Conference time! I’m at New Media Days in Copenhagen and we’re about to listen to Doc Searls talk. Should be good, his talk at Reboot was excellent but I hope he does something slightly different today.
If you’re here, come over and say hello. I’m the one not wearing a dress shirt (which narrows it down to about ten), but with a scarf and a Milkcrate Athletics t-shirt instead.
tags bloggar.se: new media days, nmd06, konferens, doc searls
I just finished watching Fight Club for the second time. Apart from being a good film, it raises the issue of consumption being the shackles of society. This would fit nicely along with my previous post on identity through non-ownership. That is, if all consumption leads to ownership – which of course it does not.
The consumption of material things differ from services or disposable items such as food or drink, through binding up money in the form of an object. You can happily spend anything from 25 to 55 Swedish crowns on a beer – but if you buy a brand object for 50 crowns, you find it hard to throw away. Even though you don’t need it, and don’t intend to use it. You lock your money into objects that create a mental weight that needs to be carried.
In order to avoid these objects and the anxiety that can be connected to them (old memories, bad decisions when choosing the product) , I’m implying that there will be a large increase in the consumption of services and disposable items instead. Food and drink are experiences that you carry with you in your memory, not on a shelf in your home. Therefor they stays in your mind as long as they are needed or wanted, and may come or go during your life depending on what triggers your memories. The experiences are free in your mind, and thus – you are also free.
Also, you can buy more of this freedom through consuming services that allow you to not do certain things. A popular example here in Sweden, connected to our recent shift in government, are maid services at home. Cleaning and general housekeeping, for instance. You purchase these services in order to expand your free time, and your freedom through that. The carpet is always clean, and the thought of it not being so doesn’t even enter your mind. I’m leaving the moral aspect of housemaids and the likes aside for the time being.
The more I think about it, the more I see people moving away from physical things and towards experiences instead. And in order to have these fantastic and memorable experiences – you need the knowledge and information that leads you there. This information on the other hand, can’t necessarily be bought. And at that moment, the value of information supersedes the value of money. This is new, and I reckon it’s a trend that should be watched very carefully. Read more about it in my previous post concerning The Netocrats by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist.
tags bloggar.se: identitet, informationalism, nätokrati, nätokraterna, fight club, ägandeskap, Ping Intressant.se
If there are any readers that happen to live in Jönköping (bit of a long shot, I admit) – come over to the IHH and say hello tomorrow (Thursday). I will be discussing the future of the internet together with a few very interesting names. But there will be plenty of time to talk to others as well.
Every now and then I accidentally press the folder in Bloglines, instead of a link. This means that all the unread posts open at the same time, and there is no way of cancelling it either (please fix this Mr Bloglines).
Anyway, every time I do this I have to go through a few hundred posts just to make sure that I don’t miss anything. I guess this is good in some sort of way, at least I get through it. Here’s a round up of a few links that I liked:
Get a group of people to answer questions with SMS. Should work really well on a local or hyper-local market.
How magazines have shifted to digital publishing – about time too, one might think.
Difficulties that newspapers face while building communites
GeoTagging for WordPress. Thanks!
Online Journalism Awards finalists – always interesting to see a few newcomers on the list.
Five rules for building a successful online community
Finally, the slightly old Startup Review of MySpace. Anyone working with the internet should have read this.
tags bloggar.se: bloglines, journalistik, communities, media
Or at least it’s better looking. Thanks Olof and Peter. If something looks a bit shifty, try and reloading the page. Everything doesn’t seem to follow through straight away.
London last weekend was a treat. I met three inspiring women that left my head spinning all through Sunday. I love this travelling life, it’s what keeps me on point I think. I’m already looking forward to going back even if Warsaw or something like that is probably up next.
Just a short post now – three sites that I saw and heard of in London:
Ocado
A Supermarket-service that delivers food and groceries from Waitrose to your home. If you try it, I recommend the fine Lincolnshire sausages. I wish I could get some of those here in Sweden.
Opodo
Seems to be the English equivalent to Travellink.se, the .com-address links to them both. Nothing special in my eyes. I searched for London – Hong Kong and found… nothing.
Carbon Neutral
This one sort of speaks for itself. I read several articles about this issue (about time too!) and I reckon this will be become big business everywhere pretty soon.
tags bloggar.se: ocado, opodo, carbonneutral, England, London
Copied from Good Old Tech:
We are looking for a freelance programmer who’s familiar with dojo & django and has a working knowledge of databases, PgSql in particular. A lack of formal education isn’t a problem, but a lack of experience in the form of professional or hobby projects is.
…and taking interns
If there are any Swedish students that are interested in doing their “exjobb” with us you are welcome to contact us with your project idea. Web projects using dojo && (django || turbogears || rails || equivalent framework) will be prioritized.
Send us an e-mail if you’re interested and we’ll take it from there.
technorati tags: work, hiring, django, dojo, job, sweden, malmö
Andra bloggar om: anställer, jobb, dojo, django, exjobb, sverige, malmö
Rob Curley is a strange man, no doubt about it. But he has a knack for seeing the obvious when it comes to newspaper-centred web development. After creating an award winning Mark Twain site, an online music calendar and now lately an extensive podcast library in Naples, Florida – the time has come. He’s going to the Washington Post. And so he should.
I visited him in Lawrence when I used to work for the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan. They sent me over together with Andreas Ekström to see if their success was something that we could learn from. It was, but still we didn’t do it. That’s another story though.
Back then, he told me that a lot of people said that he could never pull his sorts of sites off if they weren’t situated in really small towns. Washington should be a good challenge, but I’ve got no doubt in my mind that he will succeed.
When I heard he was in Sweden to talk I knew I had to hear him again. So we went to Örebro and met up Niklas Jonason from Citygate that was kind enough to let us come, even though we weren’t a newspaper in their network. I made a few notes that I’ll share with you below.
Curley listed six (well, seven actually) core new media strategies for success:
Hyper-local content – “So local we can’t print it. Because if we did, we’d run out of pages”
Hyper-local means local down to each block of houses. Curley spoke of journalism in two stages – small J and big J. This is small J, and it is not to be dismissed.
Database-driven coverage – Collected from from the government
Curleys team managed to collect vast amounts of data on a very local level. The price of every house in a specific area for example. And then all the prices of all the sales the last five years. That sort of thing.
Multimedia overkill – so much video/vr/podcast that people don’t go to TV-sites
TV on the internet is a threat. TV worked on TV, why wouldn’t it work on the net? YouTube proves this sufficiently well. The only reason that the TV-stations websites don’t rule the web is that they don’t do it well enough. But they probably will soon, and that’s why newspapers have to stay on point. And that’s why newspaper sites have to do everything that other media sites do as well – and more.
Embrace platform-independent delivery – “Send your content to anything that people want to use”
PSPs, iPods, Mp3s, Zune, computer – or what ever people could possibly use to get your content. Support all of them.
Dialogue, not a monologue – “Make it feel like it’s their website, not your website”
We all knew this one. If only more people acted on it….
Evergreen content – can also be done with historical perspective
Find the things that matter in your town/area.Then find which of them will last over time. Then go crazy and do everything you could possibly think of on that subject. History is easy, if it’s lasted this long it will probably last longer than that.
and then the final one – Internology – the art of getting (a hell of a lot of) interns to do (a hell of a lot of) work for almost no money.
That one speaks for itself. But it seemed to be the key of a lot of his projects. So go out there and get a lot of interns – right now!
tags bloggar.se: rob curley, lawrence.com, naplesnews.com, strategi, media, tidningar, citygate
As a follow up to my last post I thought I’d write about the trend that has interested me the most lately. The urge to own as little as possible, but at the same time have access to everything. This fits me the best at the moment.
Trend consultant Kristina Dryza (who I’ll be meeting for tea tomorrow!) wrote an insightful report on this issue. You should definitely read all of it, but before you do I’ve broken out a few key passages:
Ownership is all about attachment, dependency and possession. The impulse to possess leads us to develop habits of being attached to both people and things. By trying to possess, by mentally holding on, we live in fear. The temporary induces detachment, while ownership sustains attachment. It’s about mentally letting go – defining a new relationship with your external objects that will set you free.
[…]
Therefore, the usage of products, not their possession, is becoming increasingly more important. Owning objects binds us to the past and the future, while the joy of temporary is in the here and now, this moment.
[…]
If you own something, there’s always the potential to lose it, while if you own next to nothing, you won’t worry about ending up with nothing
Seen from this perspective, it is strange that anyone would want to own anything that has an instrumental use. A lot of people rent their apartment. I’m one of them, but why don’t we rent our clothes, computer or television as well? Price? Partly, but not entirely. I think the price and therefor the believed value of owning is assumed to be so much higher, and therefor some feel that they are losing out every time they pay rent instead of paying off a loan. Rent isn’t an investment. But is ownership?
Not necessarily. In strict economic terms, real estate and housing tends to be good investments, but they also tie you up in a lot of ways that people have learnt to accept. That you are supposed to live in one place, for instance. Once that is established it also makes sense to have your own place to stay. But if we break that connection, where does that leave us? For me, it’s a state of serenity. I can move freely between cities and countries without feeling that I should be anywhere.
I see this trend cross several generations. My parents lease their car, simply because they don’t want to worry about paying for expensive repairs or people scratching their car door in parking lots. It’s not important for them to own the car – what is important is that the car works, and that it’s there when they need it. Ownership is not required for these two factors.
What do you think? I’d love to hear some thoughts on this.
Buying physical things (clothes, cars, gadgets) as a part of creating your identity has been going on since the beginning of commerce. Strangely enough this is one of the few behaviours that haven’t followed us to the internet. Consumption on the internet in there, paying for premium levels or online shopping, but not the connection between the consumption of physical things and your online identity. Until now.
First the steps that preceded this:
1. Identity through listing information
Online communities make us used to social documentation such as interest listings, choice of music, random philosophical quote or otherwise identity creating statements. This is old hat by now, everyone has done it one way or another. Even the template your blog uses is a statement – or a non-statement – about who you are, or who you want to be (my template says that I’m lazy :).
2. Identity through listing your ambition
43things aims to document your ambitions in life – what do you want to do? What efforts do you want others to see when they try to get a picture of who you are? Missions like “go out with the trash more often” are unlikely to turn up on these types of sites. Instead you document the things that you want others to think that you want to do. This is of course just as much a statement of your identity as listing your favourite music or food.
3. Identity through non-physical consumption
Physical goods aside, consumption as an identity creator is still powerful. South Korean community Cyworld sell their virtual currency for $300 000 a day, and this is solely used for virtual consumption. Second Life is similar of course. These two examples differ from the ones in point 4 below. Buying things in these two communities is still connected to the online identity and aims to enhance your character, rather than to document your physical life. These are two very different things.
4. Identity through physical consumption
AllConsuming.net and Zebo.com are sites aiming to document your consumption. What do you own? Who else owns the same things? And be sure that once you’ve stated what you’ve got, you’ll get a few recommendations of what to buy next thrown in as well (along with default affiliate programme).
Apart from the interesting issue of Amazon buying one or the other, this outlines the fact that the things you own in the physical world are transferred to the internet. Presuming that people don’t lie about what they own (which I’m sure happens frequently) this is a fairly new behaviour. It connects your personality-driven consumption with a specific online identity. The personality / online identity issue is an interesting one, but that’ll have to be some other time.
Creating desirability through purchased physical goods is standard. But not on the internet. Not until now.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about the issue of identity through the lack of consumption.
(I also heard met Rob Curley for the second time today, his talk was excellent. I’ll write a few key points here soon as well)
tags bloggar.se: konsumtion, zebo.com, allconsuming.net, trender, identitet
