Because media has a flavour

Posted on June 20, 2007 by Thomas Purves

2 Walls in New York

These are two exterior walls. They serve (roughly) the same physical purpose. They live across the street. 52nd street if I remember.

B) is the north side of the brand new redesign of the the NYC MoMA
A) is just another building of another century facing it across the street. Right across the street.

They have a different flavour. In general, all media have a flavour.

By it’s flavour I mean the medium’s idiosyncrasies, it’s accidental memes of little common details, you might call it it’s character. How often do we choose a medium based on it’s flavour? how often do flavours choose us?

Does the character of our age choose our mediums, or do our mediums determine the character of our age?

This is a teaser of sorts. I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot lately. I have a few answers, I believe, the start of which (at least as it may pertain to cities, and open cities) that I plan to bring to OpenCities this Saturday. I hope that you might join me in the conversation there. I guess I should book a slot.

Posted in architecture, Archive, dead media, design | Leave a comment

Collecting a lot of Underpants and the unbundling of social platforms

Posted on June 18, 2007 by Thomas Purves

Dave Winer and Euan Semple are writing about the eventual unbundling of social platforms.

I like this idea that we could all manage our own bundle of apps both social and professional to track our calendars, “buddy” lists, statuses, media habits and etc. etc. yet somehow all of these would stitch together as well, or nearly as well, or even better than they do on facebook but that we wouldn’t have to rely on a single closed platform designed for 23yr olds* to do so.

RSS and openID are somewhere down in the roots of the tools needed, but I think we need tools that take these to higher level of abstraction before we’ll get anywhere.

For example, I see Jaiku [my Jaiku page] taking the first step(s) in this direction. You can feed Jaiku feeds for near every social presence app you can think of from you blog to your status feed to photos and music etc.

As I’ve said Jaiku manages to collect a lot of underpants. But underpants are only half the problem.

(of course we know)

Step one: collect underpants
Step two: ???
Step three: Profit!

So what’s step 2? I think we’re still missing the room that really ties all the rugs together. Even, Dave, the great prognosticator is a little vague “How exactly it will happen is something the historians can argue about 25 years from now. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will, unless the rules of technology evolution have been repealed (and they haven’t, trust me)”

*23yr olds and native English speakers at that

Posted in Archive, facebook, jaiku, socialmedia, socialplatforms | Leave a comment

CaseCamp5 Toronto pt 3

Posted on June 12, 2007 by Thomas Purves

Chris Matthews of Specialized Bicycles is schooling us all on Brand Awesomeness. It’s now defined term. Chris has way firmer thighs than you. Awesomeness doesn’t matter if you are the biggest gorilla in your industry you can still be awesome. As it happens, Specialized is huge their particular segment with approx $400-$500M revenues, 1500 dealers in USA, 200 in Canada and 40+ countries around the world yet still maintain a passionate customer base.

Brand Awesomeness: All that matters is doing stuff that makes sense to your customers.

Specialized riders clubWhat makes a ton of sense for specialized customers is the Specialized Riders Club an awesomely feature-rich community site for cyclists. You can create a profile, you can create a profile for each of your bikes in super-geek detail, you can find rides and riders in yours or any zip code. You can keep journals post ride stories and photos and gossip with community members about gear and rides and whatever it is cycle freaks talk about.

Lessons learned:

They were expecting hardcore rides to like it the best. Unexpectedly It made the biggest difference for new riders to help them find rides and how to get involved in the community.

People won’t tell you outright that you should build a brand community. But as a tipoff, you might think of this as a big red flag that your customers are ready for a brand-centric community:

“Does Specialized have an authorized tattoo? I am considering having the logo “S” tattooed on the lower part of my right calf. Do I need some kind of copyright authorization?” (they sent him the .eps file)

It did take longer than expected before membership accelerated. It was the second version with more features to let the community members talk to each other that seemed to do the trick. And time for users to learn what they were always missing.

Chris’ presentation rocked the show tonight. I hope he might post the slides and speaker notes to his site.

Thank you Eli and volunteers for bringing together another CaseCamp. Always a highlight of the camp circuit. Get your flickr fix here. I’ll update these posts with photos soon as I get the chance.

Posted in Archive, casecamp, marketing, socialmedia | 4 Comments