The whole thing is really interesting and you should read it all, but one of the most interesting for me was his fourth point:

“4. If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!”

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.”

I’ve written a couple other times about the asymmetrical nature of the web, but what I find interesting about this is that it show a possible direction for the relationship between traditional, physical organizations and the more abstract digital ones.

How any organization bound by traditional rules of law and codes of conduct operates in a world where organizations not bound by these same rules become increasingly powerful is critical I think. In this case it’s journalism, but the same could apply to any brand.

Actually – this isn’t really about the iPhone antenna, at least not directly. Rather it’s about this page Apple put up today following their press conference.

Every smartphone has a cellular antenna. And nearly every smartphone can lose signal strength if you hold it in a certain way

I’m not sure what the right answer is for Apple in this scenario, but I feel fairly certain it’s not to say “the iPhone 4: just as bad as every other smartphone!” The page is a list of phones from Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung, along with an iPhone 4 and 3GS showing that iPhone performs no worse than those phones.

Apple is making the case that an iPhone whose phone function is similarly bad to every other phone is still the better device, and this is probably true. But it’s a coldly intellectual response that I’m not sure will resonate for an emotional customer base. For a brand like Apple, I’m not sure what is gained from even talking about other phones unless you’re talking about how much better you are.

It’s a small thing, and likely of no consequence to Apple. I’m not convinced that any amount of back and forth on something like antenna design is going to dissuade people from buy what is, if nothing else, an attractive phone. Frankly, at this point, there just isn’t a product on the market that represents a level of competition to the iPhone to render this kind of mistake meaningful.

Still, it seems strategically sloppy to me.

Also, this.

Well – this came out today. I’m always hesitant to reference surveys where I don’t know the methodology, but it does seem to suggest that Adidas’ consistent, multimodal approach is outpacing Nike’s single event.

“Half the game in buzz is ‘fanning the flames’. The Adidas football facebook page, for instance, is now up to over a million fans and they are dropping new content several times a day, all while the average post is generating upwards of 100 comments. At the end of the day, brands need to keep the buzz ball in the air as long as possible – sponsored or otherwise,”
- Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of digital strategy at Nielsen.

Too often advertising gets confused with marketing, and the result are efforts that focus on single spikes of awareness rather than long-term affinity. Making a commercial like Write the Future is incredibly expensive and while it generated a lot of buzz early on, without support, there are just too many other things happening all the time for it to remain front of mind.

More over, this style of marketing lacks any ability to react or adjust. WK and Nike took a big gamble that least ONE of the players in the commercial making it deep into the World Cup, now it would seem they’re stuck with a commercial that is irrelevant. You’d think both WK and Nike would have learned their lesson after the Kobe/Lebron playoff commercials.

I wonder how much better that budget could have been spent developing projects to actually connect with fans regardless of the outcome of the games rather than a mini-movie. It’s not that great advertising isn’t important, but it’s not a replacement for being there, interacting with your customers and creating the kinds of experiences that can last over time.

If you missed it – part one is here.

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.

Here is how I responded:

I think the author is well intentioned, and in a lot of ways, dead on about the issues of advertising online. My issue is that I don’t think fixing advertising is going to be what ultimately helps brands online.

My view is that advertising isn’t just a tactical approach, it’s also a way of thinking. It has fundamental notions of how the marketplace works and how brands relate to their customers. Advertising is about punctuating one narrative stream with another, something that doesn’t exist online. There is no stream online. Agencies, I think, often underestimate the power of the hyperlink. It defines the way people conceptualize the web, and it’s non-linear.

The web has fundamentally changed this brand/customer relationship though, and presented brands with opportunity to not just talk about themselves, but to actually provide a real and meaningful experience rather than just the promise of an experience at some later time. If a brand wants to know what the future is, or an agency for that matter, it’s not contained in the mindset of advertising, rather it’s in the world of product and service design.

There is a reason restaurants don’t advertise their food IN THEIR OWN RESTAURANTS. So much better to give them a great meal with great service once they’re already there. The web is a brands restaurant, the people are there. Give them something to love.

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.

You can listen to part one here. And Part two here. For you convenience, I made sure to annoyingly tap on the table in both, so you don’t have to worry about missing that.

Bret has interviewed some other really interesting people (most with far more pleasant voices than mine), so while you’re there, you should check some of the other interviews out.

Let me just get this out of the way: As a devoted Lost fan, even I realize that the last thing the world needs at this point is another word written about Lost. But hear me out – because this isn’t a post about Lost, rather it’s a post about what Lost can teach us about design. More specifically, what it can teach us about the relationship between strategic intent and design.

I’m going to mention a number of specific plot points and events from the beginning of the show through the finale, so if you haven’t seen the entire series and want to go in fresh, you should stop now.

Let’s say I asked you to design a camera – what are the things you’d need to know before you could get started? Maybe format, digital or film. Maybe its intended audience, professional or amateur. What about price point? There are likely dozens, all of them important and it’s the answers to these questions, and the synthesis of these answers that define a successful design. After all, if you’re designing a digital rangefinder, adding a faux film advance lever or a film rewind handle would create a camera that, if viewed as single aesthetic endeavor could be called beautiful, would still be a failure of a design.

This I think is was a core failing of Lost as a designed narrative. While each aspect of the show was nearly perfectly designed, it ultimately failed to work as a cohesive whole. Taken as individual design elements, the numbers, the hatches, the others, the haunted shacks and ring of ash, DARMA, the time traveling; each part was design perfectly, and even as a group, when viewed as a single aesthetic endeavor, it’s beautiful. The problem comes in when trying to actually use the product. As it turns out, each of those design elements was the narrative equivalent of a film advance on a digital camera – beautiful perhaps, but so pointless and distracting that it actually degrades the totality of the product.

The final, stark example of this was the very last scene of the program. As the closing credits went by, the viewer is left with the image of plane wreckage on a beach. Given the nature of the Lost, it’s not surprising that many fans wondered what this meant. Which wreckage is this? Is this the original 815? Was it Ajira 316? Does this mean everyone was dead the whole time? Such a stark image, placed so conspicuously into the show must be there for a reason, right? No. Direct from ABC was this – “The images shown during the end credits of the ‘Lost’ finale, which included shots of Oceanic 815 on a deserted beach, were not part of the final story…”

Hearing the writers speak about these elements towards the finale of the show, they seem almost annoyed that people were trying to piece things together, or applying meaning to elements of the show. But can they really be surprised? This is the lesson I think designers can take from the show – don’t design the path you don’t want people to take. It sounds so basic I feel a little dumb saying it, but I still find myself telling designers not to put visual emphasis on elements they don’t want people to pay attention to. Don’t design elements that don’t express the intent of you or the product.