.oO Tailwind

Myself and an old uni fredn Fosta are firm believers of the idea that any picture with lots of the same thing in always looks cool. infact, we did a book on it. 

I saw this image and loved it.

Not sure why.

http://unaesthetic.net/

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I saw this post charting the growth of Twitter. Will it stay? Will it go? I don’t know, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

The same post also has link to an interesting article on why Twitter isn’t so good.

More stuff to read.

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I read a blog posting called What Must Starbucks Do that seems to have generated a lot of interest.

It’s basically about how Howard Schultz has issued a challenge to his team to reinvigorate the chain. He feels that its losing its soul, its uniqueness even.

Here’s and excerpt from the posting:

March 2 | Howard Schultz’s battle cry email deriding decisions the company has made in order to grow is making the rounds. If you haven’t read it, you can read it here.

He’s concerned Starbucks is in danger of losing its soul, its uniqueness—its remarkability. Howard says the romance and theater of coffee have disappeared from Starbucks stores because Baristas now use push-button machines to make espresso drinks. That stores no longer smell like coffee and that every store looks cookie-cutter.

I read this, and then I find myself in the Starbucks near to my office looking at a tangible example of their demise:

Look closely and you’ll see a new machine. It’s not a manually operated one. It’s push button!

The art of coffee making is indeed dead.

The Barista now places a cup underneath the spout and presses a button.

I mean it was pretty puch button before, but for some reason the semantics of this coffee ‘thing’ reach tipping point.

It really is a glorified vending machine.

I shall now be boycotting this particular branch of Starbucks and any one I see that has these operational efficiencies in place.

LOVE MY COFFEE!!!! It just cost me £3!!!

CPC has been the mainstay of ad revenue for some time now. Ads are displayed alongside relevant content be-it a search results page or something else and the advertiser pays a fee every time someone clicks their ad.

Simple, but cheatable.

It’s open to mistreatment, largely by an advertisers competitor. Because they can click the ads and cost the competitor advertiser for ghost queries or click fraud as it’s been called.

Pay-Per-Action is a clever evolution of this that should prevent click fraud as it’s not so easy to spoof. It will only cost the advertiser if the user visits their site and they carry out another action. This action needs to be the completion of a key goal such as buying something, registering for something or downloading something as to avoid further click fraud.

It’s nice, it’s simple to understand but will require some complex understanding of what advertisers want users to do. It’ll also help the smaller companies track ROI and may even get them to think about ‘goal based’ design for their own websites.

PPA and CPC will live together for sometime and due to there being a new link style for PPA, the two methods should be decipherable.

But, I spotted some slightly worrying news that Google are introducing a new format for these ads. Check out the FAQs. The new format allows advertisers to display up to 90 characters inline with page editorial so that they don’t look like ads at all, they look like hyperlinks. They will only reveal themselves as ads when rolled over and will be mixed in with the page content.

From the Google AdWords site:

“Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.”

Hmmm. I wonder what this will do to the integrity of link language…?

At the moment, despite the fact that others have been using this in-line link-ad approach before, the hyperlink is a trustworthy little device for users. I can see some clever copy-writing being used to suck people into sites that they don’t want to visit. As the PPA model works on further actions or goals being completed, I think we’ll see some frustrating uses of this.

I guess I need to see one before I can work tis one out.

Blogs for sharing thoughts (WordPress, Movabletype, Vox, Blogger), photo blogs for sharing pictures (Flickr, HQ23, Photobucket), video blogs for sharing videos (YouTube), music blogs for sharing you music preferences (Last FM, Pandora, Pure Volume), presence blogs for telling the world where you are and what you are doing (WAYN, Twitter, Dodgeball) and rather ironically professional blogs for casting a professional image onto the web (LinkedIn). Oh and the new raft of Mobile Blogging tools that make all of this nice and easy (if not cheap) from the palm of you hand (Moblog, Radar, Mozes).

If like me you ‘play’ with these things a lot, then like me you’ll find a self-erosion of privacy well underway. Is it possible to work in experience design and not bare your soul to the world?

No. Not really.

Identifying this set me to thinking about how things used to be prior to the explosion of community offerings and social networks and the point at which anonymity is desirable or not.

What occurs to me is that the boundaries between ’social me’ and ‘professional me’ have long since blurred. Colleagues know me by my web alter-ego ‘Snowbadger’ and I know them by other fantastic monickers such as ‘DrPig’, ‘ParisHasslehoff’, ‘SonicPixie’ and ‘Boomtish’.

Brilliant. Insights into people’s minds I could probably do without!

Which prompts the question when do I use Snowbadger and when do I use Warren Hutchinson? I started using Snowbadger on the basis that no-one else was using it and I hate the idea of being Warren29876.

ID continues to be an issue but that’s another posting, If you haven’t sniffed out the Open-ID project, then I suggest you protect you alter-ego now.

It started with MSN Messenger and Email when we started having to reveal our personal email addresses in order to get connected to each other and chat with friends while at work. But this soon developed into a business tool and we needed to chat to colleagues as well as friends. The problem was we all had silly ‘call signs’ due to the registration issue. MSN messenger recognised this when it introduced the ‘business tab’ to the chat client which enabled you to have 2 identities on MSN but by then it was far too late, we were all exposed!

When I am meeting people that I don’t know, particularly when I’m interviewing for a role here at LBi, I try to create a rich picture by digging up some background information on them from various sources. I can get a professional take from Linked In, a personal take from Friends Reunited, see what music they are into at Last FM, check out their thoughts on a their blog (if they have one) and even look at their pictures on Flickr. All this without even running a Google search.

Weird or wise?

There have been lots of postings written about blogs being your new CV, but what about the other sharing properties?. A search for my name brings up my linked in profile, my Last.FM profile, some Tailwind postings, my book on Amazon and some other stuff.

Is this the new CV? This post thinks so. The idea of personal branding is old, but in this context new.

Is trying to remain anonymous a good or a bad thing? Would you be conspicuous in you absence on these things?

The prevalence of social networks and community sites is eroding our ability to keep ourselves to ourselves. In order to ‘take part’ you need to give a lot away and if you don’t play you could be conspicuous by your absence.

So anonymity Vs nymity (?) ;).

We’re in the middle of a project for a client where this dichotomy is patently obvious. It’s a community around a professional discipline that has had active forums for some years now. It’s an established community based on old-skool tools. There are numerous professional resources available in this system and there is a lot of professional support that takes place within the forums. There have been marriages too, which any community worth its salt should be able to boast!

We’re looking for ways in which to make these active communities more real, more connected and create more ‘currency’ in the system so that people take part in a positive and conducive way.

But there is a paradox at hand. Members of this community want to share resources and artifacts that they have created but they don’t want to append their name through fear of failure, through the artifacts not being good enough. That said they do want recognition if the artifacts are deemed useful and are downloaded by the community. In essence they crave peer recognition but are scared of failure.

On the flip side, they use this network for significant amounts of personal support and often discuss their workplace issues with virtual friends. They have a strong desire to remain anonymous through fear of retribution. In their daily jobs they are quite isolated despite having many colleagues. It’s a solitary role at times where asking question about how to do something could be construed as failure.

The power of this social network has the ability to seed a cultural change for this profession making it okay to ask questions, gain support etc.

For me its a running example of the need to be ‘me’ but cast a professional guise at the same time.

This is a little bit weird.

I was conducting some image searches today on Google, one for some fruit pastels and one for a badger (don’t ask) and this image of a badger revealed himself twice to me!

What are the odds on that?

And this one:

This is a very quick post to point you in the direction of Twitter. If you haven’t already started telling the world what it is you are up to, I suggest you do so now so that you’re not last ‘at it’ in those chats around the coffee machine / water cooler.

I’m committing to trying it, yet I’m still wondering what the point is (does that remove me from the target market? Oh well). But.. there are some rather lovely little Google map / Twitter mashups such as the imaginatively named Twittermap and Twittervision which is quite addictive to watch.

It’s like trying to eat a Fruit Pastel without chewing.

On Twittervision you can see twitter posts come up on a map as they happen. The US UK bias is quite interesting.

Okay.

It’s not.

I love the Eurostar.

For me it has been ideally placed for my regular trips to Paris and even though I live near to both it and Heathrow airport I choose ‘Le Train’ whenever as it takes roughly the same time. I’m not sure of the carbon footprint of either journey, but the train is a far nicer experience than flying IMO.

This year will see the London Eurostar terminal move from London Waterloo International to St Pancras. For those that don’t know London this means that it is moving from one side to the other.

The main aim is to shorten the journey through southern England to the coast and tunnel entry point in Kent because apparently St Pancras is better placed to link with the ‘high-speed’ rail routes down to the coast.

It’ll be 40 minutes Quicker apparently which is a shame becaus eyou lose some of that travelling across London. Well I would.

So what will happen to Waterloo ‘International’?

Apparently nothing that inspiring.

This is old news, but so far I’ve not seen anything happening.

That whole area is going through a massive regeneration right now as I understand a lot of buildings are coming down and three high-rises, dubed the ‘Three Siters’ are going up in next to the London Eye and Shell building.

It’ll probably mean that my business meetings in Paris are now better served by flying (boooo).

I’ll miss you ‘Le Train’… amitiés.

A colleague of mine has recently posted on the state of cycling in London. I wrote about my frustration at the lack of integration between the rail networks and the city when it comes to the transportation and storage of bicycles, but Stephen highlights a very good point.

Riding a bike in London canbe exhillerating fun (!) but the authorities do little to encourage us out of cars and onto greener forms of transport.

I spoke with a colleague yesterday who tiold me that it takes the same amount of time to ride a bike in as it does to ride a motorbike!

I mostly ride through Holborn or Blackfriars on my way to Clerkenwell where the office is. Either route I take is strewn with potholes and uneven drain covers.

I have a rather nice folding bike that has thin wheels so I try to avoid riding through these hazards as a way of saving my wheels.

Swerving from buses and eager taxi drivers who just love pulling out in front of me is enough fun as it is, I don’t need the crappy roads. They are horriffic.

Recent visits to Amsterdam and Cologne show what it should be like.. Incidentally here is an interesting statistic from a Dutch cab driver; there are 1.5 million people in Amsterdam, 1.6 million bikes and 700,000 bike thefts a year!!

So everyone has a bike, but half of them steal them! Brilliant.

Tonight I attended a lecture given by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the British Computer Society here in London. The talk was entitled “The Web; Looking back, Looking Forward”.

Firstly I have to acknowledge that it has been a privilege to hear Sir Tim (yes I will use his deserved title), arguably someone who has had as significant an impact on the human race as those that invented the combustion engine, printing press and aircraft.

As the closing speech indicated, it’s not often you find yourself in a lecture given by the inventor of such a significant artifact as the web.

As I digest the thoughts and ideas Sir Tim has communicated tonight, I can’t help help feeling admiration for the ideology they developed when designing the web at CERN. It was great to hear of the developmental culture and the overarching idealogies that governed the web’s early development from the man who did it.

Sir Tim thought fast and he talked fast. Keeping up was the order of the day as he steamed through his presentation, not by notes, but by what was in his head. His body language was as manic as his speech, but he talked with aplomb and addressed the audience directly and enthusiastically.

He must ‘talk’ at these things a great deal so it was fantastic to see such an enthused delivery.

So what did he say…?

Well, I started to try and keep a consistent form of notes using my mindmap software, but this was foolhardy task. I couldn’t keep up!

He started off by talking through a cycle of how the web has evolved. He kept referring back to this cycle and used different lenses (wikis, websites, google, blogs) to show how the systems have evolved and been built on systems generating new needs for new systems.

The cycle is framed around the following concepts:

• Issues
• Ideas
• Social
• Technical
• Micro effects
• Macro effects
• Issues

It’s a classic innovation loop. Issues need to be solved and someone picks one up and sets about designing against it. This generates ideas. Ideas have a social context and set of rules and need some technical footing in order to be realised.

This in turn creates a microscopic effect or system that can develop and bloom into something else with a macroscopic effect. The new system on a system of course breeds new issues and context and sets about creating new ideas.

Lovely.

Let’s look at this in the context of a couple of examples. Firstly Google.

The issue, given that the web has been growing so exponentially was that people couldn’t find the things they are looking for. So the idea was to generate an index. In terms of the social aspect, what was needed was a link incentive and the good citizenship of good sites link to good sites so must therefore… be good! The ads are also an important aspect of how Google works. The tech aspect is the Eigenvector algorithm which in turn generates the microscopic effect of the Google website. Of course the macroscopic effect is the Google phenomenon.

Interestingly, the new issue here is Google spoofing. Sites pretending to be sites linking to other sites, tricking Google into indexing them.. And so the cycle restarts.

One more, let’s look at wikis.

The issue was that people couldn’t easily write stuff in these systems. So the idea was to use forms to edit content on-the-fly. Socially the idea requires everyone to edit and builds on the principle of the wisdom of crowds. The micro effect is the wiki, the macro effect is Wikipedia. The new issue is that Wiki battles take place where consensus for the right content is constant.

Principally he and his team at CERN in Switzerland created a system that was mindful of future developments. He talked a lot about ‘clean’ developments like TCP/IP which enabled things to be built on them.

On August 6th 1991, Sir Tim developed the first website whilst at CERN. This was a website that explained how to build websites. So when people visited this site they were compelled to create a website and most importantly to link back to the CERN website as a form of good citzenship, here’s how you build one.

This single philosophy is pervasive in all successful web media. Good sites are linked to and the language of links develops the value of the system. People find stuff and link to it.

This reminds me of my first venture into the web back in 1992 whilst studying design at college. I remember ‘view source’ being the tool by which I learnt HTML. I remember logging into Foothills and Resort using telnet on a Sun Workstation and always asking ‘how do you x, y, z?” I remember emailing people who I hadn’t ever met to ask them how to layout things using tables.

Sir Tim told some really nice stories about how in the very early days the first users of the web thought that as there was so much useful information on the web that they should try and read all of it!! He then explained that in the first three years the web grew at a constant rate, to a power of 10 every year.

1/f anyone? Remember fractals..?

The key thing about the early days for Sir Tim and his team developing the web was this idea of creating a ‘foundation technology’ rather than a ‘ceiling technology’. Something that’s royalty free, open, clean with flexible points. Of course all proprietary systems are counter to this idea and there are numerous examples of closed systems that have died.

Someone asked about ‘evil usage and in particular, censorship in China’. His response was that like humanity, the web treats censorship as a fault, it finds ways round it.

Wicked.

At CERN they developed an open system that passed power to its users as not to preclude innovation.

This theme was recurring. He spoke of how we don’t know what will be created next week, next month or next year because we can’t see the ‘Issues’ that need to be resolved as a consequence of the cycle.

He talked about the Web Science Research Initiative.

“Magic = stuff you don’t understand.”

“There are 2 magics about the web; complexity and creativity”

“We could make a little Ummph, that would Ummph and then we’d aaaah”

“The web grew at a factor of 10 for 3 years. 10 hits to 10000 hits. Constant increase.”

“There was a high probability that people would go away having visited the first website and then build their own. People who visited their website would visit ours to understand how.”

“The linking thing worked.. that’s pretty neat”

“The power of the hypertext link is being able to link to anything.”

“We set about proving that you can’t index the web. We got that wrong!”

“I never imagined people would write hypertext by hand.”

“Do your bit. Others will do theirs.”

“The internet treats censorship as a fault, like humanity it reroutes around it.”

I do wonder what must it feel like to have invented something so significant, something so empowering, something that has benefitted business, healthcare, education, travel, politics, communication and social harmony?

I wonder if he sits and looks at the web and thinks ‘wow’ - he must do. Although he ‘designed for success’ and had the fundamental principles in place, he could never have imagined its impact.

In closing, I’m pretty hyped having been and seen this, I’ve had to sit at the station and finish this posting before going home as I need to get these things down now. My head is full of wonder.

BTW - I noticed that Sir Tim was using and MacBook Pro and was presenting using Safari.

Nice.