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.

  • Facebook eroding & other news

    Facebook eroding

    The tweet about Facebook eroding is part of a greater issue of what Facebook is calling internally ‘context collapse‘. Facebook recognised the issue back in 2015. There are several likely reasons for Facebook eroding:

    • Negative network effects
    • Societal norming on social media content
    • Lack of trust in the facebook brand
    • People just don’t like Facebook as a platform that much

    Business

    After Anbang Takeover, China’s Deal Money, Already Ebbing, Could Slow Further – The New York Times

    Hello, mobile operators? This is your age of disruption calling | McKinsey & Company – lots of buzz words, diagnosis but not a glimpse of a way forward

    Edelman Revenue Up 2.1% In 2018 To $894m | Holmes Report – given that all the global PR groups have had exceptionally low growth or even declines

    How Douyin became China’s top short-video App in 500 days – WalktheChat

    Wireless

    Nokia on 5G at MWC, what struck me is the sales pitch was more like an enterprise software company like IBM or Oracle than a telecoms vendor. There is lots of tech in the networks but there isn’t a recognisable killer app. His warnings about 5G upgradeable products ring true though.

    Consumer behaviour

    Asian Boss do some really nice street interviews in different Asian cities and this one about Apple iPhones in Korea is particularly instructive. Samsung is seen as the default phone as they assemble phones (mostly for Asian markets) in Korea. Whereas in Europe all of the are made in China. When I lived in Hong Kong, both Samsung and LG emphasised that they made their phones in Korea with an implicit quality guarantee. 

    The iPhone seems to have won out on product design amongst younger people. but one shouldn’t ignore the desire to support the national brand. 

  • Blazed & other things

    Blazed

    I was having an online conversation with friends in the game about our favourite advertising, and this one came up. I hadn’t seen it before. It’s a public service announcement from New Zealand: Blazed – Drug Driving in Aotearoa.

    Guinness Rutger Hauer ads

    I also managed to find all the Rutger Hauer ‘Pure Genius’ ads done for Guinness. A lot of it looks like fresh thinking but mainstream production now due to CGI and After Effects, but at the time it was like nothing else that you would have seen

    Nazira

    I have been listening to this mix by Nazira. Nazira is from Almaty, Kazakhstan and plays at Berlin’s Room 4 Resistance parties. There’s also a great interview with her on the Discwoman site

    Fieldnotes Newsletter

    First issue of Fieldnotes newsletter is out! | Chad Dickerson’s blog – I used to work at Yahoo! when Chad was there, so can vouch for the newsletter being all killer, no filler. Chad headed up Yahoo!’s incubator Brickhouse. I can also recommend a second newsletter Brain Reel by Gemma Milne.

    For A Few Dollars More

    Revisiting For A Few Dollars More – I love the pace, the way it was shot and the storytelling. It also has Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood teaming up – EPIC. When I was a child I was confused the Lee Van Cleef playing two different characters in the ‘Dollars Trilogy’. In The Good, The Bad and The Ugly he plays a psychopathic gun for hire. In For A Few Dollars More he plays the honourable Colonel Mortimer looking for justice against a bandit.

    Gian Maria Volontè played both protagonists in A Fistful Of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More – and died both times. Leone didn’t intend for the films to be a trilogy, but they work quite well together. More related content here.

  • Twitter for Mac – some alternatives

    Twitter’s desktop client on the Mac has been pulled from the app store and won’t be supported any more. It is time to look for an alternative.  What you should choose depends on how you use Twitter, I’ve tried to outline what I consider are the best native Mac apps for Twitter.

    The alternative that I use is Night Owl (夜フクロウ or YoruFukurou)  which is a small lightweight client put together by a Japanese development team. I used it historically because it had a small footprint on my desktop which is handy when you a list running in the background. It allows you to use many of the same ‘short cut’ commands that used to be available when you could use Twitter via SMS – it helps in running a productive app now.  I have a breaking news list that I use, this is what it looks like.

    Night Owl

    You can download Night Owl from the Apple App Store or their website.

    Twitterific is probably the best maintained out of all the Twitter clients for the Mac, it looks similar to Night Owl and costs £7.99 on the app store.

    Echofon has a similar layout to Night Owl , but charges you £9.99 for the privilege. It has also hasn’t been updated as often as Night Owl.  Echofon comes in full price and light versions in the App store.

    If you are managing social media accounts then Tweetdeck is an obvious option. It’s multiple panels create a screen-wide dashboard so that you can handle mentions, direct messages and keep an eye on trending topics. It’s been last updated in 2015 and I’ve heard anecdotal evidence of it being buggy.

    An alternative to TweetDeck is Janetter Pro which provides a similar look and feel to TweetDeck but allows for further customisation including custom wallpapers (if you care about that kind of thing). It also supports multiple languages for the app interface including Japanese, Korean and simplified Chinese.  Janetter Pro was updated in May 2017, it costs £4.99, you can find out more on their website and in the app store. There is also a free version in the App Store. In my opinion Janetter Pro is an overlooked gem of a product if you want a comprehensive dashboard view. If I had to do Twitter community management, I’d invest in Janetter Pro.

    Tweetbot is the editors choice on the Apple App store and comes in at a premium price of £9.99, for this you get an interface that can flex between the Night Owl and Tweetdeck style interface design.

  • Authenticity is changing porn + more

    How social media and our obsession with authenticity is changing porn | Dazed – “Authenticity and amateur (fall) into traps about not acknowledging porn performance as craft, labour, and work”, Sullivan says, referencing a piece in the SF Weekly in 2014 by performer Siouxsie Q. In the article, the pornstar argues that, although authenticity is “one of feminist porn’s favourite words”, striving for an “authentic” sex scene undermines the labour that goes into creating a porn film. It erases the fact that performing is work, and not a hobby, which in turn justifies people watching free porn on the basis that it’s not worth paying for, says Sullivan. She thinks authenticity needs to be separated from the idea of actuality and redefined to mean the craft of the performance, in order to show people it is work and not fun and games. – Interesting the way it echoes wider media concerns from photographers, to journalists and influencers. The championing of authenticity in language is very now. It will we interesting to see how authenticity is changing porn continues.

    Apple’s iPhone X is the Instant Scapegoat for Samsung’s Failure to Win OLED Orders from Chinese Vendors – Patently Apple – “Other smartphone makers, who Samsung had hoped would incorporate OLED panels, have been slow to make the transition due to their expense and are sticking to liquid crystal displays.”

    I, Cringely Prediction #7 — 2018 will see the first Alexa virus – I, Cringely – There are presently more than 15,000 Alexa skills that have been officially approved by Amazon and are available for download. These skills do everything from launching programs to gathering data to setting reminders. Though relatively simple, each is still a cloud app that can connect tens of millions of Echo products to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

    Facebook plans to thwart election ad fraud with postcards | The Next Web – guessing that they haven’t heard of mail forwarding services? Also according the Mueller report Russia had operatives in-country

    News UK to advertisers: Run your Facebook ads on our sites | Digiday – and so the other shoe drops. The Murdoch family newspapers have led the way in mainstream media pointing out the flaws in Google and Facebook advertising in what looked to me like a sustained campaign. I am not saying that anything they’ve said is wrong, but now we get to see a ‘possible’ motivation

    EU-South Korean project to demonstrate 5G system at 2018 winter games | eeNews Europe – an overlooked part of the Winter Olympics. More Korea related content here.

  • The Four by Scott Galloway

    Author of The Four; Galloway is known as the founder of L2 and as a perceptive commentator on the digital economy (well as perceptive as anyone is with a bank of researchers behind them). He admits freely in his book that his fame was due to years of effort, advertising spend, researchers, script writers, video editors and studio time.

    The Four

    The Four is Scott Galloway channelling Malcolm Gladwell; explaining for the average man:

    • How Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple make their money?
    • How the digital economy is affecting the overall economy?
    • What are the negative aspects of their effect on the digital economy?

    Galloway does a really good job of surfing the media and policy wonk groundswell against Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. Despite all that Scott Galloway has been a long term shareholder in at least one of the four – Amazon. Ethics only has so much.

    As a digital marketer the book won’t tell you won’t know already know.  I found it a bit disappointing given the role that Galloway and L2 play in the industry.  Secondly, Galloway has already covered all the territory repeatedly in his media appearances and opinion editorials over the past year. He has left little unsaid that would be considered an exclusive for the book

    As a digital marketer, if you want your family and loved ones to understand what you do for the living and the major issues that are shaping your job Galloway’s book is a good option.