[which was held at PWC's office in new York, because they couldn't secure space from an advertising agency, which made me sad - shame on us]
and before it I gave this microinterview, which I've just seen has been posted.
So here it is. It's my first ever vlog post. Exciting!
[Disclaimer - the first bit is no longer true as I no longer do that job. I guess it was true then, but you get what I mean].
In it I say a bunch of things that I hope you will find briefly interesting, including how exciting gestural interfaces are, what awesome things banners could become and how everything should be a bit more like a game.
Then I say that I think technology should be considered a medium, because I think it should - it's what we do with it that makes it awesome, not what it is.
As SouthBySouthWest approaches, promising tantalizing glimpses of what will be cool in technology and music many months from now and the possibility that the next twitter or foursquare will be launched, probably via twitter and foursquare, my thoughts turn to the real reason people fly thousands of miles to Texas: beer with friends, old and new.
As he did last year, Andy has taken the ethos of Beersphere and run with it, leaving me only to say: yes please let's do that!
I met some very good friends at South By BeerSphere last year, I can only hope to see some and meet a few more this year.
UPDATE: Beersphere has joined forces with TownHoller: the meeting of mayors foursquare pub crawl - which will now begin at BeerSphere and then start it's wayward way around Austin at 6pm.
Thanks to Heather I came across this video on twitter, and goodness does it make me happy.
I'm putting together some words at the moment, in some longer format about what TIGS is all about - how culture is inherently recombinant and iterative: it builds endlessly on and from what came before, creating novelty in new combinations. How the most awesome stuff comes from the broadest set of sources and inspiration.
Fundamentally, I do not believe creativity can come from nothing. In fact, I don't even think 'originality' can even mean that.
If something truly had no referent elsewhere in culture - how would we even understand it?
Everything is inspired, everything comes from somewhere - it may not directly quote, or reference, but everything is recombinant at some level.
[First few mins of audio are bad but it gets better]
On Monday, thanks to a nice chap called Tim, I'm heading to Minneapolis to speak at series of things called Conversations About The Future of Advertising [or CATFOA].
It's lovely to be asked, especially due to the illustriousness [yep, that's a word] of the other speakers on the course: Edward Boches, Hashem Bajwa, Colleen DeCourcy are all pretty awesome thinkdoers.
I get asked about this sort of thing a lot because, well, I write about it a lot, and as an industry, and a species, we are obsessed with the future.
And we so we should be.
If you'll indulge me [and I know you will] let me quote at you from that thesis I wrote about the future of brands, a few years back:
Prospection: the act of looking forwards in time, is a quintessentially human endeavour.
In fact, some even consider it the quintessential human endeavour:
“The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.”
Daniel Dennett has noted that “the fundamental purpose of brains is to produce future...brains are, in essence, anticipation machines.”
We spend much of our time projecting ourselves forward, and we do this to motivate ourselves to reach towards our desired future, using the lens of that future as a way to understand what we should be doing now.
As Alan Kay said, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. We can motivate our- selves by imagining less pleasant to- morrows, of eroding relevance and margins, and thus engage in prudent, prophylactic behaviour.
We are usually wrong, as I've pointed out before, due to the biases of presentism that prevent us from predicting anything actually novel, but that doesn't mean we should think about it and try to work out what our role in it is, and how to get there.
And in fact, predicting what I'm going to say is the assignment Tim has given to his class.
A nice person sent me some copies of MILK - a new "pre-digital concept printed thing", that might well have been considered a magazine, at least until recently, and is now probably a transmedia format [you can also read it online].
I punted in some thoughts about post-digital type thinking and Foursquare and that.
It's a lovely little thing of inspiration and culture.
One piece I especially enjoyed was an interview with Adam Morgan.
Adam wrote Eat the Big Fish and pretty much invented the notion of challenger brands - although he claims that the book didn't invent anything, it just made the techniques of creative thinkers "visible to everyone in te same way at the same time".
I had the pleasure of MEETing Adam Morgan on a barge a few years back.
He gave a brilliant seemingly unscripted talk without slides [which I always find impressive] and he is very, very smart.
Eat the Big Fish is getting a second edition, looking at some of the changes in his thinking of the last ten years since it was written, and one areas he is looking to explore is "opportunity".
"Do you know who invented the Cheeseburger?" asks Morgan. It was JWT in the 1930s, on behalf of Kraft slices who wanted to encourage the American population to increase their consumption of cheese slices.
JWT suggested that they attach them as an ingredient to the most popular meal in America - the hamburger. They created something out of nothing."
I love this story - the idea that an agency helped create a new usage occasion, a new reason to buy a product, and forever changed American culture - just by taking two existing things and putting them together.
Another reason I love this story is that it's almost certainly not true.
As far as Wikipedia knows, the Cheeseburger was invented in 1924 by a 16 year old fry cook called Lionel Sternberger [what are the odds?] at a sandwich shop in Pasadena, California.
I very much doubt that this was the first time anyone added cheese to a burger, but it's the first recorded, [and as we know nothing is real until it has been recorded] and it certainly predates the 1930s.
Assuming the Kraft/JWT story is at all true - I can find no evidence online, but that's not conclusive either way - what's way more likely is that some inspiring young Mad Man saw, heard or indeed ate a cheeseburger, stole the idea, and then, perhaps, the agency and the brand helped it spread.
I shall be talking about some of the things I've been thinking about recently to do with the effect of what we call technology on the advertising industry, and the larger media ecosystem it lives in.
I've been lucky enough to be asked to speak at various universities over the last few years, from the University of Westminster in the UK, to MIT, USC and CCNY over here.
It's always really interesting for me since normally I talk to advertising and marketing people about this kind of thing, but I'm usually stealing chunks of excellent academic thinking, some of which is [hopefully] new to the audience.
Whereas with a student audience, the academic stuff is usually more familiar, but the real-life advertising stuff is less familiar.
And it's that mix of things you are familiar with and things that you aren't, things both establish and then disrupt expectations, that is one of the awesome features of recombinance.
In some ways, this line of thought is itself a function of a false opposition that we set up in reference to education systems - the division between 'academic' and 'vocational' learning.
I think there is another interesting distinction to be made that works perhaps along the same lines.
Let's say that there are only two kinds of learning.
Learning things [putting entries into a database] and learning skills or toolsets, that can be applied to different things - installing different pieces of software.
I've always been in love with trivia and enjoyed looking for similarities across broad reference sets - since I don't follow sports it's probably one of my more masculine qualities. But the corpus of knowledge has long since extended beyond the means of any mind to retain.
1. Gestures Gestural interfaces are the future of human computer interaction, at least until we find a way to connect something straight into your brain. Despite the excitement the first multi-touchscreens triggered and the seeming ubiquity of the iPhone touchscreen paradigm it spawned, little has been made of their potential. Things like FluidTunes – an app which lets you control iTunes by waving your hand in front of the built-in webcam – and interactive installations triggered by similar motion detection both show new ways to interact with content, experiences and brands.
As with Fluidtunes, you control the content by waving your hand in front of your webcam - you can also pinch to zoom in and out of photos, analogously to how the touchscreen works on some of the Nikon cameras.
In a smart piece of distributed functionality, the image interface was exported via a bookmarklet that you can use it on other photo sites.
So, instead of installing a viewer like CoolIris, the bookmarklet pulls the images back into the Nikon site so you can use the functionality there.
As we continue to embrace gestural interfaces, and webcam penetration continues to increase [careful when googling for that stat...], expect to see lots more of this sort of thing, and people all over the country waving their hands at their laptops.
In a former life, I worked with Google in Australia [on the local and maps launch], in London [on the search/brand story] and in New York [on the firstChrome launch].
Across those clients and continents, once thing remained absolutely constant in all the recommendations and discussion: Google doesn't advertise.
OK, so even back in 06, Google had already dipped its toe with super-smart recruitment ads and was beginning to realise that it was going to have to promote some of its huge array of products somehow, especially in categories that are strategically vital, like local search and browsers, for ushering in Google's vision of a ubiquitous internet, always on and for all, that it can serve, and serve ads to.
But we always agreed, as Larry and Sergey said in the SEC filing, that Google was not a regular company, and had no intention of starting to act like one.
So seeing the Google Superbowl spot for search, a category where 100million dollars has bought Bing about 2 point of marketshare, left me a little puzzled, charming and Googley as the treatment was.
[Although it did remind me of the search stories that were re-constructed from the leaked AOL search data, which were a bit more ominous.]
[One of the most important things you learn working at, or with, Google, is what is, and isn't Googley. Long term Googlers just know. It becomes instinctual, because Google is a company that understands that a brand is a behavioral template for every person that works there.]
[A Google engineer once said to me in Australia: aren't all ads spam? - which is what led to this article - because I steal.]
[an inversion that I think is probably the right way to think about what we do]
and that the proof of any new platform requires big brand case studies and support, and that having your own is always useful when talking to agencies....
And in fact they have already said they are running Chrome spots across their TV AD network as a LIVE CASE STUDY OF HOW THESE THINGS WORK TOGETHER...because you can use insight from online deployment to better plan the TV, as I've been saying for years, because the internet gives you real data, not nonsense from pre-testing focus groups:
Using some of the results from our placement-targeted ads on the Google Content Network, we designed a Google TV Ads campaign which we hope will raise awareness of our browser, and also help us better understand how television can supplement our other online media campaigns.
and then I thought that maybe this Superbowl TV spot wasn't really advertising search at all.
I've literally just left the salubrious agency environs of JWT NYC where I was chatting with some lovely people about crowdsourcing [see the post below for the illustrious people I got to sit with] for the edification of a larger group of lovely people, and the video of it is already online by the time I get back to my desk.
So, like, the event kind of gets distributed across time and space.
Well, not backwards in time, but you get what I mean.
Enjoy.
ADDENDUM:
[I was just watching a bit of this - because I'm really vain and that - and it reminded me that I repeatedly rail against the idea that crowds are inherently wise, and therefore crowdsourcing is awesome.
As I say up there in video form, I think the fact that Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing and James Surowieki's book The Wisdom of Crowds came out around the same time iun 2004 caused some kind of associative conflation, where by crowds are wise, so if you source crowds, that's wise.
Or something.
Despite my brilliant dismantling of this fallacious idea -
[pointing out that in the book crowds are only wise in VERY SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES, usually guessing numeric means, when the crowd can't communicate with itself to cause information cascades, and mostly for guessing the weight of bulls.
Or something.]
- it kept coming back up, not just because no one was listening to me but because it's that kind of idea, one that is ripe for misuse.
It's not that I don't think crowdsourcing can be awesome - of course it can, whatever it actually is, - but the logic flow crowds=wise therfore crowdsourcing = awesome is nonsense.
No one is smarter than everyone, that's definitely true.
[although we really need everyone to CATCH UP and show Steve Jobs that this is true]
But as Agent K in Men In Black says:
A person is smart, people are stupid.
[Also see your high school essay entitled The Role of the Mob in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for more on this idea]
There isn't something intrinsically BETTER about leveraging crowds - like everything it depends on what you are trying to do and other context.
But, if being inclusive, or engagement, or advocacy or other stuff like that is part of what you are trying to achieve, then there is something intrinsically better about crowdsourcing is, because then the process is also the product.
Research done with 1 million Facebook fans is marketing.
As you may already know, it is now officially SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK - so there are lots of interesting events to check out and parties to go to in various different cities.
I sit on the advisory board of SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK in NYC but I've been a bit useless at helping out this time around.
However, I have promised to be on a panel tomorrow morning - and it STARTS at 9am.
[Although I didn't realize that when I agreed to it.]
Regardless, I shall be there bright, early and caffeinated to discuss Crowdsourcing with some truly brilliant people who all know more about this stuff than I do.
The very awesome and lovely John Winsor [CEO of Victors&Spoils] is moderating:
Ty Montague, Co-President and Chief Creative Officer, JWT
North America
Michael Lebowitz, Founder and CEO, Big Spaceship
Saneel
Radia, SVP, Alchemist at Denuo
[and me]
I shall attempt not to embarrass myself more than necessary.
You know how I was saying that social media stuff is easier when you do other stuff as well - because then you have content and others things to talk about and that?
On Sunday some fine people [and I] walked blindfolded from Union Square to Times Square.
So, with a flurry of excited chirrups, pings and liveblogging, the iNet has heralded the launch of the iPad [and iBooks and everything] with equal amounts of awe, confusion and ridicule - ever the attitudinal breakdown of the geeky [especially when it comes to the name - it seems feminine hygiene products still elicit a titter on twitter].
Recently, partially due to tablets [digital not prescription] and partially due to conversations with @KathySierra over twitter and various people in the book industry IRL, I've been thinking a lot about content and media and that.
[OK, so I think about that kind of thing a lot anyway, but more so.]
For a long time now I've been talking about the medium NOT being the message.
With all due to respect to McLuhan of course - because it's never entirely clear what he means - but he was I think suggesting that the characteristics of the medium both delineate the nature of the content [but that we tend to not see the medium's delineating effect because we focus on the content] and that the cultural effect of the medium is distinct and larger than the the effect of the content.
All of which makes sense. I think.
Think about what we call advertising.
Its primary form is essentially an historical accident - the nature of what we call advertisements was delineated by the nature and relative scarcity of the transmission vectors.
To whit: we put films on television, and airtime costs money, so we buy it in 30 seconds chunks, and call those advertisements.
[But, as Jim Carrol from BBH has endlessly pointed out, advertising comes from advetere: to draw attention to [literally to turn towards] - so advertising should really be considered to be anything which draws attention to a company. We have tended to conflate the expressions with the intention. Possibly.]
Up until recently however, what we called media were themselves assemblages of a number of different things.
[McLuhan had an extended definition of medium - he included light bulbs - but the point will hold for the primary 'media']
So 'television' isn't actually a clearly defined thing as such - it's a socio-cultural construct of at least two things: content and a distribution platform - the medium.
Books, magazines, radio all work the same way. A 'book' is a bunch of words printed on paper, with a certain set of culturally defined ideas that float around it.
Up until digitalness, you couldn't separate the content from the distribution platform.
But digital 'content' can be unbundled from its distribution platform.
And the iPad made me realise that it's not just distribution and content - there is a third piece: the consumption platform.
When IBM started talking about the brave new 'world of platform agnostic content and the fluid mobility of media experiences' in 2006, we weren't really there yet.
Language, as usual, helps us see where changes are occuring.
When you are watching 30Rock on Netflix via your Xbox360, or on Hulu, on a laptop, or screen, or projector, or iPad - are you watching television?
If so - why? If not - why not?
When you are reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on your Kindle [or iPad] - are you reading a book?
If so - why? If not - why not?
What about books like Pride and Prejudice? Because they are no longer under copyright, they are free on the Kindle. Previously you would pay for the consumption vehicle, now you don't need to.
A Kindle is clearly not a book, and yet it is all books, kind of.
The words don't quite fit properly anymore - because they are bundled constructs.
You have the distribution platform - in pre-digital media these were closed networks: book distributors, magazine distributors, cables, satellites, mobile phone networks.
With digitalness you just need an IP network that you can access anywhere.
Then you have content.
Digital content can take any form: text, audio, video, experience, game and so on.
Then you have consumption platforms: screens basically. Lots of different kinds of screens, that are good in different contexts.
Previously you had 'computers' that were bundled devices for content consumption and creation [and communication and spreadsheets and stuff] - but the iPad seems like it is focused primarily on being a content consumption device for the time being.
[Although the touchscreen only iPad Keynote does sound interesting, from a very personal point of view]
And you have emerging economic ecosystems that plug these things together: things like iTunes and iBooks and app stores and that.
[And yes they are walled gardens, just like when phone networks started doing content for mobiles, because that's how you make the most money from new platforms, manufacturing scarcity and exclusivity - but they will hopefully all become more webby eventually, assuming Google gets its way.]
Returning for a second to the iPad - it's been much discussed as the saviour of PRINT [although of course that word doesn't make sense in a digital context].
But how is an enewspaper any different from a news website, on an iPad? In fact, what do these distinctions even mean in an unbundled media world?
You have text, sounds, images, moving images, interactive experiences, and blends of all these.
What constitutes an unbundled newsPAPER, magazine, tv channel?
Content> distribtution> consumption - the new 'unbundled' mediascape is emerging.
When [some of] the world bifurcated around a line, those that came on found a new social space to create themselves anew.
A division was articifically introduced, because one of the inital effects of computer mediated interaction was the draw of anonymity or the appeal of being someone else, leveraging the space between who you were IRL and your forum handle.
Initially, it was assumed that anonymity was a fundamental aspect of Computer Mediated Communication:
The issue of anonymity is often privileged in CMC scholarship (e.g.,
Etzioni & Etzioni, 1999; McKenna & Bargh, 2000; Postmes,
Spears, Sakhel, & de Groot, 2001; Turkle, 1995).
Some studies have
attributed anti-social online behaviors to anonymity (Davis, 2002;
Suler & Philips, 1998).
Others have shown that it may foster group
norm violations (Jessup, Connolly, & Galegher, 1990; Postmes &
Spears, 2000).
Communication online is also characterized as
"hyperpersonal" due in part to anonymity (Nowak, Watt, & Walther,
2005; Walther, 1996). That is, the lack of visual cues allows people to
selectively self-present for better impression management.
But the draw to disclose who we are, at least partially, is too strong for a social creature whose unique identity as part of a group, is core to our sense of self and self worth.
Our ability to empathize from our own experience is the emotional medium through which we can communicate with other minds.
Then the whole social thing enabled a generation to mediate itself, and identity online became more about self-restraint than self disclosure.
Platform by platform, what used to be a profile or homepage became a footprint, a distributed identity that expressed itself in different ways in different places.
Content syndicates itself automatically, cross pollinating from the blog to twitter and facebook and back again.
Mapping out a social ecosystem for brands came naturally to those who had seen their own social ecosystem develop and grow, and so intuitively knew how to use these emerging tools and platforms.
To understand the ebbs and flows of attention one really needs to live in the stream.
[I remember when I first put a URL on my curriculum vitae. Now if you don't have some web presence on there it suggests you have opted out, and you need to be ready to discuss why.]
New aggregation platforms like Flavors.Me use the magic of RSS to stitch your distributed digital identity back together.
But sometimes it can seem daunting, trying to keep up with an accelerated culture, maintaining the constant stream of phatic pings [and re-pings] that constitute networked relationships.
Jake from Zoomdoggle hired help:
Seriously, I have a problem:
- I have 642 unopened messages on Facebook and haven’t posted a status update since October 1st.
- I have 3,639 followers on Twitter and, though I tweeted 4 times yesterday, each one was a struggle.
- I try to post 6-8 times per day here on Zoomdoggle, but somehow talking about fun is keeping me from having any.
- My primary email account (gmail) currently has 29,568 unread
messages. Admittedly most are newsletters I’ve signed up for, or notes
from my mom who’s currently bedridden with little more than a laptop to
entertain her, still, it’s hard to keep up.
I need a break. Just for a week.
I need someone to take over my
Facebook correspondence, picture posting, and commenting. I need
someone to blog for me. I need someone to twitter, thumb things up and
down on Stumbleupon, and vote things “cute” or “wtf” on Buzzfeed.
Companies are being forced to reconsider how they communicated with customers - from promotional campaigns and customer service bottlenecks, to ongoing monitoring and resolution in real time across whichever engagement space the customer wants to reach out on.
They are also reaching out for assistance, recruiting new staff and agencies to help manage the tasks.
Whilst 'Google Xistence' is clearly not real and not really from Google, it nevertheless highlights a tension that applies to both individuals and companies.
A year or so ago I went down the rabbit hole and an excellent time I had too - you can read about that here.
The mistressmind behind the hole is the lovely Samina Virani - culture journalist and women about towns.
[I found out later that I went to 'high'school with her brother. Small world, right?]
She says:
As the repertoire of global icons across all infrastructures and systems – politics, religion, finance, to name of a few – has gone rather topsy turvy, an enormous space is emerging where every discourse is called to attention. Things are not what they seemed, or rather, perhaps they were never what they were.
Traditional signifiers that connote value, identity and to which we attribute meaning have gone rather topsy turvy.Forget crumply bank notes, oil reserves, and platinum credit cards; now value is attributed to saving the planet from peril.
The rabbit hole dives into the topsy turvy nature of this marvelous current predicament - value shifting and open questioning - inviting imagination and creative consciousness to playfully embrace the unique dialogue that is emerging, and to propela new and spirited freedom of interpretation."
Which is hard to argue with.
Her newest curated experience costume liminal bacchanalian mystery tour excursion type thing is next weekend and you may still be able to sign up:
To sign up to smoke’s limited capacity costume event, go to www.404251n.com/smokeand pending approval from their madhatter, you will be sent a confirmation email with all event details.
Grant is creating transmedia extensions of his lovely book Chief Culture Officer, as of course he should.
On Feburary 13th he is hosting a Boot Camp for aspiring CCOs.
I've seen Grant present many times and he's great - plus this time you get a whole day of Harvard approved business tools and that. [Don't forget Grant teaches at Harvard Business School].
You should go. I don't think I can make it but I shall be planting spies in the audience.
Here's how to tell you if it's for you:
Are
you ready to make your way to the C-Suite? Are you already in a senior
position but would like to sharpen your cultural acumen? Are you
already your company's unofficial CCO? As a marketer, planner, media
specialist or manager you are uniquely positioned to bring change to
the corporation as their Chief Culture Officer.
So if that sounds like you - you can buy tickets here
Well,
no, technically I guess they don't, since you need to be born during a
certain arbitrarily defined time period to be X or Y or whatever, but
actually I think they do, if by generation we mean a bunch of people
who are around the same age but have dramatically different habits and
thoughts and behavior to people who are older or younger.
In Being Digital,
Negroponte says that 'each generation will be more digital than the
last'. This is worth remembering. immigrant or native: being native now
isn't what will be native soon. And, if I'm right, I mean very very
soon. You have to run to keep up with an accelerating culture.
But these are also technology tools that children even 10 years older
did not grow up with, and I’ve begun to think that my daughter’s
generation will also be utterly unlike those that preceded it.
Researchers are exploring this notion too. They theorize that the
ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series
of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely
influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of
development.
1. Gestures Gestural interfaces are the future of
human computer interaction, at least until we find a way to connect
something straight into your brain. Despite the excitement the first
multi-touchscreens triggered and the seeming ubiquity of the iPhone
touchscreen paradigm it spawned, little has been made of their
potential. Things like FluidTunes – an app which lets you control
iTunes by waving your hand in front of the built-in webcam – and
interactive installations triggered by similar motion detection both
show new ways to interact with content, experiences and brands.
A long, long time ago, in 2004 in fact, I [co]wrote an article for the Financial Times about 'brandals' who had been defacing ads for the then newly minted iPod, complaining about the battery issues the first generation device had.
Later in the piece I suggested that perhaps this willingness to get involved with, or co-create as you would say now, brand communication could be a good thing since it suggested that people were involved and paying attention and that this 'open source communication' might be a way to get advertising back into the cultural conversation.
Then the world turned and consumers got creative and everything.
Later, I suggested that these co-created texts might constitute a pseudo-modern form of communication, where the text itself is collaboratively generated, moving beyond the 'death of the author' into polyphonic, truly heterglossic cultural texts.
This kind of thing has been sped up / helped along by the nature of digitally immersed content consumers, aware of their ability to create, co-create, modulate and propagate: the participatory consumer I went on about in my thesis.
And it now finally seems like the industry has started to accept this point as well - unless there is SOME role for the 'audience' in the creation of the communication, it seems somehow less relevant, and so the top creative award winners all include SOME KIND of participation.
This seems to sit at the convergence of a number of different trends: the interactive nature of digital media; the dismantling of notions of authority the internet has triggered, which leads brands to use their customers to validate their utterances; the need to earn attention and reward it.
But it also seems very pertinent in the question of attitudes and behaviours.
The oldest cogent model of advertising is AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action.
This is, of course, grossly simplified but in some form it is still the dominant model the industry ascribes to.
However, behavioural economics, social science and neuroscience all paint a much more complex picture.
Things like Earth Hour, which only happens if people turn their lights off, and all communication that requires people to do anything, hinges on a very specific certainty: people did something.
In fact, let's raise this to a general principle:
The reason consumer collaborative creative is considered so awesome is because IT ONLY WORKS IF THEY DO SOMETHING.
And, since, ultimately, what we are trying to do, is get people to do stuff, that is, change their behaviour, these campaigns, I suspect, strike a chord because, by their very nature, they indicate some degree of success.
Set, as his books usually are, in the almost-now-just-around-the-corner awesomeness of the near future, it charts the tale of a world where people can make stuff.
It begins at point of inflection, the collapse of an economic system, the birth of another - NEW WORK - and its subsequent tribulations, and features exciting co-created theme park rides, an evil Empire [DisneyWorldThemeParks -the fallen star of his first book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom] and cute goth kids and robots and everything.
But the stars of the book are the fabbers - 3D printers.
I've geeked out about these before - because they change everything, once they work properly, which is one of the key struggles in the book - printers that can print components of themselves, and thus create more printers.
Or indeed, anything else. Like products and that.
Which is very much the theme of Willsh's excellent presentation above.
See - so far the social revolution has mostly restricted itself to media because the tools of content production are easier to democratize, and because of the free distribution platform the web provides.
The radical dentralization of the economics of cultural production have not yet really impacted industrial production much.
Of course there are lots of steps towards co-creation of products - but in essence this is the practice of making the industrial production line flexible enough to mass personalize products and let everyone choose the colours they want - which are then sent through the industrial machine to get made - or the crowdsourcing of ideas for products, which are likewise fed into the machine.
But as Wilsh points out, we are moving towards the technologies necessary for social production.
As I said in my first post about fabbers, when you print your own products in a home nanofactory, you might still be buying branded CAD files, or something like that, which is what happens in Makers, as the IP players like Disney license their IP across yet another platform.
But anything that exists digitally can be copied and distributed at zero cost, and once everyone has a fabber, a new type of industrial revolution seems inevitable.
Today's selection from the Nikon Festival, also brought to my attention via some enterprising auteur's outreach.
Here's what he said:
The video shows what can be created in one's own backyard, as opposed to needing special privileges to VIP locations and celebrities, and the video still follows the festival directions - to show what it is like to be you, with high image quality, originality, and ability to capture Nikon's theme.
Normal posting, whatever that may constitute, will probably resume soon.
Today's selection was brought to my attention by its auteur via a little blog outreach, which is good stuff since the onus is very much to spread your content as far and as wide as you can.
This is what he says about it:
The theme of the video is about the inspiration that can be found in unlikely places and that in giving back / sharing to the world – music is created!
A theme that is appropriate for the holiday season!
Today's Nikon Festival selection gets points [from me, which count for nothing] for mentioning and avoiding the more obvious tropes of 'alarm clocks snooze' and 'brushing teeth'.
Today's celeb studded Nikon Festival selection for you.
Also a bit of a tip for those of you who are in the running. Audience voting is done by clicking the star ratings - everyone can indicate how they score each film.
Then, from the Ts&Cs
Limit: Each rater may rate each Finalist Submission one (1) time during the Audience Award Phase. Multiple ratings received from any person or IP address after the first rating will be void and disqualified in Sponsor’s discretion. Finalists are prohibited from obtaining views or ratings by any fraudulent or inappropriate means, including, without limitation, offering prizes or other inducements to members of the public, as determined by Sponsor in its sole discretion. Finalists scores will be determined by multiplying the number of valid views the Submission received by the average rating (out of five (5) stars) it received (the score).
So, basically, any individual as identified by IP address can only RATE each film once - but the final score is a function of the average rating and the total number of views.
So if your film is in there - you need to be doing everything you can to get people to rate your film - and watch it as many times as possible - every valid view counts towards your score!
Being today's Nikon Festival entry that I have picked because I'm heading back to London from New York tomorrow.
[More disclosure: the winning films will be picked by judges and audience votes - nothing to do with me guv - I'm just pulling a few out here for your delectation]
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