The place was packed with South By’s itinerant freak scene of start-up makers, innovators, journos, digital and new model advertising folk. I was hanging out with Utku from Mint Digital and, in jest, we discussed how awesome it would be if this group could be a country or city-state. This prompted Greg to whoop loudly that we should call it the Kingdom of Awesome and design our own awesomeness flag, and run the whole place using Foursquare. As an aside, I’ve heard a few people recently suggest that the word “awesome” is over. My friends, you misunderstand the meaning of awesome if that’s what you think – but that’s another blog post.

The idea of a Kingdom, Republic or Nation of Awesomeness – depending on your political persuasion – is funny (especially after quantities of booze on a warm evening), but it reminded me of a tweet I’d seen earlier in the day from Jeff Jarvis:

I don’t want to get carried with all this but I think The Kingdom of Awesome is real – real in an allegorical, Utopia sense: a metaphorical ‘State’ of hive-mind.

Looking around the get-together last night it was really exciting to see all these awesome people sharing ideas. Let’s be clear, the true value of this conference may not even be the official talks and panels any more (you can find most of this stuff on Slideshare), but rather the opportunity to meet all the people you’ve been chatting with on Twitter and through your blog over the preceding 12 months. It’s a ‘no-place’ type of place where we can get together and play, and talk in an utterly open way about new ideas, our hopes and fears for the future – and, most importantly, how to make it happen. The Kingdom of Awesome is real – on Twitter, Foursquare and within the blogosphere, and in Austin at SXSW it becomes physically real, like a Virtual World taking over a physical space. I mean, where else can you casually mention you’ve just checked into a limo hot-tub on Foursquare?

Mr Jarvis’ tweet prompted several further iterations of the “SXSW isn’t a conference…” proto-meme that are relevant:

SXSW isn't a conference it's a drum circle and an act of mass deconstruction of outdated thinking

I very much like the idea that The Kingdom of Awesome has a subversive mission, and of how a ‘Notion State’ can smash real world models into pieces.

Sharing, open-ness and radical trust are all behaviours that we, as primates, not only find useful but actually enjoy. The abundance of our current Web makes sharing and disruption – especially amongst us agency-frenemy-geek-collaborateur types not merely possible but utterly inevitable. The Clay Shirky talk I just went to has only served to radicalise me (God, I wish my teenage mind had been able to access thinking like Shirky’s).

A radical sharing of the knowledge – of company IP even – that used to be jealously guarded by the traditional gatekeepers of old media is the awesomesauce of SXSW. In the Kingdom of Awesome, competitive advantage is no longer the result of being secretive. And by the way, that kind of secrecy is simply no longer possible in our connected social world even if you’re dumb enough to think it’s still a good idea. I wonder if the C-suite within big agency groups – the guys who’ve stumped up for their alpha-geeks to come out here – realise that their people are consorting with the enemy and trading the company IP like this? I doubt it. I suspect they’re not quite ready for The Kingdom of Awesome.

It’s been getting increasingly clear on Twitter and blogs that the people working in media and comms who get it have more in common with each other than with the companies that pay their salaries. The perfect storm of 2009 – the worst year ever for the old model, and the best year ever for the new social one – has allowed and encouraged the awesomeists to tunnel out underneath the walls of their fortresses and connect like never before, and they discovered that what they hold in common is stronger than any company mono-culture. SXSW makes this a physical reality. You may feel like an outsider within your own ‘official’ shop, but we’re brothers and sisters in this place. The Kingdom of Awesome is somewhere you won’t feel like an alien, and there are new – and frighteningly efficient – structures and networks where the makers of new models and culture can just get on with it without having to worry about the bollocksy idiots and politics.

The other effect of the social revolution is how it promotes talent with no regard for traditional structures or ideas about seniority, outside of the control of the employer. At some stage, you’ve got to start asking whether we even need agencies any more. In the same way as musicians don’t need labels, and journalists don’t need newspapers – talent in our industries won’t need the traditional agency structure. Just like the secrecy, that idea belongs to the age of scarcity.

This is all exciting stuff, but what about clients and pitches and stuff? Whatever we think, doesn’t it all still come down to a bloody and adversarial deathmatch? Well, yes, for the time being it does. But that’s yet another ridiculous artifact of an age that’s already passed away isn’t it?

Are pitches a sensible way for clients to appoint the right people? No, and everyone knows it. The macho part of me really likes them, in the same way I’m drawn to fighting but know it’s wrong. Pitches are an absurd waste of money and time. We could all use that time and money to solve the client’s problems and create value. I’m not suggesting we do what they did in Belgium btw, I’m just putting this one out there – it seems to get held up as the reason we can’t collaborate more closely and I think that’s bullshit. We’ve got to figure out a way of getting clients to think like this – I don’t think that will be as difficult as we might imagine.

The examples of Frank’s work left me unimpressed. I find them whimsical, disposable and inconsequential. I can see how they would provide some moments of entertainment, but this isn’t what I’m interested in. As I get older, I find myself more and more interested in identifying things that I can safely ignore and getting rid of them for good. My goal is to spend an extremely high percentage of my time on what I would like to call masterpieces.

I realise that this puts me in a minority, but it’s something I’d like to explore here for a little while. Please understand that I’m not opposed to entertainment; it’s just something I’m not interested in. No pejorative judgement is implied if you like entertainment.Simon challenged me to define what I mean by a ‘masterpiece’. I came up with three identifiers:

• A work that will survive for generations to come, and that stands outside the time it was created in
• A work that, without which, one cannot understand the time in which it was created
• A work that we cannot imagine not existing, and without which our world is inconceivable (Hamlet or The Odyssey would be good examples here).

An extremely non-exhaustive list examples of works that I would class as a masterpiece:

• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner
• Symphony No 9 by Gustav Mahler
• Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso
• The Wire by David Simon, et al (somewhat early days on this one)

As I was thinking of these works, a thought occurred to me: is it possible to conceive of a work of this stature being created on and distributed on the the web?

What I mean by this is: not an e-book, or a video, or an existing form; rather, I mean a new form, that could only exist on the web, in the way that, say, Ulysses is only conceivable given the existence of the printing press. A new, durable form that can only exist on the web or a successor technology.

I think durability is the big problem here. I think it’s possible to imagine the great majority of the content of the web simply disappearing in only a few years. I don’t see a technology that would help solve this problem at the moment.

But is there a bigger problem? Is the web itself hostile to the idea of art, to the idea of the masterpiece? We coo with satisfaction at the latest piece of whimsy on the web (one of Frank’s projects, Young Me / Now Me would qualify here), and move on to the next thing. Is it possible to imagine a work that took years to make, that makes a genuine attempt to understand what Kundera has called a ‘human possibility’, rather than something that is designed to entertain us for a few minutes?

I’m not optimistic that it is possible, but I’d love to be wrong.

At this point I should probably caveat this post with the genuine declaration that no-one I work with is an a*shole. I’m pretty lucky in that respect.

Nevertheless, there was talk about the ways in which we can resolve conflict, bring people back on side and generally push the politics to one side to make sure that the project doesn’t suffer. Here are some of the pointers the panel shared with us:

1. Make sure expectations are set with partners at the beginning, and keep it unemotional when discussing falling short of them. Keep communication open and frequent, and if expectations are unclear on either side, sort it out as early as possible. This goes as much for our expectations of our clients as it does for their expectations of us.

2. If people are behaving badly on a project, they’re probably not doing it deliberately. Most likely, they’re  just incompetent. Deal with it and, if possible (e.g. if it’s a third party partnership) try not to partner with them in future.

3. Don’t get into the bullsh*t of competitiveness and brinkmanship with colleagues - trust your work, stay cool, take the higher road. You’re not at school anymore, and no-one’s going to give you a medal for winning the playground brawl.

4. Turn the spotlight onto them: “If you were in my situation, how would you handle this? What would you do?” – make the bastard stand in your shoes. Seeing the other person’s point of view and asking for their suggestions can help find a solution.

5. Don’t be susceptible to bad vibes. As one of the panellists told his son: “Sad people like to make other people sad.” Or as we say in the UK, “Don’t let the buggers get you down…”

6. TIPS: Timely, Impact, Private, Specific

If someone’s being a bastard, follow ‘TIPS’. Deal with the issue in a timely manner; share the impact of what that person’s bastardly behaviour is having on the business (effect on the bottom line, negative influence on morale); speak privately with the bastard – don’t publicly humiliate them; be specific about the issue.

7. Be gracious, respectful and rise above the rudeness. One of the panellists had a great story about her time at Halliburton as General Counsel – she happens to be black. So, she was due to have a meeting with a group of people she’d never met and one of the guys in the meeting, assuming as a black woman that she must be in the service industry, asked her to get him a coffee. Without demur, she went and got him one, got herself one and then sat down at the meeting. He looked at her with incredulity – what the hell was this server doing sitting down?

Then the Chair walked in and suggested everyone introduce themselves. The ’server’ started by explaining that she was there as General Counsel to lend legal advice. The guy blushed crimson. She winked at him; that was all. He knew what he’d done, and that was shame enough. He’s now one of her greatest supporters and they have a good working relationship, all because she didn’t call him out. Smart.

8. Unless you’re in the military or prison service, remember that you can always walk away if it’s not working. This one really resonates with me. At Made by Many, we talk a lot about what makes for a successful project and are very careful about the jobs that we select. Our key criteria are: will we have fun doing it? will it make us famous/win an award? will it make us rich? will we learn in the process?

If a project doesn’t satisfy at least two, and preferably three or all of these criteria, then we don’t take the job.

One of the biggest keys to a successful project in our business is choosing the right kind of client. And as the panel said, if you make a bad choice and discover down the line that it’s just not working: have the courage to walk away. Otherwise, it drags everyone down, the project suffers and the end product is mediocre. No one’s happy.

Don’t be afraid to break up with them: “It’s not you, it’s me…It’s just not working anymore. We can still be friends. I just don’t feel that way about you anymore.” Sorry, getting a bit carried away with the therapy there. I blame the US capacity for ’sharing’, it’s rubbing off on me here in Austin.

The Chair said he’d buy everyone a beer if the panel didn’t come up with 8 ways to deal with a bastard. They just made it – lucky for him – there must’ve been 1500 people in the room. That’s a lot of Lone Star.

The reaction to our Twitter home page take over has been overwhelmingly positive. Thanks everyone for their feedback and comments. It was really fun working on it and seeing it in use in real time has sparked off lots of ideas about how we could use something similar as our permanent home page once we’re back home. Somehow we need to find a way of showing our social presence and network on the web, whilst combining the conversations around us.

My favourite tweet about our home page?

Ah, our avatars. Always a source of amusement (or horror) when a new set arrive from our amazing illustrator (Paul Davis). I’ve always felt that their style reflects the Made by Many way – sketching and creating things being a big part of who we are and how we work. However, to clarify, in real life none of us have fascinating skin conditions (@saradotdub), badger strips down out forehead (@bobbyc) or bolts sticking out of our neck (@malbonster).

The SXSW experience

After registration at 11 yesterday I spent the entire day with a goodie bag slung over my shoulder, just like many attendee. I think the first thing we all did was sit down and throw stuff away:

After getting rid of so much junk I was still left with a heavy bag of newspapers and directories to carry around. If we come next year I won’t bother picking up the bag at all – it’s just a hodge podge of sponsor messages that no one is interested in. Straight into the recycling bin. I just wish they hadn’t bothered to print it in the first place.

Sitting in a talk

Watching the rest of the conference crowd in a session is fascinating. We’re all geek boys, so everyone has an iPhone and/or a laptop. This constant connection to the digital world has taken over – no one sits and just listens. Everyone is tweeting, blogging, checking which session they’re going to next, checking which sessions they’re missing out on right now.

It must be a slightly threatening and interesting measure of engagement. No one was truly paying attention to me talking, but I did get a shed load of tweets!

Post match shake down

It sounds from much of Made by Many that we went to quite a varied mix of talks yesterday. Some good, some not so much… However, even the talks that didn’t hit it off became the start of a very interesting debate afterwards. Over a drink of course, this is Austin after all.

The “Passion vs Process” debate was particularly interesting. Some of the MxMers who went were a tad scathing:

The main crux seemed to be that people should focus their careers on their passion. However, no lee way was given for your skill level. Just because you’re passionate about something doesn’t mean that you’re any good at it. (And that certainly isn’t going to bring you happiness!)

This turned into an interesting post match talk about what passions some of us had followed and whether they had worked out or not. For example, one of the MxMers once went to a virtually deserted island to write a novel for 6 months. Others had started off their college years being amazing at sports, to a near pro level, but knew their passion, whilst strong, wasn’t enough to get them through to the final yard line.

At this point the conversation became a wider discussion about skill. Most fascinating of all was hearing @shanerichmond (first passion: music journalism, now the brilliant technology editor of the Daily Telegraph) talking about writer’s block. For him as a journalist it’s rarely an issue – if you’re writing a news story you have facts to report, if you’re writing an comment piece you have your opinion. You never ever start off with a blank page.

As a designer it struck me that at Made by Many we never start off with a blank page either. The way we work and our processes are nearly always intended to lay layer upon layer upon our ideas. That traditional moment of a designer firing up Photoshop for the first time on a project, sitting behind a white screen of empty pixels searching for something to start with rarely happens at MxM. By that stage in the project we have sketches and prototypes to work with. You have the information and service design in your hands – a framework (or in Shane’s case the facts or opinions) to work with.

Not so much a revelation, but fascinating to view our process from the perspective of another profession.

It was good to see a debate between two people who genuinely disagree by 180º on how the future of TV will pan out, even if some of the argument was basically dick-swinging.

Cuban believes that the future of TV is basically the same as the present: subscription services over cable or satellite, with a light dash of so-called ‘Interactive TV’. Rosen believes, as I do, that the future of TV is on the web. To be clear: everyone sane accepts that we will continue to have a dedicated large screen in our houses on which we watch video. I just don’t believe that broadcast TV has a future that looks anything like the present, if it has one at all.

My overwhelming experience of TV, and I suspect that of many others too, is that there is rarely anything on that I want to watch. I don’t subscribe to a cable or satellite service in the UK precisely because of this problem. I don’t see the value in spending the sort of money required in order to watch the few shows that I do want to watch. I also know where the off button is; I have plenty of other things I like doing in my spare time even more than I like watching TV. If there’s nothing on, I’ll just do something else.

But if they had a pay as you go plan, with small fees for each show watched, I’d be using such a service today, and giving them substantially more than the zero pounds that I currently do.

Cuban said that “there is no business model” for using the internet to supply video. He’s a hyperbolic kind of guy, so I guess he really meant “there’s not an equivalent good business model right now”, because there are certainly people making money out of streaming live sports events in HD over the web. Perhaps the best example is the NFL with their GamePass service. Of course, in order to protect the existing business model, the NFL has to hobble the new one, so GamePass isn’t available in the US. That is bound to change eventually, because it’s what fans want. It’s trivially easy to figure out how to circumvent GamePass’s IP detection so that you can use it in the US, just as we Europeans use open US proxies to watch Hulu.

The truth is that Cuban wants things to stay the way they are because that’s how he makes money right now. It might be more difficult for him to make as much money out of the same content through a more open system, such as the web. But that doesn’t mean that the demand for such services isn’t there. And demand will flush out the services.

As with wealthy musicians, programme makers have grown fat on the current model, and do not look at the problem from the user’s perspective. As a consumer of TV content, I couldn’t care less about the business model, so long as content I like gets produced. I just want to be able to consume content conveniently. I don’t want the price or availability artificially manipulated. I just want a device on which I choose what I watch and when.

Cuban doesn’t want what his customers want, and that should be setting off alarm bells in his mind. Because when Google makes an internet-enabled TV and cuts deals that are initially loss-making, but designed to bust up the industry, the old model will be in tatters and the cable companies will be screwed.

Think about it: Google has search to help you find shows, it has a video platform in the shape of YouTube, it has micro-payment infrastructure, and if it woke up and forgot about Buzz, it has social recommendation there too with Twitter. And there’s also Google’s main business: advertising.

These are just the things that are available today, with no specific design for delivering the kinds of services we’re talking about. It’s possible to conceive of dozens of ways that all of these things could be made perfectly suited to watching video content from your couch.

Cuban repeatedly argued that the problem was that the infrastructure wasn’t available today, which was perverse in a session about the future. Obviously broadband take-up and bandwidth need to improve. But does anyone believe for a second that this won’t happen? Unless he thinks that the internet is technically incapable of ever delivering streaming HD video at the scale required (which is nuts), then he has to believe that if anyone can scale up to supply such services, it’s Google.

Now imagine an Android powered TV, with Twitter apps, Facebook, games and everything else available. Consider an Android tablet that functions as a second-screen, both remote control for the TV, and a way of accessing the back channel while watching the show. Consider an ad-supported version and an ad-free version. Advertisers would be able to use the same platform for web advertising and TV advertising, and users would be able to choose how to pay: with their attention (ads) or by micro-payment.

This is only one of the many ways that the web could eat the cable companies’ business whole.

I think the cable companies have five years, at an absolute maximum, to invent the next business model. If they don’t, and try to cling to the current one, they’re done. And, like so many now obsolete business models, it’ll be good riddance.

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.

Let’s take a look under the bonnet…

ReadyforTen.com is partially built out of Twitter, but in a highly controlled way. Twitter is fast becoming the most powerful discovery tool on the Web. When you subscribe to a bunch of people’s tweets, you’re subscribing to all of the sites they discover. By following lots of people who are good at discovering great stuff online, you can save yourself a lot of time. In our case, we saw that although most mums of 6-9 year olds in the UK aren’t currently using Twitter, the leading mummy bloggers and social networkers are — and so we could use Twitter to aggregate value from all those pots into one pot: it’s about bringing the best of the Web for mums of 6-9 year olds instead of expecting them to spend hours visiting loads of different sites to collect. It’s the ‘come to me Web’.

This approach was based on an insight gained very early on in the project from a group of mums who tested our initial thinking. What we heard from them is that they don’t have very much time, perhaps even less time than the parents of younger or older kids. They go online, but sometimes they don’t get much further than checking their email (the reason we’re offering an email digest, by the way). For those parents who get past checking email, we wanted to make it as quick and easy as possible to find this stuff.

The information gap for parents of 6-9 year olds

Finding stuff quickly and easily was particularly important in this case because the 6-9 age group represents something of a ‘gap’. There are tons of sites and blogs dedicated to babies, as you’d expect, because that’s the scariest period of time when your information and support needs are the most acute. There are also many dedicated resources on older kids, as well as in categories such as education. But what seemed to be missing was a dedicated site about 6-9 year olds. What I’ve just said does not mean that there isn’t a ton of useful content for this group, just that it’s dispersed within sites like NetMums, ParentDish, iVillage and so on. This poses a particular challenge to the time-poor consumers of this content, and the aggregation idea seemed to work well as a solution to this challenge.

Twitter and the Ready for Ten conversation

It’s important to say that while Twitter is a big part of the site, we knew it was important that the parents who use it shouldn’t even have to know Twitter exists to get the value from this approach. We expect lots more mums to join Twitter in the future but we know that a relatively small percentage of all parents of kids in this age group would have a Twitter account. But some do, and for these parents there’s the option of connecting their account and joining the conversation on a more significant level, as the site then publishes their interactions with Ready for Ten into those parents’ own Twitter feeds as well. This is great for propagating the site but also means that you don’t even have to come to Ready for Ten to benefit from it. It’s a great way of using Twitter to reach the right mums and dads through their own networks. And of course, Twitter works really well on a mobile (we know most mums are never without their phones).

Each of our bloggers is also a tweeter, and we augment their aggregated feed — the Ready for Ten Twitter stream — with tweetage from ‘trusted partners’. Our bloggers are also curating the best links and tweets from the rest of the web, so the Twitter aspect is largely self-moderating (although we obviously built moderation workflow into everything anyway. With this model, we avoid getting Skittled!).

As with every real-time conversation, feedback is crucial. We’ve invited Ready for Ten readers to feed back via comment, Twitter or a feedback link. We are keen to develop the site in line with what its users want and expect, and we’re hoping that the conversational tone we have set in its design and functionality will encourage this to happen. We also really want to know what our community of creative peers thinks about this project. Has anyone done anything like this? What do you think of an FMCG taking this on? How would you develop it further?

I had a short talk to give last week at ‘What’s on your iPad”, a well-attended event organised by the British Society of Magazine Editors and the Editorial Design Organisation. I adopted the role of sceptic and these were my questions.

What sparked them off was a couple of conversations with @bobbyc and @malbonster against the background of a loud hum of optimistic speculation buzzing up from the magazine industry on both sides of the Atlantic. You can see it here, at Conde Nast, busy iPadding up with Wired and GQ; here, with Sports Illustrated (you’re not allowed to watch the swimwear section**); and here’s Interview on iPad, a magazine of pages on a screen (see four below from the iPhone app), with a little video thrown in.

It’s like going back to 1990 in the days of the CD ROM and the ‘electronic magazine’.  So what is it about the iPad that sets editorial lips aquiver?

I think there’s five key things:

- Top of the list is People Will Pay. Iphone apps have demonstrated that in a special environment (on the move or within an application) people will pay for a better experience

- Advertising: it looks good!

- The form factor: it’s handheld, relaxed, lends itself to consumption as much as production

- There’s a hugely rich design potential: nothing points up the poverty of point and click internet browsers (thank you Microsoft) like iPad or iPhone apps. Take a look here, for example:  at some interesting experiments by Bonnier R&D and BERG into the promise of the haptic interface.

- And last but not least, you can create a complete and self-contained experience in an application: no distracting links taking you elsewhere and lots of control over visual and behavioural aspects of the interface and the path taken through it.

It all sounds a lot like a magazine, doesn’t it? Sit back, turn the pages and read. Just as we thought we were entering a web of data, of synchronised, personalised content shooting freely around through APIs, along comes the self-contained application; and just as we thought we were moving from mass media to social media, making and treading our own path, along comes Interview as a linear, editorially driven page-by-page experience on my iPad (with a couple of token sharing features chucked in).

And if this is an experience for sharing, how are we going to share? Must we all have an iPad to share the iPad experience of Wired or Sports Illustrated? The answer has to be yes, unless we share through proxy URL schemas pointing to poor-cousin web pages (have you tried to tweet articles from the Guardian iphone app? Impossible). The iPad’s cheap, but it’s also very proprietary.

Must we all have an iPad to share the iPad experience of Wired or Sports Illustrated? The answer has to be yes

I feel like I’ve got to make a public affirmation now: The iPad’s going to transform many people’s experience of computers and extend the reach of digital into homes its never been before; it will restore high design qualities and condemn web browsers to obsolescence (or push them forward into innovation).

But it also might spin us backwards into a web of pages, paid content and idle, private consumption. There’s proof already that this will be at least the temporary effect (one step back, then two steps forwards?) quickening the momentum of existing trends such as Rupert Murdoch’s pay wall construction programme (fellow speaker Jon Hill, design editor of The Times couldn’t show his site’s re-design, frustratingly, because it’s in pre-launch purdah and after launch we’ll have to pay – although he did show some sumptuous dataviz).

I see in these publishers’ videos a position of denial.  They believe you can pour a magazine (and its business model) straight and unadulterated into a new medium that works in an entirely different way. The threats and opportunities magazine publishing faces are more profound than this approach addresses and the response must be equally profound, more innovative. At BSME/EDO I showed four examples of editorial innovation that looked forward instead of back and didn’t rely on an iPad as the killer app.

The first was Burberry’s artofthetrench.com, which I put up for any number of reasons. First, it disintermediates publishers: it comes not from a traditional fashion publisher but a luxury brand that once had no choice but to advertise in glossy magazines. Now Burberry talks directly to its audience. The budget that went on AOTT would not long ago have gone into double page spreads in Vogue or Harpers’ Bazaar (and Burberry, by the way, spent nothing on paid media to market this site, but pulled in 330,000 visitors from 191 countries in the eight weeks after launch). Unlike Interview or Wired on the iPad, Artofthetrench.com is a collaboration between Burberry, professional bloggers and photographers and – most importantly – its customers too. The audience, as event chairperson Juliet Warkentin pointed out, is prepared to take the huge trouble to be styled and photographed and upload their picture for consideration to be included in the site – it’s an incredibly intimate form of engagement. And thirdly, artofthetrench is not a pile of pages, it’s a grand array of images that can be filtered and blown up and commented on and shared. Not a magazine, but packed full of both inspiration and community.

Next was Quatro Rodas, like artofthetrench.com a genuine example of brand innovation but this time coming in the opposite direction – from a magazine publisher. Quatro Rodas (four wheels – not a Made by Many project) is a car monthly published by leading Brazilian publisher, Abril. The magazine’s very profitable, and Abril had its’ best ever year for print magazines in 2009, with credit crunch effects more than compensated by a soaring literacy rate and a growing middle class – but Abril is also a very smart company and thinks differently. A major piece of income derives not from the print mag, but from the annual Quatro Rodas Experience when Abril takes over the Interlagos racing circuit in Sao Paulo for a whole week, invites all the manufacturers to bring their cars, which the Paulistas pay handsomely to test drive around the track. Car sales rise up to 20% in the month after.

If print magazines have a future it must be like this, as the spearhead of a wider brand adventure with new business models that don’t necessarily rely on either advertising or paid circulation. This is a model embodied in Made by Many’s work for Five and the creation of the Five FWD brand, which was the third example I showed (disclaimer: our original 2008 design has been somewhat adulterated).

Five.tv/fwd is a web channel that gathers together Five’s male-skewed technology shows such as The Gadget Show and Fifth Gear. The site connects up the television experience with a bingeworthy library of shortform video, product reviews, viewers’/users’ opinions and ultimately with shopping. FWD moves from ‘magazine’ as product to magazine as service. It’s a collaboration between the TV channel, the production company North One, the Republic editorial company providing reviews, a picture library and a shopping price feed and – critically – the audience, who comment on and rate products and say what they own and want. It’s their interactions that generate the most valuable and interesting data on products.

Five.tv/fwd combines inspiration and community with utility. These three essential properties don’t necessarily have to involve a big budget affair with the huge kinds of visitor traffic that TV can drive to the web. Oolamoola, my fourth example, has a tiny budget and targets a hyperniche. We launched Oolamoola with Hearst last year in the depths of the crunch and well under the radar. It’s a small experiment, no more than a massively hacked Wordpress blog, with a part time editorial team being set challenges by the readership to live as well as they did before the credit crisis, on less money.

This is one approach magazine publishers should be taking, trying out new brands, extending old brands, seeing how they work together, discovering what works well on the web that might not work in print, experimenting with new business models, collaborating with partner companies with different skills and assets, engaging closely with their audience (like the week Grazia produced itself form Westfield) and creating collaborative, creative toolsets that generate useful content and valuable data. It’s not easy because it takes a new set of skills, a new culture and a different more agile attitude to development. That’s a world away from pouring pages into iPads, but it looks like we’re all going to have live with that for a while. Welcome back the electronic magazine, hello 1989.

** There is one really cool piece in the Sports Illustrated video, but it’s an afterthought at 2 mins 43 secs., near the end.

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?