Selective Amplification

Henry Jenkin’s article on Harvard’s Web Ecology project just blew me out of my chair. The study charts the Twitter activity related to Michael Jackson’s death, how people reported to each other, how fast, etc. You should check out the graph behind that link, 471 thousand people tweeted about his death over a four hour period (1.8M over 10 days). By the way, this was the same event that fooled Google as a spam event, so they blocked all requests.

Beyond the volume of people tweeting around MJ’s death, there is this graph that compares the Iran controversy to MJ, which is far more interesting to me. Roughly the same number of tweet over a 10 day period, distributed over a different area. You can see the difference between breaking news and a complex conversation, which os pretty cool. All this from 140 characters across millions of people…that just blows my mind.

Gaming Inspiration

(warning: heavy nerding ahead)

I usually find lots of inspiration from video games. I’m not a big gamer, but I’m fascinated with the space. Usually it’s less about the graphics or the game content, and more about the interactions that have been designed into the game. As games go, there seems to be a lot of really interesting things going on in massive-multiplayer games and web and phone-based games lately. Console games are sort of pushing each other deeper into this better graphics/extra gore niche. That’s mostly games for hardcore gamers. I’m more interested in what happens when there’s a wider cross-section of people just screwing around entertaining themselves.

I’ve seen a couple of interesting design/stratgey things lately, here’s my take on a few things I’ve seen. Hopefully you find some inspiration along the way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Celebrating vs. Selling

Do you ever notice how much more meaningful advertising can be when they celebrate the human experience vs. sell you products? Celebrating the human experience removes the psychological barrier of “you just want to sell me something. You have nothing to lose by letting down your guard, stepping back and appreciating how lucky we all are, (some violin strings in the background don’t hurt either). If businesses can find a higher level of alignment than ‘buy my stuff, that’s a massive change. The catch is you have to mean it – it has to go beyond the commercial…that sort of higher purpose takes lost of vision and guts.

It’s potential over features.
It’s experience over function.

Inspiration: The World is Just Awesome (campaign by 72andSunny)

The Discovery Channel just extended it’s “the World is Awesome” campaign. The original spot was so popular, it’s even got a wikipedia entry. They could have made feature level claims around their content – we’re all in HD, most adventurous programming ever, 20% more shark week, etc. They used to have a whole campaign around ‘explore your world,’ putting the viewer more in the aggressor or adventurer postion. I love how they’ve taken a step back and decided to celebrate the world they cover with their viewer instead selling their viewer on the ‘value’ of their content.