Russell Davies

meet the new schtick (2)

Hello again. This is a continuation of yesterday's write-up of a presentation I did on Monday. Make sense? Good. And on with the music.

 
I introduced this bit by saying I think this is the message the internet has for a lot of traditional media businesses. I was sort of joking and sort of not. But a little back story is required before we get there.

It's not news that the internet has stimulated all sorts of creativity in the real world. From communities and marketplaces of crafters like folksy to new forms of personal manufacture like shapeways; technology is giving regular people access to tools and markets that once they couldn't reach. And these aren't necessarily new tools or technologies. It's just that suddenly masses of people get to use them where once it was only large organisations that could. And the example I wanted to focus on was paper. (It was for The Guardian Media Group after all).

Tim O'Reilly has a great idea about the power of Watching The Alpha Geeks. And if you did that now, you'd notice that an interesting subset of alpha geeks are getting all excited about books and paper. You only have to look at BookCamp this weekend. And its attendant PaperCamp.

Two things got me really excited about all this stuff. (The first was hearing Aaron talk about The Papernet. But I didn't mention that.) The second was seeing Dave Gray's Marks and Meaning book. (Above on the left.) This is a book in Version Zero. It's unfinished. It's notes for a book.

Mr Gray was smart enough to realise two things; firstly that Lulu have made the mechanics of book-making so cheap and easy that you can move straight to the physical form of the thing as soon as you want. The best way to write a book is bundle all your notes and rough thoughts together and stick them in a book. Then carry that around, make amendments, even invite other people to do the same, until you fancy making another version. And one day, who knows there'll be a definitive 'finished' version. But maybe there never will be.

The second is that, in many ways, that's a more interesting and involving thing to own than a finished book. You're getting an object, but you're also getting into a little community.

He inspired me to make my own book (above on the right) cleverly entitled Notebook 1. I've always wondered how different notetaking styles might work for me so I've put them all together in one place so I can try it out. Grids. Shapes. Boxes. Lines. Plus I've added various things to do in case meetings get boring. Like a simple drawing of Pikachu so I can practise that, get good and impress Arthur.

You see what I'm getting at here? Books/paper are proven technologies. Brilliant things. Really good at all sorts of stuff. We're not in an age where books are about to disappear. But many of the business models associated with them may do. Because we're getting direct access to book technologies ourselves.

And closer to the newspaper world are these three things:

MagCloud is a way to make your own magazine. You upload a pdf. They print it. If you can get people to buy copies above a set base price you make money.

Tabbloid takes RSS feeds you select and turns them into a PDF that looks a bit like a tabloid newspaper. Which they email to you.

ViaPost will take electronic documents, print them out for you and post them for you.

These aren't connected things yet. (Though HP are involved in the first two.) They may well never be. But they point at all sorts of interesting infrastructural possibilities. A way that you can make beautiful print objects without any of the legacy business issues. Cheap and easily enough that you don't have to make money. Or you can find other ways of funding things. These seem like exciting possibilities.

(Picture by Ben, from this set here)

I suppose it was a combination of thinking about all these things, plus finding out how cheap newspapers are to print, that led me and Ben to make this newspaper thing. It's exciting because putting it in the world has clearly made all sorts of people think again about the newspaper format. Cheap paper, cheap printing, can make something beautiful and interesting. It's a great form factor. Just because it's attached to struggling business models doesn't mean it will inevitably disappear.

So you add all these things together and you realise that there are all sorts of interesting possibilities around the corner. For community media projects, personal media projects, for the creativity that's running rampant online to emerge in physical forms in lots of places. Blah blah blah. You know what I mean.

And at that point I just sort of tailed off. I don't have a great conclusion yet.

But there's something in all this. Something worth thinking about. I think. Anyway.

jo-ha-kyu

A great recipe for a presentation: "an ending which is surprisingly sudden".

draping the city in data and dodging augmented urban spam

It's been a long, long time since I said anything original in a presentation. I'm mostly fed up with talking about what I actually know about (brands/adverts/all that). And I don't know enough about the things I'm becoming interested in for anyone to want me to talk about them. So I thought I'd try and cook up something newish by knocking the two together and seeing if there's a presentation in there somewhere.

So here's a start, a general blatting out in public of things that might fit together.

The general area I think might be interesting is in the collision between marketing and brands and the information drenched cities we're soon going to be living in. Technologists are busying themselves turning buildings into displays, or at least draping them with informatics (whether physically or via various forms of augmented reality.) It's all really exciting, thoughtful, stuff with tons of thrilling prototypes and sketches, it reminds me of early webiness. Because, unless I'm missing something, there's not a lot of sophisticated thinking about how this intersects with commerce, marketing and advertising. (And I'm very willing to believe I'm missing something, this is why this is a bit of a voyage of discovery. And I just noticed today that Adam Greenfield's talking about it here. ) The city is already festooned with persuasion, screens are already talking to phones and animating transport systems but it's not being done by thoughtful UI experts it's being done by poster contractors at the behest of advertising agencies.

My concern is that we'll end up blundering into cities plastered with the equivalent of flash banners and microsites. Which is bad enough when they're on our screens but will be horrible when they're everywhere we go. What happens when the urban spam geniuses get to augmenting our reality?

Which is, you know, sort of interesting, but not really helpful. Because that just gets you to the cliche sci-fi visions of Minority Report etc and I don't think the future's going to be like that. It makes movie sense but not marketing sense. And I don't think society will tolerate it, and I don't think decent brands are that stupid.Well, half of me doesn't think so, and half of me suspects we're going to end up with Blade Runner directed by the people who brought you Orangina and Cillit Bang.

I'm not quite sure where to go next with that but it seems like there's something useful to be said about how these different streams of information and different forms of persuasion could coexist in the real world. I look at Dan's wonderful vision of a personal well-tempered environment and the evil marketing devil on my left-shoulder instantly wants to know whose logo's going to go next to the big bit of data and how long we can add a roll-over with a message from the gas company. You know what I mean? It's like the way advertising ended up all over the web - it seemed a pain-free option and a way to get things paid for. But if we want to provide people with all this information all over the city do we want to do it the same way? Advertisers will pay for access to that kind of attention, but is that a deal we want to do?

I think there might be an emerging area of practise here. Because it seems like this could be managed so we create good stuff that works for everyone - civil society, business, etc. But there are a million ways it could end up really bad.

Then there seem to be little threads that might connect to the main weft somehow:

Advertising/communications people know some arcane, non-obvious but relatively proven things about capturing and directing attention. Is that a skill-set that could enhance the efforts of the informaticians?

Is there some connection to the (admittedly unformed) notion of pre-experience design? How cool would it be if the data that's draped around the city leaks back into communications, and if those communications helped to explain and contextualise that data.

And, er, actually, that's it. Not a lot yet, but this feels like a thread worth pulling. So I'm going to.

establishing shots in powerpoint

This is the opening title for Basil The Great Mouse Detective. We watched it this evening and looking at this opening reminded me how good movies are at getting us instantly into a mood and a frame of mind. Which then made me realise how bad most of us are at doing that with powerpoint/keynote. There don't tend to be many establishing shots in presentations, not many visuals designed to get us into the right emotional/mental territory.

(Don't worry it was only a fleeting thought, I'm not that obsessive about presenting, I then got on with enjoying the movie, which is definitely up there at the top of the Disney second division.)

But then, afterwards, I dug out a couple of other DVDs and looked at how they established themselves.

This is the very first shot, Series One, Episode One, of The Wire. Flashing blue lights reflecting in blood on the street. That says it all right there.

This is the first frame of THX1138. Fractured. Abstract. Close.

That's Les Bicyclettes de Belsize. You get it all from that combination of text and visual. Perfect. (Les Bicyclettes is out in the UK at the moment coupled with The London Nobody Knows, they're both brilliant and both barking mad in very different ways.)

We should pay as much attention as movie makers. We get people in a darkened room, we point them at a big illuminated screen and then we show them something horrible like "Whither Synergistic Frameworks? - A Presentation To VeryBigCo By ConsultrGroup.' Seems like we should aim for a stronger start.

And a better End. How many presentations have we all done which peter our into a '... well that's it. Thanks'. What you need is...

powerpoint / keynote feature request

I've always found that presentations are infinitely more useful when you know when they're going to end. You can parcel out your attention appropriately when you have a sense of how long there is to go. So why don't powerpoint or keynote let you stick a timer on the screen? (Or do they? Have I just missed it somewhere?) You can get a timer in the presenters tools but you can't seem to let the audience see.

It can't be that hard. Could we have that please?

widgety goodness 1 - intro and desire

I went to Brighton the other week to talk at Ivan's widgety goodness thing. It wasn't on the pier unfortunately but it was still rather splendid.

I've found myself mostly doing the same presentation all year, which has become slightly depressing, so I was grateful for the opportunity to think of something different to say. It meant though that it was a bit woolly, because I can never really work out what I think until I've started saying it and it takes a few runs through for it to come together, but I think there was some stuff in there worth writing down. The problem of course with writing down your presentation is that it gets a bit leaden on the page, as opposed to the stage. And very long. So I've divided it into four posts. So here we go:

I had to confess to being a little uncertain about what widgets actually were. And I was glad to know it wasn't just me, always everyone speaking spent some time offering a definition. I know that widgets are those things on the right of m'blog, little windows of content from elsewhere but, talking to Ivan, it was clear that he also wanted to embrace the whole idea of mashing things up, of social software and things like Facebook Apps, and of the commercial possibilities for all that. Will widgets kill advertising? All that kind of stuff. So, in the absence of having any larger point I thought I'd talk about two problems for the widget industry that occurred to me, and two opportunities.

Problem One is about value creation versus value extraction, and what's going to be differentiating and therefore, er, valuable.

It's clear that online/digital is going to fundamentally change marketing communications.  It's going to destroy any advertising type that's primarily concerned with deals, timeliness, functionality, availability and that kind of thing. Anything to do with information will be replaced by digital stuff's ability to get more of the right kind of information to the right kind of people more quickly. Classified. Finance ads. Sale information. Directories. All of that will be devoured by clever code, good data and mobile phones. And whoever gets that rightest, soonest will make huge buckets of money.

But I'm not so sure it'll replace this stuff. The stuff that acts to add ideas and images to things. (I'm starting to think of this as 'pre-experience design' but that's a post for another day.) How will this perfect world of social advertising sell me perfume? Because perfume is the perfect example of a mostly information-free product, a product that's built almost entirely from imagery, association and ideas. Certainly a widget on my phone might tell me that a particular brand is on sale as I pass a retailer, and a community widget might tell me 60% of my friends on Facebook use a particular fragrance and I guess you could even do something with a flickr widget and show me pictures that remind all sorts of people of a particular scent or something. But I don't think you can replicate that old-fashioned brand stuff of connecting ideas and images to things. And though I'm firmly convinced that all sorts of media vehicles will be killed by our keen-ness to not watch loads of crap ads I don't think things like Vogue are going anywhere either. Because they're the vehicle for this kind of stuff. And there's something about a physical magazine.

This, of course, runs counter to the conventional online advertising dream that when everyone's empowered with perfect information and sharing everything with their community then all the branding con-artists will be out of a job. Or more likely they'll be lined up against the SuperWall and shot, just after the PR people and Andrew Keen. But I'm think that's one of those techno-utopian singularities that won't come to pass. There's this notion that attaching imagery, ideas and stories to a product is somehow a trick and that once we're all sufficiently melded with our technology we'll awaken from our idiocy and only buy things based on the material cost of goods. Or something. Anyway. I don't think we live in that rational a world. People like buying things that embody ideas wrapped around a physical product, and that they'll pay extra for that. And that that's fun and good.

But I could be wrong. I'm not that committed to this point, I mostly need it to so there's Two Problems to balance out the Two Opportunities. Let's not waste any more time on it. This is going to be long enough as it is.

This is Part One of a very long thing four-part thing. (1, 2, 3, 4)

widgety goodness 2 - the uncanny valley

This next point, I'm more committed to. I think it's more fundamentally problematic.

There's a hypothesis in robotics known as the Uncanny Valley. My crude version of it would be this:  the more human robots get the more we like them, until they get a bit too human, at which point they begin to freak us out.  (The idea of the valley becomes clear if you draw a graph of empathy versus realism. Have a look at the wikipedia entry, you'll see what I mean.) This does seem to be happening in 3D graphics which are starting to get realistic enough to be unsettling. The reason it's a valley rather than a cliff is the idea that eventually robots'll get so good that they'll be human enough for us not to care and we'll like them again. But since no-one's built a robot that good (AS FAR AS WE KNOW) we can't tell about  that yet.

Why do I mention this? Because I think Facebook Beacon and the like have just plunged us over the edge into the relationship marketing Uncanny Valley. I've talked about this before here and here, but it might be worth having another tilt at it. From a different angle.

Whenever you talk about the future of perfectly targeted advertising this scene from Minority Report comes up. It apparently captures nirvana for advertisers; the ability to precisely identify and perfectly direct persuasive commercial messages at a particular individual. Let's ponder for a minute what a misguided bit of futurology this is.

1. Where's His Pop-Up Blocker?

He's an elite psi-detective or something. You're telling me he can't get hold of some open source future firefox ambient ad blocker thingy?

2. Where's The Societal Push-back?

OK. Maybe he's in an awful future where such resistance isn't tolerated. I can't remember. But this would never be allowed in the real world. Society is pushing back the boundaries of advertising all the time, through legislation and social and commercial pressure. The EU would never allow this. It'll probably get piloted in Time Square (like that ridiculous directed sound thing) and then abandoned as egregious urban spam.

3. What About The Standard Of Creativity?

One thing I know to be true. If advertising's going to survive in any form then it has to get much, much better. And those ads there are typically cliched, un-imaginative streams of nonsense. I can't believe they'd invest all that money in corneal recognition and not spring for some decent creative. Especially as they're presumably getting real time tracking telling them all these ads have failed.

4. They're Just Shouting His Name

Yup. With all their genius and precise targeting this is all they can manage to do. Shout his name. In the obviously crass manner beloved of direct mail - Dear Your Name. That, at least, feels true. But is this the best that future marketing can do? Because let's face it, when that's the only thing an organisation has to do, it can seldom even get that right.

If the idea that more information equals more relevance equals great value for customers made sense to people then they'd be calling up DM agencies and offering them all sorts of extra information about themselves. I suspect that's not happening.

Much of the march towards the uncanny valley is because of our horribly sloppy use of language. We behave and talk as though large corporations are going to have genuine, authentic relationships with people. As though they're going to be actual friends. This is palpably never going to be the case. Corporations should of course be honest, respectful, enthusiastic etc etc in their dealings with me. To do otherwise would be stupid. But they're never going to convince me that they're a person, and they shouldn't try to be too much like a person. Which is probably why this stuff is getting so grating. Richard's written more and cleverer thoughts about this here. But I'll return to the robotics metaphor and my usual level of superficiality to suggest that the video below represents the level of humanity to which brands should aspire.

This is Part Two of a very long thing four-part thing. (1, 2, 3, 4)

widgety goodness 3 - meaning and fun

Right. That's the two problems. Maybe not huge, but worth thinking about. Let's look at opportunities.

Before we start let me say that I'm fully signed up for the idea of brand utility. It is far, far better for brands to spend money on useful services for their customers rather than annoying them with pointless and insulting ads. Absolutely. 100%. In fact I'm probably one of those guilty of going overboard in favour of brand utility because we're ashamed of how useful and pointless most 'brand communications' are.  I'm also conscious that it might be a little soon to start a brand utility backlash given very, very few brands have actually done anything with the idea yet. Most of them haven't even started thinking about it.

So let's assume that we're a few years on from now, when every smart brand has built all kinds of useful services into their marketing, incorporating helpful advice and utility for their customers served up by discrete and elegant widgets. Good. Hurrah. Well done. Only problem. Isn't this is a little bit boring? 'Brand utility '- the clue's in the name. It's a utility, it's not very exciting. And, again, I don't want to offend the rational massive, but I think we might need (and want) to do a little more than that.

And Wattson, Dopplr and Plundr point at what I mean.

You'll have probably heard about the Wattson before. It monitors you're electricity usage and lets you know, in real time, in an accessible ambient way how much you're using. And, when they get the companion software and community working properly, it'll let you compare yourself with other people and homes. This seems, to me, to be more than just utility, this seems to be taking information that was perfectly accessible to you before - you could have worked it all out from your electricity bill - and presenting it to you in a way that makes it more meaningful. Not just more useful. Does that make sense? Or is that pushing things too far?

Or maybe Dopplr's a better example. It's built out of very mundane information - just your travel plans. And it does a very simple thing - share that with people. So you could use it as a great example of brand utility. I have done. I've cited it quite often as the perfect thing that an airline mileage company should have done, the perfect example of a missed opportunity for a brand utility. But the more I think about it the more I don't think that's true. Because Dopplr isn't really about travel plans; it's about friendship and serendipity. (I don't think it's coincidence that it was built by a group of friends.) There's a difference there, it's about more than information. It's about something bigger. And I suspect that if an airline had built it it'd wouldn't have been made with the kind of attention and love that gives you something as elegant as dopplr. And that's not just an aesthetic after thought, that's part of how the meaning arrives.

And that seems like a big opportunity for the widgetygoodness business. If there's a way to go beyond the exchange of information and create some additional meaning for people, that'd be good. If you're using my data to make a widget I want you to do more than just help me buy stuff, I want you to generate something meaningful for me.

Or, failing that, what about making stuff that takes my information and lets me play with it.

Plundr is a game built by area/code. (Only works in the States unfortunately.) When you connect to a wifi network it works out where you are and either tells you you're on a particular pirate island, or let's you name and claim your own island. And then, if there's anyone else playing plundr on that network you can fight their pirate ship with your pirate ship. Or, you can fight some automated ships or trade between networks.  It's incredibly simple but it's silly and captivating and fun. It's basically plazes plus fun. Plazes is great.  Useful. Kind of interesting. I use it. I'm just not quite sure why. Plundr takes my behaviour and makes play out of it. That seems like something we can learn from.

Area/code have also made Sharkrunners. It's a game built to promote yet another Shark Week on Discovery. You play the part of a marine biologist, chasing about looking for sharks, learning about them as you go. So far, so slightly predictable. But the bit that makes it almost magic is that you're chasing real sharks, it's based on actual live shark data from GPS-enabled sharks. That gives it a whole other dimension. It seems more meaningful because it's more real. And you're not just showing me information, you're letting me play with it.

Imagine if Tesco thought about the clubcard the same way. Imagine if it was a game you could play. Or if you could sign up for an Oyster game which rewarded the person who'd travelled the most on the network each day, or had made the fastest trip between stations. Or something. You know. You can imagine. Think of all the data we all generate all day. Not just online, in the real world. When you take that data and try and sell me stuff it freaks me out, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if you let me play with it. Imagine a Passively Multiplayer game built out of loyalty and membership card data.

As Dan points out in his InterestingSouth talk, we can generate both meaning and fun out of real world data. And we should. There's nothing wrong, and there's something joyful about entertainment built on a service.

This is Part Three of a very long thing four-part thing. (1, 2, 3, 4)

widget goodness 4 - magical things

People talk about the Nike+ a lot. I do. It's a brilliant thing. And there's always a lot of widgety conversation about it. All of this chat seems to focus on this stuff:

Which is good and nice and everything, but with all of our obsession with screens we seem to have missed the bigger, magical thing:

And that seems to me to be the really interesting possibility for widgety goodness - adding information and social networking to products, not to marketing; making things smarter, not websites. And I suspect this means moving away from screens at both ends of the process. It means delivering smarts and information to the things in our pockets. It means getting things to talk, and to listen. And smell, and everything.

Widgets make sense when they're sending meaning and fun to ambient devices, to things like Nabaztag and Chumby. Or when the socialness is built in with things like Olinda. This, I bet, is how widgetness will really escape the  dreariness of services and transaction. By making magical things. Think of the joy of that. Widgets might become the way that our spimes talk to us. And they might actually talk. Widget makers will be the people who work out effective sound-design for ambient information. Or they'll build an interface we can understand just via touch. That seems the big opportunity for the widgety industry - to escape the little boxes on websites and build connectivity and socialness into the world of products, things and people.

Anyway. That's it. Like I say, early thoughts, but I enjoyed the day at WidgetyGoodness. Thanks Ivan.

This is Part Four of a very long thing four-part thing. (1, 2, 3, 4)

powerpoint as a toy for thought

Gareth introduced me to a brilliant little book called The Plenitude and I started devouring it last night. Excellent stuff, nice discussion of the problems and delights of creating 'stuff'. This little thought popped up in the intro: PowerPoint is a Toy for Thought. And it crystalised all sorts of stuff for me.

I love PowerPoint, have done for years, it's my weapon of choice. And I'm starting to really like Keynote too (mostly because it can do great things with video, though I wish it didn't make everything look so Californian).

I tend to write a presentation by gathering a bunch of images that represent stories, like this:

Then I chuck them, more or less randomly, into that multi-slide view (as below) and shuffle them about until they divide up into sensible chapters or streams of thought:

That seems a reasonable way to do things. And PowerPoint and Keynote do that well. But I've been frustrated for ages that no-one seems to be innovating in presentation software, Apple and Microsoft seem to have given up and I can't find any eager new start-up that's trying to challenge them, even if I couldn't imagine what that innovation would be like.

But then 'Toy For Thought' made me realise what I'd love to see happen. I'd love someone to do to PowerPoint what the Wii did to Xbox and the Playstation. What might this mean?

1. They'd think about the performance aspect of presenting more. The embedded assumptions within powerpoint and keynote seem to be that the presenter is going to stand right in front of (or very near to) the laptop. And that they're not going to move about much, or be very physical, that they're going to be  relatively sober and business-like. That doesn't seem to be that true. Look at Steve Balmer - he uses PowerPoint - imagine a presentation tool that drew on this energy and movement.

Or imagine a presentation suite that used something like this as the controller. That'd liven things up a bit. Or what could PowerPoint learn from GuitarHero?

2. They'd allow for a bit more abstraction. PowerPoint tends to be incredibly literal. (Or maybe that's the presentations people tend to make.) I've always hated U2, but I've always like the presentations they do. Because that's how I think of their gigs. You've got Bono presenting down the front and all the visual stuff is the PowerPoint - and they're very good at creating stuff that illustrates the point but doesn't just repeat it. Abstract, visual, moving stuff. Imagine if UVA collaborated with someone on presentation software, how good would that be?

3. They'd allow for less linearity. I saw Usman Haque present once, and he used what seemed to be a home-made flash presenting tool which allowed him to crawl around a web of charts, laid out a bit like a mindmap. It meant he could follow trains of thought which made sense at the time, and it meant the connections between charts were revealed to the audience, which helped us understand. And I bet he found it was easier for him to remember the contents of his presentation, because they were laid out in metaphorical space that made more sense. It would also allow for the thing I've always wanted - the ability to construct a single giant presentation, containing all your ideas, thoughts, images, videos, that you could dart through in different ways, depending on your audience, whim, timing, etc. This would make a better presenting tool, but also a better thinking tool, because you could pile new ideas on top of old ones and let them knock up against each other, creating new juxtapositions and new ideas. In fact, thinking about it, the ideal would be not to keep importing stuff into a presentation suite, but to just tag things and allow the presentation stuff to explore them. Or something.

Which brings us nicely back to the Wii, because Matt used a Wiimote at dConstruct to interact with his tilting slide interface and it had me hypnotised, because it felt like the first step down a really interesting route. Brian Eno used to talk about how he wished computers had more Africa in them:

“What’s pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It’s imprisoning." (quote found here)

I guess my tiny version of that would be wishing that presentation stuff had more performer in them. Imagine a presentation driven by a dance pad, or even a tenori-on. Imagine if it was physically difficult to move to the next image. Or if the presentation would pour on like a river unless you intervened to stop it. Or. Or. Well, you know. That'd all be more fun for everyone.