Jumping on the Virtual Bandwagon (or not)

There’s something about books that I love. It’s hard to define, and it’s even harder to justify. I understand the idea of an e-reader, I just cannot consider ever buying one. Maybe my attachment goes way back into childhood, books are one of the few objects we carry with us throughout our entire lives, learning through pictures, learning to read, learning to create new worlds in our mind.

The publishing industry is in a flap, panicking about the fact that five years (two years?) from now ‘real’ books (that is, ones made of paper) will become obsolete. But will they? Really? I’m not convinced.

My dream holiday. A beach and  good book.

Laying on a beach somewhere, book in hand the pages bent and well used, falling asleep and letting it drop from your hand. Would you take a kindle to the beach? And leave it on your towel when you jump in the water. I wouldn’t.

I like tangible things. Maybe that’s why I still keep a diary instead of just using the organiser in my phone. I like to make notes in margins of books and come back to them years later.

Don’t get me wrong, I think e-readers are a great idea, saves space, saves paper (the environmental factor alone should be enough to convince me). In fact I recently moved half way across the globe, and in the process of packing boxes discovered that between two of us, we had over 100 kilos of books, culling time began (in the end nearly half our shipping budget went on books!). Could I have put all those books on an e-reader? Yes, but then I would have had to re buy them all over again! And more importantly, for me, books hold more than just the story we read. There’s copy of Tess of the D’urburvilles that was passed down from my father (to him from his own), the well-worn pages of Cloudstreet from the summer I spent lugging it around europe, the copy of Catcher in the Rye that I’ve re-read religiously every couple of years since I was 13. For me there are memories attached to every book I own and I can see them in the pages. Unfortunately this feeling just cannot translate into an e-reader, no matter how much I wish it could.

The Thing About Facebook

Facebook Hangover - Saturday Cartoons by Mark Stivers

 

Dear Facebook,

I have so many things to thank you for, you have reconnected me with fantastic long lost friends, found me a couch to sleep on in Barcelona, sublet my apartment two summers in a row, gotten me a job, sold my bicycle, helped me discover new music, made me laugh and made me cry. But in all your glory there are still a few things about you that bug me:

1. The birthdays

I love and hate the birthday function, I love it for the obvious reason that it reminds me when all my friends’ birthdays are (so I can CALL them, not leave a message on their wall). I hate it when it’s my birthday. That one time a year when your wall fills up with the same message (times 100) from well wishers most of whom you haven’t head from in months (years, decades?), in fact all your ‘real’ friends really should have called (or are in fact actually with you).

2. Defriending

I always feel like I’m breaking the rules of some unspoken ‘Social Code’ on this one. The guilt that goes along with my annual friend list clean up. Every once in a while I feel the need to cull my friend list, I figure if I never message you (and vice-versa), never think about you and never look at your page then we’re probably not ‘friends’. I’m sure most people never even notice, but every now and then there’s that one person who shamelessly thinks you must have made a mistake and tries to add you again (or even worse messages you and point blank ask why you deleted them).

3. The awkward event invitations

Of the, i see you’re hosting a party and i’m not invited, kind. Enough said.

4. …is no longer in a relationship.

Thank you facebook for announcing to the whole world that someone broke up. The fact that people leave this up on their walls baffles me, I couldn’t think of anything worse than all those sad comments people leave ‘oh i had no idea, so sorry!’, ‘if you need to talk’, yes please, let’s have that conversation on my facebook wall instead of on my couch with a tub of ice-cream. BAH!

5. People that aren’t on facebook (Ok so I know this one’s not actually your fault)

I remember my own resistance, and that was some years ago now: Facebook was LAME…and Myspace was AWESOME. And then the tables turned, and now I find myself getting mad when i organise something and send out facebook invites and then realise that one guy that doesn’t have facebook needs his own personalised email.

You realise it most when you’re travelling, you meet people that you’ll never call or even email, but you want to stay in touch because next month you’ll both be on a beach somewhere in Croatia and it would be great to grab a beer, but without facebook, it ain’t gonna happen.

So for all your faults, and privacy issues and big brother like general scariness, for me, right now, I still need you in my life. The good outweighs the bad and let’s face it, without you, I wouldn’t have anywhere near 245 friends.

The Naked Truth of Advertising

Lauren’s blog post of a couple of weeks ago, the one about billboards, inspired me to share this with you all.  I think I have one to add to your collection Lauren.

Galeries Lafayette Ad, Paris Metro Station. Translation: Summer, live stronger.  (underneath: Bathing suit floor)

The translation of this is difficult, directly translated the text along the top is ‘Summer, live stronger’, but in french (perhaps in english too) it’s a phrase which evokes more meaning than the words imply. When I asked my partner to decipher this for me he said something along the lines of: it being summer, the sun, the heat (oh I see, it’s hot, maybe that’s why she took her bathing suit off), taking more risks, living dangerously, having confidence in yourself (to lie naked on a diving board??)…

I lived in Paris for five years, and every summer without fail Galeries Lafayette the biggest department store in France (think a David Jone equivalent) would use this image to advertise their ‘bathing suit floor’ – yes that is an entire floor dedicated to bikinis. Every single year it left me gob-smacked. I’d gotten used to the scantily clad women in the underwear ads posted all over the city, the Aubade ones are particularly famous:

 

Aubade Lingere ad, France. Translation: Lesson 57: Distract your opponent

 

At least they are advertising underwear (and still have it on) and not something completely unrelated. But the bikini one just knocked me out time and time again (I know it is in fact advertising bikinis, but come on!). These ads are plastered up in every subway station, then there’s the 50 foot version draped from the top of the store. I had many a conversation with French friends who think I’m hilarious and couldn’t understand why I got so worked up about it, they would roll their eyes and laugh, the odd one would even get defensive and go on about freedom of speech and censorship. And I would tell them how these ads would never see the light of day back home in Australia, and they would tell me that we are prudish and boring…and it would go on. Aside from the objectifying women issue, at the end of the day I questioned whether the bikini ad (obviously marketed at women) would actually make a woman want to buy a bikini there? Disturbingly, they’ve been using the same campaign for the last five years, so I suppose it must.

The Not So Long Tail

This is the article I mentioned in Digital Media last week, it was given to me in another class as the counter-argument to the Wired Long Tail piece.

“Should You Invest in the Long Tail?” by Anita Elberse for the Harvard Business Review. On the HBR website, you can’t read it without a subscription , but you can download it here

It was written in 2008, so four years after Chris Anderson’s Wired article, looking at how the Long Tail theory has developed, providing new data that refutes Anderson’s theory that the Long Tail would make more profit than the blockbusters.

Not a bad read, interesting to see how the theory has developed in practice.

How Did I End Up Here?

Discovering places you would never have thought to look for. Social networks are like a virtual youth hostel, where you meet people who can send you off in a direction you never even knew existed. Facebook is the king here, sharing links on Facebook isn’t something everyone does, and to be fair, a lot of them are rubbish, LOLcats, babies dancing or links to music videos. And then once in a while someone sends me stumbling across something like this: 6 Brutal Leaders and Their Ridiculous Secret Hobbies, when the picture is Kim Jong-il and a basketball it’s just daring you not to click. Ok I laughed, and I learned a few things, I then spent about an hour trawling around this site,  The 25 Most Baffling Toys From Around the World had me laughing so hard I cried:

On the left is a mysterious toy. On the right, a graphical representation of a virus. And, on the bottom is a picture of what can only be a child catching herpes. – cracked.com

I don’t know who their writers are but some of this stuff is sacred. Seriously your Sunday afternoon will never be the same again.

O-desk – changing how the world works (one dollar at a time.)

O-desk is like the job classifieds for the world. It’s essentially a recruitment company that allows both employers and potential employees find each other. The difference is, all the work is done virtually. Web design agencies looking for flash animators, children’s book authors looking for ghost writers, accountants, copywriters, personal assistants, software developers…it’s all there. O-desk acts as the middle man, creating profiles on both sides and ensuring no one gets ripped off in the process (the employer pays o-desk who pay the employee – minus a small fee). Working hours are trackable – you log in when you’re working – and screen shots are taken (six an hour) so employers can see that the work is being done. It’s actually quite a great little resource for, well, everyone, whether you’re starting your own company or looking for a little freelance.

I know about o-desk because my boss uses it to find graphic designers to create icons and logos for less than a dollar a piece. Yes, you read that right. A dollar a logo…for weeks I sat at my desk wondering when he’d find an offshore version of me who’d offer themselves up for half the price (or a tenth), so naturally I went in to check out the competition. I found someone who would do my job (well, ok, not ALL of my job…but a part that takes up a fair chunk of my time) for 56 cents an hour! I’m not kidding.

Bennani's O-desk profile (please note: this information is available for anyone to see on the O-desk website)

So his credentials were nothing special but he did have the slight advantage of charging, oh about 100 times less than I do. I knew that Bennani wasn’t really a threat to my job, but there were a couple of hundred people offering themselves up for less an 5 bucks an hour – for a second I even toyed with the idea of sub-contracting them.

I guess it comes down to this: in the globalised world that we live in, what are we worth? And what are our chances when there are thousands of people out there willing to work for five dollars an hour??

The Wilderness Downtown

I just love when creative people combine their talents and come up with something like this. Arcade Fire has just released an interactive music video for their song We Used to Wait, the video was made in collaboration with Chris Milk, and American music video director and producer and Google. The HTML5 powered clip can be played on most browsers (notably not explorer) and Google suggest you watch it on Chrome (which if you haven’t already downloaded you should, because it’s awesome.)

The clip takes the viewer on a personalised tour of their childhood home. The site first asks you to type the address of the street where they grew up, the video then uses Google Maps and Street View to personalise the clip. It’s really quite nostagligic and beautiful – and the song’s pretty good too. Check it out. It really speaks for itself.

This project was done as part of Google’s Chrome Experiment showing how HTML5 can turn your web browser into an interactive work of art.

Come out, come out wherever you are…

This week Facebook announced it’s latest feature, Places. Not exactly an original concept (given they stole it from foursquare), but one that kind of has me wondering how much information is too much?

3 REASONS FACEBOOK PLACES IS SCARY

• If you don’t have a stalker, you will soon.
• There’s a 95% chance someone will rob you while you’re on vacation (or just down at the shop)
• Next time you lie to your boss/partner/parents, well anyone really, think twice and just hope you don’t get tagged.

The new feature works like your status update, allowing you to share your location with all of your Facebook friends at the click of a button, the idea being that you can see if you have friends close by, or if you’re deciding what to do on a Friday night you can hop onto Facebook and see that four of your mates are all at the same bar (and wonder why you weren’t invited). Not only will Facebook places able users to tell their friends where they are in the geographical sense, it will also allow users to ‘tag’ places, ie. Little Cupcakes, Degraves St. (just incase you didn’t realise your best friend was sitting two tables away).

Facebook would like places to become a natural reflex, so that every time you log on, you “check in”. But if, like me, your 245 Facebook friends aren’t all actually good friends, then do you really want them ALL to know exactly where you are? I don’t. Ever. “I am in Melbourne” is fine, “I am at 245 Chapel St, Prahran” is not. Now this is all good and well, because i just won’t use it. There’s a catch, of course, (and this is the scary part) other people can “check you in” by tagging you when they check in…I’m already battling to untag all those pesky photos, now it’s places too, notification overload! You can deactivate places…but like all things Facebook, it’s defaulted to active (oh and good luck navigating those privacy settings).

Is it normal that I find all this a little bit creepy? Like the iphone app “find my iphone”, really handy for those of us that constantlty manage to misplace out phones, or on the off chance a mugger isn’t smart enough to delete it. Unfortunately it has the possible side effect of your partner being able to GPS track you 24/7…hmm.

At the end of the day you share what you share (and what your friends share…and what their friends share…)

Political Advertising at it’s Best and Blandest

Are we, as a country, really this boring?

Ok. We got it Julia wants us to move forward and Tony wants us to stand up. They must think we’re a lazy bunch, come on, get active Australia!

Having only moved to Melbourne a month ago, I depressingly discovered this week that not only do I now live in a safe liberal seat, it’s the seat that until late last year was held by Peter Costello (cringe and groan simultaneously). I’ve spent the last two federal elections overseas, the first in London, the second in Paris, as a result for all of my voting life I have yet to experience a federal election campaign in full swing. And I am now realising how lucky I’ve been.

The political advertising in this campaign is embarrassingly bland and totally predictable, the “Look at us, we’re great. Look at them, they’re evil” strategy that nearly all parties abide by is rarely adopted in other areas of advertising…gee I wonder why? Because it makes you look petty and stupid. If you have to point out the other guys flaws to make yourself look good, then what you’re telling us is that you don’t think you’re strong enough (ie. can win) with what you have to offer alone.

Every single time a campaign ad comes on the tv my french partner gets this stunned look on his face and can’t quite believe that we actually sit through this barrage of fear mongering, mudslinging and whinging (in France, political advertising is banned in the 3 months leading up to an election – we could only dream). As I try to explain to him that although some of the ads LOOK like death threats against the opposing party, it’s really just the same old boring content coloured into black and red with a scary voice-over. Although that one with the scalpel really is kind of scary, especially when they cut the kid in half.

There is evidence that someone is trying – Kevin the Lemon, Timewarp Tony, but there is still a serious lack of creativity in political advertising, and the fact that this hasn’t changed in years would suggested that they believe they are sticking to a tried and true method. Does it work? I’m not convinced.

So we will sit through it all for one more week, and then it will be over…and we can all go back to watching Masterchef.

NOTE: The recent “if you think, vote greens” ad that was produced for The Pitch segment of Gruen Nation will probably turn out to be the most viewed ad of this campaign after the all publicity surrounding its not being able to be aired. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s on the ABC website and on YouTube.

safe and sound in hAPPyland

A couple of months ago the New York Times Magazine ran article called The Death of the Open Web in which writer Virginia Heffernan surmised that the iphone/ipad and more specifically the apps that we use on these devices have created a newer, cleaner, more exclusive version of the web. We no longer have to trawl through a messy, ugly world but rather as Heffernan suggests we can now visit “an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff. This suburb is defined by apps from the glittering App Store: neat, cute homes far from the Web city center, out in pristine Applecrest Estates” she goes on to suggest that people are turning to this new ‘chic’ world, paying for prime content and in effect quitting the ‘open web’ transforming the virtual world as we know it.

To start with, the iphone does have an open web, it’s called Safari and it is about as messy and unruly as you get, sites that are not mobile specific are difficult to navigate and unless you have pointy little witch fingers you’ll find yourself ending up all over the shop, wanting to throw the goddamn thing into a wall. And then you’ll hit a site that’s made with Flash…don’t even get me started.

I don’t know which apps Virginia Hefferenan uses, but mine are certainly not void of the ‘hustling, mobbing and mugging’ that she refers to, in fact, my apps force me to look at advertising that i could easily skip over on my computer. And while i will admit that they can be cleaner, sleeker versions of their former selves, there are limits to what you can do on an app as opposed to its original. For example the wordpress app does not allow you to add hyperlinks, or pictures (or anything other than text really).

I’ve been living without internet at my house for nearly a month now (moved house and discovered that my ISP is a great big joke of a company). A computer without internet is like a remote control car without batteries…boring and useless. As a result my iphone has become a ‘cannot live without you if i lost you life would be meaningless’ device.

As my laptop sits in the corner glaring jealously at his arch enemy Mr. iPhone he secretly wonders whether life will ever be the same again.

And here i am, with my new clean, sparkly, safe version of the internet. It’s not all glitz and glamour, let me tell you. Having nothing but a pared down, squeaky clean version of the internet has far from made me want to ‘quit’ the open web as Hefferenan is suggesting, in fact I find myself longing for the messy, link filled pages of the web that only my laptop can offer.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iphone, and at the risk of sounding like a pretentious little so and so, I’ll admit that i have almost forgotten a life pre-iphone. It is a like a little personal assistant who can do just about anything. Example: I just moved to Melbourne, my iphone (and it’s many apps) helped me find an apartment, listed my appointments and told me how to get from one to another, the maps told me where i needed to go (and how long it would take) and the tramtracker told me how to get there. After a long day it told me a great bar just down the road to get a beer at. And then, at around 3pm every day the battery died and i was screwed. But as i sat waiting for the pizza (that I’d ordered through the pizza hut app) and wondering if it would ever actually arrive (it did) i realised that my iphone is such an integral part of my life and there is no denying the convenience of the app especially on the run.

But i really don’t see those apps replacing the sprawling vastness of the web, and i look forward to next Wednesday (sometime between 8am and 7pm, thank you TPG) when i can plug the Ethernet cable of life back into my laptop and my iphone can get back to doing what it does best, calling people.