you haven’t tried out Safari Reader yet, you should. It’s a really simple but incredibly useful little feature that detects when you’re on a page with a lot of text, and offers to display that text in a reduced distraction popup. (Update: thanks to reader Tom Harvey, who points out that Safari is also available on Windows, and you can use the same technique to hack the reader display there.)
Safari shows this little icon when Reader is available.This morning, I visited an an article page suggested to me by a colleague, but the annoying animated Flash ads underneath the overlay were still visible and distracting, because the Reader panel doesn’t take up the whole width of the browser window, and the overlay is somewhat transparent (20%, it turns out).
There’s actually an easy way to hack this so that the overlay is completely opaque. Safari Reader’s UI is provided by an HTML file embedded in the Safari application bundle, and that file contains all of the CSS used to control its appearance.
Here are the steps to make the background completely opaque and distraction free.
First, open the Finder, and locate Safari inside the Applications folder. Control-Click (or right click if you have it enabled) on the app file and select “Show Package Contents” from the popup menu. This will bring up a new Finder window, with a single Folder in it, called “Contents”. Inside the Contents folder, there’s a folder called Resources, and inside that is a file called “Reader.html”
Now, open Reader.html in your favourite text editor, so Control-Click and chose Open With… and select your editor from the list. If you don’t know which app to use, your best bet is probably Text Edit.
Inside Reader.html there are a bunch of CSS styles, but the one you’re looking for is #background, which is on line 122 of the file. By default, this sets the opacity to 80%, so changing the last number in the background-color directive from 0.8 to 1 will make it 100% opaque.
The only drawback to this approach is that when Apple updates Safari, you’ll need to reapply the hack because the update will overwrite the entire application bundle.
Here’s what that CSS code looks like once you’ve made the change:
Now, save the file. OS X may ask you to enter your admin password in order to save the file. Once the file is saved, restart Safari and enjoy your new completely distraction-free reading.
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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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Our Digital World: A Snapshot
I did a quick poll via Twitter and email last week to see what sites, services and apps some of the people I know are using in their daily lives. These are of course likely to change as more and more services make their appearance (or, as I sometimes wickedly dream in the case of Facebook, slowly die), but for now I notice some clear trends:
News sites will continue to be a key source of information, even as print fights for survival
BBC News, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Dallas Morning News, Al Jazeera, News24, the Daily Mail and the Sun were the most commonly visited sites amongst respondents to my poll, with the BBC and Guardian clearly leading the pack. Smaller, more local sites still have their audience amongst people who have an affiliation to those areas. News sites found a mention by all respondents, so whatever happens to print magazines, their digital avatars are here to stay. As the Times prepares to go behind a paywall, it will be interesting to see how they respond to the changes in the behaviour of their audience – something that is bound to happen.
Social networking is going nowhere but up, and Facebook still leads
Much as we may love to hate Facebook, everyone continues to use it. Accessing Facebook via the mobile phone is something that, as Facebook themselves say, is on the rise, as 1/4th of their 400 million+ users visit the site via their phones. Twitter is right up there with Facebook, and Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, LiveJournal and Delicious also found a mention.
Gaming sites are an advertising opportunity being missed
Eurogamer and Gamepro, sites which I’ve never heard of as a female not too much into gaming, emerged as two sites mentioned by a few of the respondents whom I know to be young British males. I thought that was quite an interesting piece of information, and having taken a look at the sites in question, I noticed that the only products being advertised are more games. I can’t help thinking that there’s an opportunity completely being missed by brands whose target audience is this demographic, such as Lynx or Axe, or even consumer electronics brands. As Gamepro clearly states, of their primarily young male audience 80% plan to buy a laptop and 60% plan to buy other consumer electronics in the next 6 months.
Google continues to rule the Search domain
Literally and figuratively, that is. There was absolutely no other search engine mentioned. Sorry Yahoo!, sorry Microsoft. I wasn’t very surprised, because have Yahoo! or Microsoft given us the sheer joy of being able to play Pacman lately? No, they have not :)
Other (not as remarkable) conclusions include Tweet Deck and Tweetie being the most commonly used Twitter apps and Google Reader being the feed reader of choice.
Of course these conclusions are based on a very limited pool of respondents, but I find it helpful to do this every now and then to have a reality check. Much as I like Diaspora, for example, I don’t really think Facebook is in too much danger yet, and as I found with the gaming example, sometimes we overlook simple things.
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Designed by people that hate you. No, really
Self-service checkout machines. Is there any other machine we interact with in the modern world that is quite so odious?As I stand in line to use one of these infernal devices, listening to the sighs of frustration from the customers ahead of me, I debate whether it’s worth. The extra minutes I’ll save from not queuing up for an old-school conveyor belt, or the agony of a vein exploding on my forehead from using one of the damn things…Cannot verify your bagsWhilst I can’t condone shopping in socks and sandals, I try to be a good eco-boy by bringing my own bags to the supermarket each week. Somewhere in the Pacific there’s a baby albatross with one less plastic bag in their stomach who’s thanking me.Each week, I duly select ‘using my own bags’ and place my deluxe hessian bag in the bagging area. And each week I’m told my bag can’t be verified and that I’m to wait until an assistant arrives to help me. I’ve tried placing my bag down gently as if it were precious cargo, in the hope of getting the machine to acquiesce. I’ve also tried ramming it down, in the hope that announcing my bag’s presence with a punch will have better results. Neither works and each time an attendant has to be called over.What does it take for a bag to verified without calling the work experience boy over? Why not tell me so I can alter my behavior or bring a different bag? If this isn’t possible, then why not just say so? Want to use your own bags? Press here to call an attendant over.Transparency. Don’t lie for the sake of sounding technically competent, because God knows the machine is failing at that one.Unexpected item in the bagging areaYou’re merrily scanning and bagging, accompanied to the sound of beeps from the bar code reader. Until, unexpectedly, the machine interrupts:Unexpected item in the bagging area. Remove this item before continuing.WTF? I’ve just scanned that wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano. I live in Islington – buying expensive cheese should hardly be unexpected behavior.Hold on, did it scan? Was the scanning beep I heard a false memory? Or…Unexpected item in the bagging.Ah, the machine was just playing catch-up – it’s found the cheese after all. Thanks for scolding me just because you’re a bit shite.Please remove your cardThis being slow doesn’t just extend to playing catch-up, often the machine is downright one step behind. How many times have you been told to remove your card after removing your card from the chip and pin machine? It’s very dull being told to do something that you’ve already done.Trying to do too muchA lot of these problems stem from having to be able to deal with the worse case: yes, items do get dropped into a shopping bag without them being scanned occasionally. Of course, the system needs to be able to deal with every eventuality. But many of these problems stem from the checkout machine trying to do too much.Interacting with one of these machines is a nightmare, with slots, swipes and scanners all over the place. Fiddle up here and remove whatever from down below – the interactions are all over the place. What would happen if the experience were concentrated down? If these machines are here for convenience, how about *just* focusing on credit/debit cards and get the shopping experience *right*? Do one thing really well rather than lots of things badly.What does this all mean?Rants aside, I do have a point to make.It baffles me that someone, somewhere has said “yep, this is it, this is good enough to have our name on it.” I know that systems, services and platforms are always a balance between what can be achieved within the time, money and expertise available. I’m also sure that these machines are a huge technical accomplishment: it’s a barcode reader, measuring scale, cash dispenser, payment and touch screen device in one. That’s unbelievable.However, that’s all wrapped up in a truly dreadful customer experience. Could some of the time (and money) spent integrating three different payment types into one device been better spent getting the shopping experience right?Of course, being able to accept notes, coins and cards was probably part of the brief so the manufacturer isn’t all to blame. However, how much better would it have been if someone had had the confidence to say “we can do it… of course we can do it… but it may not deliver the experience you’re looking for.”It would have been a bold move, possibly a courageous one. However, each time a customer uses one of these machines and is frustrated,I can’t help but wonder about all the money supermarkets spend each on branding, marketing and creating the perfect store environment. Millions of pounds a year and it comes down to this? My last thought as I walk out of the supermarket isn’t of quality or value for money, it’s of my last experience at the store.Unexpected item in the bagging area. Remove item before continuing.Self-service checkout machines. Is there any other machine we interact with in the modern world that is quite so odious?
As I stand in line to use one of these infernal devices, listening to the sighs of frustration from the customers ahead of me, I debate whether it’s worth it. The extra minutes I’ll save from not queuing up for an old-school conveyor belt, or the agony of a vein exploding on my forehead from using one of the damn things…
Cannot verify your bags
Whilst I can’t condone shopping in socks and sandals, I try to be a good eco-boy by bringing my own bags to the supermarket each week. (Somewhere in the Pacific there’s a baby albatross with one less plastic bag in their stomach who’s thanking me.)
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UK General Election candidates, who are they really?
Forget reading manifestos, analysing policy impact on your monthly take-home pay or weighing up the pros and cons of entry into the Euro. Who are our political leaders and, more importantly, what do we really think of them?
What started as a conversation at SXSW launched in double-quick time just over a week ago after a flurry of code production and pixel shuffling.
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