Get Shouty


Social Business: Innovation and Storytelling: Connect Now
April 15, 2010, 5:33 pm
Filed under: Experience

My notes:

The theme: One of the fundamental challenges organisations have is in developing a culture of innovation and inspiration- and building the teams and behaviours that will share and collaborate in order to achieve this. Where do you start? And how do you feed the fire?

Chart 13:

Change management is a scary word

It’s difficult, lengthy and expensive

Is technological change environmental change?

Chart 14:

(from Mumbrella’s coverage of the APG Battle of the Big Thinking Battle of Big Thinking part 1: Creating unique brands; Changing the world; Perth vs Sydney

Speaker: Peter Williams – CEO, Deloitte Digital

Topic: The formula for changing the world

Quote: “Any match in the box can start a fire.”

His argument:

That rather than chasing influencers, brands need to understand that when a population is ready to go through a phase transition anything can be a trigger if you understand it.

Using a home experiment involving a bottle of beer from the freezer, he showed how once one molecule of beer freezes (or changes phase), the transition moves to the next.

He also challenged the audience to clap in unison, and with no other obvious organisation, the room fell into rhythm within about a second.

He argued that formula for changing the world is simply having a self-influencing population that is ready to make that phase transition, and a trigger.

Chart 15:

Phase transition is more than synchronicity

You need to design the ‘what’s next’- because you’ll lose momentum and the potential for shift if you stop supplying new triggers and adapting the rules.

This formula’s potential describes the building blocks of change

It’s a process- an organic model that lives. It’s not set and forget.

It’s about creating an environment and prompts for adapting the simple rules and the trigger

Because phase transition is a chain reaction- you need to keep feeding the loop

Chart 16:

“Any match in the box can start a fire.”

“The ability to combine knowledge and information in a new way is important. Just because you have knowledge and information does not mean you are a creative person. But it is also impossible to be a creative person without knowledge and information.”

http://knowledge.smu.edu.sg/article.cfm?articleid=1267

Chart 20

This exercise was inspired by Helen Hasan’s presentation at the NSW KM Forum – February Triple Threat.

At it’s heart:

  • You ask participants to find someone they don’t know and negotiate a game of PSR
  • (this can usually be seamlessly achieved
  • Then you ask that ‘team’ to find another pair and negotiate another game (with no further explanation)
  • What was a simple and explicitly understood task becomes a lot more complex….and chaotic
  • …. what will happen next?

Helen Hasan is Associate Professor in Information Systems at University of Wollongong.  She has been a member of the KM committee of Standards Australia since its beginning and is proud of her role in writing the Australian KM Standard released in 2005.  Her research areas relate to an innovative aspect of KM that she now refers to as ‘Sensible Organisation’. She has published widely in academia and she has applied her research findings in numerous consulting projects.

Photo credits:

Chart 23

http://threexthree.wordpress.com/

Chart 24

http://teamred1.tumblr.com/

Chart 26

The management team also used this structure to present quarterly back to the team

Chart 36

This diagram was created for my chapter of ‘Age of Conversation’

What it says is that you’re never more than 2 steps from disaster….

And with the tenure of marketers….why would they take that risk ?

Chart 39

Blog coverage: From State of Flux :

Can I explain what I do to my Mum?  Katie Chatfield highlighted that we are working in a field that is quite complex and that has a new language. Don’t use jargon and discourse people don’t get, people need to understand your ideas to take them up. Use language as a tool to transfer your idea to the next person, when your trying to translate an idea to someone, it needs to be a story they can tell to other people.

Chart 43

Blog coverage: State of Flux:

Jack’s Show and Tell
Katie Chatfield introduced us to her company’s concept – Jack’s Show and Tell. This is cool! Company gets together to “build a titanium culture” recognises and awards work that changes the game. Gives people a chance to learn to tell great stories. Once a month, brought to you by the strategy, creative and design team. It is show and tell for grown ups and not a lot has changed since Year 3 at school. Simple stories, powerful experiences, transferring knowledge and a chance to look at how someone looks at the world

Chart 47

Ralph was inspired by the ancient (and, sadly, lost) art of haikugami, where the traditions of haiku are melded with those of origami to create beautiful and functional poetry.

In this entertaining and interactive presentation, Ralph shows what’s possible with 500 people, 5 minutes, and lots of pieces of paper!

See his fab presentation and  some of the creations

Chart 49

Photo credits:

Chart 50

Photo credits:

7 comments


connectnow- come prepared to play!
April 4, 2010, 8:58 pm
Filed under: Experience

I took some video notes a while back to prepare for ConnectNow a conference that is happening in Sydney next week.

I want to explore some of the programs that I’ve designed and facilitated that help build face to face storytelling cultures and share some of the outtakes.

And I’d love to give people some experience of what it’s like to participate in a grown up show and tell.

Where I’ve got to in designing the experience is something along these lines:

  • knowledge exchange- exploring the potential of 200 units  towards 40,000
  • what can we learn from paper, scissors, rock
  • simple rules + the notion of phase transition
  • paper planes and storytelling

I’m hoping that people come prepared to play!

6 comments


expert opinions
March 31, 2010, 10:07 am
Filed under: The Rules

Elvis at home with Barbara Hearn, a high-school girlfriend

From this vanity fair article on photographer Al Wertheimer, who shadowed Elvis in 1956, the year Elvis-mania hit. Wertheimer on what made Elvis different:

“He dared to move….Singers just did not move onstage in those days. You stood there like Frank Sinatra or Perry Como, and you sang from the waist up. Elvis broke all the rules. He moved his hips. He charged the microphone. He was introducing something that was just not acceptable to grown-ups and the more conservative groups. I have the William Morris guys getting him into a corner, and they’re giving him advice: ‘Now, Elvis, look, you get up there, you sing your song, but don’t move too much.’ Elvis dutifully listened. He wouldn’t argue with them. But once he got onstage he did what he wanted. And it created such a sensation. Not because you could hear him sing—there was too much screaming going on. The kids loved it. And the kids were the ones who bought the 45s.

Via Matt Linderman at 37signals, who says,

Funny to imagine those experts sitting Elvis down and telling him that he’s got to stop moving onstage. Shows you the problem with experts: They’re experts on the past. No one is an expert on the future.

1 comment


4 years of shoutyness
March 30, 2010, 4:16 pm
Filed under: Digital Strategy

The baker’s dozen of posts that you all really liked in the last year:

My favourite, one of the most important things I’ve ever done and one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to share:

And so what’s the outtake from this year? This blogging thing, this tweeting thing – it’s not about technology.

If you’re not using it to fundamentally try to understand all that what being human is like you’re missing the point.

You can make the invisible visible.

You can preserve and protect the fragile and ephemeral from disappearing.

You can inspire people to do things.

You can create places where people can listen and share; laugh, collaborate and hope; and support and grieve.

My lessons in this fourth year of Get Shouty have been about the real costs of committing to real communities.

And the real value of participating in them.

Thanks everyone.

4 comments


curioser and curioser
March 18, 2010, 6:00 pm
Filed under: Digital Strategy, Experience

So many thinkering Sydney events this week. It’s always great to get away from behind your desk and fill up the inspiration tanks a little.

While I usually broadcast my experiences of these things while I’m out and about, I’m starting to become very much aligned with Tim Burrows thinking outlined in Why I’m over live blogging (and I’m not sure about live tweeting either) as I believe it reduces your ability to absorb what’s actually going on in the room, or as Tim puts it:

Often, the temptation to be first, or even instantaneous, is at the expense of proper thought…often,  I don’t think the process does anyone much justice.

I attended some Adtech keynotes and Breakfast sessions as well as a new event put on by the APG this week. My focus was not only to get information and inspiration, I was trying to see the value of ‘being in the room’. Seeing people do their stuff and chatting in between sessions is a great way to get a sense check of the barometer of the industry and the strength of your personal network.

With so much digital content and opinion being generated swirling around the live moment and the speaker I think that, if you can’t be present yourself, you need to have a rock in the audience. Someone you know, someone you trust, someone who can make you think and put their own ego aside to contextualize what’s going on.

So I’ll let some of my rocks,  people who I really respect and admire,  to give their opinion and outtakes:

From Ad:tech- which focuses on all aspects of digital marketing and advertising

Mark Pollard’s experience

From the Battle of the Big Thinking- put together by the Australian Planning Group, fifteen people speak for fifteen minutes each in five topics. You can see the whole list here.

2 comments


Tell me a story
March 16, 2010, 6:15 pm
Filed under: Experience

I love the brevity and the passion of video case studies. I love their structure: an insight, the experience and the results.

What I think is food for thought for all of us is the notion that the journey of our work is a story in itself.

And I love that ‘the idea is everything’- and yet almost all of the tippytop winning entries all have ‘live’ as a large component of the work.

Have a stroll through the video case studies below, be inspired,  and have a think about how we can all better tell the stories of what we do and what can be done:

2 comments


Is it the right chart?
March 10, 2010, 3:08 pm
Filed under: Experience

How to Pick the right Chart by Amit Agarwal on Flickr found on Swiss Miss

Useful, perhaps, for presenting information- but how are you presenting insight? How are you embedding knowledge? How are you facilitating the transference of ownership of your ideas to your audience?

Now compare that ‘thought starter’ to this:

I love this video of Oliver Jeffers’ process: ‘The pictures define the words and the words define the pictures’.

I wonder what would happen to our ability to educate and motivate one of our most important audiences, our clients, if we stopped thinking about ‘charts’ and ‘decks’ and even ‘presentations’.

What if we thought: ‘story books’?

The purpose of story books are multiple: curated moments between parent and child; almost unconscious educational experiences where children don’t even know that they’re learning to read; and potentially building the foundation of a lifetime relationship with the power of the imagination and the delight of the written word. They live beyond  the duration of the mechanics of reading aloud and they are designed to be retold. Powerful stories you can bring to life years afterwards, in their entirety, and without the book in front of you.

Now those are benchmarks!

4 comments


How frickin’ awesome are cardboard boxes…
March 9, 2010, 2:18 pm
Filed under: Experience

What could you do with:

  • Several cardboard boxes
  • Beach balls
  • An old bucket
  • A 1950s-era Dansette record player that can play vinyl discs at both 78 and 33 rpm?

If you’re Robin Hemmings and Oliver Millingham you use them to  bring to life the ”46 or 47” real and imaginary people,  in the play One Small Step, who were  involved in the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States.

”They’re all essential components of our rockets. You see, we have to fly to the moon several times while we’re in Sydney.”

Last year was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing – a defining moment in human history: something which would have engrossed the greatest scientific minds of the past 2500 years, from Aristotle to Copernicus, Galileo to Newton. Yet, just four decades on, the world was more interested in the antics of Paris Hilton and the death of Michael Jackson than recalling that thrilling vision

Steve Meachem, in his review “How to get to the moon – with just a little excess baggage”

Nevertheless, audiences have been moved by One Small Step, which relives the era when rival empires set themselves a seemingly impossible challenge, then raced to meet it via names like Sputnik, Gemini and Apollo.

”The whole show is like one big dare,” Hulse says. ”If it was just about technology it wouldn’t make good theatre. But it isn’t. It’s about human endeavour.”

I saw the show and I loved it. I was lucky enough (or rather I know @IanLyons …) to be able to take the creative team I work with to the show and this was their response:

How frickin‘ awesome are cardboard boxes…

What really came across was ingenuity- the passion and the playfulness of the storytelling. Cardboard boxes became rockets and jet packs and all kinds of gadgetry. Small children clapped and big  kids cheered and everyone got swept away with the energy and the notions behind the adventure of having a really big vision and committing to a huge challenge.

The teams that participated in the space race didn’t have anything thing they needed on the shelf to get there. And yet NASA sent astronauts to the Moon using less computing power than you will find in a modern family car – we’re not even talking top of the range models here.

I can’t help but think that with advertising creative we can forget the vast color, depth and variety of the human imagination- and how much more fun (and effective) it can be to inspire an experience in someone’s head rather than giving it to them on a plate.

Maker-uppering works best when the storyteller and the storytell-ee are feeding off each other. When you play together. When its participatory.

In realising our messaging to the n-th degree we can paint all the details and don’t allow our audiences imaginations to become involved. I can’t help but think that we might pre-digest our creative a little too much to allow a role for our audiences. We all know that kids can like the box better than the present: a toy is what it is while a box can be anything you want it to be. I wonder if instead of briefing “out of the box thinking” we might have more fun and invite more participation with “what could we do with this box” thought starters.

UPDATE: must share this Calvin and Hobbes’s transmogrifier from Simon

.

How to get to the moon – with just a little excess baggage

2 comments


Visible and invisible arts
March 3, 2010, 12:27 pm
Filed under: Experience, passion

I am having a look at motion right now.

How people move, in relation to all other things.

In a lot of martial arts there is a notion called “ukemi”

A common take is that ukemi, (which Aikido calls “the art of falling”), is thought of as the passive, difficult, or the less desirable aspect of practice. The “fun” part is throwing people. The boring part is getting thrown.

The action of uke is called “taking ukemi (受け身).” Literally translated as “receiving body”, it is the art of knowing how to respond correctly to an attack and often incorporates skills to allow one to do so safely. These skills can include moves similar to tumbling and are often used as a valid exercise in itself. In aikido and judo training for instance, many classes begin with ukemi training as conditioning.

But there is a different way to approach ukemi that is not only more interesting, but much more effective. It means shifting your mindset from passive to active around the practice:

(At its simplest) Instead of being pulled around and thrown to the ground, you realize a tremendous advantage if you actively following an aggressor’s (nage) lead, moving under your own power and direction. At some point, nage may do something to take your balance beyond recovery. Once you notice that your balance is going, you actively disengage your interaction with nage and lower yourself to the ground! Notice who’s doing what in this description. Uke should always feel in control, even when being thrown.

The meaning I learned describes a practice that brings awareness and facilitates control in relationship to physical things in your environment. Most people who know me would say that my relationship with stairs would belie any knowledge of ukemi- but that’s where the practice bit comes in- you need to be mindful in order to get the benefits.

I’m thinking a way to describe it is perhaps ‘the art of response’. One of key benefits is that it prevents fear in the moment- most people are terrified of being hurt in a physical confrontation and that overwhelms them.  Quite a bit of the practice for a female is evasion- not only how to get out of a physical situation but how to get some degree of control over it: how to manage it, to prevent it happening or defuse escalation. It’s an invisible art.

I like the tension between visible art (flashy, shouty, look at me stuff that happens in the moment)- and invisible art (tone, consistency, awareness/thoughtfulness that happens over time). I like that the everyday practice of ukemi changes experience and enjoyment of a moment- it also should positively impact the moment of all those around the practitioner.

I think we all focus quite a bit on form and attack- on the aggressive ‘nage’ expressions of advertising. And of course we need to have these skills, but when we combine these with the invisible arts of ‘uke’ we can create something a bit different. What can be achieved when these two skills are applied in concert is a duet where people can feel the harmony and wander off thinking that they are singing their own tune.

7 comments


Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.
February 26, 2010, 3:15 pm
Filed under: Experience

I’m a huge believer that people can process information  more quickly and more deeply when it is presented as a visual narrative. 80% of the brain is dedicated to visual processing….

One of the best examples of this is Gapminder -a data visualization tool used to highlight statistics about our world to promote the UN Millenium Development goals.

Contextualizing abstract data in this manner allows for an increased understanding of the World, possibly leading to insights and more informed decisions.

If you can get people to play with the information and see the impact, you can unlock even greater understanding:

Designers Jochen Winker and Stefan Kuzaj work with the visualization of data, and have been developing innovative models for absorbing complex information. Their latest work (you can see above) features methods for making information interactive, requiring users to engage with devices in order to fully unlock the value of the information at hand.

Some great examples:

9 comments


more ducks in a row
February 18, 2010, 3:36 pm
Filed under: Experience, Great Stuff

Love it live

  • Experiential – from Live to LOUD
    • Social media is having an explosive effect on experiential campaigns, creating the potential to multiply thousands of brand interactions into millions.
  • Japanese landscape design studio EARTHSCAPE,  have created a giant travelling human-shaped herb garden. Called Medical Herbman Café Project (MHCP), the garden arrives in shipping containers which convert into a shop and cafe at each location. Proceeds from the shop and cafe are used to build playgrounds in developing countries.
  • For Sony Ericsson’s Hopper Invasion campaign a grid of inflatable ‘hoppers’ were constructed that were each connected to air pump devices. Fans of the event were encouraged to use the hashtag #prompt while tweeting what creative things they would like to do if they had hundreds of hoppers; these tweets triggered the inflation of the hopper grid, resulting in a real-space visualization of online activity associated with the event.

The business of show business

Innovation

Show Business

· Check out the reviews of some European expos: PLASA for lighting & visuals, audio and motion control; ABBT for theatre tech; ProLight+ Sound

· The staging at the Brit Awards was mind blowing.

o See the versatility of the staging: Dizzee Rascal & Florence + The Machine and Jay Z & Alicia Keys

§ Have a read of the how the 2009 Awards were put together

· Julia’s Bicycle :an online tool to measure a venue or event’s greenhouse gas emissions

· Love the rambunctious jazz cabaret, twisted circus and burlesque performers that create the mayhem at Redbennies in South Yarra

Innovation

· Sportpong is an interactive physical computer game where the field is projected on the ground and two (or more players) compete in teams. With a ‘paddle’ you hit the ball and try to strike a goal or defend your goal.

· Elie Zananiri’s Big Screams project featured an interactive screen displaying cartoon-like characters, each generated by, and linked to participants, who called into a specific number through their mobile. Each character battled the other participants in a game won by whoever screamed the loudest into their phone, the resulting audio pushing other characters off the screen.

· It may become possible to transform a variety of surfaces into a touch sensitive screen. Displax has created an incredibly thin, interactive film that can be applied onto surfaces both curved and flat.

· faderTouch 3.0, is a portable rear projection touchscreen interface. The display can be viewed from front and rear. Audio visual instruments are programmed in Processing triggering sounds in Ableton Live via MIDI.

· Augmented reality (AR)

o A short film about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

o A t-shirt houses an AR game of Paper, Scissors, Stone.

o 35 great examples of where Augmented Reality and their applications to the commercial and art world.

Leave a comment


the Robin Hood tax
February 17, 2010, 5:35 pm
Filed under: Get Activist

The ad is written by Richard Curtis and stars Bill Nighy.

A British coalition of charities and unions has launched a campaign The Robin Hood tax for a tax on speculative banking transactions.

The ‘Robin Hood Tax’ targets financial institutions who were bailed out using public money during the global financial crisis.

The idea is to direct the money to public services, poverty relief and addressing climate change.

For an Australian perspective you can listen to ABC’s Life Matters program which interviewed Max Lawson, Senior Policy Advisor, Oxfam U.K and Professor Neil Warren from the Australian School of Taxation, University of New South Wales. They have a chat about it here.

I’d have to agree: Not complicated. Just brilliant.

1 comment


getting your ducks in a row
February 11, 2010, 4:43 pm
Filed under: Experience

Social Media

  • Facebook Groups Vs Pages: The Definitive Guide
    • Over the past couple years the Facebook Pages and Groups products have moved closer together, forcing marketers to ask themselves: which one should they use? A be useful to highlight the core differences between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups. If you had any lingering questions, this guide should completely clear things up for you

Online Measurement

Case Studies

Creative and Strategic thought starters

Leave a comment


North east west south all in the same house
February 9, 2010, 5:28 pm
Filed under: Zeitgeist


This weekend was a very strange one in Sydney.

It rained. Sheets and sheets. For days.

But that was just the bed that was made for strange. This weekend, it seems, is when Chatroulette (very VERY NSFW) shacked up in the spare rooms of our imaginations.

The New York Times states: “created just three months ago by a 17-year-old Russian named Andrey Ternovskiy, (Chatroulette) drops you into an unnerving world where you are connected through webcams to a random, fathomless succession of strangers from across the globe.”

17! Check out Fast Company’s coverage of the bidding war between the U.S. and Russia over where the company will end up. Some estimates put the site’s worth somewhere between €10 million and €30 million.

The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click “start” you’re suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they’re staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click “next,” instantly calling up someone else. The result is surreal on many levels.

Huh ?

The ever awesome Annik puts it this way:

If you haven’t checked out ChatRoulette, I highly recommend it. This kept me and my housemate entertained for no less than 2 hours during last Saturday’s never-ending downpour and at first I was embarrassed to be talking to complete strangers in my pajamas, but by the end I needed to be prized away from the computer. (and I do heartily suggest you visit her site for some seriously good funny)

Jason Kottke has this to say

During my session, the average “chat” lasted about 5 seconds and I observed several people drinking malt liquor, two girls making out, many many guys who disconnected as soon as they saw I wasn’t female, several girls who disconnected after seeing my face (but not before I caught the looks of disgust on theirs), 3 couples having sex, and 11 erect penises. In a Malkovichian moment, I was even connected to myself once…and then the other me quickly disconnected. In short, Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now.

What the?

New York Magazine’s Sam Anderson braved the fray in his piece The Human Shuffle Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past?

Although ChatRoulette feels radically new, it’s built entirely out of recycled parts—it’s just a potent combination of programs we’ve all been familiar with for years. Web chat has been around since the beginning of the Internet. Skype made the Star Trek–like experience of instant synchronized video communication an everyday reality back in 2003. But these experiences were almost always curated: The point was to chat and Skype with co-workers and friends, or at least with strangers who shared your interests

I really like this kernel

The internet has always been defined by (and drawn much of its energy from) the tension between chaos and control—and over the last ten years, web culture has skewed heavily toward control. Our most popular new online tools—Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Digg—were designed to help us tame the web’s wildness, to tag its outer limits and set up user-friendly taxonomies. ChatRoulette is, in this sense, a blast from the Internet past. It’s the anti-Facebook, pure social-media shuffle.

Once you dive in, there’s no way to manage the experience—to filter users, search for friends, or backtrack and reconnect with someone you chatted with an hour ago. There’s only the perpetual forward motion of “next.” It’s the Wild West: a stupid, profound, thrilling, disgusting, totally lawless boom.

Dip your toe in and catch up on the latest random adventures here: The Best of Chatroulette

UPDATE: and it had to happen…the first pitchslapping I’ve seen:

If you rise above the sea of failing men and charm a woman on Chaatroulette, we’ll give you a token for real life date-winning outfit: A French Connection voucher for 250 pounds
from Manifesto Feb 26 2010

This weekend was a very strange one in Sydney.

It rained. Sheets and sheets. For days.

But that was just the bed that was made for strange. This weekend, it seems, is when Chatroulette (very VERY NSFW) shacked up in the spare rooms of our imaginations.

The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click “start” you’re suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they’re staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click “next,” instantly calling up someone else. The result is surreal on many levels.

Huh ?

The ever awesome Annik puts it this way: http://annikskelton.com/2010/02/08/2612/

If you haven’t checked out ChatRoulette, I highly recommend it. This kept me and my housemate entertained for no less than 2 hours during last Saturday’s never-ending downpour and at first I was embarrassed to be talking to complete strangers in my pajamas, but by the end I needed to be prized away from the computer. (and I do heartily suggest you visit her site for some seriously good funny)

Jason Kottke has this to say http://kottke.org/10/02/chatroulette

During my session, the average “chat” lasted about 5 seconds and I observed several people drinking malt liquor, two girls making out, many many guys who disconnected as soon as they saw I wasn’t female, several girls who disconnected after seeing my face (but not before I caught the looks of disgust on theirs), 3 couples having sex, and 11 erect penises. In a Malkovichian moment, I was even connected to myself once…and then the other me quickly disconnected. In short, Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now.

What the?

New York Magazine’s Sam Anderson braved the fray in his piece The Human Shuffle Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past? — New York Magazine http://nymag.com/news/media/63663/#ixzz0f12UXjCE

Although ChatRoulette feels radically new, it’s built entirely out of recycled parts—it’s just a potent combination of programs we’ve all been familiar with for years. Web chat has been around since the beginning of the Internet. Skype made the Star Trek–like experience of instant synchronized video communication an everyday reality back in 2003. But these experiences were almost always curated: The point was to chat and Skype with co-workers and friends, or at least with strangers who shared your interests


I really like this kernel

The internet has always been defined by (and drawn much of its energy from) the tension between chaos and control—and over the last ten years, web culture has skewed heavily toward control. Our most popular new online tools—Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Digg—were designed to help us tame the web’s wildness, to tag its outer limits and set up user-friendly taxonomies. ChatRoulette is, in this sense, a blast from the Internet past. It’s the anti-Facebook, pure social-media shuffle.


Once you dive in, there’s no way to manage the experience—to filter users, search for friends, or backtrack and reconnect with someone you chatted with an hour ago. There’s only the perpetual forward motion of “next.” It’s the Wild West: a stupid, profound, thrilling, disgusting, totally lawless boom.

2 comments


Got Game?
February 9, 2010, 10:54 am
Filed under: Experience, Great Stuff, Zeitgeist

Got to love visualisation.

Also check out the video game time line here.

You can search the timeline by person, technology, business, console, accessory, game or cultural.

The timeline starts at Charles Babbage in 1792 with some key turning points  games development, like the establishment of Milton Bradley in the 1860’s and the launch of Nintendo in 1889.

1947 is believed to be the first year when a game was designed for playing on a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). This very simple game was designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. A patent application was filed on January 25th, 1947 and U.S. Patent  #2 455 992 issued on Dec 14th, 1948.

Spacewar! is one of the earliest known digital computer games. Steve “Slug” Russell, Martin “Shag” Graetz and Wayne Witaenem of the fictitious “Hingham Institute” conceived of the game in 1961. It took approximately 200 hours of work to create the initial version.

Anyways- there’s loads of history geekiness – and some really useful launch dates and synopsis of most of the major games up to 2010.


3 comments


a little light reading
February 5, 2010, 6:21 pm
Filed under: Great Stuff

Some bits and pieces for inspiration and information- from the sublime to the ridiculous

  • Google Search Stories:
    • These super short  videos show how people are using search technology to achieve their goals
    • Your investment: maybe a couple of minutes
  • 1500 examples of social media marketing from various corporations – a wiki of social media marketing examples.
    • It’s searchable by company, type of social media, industry and country
    • Your investment: maybe a couple of minutes today- useful forever
  • How IBM Uses Social Media to Spur Employee Innovation
    • How do you pull off “authentic” while maintaining the company brand message?
    • Your investment: maybe a couple of minutes

And for the super keen

And for the silly

Leave a comment


Google before you tweet
February 3, 2010, 10:04 pm
Filed under: Great Stuff, The Rules

I’ve seen this all over the place- and I do love to track down the artist:

Letterpress print designed by Joe Newton.
Typeface: Olduvai by Randy Jones.
Paper: Somerset Velvet 300 gsm, soft white.
Size: 8.5″ x 11″ (approx A4).
Printer: Woodside Press, Brooklyn, NY.

Signed and numbered limited edition of 100.

You can buy it for $15 at I Love Typography here.

1 comment


Take care out there
February 3, 2010, 3:05 am
Filed under: Get Activist, Great Stuff

We just forget how much we mean to people.

We forget how vulnerable and precious we are.

And yet I love how much this notion moves us and how powerfully we can express this without a word.

Take care out there everyone.

(thanks for that video Ze)

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everyday acts of innovation
February 2, 2010, 2:33 am
Filed under: Experience

Innovation is undoubtedly the ‘secret sauce’ of business success. The good news is, the ability to innovate is a learnable skill — at least according to three researchers from INSEAD, Brigham Young and Harvard in their new study conducted over a six-year period.

‘Our research showed that at most companies, top executives do not feel personally responsible for coming up with strategic innovations,’ said Hal Gregersen of INSEAD. ‘True innovators rely on their courage to innovate and a willingness to take risks.’

Most innovative leaders possess five key “discovery skills” that distinguish them from their less creative colleagues:

  1. Associating – The ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields, is central to the innovator’s DNA. The world’s most innovative companies prosper by capitalising on the divergent associations of their founders, executives, and employees.
  2. Questioning – Innovators constantly ask honest questions that challenge common wisdom or ‘question the unquestionable.’ While most managers focus on how to make existing processes – the status quo – work better, innovative entrepreneurs are more likely to challenge assumptions.
  3. Observing – Discovery-driven executives produce uncommon business ideas by scrutinizing common phenomena, especially the behaviour of potential customers.
  4. Experimenting – Using the world as their laboratory, innovative entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots. Most engage in some form of active experimentation, whether it is intellectual exploitation, physical tinkering, or engagement in new surroundings.
  5. Networking – Innovative entrepreneurs devote time and energy to finding and testing ideas through a network of diverse individuals in order to develop radically different perspectives. Unlike most executives who network to access resources, innovators go out of their way to meet people with different kinds of ideas and perspectives to extend their own knowledge domains.

The five skills, Gregersen says, are ‘a habit, a practice, a way of life’ for innovators.

Although Gregersen and his co-authors use the DNA metaphor, innovative entrepreneurs are actually made or developed, rather than born. “We each have unique, fixed physical DNA,” says Gregersen, “but in terms of creativity, we each have a unique set of learnable skills that we rely on in order to get to the ideas that will give us some insight.” Research involving identical twins suggests that only about 20-25 per cent of our creativity ability is geneticically driven. “This means the other 75-80 per cent comes from the world we live in,”

Quotes and data compiled from here, here and here. The study appears in the December 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review and can be accessed online at http://www.hbr.org.

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tools for telling taller tales
January 31, 2010, 11:52 pm
Filed under: Great Stuff

Red Riding Hood Remix is a primer for breaking out of a default story and finding ‘tools for telling taller tales.’

Jason Theodor explores the creative methods for innovating a ‘story’ (or project) by approaching it in different ways and from different perspectives using his Creative Method and Systems in the presentation below:

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