joncrowley.ca

You can talk about freedom, or openness all you want, but it doesn’t really matter.

Innovation for the user isn’t happening on Android devices.

Moving from iOS to Android was an experiment to teach me something about other interfaces, to make me more well rounded as a strategist, and to challenge some of my assumptions about the ‘right’ or in some cases ‘only’ way of doing things.

All of that has happened.

But the primary feeling of owning an Android device is the feeling of being 6 months behind.

I bought a top of the line Galaxy SII in August. I’ve been using it as my primary phone since then, so for about 5 months total. In that time frame, I’ve waited for updates (none of which have ever come), waited for new and old apps to be ported to the platform (I’m still living sans-Instagram and Pinterest), and putting up with features of great apps that don’t work (I can’t record video on Path, or edit posts on Tumblr).

This isn’t really a complaint about Android. It’s a complaint about systems that are fragmented, both by OS and by hardware. And it’s a hint of ‘broken window’ theory, as well - if Google doesn’t care about this platform working well, why should developers.

I can completely understand the appeal of control, that Android devices promise. I was thrilled by it, for the first month or so I owned the phone. But that thrill of control fades, when you realize it can just as accurately be called management or maintenance, and it’s far from optional.

Assuming standard use, with minimal ‘management’ or ‘maintenance’, my experience on Android has been one of terrible battery life, intermittent crashing, software conflicts, and frustrating hardware issues (such as the infuriatingly loud buzzing noise the phone makes when vibrating, akin to a subwoofer rattling in a trunk). 

At this point, people will point out that 1) I’m not running Ice Cream Sandwich, 2) I should get a Nexus branded phone, rather than something running Samsung’s TouchWiz UI, and 3) I should root the phone, and just run Cyanogen, or something similar.

1) I can’t run ICS, Samsung hasn’t updated the phone.
2) That’s not an argument, it’s a suggestion that Android is a failed experiment, and that ‘open’ means failure unless you leave it unedited.
3) I don’t WANT to root my phone. I shouldn’t have to. If I need to make an unstable phone LESS STABLE to make it usable, it is a poorly designed and manufactured phone.

I’m not writing this as an Apple fanboy. I’m not writing this as someone who has no idea what he’s talking about, and hasn’t devoted time to trying to understand this platform.

I’m a reasonably experienced user, of a recent flagship device, of the most successful manufacturer of Android smartphones.

And I’m telling you, it’s not good enough.

There’s a reason a single manufacturer, with a line that has never exceeded the 3 phones it currently sells, makes the majority of profits in the smartphone industry (as of Q3 2011 numbers). \

It’s because, at core, they don’t really have any competition.

This is a great example of what the future of the web is like. Simple, tool-based solutions that don’t ask you to be a mechanic, when all you want to do is drive a car.

I spend a significant amount of my time in university feeling like protest, as a concept, was severely broken. To the point where I blogged about it a few times, completed a project under the name ‘ground war’ for a communication theory seminar, and basically attended a few protests in Nathan Phillip’s square just to get a bigger feel for what the issues were, for why protest didn’t seem to work.

Shortly after I started getting more personally and academically involved in the social web, I started wondering if there was any way that could help with protest. Poking around, seeing communities, discussions, flashmobs, etc. I came to the conclusion that no, it couldn’t. The gap between badging oneself as an activist online, and actually doing something about it, fell apart.

This year, it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was wrong.

I’m not talking about the Arab Spring. While that was definitively a massive success of protest, I don’t see it as a massive success of digital protest. What got change to happen, frankly, was things getting bad enough that people were willing to risk everything to fight for change. While the internet was massively beneficial for organization, and sharing information, the actual fight happened in the streets, and it was quite literally a revolution, in most cases.

It wasn’t a facebook revolution, or a twitter revolution. These tools facilitated the flow of information, and were integral to changing worldwide opinion, and connecting individuals. But it was the people putting life, limb and livelihood on the line, in person, who made a difference.

No, I’m talking about the anti SOPA / PIPA protests that occurred recently online, and what made them different, in my mind.

Tumblr, Wikipedia and Reddit were standouts, but more than 75,000 sites did something that made a bigger difference than any online protest I had seen previously.

They generated personal, self-interested outrage, and then directed it meaningfully.

Step one was simple. Rather than saying ‘this ill-defined, unclear bad thing will happen to the future, they just DID it. They either blacked out, or pretended to black out, the content users were expecting, and SHOWED them, in no uncertain terms, what the worst case scenario of letting this bill pass was.

Crucially, they weren’t fair or balanced about it. That’s not how you drive people to action. The same ‘boston strangler’ language the content industries have been using for almost half a century is what gets a gut response. That’s how you drive action. You make it real, make it personal, and make it clear.

Wikipedia being dead? That is hard to ignore.

Step two was even better, and I think it was best handled by Tumblr. Rather than saying ‘This bad thing will happen if you don’t stop it’, they automated the next step – protest as flowchart.

Providing clear names, phone numbers, auto-populated email messages, and suggested scripts, the companies that drove this protest simplified politics, actually making sure the individual people who could have an impact understood the issue well enough to be heard.

This is something that is patently not a part of mainstream political action. It’s not about understanding complex issues of law and politics as a badge of your greatness. It’s about getting shit done, and the way to do that is to inform people.

By the end, the numbers I’ve seen suggest that almost 88,000 calls to congress were generated by the Tumblr community. Other protests generated nearly 3 million emails.

Outrage was generated, and then translated into a language government understands – personal appeals from angry, concerned, or scared constituents.

And, crucially, things didn’t need to get so bad that there were riots in the streets. This was a functional, organized, peaceful protest, and it was more powerful than one of the biggest lobbying engines in the world. This time.

So I can’t help but imagine what the semi-unified internet community could do, if it wanted to. This amount of action and outrage, spread globally, could make a sizeable dent in patent reform, or international aid, or pretty much anything.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to fix protest, but it seems to have been figured out. Maybe we should spend some time thinking about how to apply it.

Social media has built a cottage industry of self promoting pseudo experts. We all hate them. We all hate them to the point where, each one of you is thinking of a specific person who you think I’m talking about. That person? They hate social media douchebag guru ninjas, too.

So, it’s a problem, yes?

I’ve found a simple identifier: if you can hear someone giving the same presentation, the same advice, and the same examples, more than 6 months apart, they are likely terrible at what they do.

They need to stop giving the same presentation.

They are teaching you social media 101, using last year’s assistant profs notes, and a photocopied version of an out of date textbook.

This is a changing space. Rapidly changing. Massively changing.

And while I would never suggest everything new is relevant, even if google shoehorns it into search results at a baffling level, it is usually worth understanding.

Someone who is still stopping at “listen before you talk”, or “it’s about brand love” is still talking about 3 or 4 years ago. When this was still new enough that there wasn’t data. When this was still new enough that you had to convince clients it was important, rather than convincing them that they need more of a strategy than “we need to be on social media”.

The dummies books have been written. Repeatedly. You don’t have to keep preaching the gospel of “I understood twitter in 2008”.

Instead, a few polite suggestions:

Get some f**king data, to back up your assertions.

Stop pretending it’s simple. It’s only simple if you aren’t optimizing it. Expertise isn’t about stopping at simple.

Things are (always) different. Examples more than 6 months old are likely no longer representative of the current platform and community dynamics.

“Entry level” changes. If you’re giving the same ‘how to get started in social’ advice today, that you were giving even a year ago, you’re a fraud. Pick a new scam, please.

You can’t be a revolutionary after the war is won. You’ve either decided to become a productive member of post war society, or you’ve ended up unable to let go of the fight.

So either grow up with the rest of us, or pick a new fight.

Really proud of NOTCOT.org, one of my favourite websites, for taking a stand on PIPA/SOPA today that stays true to the design, doesn’t cripple functionality, and informs without frustrating.

Bravo.

Us internet folk have a small problem. We keep forgetting that technology doesn’t always matter. In many cases, it’s an executional side-effect of what a company or person actually does.

You wouldn’t say Fed-Ex is a Car company, or a Plane company. But you could find an army of people who would tell you Amazon is a tech business. And I’ve never really understood that, except as a barrier to keep people from thinking they can understand, or contribute to something.

This came to my attention when I was discussing Wikipedia on twitter, with Spencer Saunders. We were talking about open source projects, and Wikipedia came up… But I think you can argue that Wikipedia is far more of a crowdsourcing success, than a technological one. The fact that a wiki is the backbone is less important than the fact that volunteer collaborators filled it with content.

Similarly, the fact that Amazon has a massive technological back end laser focused to optimize experience, is less important than the fact that they’re a massive retailer with the best catalogue ever.

It’s easy to see the overlap, but I think it’s important. We can’t keep pretending that everything online needs to be tech first, and something else second. There are ALWAYS going to be interesting technical problems and challenges to solve in the online space.

But this technology, for the most part, is soon going to be invisible, the same way a telephone is, or a cash register is, or a car is. Things on the web are already becoming black boxes that just DO what they are supposed to DO.

And I get that this scares people. I get that some deeply brilliant people, like Cory Doctorow, for example, will feel like a closed, Apple style product future for the web is terrible. I see his point. But what he’s forgetting is that EVERY CONSUMER PRODUCT IN HISTORY has undergone this transition.

You used to make your own clothes at home. Now you buy them in a store, and probably can’t fix them if they break. You used to build your own home. Now contractors do it, and allow you to have more complexity and range than you otherwise could have. 

You used to need to know how to maintain a car, to drive a car. Now you need a mechanic.

This isn’t downgrading or denigrating any of the skills mentioned. But it is making a very clear point - that expertise narrows over time for a reason. The average person can only master so many complex skills. And insisting everyone needs to know how to code to understand the online world is akin to insisting that someone needs to know how to repair an internal combustion engine to be able to commute.

I’m a digital person. I wouldn’t call myself a technical person, because frankly, I think we’re already starting to set the bar too low for that.

But I think it’s very important that we stop creating the impression that everything new, vibrant, and important online is really just for the internet people.

We need to worry more about making the technology invisible, for more than just the very lowest experience level of user.

I’ve heard, and seen, many people justify a series of less than brilliant decisions with the argument that they’re ‘following their dreams’.

First: Grow the hell up.

Second: Chasing a dream isn’t the same as having a plan, or doing what you love. Chasing a dream is completely detaching your objectives from reality, and buying into the myth of north america; the idea that hard work, and dedication, can make anything happen.

It’s a beautiful myth. A necessary one, too. But it’s a myth all the same. Because hard work and dedication are important, but more often than not, it’s the stuff that you can’t really teach or learn, like talent, style, intellect or intuition, that take someone to the highest levels of something.

The important thing to note here, is that everyone needs to work hard and be dedicated to succeed. But the people who aren’t naturally good at something start at a terrible, and often insurmountable disadvantage, when it comes to getting to the top.

Here’s how someone’s career is likely to go, if they follow their ability and passion, rather than a specific dream:

They finish school, and look for a job where they can learn something, and get closer to getting paid to do what they love to do. That job helps them realize two things: that getting paid to do something you love is totally awesome, and that it’s even more fun when you’re good at it. So they begin to specialize, to chase the intersection of what they are interested in, and what they are good at.

If they continue chasing this intersection, they’ll likely ending up working in a bunch of different roles in the same industry, learning a ton, and most importantly, moving in the direction of not just getting better, but also picking what they are better at - as you progress in a field you are passionate about, you can learn what direction suits your natural talents and interests, and challenge yourself to grow in that direction.

[In my personal example, my interest in communication theory and copyright in online spaces took me from PR to design / production work, to internal client-side digital marketing, to digital and social strategy.]

Dreams don’t work like that.

If you have a dream to be a rock star, you work toward that one specific goal. You save up and get a guitar, you learn to play, you start a band, and you do other things to support yourself while you try to make it work. You continue working hard, being dedicated, and chasing your dream.

But you don’t really divert, from a dream. I find it’s rare that people who dedicate their lives to chasing a dream really shift their expectations. You don’t dedicate your life to an end goal, and work toward that end goal for years, only to end up somewhere else and consider it a success.

It comes down to whether you consider your career, and your life, to be about a destination, or a journey.

Journey people admit they don’t know where to end up. Ideally, they chase passion and talent, and see where the best next step there is for them to take will lead them.

Destination people focus more on what and who they WANT to be, than what or who they would be GREAT at being.

Dreams can be motivational, inspirational, and solve a hell of a lot of problems. But they aren’t anything near a plan, or even an optimization of circumstance.

Nobody Goes to Facebook Anymore, it’s too Crowded - UnCrunched

Michael Arrington proves, once again, that he has no idea what the average or common user experience is when it comes to social media. At all.

The average user doesn’t have ‘thousands’ of friends tied to their account. According to Facebook, the average user has about 130. You cannot be a focus group of one, when you do not have a remotely standard experience.

A few years ago, I had a conversation with a good friend about someone we had both gone to school with, about a decade ago. They had just kind of dropped off the radar, and neither of us had heard anything. We didn’t think too much of it, but it became a sporadic topic of conversation, almost a game: why can’t we find any trace of this person online, anywhere?

Over the years I checked social networks, googled a few dozen things a few dozen times, scrolled through photos and status updates of people who I knew used to be close to them, and still never really heard anything.

Understand, this wasn’t a serious investigation. I just found it odd that someone had remained so offline, and when their name arose again in conversation, I’d spend ten or twenty minutes seeing if I could track them down, this time. It was weird to lose track of a person to completely, in this day and age.

We used to throw theories back and forth; was this person dead? Moved to a country with less infrastructure? Changed their name, entered witness protection, joined an Amish community?

I found out not that long ago that essentially, to drop off the grid, it takes removal from mainstream society - the person in question had spent a period of time homeless. I only found this out when they appeared on (obviously) facebook, in conversation with someone else.

The reason I’m bringing all of this up, is that this is the reality of ‘total privacy’. Our online and offline societies are becoming so intertwined that you would need to withdraw from one, to withdraw from the other. The assumption that not using social media, or not owning a computer or smartphone, would keep you offline, is absurd. No one would argue that by not owning a camera, you can avoid having your picture taken. No one would suggest that you could avoid being written about by not keeping a diary.

The options for someone with severe fears about privacy, in a networked, social media driven society, are not exactly pleasant: you can participate actively despite your fears, you can passively be made a participant by those around you, or you can exile yourself from participation in mainstream society. 

In a world where you need to accept that you can’t be invisible, the next best thing is camouflage. 

And that’s why identity online is interesting as social media behaviours develop in the mainstream. You likely won’t be able to avoid having your legal name be searchable in a way that is connected to you. But you can establish a persona that you are comfortable with others seeing, a selective layer of your life that you’ve made peace with sharing with others, with the world.

Despite current, justifiable, fears related to privacy, the price of being invisible is too high. Instead, you need to focus on how you’re seen, and by whom.

This is an old topic, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about recently, especially in reference to a recent quote from Drake in an interview with Billboard:

“I’m really scared for my generation, you know. The thing that scares me most is Tumblr. I hate what Tumblr has become. […] Instead of kids going out and making their own moments, they’re just taking these images and living vicariously through other people’s moments. It just kills me. Then you’ll meet them and they’re just the biggest turkey in the world. They don’t actually embody any of those things.”

This isn’t to say I agree with the argument at all, but I do find it interesting, suggesting that curation is both 1) inherently an attempt to express actual identify rather than affinity, and 2) that curation isn’t a creative skill. I feel like these positions are incompatible, when you dig into them.

Curation is becoming essential, especially for brands operating online - not just on Tumblr, but on Facebook pages, twitter feeds, etc. Finding enough stuff to talk about, or the Blank Box Problem, as the brains behind Percolate have dubbed it, is a lot of hard work, albeit a completely different type of hard work than creating something yourself.

I personally consider curation a low-order creative skill, because it does require some talent to do well (an eye or POV that is distinctive and developed), as well as dedication. But it’s not (to lapse into copyright lingo) transformative - and there’s a reason gallery curators are not generally considered artists in their own right. But this leads us to a solid point - curation is at core a developed form of appreciation, not one of creation. Building a collection isn’t about expressing what your life is, but instead about expressing your taste.

And doing so online means that it can be an order of magnitude removed from what you live, or could possible achieve.

Creation is an utterly different thing. When you create, you express some aspect of yourself, whether it be talent or intellect or perception. And the biggest issue that curation faces, as what is now the leading participatory activity online by my estimate, is that comparison with creation, with the generation of original work.

Because people are adding commentary, because they’re hitting a publish button, it’s easy to, without thinking, lump these two actions into each other. We use the same function on tumblr or facebook or twitter to share a meme we found amusing, as we do to share a carefully composed photograph we’ve taken with a new DSLR.

What we can’t continue to do, is pretend these are similar activities. Sharing is a class of action, but there are significant differences between the subcategories - debate and wordless screaming are both technically elements of vocalization, but we don’t insist that one has to be interpreted by the lens of the other.

Creative sharing involves originality, development of the content, and distribution. Curative sharing involves discovery, distribution, and possibly commentary. These are not comparable activities, and yet online we seem to insist they are.

If we don’t begin to draw the line between remix and reblog, in other words, we’re going to continue in the flawed assumption that we can learn the same things about a person, a brand, or a collective by looking at what they create, and what they curate.

‘The Medium is the Message’ pull quote does not discount the importance or impact of content.

It merely posits that methods of delivering information or content are what creates game changing impact. The message delivered is still essential, but dies without a medium. The message is shaped, empowered, and made real in a different way with each medium used.

You can have the best medicine in the world, but if it doesn’t have a delivery system, you still die.

Thank you.

(This is merely my interpretation. Feel free to disagree, if you have justification for doing so.)

EDIT: mostly written in response to this piece by Om Malik

from Hungry Academy

I love this idea because it admits one core fact which is still shaping the way businesses that operate online function - there isn’t really an ideal schooling path for this, in my opinion.

While doing this for an engineering team is a start, I’d love to see a Hungry Academy-style approach to building other teams and skillsets within a start-up environment. Almost like a career incubator rather than a start-up incubator.

At the end of the day, I love any idea that aims to solve a complex problem. Finding the right fit of skills, drive and culture is definitely a problem that hasn’t been definitively solved yet, anywhere.

The core node of the internet changes, over time.

It used to be a specific machine, a specific email address, a specific website, a specific profile.

Lately, the core node online is a person. And the tools that tie other outposts, other data, to the idea of a core, identity-based node, are the ones that are winning.

Which is why I don’t feel like many deeply interesting things emerging online will last. Not because they are broken, or inaccurate, but because they’re using the wrong anchor point.

The story is the root element of human differentiation. The ability to create, share, embellish and pass on stories is the root of our myriad cultures. But I don’t believe the story will ever be the core node online, because every story has perspective, and that perspective is inherently glued to the core node - a story from the Guardian has a different perspective than one on the same subject from the New York Times. A story from me has different meaning than the same one from you.

When I see people trying to avoid the core node question, or tie it to something ephemeral and open to broad interpretation, I wonder how their ideas will grow and survive.

People interact using their identity as the core node that ties everything else together. This is true online or offline. And I don’t think this is a step on the path to something else, I think it’s an inherent element of how our species works.

The simplest rule I know of is to just admit when something doesn’t make sense.

And yet, this seems to be the hardest rule to get people to follow, because we’re trained from an early age, to give people what they want.

Humans are irrational creatures. We want things because we don’t have them, because others do, because we see success as related to those things, or status, or power.

In my personal experience, having a passionate community is one of those things that most people want, and many people don’t have a logical foundation for.

But you won’t get a brief from a client asking if you THINK they should start a Facebook page, or hire a community manager, or develop a social strategy. You will be asked to do one of these things. And you likely won’t be given much of an opportunity to ask why.

But I don’t care. Push back. Admit when a request, or even a demand, makes no sense.

Because the true meaning of integrated isn’t “we did EVERYTHING” but “we did what made sense, where it made sense, in a cohesive manner. There’s a massive difference between building a touchpoint everywhere you CAN, and building a touchpoint everywhere that makes sense.

You might not need a mobile app. Facebook might not make sense for you. People might not respond to an email newsletter about your service. There’s a good chance you can’t ‘gamify’ your brand site.

And that’s okay. Despite what requests, briefs, and recommendations you’ve seen try to suggest, you can’t have something that is both innovative, and comes with best practice examples of how it has worked before. You can’t be game changing by copying the other guys.

You don’t win by doing things that don’t make sense. You win by doing logical, rational things that aren’t covered by (the current, accepted definition of) common sense.

And you win by doing them extraordinarily.

It isn’t an attack on power users, the same way Final Cut Pro X wasn’t a slap in the face to power users.

This is evidence of a core truth: no one changes the game focusing only on what power users want.

I don’t mean this as an extension of the ‘faster horses’ problem. I mean, simply, that your baseline experience shouldn’t be focused on what gets the power user excited. You don’t want to alienate them, but, let’s be honest, the intense power users weren’t using Twitter.com, or the Twitter iPhone / Android app anyway. So mostly, people are complaining that they aren’t the core target anymore.

New Twitter (or #newnewtwitter, depending on who you ask) is about redefining the experience to better align with the value proposition Twitter has been claiming for several years; that the service is about Discovery, or Serendipity, or Breaking News. And if you want to be the internet’s early warning system for everything, then yes, private message functions are going to be de-emphasized. Especially when you’ve had a little voice in your head forever saying ‘I have half a dozen apps that do the same thing, and given our deep integration into iOS, competing with iMessage seems dumb’.

But most important is the Discover (or #discover) tab. This is the first thing Twitter has launched that feels NEW in a long time. Breaking the massive firehose of data into Stories (organized by both hashtag and topic), Activity (adding even more of a social layer to the platform), Categories (aiding user discovery, which has always been an issue on Twitter) and even trends (which you can continue to totally ignore unless you’re involved in a current trending topic) is turning this churning mass of data with potential value, into a discernible discovery engine.

The Discover tab is Twitter becoming a relevant capital N news source, rather than a way of discovering what people you know, or know of, find relevant. This doesn’t replace any of what Twitter is and was, but it extends it. Twitter as news magazine also offers an important differentiator in terms of ways to access the platform - possibly enough of one that Twitter can own the access point again, and use that as a starting point for new revenue generators.

I’m not going to say the new Twitter layout is anywhere near perfect. In fact, I expect a large number of tweaks will be made, and soon. But I do think it actually offers a direction for the future of Twitter. Which, despite buzz, despite early adopter cred, and despite my power-user status (27,650 tweets and counting), isn’t actually about how me, and those like me, use the service.

PayPal made a very big mistake.

Paypal realized this, and fixed it. 

But there’s a lot to learn from what happened, and it’s not just about the error made, and not just about the response.

1. Digital / Social needs to own customer service. This is plenty counter intuitive, but it’s the logical move. When something goes wrong in customer service, very wrong, it will almost inevitably become a social media issue. When the team in charge of social doesn’t have this information from the get go, they are unprepared and scrambling to find out what happened, and what the truth is. More important that that, customer service, in my experience, is run with the wrong objective: getting people off the phone, and making complaining more work than it’s worth. Social media, on the other hand, is run with a focus on optics, community building, and the long term effects of each interaction. Every time something gets migrated between a customer service team and a social media team, or vice versa, information and context is lost. There is no ‘private resolution’, anymore. Customer service is a glass house, and the problem isn’t thrown stones, it’s peeping toms.
2. It’s better to be 80% right in 2 hours, than 100% right in 8. A DAY flipped over between Regretsy posting it’s account of what happened, and PayPal correcting and apologizing. It went from December 5th, to December 6th. I don’t have a measurement in hours, but I can tell you it was too many. Even if the account isn’t 100% accurate, it’s obvious enough that this is an issue worthy of quick resolution. I can understand the need for review, revision, getting internal and external alignment, etc, but that’s less important than a response of some kind, admitting fault, and explaining you’re going to fix it. If something public saying ‘This isn’t acceptable, and we’re on it’ had appeared on multiple PayPal owned properties, immediately, this likely would have been less of a disaster. Speed matters, and everyone watching this would do well to try their best and shorten their response timelines for these issues.
3. Terms of Service, User Agreements, etc, need to be written in Plain English. Natural language is key. I understand the value of ambiguity, but this write up of the situation clearly points out that this was not beneficial. If your rules and regulations can’t be written clearly enough to be followed by either your users, or your staff, issues are on you. I understand the value of legal text, and I understand (to an extent) why it is written how it is, but this is wrong, for society as much as for companies and users. Why can’t we enact a simple natural language rule? Creating a series of legal agreements that can only be understood with professional help pretty much guarantees that people will either ignore, or accidentally violate, the rules.

This will happen again, in a few months, as it always does. I will note it, talk about it, and use it to remind myself that things need to change. But in the end, until we start treating every client-facing position as a media-facing position, this stuff will keep happening.

People are media outlets, now. Outsourcing contact with your customers, or lax training of customer service reps, is equivalent to letting interns run your PR department without supervision.

One of the biggest dreams of the average brand is still going viral. This isn’t new, but it is getting more irritating.

We could blame Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, and the man responsible for the word Meme entering public consciousness - this is the genesis of the concept of the ‘viral idea’, a self propagating memetic life form that everyone seems to think is the key to making any brand relevant.

There’s a key issue with this, and I think it’s best clarified by getting people to actually look at the most prevalent type of meme online - the ‘image macro’ format first popularized by lolcats. The example I’m going to use, though, was created by an acquaintance of mine; it’s called Watch The Cradle.

And seriously, you should check it out.

This is the holy grail of memes, as far as I’m concerned. A quick rundown of why this works:

1) It’s instantly recognizable. The image macro format is prevalent enough that nearly anyone who would find it amusing has encountered it online already.
2) Getting it comes with a certain amount of cachet. To understand Watch the Cradle, you need to be familiar with internet jokes, and familiar enough with a popular hip hop record to know the lyrics being referenced.
3) It’s cute. There are babies, which make everything more pleasant, and changes the context pretty effectively.
4) It’s accessibly participatory. You don’t need to be particularly creative to participate, you just need to be familiar with the format, the music, and google image search.
5) You can share it with everyone around you, pointing out how clever you are, whether for finding / getting it, or for contributing.

In my mind, these five points are the big ones to hit to cross over into virality, with the big missing one being the intangible (that is to say, being so undeniably awesome that people NEED to share or participate).

The problem I mentioned earlier? The problem is that we can use these same points to explain why the fat kids get teased in grade school.

Everyone gets the joke. You getting to laugh means your aren’t one of the people who is the butt of the joke. It’s funny, even though you shouldn’t be laughing. Anyone can join in, and in fact, you gain respect and power by joining. It happens in public, not in isolation.

What I’m trying to say is, brands need to aim higher. None of the attributes I’ve mentioned build positive associations about the subject matter.

You don’t want to be viral. You want to be the thing that is so culturally relevant, it inspires this low impact participation. That doesn’t happen by trying to go viral.

Awesome though it is, you don’t want to be the image macro that made me laugh so hard I spit coffee on my keyboard. You want to be the amazing record by two titans of the form.

Your objective should be to inspire participatory culture, and to exist in a form that facilitates it. Brands that mean something don’t create movements. They inspire them.

david:

iMakeMemes

Presented without comment on the state of, and complexity of, things marketing is trying to emulate.

MailChimp hits it out of the park, creating something that is a valuable resource as well as a great marketing tool for their service, without sacrificing one for the other.

I’m impressed.

This is where Augmented Reality is going to tip.

Not in the wild, not in HUD-emulating applications that add an information layer to everything you see and interact with. No, AR is going to become commonplace in exactly this way, in controlled environments.

This is an overly simplified system, but there’s no reason looking at a page would limit you to links. It could immediately pull up animations, video content, and audio track narrating the shoot, etc - while keeping a tactile object that responds to multiple types of interaction (not just finger-on-glass), and that isn’t limited by the dimensions of a smartphone screen.

A QR code fails because it’s a voluntary interruption model - that is to say, it requires too many barriers, first one needs to see the page the code is listed on, then they need to care about the code, then they need to have an application to scan it, then they need to do the actual scanning, then the page needs to load.

An AR model goes “This magazine has an augmented mobile experience. Open this app to see all the extra content on each page” and leads into an ongoing experience, one that can very easily add value. There’s not a series of decisions. There’s a series of discoveries.

Do I want HUD style AR? Of course I do, I grew up reading science fiction. But do I think that we’re going to head directly there? No. It will first be applications like the one above. After that, retail applications (point your phone at any item for sale in our store, we’ll recognize it and serve you unbiased reviews, pricing info, and further details, as well as the ability to purchase via mobile, and pick it up at the door on your way out). After retail applications, expect it to graduate to wikipedia / serendipitous search (point at something, we tell you what it is. Without asking or clicking. Just hold the crosshairs on one item for too long, and image recognition does the rest).

But it starts here. With a removal of the ‘take a picture and see what happens step’, and its replacement with continuous passive content offerings, layered on top of the everyday world.

Juicebox

attentionindustry:

I spend a significant amount of my time in university feeling like protest, as a concept, was severely broken. To the point where I blogged about it a few times, completed a project under the name ‘ground war’ for a communication theory seminar, and basically attended a few protests in…

Serious Jon is serious.

Kavinsky - Nightcall (Drive Intro)

fastcompany:

AeroShot sent me a batch of “breathable energy” to wake up today’s project meeting. It’s lime-flavored inhalable caffeine (and some B vitamins). We wrote about AeroShot in the current issue of Fast Company, and Co.Design has a longer story about the Harvard Prof who created it — he also wants to make smokable chocolate.

So  much want.

newsweek:

floralavenger:

Interviewer: You’ve long argued for the decriminalization of marijuana. Do you smoke weed?

Barney Frank: No.

Interviewer: Why not?

Barney Frank: Why do you ask a question, then act surprised when I give an answer? Do you think I lie to people?

Interviewer: I thought you might explain why you support decriminalizing it but don’t smoke it.

Barney Frank: Do you think I’ve ever had an abortion?

via

Awesome.

Seriously, can every politician be more like this?

Ye Olde Cube Farm. (Photo by joncrowley)

fortune cookie suggests gossip is going down. (Photo by joncrowley)

Spent the whole weekend with my girl. Amazing. (Photo by joncrowley)

Overwhelming urge to decorate and apartment right now.

Eames design. Herman Miller manufacturing. Paul Smith fabric. Fuck me.

Future batphone?

MPAA head (and former U.S. Senator) Chris Dodd speaking to Fox News (as noted by Hillicon Valley).

I mean, he actually said this.

In one soundbite, he’s both threatening any and all U.S. politicians and implying that they’re corruptible. It’s a statement that so egregious, it’s hard to think of anything worse he could have said. Maybe: “if these guys don’t start supporting whatever we say, I’m going to hire some goons to fucking kneecap the bastards”.

But actually, that’s not worse. Because that doesn’t imply the politicians accept bribes (in the form of lobbying money) to support issues.

This is much, much worse than Dodd’s assclownish statement the other day. And it also shows that Dodd really, truly does not understand what’s going on — why people are so upset about these bills and the subsequent reaction to them, as Mike Masnick lays out perfectly.

Amazingly, this discussion is morphing beyond the destruction of the fabric of the Internet and into the underlying notion that our political system is fundamentally corrupt. 

The MPAA should fire Chris Dodd immediately. Of course, they won’t — because in a year (when he’ll be far enough removed from his Senate term to officially lobby) he’ll be the best lobbyist ever. At that point, he’ll be able to do it behind the scenes (with people he served alongsides for decades), and not with fucked up statements like this. 

JON’S COMMENT:

I don’t understand how anyone is surprised Dodd said this. This is how lobbying works, and how campaign finance currently works.

It’s legalized bribery. It’s the equivalent of the Catholic Church and its indulgences.

The refusal to accept that this is corruption is the core of what is happening in America. Democracy can be bought. Truth can be paid for.

The MPAA is just being straight up. That’s the saddest part.

This is how FastCompany’s pages look on my hi-res, 15 inch laptop screen.

Was this site not designed to be read? Was the expectation that a MASSIVE image taking up 2/3rds of the screen would entice me to see if there was actually an article hiding somewhere?

I’m not one of those ‘above the fold!’ zealots, I believe that people scroll.

I just also believe that people like to have some clue what the hell they just opened in their browser.

barackobama:

think-progress:

Obama sings! He sings Al Green!

In the office late tonight, we all just took a break to huddle around someone’s computer and grin like idiots at this.

Winning.

This is likely about 95% correct.

attentionindustry:

Really proud of NOTCOT.org, one of my favourite websites, for taking a stand on PIPA/SOPA today that stays true to the design, doesn’t cripple functionality, and informs without frustrating.

Bravo.

Government regulation is usually an attempt to fix one of two things.

Positive government regulation attempts to fix negative impact of business on society, or negative impact of society on individuals.

Negative government regulation attempts to fix negative impact of innovation and discovery, on incumbent businesses.

Which category does SOPA/PIPA fit into?

Seriously, this is a riot worthy issue in my mind, americans.

Go occupy a congressman’s office or something, please.

mashable:

It’s hard to imagine a better SOPA blackout page than the one at The Oatmeal [pictured above].

For full Mashable coverage of SOPA, go here.

This is perfect. Like, actually perfect.