Only Dead Fish

How To Work Better

Spotted in the staff area of The Tate Modern.

"Everyone Has A Story To Tell"

"I simply ask people to write in my journal. What they write is up to them.". David, a copywriter from Salt Lake City walks up to strangers, gives them his moleskin notebook ("I only use moleskin notebooks"), and asks them to write about whatever they want. Quite a few of them do.

"There are so many people out there with such diverse backgrounds and perspectives...it’s absolutely fascinating to me. Have you ever looked at a person and thought, “I wonder what their story is? How did they get to where they are? What are their dreams?” I do. All the time...This is my chance to get to know some of them, even if it’s just a glimpse, and share their stories that would otherwise go untold."

Write In My Journal. Simple, quirky, and another interesting narrative form.

Cluetrain At 10

Believe it or not The Cluetrain Manifesto is almost ten years old. But it's simple messages about markets as conversations seem more relevant than ever. Micheal Specht has repurposed the book in the form of a simple presentation which gives us an easy reminder of these prescient messages. Good stuff.

Cluetrain Review

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web 2.0 cluetrain)

Via

Myth Of The Near Future

Great video from Faris that ties in rather nicely with his recent Campaign piece and also his IPA piece. Go Faris.
2010: Entertainment and Communication from Faris Yakob on Vimeo.

Choice

Image courtesy

I am reminded by Giles' post that there are two kinds of people in work - those who will do the job and those who want to make the job better. I don't think this distinction has ever been more important but sadly, there are too few of the latter around. And it makes a difference - surrounding yourself with free-thinkers frees up your own thinking. And if you limit your thinking, it's a form of self-sabotage.

In the end, it's all about choice. Its so easy to forget that our lives are governed by the choices we make. I forget it all the time. But to paraphrase John Grant, the choice is ultimately between stagnation - going round and round and becoming a smaller a version of yourself - and generativity: starting, creating, exploring...

Making

things

better.

Writing Out Loud

Yep, it certainly is.

From the Flickr photostream of Will Lion

Flow

Image courtesy

When I walk through Waterloo station every morning there are hundreds of people trying to do the same thing as me - get from one side of the station to the other in as direct a way as possible. There are so many people, trying to get to so many different places at once, it seems strange that there aren't more people getting in each other's way, colliding with each other.

Perhaps not so strange. In The Social Atom, Mark Buchanan writes about the work of German physicist Dirk Helbing, who has devised models for studying the spontaneous formation of human 'streams'. In situations where hundreds of people are moving in opposite directions, people avoid collision by shifting slightly sideways one way or the other. This simple individual behaviour rapidly leads to "an organized flow and the formation of coherent lanes". People only move as far as they need to to find other people who are moving in the same direction, bringing people of similar movement together. Lanes which form, even accidentally, quickly grow as other people join.

The people involved are not necessarily thinking that consciously about what they are doing - this is a natural outcome. Structures that "self-organise on their own, without human intention". People that make small adjustments to what they're doing in order to make it easier to achieve something. A simple form of self-organisation. Much like the self-organisation that characterises the social web. Because, after all, the web is humanity connected, and typified by online communities that self-form.

So what about value?  We talk about supply and value chains. But of-course the world is not linear anymore. In a hyper-connected world value doesn't move up and down a chain, it flows around a network. In a network, value is not owned by a single entity, and users are included as value creators:

"The value in media is no longer in sources but in flows; when we pool our cognitive surplus, it creates value that doesn't exist when we operate in isolation"
Clay Shirky

This is not an economy, it is an ecosystem.

E-Paper (2)

Regular readers will know I've long been following the development of e-paper. Until recently it's been in very much in beta - an interesting but slightly clunky interface that has slowly been developing in usability and application. But I think it's just turned a big corner.

Early next year, Plastic Logic, a company that was born out of Cambridge, are launching a wireless e-reader that uses tiny polymer transistors embedded in a flexible plastic substrate meaning it's easier to read than conventional flat screen displays especially in strong light. The technology means that screens can be as slim as thick paper, very robust (the screen and all the components are made of plastic) and even flexible. They've built a big factory in Germany to produce the technology and the e-reader. Here's a 5 minute demo of the e-reader from their CEO:

There's something truly inimitable about the physical experience of reading a magazine, but this is an interesting way of enriching previously static content. And I can certainly imagine this replacing a newspaper whose physical form I feel far less attached to (after all, news is everywhere, right?).

So now the real questions start - like is this paper or screen? And will it converge with the kind of ultra-thin flexible screens being developed based on technologies such as OLED? My hunch would be that we're not too far away from the point at which the smarter publishers will view this as a way to capitalise on all the good characteristics of printed media - like good art direction, great pictures, layout, use of typography, the balance of long and short-form text - with the benefits of screen and touchscreen media - interactivity, usability, moving image, video. As long as they don't make the classic mistake - taking what works in their analogue product and applying it without revision or amelioration to take account of a new, and very different, medium. Interesting times.

The Knowledge Revolution

I've seen a couple of things recently that have suggested that the "internet revolution" is over. That 2.0 has been with us for long enough now that we all know what to do - it's now just a matter of getting on with it.

For me, this just doesn't ring true. As the connectedness of our world increases exponentially, so do the questions around what this could mean. The reality, is that we still know very little about how a hyper-connected world really works. In the same way, as the amount of available information grows exponentially, our knowledge also grows, but we still know so little about the world (and the universe) in which we live.

The simple truth is that every question we answer leads to more questions. As usual, the exceedingly bright Kevin Kelly has summed up this phenomenon far better than I can over here:

"...even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially.  In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge...we have not yet reached our maximum ignorance."

Culture, Communication And Impermanence

 

Image courtesy. A piece by Scott King outside the Tate Modern, and across from where I work

One of the things I like about this blog is that it captures my thinking as a snapshot in time and if were to look back, I can see how it has moved on, changed, evolved. In reality, I rarely go back over old posts in any kind of systematic way, but it's kind of comforting to know that they're there. But will they always be?

Perhaps it's not such a dumb question ( I happen to be seeing the guy that runs Sixapart this week so maybe I'll ask him ;)). In this piece for WORD, Steve Bowbrick talks about the relative fragility of digital storage pointing out that in the 50 years or so since computers have been around we already have whole streams of data sat on floppy discs, magnetic tapes or wheelie-bin size hard drives, which are rapidly becoming innaccessible or are already lost forever. Quite a thought when you think how much of our lives are distributed around the web sat on somebody else's servers. What happens if Flickr is shut down? What will today look like to tommorrow's information archaeologists?

Contrast this relatively casual approach to data storage with the British Library whose collection of every item published in the UK grows by some 12.5Km of shelf space every year. So fast in fact that they're now building a huge new warehouse to handle the overflow, capable of storing another 7 million items in 262 linear kilometres of automated, low-oxygen, high-density storage.

OK. So maybe we don't need to store everything. But who gets to decide what we keep and what we lose? And how do we decide what forms of data are the most important for future generations to understand how we live our lives today? As we all become more connected, more and more of our modern culture is wrapped up in communications that rapidly become innaccessible - the kind of narrative that is of-the-moment, at one time there and the next gone forever (what I think Grant called 'phatic communication'). Think of all the old tweets, the IM messages, the Blips, the text messages. Think about the picture that they could paint of how we live.

 

Image courtesy

Which makes projects like this one, rather interesting. Photographer Kelly Shimoda has photographed illuminated text messages over a couple of years and posted them online. Even without their situational context they seem to tell a story of sorts that is in turns funny, strange, cute, tragic. Unexpectedly good.

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