Ged Carroll

Category: online | 線上 | 온라인으로 | オンライン

The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.

Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.

Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.

Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.

Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.

  • Creative Labs + more things

    Facebook shuts down Creative Labs, apps – CNET – interesting that they are reining this stuff in, probably cheaper to buy success than make it at the moment. Creative Labs participation would probably have been a key attraction in attracting rockstar talent as well

    Why Brands Are Ditching Twitter’s 6-Second Vine App | Adweek – One of the main reasons brands are turning away from Vine is because unlike its competitors, Vine doesn’t have an advertising model, although brands often buy Twitter ads to promote their clips, noted Topher Burns, group director of distribution at Deep Focus

    How Corporations Profit From Black Teens’ Viral Content | The FADER – there is a whole Public Enemy album worth of material in here about social media being a 21st century version of the antebellum cotton plantation

    Just why are Louis Vuitton and other high-end retailers abandoning China? | South China Morning Post – although Chinese shoppers consumed 46 per cent of luxury goods around the world, their purchases in their home market accounted for only 10 per cent of global sales, falling from 11 per cent in 2012 and 13 per cent in 2013 – more luxury sector related posts here.

    Losses point to bleak future for music streaming services – FT.com – also bad news for streaming infrastructure companies like 7Digital (paywall).

    With ‘Mr. Robot,’ ‘Silicon Valley,’ and ‘Halt and Catch Fire,’ Hollywood Is Finally Starting to Get Hacking Right – The Atlantic – and inspire new generations of developers in the same way that Star Trek inspired new generations of engineers

    Making AK-47 Magazines – Matra in Bosnia – interesting minimalism in both form and production with extensive use of stamping

    The Dude Cardigan Abides. | Pendleton Woolen Mills – nice history of the cardigan made famous by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski

    iPad Pro: Wrong | Monday Note – interesting reflection on user behaviours

    Panic in iOS Land | Monday Note – interesting critique of Windows Phone apps

  • Encryption backdoor + more

    Mossberg: An Encryption Backdoor Is a Bad Idea – Re/code – Walt Mossberg explains in non-technical terms why an encryption backdoor is a really bad idea. More security related content here.

    The best buyer for Yahoo’s core internet business may be… Alibaba – not convinced that Alibaba would want to. There few synergies with its existing business and would need a major effort to reinvigorate the Yahoo! operations overseas. Then there would be the political issue of a Chinese company being obliged to support the Chinese government in their intelligence efforts holding hundreds of millions of email and instant messaging accounts….

    Pando: Has Pando missed the heart of the Uber problem? A transportation industry expert writes… – a must read (paywall)

    Daring Fireball: Bloomberg: ‘Apple Gets More Bang for Its R&D Buck’ – but where does this leave them in terms of patents?

    Airbnb CEO Blames TBWA for S.F. Campaign That ‘Embarrassed’ the Company – really? At the least AirBnB paid for the campaign, signed off on the brief and signed off on the creative. The response kind of mirrors the passive aggressive tone of the original ads. This feels like provenance to me rather than allowing AirBnb to build space between themselves and the campaign.

    No need for detergent—ultrasonic-infused water can clean by itself – jewellers and laboratories have been using ultrasonic baths for decades. It will remove the food, but it won’t necessarily clean germs.

    How to Fix Everything | Motherboard – Apple quietly stopped accepting applications for “Authorized Service Provider” designations in 2010. There are the seizures of “counterfeit” parts being imported from China that may be legally legitimate. There are the lease programs carriers and Apple have started that ensure you won’t ever actually “own” a phone ever again

    Troy Hunt – Inside the massive VTech hack – interesting diagnosis of the breach by Troy.

    Could China have an ICAC? HKEJ Insight – it would be interesting if it did. I don’t think it would work with the rule of law as a tool of political power.

  • Not all engagement is good engagement

    When thinking about the nature of engagement; I think that it is important to differentiate between bad and good engagement. One of the key issues is that engagement metrics currently don’t distinguish between bad and good engagement. Not all engagement is good engagement.

    In terms of a case in point about good engagement, let’s look at the brand Burberry. It’s hard to understand how far the Burberry brand has some over the past decade. So the brand has fallen hard from the overall decline of luxury sales in China, but just ten years ago it ran the risk of losing its luxury status completely. The brand first faced seeing its product becoming terrace wear as football casual firms dressed in Burberry prior to their violent clashes. Then chavs took to wearing the iconic Burberrycheck.

    I remember seeing a Japanese lady at SymbianWorld around this time dressed in a well tailored Burberry check suit as part of her business attire and finding it completely at odds with my perception of the brand.

    So it makes sense that ‘bad neighbourhoods’ offline would have similar effects to online. There is now research to back this up. The bad neighbourhood identified is people who brag in social posts. Scopelliti, Lowenstein and Vosgerau have done quantified the adverse effect that bragging has on relationships.

    The second thing in the research is that those doing the bragging are so utterly unaware of its effects on their audience.

    More information
    The two faces of Burberry | The Guardian
    Burberry versus The Chavs – BBC
    Scopelliti I., Loewenstein G., & Vosgerau J. (2015) “You Call It ‘Self-Exuberance,’ I Call It ‘Bragging.’ Miscalibrated Predictions of Emotional Responses to Self-Promotion,” Psychological Science, 26(6), 903-914.

    More luxury related posts here.

  • Scratching + more things

    History of scratching

    A brief history of scratching | FACT magazine – a great piece on scratching but skips over many of the greats prior to Q-Bert et al such as Mr Mixx, Cash Money, DJ Supreme and DJ Pogo. Scratching went through massive changes from the mid-1980s to the mid 1990s. Q-Bert et al were standing on the shoulders of other scratching innovators

    Consumer behaviour

    Researchers reveal millennials will take a 25,000 photos of themselves in their lifetime | Daily Mail Online – lifeblogging or qualitative ‘quantified self’?

    Bill Drummond (of The KLF) fame did this really good talk about how the iPod (and you could add smartphones) have changed our relationship with music

    Marketing

    Tic-Tac have put together a great tie-in with local Hong Kong independent musicians and music festival Clockenflap (Hong Kong’s answer to Glastonbury). Budding artists can submit their own video with a chance to play at Clockenflap.

    FutureDeluxe did this great bit of CGI work for the adidas X Primeknit football boot.

    Media

    Cross Device Tracking Creates New Privacy Concerns, FTC Says | Advertising Age – “They do this under the veil of anonymous identifiers and hashed P.I.I. [personally-identifiable information], but these identifiers are still persistent and can provide a strong link to the same individual online and offline,” Ms. Ramirez said, in language that challenges the typical rhetoric from companies that track consumers.”Not only can these profiles be used to draw sensitive inferences about consumers, there is also a risk of unexpected and unwelcome use of data generated from cross device tracking” (paywall) – interesting that cross device tracking is seen as a ‘new privacy concern’ rather than an established one. This delay between regulatory attention and development is why cross device tracking companies have such an advantage over governments and consumers

    TBS is giving eSports its mainstream moment with new weekly program – Digiday – interesting move, US media following normal practice in Korea

    Retailing

    Here’s where teens shop as old favorite stores go extinct | Fusion – Malls still are super important to teen culture as physical spaces you can go to hangout without parents

    Security

    From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities | The Intercept – basically you have no privacy, presumably this would allow them to zoom in on Tor users at some point?

    Software

    Google faces new US antitrust scrutiny, this time over smartphones – CNET – the US antitrust scrutiny could turn to action that would  fragment Android distributions quite dramatically… More Google related content here.

  • The limits of digital

    A few articles that I read over the past few days highlighted the limits of digital. The FT published an analysis on the modern problems that digital has wrought on the advertising industry.

    Jeff Goodby, chairman of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners – a successful longtime American advertising agency said:

    In the past, he said, the only true measure of success was whether the public knew and cared about your work. “You could get into a cab and find out, in a mile or two, whether you mattered in life, just by asking the driver.” Now, “No one knows what we do any more.”

    In essence advertising campaigns had lost talkability, positive brand associations and long term memorability – the kind of things that you would think of being important in terms of marketing’s role in brand building. Digital has worked in performance marketing, brand building shows up the limits od digital

    Brands, particularly emerging brands like designers have it as bad as advertising agencies, here’s fashion site Man Repeller on the challenges of building a brand:

    When I first started working in fashion retail, coming from a fine arts background, I thought it would be completely different. Working with the clothes but also seeing the way it had to recycle every six months got me thinking about the branding that gets pushed upon designers. I think it happens in all creative fields because of social media. I see it with a lot of my peers. We see the same obsession with youth — young painters — in the art world that you have in fashion with young designers, the same pressure for a cohesive vision. At 25? Nobody knows what they’re doing at 25. And that’s totally fine. You’re still finding yourself. And there has to be more room to find yourself when you’re young as opposed to this pressure to emerge as a fully formed Greek myth coming out with her uncracked egg, or whatever.

    Which impacts the kind of businesses likely to grow in the future. They are likely to be ‘culturally stunted’.

    The noisy environment of social has meant that brands are also distorting themselves to get cut through, Vice magazine covered what can only be described as sociopathic brand personalities of independent coffee shop chains in London.

    Or Instagram baiting street side billboards like a pub landlord who misquotes Enoch Powell and thinks that the National Front aren’t serious on race issues

    More digital related posts here.

    More information
    How the Mad Men lost the plot | FT
    MR Round Table: The Burnout Generation – Man Repeller
    London Is Tearing Itself Apart Because of Coffee Shop Sidewalk Signs | VICE