Open (finds, minds, conversations)...

There Will Be Blood: To My Mind, The Greatest Film Ever Made

I'll wander off-topic for a moment, if I may to raise a cup of coffee (it's breakfast time on Monday, for goodness sake) to the cast and crew of the Greatest Movie Ever Made.

Last week I saw There Will Be Blood at Brighton's Duke of York's Cinema and it knocked me for six (US translation: out of the park). I spent the rest of the week intermittently debating whether it was the best film I'd ever seen. I have a canon - more or less - a top ten favourite films at least, so it had to displace one of them to get in.

By Saturday I'd decided it was in fact the best film I'd ever seen. I couldn't get it our of my head. Still can't.

Even more prestigious than Being Mayfield's Favourite Film, is of course winning at the Oscars.

And so, even though I've not really cared one way or another about them for a good while, I was delighted to see Daniel Day-Lewis win Best Actor for his part in There Will Be Blood and the ilm also picking up the Oscar for Best Cinematography (shudderingly beautiful).

If ever an actor's Oscar was earned, Daniel Day-Lewis's was: I've never seen anything quite like his performance. Still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up to think of it.

So if you haven't seen it yet and if you're in Brighton - get thee to The Duke of York's. If you're elsewhere find the best cinema nearby you can to see it. Incredible stuff: too good, too big, too brilliant to catch on a plane, on DVD or whatever...

Here's a scene from the movie that'll give you a sense of what I'm talking about, as least as far as Daniel Day-Lewis's performance goes...

Oh, and I'll be buying the soundtrack soon too - Jonny Greenwood created a score that's like plugging your cortex directly into the film's soul.
OK, that's enough: I'll go back to talking about the web, media and communications again. Thanks for indulging me...

cinema, film, oscars, therewillbeblood

Bestario: Beautiful, beautiful data visualisations

David Weinberger sang the praises of Bestario, a Spanish web outfit, on his Everything is Miscellaneous blog a little while back.

These are people after my own heart - though I don't understand the text on the website I can tell fromt he images on their bestialab section that they are data visualisation geniuses... gorgeous.

Click on the image below for an explosion of visual data (if you like that sort of thing...).

Or this incredible water image:

web, data+visualisation, bestario, spain

Of Neuroscientists and Businesspeople

Thanks to Umair Haque becoming a regular contributor I've signed up to the Harvard Business Discussion Leaders RSS and have been enjoying some of the other contributors there.

One post that stood out for me was Why Aren't Business Leaders and Neuroscientists Collaborating? by Diane Coutu, who muses about keeping a notebook of things you don't know about and how she didn't understand how strategists thought as well as talking about what neuroscience can teach business.

There are so many opportunities to innovate by bringing different fields of science to bear in business - I love it when I hear questions like this being thrown out there.

business, harvardbusiness, neuroscientists, thinking

Cadbury's Gorilla - what next?

So thinking about mass media-driven "viral" campaigns my mind turned to the Cadbury's Gorilla, a TV ad in the UK last year that sparked a frenzy of emails, YouTube spoofs, blog posts, Facebook groups and all the things an ad exec must dream of when he mutters something about viral and social networks to his creatve team.

In fact The Guardian carried a write-up of how the genius of the team at Fallon helped Cadbury's bounce back from its salmonella scandal.

A massive success, then. So what next?

This ad wasthe equivalent of a one hit wonder - and its currency is sliding out there. Just take a look at these the top groups in Facebook: the main thing that is happening is people leaving...

And in fairness the one wall post you can see on the largest group is someone asking why the ad are no longer on TV: a true fan (why she can't just watch it on YouTube, I'm not sure...)

The creative was massively successful in getting distributed across the networks by sharing and becoming part - momentarily - of the cultural zeitgeist to the extent that people would want to remix it with, say the Eastenders theme or excerpts from X-Factor.

But while Eastenders and X-Factor remain part of our popular cultural landscape the monkey fades. Was it like deely boppers, Flat Eric, Nena: a one-hit wonder, not built to last. Maybe that's asking too much... After all the brand's here to stay, no?

Image: the Wikipedia entry's illustration of deely boppers - coincidentally on brand for Cadburys - surely they aren't that smart.

: : Via Robin Grant who also points to some analysis by Scamp. The latter also points out that Fallon - undisputed king of UK mass advertising in 2007 - got a 9/10 from Campaign magazine - what, he asks, does it take to get a 10? Well, for all their campaigns to be as good as Sony Bravia and Cadburys, would probably do it... now that's definitely asking too much.

advertising, cadburys, fallon, marketing, socialmedia, socialmedia, viral

Free eBook recommendation: The Future of Reputation

Following some lobbying from Danah Boyd we have free online version of Daniel J Solove's The Future of Reputation which takes some difficult questions head on (How will our attitudes to privacy change in the next few years? Will we be able to change the law in useful ways? How do we deal with mob rule / vigilantism in attacks on online reputation?

It starts with the chilling tale of "Dog Poop Girl" a lady in Korea whose dog defecated on a tube train and who was hounded (sorry) by an online campaign of shame and ridicule that spread round the world and forced her to drop out of University.

It reminds me of so many small tales of online retribution and how "famous on the internet" isn't always a good thing.

Worth downloading and reading for sure: we've yet to really think through alot of the implications of the social media revolution and this book's a really good place to start.

Obviously it has a lot to say that people in brand marketing and media should take on board.

And if you're seriously interested it may well be worth buying a copy - it's available on UK Amazon.

reputation, society, law, academic, danieljsolove

How to behave online in 3 minute and 30 seconds - social media marketing without nuisance value?

This video from "Because We Care" is a crash course in "How To Behave in Internet Forums".

It pulls off that brilliant trick of being light-hearted and actually informative - I'd be happy to point someone here if they wanted to learn the basics.

Covers trolls, arguments, fanboys, teenager txtspeek, gaining respect, obeying the rules, SHOUTING, lurking before posting, keeping on topic, picture etiquette, general manners, and having thick skin.

How To Behave On An Internet Forum
....and the second part of this post is about the fact this video is marketing, and I almost didn't notice it was.
That's maybe a good thing though, right. There was an ad attached to it and the "Because We Care Group" turn out to be a front for Diesel a brand which - when I wore it in the 90s was incredibly cool and since now that I'm middle-aged with kids and not wearing it probably still is...
The link from the video goes to www.becausedieselcares.com - which is less useful when you get there, but hey I'm not the target demographic, right?

I like this work. I think it's creating stiff that people find useful (because its entertaining or informative).
But if you don't notice that it is connected to the brand then what's the point?, I hear trad brand marketers cry.
Fair question. Well success in networks is all about being useful. A straight BUY message just isn't. Nor is a zesty creative going to stand up and earn its keep on its own - not in Videojug.
This Diesel content will hang around for a while. It gets tens of thousands of views in communities like Videojug, and gets links from the most popular blog on the web BoingBoing. For a lot, lot less money than some "viral" hits but with a whole lot more soul it gets to stake a place in the networks.

marketing, socialmedia, forums, howto, viral, diesel

Last.fm data visualisation

It's been a while since I posted some cool data visualisation things here, so here's a treat from Anonymous Prof, who has been busy mapping Last.fm.

The post about the networks is worth a read. Anonymous Prof used the Last.fm API to gather his data and started to build visualisations of the networks, including some interesting observations about "outliers", small networks of users isolated from the main community.

And his ambitions don't stop there:

I’m also beginning to collect the listening history of users (again thanks to the wonderful API) and hope to examine music listening patterns as they relate to the network. That’ll be a much bigger problem because of the volume of data. I collected a small amount just to see what it would look like and for the 183 users that I checked, I already have 1,179,480 track plays. Scaling up to ~300k users is a bit much. Regardless, I may use the friends data to identify a sub-network of friends and track their listening patterns to see how they influence one another.

Now that could be seriously interesting - I'm subscribed and look forward to hearing more about his adventures with that network.

Via Data Mining

Tech journalist comment-mobbed by IBM Lotus Notes, er, fans...(?)

Image: One of the ridiculously pro-IBM comments on a rather mildly critical blog post about IBM...

Computer Weekly stalwart, Cliff Saran wrote a post that was mildly critical of IBM's inability to answer a question about running Lotus Notes on Windows Vista (that sort of thing has to be purely theoretical research or some kind of penance, right?).

Anyway, what he got was a good dozen or more comments from people angry at his position on this - here are four examples:

"please tell me who your boss is, I would like to complain about your lack of real content."

You make one simple request, to which you already know the answer. You don't get a response to your "duh" question. Then you, due to your position as the owner of the IT FUD blog, totally insult with malice, a company that continues to drive IT into the future.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is for ANY vendor to support an infinite number of versions of their software, just because a handful of customers are too lazy or too tight-fisted to upgrade? Especially in a Microsoft environment!

This is truly pathetic. With our shop heavily invested in IBM, I came across this headline and thought it'd be of interest. It's clear this loser has a beef because IBM won't kow-tow to trivial demands from a whacko journalist to completely revise their certification paths.

Cliff pops up in the comments section himself to point out the pathetically, bleeding obvious:

I've put my name to this blog posting, unlike some of the people here, hiding their comments to my posting behind private email addresses, who clearly have a vested interest in IBM.

Is there really a happy band of Lotus Notes users out there? Was Cliff Saran's post really so poor that it incited a torrent of invective from independent readers who couldn't stand to see an IT journalist take a pop at Big Blue or other big technology companies (which is basically a big part of what tech journos do in the UK)?

It's clear that person or persons unknown with an interest in IBM have taken it upon themselves to mob Cliff in his comments. You expect this kind of thing from the more rabid members of the Church of Apple - but Lotus Notes?

Or - if you want a really piquant conspiracy theory with your afternoon tea - could it be that someone has mounted a commenting barrage on Cliff Saran's blog in order to make IBM look like its playing silly games with social media?

Anyhow, anyone outside of religion/Macs/politics seen this sort of shameful comment-mobbing?

Social lending will take 10% of loans market in two years - Gartner

James Gardner's Bankervision (an incredible read whether you are interested in financial services or not) carries a link to a shocking report:

Over at Technology and Finance, Tom Groenfeldt reports that Gartner is forecasting that in two years, ten percent of all retail lending and financial advice services will go to social banking applications.

Now James calls that prediction "aggressive" - and he's better placed to judge that than I - but what an incredible thought nonetheless...

Imagine ten percent of your market disappearing in a few years to social marketplace... Of course it's happened (and then some) already for music, news, classified ads, movies etc - but there's something thrilling about seeing the forces of change stirred up by the social web reaching the personal finance sector. (Or is that just me?)

Looking at the "eBay for loans" that is Zopa, the idea is working. Really working. I have put a small amount of money into play as a lender

I would say that the conditions are right for this to happen in the UK faster than many might think. You see, we think of "the mainstream" in many markets, especially financial services, in a prejudiced, old media kind of a way. It's habit.

But the mainstream for financial services in the UK has a massive, online-savvy, activist core. It's called MoneySavingExpert.com.

Over the past couple of years MSE's forum has grown massively and it now has over 283,000 active members, making it one of the most significant communities in the UK, and certainly the pre-eminent consumer finance community.

The email newsletter put together by the editorial team reaches a million people and the MSE website says it gets over 4 million visitors a month. This community was a major force - if not the prime mover in my opinion - in bringing the bank charges issue to the fore in the UK: an incredible demonstration of the power of online networks to out manoeuvre vested interests and corporations.

Zopa's already been discussed on the site's editorial and blog sections and is recommended as an alternative for people earning over £25,000 in MSE's advice on loans:

If Zopa's 'uniqueness' worries you, I wouldn't be. It's unsecured lending; you get the money and need to pay it back. If you were looking at 'lending' to Zopa, it'd be a whole different kettle of fish requiring some risk analysis, but borrowing from it is pretty straightforward really!

There are also 285 mentions of Zopa in the forums - sometimes people mention investing in it as part of their savings plan.

I think that it is here that we will see the momentum building that gives Zopa and similar providers the tipping point into the mainstream... What comes next? Well insurance and mortgages look like good candidates....

Guido Fawkes airbrushed out of the present by Tory pamphlet

*Amended*

Conservative aAgitator and uber-blogger Guido Fawkes has called out a Telegraph leader writer for airbrushing him out of the stats in a pamphlet on politics and the web.

"Politics, Policy and the Internet" was written by Robert Colville and published by the Centre for Policy Studies and includes a chart based on Hitwise data for the "Market Share of Websites of Leading Blogs":

But why would they leave out a star right-wing blogista from such a study. Guido suspects the Telegraph may be ashamed of his success. Guido makes a shocking accusation:

To come second to one not-always-sober Guy with a lap-top after losing £10 million on developing your website last year?

Surely not?

According to Guido, Colville says he fully intended to include order-order.com, the "website of the leading blog" of Mr Fawkes.

: : "Politics, Policy and the Internet" is worth a read in its own right, BTW - if you like that sort of thing.

: : : Reminds me of some grumbles I heard in meejah-land about the Telegraph using Hitwise data to declare itself the best read newspaper website in the UK. But that was may have been just down to sour-grapes on the part of A.N.Other national newspaper's team and not a complex point about a demographic bias in Hitwise's data-set.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, politics, telegraph, guidofawkes

You want marketers to talk straight?: try Huawei

Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei - they make everything from 3G base stations to the USB modem dongles that suddenly everyone seems to have - is trying to buy

Not for the first time (remember the Dubai Ports World shambles) we can see that when it comes to takeover battles, patriotism is becoming the last resort of scoundrels in American corporate life.

Mutterings in Washington about the security implications of a Chinese company owning the company that runs the Pentagon's firewalls have raised tempers at the company and incited the CMO to give a - ahem - forthright rebuttal according to the FT:

The Chinese company participating in the planned buy-out of a US telecoms equipment maker has angrily rounded on US politicians who claim the deal could endanger US national security.

Xu Zhijun, chief marketing officer at Huawei Technologies, told the Financial Times that the concerns expressed by some US lawmakers were "bullshit".

Image: Xu Zhijun, CMO of Huawei, calls politicians as he sees them... 

Via Mark Andreesen

Technorati Tags: huwawei, security, US, politics

All the TechPresidents

US Presidential elections are always fascinating to me. The primacy of that country in the world obviously makes the epic process of selecting  its leader of interest to anyone, but there are other reasons too. 

There was an aphorism I heard several times when I was studying American history at both  Sussex and Groningen: American history is not long, but it is very broad. The scale of the country and the complexity of its 2oo+ years of being give it a richness and complexity that is absorbing, to say the least.

Part of the breadth of this election takes in the new constituency. I was lucky to hear Joe Trippi, architect of the Howard Dean 2004 campaign, speak in Westminster last year and subsequently read his book about the experience, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

It was clear in the aftermath of that phenomenon that 2004 was a dress rehearsal for the 2008 campaign.

At the excellent State of the Net conference in Italy, which finished yesterday, I saw Joshua Levy of Techpresident talk about the current state of the campaign. I'd not spent much time following the current race online, so I was surprised at the scale of Obama's lead in terms of popularity on Facebook and MySpace.

 

Obama's online popularity is of course out kilter with his standing among Democrat voters - where he is running a close second to Hilary Clinton. His success in the online world is in part due to his support from young voters and his canny support for  net neutrality [link] and free speech, key issues for internet citizens.

What struck me was the way that actually the most effective campaigning was being done by people outside of his campaign staff. Josh showed us a video produced by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas setting Obama's speeches to music and also a Bollywood remix of Obama.

 

As Josh adroitly pointed out, some would say the latter video is highly representative of Obama's campaign: it says nothing of substance while being highly involving. Style very much prioritised over substance: a wise position at this stage in the Herculean task of building a coalition of support large enough  to win a nomination to run for President. You want to give people a good feeling about you, but as few reasons as possible to start disliking  you...

In contrast to these spontaneous expressions of support is this cringe-inducing video by Hillary Clinton's team designed to appeal to the young voters flocking to Obama's (is cause the right word? Brand?).

It's one of those efforts that prompts you to reverse engineer the creative process. You can imagine the brainstorm where the bad idea was conceived, and built upon: "Yeah! Yeah! And then we could, like, have Hillary photoshopped with a guitar with someone saying she, like, totally redefines what it is to have guitar solo."

Someone in the room knew it was an abysmal idea and stayed quiet. Let us remember that always, and swear never to be the person who didn't say: "That completely sucks. People will laugh at us."

As Joshua put it: "No one under forty would write the line 'The blogs were going crazy." *Cringe*

: : If you're interested in politics and online campaigning it is worth taking a look at the dark underbelly of the campaign in this Observer article and comment piece by the brilliant Mark Hanson post on Comment is Free (write more, Mark, write more!).

Technorati Tags: US, politics, presidential, clinton, obama, youtube, marketing, stateofthenet, italy, web, web2.0, socialmedia

The magic of network effects: What is Social Media? translated into Chinese

This is a long post, but I've got a good story to tell you.

Personally, this is the most thrilling example of the power of network effects, the social web and the creative commons I've yet experienced.

As regular reader will know, just a year or so ago I wrote an eBook called What is Social Media? at Spannerworks (now iCrossing UK) and published it under a Creative Commons attribution licence. The thinking was that this would be useful to our networks - marketers and media people who wanted straightforward definitions, explanations and examples of different social media formats.

It's done very well a good amount of downloads, links and the attention it has earned means it ranks highly in Google for search terms like "social media". Some UK university courses started using it for PR and information management courses. Word is it is being printed in India at a university. Someone told me that had used it as part of a start-up's business plan to help explain social media terms to potential investors.

Great. But this week at iCrossing, my colleague Yong Yang was searching through Google.cn for references to us and found a load of conversations about the eBook. Apparently it had been translated into Chinese. Wow!

I got in touch with one of the translators, Jia Liu, who is living in Boston at the moment and what she told me seemed even more incredible.

In September last year Jia put out a call on a social network called Yeeyan for people to help her translate What is Social Media? into Chinese. Yeeyan is a community that wants to bridge the gap between Chinese and English blogospheres. Members translate interesting Chinese blog posts into English and interesting English blog posts into Chinese. An amazing idea in itself.

Two people - Zhifeng Sun from Shanghai and Xinyu Mao in Qingdao - answered the call and over the next month they created a Chinese version of the eBook, adding images of Chinese blogs and social networks where appropriate to replace the English examples.

As a result of the experience the three collaborators decided that they should create a open platform for publishing more free ebooks like this. In late October they created Innobook, which has now published five ebook translations including The Bootstrapper's Bible by Seth Godin and Advertising 2.0 by Paul Beelen.

In her email to me Jia Liu started off by saying "It's really a magic 2.0 world..." - I couldn't agree more.

It reminds me of Adam Arvidsson's "magical humanism" that I blogged about last summer.

He said that we only partly understand the power of synergies of knowledge and of human social networks. We don't completely understand what they do and in a specific situation we don't know what the precise effects of engaging with them will be, but we invoke these "immanent forces" anyway with a kind of faith in their benign effect.

I certainly didn't imagine this outcome when we published What is Social Media?, but when you set data and knowledge free in the networks they take on a life of their own, it seems. It's great to see the little ebook off on its travels.

I wonder what it will get up to next?

Technorati Tags: ebook, ebooks, creativecommons, social media, yeeyan, china, chinese, innobook, social networks, networks, network effects