DISQUS

Hey Ming,

For someone so well versed on discovery and being discovered, it's flattering to help you discover something new about any technology!

Couldn't agree more, Adam. There's an environment for success here that is created by Brandie and Luxor.

I think it's even more kudos to Brandie that she's able to achieve this kind of media experimentation, and earn the trust of a company in the Casino world: one of the most restrictive industries in terms of information control.

Whitney, as usual your writing got me thinking in a different way about something I already hold high in every day life.

You got me to go back and learn more about Tzedakah especially and who Maimonides was, how he came up with the Mishna Torah, and all that Jazz -- which led to even more insights. And then reading your post again with comments led to more ideas still. So thank you! I think the blog post was pretty high up on the Tzedakah depth chart!

I do what I do in terms of strategy and user experience, and work in general always attempting to reach the top level of Tzedakah. While I may not get there, I always want to help people learn something new, have something of utility; and at best, provide work for talented, hard-working professionals. That is the ultimate reward.

If I can spend my time exchanging ideas so that someone can learn a new way to support themselves or their family: that is the most gratifying time spent. Giving to charity is of course great, but to be honest, dropping the coins in the Tzedakah box doesn't even compare to presenting ideas on some aspect of user experience to people and watch their faces light-up with the delight of learning something new, or finding a new approach to something old. To me, a day in the office like that is worth more than a high-holiday pray-a-thon.

Wait a second. Finding out something new and sharing it with others, who can share that information with others.... sounds like social media. Today, social networking and the ideas of companies being part of the conversation between people is often termed "disruptive."

Funny, but this is how Maimonidies was viewed way back (like 800 years ago) when he wrote the notions of Tzedakah. Today, we take these ideas as gospel, as though they so self-evidently represent universal truths. No matter what you're religion, we can all agree that helping someone help themselves is a great idea. But back then, these ideas were tremendously disruptive. His writing was burned by orthodox congregations in the name of G-d (only to be brought back to europe and vaunted to spur the renaissance later). Now they are revered, and we can't help but think about them during this annual time of renewal.

This brings me to the point of your post and the comment from Arnie correcting you in terms of the "actual" text from the Mishna Torah. As I was looking back on the guidelines of Tzedakah and the study of these works in the context of Maimonides' life as a social-networking node in his job as an Egyptian doctor and local spiritual leader on the weekends -- it really shows off how unimportant the texts are, and how incredibly important critical thinking, questioning, and interpretation are.

Just like Shakespeare a few hundred years later, is any of Maimonides writing really written by him? Who cares about the correct wording? When I came to your post, I had always thought about Tzedakah as justice, plain and simple. I'm making it a mission to learn as much as I can, and share as much as I can back filtered through my experience because it's my job as a person. Justice. Period.

This viewpoint was mostly informed by an cartoon poster at hebrew school about Tzedakah that followed the popular commercial Schoolhouse Rock series. At the top was a man shaking another man's hand in congratulations for his new job.

Over the years, I have heard many different interpretations, including ones like the views on this page, that have added depth, interest, and complexity. On one of the sites I saw while clicking for more information on Tzedakah wrote at the bottom, "This page is designed as a guideline and to help formulate more questions."

So to end this ramble, I hope the readers of this post, regardless of denomination, will take this as a spark plug to spend the first few weeks of September renewing themselves, asking questions, and finding something new to learn and to share.

Who knows. Maybe in 800 years, someone will discover one of your ideas, and it will make a big difference in the way they live their life.

couldn't agree more, Tiffany! That's what makes Microblogging and the future of other assymetrical communications platforms so fascinating as we head towards ubiquitous computing. I have no idea how well tell stories ten years from now, but I have a feeling it will resemble the issues your blog and this article, and twitter are starting to address now.

I think you're pointing out something very important here. That every tweet builds a fictional narrative every bit as compelling as any other mass media.

I knew there was a reason I liked you! Wrote about it here a few months back, bringing a bit of The Graduate script into Twitter to the similar results:
http://www.newmediabuzz.com/the_new_media_buzz_...

Not sloppy at all. But I think you're making my point here. The core stays the same, here's someone selecting this professionally created content, in a particular order, for an audience.

Any time you present something whether you're grandmaster flash, or Daftpunk, or Mr. Rogers showing movies, you are creating a subtext driven by the content+presenter+audience.

Your example of delicious, or StumbleUpon, or Digg would be the same, you are the DJ, the links are your playlist.

Right?
Right?

Great, interesting post. But it does seem obvious, as you conclude, to be about the growth pattern of a physical product against the growth of a digital product. For Webkinz, the maps almost follow a map of UPS hubs. As demand volume grew across the northeast, it also lowered their cost of adding retailers who were farther away (2-3 hubs).

What's also interesting, as my children have recently grown from heavy Webkinz users to heavy YouTube users (my six year old can type "cats" once and be set for an entire visit) is the same in-person group approach to visiting these sites. They use these sites on their own, and when they get together for playdates, they open the computer and share favorites together.

Thanks so much for posting the link! Interesting app from Neki, certainly underscores how cool it would be if they opened the platform with an API; how much more value could be delivered.

Alan, as usual, 13 months ahead of me. Thank you for adding that "everything old is new again" link. Well worth the time to read.

The fact that people like to gather in communities doesn't change, only the technology available to do it.

@paula: agreed. Another click away is a killer. I have been liking the sites that use the columnar right for recent comments across the board, in that it gives you a sense of what's being bandied around the different articles, and directs you to those posts.

Wow. Bandied. Who knew the king's english would have popped out?

@russ: Well, if we're facing things, we should also face that it may feel more comfortable because it fits with our own habitual sense of read first, react second. But my habits of interaction today are nowhere near the Super Smash Bros. Brawl sensibilities that make up the future of our jobs and the brands we help to anticipate those trends.

Bless you for saying my articles are short. +2

Thanks for the commiseration, Matt. What you describe is what I see a lot from traditional-driven, "design for the presentation" approaches. Many sites are never built for users, only for meetings, let alone next week or next year.

Alan - thanks again for another excellent post.

Ahh, the low spark of high-heeled boys. I have found these situations result from a combination of four factors: glory, time, money, and education.

The TV spot is the most expensive and most attention-getting for creatives. Not just the spot itself, but the process of the creation and production. After you've gotten over the hump of finishing out a spot, and paying for the placement, it feels so good, everything else seems secondary. People want to keep that feeling going, and creating banners that feature their TV creative become something of an artifact to remember the great time we had with the client on set.

The thing about banners that Google gets (especially with OpenSocial), and that almost no traditional agencies have come to understand is that you're opening real estate for yourself across an incredibly wide network.

But by the time the starcom's of the world have made the banner buy and the creative is set to begin, few have the interest, time or budget left to think about what goes in that real estate: how to really take advantage of the technology they're using to play in that space. The AEs you talk to rarely if ever stop to think about what's possible, and the creative leadership has already moved on to the next storyboard.

I try to approach it with AEs as a budgetary play with the client, saying that Flash allows you to ostensibly put five times the creative in a banner space without costing any more on the buy. This is all before you even start to delve into how fantastic it is to use this real estate to furnish the user with tools, right where they're already at, to employ the brand in a way that helps -- or at least more directly speaks to -- the audience.

Obviously, this topic drives me nuts, because even with Pointroll and eyewonder smashing benchmarks, few seem to want to dedicate more time and resources. They just assume it is what it is, spend the money on the gross impressions and call it a day.

For anyone interested, I went a little more pragmatically at possible solutions, and folks out there taking a stab at something more in the banner space for imedia, reposted here:
http://www.newmediabuzz.com/the_new_media_buzz_...

@Alan Just had this discussion with a client the other day. I don't think you can do it if your tweeting is coming from corporate or PR. Which is the biggest hitch right now: trusting your employees. I took this viewpoint for granted in writing the post, so thank you for bringing it up. Well worth mentioning.

A lot of PR and corporate comm. folks are looking at this as though it needs to come from them, which it shouldn't - they should be facilitating, guiding, teaching, sharing. And jeez -- how much better would they be in their jobs of understanding their client if they were in a regular internal dialogue with employees?

Where you talk about conglomerates, what does that mean? To me, it's an amalgamation of a number of smaller companies/ vendors. If those folks tweeted, and brought it back as a part of the online representation of the product, they'd be syndicating their own conversational competitive advantage across ecommerce sites. That would be a huge advantage, if possible. Then your large faceless conglomerate is actually... gulp... a wide array of both buyers and sellers? Facilitating conversation?

What you're saying about the line between personal and business is a fascinating one for me. The difference is completely perceptual, semantic. Will be covering this a bit in a future post with Brandie Feuer, who tweets personally from one account, and on behalf of Luxor in another.

@stacy @brennen -- as you can see above, I'm in complete agreement. To me, every time you apply a microblog stream to almost any page, it becomes more personal, interesting, valuable. An instant reason to spend another moment of consideration, evaluation, and to come back because there is content always refreshing. It's not about reach, just reaching those who count.

@allen: All she does is make intuitively brilliant statements like that. Drives me nuts.

My bad, my comment was incomplete. I took for granted that you always look at the audience. Even in the absence of persona work (which is all too-frequent) before starting any initiative, you have to consider all the details of the audience. What are their lives like day-to-day, hour-by-hour. What do they read? Watch? Buy? What happens at dinner? What are their wishes? How can I help them? What will make them happier, even if they can't express exactly what that is?

My point about minorities growing to affluence and our fine suburban living was that these small insular groups lived and worked and affected the greater world from this environment.

Call it a fishbowl, a shetl, whatever. We're all sitting on the stoops of our twitter accounts between thoughts, projects, meetings. Sometimes it's about the fun details of a tractor pull or a new iPhone, or writing a haiku about dinner. Other times, we're sharing our work, learning new perspectives, and sending links to blogs where you end up writing ten paragraphs of comments.

It could always be worse ;)

Whitney - jackson, great comments.

All I can say to both of you is that if you look at the historical trends, there's usually some sort of corporate/technological force that accomplishes this. In the 50's it was Sarnoff creating NBC. In the Internet, we've already seen two waves of syndication of corporate buying/condensing.

Not sure what the future holds socially, but someone will undoubtedly come up with a solution. I think the first may be following Korea's "panelist" model in ecommerce. But who knows? All part of the fun.

Wow. Good one. You're touching on a couple really interesting concepts.

First, I'll throw out there the fact that Jewry (of which I'm a member), Italians, and many other minorities used tight knit communities like the experiences you describe, to advance in the US. People congregate around a common experience (in many cases a religious center like church or synagogue), and end up becoming a local voting block. That block elects government leaders who in turn reward local businesses (and their employees) with work. Over time, the parents of the community gain affluence and move out of the neighborhoods.

In this perspective is how I think f the Twitter world. While yes, it is insular, and no, it is not representative of the audience I may be trying to reach, I do think that right now it's a community of like-minds trying to figure out the next steps in how the social graph will graduate to ubiquitous computing. Or, as my wife ways, it's people who all do similar things working remotely, and Twitter is stopping by each other's cubes to say "hi."

Ryan, thanks for the link! That is a really interesting site. Plurk is trying the same thing by organizing the comments into a visual, horizontal timeline.

I find both to be a bit unusable. We'll have a lot to talk about on Thursday!

Double agree. You have to respect the real estate you're taking first and foremost. I'll really have to check out TweetDeck now!

Who is that dashing man giving @mediajunkie a hard time? :)

Thanks for another good read.

Thanks David. Agreed. it is a design challenge for sure, and it appears to be a temporary one as we find our way to the platforms we'll communicate through in the future.

Couldn't agree more! Always think back on Stephen King saying that writing is a muscle you need to exercise regularly, and Twitter really rocks for that: almost like a screenwriting gameshow.

Thanks so much for the shout-out. Makes having written the post totally worth it. Putting those lines into Twitter felt a lot like being deep in the screenplay where the characters start to be their own people.

Hey Ryan, thanks for the comment! Have you seen http://wetellstories.co.uk ?

About the fringe, I think we're 18-24 months away from tipping on microblogging. Sixty Million folks on FaceBook are updating their status not realizing they're microblogging. Kinda like widgets in that sense. Commenting on status updates will be an interesting ramp for the usage as well.

The arts grant is a great idea. As I wrote this, thought about what original works would look like in Twitter, Plurk.

Thanks Jesse! Glad you liked it.

Well, I guess there are plastics in the sense of interface design and usability, but not in the strict sense of film aesthetics I'm pointing to in this case.

Cushman, you rock

Cushman! We were just talking about the touchscreens, and I have to say they're a bit much. They seem much better in theory than in practice.

First, concentrating on watching them makes me a little queasy. Second, who else touched this thing?

Excellent comment Liza. I would only add that after hearing from ComScore about widget reach, most people are using widgets without even knowing it -- the line isn't just blurred, it's non-existent.