I’m dropping down to root level. That means I’ll be jotting down the odd reflections and thoughts at funny you should ask dot biz instead of slash blog. Starting now. Add it to your rss feed because I’ll be:
a) handing out free daily theatre tickets
b) giving away U.S. green cards (2 every week)
c) writing stuff that you might like, or your money back
A lot of internet loving and opinions about where it is and where it’s headed at the FutureEverything festival in Manchester. The best presentation I heard was that of Bill Thompson, technology writer for BBC, titled And To Those Left Behind. He said that getting him (if anyone could force him, as not even a vacation can) offline is like “cutting off parts of my mind…”, arguing that with him, it’s a steady and constant stream of consciousness that affected when coming in contact with twitter, Facebook, blogs etc. I can agree with that, but in my opinion, there’s probably a needed presentation titled “To Those Trapped Within”. How many times have you worked with, or seen, people completely controlled by their gadgets?
Keepsy might be on to something with the service that taps into the Instagram API and allows you to simply produce a physical album based on your best photos.
I like taking photos and I do it a lot. I have all the cameras I need, all the software I need and then some, plus I have flickr account where good and bad photos end up. Taken for all kinds of different reasons. And I’m certainly not alone. Photography has seen a boom lately for very obvious reasons.
Most imaging processing software now allows us to not only batch upload to flickr and export to web, but also order prints. iPhoto, Photoshop Elements and from Flickr as well. The barrier between going from digital photos (very good but no real magic) to physical (still something special about it) isn’t very high. Except for the fact that it requires you to take the time to select a bunch of best ones out of a bigger bunch (sometimes ridiculously big). When you look at some folks’ digital albums/folders, that selection has clearly not been made.
Still there is something missing for me. I love prints, and I’m not alone. So I love the fact that there are some really cool innovations when it comes to getting printed photos in the hands and wallets of people. I just ordered this magnificent PoGo portable printer from Polaroid (and do check out Zink, a company that makes this happen) from which I don’t expect high quality prints, but simple and quick ones that end up in my home and not my home page. Memories and anything worth being reminded of shouldn’t just sit on Flickr. That allows access by friends and family (and you) which is brilliant, but you don’t go there with a plan to remember what you did, do you? No, photos should be intrusive. They should be surprising and not have to wait for an invite. They need to jump at you every now and again and pick you up. Make you smile just like that. Why not let all the senses remember?
You can get vivid memories from just the smell of asphalt being touched by summer heat. Or wet leaves in autumn. Having a physical photo, touching it, evokes memories and the feeling is not the same if you only trigger that memory by seeing only. A worn out photo with jagged edges says more about the affectionate connection with the viewer than a view count on flickr. Feeling the friction of a photo, I’m sure triggers more than sight only. It adds some closeness.
A while ago I was thinking about all kinds of possible stuff thanks to the cloud, and it made me think of ATM-like printing for some reason. Kind of silly and I thought nothing more of it, after all you simply load your memory card at the photo store which isn’t far from it. But again, the proximity/immediacy/sorting aspect is enough to make that a small project*.
Instaprint from BREAKFAST ny on Vimeo.
Instaprint from the agency Breakfast feels a bit like a printing ATM to me though. I’d love to have one at the office, at home or wherever the party is. I like how printing stuff (small stuff) is as effortless as sharing photos digitally. Not that I know how that will realistically happen on a larger scale, and not that we need the same volume of photos printed out, but I love where these ideas and technical solutions are going. Maybe ATM like printing isn’t so silly after all, by way of a cloud/wifi/bluetooth/pay-per-print type set-up in strategic locations.
The Instaprinter in action. With its specific location or hashtag.
* I did some research for an Adobe project a few years ago and I talked with a great deal of people running photo stores. More than a few told me that some of the most frequent issues and questions they get is about helping people get their photos back, as their computers have crashed. The answer was “I don’t know how to restore hard drives, I run a photo store”. Most of them did sell external hard drives though… I don’t know how true or verifiable this is, but one guy said that in 20 years we’ll have young families with no recorded memories of their kids growing up. Simple reason being - computer crashed and nothing was printed. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s right. Perhaps we’re there already.
A man and his hat looked like they had traveled a thousand miles. His face was rough and his voice barely audible.
There are a lot of rumours surrounding Nintendo’s next home console. Is the company’s biggest challenge at the moment to come up with something completely different from its competitors?
I think when you talk about competing against others, the problem is that you refer to something that’s been done already and try to beat it. Rather than looking at what other companies are doing, the focus at Nintendo is on uniqueness. Providing new means of entertainment is the important thing.
- Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo
Article in from The Guardian
Heavily branded guy sitting in portobello road.
JWT Intelligence has a post about new models for supporting long-form content that I liked and which coincided with a dialogue I heard the other day about whether or not person 1; 40+ and an avid reader with too much to do, was going to get the Kindle or an iPad to read books on. Person 2 was a bit confused by the question, as the iPad has so much more to offer than the “stupid” kindle. Sure, the screen is better for reading outdoors but that’s about it.
I beg to differ. New models of long-format is longer than articles but shorter than books and this has a lot to do with increasingly bite sized reading habits. That deals with that change by adapting itself to it. Shorter. Quicker. For new times and new devices.
The iPad is problematic for this bite sized world it you are, as person 1 says, an avid reader who wants to use the iPad for reading. Because it offers so much more.
Some technologies allows us (actually, it directs or guides us) to be really “productive” within the technology by which I mean (and it might not be the best wording) you can do a lot of things and be productive across the range. I’ll let “productive” mean more than useful productiveness, as that distinction is sometimes made. Other technologies allows us to be productive with. It’s more focused and specialized. But of course it’s about how people decide to use it?! Therein lies the rub. Because we can’t, can we?
So, the Kindle is the best device if you want to read books. Because there’s nothing else you can happen to start doing with it (more or less). And an egg timer is better than the iPhone if you want to boil perfect eggs. I’ve ended up with close to green eggs and 5 answered emails. Everything is mashing up which is cool and interesting but perhaps not helping us in every aspect.
I heard about this one guy in rural Japan who answered his axe-phone in a hurry and died.
Tweet comics, the equivalent of Seinfeld - a show about nothing.
There’s a story about the last manufacturer of typewriters that’s been having a blast lately. Not the most important story if we put it into perspective, but still.
Think about the following train of thought: Increased bite sized reading and short attention span (bad for “fairly” long format reading) -> The AOL way and I dare say questionable journalistic filters and criteria -> The knowledge gathered from research experiments such as Cascade by NYTLabs and subsequent content strategies based on how stories travel through twitter -> A bit of crowd funded/supported thinking a la spot.us in the mix and voila; all articles will be researched and written only after a few sentences long standfirst type summary (more often than not only pretty true - but very interesting and/or funny) have shown great tweet-along-pass-omometor scores.
After all; who says journalism needs to stay the way it’s been? Who says articles have to be true before we read them? We might be on to something new. Or, the world is turning really fast…
[may I just point out that I chuckled when I wrote this. I have not lost it.]
