The Planning Lab » Internet

There can be no experts

Leon — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:03:03 +0000

Social media is great for talking about, well – social media. But as I'm sick of all the self-proclaimed social media experts, tweets and slideshare presentations with social media strategies, I don't think you can discount it as a passing trend. Social media IS important. But it's also an evolving concept, and trying to "fix" the knowledge of the phenomenon as definite truths is pointless. I believe discussions on social media should be seen as a flows rather than stock knowledge.

How to connect everything to everything else

Leon — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:39:07 +0000

You've probably seen the twittering cat door, the twittering office chair and the twittering bakery. These lovely examples have one thing in common: they all use home-made devices that connect to Twitter. And while these application may seem like novelty, I do think they represent something something brilliant: off-the-shelf technology that allows anything to be part of the internet.

Standardised low-tech means one thing: it's cheap and simple enough to be spread widely across the whole physical world (see previous post).

A simple schematic shows how this works: most pieces of the puzzle exist today – the only missing link are standardised input-output devices and a community for developing plugins. And instead of using twitter as a frontend interface it can be used it as a backend dataflow that allows for interfaces to be built on top.

The perspective here is not technical (since everything is based on existing ones), but from a user-perspective with one thing in mind: how technology can be packaged for maximum dissemination.

Does this make any sense?

And btw, I'm not a techie, so my apologies for getting nomenclatures mixed up.

Finding real use for social media

Leon — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 20:02:33 +0000

Instead of using social media to find new ways of basically selling chocolate bars to people (aka advertising), shouldn't the power of these wonderful tools be used for something good instead?

Obama used social media to mobilise a whole generation of people. This proves that the infrastructure can provide a great deal of momentum that cannot be stopped. And the more people that are connected, the more feasible it is.

Imagine using Twitter and other social media for:

* Starting an elite university for everyone

* Finance a microcredit system for the third world

* Starting direct-democracy movements

* Igniting resistances and revolutions, and overthrowing regims

When everybody is connected to everybody, the only thing that's required is will, and the only limitation is the imagination.

We get it, let’s move on

Leon — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:53:28 +0000

Aspargus soufflé!

There are so many "experts" on social media right now that you can't even call it expertise anymore. A slideshare search gives you 5000 presentations on the topic. I shall conclude that the difficulty level of understanding social media is below that of making a decent soufflé.

The Agency Lab: Edge vs relevance

Leon — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:27:12 +0000

Hello world.

Leon — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:16:58 +0000

From Google analytics: you.

It probably doesn't come as a surprise that most of The Planning Lab readers are Swedish. Roughly 60 percent are from Sweden, and half of you are from Stockholm.

The other sizable visitor groups, roughly 30 percent, are from the US, Germany, Brazil, Singapore, UK and Australia – not surprising since these are the "big advertising countries".

The last 10 percent are randomly scattered across the world from Portland in the West to Auckland in the East.

I love the fact that a blog can be both small and a global product at the same time.

The Piracy Lab: will the crowd bail them out?

Leon — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:39:08 +0000

Today the trial against the Pirate Bay begins. The four people that are on trial are facing damages of up to $14 million (115 MSEK). That's a lot of money. Or is it?

Consider this: there are 25 million people using Pirate Bay. If every user would pay about 55 cents, the legal damages for Pirate Bay will be paid in full. From a technical perspective there are many ways to gather people and collect money on the internet these days by using social media and crowdfunding sites.

Anyhow, it's just an idea. Good or bad, I don't know, but it is possible.

Earlier post: What filesharing can learn from Dutch pot-heads

The Piracy Lab: What file sharing can learn from Dutch pot-heads

Leon — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:36:26 +0000

Some decades ago, the Netherlands had big social problems with drugs. Stopping the drug trafficking seemed implausible in a small and border-less country.

Compared to many other European countries that had an absolutist view on the legal status of drugs, the Dutch chose a pragmatic solution: tolerance of “soft drugs” to be able to fight trafficking of “hard drugs”. The consequence of a liberal view on drugs is still disputed depending on who you ask, but consumption of soft drugs is actually less in the Netherlands than in surrounding countries.

The legal dilemma is similar to that of file sharing. Today, there’s no real solution to this phenomena. On the one hand, record companies are strict enforcers of copyright laws and suing ordinary people to state a case for the public, and bands are not getting compensated for artist work. On the other hand, the internet is an unstoppable force and people are getting used to free stuff on the internet. The term ‘steal’ is being deflated for every iPod sold.

With all the innovative technology that exists today, there should be thousands of profitable ways to provide music. But the problem is not technological, it’s legal. Spotify is a good example of how brilliant technology now has become restricted by a dependence on record companies.

So, maybe the solution is to adopt a more relativist approach to illegal file sharing to begin with? This would let us focus on the real problem: artists not getting paid, rather than on enforcing copyright laws.

Having a pragmatist legal view on file-sharing activity makes it necessary for record companies to start talking to file sharers like Pirate Bay rather than enforcing. An extended dialogue could even open up new revenue models based on all the user data that’s available everywhere.

Taking it one step further to ensure artist revenues, internet service providers could be taxed by file sharing usage. This tax would then be used to subsidise artists.

Maybe a lesson learned from the Dutch drug policy is to let go and look forward and focus on the real issues when there’s no other way? One thing's for sure: litigation has never resulted in innovation.

Finally.

Leon — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:04:24 +0000

After two years in the making, our website is finally up. I have only been involved in the project for the last months, but I can say: self-promo projects are no walk in the park. Quite the opposite. Strange, considering we as agencies can whip up a campaign or brand strategy in no time.

~~If you know anybody that wants to do some paid-by-the-hour coding work on our website, let me know asap.~~

The end of trends, what’s next?

Leon — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:52:48 +0000

Everything's linked: A visualisation of the blogosphere

The few years has seen a boom in trendspotting, most noticeable in the shape of blogs as they are the ultimate way for trendspotters to reach out with ‘new news’. But have trendspotting finally reached its peak?

The sheer abundance of “source” trend blogs, boosted by other social media, and the demand for trends have turned them into an omnipresent, realtime phenomena. Everyone is a producer and consumer of trends.

In this perfect information society, the trends seize to be trends in the sense that they lose their exclusivity: they are no longer part of the new and the latest, but part of the “now”.

If trends can no longer be seen as predictive or exclusive tools for getting ahead, they’re no longer useful for planners and marketers. If this is the case, maybe it’s time to stop following trends (which aren’t trends anymore) and start being original?