twopointouch

I’ve always been a bit of a sceptic about Second Life (posts passim, and I mean in its utility as a marketing vehicle for brands), and I won’t pretend otherwise despite a day of inspiration and intelligence at the Virtual Worlds Forum. Yes, I now understand a bit more about why brands have been investing in the network and am prepared to say that this is probably not quite such a terrible thing as earlier posts might have suggested. Some of the other virtual worlds such as Stardoll, Habbo, Eve and Entropia seem very interesting indeed.

On with the doom and gloom, though, and one presentation that I really enjoyed came from Marco van Veen, a manager at the Innovation & Collaboration Center at Heineken on why they said ‘no’ to Second Life.

Heineken obviously does a lot of advertising and sponsorship and isn’t remotely afraid to try out new forms such as product placement in films like Casino Royale. They could very easily imagine a Heineken bar or vending machines in SL, as could all of us - heck, why not a Heineken lake? - and obviously developers and marketing agencies kept coming to them with metaverse ideas. Initially, they had a lot of enthusiasm for the possibilities.

As they started to think through the business value of the project, though, several adverse factors dawned on them…

• They wouldn’t be the first beer brand to enter the world. The press and publicity that was showered on companies like Toyota, IBM and Starwoods when they debuted in SL wouldn’t be likely to be repeated for the third or fourth beer brand to enter.
• They found research from Market Truths (March 07 - costs $100 or L$12,500) which said that if brands fail to position themselves correctly in SL, they can expect a backlash from residents. This led the company to conduct its own research among residents. It turned out that almost half thought that the Heineken brand would not be a good fit within Second Life. Only 19% said they thought it would. Don’t ask me why that was the case - as I understand it, there was something of a backlash against all commercial brands in the world earlier this year and it may just be part of that.
• It didn’t sit very easily with the company’s CSR policy. Heineken wants to be seen as promoting the socially responsible use of alcohol. Clearly, if they made Heineken bottles and kegs available in SL, it would be reasonably likely that residents would play-act drinking to excess. What else is there to do with a keg of virtual beer? (or errm… real beer).
• Hand-in-hand with this came worries about the age of SL residents. It’s company policy at Heineken not to sponsor events where the proportion of adults is lower than 70%. Linden Labs’ own figures suggest that this is comfortably so, but the company had an alternative report created by ComScore that suggested that only 68% of SL residents are 21 or over. This made them fear that Linden’s figures were unreliable. Again, this wouldn’t sit well with their responsible drinking policy.
• Joined with this was some anxiety about litigation. It seemed a reasonable supposition that there are ambulance-chasing US lawyers sitting in SL and waiting for a beer brand to give some of their product to a minor. Such a suit could well seem newsworthy to a technophobe press keen to sniff out any suggestion of child abuse online.

Yes, I am an SL naysayer, but that’s not the only reason I found this a refreshing presentation. There’s such wide-eyed bollocks talked about virtual worlds that Heineken seem like geniuses for sensibly and thoroughly assessing the opportunity and turning it down on this occasion. As van Veen said, however, this is a very new medium, and the company has far from closed the door on a virtual existence.

Update: I’ve written two posts so far on VWF at our NMK site. One on the basics you ought to know and one on business models and possibilities. Also, this post is being discussed by listeners to the FIR podcast here.

I was at a roundtable debate this morning about Citizen Journalism (update: rather ungenerous of me not to mention this was hosted by the excellent people from iStockPhoto). Everyone saying they want to embrace CJ as part of their forward strategy. I suggest that mainstream media is attempting to contain rather than embrace conversations.

Me (to attendees from the Times and the BBC): You don’t link out to other people’s sites.

Times chap: Yes, we do, all the time.

BBC women: Yes, we do, all the time.

Me: Oh, okay…

Me (8 hours later at home): how do you explain this and this, then? (These are the top stories on the technology sections of their sites right now. Between the two of them, they manage to link to two sites. Both of them corporate websites. I don’t find any links to any blogs or CJ sites on any tech news stories right now).

Meh.

I’ve also learned the marvellous expression ‘Hammersmithing’. Say you’ve got two photos of the same two people, taken moments after each other. In the first, the first guy has his eyes closed. In the second, the other guy is blinking. What do you do? Neither picture is usable as it is. The editor might ask you to ‘Hammersmith’ the two shots - which means take the open-eyed head from one photo and stick it on the neck of the closed-eye portrait in the other shot. End result - usable photo with everyone’s eyes open.

Why’s it called ‘Hammersmithing’? Because the first organ transplant operations were conducted at London’s Hammersmith Hospital. Maybe that’s common knowledge, but I didn’t know and I thought it was really cute.

‘Hammersmithing’ was robustly defended as basically the same as editing. It’s one of the things news media do to help create stories that are worth something. No-one wants pictures of people with their eyes closed, neither reader nor publisher. The time and energy that goes into retouching photos is one of the things we pay for when we stump up the cash for a quality paper or broadcaster.

The very existence of the term and admission that it’s common practice resulted in gasps of shock in some quarters. But not here.

The ongoing ‘regaining trust in media’ agenda, as various mainstream channels are found to have falsified all sorts of things, goes too far a lot of the time. We need our stories crafted into edible chunks. That’s called editing. Imagine the cookery show where you have to wait 90 minutes before Nigella can pull out her perfect roast and serve it to her perfect friends. The showdancing competition where you wait 20 minutes for set changes between the acts. The press news story that interviews every possible person with any interest in the story whatsoever. A little leger de main is part of what we pay newspaper and broadcast people to do. It makes their stuff more entertaining and consumable. They filter the news so we don’t have to, because filtering is a full-time job and more. It’s only when stories are falsified or deliberately slanted, or when people are conned out of their voting cash, that anyone should become concerned.

via. Communities Dominate Brands

And apparently the most blogged about video on the ‘net at the moment. The URL of the creators, fleetingly referred to towards the end is http://www.mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/

“… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.”

In my newsletter to NMK readers today, I referred to the Internet as a ’she’. Reading that back once it arrived in my inbox, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that. I think I’m happy about referring to websites as ’she’ - they are akin to vessels like ships and cars, and also domiciles - those things are very often referred to as feminine. But the Internet as a whole?

I’m wondering about this from a web 2.0 perspective. Web 2.0, with its insistence on ’social everything’ - seems to fit well with what people normally classify as feminine characteristics - connecting, embracing, collectivism, joining together.

The proposed next generation of web applications, on the other hand, the sort that will join up microformats and form the semantic web, seem to be delivering the Internet back into the hands of the engineers, and into the traditionally masculine traits of straight facts, logic and formulae. The thing that interests me is whether this is being driven by gender agendas in some way, at least in the way it is narrativised, if not in terms of the science.

Are any readers aware of any gender politics research being done in this domain? Or have I finally found my PhD thesis? [sidenote: also interested in anyone attempting to 'queer' the 'net and what that entails.]

PS: there is a broken link in the second paragraph of the newsletter. You could patch it together yourself, but to make things easier, the link is to this - a great analysis of the new rules of reputation in the era of Google, and why the Internet is really rather frightening.

The National Roads Safety Council has done extensive testing on a newly designed seat belt. Results show that accidents can be reduced by as much as 45% when the belt is properly installed.

via. my brother-in-law. Sorry.

Interesting piece on paidcontent.org, covering a talk by Henry Copeland, CEO and founder of BlogAds, a network which serves adverts to participating blogs. Copeland says that only around 100 of the 1500 blogs his company works with are likely to be self-sustaining from advertising - and these are the creme-de-la creme - participation in the BlogAds network is by invitation only. He also recognises that blogs have special problems for advertisers:

The appeal of blogs to marketers is their singular brand identity, making it possible to accurately target their ads. Copeland: “Advertisers say, ‘I know I can trust Blog X, but I also know that Blog X has 100,000 readers - and God knows what those 100,000 readers are going to say.’ It’s not me, it’s the advertisers who are saying this.” And so, BlogAds,which handles advertising for Perez Hilton, Cute Overload and DailyKos, offers to quarantine ads away from the comment pages. “If you look at Perez Hilton, there’s certain kinds of ads that can run on the front page where you can’t see comments. And then on pages where you can see comments, there are other kinds of ads. That is exactly what is occurring.”

Brands are happy to trust bloggers, it seems, but not blog readers. They’re worried that the sort of flame wars that popular blogs tend to attract will somehow create an adverse association for their brand. From this perspective, our nascent UK blog networks should arguably separate adverts from comments, or always moderate comments, if they’re to attract larger advertisers. This is relatively easy to implement: the blogger platform does this out of the box, and other sites could use Haloscan or similar to host comments separately from articles. However, a quick survey this morning would suggest that few UK sites are interested in the separation and pre-moderation of comments of the type that is found on US blog network Gawker’s sites (though I assume they all remove offensive comments, once they are discovered):

Paidcontent: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.

Blognation: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.

Techcrunch UK: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.

Westmonster: register to comment; no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages

Shiny Media: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.

It’s an interesting conundrum. If blog networks start pre-moderating comments, that reduces their ‘bloggishness’. It’s not so much a conversation as a return to ‘Letters to the Editor’. But if that is what it takes to attract more advertising, and thus more investment in the content of these blogs, will readers forgive that? It doesn’t seem to have hurt Gawker - publishers of Gizmodo and Lifehacker, among others - too badly.

I’m going to the Battle of Ideas conference later this month. I do recommend that (London-and-environs-based) readers take a look. Despite it being at the weekend, which might understandably dampen the ardour of any self-respecting new media flâneur, it’s looking like a veritable cavalcade of fresh ideas, innovation and debate across the disciplines. Not just technology and media, but art, education, health, science, everything… I am going on Saturday (gulp!) and Sunday (argghhh!) and that says a lot about how valuable I think it could be. It’s also really cheap when you look at the range and calibre of the speakers. Yay for the Institute of Ideas for putting it on.

One particular aspect that’s interesting to me [there is a work aspect to that in terms of how NMK may be participating, but that participation comes out of my own perception of what's interesting in New Media right now] is the debate on Saturday afternoon on privacy in this new world of Web 2.0 and the strange psychology that has developed around that.

On the one hand, we’re telling perfect strangers what we had for lunch and where we are on Twitter, give our name and address and phone numbers to Facebook, divulge our deepest personal secrets on blogs (but not this blog, dear reader, rest-assured), publish photos and videos of our social life. Transparency is held as an ideal. Self-surveillance, continual publishing and, above all, authenticity, are held as golden standards.

On the other hand, people are often appalled at the thought of Tesco’s (the biggest UK supermarket chain) analysing our shopping habits, Facebook personalising advertising for us, Google recording our searches and our ISPs and credit card companies selling our browsing and buying patterns to third parties. Within larger organisations, corporate IT departments are appalled by the risks we’re taking, but we hold our hands to our ears and say ‘lalala - open that firewall, you nazis’.

So are we being two-faced? Do we want our cake and to eat it too? It’s OK to hold up transparency as an ideal for businesses and corporations and to operate according to that ideal ourselves, but when those organisations take some very obvious steps in data-mining the information that’s available, then it’s suddenly a different story?

The plan, at the moment, is to unveil some new research on attitudes to privacy and to unpick the nature of these inconsistencies at the conference.

Without the benefit of any evidence whatsoever, though, here’s a couple of hopefully inflammatory thoughts:

• Transparency online is held as a gold standard of behaviour because it’s viewed as a return to past, lost, possibly illusory norms where people dealt with each other face-to-face and where a firm handshake was all you needed to create genuine trust and a reliable relationship. Our virtual existence craves some solidity where it is lacking.
• That the transparency lobby is thus a mechanism of nostalgia. They’re Golden Ageists. That’s fine, but it’s a narrative about commercial practices that potentially shifts the visibility of what is happening to the data you’re sharing. I’m putting on my post-modernist hat, and suggesting that narratives are the way we understand the world. But one of the counter-narratives might be equally valid, one about big business set to exploit consumers at every opportunity.
• Holding those two (and more) possible narratives in our heads at the same time is far from impossible. We live in a world of warring narratives, each of which interpolate us at some times.
• That the Cluetrain has already been railroaded by those bastards in big business who can see how to manipulate this state of affairs.

I personally like the idea and practice of being transparent online about my behaviour, the things I like and don’t like, and how I’m feeling. It’s liberating to not operate under a corporate persona, or maintain a series of separate online identities. If that allows advertisers to target me better (I like really expensive, funky, creative adverts for cheap stuff, btw) then that probably won’t do me much harm. Does it harm ‘people in general’ to be transparent? That’s a harder question and automatically makes me sound either incredibly patronising or self-deluded if I say ‘yes’.

But ‘yes’, I think it does. The companies that have the most money and thus the most advanced data-mining techniques might ultimately be the most successful. They’ll target us better, harder, faster, more creatively and more often. Because we’ve opened up. That’s bad news. Commercial success would be a meritocracy in an ideal world, I think: the best companies would be most successful. Transparency is often cited as a way of making that happen - the best companies will expose their internal workings and personality, and thus win support - but it is also a way of making it fail - the consumer population becomes infinitely ‘bucketable’, targetable, individually identifiable by the corporations with the best, most-expensive technology and resources.

Update: seems like I’m not the only person who prefers Jaiku. [nb: Jyri Engestrom spoke at NMK Forum in June. We always knew he was destined for big things.]

Jaiku is nicer-looking and more functional than Twitter, and has a kick-ass mobile app for series 60 Nokia phones. However, I have about 3 Jaiku pals and 50 Twitter pals. So do I:

(a) Use Twitku to post messages to both simultaneously? (- crap mobile version)

(b) Use TwitterFeed to post my Jaikus to Twitter, then import my twitter friends’ feed to Jaiku? (- lots of lag between updates, not sure if this might result in some sort of infinite loop and hole in space/time continuum as my friends’ tweets get reposted onto twitter by me then gathered up again by Jaiku)

(c) Give in and stick with Twitter? (- but I want pretty)

(d) Stop wasting time and get on with some work…

Anyone got a clever solution to this that I haven’t come across?

Maybe this is just nonsense. I don’t know, and it reads like fanboy ramblings. I’m only half-way through the game, as well.

The world of computer games and the world of cinema have had a constant and uneasy relationship since I started gaming.

By and large, film-related computer games have been some sort of crap merchandise created after the cinema title. ‘Watched Spiderman? Enjoyed it? Now play this shitty imitation of a 5-year-old game to relive the experience’. Yeah, right. The long and disreputable franchise of Star Wars games from LucasArts ought to be enough to prove the point. The compliment goes the other way, of course. Anyone who has enjoyed the experience of Mario, Doom and Streetfighter on the small screen has had the opportunity of a piss-poor cinema experience on the big screen to choke all the happiness out of their memories of those games.

[SPOLER WARNING : LOOK AWAY]

Bioshock offers better, more realistic graphics than former shooters and a musical score that draws the player in. But you’d expect that of the next big game. Like my own previous favourites in immersive shooters, Deus Ex and System Shock 2, you get to customise your character, choosing and adding skills as you go, leading to further identification, although the main action is First-Person-Shooter along the lines of Doom, rather than a role-playing game. You are cast in the role of a ’stranger in a strange land’, some guy called Jack, so your personal past doesn’t seem to matter, aiding the identification process (though I get hints this will be pulled away as the game progresses).

The game is set in 1960, albeit in an alternative past, and the cultural references are to film noir and early sci-fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, rather than Star Wars. It appeals to nostalgia, in other words, rather than some sense of wonder about the future. I think that may be important to the immersion level, too, though that may be limited to players of a certain age. It takes from your past rather than extending your future, is what I mean to say. It’s your own alternative past, inasmuch as you identify with the protagonanist through the suspension of disbelief, and the use of fiction and history aid the player in that disbelief.

This might be spoiling things for some future players, but Bioshock also builds in quite credible moral choices for players. This comes quite early in the story. Small girls have been reined-in to aid the forces of evil. The player has the option of using the girls’ stock of evil to further their own power, and thus killing them. This quite possibly the best choice for progression, or they have the alternative, less immediately profitable choice: to save the girls. The sight of a small girl struggling in your arms on-screen, a girl you can kill or cure, pierces the screen. Whatever your choice, the consequences of that do not only follow in the game-play, but the player’s conscience. This is totally new, I think. Yes, you can kill people, including little girls in previous games, but for that to involve (or more importantly allow) a moral decision from the player rather than it simply being a gameplay decision is different.

This is a device to increase engagement in the game, of course. But it’s not one I have seen before. The only remote comparisons I can find are in cinema and in novels. It’s the Sophie’s Choice of computer games in that way, not just in cinematography, but also interactivity. Yet even in the highest achievements there, you don’t get the choices: what Raskalnikov does is ultimately already decided, however much you get to understand and think and agonise through his choices.

To gush a little more. This feels like some part of the future, not of games, but of interactive media as a whole, and of film-making. People have been harping on about interactive media for years, but this is the first time an actual example of that has touched the sides, personally. This isn’t ‘choose your own adventure‘ put into a film or computer game: the aesthetic whole means that you really interact, really care.

Bioshock took about five years to create, as I understand. Ask that of the next thing you see at the cinema.

Postscripts:

[I just looked at the Wikipedia article on the game, and came across this from the LA Times: "Sure, it's fun to play, looks spectacular and is easy to control. But it also does something no other game has done to date: It really makes you feel."]

Something else to add: Throughout Bioshock, there’s no doubt that you’re playing through a set - well written/envisaged - narrative in some ways, so it is ‘create your own adventure’ in some ways. But the marriage of cinema techniques and game techniques makes the difference. This is an interactive story, that realises the possibilities of both ‘interactive’ and ’story’. Ultimately, you’ll be good or evil or somewhere between. What I hope I’ve touched on here, is some of the ways that they’ve actually made the game touch the gamer.

At FOWA yesterday, one of the most interesting presentations came from the founder of etsy - a marketplace for handcrafted items - Robert Kalin.

Kalin is like a Web 2.0 version of Holden Caulfield - he starts his talk:

…dropped out of high school at 15. ran away to live in boston with my uncle, who was like the purple sheep of the family. eventually found my way to new york. had about 15 jobs. i was a carpenter for a while. that stuff is brutal. started to want to get an education but couldn’t pay. so i attended classes at about 8 different colleges using stolen IDs. doing it this way meant i really took ownership of my education…

And so on. He hasn’t got any slides: he’s typing addresses into his web browser to bring up pictures he’s posted to his blog. He’s chewing gum while he speaks, which is amplified by his microphone. Some of his demos aren’t working.

It’s pretty weird, but also absolutely mesmerising. Etsy is an arts and crafts marketplace, but it’s also, as it turns out, a challenge to the state of commerce on the web.

Regular commerce has become less and less about people and the inherent value of objects. This is reflected by the history of money. Money used to be made out of gold - coins had an inherent value. Then came banknotes, which were symbols of value rather than possessing a real value themselves. Now it’s about credit cards - money has become 1s and 0s flying across the Internet. At the same time, corporations own all the means of production and distribution. Commerce has become utterly dehumanised and psychotic.

Etsy began with the idea of a marketplace. But a return to what a marketplace used to mean before the twentieth century. Marketplaces used to be communities, places where people exchanged stories and news as well as money and goods. Because etsy is just for handcrafted, bespoke items, it brings the humanity back into trade. Every item is its own story and has a human face attached to it. This means that etsy attracts and retains audiences. People talk about what they’re buying and selling, because the items are interesting and unique of themselves. Buyers develop relationships with sellers and maybe ask for a personalised version of items they’re interested in. The software is supposedly finding ways to increase the face-to-face contact between members, to add a bit of a virtual world element, but it isn’t working today.

But the broader premise of the site is working. Etsy has 100,000 sellers listing 10,000 items a day.

Really interesting stuff - the more virtual many aspects of our lives are becoming, the greater the value being put on personal and personalised relationships, services and items, like we’re unconsciously reaching for balance.