.oO Tailwind

You may want to read this post on response to the brand launch. It’s more recent and post-reveal.

At work we’ve been working with the London 2012 Olympic organising committee on their digital touchpoints and the new brand goes live in 4 days time.

This will be interesting in terms of Olympic branding history and in terms of digital.

No clues yet, I can’t say anything, but please do join the treasure hunt and be inspired and see something with impact in a few days.

I’ll post the answer to ‘the clue’ later today if you can’t solve it, but it’s nothing Google can’t help with..

I’m sitting here after another intense day and instead of picking up a book or struggling to learn my bass, I’m watching another series of car crash TV super hero - Big Brother kick into action.

Every year you think that the ‘contestants’ can’t get any worse, but my word, this year is special. Talk about celebrity culture vultures, and all girls so far.

Twins, work drop-out come self-styled ‘it-girl’, pill-popping raver, retired head-hunter, indie rocker, Wakefield’s answer to Posh-Spice (please) and an eye-shadow collector thus far.

All girls and all mad as brushes.

Secretly, I love this program. I love the way the contestants give their all for stardom without realising they are there to be deconstructed, played with and torn apart…publicly.

As a nation of curtain-twitchers this program taps into the psyche of British people and it will be the water-cooler conversation for many this summer.

In truth that’s what happens. Super-close character scrutiny on a national level.

Love it or hate it, it’s back.

I also admire, from a distance as the digital media machine kicks into action. It’ll be interesting to see how they ride the current web-two-oh trend.

Quote so far:

‘I’ve got so many shades of eye shadow, I love clashing my colours’
‘Are you twins?’ - said when staring at two identical twins
‘Is it a tanning booth?’ - when looking at the diary room

Interestingly, after Carphone Warehouse dumped BB in light of the Jade Goody racism slur, Virgin Media have dropped right in.

Is it a risky strategy? Convergent brand in for convergent brand.

Well - it is the target audience. They are a ringtone, download, gossip, exclusive clip hungry bunch BB viewers. Virgin think so, they’ve made siging-up with them a usp.

Oh my. Weeks of joy ahead.

Links: Big Brother, Virgin Media

First seen by Barbd, Ex.plode.us allows you to search social spaces for people’s profiles and it draws them together.

You can run a search for Warren Hutchinson and Snowbadger (My alterego) and get different results.

This make it easier for people to ‘dig up’ the real me. Eeek.

I worry about advertising here.

I wonder what this does for the privacy, professional / social persona debate I mentioned in an earlier post.?

Here’s a list of me and my friends… It’s interesting that Snowbadger has more friends than Warren hutchinson.

Hmmm.

I thought today that I haven’t posted to Tailwind or Frankandpat for a while now.

In-fact ‘a while’ is only 6 days, but feels like and eteeeeeeernity when so much happens in a day. One wonders if a busy lifestyles starts to tinker with one’s sense of time. Doesn’t one..? Yah..?

N E Way (I’m still street), maybe it’s because I have nothing interesting to say or maybe it’s because my workload has become so unbearably heavy that I don’t have time to think let alone write.

So, this leads me to thinking - What don’t I have time to for?

Then I realsied I’ve not been able to read my own favoured blogs in the mornings on the train to work because I’ve had ‘work’ to do. Not reading, means not thinking in a weird kind of way.

I don’t want to write ‘…yet another blog full of links that another blog has. Only my blog is better because I linked it first’ kind of blog. They don’t offer mcuh.. and on relfection if I’ve done that, it’s a simple question of being lazy.

Blogs that link to ‘cool stuff man’ are lazy and boring. Unless they are BoingBoing or Gizmondo have that market cornered. They’re cool… We don’t need anymore.

I want to think.

I want to write in response to that thinking.

And I want it to be engaging. Thoughtful. Questionable.

I want. Can’t promise.

And when I write in response to that thinking, I’m going to write it once, check for spellings, and then post it live. I can spot those ‘polished pieces’ a mile away. They smell of consideration, not streams of consciousness.

Now believe me, getting on a train at 0653 and starting to work through email is depressing. It’s compounded by the fact that that at 1935 when I get off of the train, I’m doing the same.

Looooong day. (My hatred for email is another subject entirely)

So - I promise, here and now, to avoid a “look what I’ve seen, isn’t it cool” kind of blog. I’ll post when I have something to comment on.

If I don’t, let me know.

In the meantime, bear with me, I’m really busy right now.

In the ever chaotic world of convergence one has to hold their hand up to Virgin Media and say ‘good effort’. All the competition seems to be struggling to put things in one place and under one offer.

A quick visit to each of the respective homepages illustrates this, they all seem to separate Phone, TV, Broadband and Fixed-Line (that’s if they provide all 4).

While BT, Orange, Talk Talk at all all struggle to convince their customers that they can now ‘do internet as well as mobile’, Virgin have popped their head above the parapet with a nice simple proposition:

“Choose choose 2 for £20, 3 for £30, 4 for £40 or a Very Impressive Package - simple!

And the savings you make are incredible”

The idea is that you have 4 elements that you choose from which drives the pricing:

1. T.V.
2. Broadband
3. Landline phone
4. Mobile phone

I have to say I like its simplicity, I like it being in one place and I love the idea of ‘Very Impressive Packages’.

The offers are simple, coherent, jargon free and above all competitive. I’m seeing ads for this all over London at the moment and I have to say 300 minutes mobile, 300 texts, TV, Broadband and fixed-line for £40 looks very good to me.

Well done Virgin, let’s hope that you can fix the NTL customer service issues.

Blogged with Flock

WiiTube

Originally uploaded by Snowbadger.

There’s a growing list of websites that have been designed specifically with the Wii Opera browser in mind including Google Reader, WiiTube and Mapwii.

Go to Mashable for the full list.

Now, in my mind this can only go so far due to the context of the input device, but it certainly poses some interesting questions for designers and for the gaming SNS services. Chiefly the difference between ’sit-forward’ and ’sit-back’ browsing.

Sit-forward browsing is the traditional one-to-one experience controlled by a single person using a keyboard and mouse. Sit-back is a different interaction paradigm due to a couple of factors:

1. more people participate in the experience, which means that
2. the experience is under pressure to be entertaining, whilst
3. the ‘driver’ is using a game-pad or remote control as an input mechanism.

These are a completely different set of design challenges to be overcome and will not be met by traditional means so I’m interested in seeing how this develops.

I’m sure we’ll see a high penetration of Wiis given the stock so this will be an interesting area to consider for certain types of projects. I can think of one we won yesterday that might benefit from this type of integration.

From: Mashable

John Maeda @ Design Museum, London

Originally uploaded by Snowbadger.

I’ve just been to his talk at the Design Museum with some colleagues and came away feeling nostalgic, a little sad and a bit inspired.

Nostalgic because Maeda ‘plays’, he makes stuff, he doozers away and this reminds me of my first years studying product design when we were encouraged to do that; making furniture in workshops and mechatronic robots in the labs.

I hope we get to a point where the culture of what we do at LBi has this level of experimentation. That would be cool, we’ve started at least.

I’m a little sad because I’m no longer making stuff like that. I use excuses like time, responsibility and whatnot but that’s no good. Maeda has 6 children, and I only have 2!

I want my job to provision me this as his does.

I’m inspired because he’s pointed out that we let ourslves become defined and that we shouldn’t. Hence the usual questions of “is it art or design?” That he refuses to answer - “I don’t care” he says.

Pigeon holes have gotten in the way.

What is an Experience Architect? What is a designer? Etc etc. Does it matter? Aren’t we all interaction designers? Experience designers? Why label at all? Can’t our brand be an indicator of what we might offer?

I don’t want to be a pigeon. They’re skyrats.

I’m inspired by Maeda’s rules of simplicity (though a little too simple!) and observations of complexity and reflecting on our internal discussions about ’simplicity being very hard’.

I’ll be going to the riflemaker to see his 16 ipod fish. It didn’t look that good, but the other stuff did.

We’ve known about Shozu for a while now and have been using it to publish photos directly onto Flickr albeit not knowing how much it costs each time due to lack of transparency on the part of the networks. either way, we still keep playing because we love it.

I think that I was so enthralled that I could just get photos from my phone directly to Flickr (or whatever) that I didn’t really dive in to the other things that it can do. This post is a reminder, Shozu rocks on many fronts.

Shozu can upload images or video from your phone to any appropriate web service via API. It collects and remembers all your relevant user IDs for you and will act as a conduit between your phone and whatever service you like including Flickr, WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, Vox, LiveJournal, You Tube and a whole bunch more besides. Best if all it is free.

Apparently you can also hook it up to the BBC or CNN if you happen to be (un)fortunate enough to find yourself in a spot for some citizen journalism. Of course this requires foresight on the part of the user, but still very cool all the same.

Shozu Using Captcha

Originally uploaded by Snowbadger.

The only downside is that while networks continue to avoid allowing customers a flat fee per month, data charges lack transparency and are expensive and sending your 3 minute video clip to You Tube might cost you a few quid. Also, I’m not sure how you apply Creative Commons to these artifacts as you pass them to the likes of the BBC or CNN…?

Getting Shozu onto your phone is a little bit of a bind as I need the website to do so. It’s a shame that they didn’t make it easy to download via wap in my opinion but hey ho.

I’m currently sporting a Sony Ericsson w810i which is connected to the Orange network here in the UK so I have to go to Shozu’s website tell them my details and have the application delivered to my handset via wap-push. Of course, there is once again a leap of faith on your part, not knowing how much the download is going too cost. But in the interests of science, you’ll just plough on wondering what 267kb actually costs.

Still, all this is very nice but from a UX point of view it’s all a bit clunky. Any pictures I upload still require tagging, sorting, possibly even geotagging if I’m so inclined and the best place to do that is on the web.

Well, the new GPS enabled Nokias, see the N95, allow you to deal with one of those things as it’s now possible to autotag assets with geodata accurate to within 10m.

Yay, that’s meaningful to my Gran.

Apparently you have to run an app to unlock the functionality but the new version of Shozu will have a set-up function to do this for you. Aren’t they nice?

Anyway. This was just a reminder, I’m now off to start blindly sending images and video via Shozu to WordPress, Vox and You Tube.

I wonder how much it will all cost?

I was just re-downloading Shozu to my phone so that I can send images directly to Flickr, video to You Tube and other stuff to my blog on WordPress when I was presented with the following madness:

Shozu Using Captcha

Originally uploaded by Snowbadger.

Captcha is not the most accessible of form validation, bot-destroying nonsense in any form, but this use of hieroglyphics astounded me. I have the feeling that anyone with dyslexia would be sent into a tailspin. It certainly made me think.

The best solution I ever heard of was the use of a field that users wouldn’t see and bots would, bots would fill it in and thus render the form submission invalid – I can’t remember where I saw this though.