What’s this web 3.0?

Well? Have you got an answer? No neither have I really. Essentially the discussion about it is being driven by the excitement we are still feeling from the tail off of web 2.0 properties and the dream of a new development that will enable us all to come up with new properties that we could a) develop ahead of the crowd and sell off to investors or b) pick up ahead of the crowd and use to deliver great new solutions to our clients. But where we actually are is in the difficult bit between 2.0 and whatever comes after it.

The easy days of “Let’s create a Facebook application” have gone – the whizzy technology has stopped being enough, we have to actually consider how these apps will be used and why – basically what is the content? Of course we should have been doing this all along….

So what’s this web 3.0? Well it is possible to move towards visions of what it could b.

It could be contextual links and understandings eg Google understands your search terms instead of just repeating back to you the pages that have the most instances of your word or phrase it will distinguish (give example) But one model for deliver that might involve a massive “annotation” of the web using metadata – you can already see this on Yahoo’s food site (http://food.yahoo.com/). What would be better would be smarter web agents, technology that understands existing pages and build.

It could involve the ability to find data based on media, it could be “web everywhere” appliances, objects, environments networked to enable faster, more effective web apps and experiences.

Fine but none of this changes my original point – however “whizzy” and marvellous it is we still have to approach it from the point of view of how it will be used and why. The web is full of content cul de sacs, brilliant tools that don’t deliver anything useful,  lacunas of relevance where there is simply nothing interesting, no reason to spend your time. Whatever web 3.0 does look like in the end it is the content and the application as always that will be the really interesting thing.

links for 2008-02-22

• Information Architects / Web Trends Startpage
  Visual mapping of trends on the web. It’s good to look at things from a completely different angle.
  (tags: image map data science visual web2.0 webdesign trends information graphics design)

links for 2008-02-21

• Aviary – Creation on the fly / tools
  If true and effective, this will be an amazing set of tools. What marvellous mash-ups we may create my pretties… or just do some free word processing?
  (tags: tools web2.0 art design writing music applications)
• YouTube – “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” TRAILER
  He’s back.
  (tags: film media fun games)

Recession + digital advertising = problem for commercial tv

(That’s a long title, sorry about that.)
Would a recession be the nail in the coffin for tv advertising? In a recession we know that it’s better to keep spending on advertising to avoid being forgotten about, but if you had to choose between a medium that offered defined views, number of viewers, demographics, time spent on media, personal connection, geographic location (down to town level) etc and one that only offered estimated viewers and demographics which would you choose?

Of course, if you know that you want to reach people getting married and you are advertising on the wedding channel you are probably still onto a winner with tv, but it’s definitely worth thinking about.

links for 2008-02-12

• Is time spent with a brand’s messaging becoming as important as the number that see it?
  Well is it? Possibly, but what this doesn’t take into account is that for some ads you only need 5 seconds to make an impression (eg being reminded to go out and by more Cillit Bang) but for others eg a new online brand, a car launch, a longer period enga
  (tags: advertising, metrics, data, information, marketing media, minute service services, tv ads channel channels)
• YouTube – You Suck at Photoshop #4
  It’s just funny.
  (tags: funny amusing design photoshop)

Unsung hero

Maybe it’s the matter box, maybe it’s a couple of projects we have on the go at work, (probably both) but I think it’s time to big up Nokia game. In the late 90s and early 00s Nokia ran a series of what can realistically be described as ARGs to market new models. Starting before what is probably known as the first ARG The Beast they variously employed television/radio/flat plane ad space as narrative drivers, online gaming, community competitive gaming, mobile content and contact, share dealing environments and teams working together to solve storylines and puzzles for the ultimate prize….no not a new Nokia, a great time!

The last “game” was in 2004 and to be honest it wasn’t great because it was a broadband project ahead of it’s time and I couldn’t even play it on our work network the content was so video heavy. But it did have all the classic

What was so brilliant about it was that the product was so embedded in the experience that it didn’t feel like a marketing exercise where things like The Art of the Heist which Audi did in 2005 for the A3 just felt like it was designed to sell, sell, sell.

This is the kind of content that Nokia are producing now – http://www.the-passenger.com/ – which is fun but…

We need to deliver more genuinely 360 projects as consumers move increasingly off broadcast media and into interactive environments. The medium is the message and in a multi-media environment we need multi-media messaging that actually reflects the type of experience users desire in those media, not simply messaging that tries to continue a broadcast identity in a conversational environment.

I’m not saying anything you don’t already know but you might not know of Nokia Game. You can’t play them any more (boo) but you can find out what made them so great. I advise you to do so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Game

Does it matter?*

So everyone is talking about matter box and I have now had the chance to look inside one in the flesh (and not just through Andy Piper’s blog as I had done until today!) Zeroinfluencer received one and I have first dibs on eating his cereal and PlayDoh, (or is that just cereal…)

Anyway, having poked around inside I can say that it’s cool and fun,  and some of these things are semi-useful (see cereal/ play doh)  but then it’s always cool and fun to receive surprises that are well-packaged and creative friendly which the things in this box mostly are. Just a couple of thoughts then…
Most of the objects in the box are on the creative side of marketing and most therefore have a link back the web which I ideally would be monitored carefully in order to determine the value of the exercise to the client – but there are a couple that have no website attached or have a campaign website attached rather than something bespoke. Sure it will be possible to measure response my matching up date of delivery with traffic on the sites/tools but if I was a client I wouldn’t be as happy with that.

How could this come into its own for brand owners?  This kind of contact would be perfect for experiential marketing projects, anything that is trying to reach a target market “in the know”, because a box of delights like this is the kind of place where you might suspend your every day and possibly engage with for instance ARG-type activities – your mind is already open to the creative and so you engage more carefully. That’s why the soap/crayon box from Nissan is appropriate in this box where it might be ignored in another context. My instinct is that recipients will properly engage with the content of these boxes and almost expect richness – I think that’s why I was disappointed with the Original Source sample. Must try harder.

So these boxes could be a creative person’s dream both from agency side and public side and that makes a client-side dream come true. But it does depend on that creativity. I’m interested to see the next one.

* oh come on that title was a gift!