Check out the new Olympic medals for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic games:

http://www.cbc.ca/sports/story/2009/10/15/bc-vancouver-olympic-medal-design.html

Some amazing new designs.  They played with many aspects – including shape (squarish), depth contour (wavy), and design (abstract).

Very cool.

Bruce

I had a super-short notice radio interview on social media today – the audio is below. Ironic the second oldest broadcast format talking about the latest in broadcast tech..

Bruce

A video by David Ogilvy converging the worlds of direct marketing and advertising = the world of internet advertising. Which side of the “chasm” are you on?

An interesting thought piece from Michael Dila of Torch (see Slideshare presentation below).

What to get from this — no real actions to take away other being a brain stimulant.. which is worth a lot – I recommend going through the slides. It takes 5 minutes.

I also like the presentation from visual communication stand-point – great use of images to support the points. You can pretty much guess what it said on most of the slides.

Enjoy!

http://www.slideshare.net/madzorro/innovation-parkour-at-ia-summit-09

Michael Phelps gets caught smoking pot, the judge doesn’t press the case and drops it. The only sponsor who dropped Phelps was Kellogs. Good PR move? Maybe in a 1.0 world. No less than 11 websites were setup instantly supporting Phelps and calling for a boycott – social media knocked out Kellogs.

What lesson to take from this? Two:

1. Understand the risk – what’s bigger, pot or a guy who’s a hero to millions, a dedicated athlete, symbol of American pride, and winner of 8 (EIGHT) Olympic gold medals?

2. Understand your audience – are they the kind of people to connect closer to their idols when they do something that humanizes them (for example, make a mistake)?

The backlash against Phelps’ critics is amazing – and in today’s self-publishing, easy-to-access soapbox that can reach millions instantly – you have to be very very careful which side you are on.

What’s interesting is that “Web 2.0” connects directly to society’s true sentiment by accessing individual commentary.

So understand your audience and balance the risk with this insight to ensure you find yourself on the winning side of the marketing game.

Wow, every industry is getting into the Web 2.0 game, even up and coming directors/filmographers/movie makers/other names for these people.

This website offers you to connect with other industry insiders and manage your movie production project:

http://www.reelclever.com/

They also have a facebook page with nearly 1,500 fans. Nice job Reel Clever on bringing together a niche group of people. Not sure what your business model is, but hey, it’s a Web 2.0 world, I’m sure you’ll come up with a money making schema after you’ve built a huge (niche) audience..

I was intruiged by a recent post by Jeremiah at the Web-Strategist.com about how the search box in a browser is circumventing the address field. I read this after sitting with a client today and discussing their mamoth 3.2 million page website. Third client actually, the first one had 100,000 pages, and second one has about 1,000 pages. How do you organize all that content?!

So here is an idea i’ve been toying with for a while. A colleague at Jufa Intermedia and I drew it out on a whiteboard over lunch one day. Should we develop it?

The idea is developing a CMS that treats pages as stand-alone pieces of micro-content. Here is the gambit: the navigation structure is dynamically created, and the pages are easy to find using search tools. So you can both explore and/or search for specific elements. If you don’t know what you want but know the topic you explore, and if you do know exactly what you want you can narrow your search down rapidly. But wait, there’s more…

People don’t usually consume whole websites, they use parts of it at any given moment of need. Search boxes are the second most used navigation element within most sites, yet most site-specific search functions… well, frankly suck.

One of the biggest problems client’s have is
how they will structure their IA:

copy the organization’s operational structure

or

discover how the user consumes the information provided.

The answer is sort of obvious from an effective marketing stand-point – you design for the user. But it’s not that simple, because in larger organizations, the workflow of how content is published does not usually correspond to how the world consumes that information. So if you can’t create good content, then your “effective” user experience is for naught.

So instead of publishing to an area that you are responsible for maintaining, you simply publish for various categories (to seed the choice), you tag it and you tell it who your intended audience is from pre-loaded user-profiles. So you don’t publish to a part of the site, you publish to the TYPE of person you want to read the content.

The CMS will dynamically generate menus based on traffic patterns for each pre-determined user type.

It will guess at what a particular user is looking for based on what the user is looking at and how long they spend looking at it. That’s the first part. Second, is that each page must standalone. So you publish a page so it can be found using an onsite search engine. You can categorize and tag, as you may a blog entry. So instead of a site of pages linked together through a man-made and stagnant architecture, you effectively create a catalog of the content.

Imagine surfing a large site
(1,000+ pages) like you would looking for a book on Amazon.

You have recommendations based on previous experience, you have recommendations based on others experience, you have categories you can browse, and you have simple and advanced search functions for narrowing your results. If the content contains “web 2.0″ user-generated features such as comments, ratings, etc. then they can be integrated into the CMS as well, by helping rank search results, and offering new navigations methods.

So, any VC’s out there want to fund this project?

Bruce

Here’s a great quote that came to me from a GLG newsletter:

In less than 5,000 days, the Web has gone from the linking of a few computers in a lab to satellite images of the earth at our fingertips. Today, the Web has 100 billion clicks and 55 trillion links and carries 2 million e-mails per second. There are 1 billion PC chips in use, 65 billion phone calls made per year, and 600 billion RFID tags being used. Every second, we move the equivalent of half the Library of Congress across the Web. All that in less than 5,000 days.

So what will the next 5,000 days bring?

In the same inbox I just received an invitation by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle for the Web 2.0 Summit taking place in San Francisco Nov 5-7th. So what’s next indeed..!? Hopefully I’ll find out at the Summit and share it with you.

Bruce

Intranets, which are basically employee-only websites, can be a key utility in how today’s knowledge workers operate. Not very many companies use Intranets well. Some have integrated basic features and applications such as boardroom booking and connecting to HR tools (vacation requests, benefits, etc), fewer have forums and surveys for polling feedback, and fewer still have created venues for capturing corporate knowledge and project spaces where teams can collaborate together.

Enter Web 2.0.

One of the most amazing things that Web 2.0 technology has done is focus on user-centered design – making it easy for a lay-person to use technology effectively. There is now an incredible array of solutions available which are designed to be both versatile and easy to use.

Versatile? They are either open source and full of APIs to connect up to all sorts of other systems (single sign-on, user information, etc).

We’re heralding the age of corporate software productivity tools that are no longer restricted to desk-top applications. Seems obvious doesn’t it? If so, why can’t most organizations figure it out…

It’s fairly straightforward – you see the the architecture, models, and technology exist in the Web 2.0 space. Web 2.0 has created an “architecture of participation”, allowing individuals to both create and communicate with each other under an organizational umbrella. (ex. Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, etc).

However most Web 2.0 has been externally focused. Most organizations are still trying to figure this piece out – how to engage with their external audiences in this new interconnected world.

Well, the the same problem exists internally for every organization – Web 2.0 defines the technology and capability of enhanced collaboration – but how to use it internally?

The foundation exists, so to build onto this architecture of participation requires a CULTURE of participation. This is the missing component. Business 2.0 has not yet quite caught up with Web 2.0.

Enhanced communication + productivity tools + social connection — requires —> a culture of participation

Web 2.0 is about being collaborative, consultative, and feedback driven. That is the kind of work environment business needs to evolve to. I wonder what this means to the traditional hierarchies, management layers, and divisional organizational charts that exist in every business today.

I always thought the term “divisions” was well used… divisive and separate – can org-charts dissolve? Horizontally across divisions or vertically down management layers? Or both?

I wonder what business 2.0 will look like…

My brother, a friend and I started a bamboo t-shirt company recently as a hobby. The premise is simple – each t-shirt comes with “a month of guilt free (carbon-free!) living” in the form of carbon off-sets (Carbon Karma!) financed through the profits of the t-shirt. The site is still in its infancy. The store is live, but the brand and education website around the sea-saw of reduction and offset is in the works and launching soon.

“Sea-saw reduction/offset” – by this I mean if you work on both reducing your carbon footprint AND off-setting the stuff you can’t or don’t want to reduce by paying/building/planting something that removes carbon from the atomosphere, you’re actually accelerating environmental success. Cause let’s just be honest… no one is going to give up all carbon-generating aspects of life just ’cause the world is dying. So the point of Mad Monkey bamboo t-shirts is to make it easy to be cool and be green.

This is a for-profit company. I endorse the theory that environmental causes are accelerated if they have commercial viability. If there is a profit centre in it, investment money will flow. If investment money flows, innovation and consumer adoption will accelerate. You want to speed up the formula? Focus on innovative for-profit investment-backed start-ups.

mymadmonkey.com

Buy a t-shirt!