I'm worth my weight in content as a digital marketer, writer/editor, misanthropic socialite and self-proclaimed Facebook statustician.
I work as an account supervisor at Twist Image in Montreal, where I PM digital projects of all shapes and sizes.
In my spare time I contribute my monthly Digital Drama Queen column to The Charlebois Post and am the proud co-organizer of the Montreal Girl Geeks. Read more about me »
The fight for funding to superimpose the digital paradign onto print continues! Mitch Joel, of Montreal marketing agency Twist Image, unleashed this gem on his blog. This time the offenders are at Stanford, where they are mapping out communications between 18th century writers (presumably in a bid to convince Voltaire to join Twitter posthumously) using very pretty colours, delivering epic screensavers that still manage to bore your socks off.
The “dots” or “letters,” do move rather nicely through the lines or “communication channels,” and “principal investigator” is a pretty kick-ass title for Edelstein, I must say.
Said the world, “wasn’t it content we crowned king?” Well, turning content into dots makes us focus on the really important thing, here: writers of the past had friends, apparently. And in some cases, they even had more than one. And hey, with Twitter rebranding their offering as Information Networking, perhaps we will stop caring about either the medium or the message, and start focusing on the network. At the very least, this Stanford venture has the kind of “enduring” appeal of such Facebook apps as Friend Wheel, billed as a “Wheely Good Friend Visualiser.”
Considering this got a green light, things are looking up for me to receive funding for my upcoming project, “Early Modern Marital Dynamics: It’s Complicated – The Tweeting of the Shrew” in which I plot the relationship statuses of major Jacobean and Elizabethan figures over time using a kind of Ur-Facebook made by carving out of the remains of Bebo.
By now, even if you live alone on a small unnetworked island in the Caribbean, you’ve probably heard about yesterday’s breast cancer social marketing campaign that had women (and a few men, thanks lads!) posting the colour of their bra (or in some cases, the lack thereof).
Bras of "Many" Colours (runway photo by Shattered Image Photography)
Millions whimsically played along, while a few detractors grumbled in the corner. Then, there was the usual round of aftershockers who (perhaps because they missed out on the first-round fun) posted socially aware messages in lieu of hues (donate here, post this instead, breastfeeding is good, etc.) Some criticized the campaign for deliberately locking men out of the fun (and perpetuating the incorrect assumption that only ladies get breast cancer), and many cultivated semi-mock outrage over the triviality of the campaign. What’s the point? How does this help? Right! Stop that, it’s silly. Very silly indeed.
Well, as we’re all trying to out-goose each other, I’d like to add my own ridiculous complaint to the mix:
What is up with the poor selection of bras on the market?
‘Black, blue, pink, red, beige, white and none,’ read the statuses in my feed…
What, no puce? No battleship grey, Bondi blue, burnt umber, goldenrod, vermillion or wallflower? It’s enough to make a girl want to burn the darn thing.
Do I fault the imaginations of women the world over or should I start sending letters to Victoria’s Secret? They should take a cue from cosmetics companies (now there is an industry clearly in possession of cutting edge synonym technology).
Social Investigation
Clearly, getting women to mention their unmentionables was a much-needed inquiry into the sad state of affairs that is the average lingerie line-up. All this cunningly disguised as an awareness campaign for… I forget.
But at least we can trust whoever got the ball rolling to take action: we’ve done our part, now lobby those retail giants into a greater spectrum of colours in their palettes!
One of the only good things about being stuck in two airports and a plane this holiday season, was that I got to read the current issue of Wired cover to cover in one sitting (in addition to completing many crosswords, notes on my content plan for this blog, listening to music, and staring intently at the boarding gate and every agent daring to man it). In particular, I enjoyed a lovely nostalgia piece by Scott Brown on Homestar Runner.
As I twiddled my thumbs in a seat by the gate and slowly dozed off into my bundled-up down jacket, it occurred to me that the end of 2009 has brought about more cumulative net nostalgia than I’ve ever experienced.
The World Wide Wonder Years
XKCD's One-day Memorial Honouring Geocities
Holding hands and skipping down memory lane with the collective web unconscious started for me in October, with Yahoo shutting Geocities down, and the fitting xkcd tribute to the free site building and hosting service that so very many of my generation (myself included) used to launch a maiden voyage on the ol’ Information Superhighway.
Happy Birthday, Dear Internet!
Just three days later the last of a seemingly endless string of 40th anniversary landmarks for the internet was celebrated, with the microblogosphere all humming “Happy Birthday” and a lovely interview with Leonard Kleinrock on CNN. In it, Kleinrock perpetuates a sweet bit of mythopoeia that magically transforms the first word sent via network from the rather mundane “log” to “lo” (of “…and behold” fame.) He gets away with it because, as this hilarious classic CBC clip of the 80s/90s reminds us, “Internet” is pretty amazing.
Blasts from the UI Past
On the same day as Uranium Interactive posted this adorable flashback Christmas card (note to unilingual readers: it’s in French, but you will get it, and it’s well worth the click), The Onion releases the following video, a glorious piece of web jetsam that hyperlinked its way across the series of tubes at an astonishing rate (if my feeds are anything to go by…)
Along with losing Geocities, a whole slew of sites became fodder for the Wayback machine in 2009. As sites have competed for online survival of the fittest, it’s amazing how much people get attached to a certain UI or look & feel. There’s something so visceral about interactive media that takes nostalgia and resistance to change to a new level (just look at the complaints in your feed the next time Facebook tweaks its UI or rolls out a new feature).
Put on The Neverending Story and I’ll get misty eyed, but load up Super Mario 3 on a DS and there’s nothing like finding that first warp whistle… With online experiences, the stickiest sites of yesteryear hold such fond memories because the joys of using, frequenting and interacting with them are part of a slowly fragmenting and shifting experience: navigating a site in its native environment.
Boulevard of Broken Memes
Content is now broken down and cast adrift as digital flotsam on the high seas of blogs, social media, apps, aggregators, etc. The sites we interact with for hours on end are reducing to a core (Facebook, Twitter, Readers, News sites, Google, etc.), many of which are becoming “too big to fail” (but like AIG, it doesn’t guarantee they won’t be the next MySpace). And as they homogenize, the UI differences, quirks and design elements that distinguished older sites from one another are no longer as disparate. While the semantic web is still a while a way, I think the 3.0 shift will eventually have us remembering Web 2.0 more holistically than we recall individual 1.0 sites now.
Pining for the Adored
So what makes me nostalgic? Well, there are so many sites and software, and so little time to write. So I’ll save some of them for a new day. But for now, I’d have to say that hearing the ICQ foghorn or uh-oh! message alert takes me right back to the days when a shrill squeal from your modem was the happy sound of successfully launching a new mission in cyberspace…
Of course, considering it’s an opt-in, global survey, last year’s results are rather skewed (respondents are heavy on the male developer side, for example). But over time, this project can only help us better understand the differences in approach, corporate structure and hiring practices for web-related fields across the world, so it’s in our best interests to spread the word across digital disciplines and industries.
More data will make this survey a more accurate representation of the people who make websites (or those who consult/write/engineer to make them that much more awesome). So if that’s what you do, whether you’re a writer, developer, PM, designer, consultant or jack/jill-of-all-web-trades you should take five minutes to fill it out.
