Numiko, an award winning Leeds based digital creative agency

Or at least, that’s the message in a “startling warning” from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution.  It’s a classic example of the good old days argument, much loved by the Daily Mail and MPs in general: in a nutshell, Facebook, the internet and fast-moving things on screens in general are melting children’s brains, and things were better back in my day when people used to go out and speak to each other on the street.

More after the jump…

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Brilliant news this morning that our site for I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! has been nominated for Best Media and Entertainment Catagory in the Revolution Awards.  Ten minutes later, we get a call from MIPTV in Cannes telling us that we’ve been shortlisted for two catagories at Content 360 too (which will be our third year in a row, so eyes on the hatrick :-0) Well done Numikons

Something I’ve been playing around with over the last few weeks is Faviki, a semantic tagging tool.

Tagging is a familiar and widespread phenomenon online, used by things like the social bookmarking tool Del.icio.us and photo-sharing site Flickr as a way of labelling, categorising and organising content.  Tagging is very web 2.0 – it’s generally users who do the tagging, rather than The Man, using pretty much whatever words they want to describe whatever it is they’re tagging.  The result of this is a known as a folksonomy; an informal system of categorisation.  They’re great for capturing descriptive information: what something’s about, if it’s funny, or interesting, or whatever.

What tags are not so good at is organising information in a useful way…  Because of the uncontrolled vocabulary, any old net user can tag something as ‘digital media’, or ‘wickedy wick’ or ‘splunge’.  There’s no checking of meaning, no authority to control what goes on; the strengths of tagging are also its weaknesses.

Read more after the jump…

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One of my first memories of ‘owning’ content and dare I say interacting with it – was when me and my sister were granted a comic allowance!

I was a Beezer Boy… and well… my Sister (tom boy that she was) was a Beano Boy (later to convert to Buster – I think all comics in the 70s/80s had to begin with a B)!

This was a highly engaging weekly experience – which began with the sound of the heavy(ish) sound of our comics arriving through the letter box!  Swiftly followed by a sprint and high chance of carpet burn!

You might get a free gift (a ‘parp’ whistle!), and you would quickly flick through to read this edition’s story from your favourite character!  Easily digested, on demand (well… once a week through subscription) entertainment!

Just as everything else has evolved considerably in the 25 years (ouch) which have passed – comics are about to be given a new lease of life.

Marvel Entertainment will begin selling digital ‘In-Motion’ comic books through iTunes, it was announced yesterday at the Digital Media panel at New York Comic Con.  The new digital model of storytelling has been created to satisfy the changing scope of media to new technologies and will feature panels that animate scenes and add spoken dialog from voice actors.

Although I’m sure the feeling of excitement which was sparked by that papery thud on the doormat will not be achieved by the download status bar – I’m pretty confident that combining rich content around nostalgic comic book layouts and devices with Apple’s ‘Touch’ interface will deliver a brilliant experience for today’s kids (and adults!).

I’ve read quite a bit about Facebook Connect lately – the service that lets sites allow Facebook users the convenience of authentication via their existing Facebook account details:

This implementation by “news mashup” Buzz Newsroom caught my interest as it manages to combine 2 of the things I love most about the web: the ability to build applications by linking different components and content sources together, and collaboration – or the (so-called!) “wisdom of the crowds”. Here’s how techcrunch describes it:

“You sign in with Facebook Connect, and then can not only vote up or down any story, but write your own entry.

Buzz Newsroom is a big Wordpress blog. You start off as a contributor, which means you can author posts but not publish them. Buzz Newsroom editors review the entries and publish them. Once you become a trusted contributor, your status may be upgraded to “author,” which means you can publish directly.”

Once you are connected to Facebook (from another site) you have instant access to all of your friends, and although it’s hard to see this openness by Facebook as an entirely selfless gesture  it certainly does seem to have some advantages for us too. Not least the convenience of being able to login to a site without having to create and manage another user account. (N.B. Facebook aren’t the only ones to recognise this and it would be wrong not to mention the Open ID project at this point, with which Facebook recently got involved). It could also help to reinforce brands – a user’s activity on a site can be published back to the Facebook news feed for all their friends to see. And of course, a visiting Facebook user potentially brings many new visitors with them – or as the Facebook site explains:

“With Facebook Connect, users can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites” –  et voila, instant social network!

Sources:

http://developers.Facebook.com/connect.php

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/buzz-newsroom-combines-wordpress-and-Facebook-connect-for-tracking-news/

http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/Facebook-connect-implementations/

Before the web it was expensive TV and even more expensive film… but lets fast forward to 1998 to at least start at the digital dawn.

Content is King. It’s what people used to say about online. ‘It’s all about content… and loads of it., loads and loads.’ Buy it, create it, syndicate it, beg, steal or borrow it….

Increasingly  though, it seems to me that context, not content is actually the king when it comes to riding the wave of populist interactive products.

Lets just look at recent history.

Blogs got big noise – people investing huge amounts of creative time and energy generating longform opinions and dialogue around topics close to their heart. Then the v-log and YouTube arrived, with mashup-ups and short-form snippits of video media capturing the column inches.

Next; Facebook. With it’s ability to track the activity and trivial postings of friends of friends and change your status. (Let’s all own up – the status thing is what we all do most on Facebook -right?)

Now, the big (small) noise is Twitter. At it’s heart, it’s nothing more than a shorter that short text message (140 characters) of what are often the banal thoughts that are passing through peoples heads or the pedestrian occurances that are passing infront of their eyes.

Yet, it’s addictive and compelling. And not just for the ego-centric of us who want to broadcast our every micro-thought – but also to consume; or ‘follow’ as Twitter would have it, too. And it’s the context, the immediay and the intimacy with which you can both publish and consume with Twitter that sets it apart. Built from the ground up for a mobile generation around the fundamental premises of human nature – egocentricity and inquisitivness – Twitter must be making those folk at News International who paid a fortune for MySpace (remember MySpace?) sick to their boots.

I’m off now to invent not a micro-blogging service (so passe) but a niche nano-blogging service – especially for geeks – where people express themeselves in a limit of 12 ‘o’s and 1’s’ – I’m going to call it Bynr (Bi-ner)… Url squatters beware!!! 10100010 : )

(Edit  – Wow, that’s a lot of twittering on about Twitter on just one blog. Just goes to prove – don’t ever think everything has been done. Think bolder and bigger. Just because something heads the market now – don’t think that with a little bit of creative thought you can’t challenge. The Internet truly is a level playing field! Todays Twitter is tomorrows MySpace)

I was at the 4IP Yorkshire launch last night, which was great! Lot’s of fun and managed to see lots of people that I haven’t seen for ages, which was lovely- it seemed like almost everyone involved in digital media in yorkshire was there, with around 300 people attending. 4IP is a fund set up by channel4 and the reginal development agencies, such as Yorkshire Forward, who’ve added in £5million into the pot. The total fund is £50m over two years. The idea is to find lots and lots of ideas from companies large and small that provide a blueprint for Channel 4’s public service media on the web. These could be services, tools games etc that focus on one of the following:

Hidden gems – tools and sites to help people discover stuff which could change their lives.

Digital democracy – new ways to let everyone keep an eye on money and power.

Amplifying voices – new ways to empower those communities that media could never previously reach.

Wise crowds – connecting people who need to know stuff with people who know it already.

Tools to make trouble – developing disruptive media tools, then putting them in the hands of people that need them most.

You can submit ideas here One of the most interesting strands that Tom Loosemore, whose head on 4ip mentioned it ‘tools and services that keep tabs on money and power’ which to me sounds like a good idea based on the monumentus cockup casued by too few, with too much power and all our money.

The BBC’s Tomorrow’s World may have promised us 3D TV quite some time before now… (As a kid in the 80’s I remember tuning in with much excitement to use my 3D glasses which came with the Radio Times!) but… it might just be with us in the next few years.

With HD now becoming ubiquitous, engineers are looking for the next big thing. And it could just be stereo 3D television.

In a remarkably short space of time – just about two years – this has gone from a one-off demonstration in the USA through practical trials from the BBC to test broadcasts by Sky, so there is a lot of momentum behind it.

More movies will certainly be made in 3D for cinema release (Recent examples include My Bloody Valentine and Disney’s forthcoming Bolt) , but it could also be a viable home system, with consumer manufacturers already preparing for 3D sets, some of which do not even need special glasses.

Extract from:
http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk
Reported by Jan Eveleens, general manager, Image Capture Systems at Grass Valley

Been around a while this… but only spotted it while using Google’s Trends and Search Insights to aid in some user insight work. Thought it was an interesting take on how Google trend information can be used in different/useful ways AND rather like my Twitter + Plane Crash post, how internet technologies are providing faster access to information than traditional routes.

In America Google have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. When Google query counts were compared with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) they found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. An estimation of how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States can be compiled based on how often these search queries are run.

Published CDC reports proved to be two weeks late in reporting peak flu activity detected by Google.

http://www.google.org/about/flutrends