Derren Brown is a well known British illusionist, who often specialises in 'tricks' where he influences his randomly chosen helpers to do exactly what he wants them to do. In the video below Derren influences some advertising folks, as well as showing us how he did it - it's fascinating watching and makes you realise quite how much we are programmed ourselves.

Labels: psychology, viral marketing

Glasgow has decided to take on illegal flyposting in a new way. Instead of scrapping off the posters from every inch of space they take up, a time consuming and messy process, they are simply sticking 'cancelled' notices of their own over gig posters! Then the venue owners have to deal with hoardes of irate fans calling up to demand refunds. Clever indeed, so it will be interesting to see if more cities follow their lead. Or if venues start offering confirmation/cancellation info over text message instead - a new business venture for someone? [From BoingBoing].

Labels: Idea, psychology

This morning's Globe and Mail had an article about how Toronto police are using bright spotlights on rowdy club goers to help encourage them to go home, in much the same way as clubs themselves at the end of the night. The lights have been placed to cover key corners at which crowds normally gather, in their sunlight strong glare everyone tends to disperse and head home. Clever.

In related news back across the pond, Brighton police have found that incidents of violence increase around each full moon. This has led them to wonder whether werewolf myths are more linked to fact than at first thought, though only in people's behaviour not their appearance.

Labels: Observed Behaviours

You can now see a full list of labels (tags) for this site here. If this code looks to be stable it will get rolled out across the whole site, but thought you might like to check it out sooner rather than later.

The solution came from this Blogger board if you want to try it yourself (I'll leave the fixes to the PHP brackets as an exercise for the reader).

Labels: Google, Helpful App, Tech

Well the London Olympic games may still be a few years away, but there's plenty of controversy to keep everyone entertained in the meantime. Recently the British Olympic committee unveiled the new logo design to immediate, countrywide disdain. The logo cost £400,000 (~ US$800,000) and it's amazing to see what you get for that money - I'm sure it paid for a lot of focus groups & surveys.

So now the BBC is asking people to send in their version of a logo - most of which are, frankly, awful - but some of which show promise and are more in keeping with common London design styles (translation: lots of Gill Sans). What amazes me is that, as a country, we didn't take this change to have an open public competition to create a logo and vote for it. Think of the money you could raise for the Olympic fund running a premium text message vote for 'Britain's Next Top Logo'? Unknown British designers could submit their designs and win a top prize plus a place on the design team. It would have been perfect, but old school 'money for the boys' thinking reigned supreme - no wonder the Olympic budget keeps getting increased.

Now there's another uproar; the presentation video developed, I can only assume for even more money, includes a section of flashing lights that has triggered epileptic fits in susceptible people. So our beloved Ken, the Mayor of London, has waded into the fray and demanded that the company responsible not be paid for this "catastrophic mistake". My feeling on this is that it is a more honest mistake, and I'm sure that plenty of government people reviewed the video first so is it really the fault of the company developing it? Britain has pretty strict rules about limited sighted people being supported on websites, but I've never heard of anything regarding epilepsy.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I'm sure we'll hear of more 'mistakes' such as these. I can only hope that as a country we don't mess up by spending so much energy complaining about mistakes that we don't have any left to make the games the success they should be.

Labels: Designing for Disabilities, graphic design, Mistakes to Learn From, social networks

Seth Godin has always been a fascinating guru in the realm of modern marketing and his presentation at TED is no exception to this rule. It is, Godin expounds his basic view of modern marketing: you have to be remarkable to succeed these days, not average - and being remarkable makes the right people notice you, who then tell their friends, who tell their friends and so on.

Godin expounds that you focus your new idea towards the early adopters, the innovators - because they are the only people interested in truly new ideas - the average person is only excited by this week's latest DVD on a normal day. In Japan they have the concept of an 'otaku', someone who would travel all the way across Japan purely to try out a new sushi restaurant. These are the people who should be your crusaders, telling all their friends about your new product because it is just the coolest thing.

There are many supporting examples in his talk; how sliced bread wasn't popular until 15 years after it was launched, how key influencers watch Steve Jobs' Apple infomercial for two hours and how Seth himself only scores 3.7 on Hot or Not. All of them are compelling and demonstrate how right he is. For those of you who are too lazy to watch this presentation (and hence keep your business going) his summary points are:

• Design rules now: make your product fit consumer needs and be noticeable.
• Safe is risky: Be remarkable, be the purple cow in the field, take risks and find out what people like.
• Being very good is very boring.

So follow those rules and buy Seth a pint when your next business makes a gazillion dollars.

Labels: entrepreneurs, guru, viral marketing

Thanks to Mateo for sending me this great presentation of the PhotoSynth work emerging from Microsoft's Live Labs.

What's interesting to me about this is that way back when I read David Siegel's excellent Futurize your Enterprise (from 1999) he discusses many of these kinds of applications made possible by fully described semantic data. This led me to the concept of being able to search the web to pull up all photos from a physical location, say around the Empire State Building, and then stitch them all together into a single interaction point blending everyone's photos. What really threw me about this presentation is that the way they zoomed round Notre Dame was almost identical to how I'd thought it might work. Now the great thing about this is that they don't rely on positioning data, but instead visual reference points that they automatically detect and stitch together, so I'm certainly looking forward to the model they create of everyone's photos from the top of the Empire State.

Update: Having played around with the online demo (which is stunning and intuitive) I was struck by the similarity to the sequence in Blade Runner where the main protoganist Rick Deckard zooms into a slightly holographic photograph of one of the replicants he's chasing. The way the screen panned as he focussed on sections and 'looked round' shower curtains is totally how PhotoSynth feels in use. The future is here again.

Labels: Long Tail, social networks, Visualization

Google have started integrating a behind the scenes feature that allows you to do an image search for faces. It's pretty darn cool - first check out a normal search for the wonderful 'Douglas Adams', now check out the same search for his face.

Of course this is now raising a lot of discussion about privacy and the amount of information Google holds, especially when combined with their new street view feature. They can now take pictures of your house, and recognise your face staring out the window. Ultimately someone is going to do pull all this data together, and personally I'd rather it was Google than Microsoft. Boing Boing raises the point that would we be more scared if the NSA or CIA were doing this, somehow I suspect they already are - as well as voice recognition on every phone call in the country for key words. Is complete public transparency better than Government sanctioned spying and private records of your movements/actions? It'll be interesting to watch how this plays out. Google could get sued for privacy invasion but that's a harder prospect for the current administration.

Labels: Google, Privacy, Searching