Ooooh. We love visualization. It is, after all, one of the six mega trends* we encourage our clients to live by. As you might expect, we spend a fair amount of time on ManyEyes.
ManyEyes allows the entire Internet to upload all kinds of data and turn it into beautiful, elegant and sometimes surprisingly insightful pattern pictures. Lots of different kinds of patterns available to you as well and all from our friends at IBM. ManyEyes goes one step beyond great visualizations turning them into social media through its rating and discussion features. The home page at ManyEyes has an up-to-the-minute gallery of visualizations – check them out.
We encourage you to start thinking about how to visualize your stuff – make it more meaningful and you might even surprise yourself about the insight you might see inside your data. So, to help you get your visualization ideas flowing, here are a few other favorite visualization tools.
Newsmap – visualizing the Google news aggregator.
Amaztype – a typographic visual search of Amazon
We Feel Fine – a somewhat addictive set of visualizations of feelings from all over the web.
Have tool. Will visualize.
*all six mega trends are: connectivity, personalization, mobility, sharable media, visualization, virtualization.
MTV has clearly elevated the concept of socializing while watching television to an artfully modern parlor game. It’s called Backchannel.
Here’s the nutshell. Micro-blog funny or snarky comments in real time with others online while watching The Hills on MTV (you probably already do that). To play, log into a specialized MTV Backchannel game “chat room” while you are tuned into the tv show. Viewers make comments (called tags) about what is happening in the show to the 100 other people or so in that room. Other people click on the comments floating around that they like - a la an arcade game. Players get points as both a clicker and tagger with the goal of becoming a Backchannel superstar. It is all timed and limited pretty ingeniously so the tagging and clicking isn’t overwhelming. It’s way more compelling than it might sound, trust me.
The commenting goes on right through the commercials – yes, I hear the ad-people gears turning on the potential advertising metrics on that one…. Advertisers, are you ready to hear what people think of you?
Social media concepts personified. MTV connects the audience to each other (one of our well-worn mantras here), and makes their TV shows interactive, more fun and socially powered. But just think about the insight MTV is gathering from the audience on the content of the show – not to mention a new value they can offer their advertisers.
MTV has mashed up TV with Twitter with gaming with social networking – they’ve done equally interesting things with virtual worlds, but that's another story.
I tell you. MTV are ones to follow (even if their programming may not always be).
W00t! I got one!! That 100,000-of-a-kind 75th anniversary October Esquire Magazine issue with the very modern e-ink cover. It’s blinking at me now - 2 ½ x 4 1/4 inches of pure modern media.
Esquire teamed up with E-Ink (of Amazon Kindle fame) to create the first ever e-paper magazine cover as a forward look into the future of print (no backward glances in this birthday suit).
The cover has been rumored for a while, and Hearst Corp. (Esquire’s parent) has been working with E-Ink for over two years to make it a reality.
The goal here is making advertising sing – well, at least bling.
Ford Motors defrayed much of the R&D cost, paying a nice premium to have its first-of-a-kind animated E-Ink ad placed on the inside cover. Esquire’s publishers believe this tiny animated billboard on every page is the future (and salvation) for print media advertising. It’s inevitable that as the technology sophisticates e-ink ads – and print content in general - will too. We happen to think the potential – and Esquire’s experiment - is pretty modernly cool.
The cover and Ford’s ad are made up of microchips, batteries and microcapsules thinner than a human hair and covered with a flexible plastic. The microcapsules contain black and white pigments that, when charged, work together to create the images. The batteries should keep the cover blinging for at least three months, but the juice could last as long as six.
We’ll definitely see more of this from Hearst since they have a one-year exclusive from E-Ink – not to mention that Hearst Interactive Media also owns a stake in E-Ink (modern move there, Hearst!).
Once it stops blinging for us, we’ll be putting it into our modern media archives.
And to the 99,999 other lucky Oct. Esquire owners, file this one away. You never know, it might be worth something on eBay someday. If you must toss it, Esquire suggests how to recycle it.
To see what the cover looks like see this video.
To get inside the cover, see Popular Science article, Hacking the Esquire E-ink Cover.
Photo credit – Folio Magazine
Wine tasting together on Twitter – that’s Twitter Taste Live!
Okay, first you need to know about Twitter if you don’t already. In a blurb, it is a social network site that gives you 140 characters to answer the question: “What are you doing?” You can “follow” other people and get their updates. People have micro conversations. Anyone can tune in to the conversation. That’s it. Simple and modernly powerful.
Yeah, well, you gotta use it to really get it…but once you do….
Bin Ends Wine is using Twitter to hold wine tastings. A brilliantly modern marketing technique, if you must know. Here is how it works.
You sign up for Twitter, you “follow” Bin Ends Wine (search for: “binendswine” on Twitter), and you order the wines from Bin Ends Wine that will be tasted and discussed the night of the tasting. Wine arrives. You grab a bottle and a laptop (a wine glass might be good too) and Twitter away as you join in on the conversation with international wine experts on the live stream.
For you it is wine, laptop and tweets. But here’s a peek into last week’s event from the Bin Ends Wines end:
"Twitter Taste LIVE took over the “Twitterverse” once again last night to taste the wines of Hugel et Fils along with Etienne Hugel “tweeting” from his home in Alsace and countless bloggers around the world.
My head is pounding and my eye’s are adjusting from staring at three PC screens, holding a skype call to Alsace, IM’ing with our web guy, holding an in-store tasting, streaming live and of course tweeting all at the same time, but I can say that the event last night was amazing!"
We’re not surprised Bin Ends is up-to-the-modern-moment. They’ve been going “wine 2.0” all over the Internet with their blogging and podcasting and video-ing and Flickring and Del.icio.using since 2004.
Check out Bin Ends Wine’s blog and winecast, join in on Twitter Taste Live and get some tweet ideas of your own.
Sign me up!!
Advertising really gets a bad rap in today’s “social” mediasphere. Fact is, we consumers need it, and we want it – especially those ads from our very own in-town local merchants who generally offer us unique products or better yet, a shopping experience that is person-person social while keeping us close to home and eco-friendly.
Problem is those ads are generally dead trees in our mailbox or on our doorstep – and we wind up sending it back into the recycling loop, which inevitably increases our carbon footprint anyway which doesn’t help the planet….
Pubeco has a model I’m totally up for. Members of the Pubeco service can get all their full-color, personality-included local ads and promotional flyers online – plus they can manage personalized RSS feeds for their local businesses, selecting and searching by categories of interest.
Social networking features allow customers to add merchants as favorites or trusted connections, which serve to build the merchants’ business relationships as well as their “socially networked” reputation within the community. Pubeco has a Facebook page as well.
Pubeco users put a sticker on their mailbox that refuses advertising: “ No advertising, I look on the Internet. I protect my planet.”
But there’s more! Members earn points for visiting the site and the points are converted into grants to eco-friendly causes.
Pubeco is a project launched last February throughout France by Sustainable Development Multimedia. Their mission: “More promotions, less pollution.” We say: Modern media well executed and very “socially” responsible.
Now, anyone know of such a service in the U.S.?
Okay. We totally believe everything is media, but this one just Tickled Our Fancy:
a digital skin tattoo that acts as an interface for your mobile phone. While it is at, it also monitors your blood sugar levels and communicates with any ordinary Bluetooth device you happen to be near – and ooooh - it’s powered by a “blood fuel cell” - the oxygen and glucose in your body.
Among many amazing entries in the Green Design contest, this digital tattoo interface is noteworthy and oh so modern media-ish.
It operates with a Bluetooth implant below the skin that activates a matrix of pixels tattooed on the skin – for mundane things like calling or texting. When activated the “ink” lights up on the skin displaying the mobile phone’s digital display – and it goes away when not in use. The implant is a “touch screen” device, so pressing on the skin “display” commands the device. The ink is actually a matrix of microscopic spheres each filled with a material that changes from clear to black when a field in the matrix is turned on.
Your in-bod Bluetooth device communicates, as usual with the ordinary wireless world or any other sci-fi inspired implanted device.
We love this description of the project (especially the pizza part). "It is always present, always on, but out of sight and non-obtrusive. It also continually monitors for many blood disorders, alerting the person of a health problem: A human version of the check engine light. Product styling is the latest and coolest downloaded display interface showing on any tattoo on the block. This product is waterproof and it is powered by pizza."
Cozi’s getting some big press these days.
Cozi is an oh-so-simple, but oh-so-happy-making family calendar done Web 2.0 style. It offers a family journal, lists, and reminder service and is a general keeper-and-organizer-of-family-details. Its user interface is a thing of pure beauty – and its ability to sync automatically with your calendar at work is simply brilliant. But, being able to call or text message to get my shopping list sent to my mobile phone – that’s music to our modern media ears!
Newspaper publisher, Gannett is feeling warm and cozi too. After launching a strategic partnership with Cozi in April to offer locally co-branded Cozies on three of its newspaper sites, Gannett has just announced a full-on investment as a minority stakeholder in Cozi.
Speculation is that Gannett will go modern by integrating Cozi into their newspapers’ Calendar listings. Since they also have a seat on the Cozi board in the deal, we’ll be seeing the Gannett Cozi modernness being promoted across Gannett’s print and online newspaper sites. Well, like this:
Two hundred forty year old Encyclopedia Brittanica is taking a big step by dipping their toe in the participative Web, otherwise known as “Web 2.0.” Starting this month they are inviting us to join in on a “collaboration” initiative among EB experts.
Now, before you go to thinking they have gone all wild and “Wikipedia” on us, not quite so. But it is a big step toward transparency about just who is behind the Britannica. EB is inviting their existing scholars and experts to participate in a new “community of scholars,” who will each have a profile where they can showcase all their work, including work outside of the Brittanica. EB will allow us regular folks to suggest changes to the experts’ work.
As a tip of the hat to readers (and a grand experiment in our eyes) they will allow readers to publish work in the commoners area, including articles, essays and multimedia presentations.
EB believes expert information is “collaborative, but not democratic” and that this approach will give everyone the best of both worlds: a more inclusive process while maintaining scholarly appeal.
Considering their age, we think the initiative is brilliant enough to award them a resoundingly modern rank of M+!
June is "Readers Going Mainstream" month over at This Old House. The name may indicate a bygone era comfort space, but the mag is going thoroughly modern and outside the comfort zone by temporarily renaming its June edition to "This Your House" signaling an issue entirely of content from its readers.
From One Room Wonders to Salvage, the issue is 100% about, by and from readers - they even voted on the magazine cover image.
Now, reader content in print magazines isn't 100% new - 8020 Publishing has brought us "you" magazines JPG and Everwhere on photography and travel, respectively, for a couple of years. 8020 believes magazines are great inspiration and the web has great content. A hybrid to warm our modern media hearts.
This Your House may be an experiment, but we suspect that for a TV-show-gone-print, reader content is will prove to be a high-value modern remodel.
Those aren’t call letters, it’s yet another take on moving radio from broadcast to a modern media. And with more than a billion java-enabled handsets sold last year, I’d say it’s a pretty smart move.
PM1 SMS, a service aimed at radio stations, turns handsets into marketing ma-chines.
Actually, I like it. It’s total modern media. It gives listeners new kinds of access to their music and moves advertising just a touch closer to where more of it should be - on-demand. But, more importantly, the revenue and purchasing models signal the move toward true mobile commerce and that advertising models are thinking modern while gaining mainstream traction.
 Listeners text a five-digit code to the radio station which triggers a plethora of expected choices - everything from artist information, wallpaper and alerts to downloading the ringtone, buying music on iTunes or grabbing concert tickets on the go. Of course there are the necessary polls, contest entry and feedback. But, listeners can also request certain radio content on-demand and use “text tags” to get advertiser information and special promotions (that would be Frame of Mind marketing) – and of course buy non-music products, all with their everywhere-I-go handset.
A key and unique feature is listeners set up an M-Wallet account with the radio station and purchases are charged against the credit card on file. Currently, almost all purchasing done via mobile phone (for U.S. audiences at least) is through mobile service provider. Let true m-commerce begin!
PM1 SMS differs from Nokia’s Visual Radio in that Visual Radio is primarily a “push” model which then allows some limited user response opportunities. PM1 SMS is listener-initiated, two-way, get-it-when—where-I-want-it radio.
Virgin Radio launch an SMS response service last year – so we’re not too surprised that Virgin Mobile is just one major customer signing on with PM1 SMS.
Good call!
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Ooooh. We love visualization. It is, after all, one of the six mega trends* we encourage our clients to live by. As you might expect, we spend a fair amount of time on ManyEyes. 
Newsmap – visualizing the Google news aggregator.
Amaztype – a typographic visual search of Amazon 
We Feel Fine – a somewhat addictive set of visualizations of feelings from all over the web.
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