This is a lovely image was created by the Visual Insights team at Twitter from billions of geo-tagged tweets posted since 2009. Look closely and you can pick out the roads between cities – even a little bright spot that is Brighton (directly south of London).
You can see more images on the Twitter Flickr account – and some commentary on this blog post from Miguel Ros.
Part of my consciousness will always live in a universe imagined by Iain M Banks.
He died last week at 59.
I started reading his books as a teenager.
When I was at university I read and re-read his science fiction books Consider Phelebas and Use of Weapons especially.
For genre reading, I prefer crime and thrillers to most science fiction or fantasy. It’s just Banks and sometimes Neal Stephenson that pull me into science fiction.
Banks’s world, the world of “The Culture” books, was one I visited again and again, especially if things in the real world seemed tough. If I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t get my mind to stop whirring, a bit of one of them often settled me, opened up my thoughts enough to breathe and let dreams begin to form…
The book I have re-read most in recent years is Excession. I even have an e-book version as well as the paperback, so that I have it with me when I’m travelling.
There’s a bit in Excession which Banks talks about mortality, reflecting on the vulnerability of an artificial intelligence:
[…]if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the Off button, all it became was a lump of matter; all its programs became just setttings, dead instructions, and all its computations vanished as quickly as they’d moved.
It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic reqards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out…
I thought of that passage again when I read his last interview with The Guardian the other day:
“[…]I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you’re just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it’s not about you. It’s what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. ‘Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs’ – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not.”
I’ll start reading his last book, The Quarry, soon. I’m slightly disappointed it’s not a Culture book, though – as was Iain (again in The Guardian interview):
“If I’d known it was going to be my last book, I’d have been quite disappointed that I’m going out with a relatively minor piece; whereas something like Transition, a wild splurge of fantasy, sci-fi and mad reality frothed up together … now that would have been the kind of book to go out on. I’m still very proud of The Quarry but … let’s face it; in the end the real best way to sign off would have been with a great big rollicking Culture novel.
I saw Banks talk at a small arts venue in Shoreham last year, along an old college friend who has loved his work since we were both at Sixth Form college. We are both so glad we saw our hero author then, and so sad that he has died.
I didn’t know him personally, but I lived with his thoughts and ideas and imagination for more than half my life. I’ll still be re-reading his books for the rest of my life – I’m sure of that.
Farewell, Mr Banks. Thank you.
Mix tapes , a set on Flickr.
These are some of my mix tapes.
I’ve digitised these using the ION Tape2PC system, but I’ve found it hard to throw them away.
Anyone of my generation or thereabouts will remember how important cassette tapes were. The music, but also the object, that followed you through so much.
For instance, the Mind & Body mix tape followed me from living in Kew while I was at Sixth Form college, through university and some trips to California, living in the Netherlands for a while and on to the world of work, before CDs, mini-discs and then, decisively, MP3s edged them out and I had to specifically buy equipment last year to be able to hear and record them.
Looking at them now, I’m taken with the patina those years and much use left on them. Also it makes me think about their fragility. Some tapes died in machines, tangled up and beyond repair. Others were simply lost – at parties, one in a jacket at a club.
Realising how much they meant to me, I took these close up portraits. I think I’ll get them printed too…
A useful concept and an amazing talk…
One thing we learned from Google’s I/O conference is how far Google Glass is from the promotional video that the company put out for its product, long before a usable protoype was available. The video was called “how it feels”, but was of course speculating about “how it would feel” to have something like Google Glass worked really well.
Time was when this sort of thing was called “vapourware“. In these strange days we could call it design fiction, a kind of prototype, a thought experiment, a projection of what will be or what might be.
Google Glass is not vapourware – it’s sort of here (just not evenly distributed). Glass is eliteware (or elitewear): an object of veneration by those who can almost grasp a pair and derision by everyone else who are either terrified by the realisation of , experiencing present-future shock or just jealous. It’s an odd, slightly pointless and profound conversation at the same time – there are important things wrapped up in it, but much of the noise is without usefulness. (Still it gave us White Men Wearing Google Glass, which is a joy…)
Google Glass may not be all that the ads made it out to be, but it is what is coming just a little way down the line. It’s what technology wants – to be attached to our faces and feeding live images into the machine, and useful signals right back to us… That or something – some things – like it.
In his brilliant, brief address to the start up community gathered at the NEXT conference in Berlin last week, Bruce Sterling talked about this idea of design fiction. His speech was intoxicating and disorientating, a bit like the present-future he keeps telling us we live in. By turns punching-you-in-the-gut and then telling you that the future, future-present belongs to them.
Design fictions are these thought-experiment/prototypes that try to incite insight or provoke adoption and rejection in the audience.
Sterling calls them “the deliberate us of diagetic prototypes to suspend disbelief.” Still getting my head around that one.
Referring to the theme of NEXT this year – “here be dragons” – Sterling also called design fictions “a process of creating dragons, letting them loose and seeing if they disrupt anything.”
I urge you to watch the whole of his 15 minute talk – it’s bloody brilliant – by turns inspiring, terrifying, clarifying and confusing. Feel the discomfort and curiosity in the room (and yourself) when he calls out the “tacit alliance” between the tech start-up sphere and the “off-shore financiers and money launderers who want to destroy the nation state and the middle class”…
There’s more here than you can fit into one blog post – much less this one.
“I’m not a political activist, I just know what’s going on,” he says… I think the power of what Sterling is doing here is asking the right questions, or pushing us all into asking them.
Further reading
Bruce Sterling cited these groups as using design fiction:
Also take a look at the NEXT blog post about reactions to talk with some links to really interesting posts about elements of his talk…
Via Adam Tinworth’s ever-thought provoking blog.
Image: Could some of these be shorter?
Why are nonfiction books, business books in particular not shorter? Or available to buy in sections or by the chapter?
In their book Big Data: A Revolution… – my most quoted of the last few months – Cukier and Mayer-Schonberger discuss the huge, unexploited stores of data Amazon has about how we read.
Despite Amazon’s Kindle e-book readers’ being capable of showing whether a certain page has been heavily annotated and underlined by users, the firm does not sell that information to authors and publishers. Marketers would love to learn which passages are most popular and use that knowledge to sell books better. Authors might like to know where in their lofty tomes most readers give up, and could use that information to improve their work. Publishers might spot themes that herald the next big book. But Amazon seems to leave the field of data to lie fallow.
One insight from an Amazon competitor in the US has prompted the firm to start producing shorter nonfiction books:
Barnes & Noble’s analysis of data from its Nook e-book reader revealed that people tended to quit long nonfiction books midway through. That discovery inspired the company to create a series called “Nook Snaps”: short works on topical themes such as health and current affairs.
Amazon Singles is effectively the same proposition – and it appears to be successful – having sold almost five million downloads since it started in early 2011. It’s a money-spinner for some authors apparently, while others see it as a way to break into the literary world.
But will it become the norm? More popular than longer form
The short-form non-fiction book really makes sense. Anecdotally I half-finish, or third-finish a lot of nonfiction books. It’s not that they are bad, just that you feel like you have got everything you need after the first ten or twenty thousand words (a full-length book is typically 60,000 words or more).
When I wrote Me and My Web Shadow, it really felt like three shorter books – a theory of online reputation, a how-to guide and a set of manuals for various online tools and social networks.
Now that I am looking a second edition and a possible new book square in the eyes, I think that a series of shorter
And yet…
And yet… people still buy the longer books. Unlike music, they don’t yet seem to want the singles. At least not yet.
I think that what it will take for the short-form e-book market to take off is longer books being published with an accompanying series option – either preceding, simulataneously launched or
From an author’s point of view the serial ending in a complete book is the best option. Each section will be more current, more immediately available and can be amended up to the point that the paper or complete ebook is published.
Image: Is he in the real world?
In an essay for The New Inquiry, called “The IRL Festish” Nathan Jurgenson picks away at ideas like “online” and “offline” and the sense of virtue we often seem to attach to IRL (In Real Life).
Jurgenson argues that if moments of being disconnected feel more real and vital, maybe it precisely because we are connected most of the time that we are appreciating them…
The ease of digital distraction has made us appreciate solitude with a new intensity. We savor being face-to-face with a small group of friends or family in one place and one time far more thanks to the digital sociality that so fluidly rearranges the rules of time and space. In short, we’ve never cherished being alone, valued introspection, and treasured information disconnection more than we do now. Never has being disconnected — even if for just a moment — felt so profound.
It reminds me of one of those “a year without the internet” (or a day, or week, or a month experiments) articles. For the first few weeks the experimenter felt liberated, looked at life differently, felt like they were better somehow. Then the novelty faded and they felt normal. Then they felt bored and disconnected from their life. Paul Miller - a journalist who spent a year offline – describes his experience:
My plan was to leave the internet and therefore find the “real” Paul and get in touch with the “real” world, but the real Paul and the real world are already inextricably linked to the internet. Not to say that my life wasn’t different without the internet, just that it wasn’t real life.
So why are people talking about “offline”, digital diets, screen sabbaths? Jurgenson thinks we are suffering from what sounds to me like a mixture of confusion and nostalgia:
In great part, the reason is that we have been taught to mistakenly view online as meaning not offline. The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention, corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected. That is, disconnection from the smartphone and social media isn’t really disconnection at all: The logic of social media follows us long after we log out. There was and is no offline; it is a lusted-after fetish object that some claim special ability to attain, and it has always been a phantom.
There is also a sense of caution amongst people, of noticing how immersed we are in the windows into the great machine of the web, and pulling back slightly. If not slowing down our headlong charge into the connected age, abstention, “going offline” is a gesture toward slowing down, a comforting habit, like a heavy drinker who has one day off a week, partly to show themselves they can still do it.
Pushing back against always-on connected life is also about figuring out a workable framework for using the web well in our lives.
It helps me to wind down before bedtime to switch off devices, to slow down my use of the web (much as I drink less coffee and don’t eat a large meal before going to sleep). I try to delay the moment I first open a browser, an app or an inbox after I wake, to let myself start the day with a little less urgency, to think about things a little before I start inviting things to happen to me.
Sometimes. Sometimes it works like that. Other times I do it differently – partly this is a lack of discipline, partly that I am playing with different ways of living in the connected world. Working out what works.
A binary argument about “online” and “offline” is not helpful – connectedness is not all good or all bad. It has a mixture of benefits and drawbacks and we are learning how to live well online.
The polarised positions people take in this debate are down to what Kahneman calls “the affect heuristic“. When we like something, feel good about it, we exaggerate the benefits and play down the negatives. When we dislike something, we all but ignore the upside and overplay the pitfalls.
If we are able to be rational about it, we can see the upside of being connected, acknowledge the dangers and work to mitigate them.
We’ll get there. But not with out some blustering and blunders…
HT to Ross Breadmore
Another useful insight from Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think:
A term of art has emerged to describe the digital trail that people leave in their wake: “data exhaust”. it refers to data that is shed as a byproduct of people’s actions and movements in the world. For the Internet, it describes users’ online interactions: where they click, how long they look at apage, where the mouse-cursor hovers, what they type, and more. Many companies design their systems so that they can harvest data exhaust and recycle it, to improve an existing service or to develop new ones. Google is the undisputed leader.
As datafication continues, our data exhaust trails get larger: cameras and other sensors, carried by people and installed in .
Cisco’s Chief Futurist says shops’ CCTV will become the equivalent of web analytics to examine how shoppers are making their choices and allowing shops to optimise their layouts and even their offers in realtime…
As video pixel counts increase, retailers will use video surveillance to hone in on shoppers with new levels of precision, determining demographic traits like, age, sex, and more. In-store activities can also be monitored with video, including display effectiveness, customer traffic patterns, and aisle dwell time. All of this data can be assessed in real time to adjust store operations dynamically. For example, the number of open registers could be increased based on an the number of shoppers in the store; heat maps will show which aisles attract the most traffic; and object detection can figure out which items shoppers are interacting with most.
This trend is at once exciting from a business and data strategy point of view and concerning from a personal point of view. How can we manage our web shadows when we aren’t even sure what data we are leaving behind us?
While most companies become prisoners of their business models, one way to deal with this is to have a strong strategy that means you know when shift to new models and products when the time is right.
Broadstuff’s “All you need to know about Apple in 3 easy steps” suggests that the Cupertino giant may have this kind of strategic fortitude, with the consequence that financial markets get huffy because it means quarter-on-quarter performance is not the first priority.
look at Apple over 35 years and you will see that they:
1. Are typically a very early entrant, integrating a variety of existing systems in a hitherto poorly served early adopter sector with promise, to create an easy-to-use product.
2. Use great design to create a demand for a high margin product. In recent years they have also become “cuter” at doing software as well as hardware after being caught out by the MS-DOS ecosystem
3. As that market matures, retreat to the highest profit quartile. Follow the money, not the volume.
So great has been Apple’s performance in recent years that the markets have created their own expectations bubble about performance.
Jan Chipchase blows away the froth around the Google Glass/privacy conversation:
As a product that is both on-your-face and in-your-face, Glass is set to become a lightning rod for a wider discussion around what constitutes acceptable behavior in public and private spaces. The Glass debate has already started, but these are early days; each new iteration of hardware and functionality will trigger fresh convulsions. In the short term, Glass will trigger anger, name-calling, ridicule and the occasional bucket of thrown water (whether it’s ice water, I don’t know). In the medium term, as societal interaction with the product broadens, signs will appear in public spaces guiding mis/use1 and lawsuits will fly, while over the longer term, legislation will create boundaries that reflect some form of im/balance between individual, corporate and societal wants, needs and concerns.
In Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants thesis, Google Glass is an inevitability – we could see it coming a mile off. Ban it if you like, ignore it if you like, but you can’t un-invent it or the technologies it bundles together.
We are surrounded by thousands of cameras and microphones everyday in the hands of our fellow citizens. Some even play with surveillance drones at the weekend.
All of this technology will only get more common, cheaper, smaller.
What are we going to do about it?
Over the last couple of weeks the blog at Brilliant Noise has really taken off – mainly because we’ve been joined by some talented bloggers with interesting things to say. Inspired by them I’ve also written a post I’m really pleased with!
There’s no elegant way to cross-post stuff here, so I’ll furnish you with some links to the posts – let me know what you think…
Can agencies innovate? by me…
Talking at Google Firestarters – an event for the agency planning community in London – last week, I was one a of a bunch of people briefed with provoking debate about agencies and innovation. Playing on the structure and sentiment of Netflix’s brilliant strategy (“…become HBO faster than HBO can become us”) I suggested that agencies needed to innovate their business models to…
”[...] become McKinsey faster than McKinsey can become us.”
This is pithy way of saying embrace disruptive innovation. Embrace it because the times are a-changing, because if you don’t do it, someone is going to come and do it for you. Disrupt your own business models, find new ones, think about how marketing services are going to change – and then become the change. Invent your future.
Pleading the case for bread and butter content by Lauren Pope
Speaking at the brightonSEO conference a week or two back, Lauren made a strong case for content marketing to prioritise content that is actually useful to customers…
By bread and butter, I mean static or evergreen content; the stuff that answers questions like who, what, where, when, why, how much, and helps users to accomplish the task they came to your website with in mind. Affordable, practical and sustaining – it should be the staple in your content diet.
If the content I’m talking about is bread and butter, then I think viral content is jelly beans: it’s tasty and gives you a sugar rush, but not healthy in the long-term. But despite this, I think bread and butter content is sometimes pushed to the edge of the plate at the moment, in favour of the more colourful and exciting project of trying to ‘go viral’.
It’s great when you’re straight(forward) – yeah! by Ross Breadmore
Ross picked up Lauren’s theme and expanded it to marketing strategy, pointing out a number of factors that keep marketers addicted to the spectacular, when customers are just looking for brands to do their job and keep their promises. For example “presentation-ism”:
Bread simply isn’t sexy. It’s not as appealing to stand at a conference and explain how you understood the needs of your average user and then redesigned the IA on your product pages accordingly, when you could be showing impressive download stats of a mobile app created with a spurious campaign in mind. Likewise when sending round the measurement report at the end of the quarter, would you rather tell stories of incremental shifts in customer satisfaction through a social customer service portal, or report a massive spike in ‘engagement’ caused by some zeitgeist-y activity and a chunk of paid advertising?
How to create a good infographic by Beth Granter
On a very practical note, our data specialist, Beth gives a useful run-down on how to make an infographic that’s (a) actually an infographic and not an illustration and (b) engaging and useful. Especially useful if you’re not a data expert yourself, as it gives you some god hints on how to brief designers.
Meet the team…
Lastly, the Brilliant Noise team has been growing in recent months. I’ve put up some posts – but here’s some links…
