I can’t believe me I haven’t heard about this one until today. This politically incorrect masterpiece is nothing short of genius!

You can watch the whole thing here

Thanks @iditf

Well, to be honest it also reminds me the Seinfeld episode (The Pilot #1 and #2) where NBC executive Russell Dalrymple’s obsession with Elaine begins to affect his work; she tries to let him down easy by saying she can’t be in a relationship with a high-powered man and would prefer to be with someone selfless, such as a member of Greenpeace. In order to prove himself worthy of Elaine, Russell joins Greenpeace and is lost at sea during a botched assault on a whaling ship… (apologies but couldn’t find the scene on youtube)

Don’t know what about you but I can get fairly irritated at the odd tube station that doesn’t have the next train display – I don’t mind waiting, it’s part of life, I just hate not knowing how long I have to wait… I’m therefore a sucker for everything that makes your ‘dead time’ moments in life less dead by either entertaining you or, more importantly lifts you out of the misery of uncertainty and lack of control over your time.

In Zurich airport for instance, in the designated belt at the baggage area there is a count down clock that tells you exactly when your luggage will turn out(the flight’s luggage of course, it’s not personal). The time display on Firefox when you download something or the rare customer service line that keeps you informed of the time it will take the next available person to answer you etc.

All of these are the little things that make dead time more bearable.

Eko light by Damjan Stankovi does just that only on an even more prevalent situation:

Eko light is a simple yet, highly practical concept for traffic lights that not only helps preserve the environment by reducing pollution but promotes safer driving as well. Eko can be easily installed onto existing traffic light systems without much effort while significantly improving overall traffic dynamics.

There are many benefits of the Eko light, the main ones being:

Less pollution.
Drivers can turn their engines off and cut carbon emissions while waiting for the green light.

Less fuel consumption
Turning off your vehicle while waiting on the traffic light can lower fuel consumption in the long run.

Less stress Since you know exactly how long you have to wait you can sit back and clear your head for a while. No need to keep your foot on the gas. Relax.

Safer driving- With the Eko light both drivers and pedestrians can be fully aware of how much time they have left before the light changes and that way reduce the chance for potential traffic accidents.

Slightly less practical but nevertheless awesome is EggWatcher – one of the projects that came out of Poke’s recent hackday. Good work mate!

What / where else we could use a time indicator?

It’s this time of the year… New year’s trends lists are the currency of the moment, and every blogger and his sister compile a knowledgeable trends list for 2010. The world doesn’t really need another one from me.

So instead I’d like to talk about one trend which we should try to avoid in the next year.

Please can we stop killing things?

Over the last few years we’ve been all guilty of new-technologies sensationalism. Our response to the overwhelming pace of change made us believe that emerging platforms and technologies will categorically and dramatically kill everything that was before them. Search for “TV is Dead” on google and you’ll get over 2million(!) results. But is it? really? (That clever dude who wrote a book on the death of TV advertising also founded a new agency that specialises in marketing in Second Life. No, really!)

What else have we had?

Twitter is killing blogging!

Widgets will kill the homepage!

Second Life is killing Real Life!

Digital is killing advertising!

Yahoo pipes will kill the browser!

Google is killing Microsoft!

iGoogle is killing Newspapers!

Gaming is killing the cinema!

Books are a thing of the past!

Google Wave will kill Facebook!

Facebook is killing email!

Twitter is killing Facebook!

And now, the most recent hyperbole, straight from Twitter’s (AKA The Pulse) oven, I give you….

Streams are killing the web page.

Guess what. it turns out that when human evolve and construct culture(s) they have some time-attention-alchemist-like qualities whereby old things are not being replaced with new stuff, they add to them. Sometimes they compete and sometime co-habit and complementary and together they evolve and we evolve. Honestly, we’re like every good parents – when we have a new baby we don’t stop loving the older one, we find time and make room in our hearts for both…;-)

True, there are some casualties (DVD did kill the VHS) and natural selection (e.g. closure of few magazines and channels), some people make less money, some people make loads new money. Things do expand and contract, evolve and change but reality is more complex and is no where near the new-technologies massacres we read about every day.

So for 2010, let’s try to avoid the trend of killing old things in favour of new things and live happily ever after…

Peace

Dub FX ‘Love Someone’ from Ben Dowden on Vimeo.

Then later Tom introduced me to this lovely tree-sampler:

Diego Stocco – Music From A Tree from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

Which for some reason made me play this beautiful album I didn’t play for some good six years:

Then late at night me and my mate Tal talked about Who Sampled which if you don’t know it by now is tagged under “holy mother of awesomeness”

I’m ready to beat and sample myself to bed now

Meanwhile in Stockholm…

One of the most sacred truism of social media is that it is no place for direct marketing and salesy messages. Yet recent developments and observations seems to suggest that this might become just another cliche’ as companies are experimenting with social platforms as sales and promotions and even a new breed of direct marketing, one where contact (lead) is being made by the indirect requests of people.

The initial change came from brands using Twitter for sales promotions like the successful story of DellOutlet, Jetblue and many other brands. This is a no brainer. if you have a good deal to offer people will follow.

But it’s worth paying attention to emerging practices of direct marketing. I’ve been thinking about it for couple of weeks now and don’t know what to make of it yet. Sometimes I think it’s plain wrong yet occasionally it seems to make too good of a sense sense and I’m tempted to convince one of my clients to experiment with. At the moment Twitter is where these experimentation can take place so a bit limited in scope but this indeed can be just the beginning of something big.

Let me start on a true story…

Few weeks back I #lazytweeted a question about a place to stay in Barcelona. Few nice people (not just from my network) have replied with recommendations. One @reply came from an apartment hotel offering their place.

Is this the holy grail or the greatest ever spam machine in the making?

Set up search words through twitter search of your category and you might find the goose on steroids or you might find a stinky corpse. I don’t know.

Here are some fictional tweets to bring this more to life:

Someone: anyone knows a good ethical wedding company?

I can think of hundred more examples, some obviously more promising than others.

There are, of course so many issue here, I don’t know where to start.

Do people want to be directly contacted by companies or is it intruding spam that will put people off Twitter and kill it? My instincts say sod off but seriously why not? If the right offer can come in the right time by the right people – how is that a bad thing?

I’m shouting out to my network, not to sales persons you say. Well, the emergence of the #lazytweet says otherwise. When people in need they want to throw their net as far and as wide as possible right?

That’s a spam full stop, you say. It will taint my experience and kill the network. But if these replies appear not on your main stream but on your @reply stream which you can access or ignore as much as you like that makes it less problematic right? And you can always block intrusive users. Besides, you bloody hypocrite, why is it OK for brands to ‘listen’ to your customer service rants and response very quickly but NOT with anything else?

Tricky thing, virtual social spaces. You can argue that in the physical world, a sales person won’t approach you in the pub saying, sorry mate, I just overheard you asking your friend about X. I’m Asi, I’m an X retailer, come buy from me. But we slowly change our perceptions of public/private in mediating social technologies and getting used to what Danah described as their persistence, searchability, and the presence of invisible audiences. So comparing it directly to physical spaces is a bit futile although I’d still suggest taking that test.

And there are of course loads of other issues from a business perspective – mainly resource and scalability. Please let’s not fall into the twitter trap. It’s still and probably will be just a noisy minority of the early adopters so take it with a pinch etc. I guess that just like with everything social interwebs, context is king and we will soon see another demo of Sturgeon Law – some companies/brands will get it and do it right and make some good business of it, most will fail.

Please tell me what you think of this one – your opinion (as usual) is hugely appreciated.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, smarter and quicker people have thought about it. It’s getting hot in here…

This is a problem I’ve been struggling with for a long time, something Iain and I had discussed a lot in the past but always reached some dead end. I’m surprise how thin is the blogversation around it (well not really as anything around digital measurement is still pretty rudimentary)

Here is the situation:

So the client signed off your proposed idea/solution for a new project and you need to set targets. There are two immediate challenges:

1. How to set up traffic and interactions volumes?

This is the most straightforward one and surprisingly the one that no one likes to talk about . What does success look like? 50K UV? 3million? 12967 fans? 37K plays? 3.4min avarage spent on site? (this is of course a very partial list)

2. How to set up the metrics for the VALUE of traffic and interactions

What does it mean that 34K people interacted with you? or that you had 582 blogs writing about your project etc?

At the moment, and correct me if i’m wrong in many cases both are founded purely on guesswork (and a bit of common sense). We know that unlike traditional media (TV etc) every digital project is different in shape, form and colour from the previous one so there is not much to compare to and benchmark against – a company blog is not a campagin microsite is not a facebook fan page is not a youtube video is not a game etc.

Now, i know that in North America it is a bit easier as traffic volumes are not guessed, they are usually bought i.e. you set up target and buy media to meet these targets, but in the UK as far as i can tell there are some unreasonable hopes and expectations from ‘digital’.

I’d like for now to ask your help on the first point as there is some thinking going on on the second. So let’s go back to the very basics – How the hell do you set up traffic and interactions volumes? How to you decide if success is 50K or 500K? What do you benchmark your numbers against?

How do you (and clients) come to a MUTUAL, REALISTIC and REASONABLE set of targets during planning?

I think that this issue deserve a proper meeting over coffee with some clever minds but for now – please share your wisdom in he comments.

Thanks in advance for your contribution

What strikes me every time I come across a new cracking Hitler mash-up (there are hundreds of them now and they are cross cultural and cross communal) is the power of non-verbal communications. Psychology textbooks say that more than 70% of our communicative messages are passed through non verbal communications. This, the massive role Hitler is occupying in our shared cultural representations, combined with intensity of the situation is a cultural goldmine for mash-ups – we can practically project any story/script we want on this.

Here are some of the best ones:

Twitter is down

Hitler’s got the wrong bike


Hitler gets banned from World of Warcraft


Hitler finds out Lampard is signing for Inter

and now the funniest EVER, probably because it resonates so powerfully with my past experience – Hitler can’t find a parking space in the streets of Tel-Aviv (apology for any non Israeli readers for the Hebrew subtitles – belive me it’s cracking.) thanks for Kasach for the find.

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