For a number of years now Chris Jordan has been doing a series of massive pictures that graphically show some shocking statistics. If you click on the image below you can see an amazing slideshow of his stuff on Portfolio.com. And I’ve also added a lecture he did at TED this year below it. Enjoy.
My lovely fiancée and I went out for dinner on Friday night to our local Mexican bar (staffed by Japanese girls living in London). And I liked how the restaurant advertised itself.
This morning Asi sent round a link to a fantastic email that Bill Gates wrote in 2003. It’s a wonderfully vitriolic rant about just how crap the Windows experience is and how hard it can be to do simple things. God bless you Mr Gates. I bet your home is secretly filled with Macs.
Here’s a highlight:
Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.
But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.
What an absolute mess.
Read the whole thing here.
I’ve just seen this great video on Greg’s tumblr page. It’s for a new product called poop freeze which …ehm …freezes poop. You carry it with you when you’re walking your dog so that when nature calls, you can freeze the organic matter, making it easier to pick up and dispose of. Fantastic! The thing that disturbs me most about picking up a dogs mess is the fact that you can feel the heat through the plastic bag - so this solves another issue for me.
I’m also posting the film for another reason. Watch the end of the ad and see how they use the classic selling techniques I outlined in my ‘How to write persuasively‘ document. They use the ‘not only but also’ method twice and the ‘hurry this offer can’t last for ever’ thing. It’s tacky and tasteless but it’s there for a reason. They wouldn’t put this crap on TV unless it paid for itself and brought in a profit.
I’ve just bought a battery operated sensor bar for my Wii. It’s made in China and I love the Engrish text on the packaging.
Apparently the main feature of the product is:
It gets rid of the demerit of original wired sensor bar, greatly extends the controlled space, adopts large angle and infrared transmitter to get more accurate control orientation.
And the instructions are:
Well, I’m glad that’s cleared up then.
I’ve just discovered this beautiful vehicle hailed as the new low-emission compact urban vehicle. It’s been designed at the Technical University of Berlin and, admittedly, it’s rather beautiful. It’s called the CLEVER which is supposed to stand for ‘Compact Low Emissions Vehicle for Urban Transport’. So they may be good designers but they can’t spell.
I can’t help feeling that it reminds me of a high profile failure from 20 years ago. Maybe the Sinclair C5 just needed a roof. And someone cool driving it.
You can read more about it here.
I’ve been having a really poor experience of Virgin Broadband recently. It just keep slowing down and stopping altogether - sometimes for hours at a time. So I’ve found this handy tool that will show me exactly how good/bad my internet connection is. I’m going to keep an eye on my home broadband stats to properly gauge its crapness. I’ll report back soon. In the meantime, this is my current connection speed at Poke.
I saw this in the street a couple of days ago. I’m not sure how factually correct it is.
The search terms that lead people to this blog are fascinating. Here’s this morning’s batch:
I get a lot of hits from the term ‘god’ at the moment because of my post on the end to all religious wars - but I’m a bit concerned about this morning’s other popular search term ‘liar’. I know of lots of other sites that deserve that traffic more. I quite often get hits for ’shops in London’ because of my business Unchained - but I’m rather perturbed that somebody found me by typing ‘I hate my girlfriend’ into Google. I just want to state, for the record, that this is not the case and I’m very happy with my lovely fiancée.
Nathan at Rubbishcorp sent me this brilliant face that he found on FrostFireZoo. I feel truly humbled. I may have to throw in the towel when I reach my 100th entry. What do you think?
Last week the lovely people at Qype invited Lea and I out for a sushi and sake evening at Tsuru - a new Japanese restaurant in Southwark. It’s located in the very heart of the soul-less Bankside123 development - but fortunately isn’t tarred with the usual homogenous chainstore brush. The food and matching sake (courtesy of the Akashi-Tai Sake brewery) was probably the best Japanese culinary action I have ever experienced. And I’m now a total fan of sake - having washed everything down with a huge variety of fermented rice juice. Yum! But I’m not going to say any more about the meal here. Instead, you can read my raving review on Qype. Then I can skip on to talking about my fellow diners.
They were a mix of influential London bloggers and web 2.0-ists, including Annie Mole from the London Underground blog, Mex from Moo.com, Chris and Hazel from the Londonist, Niamh from eatlikeagirl, Tim from theplummetonions, Rob and Sabrina from Qype and, of course, my lovely fiancée. And because we’re all a bunch of opinionated yakkers, our conversations outlasted the meal and we had to continue them at a nearby pub (before abandoning them unfinished at chucking-out time).
So a big thank you to everyone for a great night. And I’m already looking forward to a sequel in the near future.
Like this lovely Boeing 727 which has been left at Hanoi airport. It was flown here late last year and the authorities can’t find the owner.
If you think it might be yours, you can find more details on the BBC news site.
I’ve never really wondered about this before. But at least I don’t have to ever again. I know the answer now.
Created by OnePlusYou
Steve Harrison is never one to keep his opinions to himself. I worked for him a few years ago and he earned a lot of my respect (while I earned a lot less than the going freelance rate). So it’s only right that I respond to his full page article in Campaign this week.
You see, Steve has some good points. In short, he’s saying that as an industry we have learned a lot about people’s behaviour, what they respond to and how to motivate them. And it would be foolish for us to be “throwing the baby that it’s taken nearly 100 years to nurture out with the analogue bathwater.” I agree with all of that. But I also think it’s a sweeping and unfair statement to claim that the industry is guilty as charged.
As Creative Director at Poke, my main focus is the bright new world of digital - which is apparently the area at fault. And from my achingly-trendy point of view in Shoreditch, I just don’t see it. I know that Steve worked in a big agency group for a few years before he was exiled from the industry, so I can only assume that his point of view has been coloured by that experience. But I actually think Steve has maybe misunderstood what people have been saying and has misinterpreted realism as barbarism.
Quite simply, people relate to each type of media differently. And these relationships are evolving over time. The new area of digital requires a new bunch of rules and a few of the old advertising rules just don’t work in pixel-town. These new rules aren’t by any means a wholesale replacement of the old ones - they are just a set of addendums and revisions.
And our work is never done. The new speed of change requires constant reassessment. Take online display advertising, for instance. Figures show that it’s becoming less and less effective as time goes by. Look at TV advertising that just isn’t reaching the audience it used to, can be edited out of recorded programmes and is losing its place as the key channel of influence. And look at the growing hostility towards DM from consumers, government and local councils alike.
You see, Steve, the issue here is not the change in the industry - it’s the change in consumer behaviour.
Many of these apparent barbarians who are supposedly trampling disrespectfully on Bernbach’s grave are in fact smart visionaries who are constantly having to rewrite their own rules to fit in with a rapidly evolving audience. Three years ago people sent viral videos as attachments in emails - now we just point to YouTube. Last year Facebook apps were considered a great customer engagement tool - this year they’re a no-no. At present, the internet is something you mainly access from a computer - in a couple of years it’s more likely to be through your mobile.
The landscape, culture and capabilities of digital is ever-changing and the audience is developing in line with it. The most powerful marketing method is no longer talking at people - it’s engaging with them. Communication is no longer one way - it’s two way. Companies now need to stop being precious about their brands but instead share them with their audience. The amazing ways you can now reach people were unthinkable 10 years ago.
Yes, people are the same creatures with the same motivations as ever. They’re still as greedy, lazy, selfish, insecure, horny and vain as ever. All the learnings from the past are still relevant. But the truly dangerous Philistine-ism would be to overlook the changes in audience behaviour and try to talk to people as if the internet was never invented.
Last week a lot of people visited the blog to see the scary baby cake. So I went and had a look at the cake-maker’s site to see what other monstrosities lurked therein. And I managed to find the most boring lump of edible sweetness in christendom. Voila!
Whilst looking for wedding cake ideas last night, my fiancée came across this amazing video (yes, I’m delighted to say that I got engaged last week). It’s a woman who does some incredible ’sugar art’. But one of the pieces really disturbed us.
You see, the whole point of a cake to me is that you eat it. You take a big sharp knife, cut yourself an unhealthy slice and swallow it down with a nice cup of tea. Am I wrong, people? So this creation just gives me the heebie-jeebies. I just don’t understand what kind of person would order this cake. Somebody who’s organising a birthday party for mad psychopathic child-killer?
If you want to see more, she’s even done a YouTube video of the creation of this monstrosity. Needless to say, we won’t be ordering this design for our big day.
While writing a document on web video this week, I was searching for some useful information to steal and pass off as my own genius. I wanted to include a bit about the different techniques you can use to make a video viral but - alas - after a fruitless half hour on Google I gave up. So I decided to write it myself and share it with the world.
This isn’t about the psychological reasons that people pass on video. If you want that information, you won’t do any better than this post on Seth Godin’s blog. Instead, this is intended as a resource for people wanting to create virals - or tell a client why they shouldn’t or couldn’t do one.
So - what is it that makes something viral, then?
Quite simply, people will only pass something on if it causes some kind of emotional reaction. The stronger the reaction, the more chance it has of going viral. If it just leaves the viewer with a ‘meh’, they’ll close the browser window and forget they ever saw it. So in an attempt to categorise viral films, I’m listing the variety of reactions they can cause - ‘oh!’, ‘ooh!’, ‘ugh!’, ‘huh?!’, ‘wow!’, ‘ah!’, ‘aaaaah!’ and ‘hahaha!’. Naturally, there’s a bit of overlap between categories so I’ve included an example for each one to try to clear things up a bit.
Here we go:
Oh!
Be shocking, surprising, politically incorrect, frightening or show something amazing. This is all about astounding people in some way and poking them in the eye with some kind of extreme-ness.
Granny kicks a baby
Ooh!
Get a bit fruity. Be sexually explicit, show nudity or tease with a huge dollop of sexiness. If you want to, you can take this further and end up in the next category.
Lynx webcam girls
Ugh!
Be gross or gory and turn people’s stomachs. This is the kind of stuff you pass on to gross your friends out.
Two girls One cup reaction - I’m not linking to the actual video!
Huh?!
That WTF moment. Being so totally out there and weird that people are stunned, baffled and intrigued enough to share it. You really need something that is so original it doesn’t fit with any frame of reference.
Leave Britney alone
Wow!
Show something that people think is impossible. Something that will have them trying to work out how it was done. That will make them watch it again and again, pass it on and discuss it.
Ronaldino crossbar tricks
Ah!
This is where human observation comes in. Pick out things that people recognise within themselves or from the world they live in.
Dove evolution
Aaaaah!
This is the emotional one where you show laughing babies, cute puppydogs and delightfully confused pensioners. It’s all very human and honest.
I’ll kick his ass
Hahaha
Good old comedy. Probably the hardest one to do. YouTube is full of clips from the best comedians since the invention of moving images. It’s unlikely that you’re one of them.
The Landlord
Have I missed anything out? Do you have any better examples of viral films that fit in to the categories? Please leave a comment and let me know.
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