But yesterday’s article by The Guardian calls Gaga’s success “hard work” while Adele’s hits appear effortless.
It was the feeling that she delivered great music so easily. These days the results might still be exciting, but it all looks a bit like hard work.
Music is only hard work when you make songs with synched marketing in mind: the dancing, the story, the clothes, and Gaga’s speciality, the weirdness.
Contrast that perfection with Adele’s focus on getting the music right first with delicate songwriting and harmony.
In music, ‘keep it simple’ and ‘stick to the fundamentals’ are old adages that ring true. Even Kanye silences his entertainment side and mums his social network activity when producing.
Pinterest focuses on one thing only, images. Simplicity like Instagram. Tumblr allows posts on text, quotes, pictures, video, link, chat, and audio.
“Repin” conjures quickness. Publish, boom, we feel like contributors. ”Reblog” sounds lengthy. Internet denizens have 3 second attention spans.
Pinterest is a Facebook Timeline app which means your pins show in the real time ticker. Log into Facebook, you can’t miss your friends’ pins. Tumblr awaits.
Pinterest is searchable. Tumblr search is confused by the plethora of mixed media content and too many tags. Again, simplicity.
Pinterest users all have the same looking template. Like Facebook. Tumblr has 1000+ designs to choose from including create your own.
Pinterest is a girl’s world. Tumblr is for “Teebowing.”
Photos are more engaging pieces of content than video.
Photos tell a thousand words and take no more than three seconds to like.
Video still requires attention and is stuck in the weird world of flash and HTML 5.
Most Internet videos you’re willing to watch are professionally made. Most amateur videos go unseen unless they’re viral or shared by someone in your social network.
Sound
Siri
Siri
Siri
Siri
Electronic devices will be voice controlled in a couple years. People will get used to talking again.
The reemergence of sound plus the ever growing popularity of filtered photos creates a whole new space for audience engagement.
After all, isn’t video just a fast aggregation of photos and sound?
The abundance of information across blogs, forums, and social networks will influence the Chinese to invent all kinds of stuff. Many Chinese aspire to be the next Steve Jobs.
China is a land of contradictions, arguably more ‘exceptional’ than the United States.
“Siri is the beginning of a huge transformation in how we interact with banks, insurance companies, retail stores, health care providers, information retrieval services and product services.”
Booking a restaurant table, hotel room, ordering a pizza, or taking a quick note and sending a hands free emergency email will all be voice controlled. Glad to be speaking again.
Never mind the plot, it looks like the Indonesian concept of Sleepless In Seattle.
Except the relationship happens over Twitter instead of AOL.
Fortunately, Twitter is not AOL nor is it a date site although one can see obvious flirt replies in the stream. Note you need to follow both people to notice it.
More important about the movie is Twitter’s international growth. Jack Dorsey announced a Twitter office in Munich this week.
With the 3rd largest Twitter market, he should think about Jakarta next.
We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.
The first thing that comes to mind, other than the irony and timing of this just after SOPA, is Nike Town and Amazon.
Nike Town uses a mail shoot to transfer shoes from the stock room upstairs to the customer. Amazon ships everything in one day. Combine these concepts with Pirate Bay’s fantasy and imagine the world’s best products transferred to you in minutes, or moments. Returns would also be instantaneous.
The only way I can see this happening right now is if a tunnel is built underground alongside the Internet cords. Every tunnel connects houses and retailers throughout the world. Any ordered item can be picked up at a nearby portal, even a coffee shop. Physibles creates happiness for customers and fat margins for retailers.
Almost impossible to foresee but nobody thought we could fly either.
“…feels to many like an exercise in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales in a minor key.”
Amazing things happen when you change the platform.
Instead of a structured term paper, tell students to write an extensive blog post or use the new iBooks Author software to create an interactive report.
When Pages and Keynote came out, I was 5x more excited to build presentations rather than using Word and Keynote. I couldn’t wait to show my understanding through mixed media, a combination of diagrams and pictures that augmented text.
The trick to reversing rote education is using the latest technology tools to galvanize creation. Make the students feel like they’re painting.
Schools need to make the classroom experience interactive too. Use social media to allow students to leave classroom feedback or provide real time comments. Encourage the quiet kids to ask questions and tag others to answer. Post anonymously to the whole class.
We hear it all the time, people don’t know what they want unless they’re faced with scarcity or educated on all the choices.
But there’s two problems with this assumption.
There’s no way for someone to be happy with a product made for the masses and there’s no way for someone to be happy if the array of product is hard to search.
The Internet breaks interests into clusters. Any reader or music shopper can log onto Amazon and break down a generic search like “Japanese” into sub categories “comics” and then “animals” until they find exactly what they’re looking for.
Books > Japanese > Comics > Animals
But consumers also have the option of searching books by “wisdom of crowds” in the most popular books section. The retailer can influence purchasing behavior too with recommended titles. By limiting selection, they increase profits.
From a consumer perspective, choice is turned off or on based on how choosy we want to be. The more knowledge or familiarity of a product makes our checkout easy, given a reasonable price. Product ignorance or carelessness turns people into marketing targets for endcaps.
The online and physical store worlds benefit from both the long-tail and universal ways of selling.
P.S. – Social influence makes choice even more elastic. Friends can deteremine your wish lists.
Kodak owned photography like Google owns search. But Kodak’s myopia over digital cameras and mobile phone led it into bankruptcy.
Film today is like the vinyl of past, tangible stuff you see at garage sales and stores like Urban Outfitters that sell trendy nostalgia.
Most people will never buy a camera again. They’d rather have a Smartphone with an 8-megapixel camera and the ability to augment their photos with filters and share them instantly with the world.
Everyone is a photographer. Just as everyone now is an author or a musician.
We create stories now, timelines, and live in Twitter moments.
-Scarcity before 2000 just meant another TV show, book, or album had to be decent to be paid for or viewed
-Consumers are not couch potatoes but want to create and share
-1998 allowed the copyright owners to put device destroying technology on their content. Ironically, the government did not threaten the mixtape which forms the basis of the Internet sharing culture
-SOPA and PIPA are “nuclear,” an attempt to destroy the people’s Internet
-The content owners want us back on the couch, completely passive and unsocial
I always wanted to make electronic music and hip hop beats. GarageBand made this possible. I released one album and loads of B sides of studio quality music. Cost: $0.
I’ve always wanted to publish a professional looking book. iBooks Author makes this possible. I will publish my first interactive book this year, combining imagery, hyperlinks, and diagrams created through Pages. Cost: $0.
Apple gets rid of costly impediments and instead empowers us to create. We have no more excuses, a subtle reminder to my musicians and authors out there who still haven’t shipped yet.
The best solution for SOPA is to make everything available. Give people an easy, Internet friendly and cheap way to buy content and they will.
Otherwise, people will simply find what they want via a Twitter link or Google search and consume it for free.
You can’t fight free.
The music industry learned the hard way. The RIAA’s lawsuits and scare tactics only encouraged more innovation of piracy.
But we also saw startups bridge the gap. Spotify is a music service that feels free and pays the copyright owners. Ironically, it started with unlicensed content.
Spotify never would have happened if SOPA passed today. The US government would’ve smashed it.
Quora added the follow button, a quick and easy way to get users to follow you on Quora without leaving your website. It’s an obvious copy of the Twitter follow button.
Quora also added boards (an obvious copy of Pinterest) just last week.
There’s no shame in emulation. All the social networks steal concepts from each other and rebrand them, just like every other business. The difference maker is marketing and unique product.
For Quora, that unique product is a large community of know how. Instead of looking up info from blogs and Wikipedia, Quora users ask a question and get the insight of someone who’s been there and done that. Experience is the best research.
Quora users also get votes for best answers and points for answer requests. I received 1 vote and 18 points for answering a question today about managing blog over consumption.
As far as I can tell, Quora is the only social knowledge base out there made for a community of curious people. If you want a crowd response, Google it. If you want a specific answer deeply experienced or researched, use Quora. To each his own.
“There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place”.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
Prescient, a man that saw the intersection of freedom and technology.
I retook a typing exam in elementary school because I couldn’t memorize the location of the keys.
I had the same learning curve with the Internet. It took me a bit to figure out that the “Enter” button drove me to NBA.com.
Fast forward 15 years to the Smartphone/Tablet era. Internet access and the keyboard are innate tools. It’s writing with a pen/pencil that must be learned.
Since typing is like walking, schools today should teach coding. I started to learn coding this week through Codeacademy, a free weekly course.
Coding is the creative behind the content on the Internet, kind of like the back of the fence. No one sees it but it has to be perfectly painted to be appreciated. And to work.
I just want a basic understanding of coding. If I’m good enough and passionate about it I’ll build websites and apps.
I email archive special retweets from people I admire.
My most recent Retweets came from a favorite author, Hugh McLeod. Another retweet came from one of my favorite Arsenal players, Alex Song. I also get retweets from lesser known but significant technology VCs like Semil Shah.
These retweets made me feel like a kid again.
When people you admire give you attention, whether it’s in real life or on Twitter, it’s really a special moment.
I had a chat with a Google+ employee yesterday. He’s 6 months on the job and helping onboard big brands.
Instead of giving him feedback on Google+ I gave him some advice.
Keep it simple. MySpace lost users because of page clutter while Facebook was the clean alternative. Facebook is now the one under the microscope. If there’s one thing Facebook is doing wrong, it’s the simplicity of design on the browser and in the app experience. The Timeline is a great idea designed bad, a mixture of an out of the box banner head from WordPress 3.3 combined with an Effector Tumblr post theme. The app is only useful for the newsfeed, otherwise it’s heavy and buggy.
Facebook on Flipboard is where Facebook needs to be for mobile and iPad usability. Path is where Facebook needs to be in design, which is why Facebook had to acquire the expert Gowalla team. On top of all this is the never ending mass confusion over public sharing given Facebook’s private origin. If Facebook wants its users to go public to the world now with status updates, they’ll just Tweet instead. Once private, stay private or the users will become dubious and leave.
Smarter TV This is where Google will catch up with Facebook in terms of users. Although we’ve been distracted smaller devices, TV is still the hub for our entertainment needs. You won’t be watching Tebow play this weekend on your computer or mobile. You will make the effort to see it on a bigger screen, and watch the game with friends. With Google TV, imagine watching the game with buddies through a Google+ Hangout. Next year be prepared to watch football games all through Google products: Google TV, Google Android app, and a Google phone as the remote.
TV Check Ins I restrained from saying this but if Google is rigging its search results with Google+ promos then why not make its social network the default check in for TV. Get Glue just got more funding in anticipation of the huge opportunity to marry social and real-time tv. Google+ could smash it.
Google+ is actually benefitting from coming late to the social game. Early adopters understand it as a solve between Twitter and Facebook or public and private. Having the ability to mass market on TV is also a huge plus for Google (no pun intended). Google is finally taking social networking seriously.
