a hundred avatars

SPEWing good ideas

Tom O'Brien recently tweeted a link to Neal Stephenson's Spew, a piece in WIRED from what is essentially the dawn of time, 1994. What's crazy about it, given when it was published, is how prescient NS was on where we would be 15 years later.

Go ahead. Read the piece. It's really good, in the way that a cyberpunk piece called 'Spew' from 1994 is good. I know sometimes the links don't come through when these blogposts pop up on Facebook, but Google it if you don't see the link and read it.  I'll wait...

OK, it's not the Baroque Cycle or even Snow Crash, but it's sort of what we do for a living (or should be), right?

Anyway, a few things occurred to me while reading the piece:

1. Why don't people move more quickly? TV networks, publishers or advertisers don't respond to niche opportunities anywhere near as quickly as they do in the piece. I don't understand why, unless ennui, inertia or fear are fair explanations. There's no good excuse why, and we can accelerate how we move against opportunity. We just need a better infrastructure.
2. Try harder to find it: finding insights that are actionable.  Frankly in this day and age it's not hard to find information that matters, but honestly a lot of what we see in the business world is more often than not the result of outdated models that measure something that we all agree matters as opposed to the things that actually are happening. Not sure why this is the case.
3. WTF? Do you think anyone who read this piece 15 years ago really understood what NS was talking about? Did he? Did pieces like this create our reality (which is pretty spot on, at least from the perspective of what is possible) or was NS just so hyperaware that he intuited the next 15?
4. DIY: NS captures where culture really comes from perfectly.  As much as in his future there seems to be some sort of corporate-entertainment-technology complex that produces 'everything' they need to be culture vultures to find out what is really happening.  Technology that centralizes culture doesn't actually centralize culture creation but rather paradoxically just seems to help figure out what's really going on. Then the 'centralizer' can figure out how to take advantage (or not) of what's going on.
5. Intuition and in person: As much as the character in Spew has access to all the information out there, he's not purely quant driven in his approach.  He knows  "something is there" without being able to put his finger on it and really can only find out by going to where the target is and seeing it in person. Data feed doesn't replace human touch.

The Power of the Human Interface

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

that was sweet. via ivette

Just one personality, please.

Loved this description of the new digital life we lead from an introduction to an article about The-Dream written by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker.

One way to understand social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is to consider that  younger digital natives are not necessarily being exhibitionists when they post photographs of themselves and share personal details there. Instead, these users are living a life in which consciousness is spread out evenly over two platforms: real life and the Web. Rather than feeling schizophrenic or somehow pathological, digital natives understand that these two realms divide the self much as speech and the written word divide language, a division that humans have lived with for a long time without going bonkers

Based on some new research I've seen lately, I think there is an increasing unification of behavior and thinking between the mobile and 'wired' world as well.

Obama, the Recovery and Transparency

According to www.recovery.gov, yesterday was the first day that federal agencies in receipt of recovery (which I suppose is how we're trying to brand the stimulus these days--well done) funds start to be obligated to report in a transparent manner how the money is being spent.

The site is pretty basic (I've copied the mission statement below) but I'm very interested in seeing how it evolves, as promised, over time.  As people can interact with the site and how the money is flowing I hope that not only will it have a positive effect on limiting waste, but also almost a placebo effect on making us all feel that something is changing for the better.

Perhaps this degree of transparency + accountability should be added to Andrew Cuomo's lessons from yesterday's post?

                                    Our Mission

• Education: Explain the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act;
• Transparency: Show how, when, and where the money is spent;
• Accountability: Provide data that will allow citizens to evaluate the Act’s progress and provide feedback.

Read the rest of the mission statement after the jump.

Real Change

Perhaps as inspiring as President-elect Obama's election and message of change has been his campaign's ability to execute along the way.  As much as change, his candidacy and prospective presidency (now no longer prospective) have been about the possibility of competence we believe in and need.

The campaign was as professionally and well run in so many ways, as many others have documented along the way. So will it continue?

If this site launched hours after the election was final is any indication, you ain't seen nothing yet. Let's hope so.

I could quibble and say that the functionality isn't quite there. That it's no My Starbucks Idea or Member's Project but it's a great start. 

Synthesizing the System of the World

No, not that synthesizer.

This post from Renny Gleeson over at Wieden hits the nail on the head.

As he puts it:

It seems to boil down generally to this:

• "digital" shops tell you "traditional" shops don't get (meaning, of course, 'understand' or 'do well') "digital", "social media", "viral marketing", or a host of specific functionalities - e.g., SEM, SEO, mobile development, etc., etc., etc.
• "traditional" shops tell you "digital" shops don't "get" "branding", "craft", "storytelling", or "advertising".

He goes on explain a number of reasons, all contradictory and all true.  The problem? Both types of agencies are right and both are wrong.

A few thoughts on why this is just a blip on the path to the dissolution of the distinctions that make an agency ‘traditional’ or ‘digital.’

1. During any period of change there are always exceptionalists (either traditional or radical) and synthesists (traditional or radical).
2. It’s not about the past versus the future. It’s about the extremists versus holistic thinkers. Never know who will win. It's good to be extremist, but it's even better to be the best kind of opportunist.
3. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. As in love with the digital world as I am, the more I get pulled that way, the happier I am to have the tools I've learned through the years that help create big ideas rooted in human insights.
4. The history of ideas is the history of this tension between exceptionalists and synthesists and the resulting creation of a third, better system of the world.
5. All this talk reminded me of Bloom’s Taxonomy, which I’ve decided to include here, just because I can. It's a good reminder that there are different, and better, ways to approach information and what you do with it.

/derivative rant

Excitement around 'Apple' iJam

Back around the holidays, you may have seen one of the most requested gifts out there. No,  not the Wii or the iPhone, but rather another fantastic product designed with only your pleasure in mind.  That's right, the iJam.

Although we're six months away from Xmas in either direction, apparently one iJam just made it from Spain to San Francisco, no surprise thanks to Spain's notoriously slow mail.  It was received by my friend Ezequiel Triviño, who I met through my friends and former colleagues at Sra. Rushmore, some of the best creative minds in Spain.

Ezequiel and a friend decided this iJam didn't meet their high standards and that they would return it to the Apple store in San Francisco. Hilarity ensues. Check out the video here:

Full disclosure: Ezequiel is a great creative mind, has won and forgotten about more creative awards than most see and the the founder of Wikreate, which is in its first six months as they describe it is:

Wikreate is a new model of a 360 advertising and communications agency structured as a social network of skilled professionals and partner agencies.

This founding principle is related to a lot of the thinking behind the title of this blog (a hundred avatars) and a model for the way the world has gone and continues to go: smart, well intentioned people coming together in new combinations to do things that have never been done before. New goals need new models, right?

I'm looking forward to seeing the work they do for clients with slightly larger budgets than the iJam. But if Spain wins on Thursday and Sunday for Euro 2008, I definitely want one.

iPhone Killer or Spec for 4G?

Apropos the iPhone buzz following Jobs most recent impersonation of a burning bush, i though this post on How to Create an iPhone killer was particularly well done. (via things magazine)

Check out the post, but ideas like 'digital buttons should not be like real ones' remind us that as technology changes, the cues we can use to persuade people to act differently should change accordingly.  New technology creates the potential for new experiences.  Let's make them, instead of copying the old.

Make it new.

huh? FAVRD

not sure why, but there's a haiku-like pleasure in all the Twitter mashups.

Here's one:

FAVRD  via del.icio.us

Brandtags, Semiotics and 007

I had a much longer post planned involving a deep semiotic analysis of Noah's fun semiotic playland that is www.brandtags.net and its relationship to how changes in technology change language now that I finally had the time to read much of Professor Naomi Baron's Always On.

Not going to happen today, unfortunately.

However, in the spirit of regular posting following a hiatus spent at a early-Bond quality corporate HQ yesterday, here are the sites I've been playing with lately. They're like Q (this one, not that one) for the rest of us.

1. www.brandtags.net
2. Tweetscan
3. TimeTube
4. Programmable Web
5. Summize