Sigh. Meme-oriented tourism exists, as reported at the weekend:
Central Asia, one of the least-known parts of the world, is the perfect home for Borat Sagdiyev, the faux television presenter whose new film Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan, arrived in Australian cinemas last week.
…do I get some kind of badge for “First Post!” honours?
The current trend of articles built as “The Seven…”, “The Top Tips You Need…”, “5 Winning Strategies” (etc) are starting to grate a little on me. I can only guess that this is a Q4 2006 “minutes to midnight” attempt to grab social networking visibility.
But at least Ken has gone out on a limb and named some working/nearly-working implementations for marketing messages via mobile.
Real-world working models have been few and far between in my usage and visibility of them as a consumer. As a technologist, it’s clear that the device no-one can leave home without, and which is seen as a link to the rest of the world no-matter-where, is an advertising success story waiting to happen.
He’s right in that with regard to some blue-sky ideas:
It’s [the strategy] not clear, and by the time this one is figured out, the mobile marketing train will have left the station long ago.
In this context, as per his opener, the most-discussed strategies may not have the strongest long-term prospects.
The one I feel most strongly about is the corollary/inverse proposition of
3) Location-based advertising: Remember all the hub-bub about location-based services in 2000? Mobile phone users will merrily walk down the street as their mobile phone beckons them in to the nearest boutique or café with a well-timed ad. The scenario sounded nice…until you actually thought about it for more than two seconds.
Traveling in Europe and East Asia at the beginning of the year, I acutely felt the begging need of a location-based, customer-initiated, service to give me context-and-texture for where and when I was.
I work as a visual thinker; I can’t draw or paint, but I have worked as a pseudo-Producer on projects with real, actual, talented artists.
The visual part of my memory and work processes means that I can “look” with my mind’s eye simultaneously at both the macro- and micro-levels of problems and solutions. Visual thinking may have come from my grandfather, an architect and artist.
So I get strong, even visceral reactions to architecturally-sculpted forms, and their (digital) media representations; seeing this go by on flickr made me reach for an image I clipped from my cousins’ portfolio:
They say
We thought of the Tin Alley facade as a hedgerow – an urban edge of artificial landscape.
I “feel” it more like a futuristic-retro anachronistic “funky workplace design”; translation: what people in the future might think that we of the present thought a retrospective of today might look like. It works, in an R-and-D/University Research building context, as well as a design and layout for a small media company.
The great thing about opinions on architecture?
Everyone has one, and they’re all different.
To simplify invoicing, I had a few choices to pick from when I restructured Crixa some years ago:
While I aspired towards #2, Crixa ended up actually only doing #3.
2006 was to be different: I switched to FreshBooks (referral link) and haven’t looked back.
They have also experienced a variant of unintended use cases in their discussion fora: the Structure Makes It Worse use-case.
“I’m all in. You diversify the categories too much and there is no center of mass for everyone to hang and talk about issues, they end up using their time jumping back and forth and leave without adding anything to the discussion. Let’s do it.”
This type of issue is what convinced me to make gkoya post categories on the fly, and reshape/reform them as usage changes.
(gkoya/Crixa has no affiliation to FreshBooks, except as a satisfied customer)
Dion Hinchcliffe‘s diagram somewhat resembles a cross-section of an infection, and perhaps rightly so.
While I dislike the “Seven Habits Of…” angle/meme of the article, I did like his checklist, despite (in my opinion) the misuse of “leveraging” for “lever” or indeed the simple “exploit”:
If you consider unintended use cases, it’s possible that the “inspired users” might create the social community themselves; cf. the critique of the World of Warcraft Social Network.
