Cool Stuff from the Internet

A box that continually sells itself on ebay.

Money for young scientists is shrinking.
"Scientific revolutions are often led by the youngest scientists. Isaac Newton was 23 when he began inventing calculus; Albert Einstein published several of his most important papers at the tender age of 26; Werner Heisenberg pioneered quantum mechanics in his mid-20s. At the time, these men were all inexperienced and immature, and yet they managed to transform their fields."

Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet?
"I got off the ChatRoulette wheel determined never to get back on. I hadn’t felt this socially trampled since I was an overweight 12-year-old struggling to get through recess without having my shoes mocked. It was total e-visceration. If this was the future of the Internet, then the future of the Internet obviously didn’t include me."

A letter from Thomas Edison
"The worst is to come, for it takes about seven years to convert the average man to the acceptance of a solved problem."

Can You Trust a Facebook Profile?
Yes.

Red Bull and the Secret Half-Pipe
"For those of you who haven’t heard of this, Red Bull custom built a half pipe for White at a secret location in the middle of nowhere. They fly him out to the location via helicopter whenever he wants to practice. This allows him to invent new tricks away from the prying eyes of the press and his competitors. Both the pristine condition of the halfpipe and its secret location have allowed White to pioneer new tricks that he will debut tonight for the first time in Olympic competition."

Douglas Adams on technology
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

The Reversion from Perversion

Three years ago this month, Emily Nussbaum of NY Magazine used this as her subhead in the feature article, “Say Everything.”

“As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.”

But I do wonder if the revolution has been somewhat dramatized. I wonder how many words have been written about kids living out loud, uninhibited, sexting away our American, God-fearin’ moral fabric, leaving a thousand wrung hands from the trail of teen perversion brought from MySpace to Facebook and now to the mobile phone. And I wonder if this is a product of our inherent fear of change rather than something real.

Or as Douglas Adams said, 

“Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”


The problem, of course, is that I think we’re making rules based upon vocal anomalies rather than something more generically true. For the most part, young folks like their secrets. If for no other reason, to hide them from their parents. They try to obscure all the stupid crap they’re up to so as to not open themselves up to some old-fashioned parental backlash.

So while more words have been written about a generation spent sharing themselves to total strangers online, it merely covers up the more regular activity of being a normal kid. Either way, the actual shift might end up far more interesting than the headlines sometimes indicate.

Maybe we’ll still be influenced by a greater number of inputs, but we’ll learn to value those closest to us even more.

Maybe these closest few will be just as a handwritten note is to an email, far more important, meaningful and lasting.

As usual, most the old rules still apply. We value the scarce more than the ubiquitous. We value experiences over things. And I haven’t found much evidence that this will somehow stop being true.

(photo via yyellowbird - ps, she's got a ton of great stuff - check it out)

Products that have a story to tell

Bobsmade describes their products more like art than apparel. You buy a pair of shoes, glasses or some headphones, give Bob a theme and your favorite colors, and a few weeks later you get a one-of-a-kind thing. And probably a pretty great conversation starter.  

With Nike PhotoID, take a picture and get a pair of shoes created from the dominant colors within it. This isn’t just about how the shoes look, but they become a memoir of that experience captured by the photo.  

When products are at functional parity, it doesn’t follow that they have the same value. We usually ascribe value based upon all the stuff we talk about it brand-like terms. How does it make me feel, how does it make me look, what will my friends think. Stuff like that.

But these are examples of not just increasing value by creating an environment in which the thing is more valuable, but creating value by giving the product something sort of like a life of its own. It gives them a story tell. Or a story for you to tell. They’re naturally talkable.

Rob Walker is experimenting with these stories with Significant Objects by pairing writers and thrift store items, giving these things a life of the author’s imagination. Even though the story isn’t true, the value of the thing does change.

It makes you wonder how much we can increase the value of the products we sell just by giving them their own stories to tell.

Linkies

Making Good Design Decisions

http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=goodguesses-1212530304380551-8&stripped_title=making-good-design-decisions

Filter Failure/Clay Shirky
Yitzhak Rabin: 'If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe it’s a fact.'

Chimps make their own movie

Easy = True, Cognitive Fluency Shapes What We Believe
"Because it shapes our thinking in so many ways, fluency is implicated in decisions about everything from the products we buy to the people we find attractive to the candidates we vote for - in short, in any situation where we weigh information. It’s a key part of the puzzle of how feelings like attraction and belief and suspicion work, and what researchers are learning about fluency has ramifications for anyone interested in eliciting those emotions."

In the next Industrial Revolution, Atoms are the new bits

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/1813626064?isVid=1&publisherID=1564549380

The Jeans Battle

One thing is clear. None of them are spending all that much time selling a pair of jeans. No nods to superior stitching. No time spent to say “shop at Mervyn’s.” They’re selling a purpose, a manifesto and a mood. Mostly, they’re selling a context.

Levi's - Go Forth

Diesel - Be Stupid

Wrangler - We Are Animals

Wrangler spot via Charles Frith

The Things a Computer Can't Do

We know that we are fundamentally dichotomous. Rational decision makers with an engine fueled mostly by our instinctual, emotional motivations. So when we’re making advertisy marketing things, which buttons are we usually trying to push?

IBM created a supercomputer meant only to play chess. They called it Deep Blue. In 1997, after years of failure in the quest to defeat World chess champion Garry Kasparov, it finally won.

But even after the historic win, they had largely still failed at doing what they set out to do.

“The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force.”

Yes, the computer won. But only because of a superior memory, a natural progression of computing, not the re-creation of the human brain they had originally sought to make.

But perhaps something more interesting is now stirring. Computers are not just built to hold data in a vacuum. They hold and filter our own information. And as the tools to access that stored data becomes more accessible and ubiquitous, are brains are left to accomplish other things. We are quite literally becoming part human and part machine.

“A whole lot of my cognitive activities and my brain functions have now been uploaded into my iPhone. It stores a whole lot of my beliefs, phone numbers, addresses, whatever. It acts as my memory for these things. It's always there when I need it."

-David Chaimers

All this means is that those rational decisions will more and more often be ceded to computations, algorithms, and the like. It’ll weigh hundreds of options and combinations, guiding you to the most rational choice. Our brain power will be reserved for the things those algorithms have more trouble solving for. Which is all very interesting when you start to consider the power there is in that.

What this means is that we’ll be consistently playing in much more unstable places, finding relevancy not in a single usp, but in a brand’s ability to find motivations that run much deeper than most of our branding models are capable of accomplishing today.

This means resolving problems far less solvable within a few words on a brief. It means creating things more meaningful and lasting than campaigns. It means not only ceding brand ownership to the audience in the rhetorical, but in the literal. It means not only activating audiences, but providing the space for disparate groups to find commonality.

And it means not only affecting messages, but radicalizing products and services in ways that disrupt simple comparisons. Which is all to say that we’ll look less to slogans and more for purpose.

But I assure you this, this environment will be far more interesting, fulfilling and important than we as an industry have experienced before. Just as soon as we get on with it already.

All kinds of stuff from all of everywhere.

4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures

1. It's better to smile. 2. You shouldn't take your picture with your phone or webcam. 3. Guys should keep their shirts on. 4. Make sure your face is showing.

Metaphorically Speaking - A TED talk from James Geary

The Social Data Revolution

"In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008. Information overload is more serious than ever."

Digital Media, Storytelling and the Repression of Communication

http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=townhalltalkjanuary2010final-100113112917-phpapp02&stripped_title=digital-media-and-authoritarian-systems

Super Freaky Life-life Sculptures

Matthew Brady's Lincoln

"A month before the election day, Lincoln received a letter from one Grace Bedell, an 11-year-old girl from Westfield, New York, which urged him to grow a beard because “[growing a beard would] look a great deal better for your face is so thin,” and it would make him more popular. It would prove to be so. When Lincoln left Springfield on February 11th, 1861, bound for the White House, he was fully bearded. On route, he stopped in Westfield and met Grace and he said he took her advice."

The Uniqueness of Humans

This one's a can't miss. Primatologist Robert Sapolsky examines the fascinating similarities between us and other species, but along the way exposes just how wonderfully alone we are. 

The Hits Survive

In this fantastic portrait of the James Patterson blockbuster publishing machine, more evidence that the death of the hit may have been a bit overstated,

"Like movie studios, publishing houses have long built their businesses on top of blockbusters. But never in the history of publishing has the blockbuster been so big. Thirty years ago, the industry defined a “hit” novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in hardcover. Today a book isn’t considered a blockbuster unless it sells at least one million copies."

"The story of the blockbuster’s explosion is, paradoxically, bound up with that of publishing’s recent troubles. They each began with the wave of consolidation that swept through the industry in the 1980s. Unsatisfied with publishing’s small margins, the new conglomerates that now owned the various publishing houses pressed for bigger best sellers and larger profits. Mass-market fiction had historically been a paperback business, but publishers now put more energy and resources into selling these same books as hardcovers, with their vastly more favorable profit margins. At the same time, large stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were elbowing out independent booksellers. Their growing dominance of the market gave them the leverage to demand wholesale discounts and charge hefty sums for favorable store placement, forcing publishers to sell still more books. Big-box stores like Costco accelerated the trend by stocking large quantities of books by a small group of authors and offering steep discounts on them. Under pressure from both their parent companies and booksellers, publishers became less and less willing to gamble on undiscovered talent and more inclined to hoard their resources for their most bankable authors. The effect was self-fulfilling. The few books that publishers invested heavily in sold; most of the rest didn’t. And the blockbuster became even bigger."

Again, it doesn't seem to be the hits that are suffering and the long tail remains rather vibrant, but it's in that murky middle where the waters seem to get choppy.

Well worth the read.

The unlikelihood of anything cool happening.

What percentage of the things we see or hear during the day are all that interesting, really?

Yes, yes, we have some sort information overload. And yes, yes our default position is skepticism and avoidance.

But no matter how busy any of us are, we like to do cool stuff. We watch things that are interesting. It’s just that usually when we’re dealing with anything to do with marketing, our inclination is to assume it’s not worth our time. We’ve been proven right so often, it’s generally a safe bet.

And then when industry types start making these advertisy things, we assume that people are these disinterested beings. We assume that we can’t expect anything. We take the default position as the only possible position.

And just like that, we’ve argued ourselves into treating the audience in a way that reinforces a posture that doesn’t help us and bores the hell out of them.

It’s a rather destructive cycle, no?

But there are so many times in my day where something cool is so unlikely to happen. Standing in line at the store, the rare television commercial I actually see, sitting in dead stop traffic. And these are extreme examples. I can go days without anything all that cool actually happening, which is either sad or normal, not sure which.

So instead of assuming that the audience is overwhelmed and unlikely to take a few steps towards you, maybe we can fill up all that monotony with a wholelotta cool. Because cool will only be unlikely as long as we let it stay that way.

photo via the fantastic yyellowbird