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.

  • John Browett + more stuff

    John Browett

    It was a bad day for John Browett this week. A US technology site used the British word ‘shite‘ as a descriptor for Apple’s new head of global retail. It makes sense when you realise that John Browett, was formerly CEO of Dixons Retail – the people behind PCWorld and Currys. Currys and its sister company Dixons own brand products were long a textbook definition of the word shite; as was their customer service and whole retail experience. They were a shop that UK consumers loved to hate – so the association of John Browett and Apple was alarming. Whilst I was alarmed that the Apple Stores were likely to go horribly wrong there was something strangely gratifying seeing European English slang used on an American site.

    Design

    Tom Hovey introduced me to the work of the Dead Sea Mob – a collective of illustrators.

    Iittila Ultima Thule glassware – I first came across these flying with Finnair and they are a wonder of product design. Designed by Tapio Wirkkala in the 1960s after being inspired by the melting ice in Lapland. The surface patterns gradually change as the glass burns the surface of the wooden moulds. Iittila apparently spent thousands of hours perfecting the glass-blowing technique for these glasses

    IBM and Eames Office released a free iPad application Minds of Modern Mathematics that captures work that Charles and Ray Eames did in the 1960s. Mathematica: A World of Numbers… And Beyond was an IBM-sponsored exhibition. The app captures the artifacts and the history in a great interactive application.

    How to

    10 Free Data Visualization Tools « Social Web Thing

    URL Design — Warpspire

    Luxury

    How the celebrity gravy train is gathering pace | SCMP.com – product placement and spokesperson roles become more abstract in Chinese luxury market (registration required)

    Marketing

    Land Rover Edible Desert Survival Guide via The Inspiration Room – was a great marketing artifact developed by Y&R Dubai that reinforces the Land Rover brand story far more than Victoria Beckham

    Media

    Nielsen Numbers Glitch Results in Low Traffic Numbers

    Industry Reference: The Social Business Stack for 2011 (Slideshare) « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang

    5 Anti-Piracy Strategies Designed to Hurt Torrent Sites in 2011 | TorrentFreak

    Online

    blog · RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried – Mozilla and Google killing RSS in the browser. Google probably in favour of Google Reader. Mozilla’s reason is less clear.

    Google Keep is an interesting lightweight challenge to services like Evernote. It is a move way from from Google’s recent over-featured products like Google+.

    Doodod (pronounced Doodoh) is a small Beijing start-up doing some very interesting things with visualisation of posts and reposts on Sina Weibo.

    Technology

    Apple and I.B.M. Aren’t All That Different – NYTimes.com – classic bit of PR by IBM trying to tie their innovation message to the brand cool of Apple

    Windows Surface convinced me that Microsoft was going to attempt to drive innovation no matter what it cost their partner eco-system. This is likely to spell a faster cycle of innovation from rivals like Apple and Google. The wild card in all this process is whether it will kick-start innovation in the Android eco-system with over-laid UI, exclusive applications and more integrated software | hardware design. Things are going to get interesting

    Web of no web

    Apple Missed Getting Xbox Kinect Tech, Patents Smartphone Motion Gaming Anyway | Fast Company – interesting that Beracha rejected Apple as a pain-in-the-ass and sold the tech to Microsoft instead. Apple must be really awful to work with

    Wireless

    W+K Shanghai Guide for iPhone and iPod touch on the iTunes App Store – really cool.

    Did Angry Birds eat the iPad mags market? | FT.com – you heard it here first…

  • Sina Weibo microblogging service

    China has its own unique ecosystem of web properties and Sina Weibo is the latest of them. It has a passionate blogging culture where some blogs by celebrities, experts and populist pundits can attract an audience of millions. Sina.com is a portal and blogging platform. They also have the most popular micro-blogging service. I thought I would have a poke around it and try to work out how it was to use despite my complete lack of ability to speak or read Chinese.  Here is my account details, feel free to friend me.

    So what’s Sina Weibo like?

    Whilst Sina Weibo is similar to Twitter it is a much more fully-formed service. Signing up was pretty straight forward and Weibo tried to recommend 20 existing members that I should follow, my favorite being the feed for a branch of the Chinese police. They have a name which Google translates into English as ‘Starsky Guardian‘ – that alone is a cool enough reason to follow them.

    I quickly managed to get the service to accept the RSS feed from this blog and convert it into alerts on the Weibo service. (In order to give a potential audience something to read, I have started carrying bilingual titles to my posts in pidgin Chinese courtesy of Google Translate. I try and boil the title down into a simple concept of two or three words and then hit the translate button). Something that I would have done on Twitter through a third-party service like ping.fm, dlvr.it or twitterfeed.

    Weibo also has a built-in URI shortener, but it has no analytics for seeing how many people click on a link. So marketing campaigns on Weibo could be harder to measure than on Twitter. As far as I can tell Weibo gives you a lot less opportunity to alter the look-and-feel of your account to reflect your personal brand than the likes of Twitter.

    Another absence that I noticed about Weibo was the lack of spam invites or follows from people wanting to sell me Viagra or fake watches. I suspect that Sina.com must carefully tend its community, partly to ensure government compliance, but a secondary benefit is fostering a better community online.

    In conclusion I think that  Sina Weibo provides consumers with a superior experience to Twitter, but as a marketer Twitter offers more opportunity for brand communicators. More online related content here.

  • NFC + more news

    NFC

    Digital Evangelist: What would I rather pick up my phone or my keys as I leave my house? – Ian on NFC. NFC or near field communications. Like most technologies NFC has been a long time coming. It sprang out of work that was done around RFID (radio frequency identification), where a passive device is powered and communicates with a powered transmitter. Its the tag that’s in library books or items to prevent shoplifting.

    Standards for what we now know as NFC were set in a technical outline by Philips and Sony back in 2002. Two years later they established the NFC forum. A year later and Sony launches an NFC shell add-on for its Nokia 5140 ruggedised mobile phone. Nokia, France Telecom and Samsung experiment using NFC to pay for public transport and mobile payments. China Unicom rolls out NFC in public transport across Beijing and Chongqing. This year Nokia launches the first NFC compatible smartphone and Nice experiments with being a contactless city with bankcards and mobile phones.

    China

    FT.com / China – China launches own online mapping service – its a bit poor, but this is a first iteration. China has concerns about state secrets leaking out

    Batman Wins Chinese Lottery – WSJ – absolute genius, love it

    Consumer behaviour

    For Millennials, Brands May Be as Important as Religion, Ethnicity | Fast Company – wasn’t this the case for generation X and even boomers as well? Brett Easton Ellis built a writing career on documenting the brands of disaffected youth. Yuppies were status brand obsessives. William Gibson and Douglas Coupland fetishise brands or deliberately create a brand void in their works. The move from glasses to bottled beer in European bars and clubs was about the bottle label being a brand totem for the user

    Innovation

    Three Innovation Trends in Asia – Harvard Business Review – interesting article. What the middle-market segment looks like in different Asian countries is particularly pertinent especially as it gets hollowed out of the developed world

    Japan

    HISTORY of HEIBON PUNCH 平凡パンチの歴史 – fascinating cover designs. Heibon Punch was a homegrown Japanese men’s magazine a la GQ that finished in the mid 1980s. Love the 1960s jazz record series they put out with Quincy Jones

    U.S. Says Genes Should Not Be Eligible for Patenting – NYTimes.com

    Luxury

    New luxury trends emerge in China: News from Warc.com – maturing market?

    Great new fashion innovations for 2012 | FT.com – interesting ideas that seem to owe a lot to streetwear brands. Experiments in materials by Thakoon, DVF and Proenza Schouler are a chip off the old block from the work that Massimo Osti pioneered at CP Company, Stone Island the collborations with Sugergra and Levi’s. The multi-garment garment is straight from Acronym’s play book

    Luxury Gets More Convenient – WSJ – counter-intuitive. Koreans buying Gucci in the 7-Eleven

    Online

    Google Stop Indexing Blogger (Blogspot) Posts – need to get this sorted sharpish, at least they can’t be accused of being biased!

    Retailing

    Chinese Online Shoppers Have High Standards – China Real Time Report – WSJ

    Software

    Microsoft Launches Office 365, Bringing Millions Into the Cloud | Fast Company – it looks like Ray Ozzie’s work was done at Microsoft

    Technology

    Op-Ed: Optical Media Not Dead Yet – dead in technology circles a relative thing. Sony only stopped selling cassette Walkmans in Japan on Friday

    Web of no web

    Microsoft Buying Canesta to Bolster Gesture Technology – NYTimes.com – minority report here we come

    Wireless

    China Mobile: Not in the Comm Biz – WSJ – in the information services business apparently. Some good telecoms numbers here

    Project to Test Home & Electric Vehicle Network Standards for CO2 Reduction | NTT DOCOMO Global – really interesting project extending smart home thinking to a smart life

  • Dopplr death & more news

    Dopplr

    The slow death of Dopplr | guardian.co.uk – on its own the death of Dopplr is not really news, the interesting timing  of this article by The Guardian put out this evisceration of Nokia’s web service ambitions. I’m not saying that Jemima Kiss got it wrong, but the timing was interesting: published last Friday – right on the eve of Nokia World. Dopplr is similar to other startups that have gotten lost after having been acquired. Dopplr allowed users to create itineraries of their travel plans and spot correlations with their contacts’ travel plans in order to arrange meetings at any point on their journey. It was known for the quality of its user experience design in comparison to other apps.

    China

    String of Holidays in China Bring Time Off, With Complications – NYTimes.com – complex yes, but I can’t help feeling for the bureaucrats who came up with this who thought that they were doing the best they could for the people and now must be as popular as tax collectors

    Economics

    Inflation in China Is Rising at a Fast Pace – NYTimes.com – the downside of continual double digit growth

    Environment

    MIT: We’ve Got Plenty of Uranium | Fast Company – nuclear power not the washout environment naysayers think

    FMCG

    Deal Profile: Unilever to Buy Alberto-Culver for $3.7 Billion – WSJ – interesting move that strengthens Unilever by taking out a competitor. It does make me wonder about all the brands that Unilever sold a few years ago though

    Japan

    Japan Surrenders – The Atlantic – interesting though very American focused article on changes in Japanese society over the past three decades

    Marketing

    Some of Sharecare.com’s Health Advice Will Be From Advertisers – NYTimes.com – this was where I thought Hunch and Yahoo! Answers could have done more. Ideal opportunity for branded content as trusted brands are experts in some areas and expertise could help imbue trust in a new brand

    Media

    Jason Calacanis: Revenge is a new editorial project to rival TechCrunch | guardian.co.uk – interesting that he is going down an email newsletter route. It potentially cuts social sharing a la Twitter and Facebook as well as social bookmarking off at the knees

    The real cost of free | guardian.co.uk – Cory Doctorow in praise of free and dealing with ill-informed critics

    Online

    Yahoo: Is Carol Bartz in the process of being replaced? – Quora – insightful answer. Possibly yes as part of a process to take Yahoo! private. The critique of Bartz is telling:

    • She has not articulated a coherent product or vision for the company
    • She wasted over $120M on an ad campaign (no material impact on any user engagement metric)
    • She promoted executives like Hillary Schneider after failing miserably with APT (Yahoo ad exchange system).
    • Yahoo left between $500M to $1B of value on the table as part of the search agreement with Microsoft (Carol made Hillary the POC for the Yahoo deal team – lets just say that Microsoft had their way with the Yahoo deal team)
    • She used odd (my gentle way of saying they didn’t work) PR tactics to recast Yahoo in the tech and business community

    Alibaba and Yahoo quagmire: a battle of the wills | FT.com – the FT is very slow to this story. I suspect that this isn’t only about corporate wills, but also about Ma pleasing the Chinese government as well and if he manages to get even richer by doing so: win-win

    Combing Your Friends’ Tastes, Not the Whole Web’s – NYTimes.com – social search market analysis

    Software

    N900 plug-in for OSX iSync – makes Nokia N900 into a a viable option

    Technology

    China Catching India As Asia’s Service Provider? – WSJ – China’s technology service industry catching up with India

    Web of no web

    DOCOMO and University of Tokyo to Conduct Joint Research for Urban Planning Based on Mobile Spatial Statistics | Press Center | NTT DOCOMO Global – really interesting work here, kind of reminds me of The Dark Knight were Batman maps out the building in Hong Kong using mobile phone signals and captures mafia money man Lau

    Wireless

    Nokia’s problem – QuirksBlog – interesting thoughts on Nokia from a software developer

  • Bloglines RIP

    Bloglines RIP to a well loved friend. On September 10, 2010 Ask announced that it was closing down Bloglines on October 1. On September 11, I removed my ‘subscribe to Bloglines‘ bookmarklet from the toolbar of my Firefox browser and closed my account for the last time after about six years of use – it had been a part of my daily routine and it feels really strange not logging in.
    Bloglines screenshot -its been emotional
    Today is Bloglines last day – and the farewell is a bit emotional. Bloglines was part of my work flow. It allowed me to stay up to date with the latest news and developments. Bloglines also worked well on my mobile devices, allowing me to dip in and out of the latest news. It wasn’t part of It made me smarter.

    Instead I am now logging on to Fastladder. Fastladder is an English language version of a Japanese RSS aggregator Livedoor Reader. It’s mobile experience isn’t as good as Bloglines, but I found that I have started using my laptop on a 3G dongle and my mobile less since I moved to the iPhone from a Nokia E90. I considered, trialed and rejected Google Reader for a number of reasons.

    • I go to China a fair bit and Google Reader is blocked
    • Google Reader has some user experience issues, in particular the subscription process for a new feed it clunky compared to Fastladder or Bloglines. It is surprisingly un-Googly, Google is obsessed with imbuing products with social and has forgotten about the user experience
    • I think that its bad to have all your eggs in one basket. What if Google decided that Google Reader just wasn’t a big enough business for them, as they have done with other services?