The blogosphere’s been buzzing with commentary on the latest ‘OMG Twitter!!!’ article, this time a Time cover story - How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live (ignore my cynicism - it’s worth a read). It observes that lovely though the ambient awareness of others’ daily lives that regular status updates afford us are, the more interesting application of Twitter is in the way it can add a second layer of dialogue & bring a wider audience into exchanges which would have previously been closed - delivering a “super fresh” web of real time conversation.

Wired’s Is a Tweet the New Size of a Thought takes this one step further, exploring how these new ways of communicating may actually be changing the ways we conceive and develop thoughts and ideas:

The most important thing about [Twitter] isn’t the messages themselves — most of them are admittedly banal — but the form of the message: 140 characters or fewer

If you want to understand how and why that matters, think about another textual medium — the book. For the last 2,000 years of Western culture, the book has been the ideal, default form of the written word — the organizing shape of thought, the fundamental unit of knowledge — and no one should expect the humble 140-character tweet to take its place. But the invention of the book was world-changing not because it made possible the kinds of extended thoughts that fit that shape … but because it gave them a radically expansive new form, allowing us to mass-distribute, study, catalogue, cross-reference, and otherwise get them out of our heads and into the world in powerful ways not previously imaginable.

And just so, too, by forcing users to commit their thinking to the bite-size form of the public tweet, Twitter may be giving a powerfully productive new life to a hitherto underexploited quantum of thought: The random, fleeting observation.

NYU professor Jay Rosen talks about “mindcasting” - whereby the germ of an idea may be tossed out in a tweet (vs a fully formed blog post or think piece), and then shared, picked up by others, and thus critiqued, reshaped and developed in the process.

Nick Carr’s controversial piece in the Atlantic last year (Is Google Making Us Stupid) argued that our habitual consumption of bite-sized content online is shallower than the more intense and sustained consumption of long-form content from printed books, which in turn has a detrimental effect on our cognitive abilities by diminishing our capacity for concentration and contemplation.

Whether or not Carr turns out to be right remains to be seen - there’s no conclusive proof either way (although a UCLA study found that amongst older adults, web searching actually appeared to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that’s not activated during reading). And we all know that sometimes we need to knuckle down and focus on a task where we need to block out other distractions - where continuous partial attention simply isn’t appropriate, hence shutting down Twitter and avoiding checking email allows us to focus our minds. But by the same token we can also get great mileage out of the nuggets that tools like Twitter allow us to access - then spread, share and reformulate into longer form blog posts and think pieces:

It’s not that tweet-size sparks of insight haven’t always been part of the media ecosystem, in other words. It’s just that Twitter now has given them a vastly more exciting social life.

So amidst all the hype around Bing, I gave it a whirl, to see if it really was all that and a bag of chips. Yes, it’s pretty. And yes, it’s got some nifty little features (although I personally detest the auto-play of videos on rollover - is clicking really that hard?). But few would disagree that Google’s pretty much nailed the issue of effective and efficient search (leaving aside the challenge to its hegemony posed by the likes of Twitter in real-time search). And I can’t see that the most important thing about Bing is the name itself - even if it is a backronym for But It’s Not Google.

Although the exact components of the Google algorithm are notoriously secret, it’s well-known that the number of links to a given site, and the quality of those links, is a core driver of PageRank. Which is great, although the wisdom of crowds isn’t always tremendously wise - it can be gamed and it doesn’t have the intuition to know what you’re after.

Which is the inherent issue with search. You query, it scrapes and brings back the results. Great, but often the real value is in find, rather than search.

As this article in Business Week highlights, we need human filters to find information for us, to add value via recommendation:

The value of most information has collapsed to zero. The only scarce resource is attention.” So how do we figure out where to direct it?

The easiest way is to get tips from friends. They’re our trusted sources. At least a few of them know us better than any algorithm ever could. Little surprise, then, that the companies most eager to command our attention are studying which friends we listen to.

One of my former clients was a well known telecoms enquiry provider, and central to their core proposition was the value of find vs search. But even intelligent search doesn’t have the value of a truly curated find from a trusted source. Google Squared is admittedly seriously bloody impressive. It scrapes the web for “data structures on the web that imply facts”, to structure unstructured data and give you a table of organised results. Companies like Mahalo, and indeed my former telco client, position themselves as providers of human-powered search, whilst Wolfram Alpha describes itself as an answer engine. These are all well and good, but an engine can’t (yet) make truly personalised recommendations the way a likeminded friend can.

Engines like Aardvark are trying to offer personally relevant recommendations - by harnessing your own friends, so it’s essentially a redirection service. Aardvark users add the service to their email or IM buddy list: you can then email or IM it a question, and the engine checks your network of participating friends (and friends-of-friends) to find someone who might be able to answer it. But friends must have signed up with Aardvark to be considered, and they can control whose questions come to them, and when. OK, it’s early days - as of April 2009 they claimed 10,000 users. But at the moment this social search engine is still just a connection service - matching you with someone who’s willing and able to answer your question in real time.

The value of influencers within social networks is huge - hence why the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are investing heavily in teams of sociologists, anthropologists, and microeconomists to better understand who we trust & pay attention to, how and why. But as research from Facebook’s friendship laboratory shows, the most valuable interactions depend on reciprocal relationships:

To rival the power of human find, the killer engine would have to be able to sift through data to find the most relevant results for us, based on its understanding of our likes, preferences and behaviours. And there’s the rub. To do that we need to engage in a reciprocal relationship. The more data and behaviour we share, the better recommendations we’ll get back. But it’s a very different matter to share this level of personal information with companies - who will ultimately look to monetise their offering - than with our friends. We want to have our cake and eat it. We want an engine to understand what we’re after and provide us with exactly what we’re after - but we’re not (yet) comfortable with giving out the information the engine would need to achieve this. It’s an incredibly fine line, but the company who’s able to crack it and truly harness the power of personalised find will really move search to the next level. Within this context, for all its claims to be a groundbreaking ‘decision engine’, doesn’t Bing feel rather more like a gentle hop in the evolution of search, rather than a revolution?

[ via ffffound ]

Dear clients. We know that you’re hearing all about Twitter and it sounds very exciting. It’s great. And you want to get involved. Which can also be great. As long as you think carefully about why you’re using it, how you’re using it, as long as you actively engage in the conversation and don’t use it as a broadcast medium, as long as you dedicate real human resource to it, as long as you’re nice, as long as you think carefully about the implications of partaking in the social space. As long as you understand that you don’t control the conversation. The crowd does.

As Skittles found out:

And as did Starbucks.

They launched a multi-million dollar ad campaign which included posters in six US cities, and attempted to “harness the power of online social networking sites by challenging people to hunt for the posters … and be the first to post a photo of one using Twitter” - with the contest rules stating that participants should use predetermined hashtags.

Mr. Bruzzo said Starbucks’ social media presence gave it an advantage over competitors with gigantic ad budgets because its fans wanted to talk about it online. “It’s the difference between launching with many millions of dollars versus millions of fans.”

Yes. Except that you can’t control what people are going to say about your brand. When you encourage a conversation, you have to be prepared for the fact that you might not like what the other party has to say.

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s documentary about Starbucks’ unfair labour practices debuted the same day as their Twitter campaign. Which he then hijacked, to spread the word about Starbucks’ treatment of its workers.

He encouraged people to “tell Starbucks to stop screwing workers” by taking pictures of themselves holding signs criticising the company’s labour practices, and then tweeting them using the “official’ campaign hashtags. Within hours, dozens of people had taken up the cause - getting the anti-Starbucks video over 30,000 views, a front page mention on Digg, and 10,000 signatures for a petition to urge CEO Howard Schultz to allow workers to unionise. Admittedly not as public nor as widespread a FAIL as Skittles, but nevertheless not great news for Starbucks.

Starbucks forgot - or chose to ignore - the fact that how a company or organisation behaves says just as much about the brand as its marketing activity. Everything communicates. They forgot that social tools are democratic. Designating the hashtags as ‘official’ doesn’t give you ownership of them, and you can’t stop people using them how they please. Social tools give people a voice to have their say - you can’t just issue a set of instructions and expect to control how users behave. It’s not a campaign - it’s a conversation. And you don’t control it.

I’ve joked about the sadly all-too-common ‘e.g. Twitter’ brief - the brief which asks you to consider how the brand should be using social media- ‘e.g. Twitter’. 3 years ago this would have been the ‘e.g. SecondLife’ brief. 2 years ago the ‘e.g. Myspace’ brief. Last year the ‘e.g. Facebook’ brief. This year it’s the ‘e.g. Twitter’ brief. It seems Starbucks got so excited about the idea of using Twitter that they failed to consider that it might not just be fans who would want to join in.

Did Starbucks take the feedback on board and respond to users - either to defend their labour practices, or acknowledge the criticism and explain how they planned to improve things? No. They were caught with their pants down and closed the competition.

Social spaces are transparent and democratic. So not a good space to play in if your organisation is neither of these things.

[ via boing boing ]

Lovely infographics today on Flowing Data looking at the various ways Twitter could develop in the future. There’s a lot of buzz about the potential challenge Twitter poses to Google in the field of real-time search, and the open API has allowed numerous applications to be developed - if this trend continues, how could we be using the service a year from now?

The above graphic (by Brian Solis & Jesse Thomas) shows all the current incarnations of Twitter data while the below (by Steve Rubel) looks to map Twitter’s possible future - click for full size versions. V. nice.

[ via Flowing Data ]

I’m exceptionally late to the party with this one, as it’s a series from 2003-2005 - so apologies if it’s old news to you. But in case you haven’t already seen it, Chris Jordan’s Intolerable Beauty - Portraits of American Mass Consumption is well worth a look:

Cell phones #2, Atlanta 2005

Circuit boards, Atlanta 2004

The strange combination of beauty and horror for me also serves as a potent metaphor for our consumerism. When you stand at a distance, consumerism can look pretty attractive—all the nice shiny cars and houses and clothes and plasma TVs and so on. But when you get up close and look at our overworked dysfunctional families, the waste streams of our products, the wars our greed is fostering, worldwide environmental degradation, toxic metals in the breast milk of Eskimo women, birth defects in the children of the mothers who assemble our electronics in China, then you start to see that our consumer lifestyle is not so pretty. I try to create this effect in my photos, where it looks like one thing from a distance and then up close you realize it is something else.

Also by Chris Jordan and well worth checking out, are his series Running the Numbers (and Running the Numbers II) which are stunningly beautiful visualisations. The first looks at “contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics”, where “each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on”. The second looks at “mass phenomena that occur on a global scale…the number of tuna fished from the world’s oceans every fifteen minutes, for example”.

Barbie Dolls, from the first Running the Numbers series, in 2008, was particularly arresting - it features 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006:

Partial zoom:

Detail at actual print size:

[ full interview about Intolerable Beauty at Orion Magazine ]

….when you pay attention

Spotted at Oval tube yesterday.

Nice piece by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about how underdogs come out on top - by breaking the rules:

Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought.

The first point is pretty straightforward, and very much along the lines of the ‘10,000 hours’ theme in Outliers - that the underdog simply tries harder. Goliath gets lazy and David sneaks up behind him - the hare is beaten by the tortoise.

The second point’s no massive surprise either - Davids often win through guile rather than force - by changing the rules of the game. The status quo works well for the Goliaths - less so for the underdog. So Davids don’t follow the herd. To be a challenger, you have to upset the applecart - it’s all very well trying harder, but you’ll only ever be running uphill unless you start trying to beat the big boys at their own game by playing a different game:

The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analysing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful — in terms of armed might and population — as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time. . . .

What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analysed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win… even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.

It’s not exactly earth shattering news that the underdog has to behave with more wile and cunning than his opponent. But it’s not just simply a case of thinking outside the box. Changing the game takes guts. It’s risky. And having the courage to take risks, and the tenacity to give it your all, still isn’t a guarantee of success. But when doing nothing leads to almost certain defeat, isn’t it better to have tried and failed, than never to have tried?

It’s all very well talking about wanting to be a challenger brand. But to be a successful challenger, rather than one that just talks about it, you have to make some scary choices.

Davids do try harder. Davids are smarter, more nimble, more agile and more sneaky. But most importantly of all, they have a whacking great set of balls.

Sod Apple and Nike (Nike+). This has got to be my favourite brand partnership ever.

Lego teamed up with French optical company Lynx Optique to create these amazing Lego sunglasses that you can customise with your own Lego bricks. Truly playful, personalisable fashion. And it’s got freaking Lego bricks. Think of the possibilities! What’s not to love?

[ courtesy Dvice ]

Update:

I was utterly remiss in also pointing out another of Lego’s fabulous partnerships announced earlier this year. Joining up with Digital Blue, who make electronics for kids, to produce a line of Lego-style digital cameras, video cameras, MP3 players and walkie talkies, was another absolutely inspired union:

So awesome. I want. Lots. But though the gear has got the familiar Lego look and feel, it’s not actually made from Lego bricks, and - as you might expect for off-the-shelf consumer electronics, esp. ones designed for kids - you can’t disassemble them, or easily mod them with your own brick-based magic. As Gizmodo pointed out, wouldn’t it have been great to see a model for big kids with detachable lenses: throw in a brick-mount plastic fisheye and a gimmicky zoom lens and you’ve got yourself a neat little lomo with a Lego twist.

Sorry Lego, for making these little more than Lego-themed, you lose geek points - but undoubtedly exceptionally cool nonetheless.

Having been tagged by the effervescent Mr Eaon Pritchard, to share my own view from the trenches, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Because what better way to procrastinate on a Friday morning than show you a picture of my desk? It’s not quite blogging about kittens, but it’s a slippery slope, let’s face it…

(click on each photo for tagged notes on Flickr if you too are putting off work, and want to procrastinate a little longer)

The trenches themselves. The meta-trenches in fact, because you can see Eaon’s post on my screen. Wooaaaah. Note also my highly sophisticated system for raising my computer to the right height. That and it’s a stash should we run out of printer paper.

The wall next to my desk. Genius from Winnie the Pooh and That Cern Thing Explained G2 cover. Still makes me laugh. Yes I am a massive geek. We know this.

This cupboard is just to the side of my desk. For some reason there’s a cuddly yoda attached to the door. I don’t know why. I like to think he provides sage wisdom to the office using jedi mind tricks.

The print on the wall behind my desk. It’s a big garden maze. With random disembodied hands stuck on in various places waving hello. And the rather pleasing ‘Caution! John Terry‘ yellow sign added for good measure.

OK I’ve shown you mine, now John, Amelia, Sam, Asi and Le’nise, you show me yours… (If you can be arsed joining in, tag it ‘view from the trenches’)