Rupert Murdoch recently talked with Sky News political editor David Speers on Sky News Australia. Murdoch has proposed that he wishes to block Google from indexing News Corporation sites. He goes on to say that he envisions a model where users would pay News Corp. for accessing news on his sites.
This seems like a desperate plea from Murdoch and it shows that Newspapers are on the decline. He fails to understand the difference between printed and online news. If users have the choice of reading news from free & trusted sources or paying for it then it looks like Murdoch’s plan is doomed to fail. Information Architects aptly tweeted:
I doubt that Murdoch will go ahead with his plans but the idea of a search engine exclusive Internet is an interesting one.
“Lose/Lose” is an Arts project conceived by Zach Gage, a digital and mixed media artist from New York. In a 1980s-style video game the application actually attacks the Mac platform, deleting users’ files as they progress through the level and shoot enemies. It is a ‘video-game with real life consequences’. Zach explains it in more detail on his website:
Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.
This ‘game’ poses some intriguing questions as to how we now perceive technology. ‘At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions?’ and ‘If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data?’
Source: Apple Insider: ‘Art project’ video game attacks Apple Mac machines
“ When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
Executive Director of the CA Milk Processor Board, Steve James, talks about the marriage of viral marketing and social media.
Social media and viral marketing are virtually interconnected (no pun intended). The success of social media — in allowing people to gather in groups of mutual interest and to share what’s meaningful in their lives — is really the foundation of viral communication. In terms of viral marketing, we’ve seen that people will happily pass along your marketing as long as: 1) the content is entertaining and 2) the message is genuine.
This follows on from my reading of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, that something has to be remarkable to be worth talking about, worth noticing. A great example of getting the message right whilst retaining entertaining content is a local sausage company called The Good Little Company.
Source: Organized Chaos: Viral Marketing, Meet Social Media
I came across a post by Adam L. Penenberg, author of the Viral Loop, in which he talks about entrepreneurs who built multimillion- and billion-dollar businesses from scratch by ‘building virality’ into their products and services. He says:
At some point, as the number of users doubles, then triples, the company achieves what’s known as a “viral loop,” when the product spreads even if the company does nothing to promote it. The trick is that they all created something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread the word about their product for them. The result: Never before has there been the potential to create wealth this fast, on this scale, and starting with so little.
It’s interesting to think of Internet businesses, such as Facebook and Twitter, that have been built around this viral model — “to use the product, you have a strong incentive to spread it”.
Source: Let’s Kill “Viral”: It’s Time For a New Word
I came across an article by Steven Levy on Wired entitled ‘Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter’ which talks about the evolution of Twitter. Levy talks about how the Retweet wasn’t introduced by Twitter but by its users — Biz Stone called it “a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.”
A second example he went on to discuss was the introduction of the hashtag, born out of a user, Dan Zarrella, who wished to save the retweet (Twitter had announced plans for a relatively minor change to how the site fucntions). And this was the birth of the hashtag as we know it.
This model is different from anything previous. Very quickly Twitter has gone from a simple web service to a constantly growing, increasingly complex ‘ecosystem’ that is evolving as its users discovers new ways to harness potential that couldn’t have been conceived by Twitter’s creators. Twitter has “established itself as a staple of social networking, commerce, electioneering, celebrity culture, public relations, media, and political protest.” (Levy, 2009)
It will be interesting to see how Twitter plans to monetise itself and what business model it will adopt. If its users are shaping its service, who inevitably owns Twitter?
Source: Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter
Ev Williams and Biz Stone took the stage at Startup School, where they took many questions form the audience. The guys were asked ‘How did you estimate the size of the market?’, Biz replied:
If anything we sort of thought it a waste of time, some of our engineers thought it was a waste of time, “If you add video to it maybe I’d work on it”.
Evan went on to say:
With Twitter there is no market, other than we knew it was cool.
So people, don’t waste your time with market analysis, just go out and make something cool!
Source: Startup School: Ev Williams And Biz Stone Admit Even Twitter Thought Twitter Was Stupid At First
I came across The Apple Time Capsule Memorial Register. It is an ‘online memorial’ for Apple users who have had their Time Capsule die. The owners of the site hope to provide a reliable overview of the scale of the premature passing of Apple’s “server grade” backup solution.
It’s quite interesting how a small community of unhappy users have come together, quite like in the story Clay Shirky tells of at the beginning of Here Comes Everybody, that outlines how group collaboration is far more effective in communicating a message than a ‘lone ranger’.
I was lucky to attend a Masterclass by the local ‘responsible design agency’, Atto. Atto have worked on a number of amazing projects, Your Name on Toast, Build-a-Beard and the Good Little Company to name just a few.
Heather, Karys and Peter are a small team of creatives that truly understand the secret of awesomeness. During the Masterclass they talked about how to create a values-driven business, shared their awesomeness secret with us and set a design project.
The day provided some great thinking and discussions and the nugget of information that resonated with me the most was, when approaching a project or job think about how good it could be and strive for that.
I have always believed that by creating and working within constraints allows me to be more creative with my output. A brief that is too open-ended can often hinder the project that I’m working on and I find that it is much better having limitations in place.
I recently read through Paul Constant’s review of Twitter in which he talks about how human inventiveness arises from the 140-character restriction Twitter ‘imposes’. It is interesting how this idea transcends beyond Twitter and into our work as designers.
Source: The Stranger
I am a 24 year old multimedia designer and MA student studying Multidisciplinary Design in Belfast, N. Ireland. I work and blog at 