Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article , “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”, which we posted in The Collective No. 22 created a storm of responses. One of them came from Biz Stone, founder of Twitter, writing in The Atlantic and is worth a read.
Online, offline and increasingly mobile
Insights and implications from the generation born between 1980 and 1995 from Edelman 8095 at PSFK.
A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years
Novelist Douglas Coupland reveals the shape of things to come in a messed-up future with 45 tips for survival. It includes gems like “People who shun new technologies will be viewed as passive-aggressive control freaks trying to rope people into their world, much like vegetarian teenage girls in the early 1980s”.
Street artist JR wins the TED prize for 2011
Street artist JR has won a grant of $100,000 and the chance to work with the TED community to develop “an audacious wish that will involve the world in a brand new piece of art.”
Postcards from the future
An exhibition is running at the Museum of London by illustrators Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones, bringing the potential realities of climate change home.
Inspiration from Google Labs
There’s lots of awesome stuff on this collection from Google Labs, including digital highlights that have featured here in the past like the Wilderness video, painting light with iPads, Uniqulo etc etc. Pages and pages of inspirational creativity for you to copy and steal.
Aleks Krotoski writes about a new audience, the cult of me. “They are selfish, they are narcissistic, they are interested in what kinds of effects they will have on your content. They want it interactive, they want it networked and they want control.” This was a speech she delivered for broadcasters but it resonates for brands too. She gives some brilliant examples of creativity, like The RSC’s Such Tweet Sorrow, a re-telling of the Bard’s famous tragedy told via Twitter. She warns: “There is one thing you should NOT do: DON’T litter every single potential touchpoint – every potential delivery mechanism, from television to cinema to mobile phone to ringtone to social network to twitter feed to radio station – with your assets. That is an absolute waste of your time and money. This scattergun approach does not work for me-cultists. We don’t feel loved, frankly. Instead, focus on delivering your stories to the right platform by embracing the unique attributes of each medium.” (Incidentally this article has been shortlisted for post of the month by Only Dead Fish and Neil Perkins will be writing for us next week.)
Despite the headlines about horrible toilets and shambolic organisation for the Commonwealth Games, India is doing rather well. The Economist reports that its economy will expand by 8.5% this year. Moreover, India will soon outpace China for two reasons. 1/ Demography as China’s workforce ages unaided by its one-child policy. 2/ Democracy, which means its private companies are strong and thriving.
Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Why the revolution will not be tweeted.’
Gladwell is a brilliant storyteller. In his latest New Yorker tome, he casts a scathing eye over social media, saying it can never provide what social change has always required because it is built around weak ties. “A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución.”
“Loyalty is what we call it when someone refuses a momentarily better option. If your offering is always better, you don’t have loyal customers, you have smart ones. Don’t brag about how loyal your customers are when you’re the cheapest or you have clearly dominated some key element of what the market demands. That’s not loyalty. That’s something else. Loyal customers understand that there’s almost always something better out there, but they’re not so interested in looking.” Read the post in full on his blog here (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/09/loyalty.html)
Downtown Wilderness, amazing stuff using Google Maps
This is the most creative, indeed the best website I’ve ever seen. Arcade Fire has released this personalised video imprint for the track Downtown Wilderness, which cleverly combines Google Street Maps with animation and conventional filming to frame the song in the streets where you grew up. You do need to download the Google Chrome browser to watch this, but it’s worth it. I think it’s the most exciting website I’ve seen. Type the address of where you grew up and the video will play with the guy running through your street. Inspiring stuff.
Uniqlo does it again
Uniqlo’s tweet campaign was brilliant. Tweet for treats! The more people tweeted, the lower the price became. “Tweet about any item and the price will come down for all.” Customers could get the special prices at 9am on 9 September.
This is what Mother New York did for Target’s latest collection. It involved 155 rooms from the New York Standard Hotel, 60 dancers, a new pop symphony from one half of N.A.S.A and original visual programme from Daft Punk’s light designers. Lovely.
An excellent piece of journalism from Wells Tower, the young American author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. He reports for GQ from the world’s cannabis capital, Amsterdam, where he worked undercover at one of the city’s hash coffee shops. “Fainting customers are a familiar problem, and Felix moves with professional swiftness, managing to get his arms around the kid an instant before his skull smacks the floor.”
Reality Snacks
Russell Davies has highlighted his favourite bits from David Shield’s Reality Hunger, a book about how truth and lies collide with modern communication. Nuggets like:
“Collage, the art of reassembling fragments of pre-existing images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century.”
“The tour guide said, “Rothko is great because he forced artists who came after him to change how they thought about painting. This is the single most useful definition of artistic greatness I’ve ever encountered.”
“Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.”
Searching for a new product name? Just add an ‘i’
Amusing article in this week’s Guardian on the ‘iClones’. Firms, inspired by Apple’s success with the iPhone, iPad, iPod, are adding an ‘i’ to their own products. KFC has the iTwist, a chicken tortilla wrap; BaByliss has the iTrim Stubble, its £50 battery razor; and then there’s the iBrush, Bio Iconic’s roller brush for people with flyaway hair.
The world’s worst traffic jam
This may be some consolation to anyone out there stuck in traffic. At least you’re not sat in the world’s longest traffic jam in history on the Beijing-Tibet Expressway. The tailbacks stretch for 100km and 400 police officers have been assigned to the area to quell rising tensions. No wonder.
Lewis Pugh swims in cold waters to draw attention to global warming. Three years ago he swum in the North Pole. This year, he swam in Lake Imja, 5300 metres above sea level underneath the summit of Mount Everest. It was formed by recently melting glaciers. It was the toughest swim of his life. During his first attempt, he nearly drowned and he had to try again and forget every single thing which he had learned in the last 23 years of swimming. He had to swim with humility rather than aggression.
He says it taught him two important lessons, “The first one is that just because something has worked in the past so well, doesn’t mean it’s going to work in the future. And similarly, now, before I do anything, I ask myself what type of mindset do I require to successfully complete a task. And taking that into the world of climate change, which is, frankly, the Mt. Everest of all problems — just because we’ve lived the way we have lived for so long, just because we have consumed the way we have for so long and populated the earth the way we have for so long, doesn’t mean that we can carry on the way we are carrying on.”
Watch something beautiful
This beautiful film on words is visual poetry.
Angry Birds
The number one paid iPhone app across 49 countries. If you haven’t yet discovered the charm of firing birds in a sling to destroy some pigs, be careful. It’s addictive.
Facebook is beginning to look and act like a sovereign state says The Economist
I’m a little late with this, but interesting perspective from The Economist on Facebook as a nation.
“Like any ruling elite that knows it relies on the consent from the ruled, Facebook seeks advice from its members on questions of governance… And like any well-intentioned politico, Facebook makes blunders…If Mr Zuckerberg achieves his goal of creating the world’s favourite “social utility”, he may need to give users a more formal say—a bit like a constitution. Experience shows that networks which neglect governance pay a price. Take MySpace, which was once much bigger than Facebook: its growth stalled a couple of years ago when its managers let the site become too disorderly. There is a thin line, it seems, between the freedom that spurs creativity and a free-for-all.”
Marketers as growth drivers
News International’s online pay wall prevents me from sharing this article in full. But there was an interesting interview in The Sunday Times with Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever. He explains why he has put more money into marketing.
“If you need to restructure, you put a finance person in. If you need to grow, you put a marketing person in.”
There’s a raft of brilliant content from the latest TED global conference in Oxford. In this extract, author Matt Ridley argues that it’s not important how clever someone is, but what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.
Luke Johnson’s tips on saving money
Pizza Express millionaire Luke Johnson, who was a huge success at our last Question Time debate, wrote a useful FT column this week on saving money in tough times. FT subscribers can read the article in full. Here are some highlights of his advice, which is especially handy for entrepreneurs and SMEs.
-Understand what everyone does
-Monitor absenteeism
-Ask for early payment discounts
-Sign the cheques yourself
-Lead from the front about costs
-Buy second-hand
-Do random expense claim audits.
Internet trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research
I’m a little late with this. But there’s lots of good facts and figures to share in this presentation.
Happy talk
Alan Mislove, a Boston Northeastern University computer scientist has been analysing the happiness of the US nation using Twitter streams. The west coast is happier than the east coast and happiness peaks on Sunday mornings, spiralling downwards on Thursday evenings.
The Collective is going on holiday, but will return on August 13th.
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