Locals and Tourists is a great little project by Eric Fischer doing just what it says: plotting the locations of photos taken by…locals and tourists in cities around the world.

It’s interesting to me to see the geography of the cities become so visible through the data. Even more so to see the notion of “what’s interesting” about each city described through the cameras of people who live there and those that don’t.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Digital Strategy
Last week I mentioned the upstart Texas Tribune as an example of journalism alive and well online. This week I found this article by Folio about The Christian Science Monitor and their efforts to understand how they exist and what they mean in a digital world.

While many other, far bigger, organization continue to try to shove a square peg into a round hole, the CSM took a holistic approach, looking at their entire ecosystem and not just looking at their digital footprint. By trying to understand not just what they wanted as a business, but what their customers wanted, they have been able to design a complete system of inter-related publications, both on and off line. This quote from the beginning of the article shows their efforts to understand what they mean in the larger news/internet world:

“Our approach is a composite of the learning economy—we’re serving people without a lot of time, who are trying to understand complex issues quickly, and contribute to a solution. As one guy here says, our mission is ‘Help me get smarter, faster.’”

Kites and Oil
I continue to love seeing the way people use ever increasing access to ever shrinking technology to solve real world problems. I wrote early on about CubeSats and Make, and a couple weeks ago about the Afrigadget Blog. Living a world of Tivo’s and iPhone’s it’s consistently refreshing to see technology stripped down to it’s basic elements and used to serve an individual’s needs.

This week brought this article in the Times about Grassroots Mapping, a project originally designed to help communities create maps, now focusing on documenting the gulf oil spill. With BP trying hard to exert control on information getting to people about the ongoing devastation in the gulf it’s great to see ingenuity and simple technology outsmarting them and allowing everyone to see what’s actually happening.

Finally, I really want to do this to Marco.
Awesome.

They’ve followed up with another one I like – Jet Lag Fighter

In both cases, I like that Virgin is looking at the totality of a customers experience with them. In the case of Flying Without Fear, they’re targeting people with a predisposition to not liking Virgins core product offering and trying to address it. The interface is dead simple and because the application is mostly audio, it means the user doesn’t have to spend their time interfacing with the app to get what they need out of it. Jet Lag Fighter is much the same. It takes a key negative experience of traveling and attempts to remedy it. Because Jet Lag Fighter is something you’d use specifically when you’re not interfacing with Virgin’s main product, makes it a great brand play too.

Overall, two great examples of a brand understanding their ecosystem, their customer, their brand, and their technology.

Media Diet
It takes me about 45 minutes after I turn my computer on in the morning to catch up with all the sites I read everyday, twitter, and a list of RSS feeds that I work diligently to keep trim. That said, I can’t help but wonder if I’m spending my time reading the best things I can.

What I Read is The Atlantic Wire’s regular series asking people of all stripes what they’re reading. While it’s not just online reading, it does slant heavily that way, so it’s pretty easy to sample the recommendations for your own use.

I love this site for two reasons: First, I like being able to see what smart people reading. From the most recent entry – Clay Shirky, to Terry Gross, to Ezra Klein it’s pretty fun to see where there is reassuring overlap and where I might be able to pick up some new stuff. (Side note: Shirly doesn’t read tech blogs, which makes me think I should’t read tech blogs, but if tech blogs are wrong…)

The site also fills a non-trivial need I have to know what famous/smart people do in their free time. Do with that what you will.

Put This On
I had a chance a few years ago to move to New York permanently. I had a great job offer with a great company in a city I’ve loved my whole life. In the end though, as much as I love NYC, I just couldn’t leave Portland. Portland is a easy city to live in, maybe that makes me soft, I don’t know, but I like it.

What I don’t like though is that it’s one of the few cities I know of where there is such a thing as “my nice running shoes.” These are the shoes people wear when they want to be “fancy.” Portland is also home of the “nice hoodie”, “nice parka”, and “nice hat with ears”. Mostly this is fine, but some times it’s nice to see people going out without looking like their camping.

Since I started Fight, I’ve to make a conscious effort to try and dress more like a grown-up, and this is why I like Put This On. Men’s style can go so wrong so easy, and more often than not these days it seems to trend between “childish” and “douche-y.” PTO is all about how to take things that used to be basics and bring them back. Pant’s that fit, a nice tie, nice shoes. Things your grandfather wore every day and looked awesome.

Meet the Facts
I love politics. I grew up in a fairly political family where debating issues remains a pretty standard way to pass time. What I don’t like anymore are political talk shows.

Meet The Press is a Sunday morning stalwart, broadcast continuously since the late 40′s. Like most political shows though, recently it’s become more a place for politicians and business leaders to get some free airtime than a place of even moderate debate.

Enter Meet the Facts. Another example of the asymmetrical nature of the web, MTF was launched after numerous pleas for the show to simply fact check its own guests. Started by a couple college students, the site has gained the attention of people like NYU professor Jay Rosen, an early critic of the state of political journalism on T.V., as well as NPR and the Huffington Post.

My favorite part of the whole program is that the creators have offered to give the entire site to Meet The Press if they will just start fact checking.

“If NBC News and the staff of Meet the Press agree to permanently institute a public fact-checking system for everything guests say on the air, we think they should absolutely name that feature “Meet the Facts” and we will gladly transfer over the domain name, Twitter username, and Facebook page username for their use, and at no cost.”

If It Was My Home
I feel weird putting this here as something I “liked”. Maybe “appreciate” is a better word? At any rate, among the many great and important projects people have done in response to the gulf oil spill, this one really drove home for me the massiveness of it geographically.

Sitting here in Northeast Portland and recognizing that there is oil coving an area that would reach well out west into the Pacific and and far enough east to pass Mt. Hood is staggering. Combining that with utterly heart wrenching photos (caution, these are disturbing) from The Big Picture of the devastated wildlife in the spill begins to make concrete to someone sitting 2,000 miles away the level of tragedy taking place. If you have the means, and you’d like – you can donate here.

Both are regular targets of ridicule as time-sinks, examples of wide spread vanity, and general creepiness; and while they may be all those things – worst inventions they are not. In fact, I think there is a lot we can learn from the popularity of each. In either case, rather than mocking these games and their fans we might be better served instead by looking at what they’re telling us about societies own short comings and how we as designers, developers and strategists can not only respond to them, but try to alleviate them.

Think about this from Jane McGonigal’s recent TED presentation

“We know that we are optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they’re given the right work.”

Then consider Time’s take on Farmville – “more a series of mindless chores” than a game. To me, the real criticism lays at a society and industrial system so devoid of meaning or fulfillment that people get more out of tending a make believe farm.

Similarly, in describing Foursquare as “Just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism” and creating “another layer onto a generation living virtually” I have to wonder if the author has ever actually played the game. In fact, Foursquare is an outstanding example of how a game can actually move people out into the physical world. After all, you can’t really play the game without going out into the world, and the more places you visit, the higher your score. If anything, it’s the pressure coming from brands and agencies trying to find an angle and those who ask “but how does it make money?” that have pushed Foursquare away from the core that made it popular in the first place. Instead of focusing on how to make the game play better, the Foursquare team has ended up focusing on how further enable coupons and business oriented reporting tools.

While it’s easy to poke fun at either of these or write them off as nothing more than mindless wastes of time, doing so misses the message in each. While businesses decry the loss of passion and dedication of their workforce, and brands fret about a lack of relevance, the solutions are staring us in the face.

What if though, instead of that next micro-site; you, your agency, and you client actually tapped into this need for meaningful work and provided the structure and toolset for people to do it? What if a brand project was able to motivate people in the way Farmville or Foursquare does, but for something more than digital farms?

Here is a small example of how Fight is trying this:

A while ago, one of Fight’s clients, Portland General Electric came to us with a challenge – how could they use the web to get people more information about energy efficiency? While we could have set them up with a Twitter account to send out efficiency tips, or a micro-site about wind farms we decided to go a different direction. We instead started a project called Operation Switch. The purpose of Switch is to give people simple missions – installing CFL light bulbs, or washing your laundry in cold water – that while individually small, have a huge benefit when done collectively. After the first mission, Switch participants managed to make changes that will result in 14,445 fewer pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere.

We’re still in the early stages of the game, and it’s likely that we’ll continue to tune things along the way, so far peoples response to being given work that means something and then shown the results of their work, is proving that the desire to act is there it’s just up to us to help make it happen.

BPGlobalPR
Sometimes people ask me about the name of this site. The answer is projects like BPGlobalPR. BPGlobalPR is a perfect example of the asymetrical nature of competition on the web.

In a time when corporations seem able to actively limit journalism, BPGlobalPR may be one of the few points of commentary on the matter generating any large scale response. I’ve read that it was the images of dead sea animals and destroyed landscapes that fueled a national boycott of Exxon after the Valdez. Absent that, this may be the best we can do. Without a press free to report on the actual situation, this stands as a small beacon of hope that multi-national corporations and their PR firms don’t control everything just yet.

Lost
Yeah, okay, so I just yesterday wrote a post about Lost as a cautionary tale for designers. I stand by that – as a product, Lost ended up being pretty terrible. But there was a reason I watched it for 6 years – aspects of the show were also pretty amazing. So much has been said, it seems silly to write more, but I can’t think of a program that has done more to layout a map for what narrative television could be in a post-internet world than Lost. Whether it was their consistent usage of DVR easter eggs, ARG’s; their direct response to conversations with fans written into the show, or their usage of other non-connected mediums to tell the meta-story (how many books were referenced in the show?); Lost stands a milestone in post-modern T.V. narrative.

The Texas Tribune
You could be forgiven for believing there are just two sides to the problem of journalism and the web – pay wall, and no pay wall.

The fundamental question these two sides actually seek to answer, though it’s rarely stated as such, is: “How do you maintain exactly the same business model you’ve always enjoyed in technologically and culturally changed landscape?”

The answer is becoming increasing clear to a lot of people: you don’t.

Enter the The Texas Tribune an online, non-prift news site started about 6 months ago to try a different path. This is from their About page:

“Because the Trib’s focus is exclusively public policy, politics, and government, there’s nothing to distract us from the task at hand. Because we’re non-profit, we don’t have to sacrifice our mission at the altar of commercial considerations. Because we’re nonpartisan, we’ll give you the straight skinny—the facts—without an agenda or bias. Because we work for you, the people of Texas, not shareholders or other corporate overlords, we’ll never get our priorities out of whack.”

The Texas Tribune I think makes clear a needed distinction in the conversation about the future of journalism: are we fighting to save journalism, or fighting to save profits? Looking the Tribune, I’d say journalism is alive and well.

The Tribunes 6 month report card

AfriGadget
This morning I’ve seen a bunch of tweets about a rumored update to Apple TV. Google just announced their version, Google TV. In a couple weeks we’ll all be seeing the next iPhone. For many of us, innovation can add new levels of convenience, new ways of creating, or new ways of communicating. Working in marketing, innovation can quickly become something viewed in terms of new “brand opportunities.”

The AfriGadget blog reminds me on an almost daily basis that for a lot of people, innovation is a matter of life and death. This isn’t capacitive touchscreens, or 1000fps cameras, its car batteries, broken mirrors, and old bikes, each of which is having profound impacts on peoples lives.

Okay – so that’s only 4 things, but it’s my first try. 5 next week for sure.

But as things begin to calm into “merely insane” rather than “constantly staring down the barrel of catastrophe” I’m hoping to get back into this, though with a new perspective and one that is being developed daily. While the agency world still offers plenty for me to rant about, there are also now plenty of opportunities and new responsibilities to act. And that is a pretty incredible feeling.

So here we go.

Two quick stories:

Story One:
I think I had a fairly common high-school experience: I got by okay, though I was not what one would call “popular”, I was an average student, and for the most part I found the U.S. school system, like most social systems, to be designed to support the personality types of those who designed it. I did had a private studio in the basement of the school where I spent about 1/3 of my days doing “self-guided” (read: alone) industrial design study. While I can’t say high-school was the torment for me it was for some of my friends, I would say it was decidedly NOT the “best years of my life”.

Story Two:
In 2000 I found a design website called Extra Lucky run by then San Jose based designer Joe Stewart. After exchanging a couple emails, I began writing for the site, and at the same time started a near daily conversation with Joe that has lasted almost a decade, through his time in New York during and after September 11th, though two cross country moves, my engagement, his first child, and next week my participation in his wedding. Important to note though: we’ve been in the same room exactly 5 times in those 10 years.

I bring this up in response to several articles about or around Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop who recently described the social web as leading to “transient relationships”, “dehumanizing” community life and, causing a general loss of “social skills”. His commentary came up after the suicide of Megan Gillan who overdosed on sleeping pills after being bullied on the social network Bebo. What’s troubling to me though about the Archbishops position, and those that support him, is that by focusing on the social network specifically, or the web broadly, they’re hoisting up a convenient straw-man at the expense of actually helping anyone while trying to tear down the a major support system for a lot of people.

In George Pitchers article in the Telegraph he asserts that there is something fundamentally different and fundamentally less human now in society than we were pre-internet. But while it’s undoubtedly true that the world is different, I’m not sure we can honestly say it’s any less human. The logic here assumes that relationships we have in person are somehow intrinsically more profound than those we have online. Anyone who’s worked for any length of time in advertising, where “friend” gets tossed around with great freedom, knows this is not the case. More importantly to the subject at hand, anyone who’s ever been to high school also knows this isn’t the case. So while I met my finance in person, in high school, most of my communication with my actual friends is over IM these days. I’ve met more people face to face that I first connected with on Twitter this last year than I met total in the previous 3 or 4. I’m just not sure we can point to any specific coloration between relationships online and off in terms of quality. Though my feeling is that this has less to do with technology and much more to do with our notion of “friend”. In Andrew Keen’s article Social Media Can Open Our Eyes to the Value of Physical Life Robert Scoble says of the effects of the web on society “What we are really yearning for is intimacy”. But has that ever not been the case? I have to wonder if we what ascribe to social media, or the web isn’t a new problem at all, but rather something we’re only just openly talking about, perhaps ironically, because of the social web. Was there ever a time when we didn’t yearn for realness? If we’re to look back fondly on a time before the web, don’t we also have to acknowledge the very dark, isolating nature of those times too? History has a funny way of remembering the winners, those for whom the system worked, while quickly forgetting those that didn’t succeed, those that got lost along the way.

Ultimately though, I wonder if the Archbishop is even asking the right question. Whether or not social networking, or the web, Bebo, or any of it is “dehumanizing” us is moot. For better or worse, this is a major component of human communication now; and the reality is that what it provides isn’t a less human relationship but rather a different type of relationship, and for many people, a better type of relationship. I say better because for the most part human social systems are designed by people for whom society already works and everyone else either learns to deal with it or gets left behind. The web has been the exception. It has become the place where those who might have stayed in the corners can and do have a voice, and more importantly, can create social systems that make sense to them. So while the relationships developed online might not look real, or useful, or complete to those getting by with society the way it is, they are clearly tremendously valuable to many people and by understanding this and acknowledging it rather than demonizing it, we can turn our attention to helping those who actually need it rather than wasting our time lamenting technology.

Thinking about this finally motivated me to write down something I’ve been kicking around for a while, namely what is our role, our responsibly, or our right in determining what brands deserve a voice?

Not surprisingly, a number of the people posting that Krugman article had the green tinted avatar showing their support for the Iranian democracy protesters. I was reminded of this article from Wired about customers boycotting Nokia over their alleged supplying the Iranian government with the surveillance systems now being used to stifle dissent and protests. Nokia denies they supplied anything out of the ordinary, but the story is one of hundreds, maybe thousands where major corporations, our clients, get caught doing the exact things many of us decry in our personal lives. Another example: flipping through the latest issue of Good, I found an ad for a cell carrier called Credo asking me pointedly if I care about polar bears. It is a commonly known fact that I care about polar bears a great deal so finding out that Credo donates mad cash to the polar bear cause while AT&T, the people that make my iPhone “work”, contributed the maximum amount possible to the Bush/Cheney campaign, left me feeling like I had betrayed my ursine brethren.

As just one guy, it’s pretty easy for me take the view that it makes little difference who I choose for my cell carrier. But here is the real dilemma for me, and I think for any one who works in any capacity in the marketing/advertising/branding industry: my voice isn’t the same as everyone else’s. I’m not just one guy. I make my living by being better at communication than average people and by helping brands get people to buy their shit. I try to do this by working with my clients to create experiences that don’t pollute the lives their customers, but ultimately, regardless of the quality of the thing I make, I’m still helping that company to succeed. I may not be drowning the preverbal polar bear, but I’m surely helping to pull the iceberg out from under him.

But this disproportionate amount of power swings both ways: What if, one day, we all decided that we wouldn’t work with a certain brand? Without any capacity to effectively talk to the public, that brand would cease to exist. This topic seemed to me too important to have not been written about ad nauseam, but while Googling the phrase “ethics in advertising” brings up plenty of discussion on the topics of how we work: “is it okay to lie in advertising” or “is it okay to use sex to sell a product”, I couldn’t find anything on the ethics of choosing who we work for. Admittedly, my search was cursory, but that this isn’t a top line topic seems a little terrifying to me. We spend millions of words and gallons of coffee on the minutia of “ROI for Social Media” but how often to we ask “Does this company even deserve a voice?”

For a community that fancies itself progressive, worldly, and humane, we seem strangely mute on this topic, willing to subscribe to the same relativism we find so off putting in our governments. Who are we to say who lives and who dies? But who is anyone? “Why not us?” might be a better question. I can’t help but feel like the Spiderman Rule is in play here: we have this power, this power to make and break brands of any shape or size; don’t we also have this responsibly to do it?