A Donkey on the Edge

Well well well, Movabletype now uses the arrival of spam to trigger its scheduled publishing events. It's quite a neat idea using the inevitable flow of spam to trigger events that once required a cron-job.

(you can still use a cron if you want to)

The State Of Web Development - Ajax set to surpass Flash in '07

Which is really good news for no hard and fast reason. Ever since I first learnt about the DOM I've been speccing interfaces that use its manipulation and arguing with developers over their implemnetation.

In 2000 I conceived a remote aircraft dashboard as part of an online game. The designer and coder created the whole thing (an Airbus cockpit with jillions of knobs and buttons) with sprites and JS and it worked beautifully.

I think at the time, part of the problem was finding time in the project plan to do client-side scripting. It was tough to explain to clients why we needed those extra days in the budget.

Well since the big JJG Ajax article and the flood of lovely Web2.0 thingies, it's become a lot easier to code and also a lot easier to explain.

Now that Yahoo have released their pattern library this should get even easier. We've all struggled with how to describe asychronous behaviour in a boxes and arrows world, take a look at the Yahoo stuff, they've done a pretty good job.

Community based Content centric URL's on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

This is a link to a guy called vaXzine's stream on Flickr. I first bumbed into him (her?) when he dropped a note on a white board session I grabbed with my cameraphone.

I want to make his whiteboard sessions into t-shirts:-)

Community based Content centric URL's

I love this little story from the innocent website. In fact i love most of the copywriting on the site. I would have thought they'd passed the tipping point of evil by now but you couldn't tell by looking at their website:-)

In fact, being accountable to our customers is something that is in our blood. In the summer of 1998 when we had developed our first smoothie recipes but were still nervous about giving up our proper jobs, we bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London. We put up a big sign saying 'Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?' and put out a bin saying 'YES' and a bin saying 'NO' and asked people to put the empty bottle in the right bin. At the end of the weekend the 'YES' bin was full so we went in the next day and resigned.

Got this a couple of weeks ago from Chris, a man I trust.

Hi Dug,

The running place both we got our kicks from is called Runners Need (http://www.runnersneed.co.uk), unfortunately as north as their branches are is Camden (with other shops in Holborn and Liverpool street). All the shops specialise in one thing and one thing only--running kit. All the people working there are seasoned runners and serious about ensuring you get the right stuff for your foot (I promise they haven't paid me to say any of this...)

They either put you on a treadmill or take you outside and watch you run, how your foot hits the pavement, the pressure exerted, pronation, etc. and then get you to run in a few different types of shoes that cater to how you run.

Good luck.

Now, I'll be the first to admit I don't know what pronation is but Nicki really needed some running shoes that fit her properly so I sorted out a fitting for her birthday.

Her feedback is that the shoes are not only a perfect fit but just right for what she wants to do with them.

Each customer works with the in-store experts to create unique value. Where do you run? How far, how fast, in what weather? Whether the customer is training for a marathon or simply wants to get better mileage out of her kneecaps, the in-store experts help build an experience with the customer that ultimately adds value for both the store and the runner.

Now so far so good, I only wish the website offered the same value co-creation potential...

Glad to see Iain Tait is experimenting (and, in the process has found a place to buy genitals).

I just read quite an interesting report by Elizabeth Coverdale called Cyberculture and Gender Identification in Online Chat Communities. She looks at role-play, gender reassignment and in particular digs a little deeper into the language people use when "inworld" (be that in full 3d environments like Second Life or simply chatting over an IM client).

It turns out that men and women have subtle differences in the way they structure a conversation. According to Coverdale, women pepper their conversation with meta-messages design to create a mood, they use phrases like giggles or "lol" more frequently than men with an aim of creating a cocoon of aproval and friendship around the conversation. Men will just say what they want in shorter phrases with little or no introduction.

I can't say this has been my experience. I find myself often drifting into a world of emoticons when I chat...

My Second Life avatar is currently a young Korean woman and while I'm still just roaming around figuring out the various inworld dynamics I can imagine things could get a little wierd. (If you take a look at Iain's post and are confused by the pictures, a Google search should give you a clue... and cheesh, I'm reminded I never did find out what the three shells do in Demolition Man)

A colleague just pointed me to this video which a friend of his (Bjorn Turmann) posted to YouTube to promote the launch of his new book

I think the film is a little understated so may not do tremendously well on YouTube which does tend to feature the more explosive videos.

Still, it's a very interesting experiment in getting messages out across media. It reminds me of the James Bond book launch I worked on a few years ago were the story ended, and on the last page, we put a message from a sinister security organisation asking for recruits. The message had a url which led to some recruitment tests which in turn led to an adventure game where the reader had to work with other readers to save a beautiful (of course) scientist from the grips of an evil overlord.

And how did I miss this one: Second Life Liberation Army attacks Reebok

Yup, an ingame protest attack:-)

Just saw this item on Slashdot. A classic example of a big corporation not getting the new consumer.

In a nutshell, in the guise of protecting its intellectual property (IP) against illegal merchandisers, Universal is throwing out a lot of babies with the bath-water. The whole Joss Weedon, Firefly etc. type-thing is the foundation for huge amounts of high-quality fan-art and the fans that create, buy and wear it want a stake in the outcome. They promote the TV show and want nothing more than to be a small part of the magic.

Except that nowadays, the fanart IS the magic. Without this degree of customer participation, films like Serenity and shows like Firefly just wouldn't have the same reach, nor the same staying power (the stuff that sells season X DVDs long after the closing titles have rolled).

The core of the problem is simple. Traditional IP owners think of the IP as being the primary source of value for them. In essence, they pay guards to surround the mine and miners to extract the value. The whole idea that the consumer could be adding equivalent value is alien to them and their infrastructure doesn't allow for flexibility or evolution (they are frozen in time by legal agreements and the lawyers that protect them).

The punch-line of this particular piece is that the fans are sending Universal an invoice for their services (more details here). You go girl:-)

Well a bunch of stuff has happened recently and I just noticed that last entry about Universal was my 1000th post! Turns out I've been spewing this nonsense since 2001 so now seemed like a good time for something new.

Normally, I use the blog as a platform to discuss web design, standards and so on, but recently I've been more interested in how the advertising industry is going to adapt to embrace the forces of value co-creation. So I guess that means I'm less fussed about the design and more fussed about the semantics, ie I don't want to spend as much time tweaking the design, and whatever design I settle on either won't be mine, or won't have taken me months of effort to create.

Visitors from A List Apart can still see my positionally-based flexible layout and more recent visitors wanting to discuss the relative merits of my shufflebox design concept can still get to my first attempt at a complete shufflebox page but for everyone else, I'm going to start playing with plain old default templates and a bunch of designs taken from The Style Contest. Incidentally, if you're an MT user wondering how to access the stylecontest templates, all you need to do is paste the url "http://www.thestylecontest.com/designs/" into the StyleCatcher window--beautifully simple:-)

Finally, as Movetype default templates don't have a standardised template credit, here is some template link love: this blog currently using the style Kiss 82 (as in keep it simple stupid) from Oinam

I get a lot of questions about MySpace from clients.

For the most part, they find the site confusing and don't understand the mechanic it supports. In a nutshell, the service essentially allows you to spread the word in a seamless way--take a look at the Dixie Chicks movie above, their site had a single-click experience to copy this. The same site allowed me to express my support (and outrage at monkey boy) by posting comment, marking them as friends and recommending them in my profile.

Check out the Chicks' blog they're using Wordpress and it looks good. The only shame is the flash front end doesn't let you record name and email so my post went up as "anonymous blogger"

Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing: Social Value First, Brand Value Second

An example of this was Nike's mega, Google-powered community Joga, which whilst on the surface seemed to be doing everything right, quickly revealed itself to be high on brand value and low on social value.

I posted this over on the TMW blog but this one is both spot on and important so I thought i'd cross-post it. A must-read for client-service types new to the collaborative media space.

I've walked past this mannequin (is that the word?) for a week know and stop and stare every time I go in to buy a sandwich. I'm guessing this particular model is based on Kate Moss, but the hair-style, the lighting and position make her a doppelgänger for Meg White :-)