Ged Carroll

Category: media | 媒體 | 미디어 | メディア

It makes sense to start this category with warning. Marshall McLuhan was most famous for his insight – The medium is the message: it isn’t just the content of a media which matters, but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.

But McLuhan wasn’t an advocate of it, he saw dangers beneath the surface as this quote from his participation in the 1976 Canadian Forum shows.

“The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity. The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”

McLuhan was concerned with the mass media, in particular the effect of television on society. Yet the content is atemporal. I am sure the warning would have fitted in with rock and roll singles during the 1950s or social media platforms today.

I am concerned not only changes in platforms and consumer behaviour but the interaction of those platforms with societal structures.

  • Ontheroof & things that made last week

    Russian crew ontheroof took their skills to Hong Kong, hacking one of the city’s iconic electronic billboards mounted on the top of an unfeasibly tall building. Ontheroof have attracted sponsorship from large corporates despite the illegal nature of their work. They’ve worked with brands like Huawei and Canon cameras.

    Their risk profile would preclude many western brands from collaborating with them. I was surprised that Canon did a deal with them.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if they were weren’t demonetised on YouTube due to their risky and illegal behaviour. Even if landlords were open-minded, their insurance company certainly wouldn’t be. It isn’t about getting ontheroof to sign a waiver; but all the unintended consequences:

    • They could fall off and hit someone
    • The building could be sued for damages due to the trauma of watching one of them fall of a building to their death

    If they used safety harnesses their content would lose its appeal as they are competition with other crews looking to ever more extreme footage.

    Not too sure if the swiftly added disclaimer would be enough to stop the lawyer letters coming through the letter box with this ode to Invisalign braces. When does parody become slander.

    Wee Scottish travel agent Thorne Travel put together a unique YouTube advert. I am guessing that it go nowhere near a legal team before it was uploaded on YouTube. Not too sure that they have permission from David Guetta for the soundtrack or Disney for the appearance of Mickey and Minnie Mouse – which probably explains why it got taken down. I thought that the N.W.A. soundtracked remix of the video was inspired. It also provided material for The Poke.

    The Poke have remixed some of their videos including a Halloween themed one with Michael Jackson’s Thriller the soundtrack and strategically placed pumpkins.

    Warner Brothers are pushing out to Western audiences Black Butler, a Japanese live action adaption of a Faustian manga tale. If you like anime like Death Note, you’ll like Black Butler.

    Finally, Agence France Presse put together a really good animation on how Ebola attacks the body, surprisingly it was hosted on DailyMotion.

  • Dan Catt + more things

    Rev Dan Catt | Conference Eaters – captures the dichotomy of conferences really well. Dan Catt compares the experience of conferences to religious services where the faithful gather.

    Brand Brain Britain! How Brits engage with brands differently across the regions | Weber Shandwick – interesting research on brand attitudes. More branding related content here.

    Huffington Post and Leo Burnett partnership | Marketing Interactive – in reality this line is being blurred all the time Vice Media etc

    ​How an FBI Informant Ordered the Hack of British Tabloid ‘The Sun’ | Motherboard – could the FBI be legally liable?

    Generation Flux’s Secret Weapon | Fast Company – interesting analysis of Chipotle

    Only 25% of iPad Users are aged 16-24 | Global Web Index – it makes sense given that the iPad is a discretionary purchase with adequate substitute products

    Slack is Killing Email | PixelBits – is it really? I think there is still a use case for email and a use case for less email

    Google’s Eric Schmidt: “Really, Our Biggest Search Competitor Is Amazon” – trying to spin their way out of European sanctions

    Microsoft And Salesforce Promise Windows, Office And OneDrive Integration | TechCrunch – hell froze over

    Saudis would accept lower oil prices | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – all about trying to raise barrier to entry for competitors

    The Cost of Living the Luxe Life Has Fallen — if You Live in Asia | TIME – softening property prices

    Ofcom | UK leads the way with new wireless technology trials – overly dramatic headline for white space trials

    How China’s ‘naked officials’ make the getaway｜WantChinaTimes.com – since there is such an obvious behavioural trail shouldn’t card transactions and travel record patterns create ‘red flags’? Why do so many get through?

    Finland is in trouble, and it blames Apple for everything – Quartz – bit of an exaggeration but gives you an idea of how crucial Nokia was

    Singapore rail operator eyes UK minicab firm | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insights – interesting move. Is Addison Lee a technology company or a transport company?

  • RoomAlive + more things

    Microsoft’s ‘RoomAlive’ transforms any room into a giant Xbox game | The Verge – interesting idea, taking immersive experiences to the next level with RoomAlive without the disadvantages of VR goggles, by project mapping over the room instead. More related content here.

    Analysis: What’s Next For Waggener Edstrom? | Holmes Report – interesting analysis on WaggEd. An ideal acquisition target for BlueFocus? The agency had stagnated for a long time, despite building (and losing) a deep bench of expertise. Secondly building around a single client like that in the long term means that your margins can get hollowed out for your hero client and your processes warped to handle just one way of working. (Paywall)

    The overstated financial impact of Occupy Central | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – interesting analysis of the market implications of recent events in Hong Kong

    FBI Director: China Has Hacked Every Big US Company | Business Insider – admission that law enforcement is impotent in the face of widespread state actor hacking. Given that security is so lax, this is yet another great argument for strong cryptography on assets. Secondly, it highlights the US inability to fight in this grey space. This tells China that it can operate without cost, which will embolden it to act in more brazen ways.

    When review tapes were ‘kind of bicycled around from one TV critic to another’ | Jim Romenesko – two things about this, firstly media being biked around for review. I worked on the launch of IMD in the UK which saw the delivery of digital audio and video to TV and radio stations including advertising assets, music promo videos and tracks. Secondly the way the reviewer talks about his habit for following live events on TVs reminded me of the social channel hopping I do today across Twitter lists

    Weibo: TCL dotes on HTC, LinkedIn’s Shen warns of bubble | SCMP – is a tie-up with TCL what HTC needs? TCL already has a plethora of low end phone brands including Philips and Alcatel, HTC might fit into the mid range for them

  • Why did Yahoo Directory closing become a big deal?

    Yahoo Directory is a bit like the shark. It has been around pretty much as long as the modern commercial web. Yahoo! was among the first online media companies. Whilst peers like Lycos and Excite disappeared Yahoo! managed to survive. The name Yahoo! is actually an acronym: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. Yahoo! started as a list of interesting links to sites, these then needed to be categorised as it grew and the first iteration of Yahoo! was as a directory.
    yahoo
    Yahoo! then expanded its service offering with a portal, email, shopping, auctions, celebrity chats and specialist kids content. Directories were the forerunner of search as they provided editor-driven categories. In 1998, Netscape went into competition with Yahoo! with its own directory, which now exists as DMOZ – an open directory hosted by Aol and run by volunteer editors. DMOZ has catalogued 4,167,366 sites in over a million categories over 16 years. It became obvious that human editors couldn’t scale.

    Even when consumers went away to the search box of Alta Vista HotBot and Google, the Yahoo! Directory served a secondary purpose. As a repository of ‘screened and categorised’ websites algorithmic search engines took entry in a number of directories into account as part of their ranking for sites. Directories became important to search agencies.

    When I worked at Yahoo! during the start of the web 2.0 period, tagging and its role in social search was considered to be reflective of Yahoo!’s past in directories and offered a future that was not solely dependent on the dictatorship of an algorithm. Social search promised a blended approach.

    Over the past decade Yahoo! Search and Google both gradually depreciated the importance of a directory entry for search ranking as other signalling factors took over including social mentions.

    A lot of digital marketers have lived with Yahoo! Directory for a long time. The shutdown of Yahoo!’s original service comes at a turning point for the company. It looks as if Yahoo! is about to be torn apart as Wall Street tries to get it to liquidate its holdings in Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba; return the cash to them and pick over the rest of the assets like a dead carcass on the Serengeti.

    More information

    Progress Report: Continued Product Focus | Yahoo! Corporate Tumblr account
    The Yahoo Directory — Once The Internet’s Most Important Search Engine — Is To Close | SearchEngineLand
    Yahoo killing off Yahoo after 20 years of hierarchical organisation | Ars Technica
    Yahoo Directory, once the center of a web empire, will shut down at year’s end | The Verge

    More Yahoo! related content here.

  • Yahoo corporate culture

    I bumped into some former colleagues over the past couple of weeks and the experience reminded me of a lot of the items in this post. We shared a common bond based on our exposure to the Yahoo corporate culture. Given the circling activist investors surround the current iteration of Yahoo! this maybe a capsule of a soon-to-disappear culture. Many of the things below are artefacts, totems of the Yahoo corporate culture.

    • You know that Yahoo! was the brand and a Yahoo was a person who worked for Yahoo!
    • You were told that you bleed purple. There were values that were ingrained into you
    • You understood the struggle of constantly moving budgets and spending a quarter’s marketing budget in three weeks
    • You have an address book full of friends and aquantances working at great companies in digital media. The business was a rotating door for talent, in six months you had a great Rolodex full of contacts.
      Yahoo! timbuk2 bag
      Your have an old brand Yahoo! laptop bag that just won’t die. Not too sure what they made those Timbuk2 bags from but mine is eight years old, well travelled and still looks new.
    • Friends introduce you to former colleagues you were less familiar with by including their IM identity as well as their name.
      Yahoo! star
      You still have a star kicking around in a box somewhere from when you packed up your desk one last time.
      Lost
      Your colleagues gave you a list of tchotchkes to get from the shop in building D if you went to the headquarters campus in Sunnyvale.

    You’re still using at least one of Jerry and David’s Christmas presents around the house.