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

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”

Cut to cringe-making clips of Stephen trying to engage with yoof. Stephen is (and looks like) a 40-something old-media professional – but to the young user-base of Chatroulette he must have seemed more like one of Chris Morris’ horde of sexual predators. Cue totally embarrassing attempt to ‘make contact’ with real young people using CR (handled like contact with a strange alien species):

Imagine being seventeen and a bloke like this crashes into your bedroom and says, “Hi guys, what’s happening with you?”. Terrifying.

Stephen didn’t appear to have done very much research and appeared not to know even how to talk about the thing he was reporting on:

“Well, I’ve been “playing” – if that’s the right verb – Chat Roulette for about 15 minutes now, and I’ve been dumped faster than Jordan’s husbands – it really is that quick.”

Arf arf.

Unsurprisingly, Stephen found it difficult to find anyone willing to talk to him, but eventually managed to groom (if that’s the right verb) a seventeen-year-old US user called ‘Perrin’, by telling him the interview would be broadcast (Stephen: “Yes, it is ‘awesome’ – in a way…”). Smith totally missed the point – it’s not about making friends dude – and easy analogies with the casino game ‘roulette‘ proved too irresistible. As anyone who’s played Chatroulette will tell you, it’s more like Russian Roulette than the little wheel.

“Some say you’ve got more chance of beating the house in a casino than finding a friend on Chat Roulette”

Enter mad expert, psychologist Judi James, with the disturbing news that Chat Roulette is damaging…

Err, right – and presumably that extends to talking shit too?

There then ensued a studio debate where Danah Boyd was unable to get her points across – let’s face it, the pitch had been thoroughly queered by then and it’s arguable that a real debate was by this stage now impossible. Jeremy had started to become Chris Morris. His introductory question to yet another ‘expert’ Dr Aric Sigman was:

“Aric, why would you go nude? There are people masturbating and all sorts of things.“

Holy God! Not masturbating!

Anyone genuinely interested in trying to understand Chatroulette should read Danah Boyd’s recent post at Apophenia, but if you get the chance you should also watch the programme on iPlayer and compare it with Brass Eye (below). Being described as “a craze” by a programme like Newsnight almost certainly means it’s over – although I really hope not, because it’s the best thing that I’ve seen for ages. We need more batshit, out-of-control scary stuff… it may be the best way to save “our Internet” and to halt The Enclosures.

I blogged last year about one conference I attended in London last May. There was a general feeling that the speakers offered nothing new, virtually no excitement or insight and most of the talks boiled down to a personal retrospective. That’s fair enough you may say, but the conference was billed as being about the future of the industry.

It felt as if the speakers had just been asked to turn up and speak about anything they wanted. No vetting by the organiser and seemingly very little brief to the speakers.

As such I’ve given up on any conferences this year. Apart, obviously, from the biggy. The one we’re all off to.

So this being my first SXSW, and what looks to be a mouthwatering list of speakers and five days of talks, here’s what I’m hoping for.

• Surprise and delight. I want to see evidence of people who are developing truly new ways of ‘thinking and doing’ in the interactive space. It’s not enough to just mash up a few APIs in 2010.
• It might be nice to hear about some things that may not have worked. Getting on stage and talking about successful projects is common. Getting up in front of hundreds and talking about a complete failure (and the whys) is far more interesting.
• I’d like to hear about methods, processes and new ways of working.
• I’m sure, in five days, we can muster a couple of moments when my jaw hits the floor and my mind is blown. Failing that, funny presentations are always a treat.
• It would be nice if not everyone agreed with each other and there was some useful, healthy, impassioned debate. Don’t you just hate it when panels all agree with each other?
• I’d love it if someone spoke about something that I’d never actually considered or thought of before. A thing that makes me want to go away and start reading / playing. Put something new on my radar.
• I definitely don’t want to hear any agency creds.
• I’m also expecting some great after parties and the opportunity to meet some great people IRL for the first time.

How about you? Anyone have any great recommendations for talks to attend? What are you expecting / hoping for?

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.

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.

Rishad Tobaccowala’s blog post at Reinventing, and his speech at the American Association of Ad Agencies Transformation conference, are both incredibly exciting.

With both, he calls for renewal and appeals to the ad industry to save itself by hiring in top tier talent to build a new world, specifically:

“This is the time to build. The talent we most need are builders, sculptors, painters. Folks who create and not just manage.”

And what should we be building?

Rishad says the ad industry needs to be able to remakes industries and build new business models in order to survive. This is what the hungry, young tech dudes in Silicon Valley do. If the ad industry doesn’t go out and get these people, he says, they’ll simply carry on building the future anyway for themselves. Like, they already are. And the ad industry will remain on the outside looking in – watching the builders smash their world to pieces and re-make it in their own image.

The problem?

An ad industry that’s developed an incentive system that rewards seniority over talent.

Rishad’s blog post is a must-read and neatly dismisses any thought that this is about digital versus analogue. That’s boring. This is about making stuff – specifically re-making the way the world works with new platforms, apps, ecosystems, communities and models. Yeah! And it’s about making the ad industry somewhere The Geekerati want to work (they’re looking for, “Accountability, a culture that will let them do what they want, and some skin in the game”).

He’s not pulling punches. This is a raw and emotional appeal to the old guard to get with it or get out.

You came in with dreams, and now you stand with spreadsheets. Let’s get back to the audacity and the dreams and the spreadsheets will fill up beautifully.”

It’s been driving me nuts.

Since we started in September 2007, we’ve made several attempts. We launched with this at the top of the page:

…And this on the sidebar:

Our Twitter feed says:

Very Social Digital Stuff.

My Twitter describes Made by Many as:

A platform-building mutant network design company.

And in our creds we initially summarised it as:

We help brands and publishers create, manage and monetise community and Rich Internet Applications

Which has recently been changed to:

We help Media Owners, Brands, Start-ups and Organisations to create & manage owned & earned media platforms

And even more recently on our website, and on a bit of a late-night impulse (fueled in part by the frustration of not having nailed it, in part by some over-excited thoughts about the changing meaning of the words “awesome”, “awesomeist”, “awesomeness”, and partly by alcohol) we changed it to:

We know none of these is quite right, and that some are quite wrong.

But as we try once again to create a canonical definition, I wonder if we’re barking up the wrong tree.

Why limit ourselves to one little line?

Why try and cram everything we do into a single paragraph?

We have feet in many camps: we make stuff, we consult. That’s the way we roll.

We’re a design shop and a software developer, but we’re not a production house. What we do is both complex and evolving quicker than words can keep up with. For example, it’s become more difficult every week since we started to draw the line between what used to be called ‘marketing‘ and what used to be called ‘product and service design‘. Everything is converging.

I wonder if what we are might not really have emerged yet. I don’t even want to be an agency any more – I think network is more accurate.

There isn’t a right or wrong answer to any of this (that’s part of the problem), but I wanted to share our dilemma. I imagine it’s a problem a lot of other people have too and we’d be interested in how you’ve solved it (if it can be – or should be – solved, that is). And let us know what you think we should do.

One thing we’re toying with at the moment is having lots of lines. Maybe the elevator pitch belongs to the world of scarcity, and we’re about the long tail of meaning – an abundance of lines, each unpacking a different facet – potentially for a different audience. Sara and I are working on a long list, and thinking about how we might use all of them. We aim to share the whole process, at the risk of being quite boring.

Jimi Hendrix has a ‘new album’ out. I hate it and I haven’t even heard it yet.

I’m a lifelong Hendrix fan. Ever since I heard his interpretation of The Star-Spangled Banner I was hooked. My initial response upon hearing it was “I didn’t realise that was allowed”. I had a tape of his performance at the Isle of White Festival in 1970 and the entire performance re-engineered what little I understood of music. I put Hendrix on a par with Aphex Twin or Squarepusher for experimentation. There are just some sounds which nobody else has ever made before that just leap out at you and remind you that you’re alive and that life is actually very interesting. The distorted screams and moans he would make with his strat echoed the pubescent confusion I was feeling at the time. And even now they still root out emotions that don’t often see the light of day.

That aside, this ‘new album’ is a collection of studio outtakes, jams and cover versions that has been chucked together by Jimi’s step-sister Janie. Janie was adopted by Jimi’s father Al, who died in 2002. Jimi’s brother Leon was written out of the will by Al shortly before his death. It seems that this kind of in-fighting and wrangling goes hand-in-hand with the legacy of dead rock stars. Especially those, such as Jimi, who died tragically early and unexpectedly, without the foresight to create their own will.

Hendrix only actually completed 3 studio albums in his short career (he died at 28). But each one is crafted into a complete body of work which tells a unique and original story. This ‘new album’, titled ‘Valleys of Neptune’ tells a story, but it’s a story based on lies. It’s a mishmash of stuff that I can’t believe Hendix or anyone else in the Jimi Hendrix Experience would have blessed, if they were alive.

I’m not against these type of collections at all. The lie is in the marketing. The title track suggests it’s from some tape that Eddie Kramer found down the back of the sofa in the reception at Electric Ladyland studios, but which they were just too stoned to release. And just for you it’s been remasted into a deluxe package with horrifying digital clarity. Bullshit. Why not simply call it Scraps of Hendrix’ or ‘The Stuff Hendrix Wouldn’t Dream of Releasing’. I thought the same thing about Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, a collection of crap that Jeff Buckley wouldn’t have released if you’d paid him millions but which got chucked out by his estate once he’s brown bread.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some really good deep-dives into aspects of Hendrix that are worth a listen – Blues is exactly that. It was another posthumous release but simply collates many of the very bluesy recordings, jams and live performances he did. It tells a story, an honest story. And if you want to experience his live work, try Live at Monterey and Live at Berkeley. And if you want to hear the Hendrix BBC Sessions, well, listen to that, there’s a bum note on Manic Depression that has to be the most glorious and beautiful bum note I’ve ever heard.

This isn’t the first of these cheesy-titled anathemas, avoid First of the The New Rising Sun (much of which isn’t even in tune) and South Saturn Delta. There’s a reason why these things weren’t released when Hendrix was alive. Elbow call it demo-itis. It’s when you demo a song, send it to your friends, family and A&R people, they love it, then you develop it more. The problem is, nobody likes any other version than the one you sent them in the first place, even if you recorded it in your bedroom on a TASCAM 4-track. Most bands are pretty careful about what they put out. It’s only in death that they begin to lose control. They stop being able to tell their own story.

If you want to get into Hendrix, listen to Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and then Electric Ladyland, in that order. Ovoid anything that has the name of a planet in its title, it is probably shit.

Image credit: designerfake

At Made by Many, we love playing with – or at least trying out – a lot of the new apps and sites that make their appearance on the web. Now admittedly Posterous isn’t *new*, but we’ve been giving it a go off and on, with the aim of deciding how best to use it, and how best we can use it in a way that is different from what we write here. The result: we’ve decided to make it a visual repository of the stuff we see, like, read or otherwise discuss about the web. We envision it as a sort of Oddbreak for geeks. So if you’ve got some time on your hands and you can’t be bothered reading long blog posts, just head to the Made by Many Posterous! You may want to add it to your bookmarks too.

Some years later, not that much has changed. I still read like a mad thing and I still love words. Only now there are more words to love, from the solid everyday standbys (“wattage”, “traveller”, “coax”) to the niche-y specialists you bring out for added pounce(“peripatetic”, “disingenuous”) when time and audience are right.

The thing that really makes my head spin is the way language evolves. Even as I type this, old words are morphing and merging to send nifty little neologisms strutting out of our cultural soup of signifiers, all a-dazzle with tasty wordiness. Perhaps my favourite of these is the portmanteau, a linguistic mashup of two words and their meanings.

For some time, I’ve been meaning to make a list of the niftiest new (or new to me) words I come across in daily parlance. Here are three I have enjoyed this week, with more to come as I encounter them.

Manopause

Noun: a break from dating, flirting, and all forms of sexual interaction with men

“He is totally giving you the eye, go for it!”
“I can’t, I’m on a manopause. He’s fit though — get in there, Shaz.”

Faffage

Collective noun: timewasting, to-ing and fro-ing and general faffing

“You’re right — there is a direct correlation between the number of children a person has and the degree of faffage involved in their getting from A to B. Thank God we chose art over ankle-biters.”

Hellacious

Adjective: really awful with a sort of visceral twinge; a combination of hellish and atrocious

“During the coldest night that winter in Siberia, Ferdinand was forced to rise every hour to stoke the fire with priceless Louis XIV furniture. For an antiques dealer it was a truly hellacious experience.”

Photo courtesy of New York Public Library, used under a Creative Commons licence

Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.

Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.

Your content isn’t the same as my content

There are some sites that people check two or three times a day. BBC News is one of them for me. However, out of the 50 or so articles on their home page in the morning, I’ll probably only read around ten stories. As I check back during the day, there’s a law of diminishing returns, in fact every time I visit I usually end up reading half as many stories as I did the previous time.

This isn’t because there’s no ‘new’ news, it’s that new stories have problems bubbling up to the surface. Unless it’s a major breaking story, new content tends to get lost.

It’s easy to see why: the articles I read first thing loiter on the page till they reach the end of the editor’s news cycle, disregarding that I don’t need to read them again. New stories also get lost amongst articles that I decided not to read in the morning: if I’ve ignored them once do I really need to be presented with them again?

Rather than delivering the same content to everyone, how about delivering articles through an application that knows who I am and what I’ve read? Strip out the deadwood I’ve consumed already and the content I’ve ignored. Concentrate the experience down to new content I haven’t seen yet and make the experience personal.

Of course, feed readers have been doing this for some years using RSS. However, the iPad is targeting the ‘non-tinkering’ tribe, the people who don’t know what a feed is or for that matter care. RSS readers also deliver content in a totally non-branded and generic way – one story, one source is treated much the same as any other. The iPad allows us to go so much further.

Going click happy

These are the stories I read in one session on the BBC news site a few days ago:

Yet of course this isn’t actually the sequence of pages I looked at. My browsing experience was closer to this:

I bounce between the home page and content, flitting between the two. 12 clicks to read 6 pages? Laid out end to end it seems crazy that I spend so much time in the lobby compared to where I actually want to go.

How do I decide where to go without the home page though? What if we were to start seeing content as sequences of pages and stories rather than individual pages linked from one page? Some sites are already moving in this direction, placing previous and next story links at the top of each page. Here are two examples, from Heat and Vogue magazine:

Where does that next page link take you? At the moment it’s usually based on recency – the story that got published next is next. But how about a series of pages based on your reading habits and interests? Or a user generated set of the most popular pages? An editorially curated feature set consisting of a series of stories, videos and galleries? A set curated by a friend, a brand, a newspaper or a celebrity? Or an experience that combines shopping and content in one experience from multiple sources?:

From an interaction perspective this is made possible by the tablet form factor of the iPad. The experience of holding content in your hand and the immediacy of the iPad’s page swipe allows us to start thinking about how content can be grouped together in new ways, and how home pages can become about discovery rather than merely a glorified destination board.

Put that monolithic template back where it belongs

All too often sites are designed around one template for each content type. A blog post uses the blog template. An article uses the article template. The presentation of each story remains the same even if the needs of the content changes.

It’s an alienating experience when you compare online stories against their print equivalent. It’s only content that’s been created natively for the web, such as videos and slideshows, that rise above the print magazine’s content.

However, when it comes to features and articles, the presentation feels constrained. Hemmed in by the rigidity of a content management system dictating that every story needs to fit the same template. A template that needs to fit every screen resolution and every browser.

The iPad is an opportunity to look again at the balance between the needs of content and the content management system. What if we could start using apps to delivering content in a known environment to craft deeper and more engaging online experiences? What if we could start using the known characteristics of the iPad (such as it’s screen resolution and multi-touch screen) as constraints that influence the design in a positive way? We’d be able to stop designing for the lowest common denominator and craft for the richest experience.

Shelving that one-size-fits-all template and beginning to design for a different experience in story telling would be a good place to start.

Take a beat

One of the key parts of the experience of reading a newspaper or magazine is rhythm. Part of this comes from the visual design (that flexible grid again), but also a tempo that comes from story length and weight.

Here’s a typical spread from the print edition of the Daily Telegraph:

The page has four stories, and each one is of a different size. The length of each one has been determined by how important the editor feels the story is relative to the day’s news and, of course, how many column inches he has to fill to print the newspaper. The varying lengths of each article give the reading experience a rhythm of it’s own, mixing depth with occasional breadth (especially as shorter stories tends to be less serious and more frivolous).

On the web, that same serendipity of rhythm that comes from a print constraint is removed: the web is never going is run out of pixels, nor need to fill so many column inches a day. Which means that all too often stories on the web seem to take the same space, regardless of their importance. The same length, the same presentation, the same template.

Is this because a story had to be long enough to justify a page? And that in a world driven by information architecture every needs needs it’s own URL?

Wouldn’t it be better to start seeing stories of different length as a good thing? Something to deliberately create? An opportunity to let the user take a beat, mixing groups of short stories amongst longer articles:

A story could be as short as 140 characters (as so brilliantly demonstrated with the tweets interspersed between images on Pictory) or as long as an essay.

Of course, the best of the web experience can also be used to create compelling experiences that have a rhythm of their own. How about if a stream of mixed length stories were to include data visualisations, video stories and slideshows? It’s not so much a content set as a playlist.

King banner

The iPad is a huge opportunity for the relationship between advertising and content to be changed for the better. No longer does advertising need to be constrained into insignificant banners that no one pays attention to.

Ads need to become part of the experience in a positive way, a relationship that can help both the user and the advertiser. The worse that could happen is if the model of disruptive advertising continues: the only way we can get your attention is if we piss you off:

For sure, something that’s mildly annoying on your current computer is going to be infuriating and brand destroying when you’re holding the content in your hand.

Online ads need to become part of the content themselves – not an overlay or a banner, but a page in their own right. Yes, they can swiped away with the hand, but surely the iPad’s full colour screen goodness is a rich enough canvas for a compelling advert that can attract attention?

The three ages of the web

All of this contributes to different aesthetic and a different way of experiencing content online. The iPad is the next step on in a long journey from the first days of the web.

From a design perspective, the web started off as something tiny, tiny, tiny. Fonts were small, images were small and buttons were exceptionally small. They had to be. We forget now just how small how a monitor resolution of 640 by 480 is.

Clients became obsessed with trying to cram everything into the viewable area of the page (remember, users don’t scroll…) and designers compensated for this by downsizing everything. This included the body copy, with many web designers coming from a print background (myself included) thinking it was okay to set type in the, impossibly small to read online, 10pt.

As the internet progressed, monitors became bigger and the slow crawl from 640 to 800 and onwards began. Web 2.0 came about and nearly everything became shiny. Serifs became fashionable, not least because designers started caring about usability – type at readable sizes suddenly means that serifs become a practical proposition. As the size of your monitor went up the size of your browser window stayed the same, a near universal page width of 1024 pixels.

The third and upcoming age is a different world. Innovations like typekit and the slow painful death of IE6 mean that typography can be anything. The years of learning usability the hard way have paid off: designers now have constraints to be creative with. What it means to read, consume and interact with a web page is moving on. Images, type and experiences are becoming bigger. On the iPad they’ll be full screen, edge to edge and seamless.

This reflects the same developments in the way websites and pages are structured:

From a very regimented beginning (when hand holding was a necessity: navigation to get you back, links for other things to see in case you came to the wrong place) to a focus on content. This second age spoke of a confidence in the content and the way that people consume it – we’re not going to distract you with link bait… read the article and then decide where to go next at the end. Navigation? Everyone knows where the back button and search field is.

As this confidence has developed, sites have begun to take advantage of all of the space available. Sites like thesixtyone, where the full screen is used to focus the user on discovering new music, rating and sharing as you go.

Or the beautiful Thinking for a Living, using a new way of navigation through an article to turn the way content is presented upside down (or side to side at least).

The future of content design?

Sites like these are beginning to provide a glimpse into a new way of thinking about content. The iPad (and it’s sires) are a huge opportunity to continue this trend. To start…

• exploring new ways of grouping content together by users, curators or themes
• personalising the content you see based on what you’re already consumed
• using the way you interact with a touch screen to drive navigation and page flow
• developing richer advertising that’s a part of the experience rather than an intrusion
• recreating for the web content rhythms, mixing short and long form content together

And above all, to design content with confidence.