Christopher Butler

via The Long Now Foundation: Art project in progress A History...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:14:51 -0500

Art project in progress A History of the Sky features lots and lots of time-lapse videos of the sky that are synchronized so that they’re all showing the same time of day. Ken Murphy is the artist that created it and he hopes to one day manifest all the data he’s collecting as a video installation that’s always displaying the skies of the last 365 days. The project was recently featured at the Exploratorium, but it’s still in a need of a home for the installation.

Neat! Explanation of the Ames’ Room illusion here >

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:03:52 -0500

Neat! Explanation of the Ames’ Room illusion here >

Cyborgia Now! Your computer really is a part of you.

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:07:58 -0500

Cyborgia Now! Your computer really is a part of you.

The “Mad Scientist” Blogger Many of our agency...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:39:01 -0500

The “Mad Scientist” Blogger

Many of our agency friends have been blogging for a few years now, but it’s been about as effective a strategy as attending a networking mixer; most companies know instinctively that they need to be there, but they just don’t know exactly why, what they will bring to the conversation, or what they’ll do with the experience. As a result, many agency blogs are pretty unfocused. Some are mostly “neat stuff” aggregators, while others are “innovationspeak” engines running on the Taco Bell model—you know, same words, different combinations. Few actually know what they’re about.

This month’s upcoming newsletter is going to be about how to improve your blog—make it accurately represent your firm, educate your prospects, and generate new interest in what you offer. In the meantime though, I’ve been thinking about a way that some agencies have used their blog that I call the “mad scientist” strategy. Let me explain…

The Iceberg Theory

This image comes from my presentation on writing for business called Professional Writing
for the Unprofessional Writer.

First, I need to apply the iceberg theory—the idea that good writing should only reveal about one eighth of a writer’s knowledge of the subject—to your blogging strategy. Peter Turchi, in his book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, quotes Hemingway on the concept of the “literary” iceberg:

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows… If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of all those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them… [But] if a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A corporate blog should reinforce this idea. I believe that the value of a blog is in the long-term relationship that is built between it’s author and readers. Blogs take a cumulative approach to tell an ongoing story with many short posts. They are relational. When someone subscribes to a blog, they are making a commitment to getting to know you—one they can break at any point (and are likely to) when a blog loses or never develops focus. The story that is told by a blog, though, is one that, when looked at in retrospect, leaves an impression of the writer’s interest and expertise on the reader. At any point in time, I can look at some of the blogs I read regularly and have a sense for who the authors are and what they’re about. The seven eighths of the “iceberg” are in that impression, while the one eighth is in each individual post. This is why a blog that is focused tightly by a firm’s positioning will be more effective that a “generalist” blog. It will slowly describe that positioning through posts that cover thoughts about practice, new ideas, application of expertise, and the like.

But What About…?

There is an exception to this; you may already be thinking of one. What about those bloggers that write so often that their blog is more of a written document of their thinking—as expansive of or peripheral to their core discipline as it may be—than a deliberately considered marketing tool? There are many, many bloggers like this; you might describe their blogs as “unfocused.” In fact, the blogs I look forward to reading most are blogs of this kind. But that’s because they arefocused, just not in an immediately discernible way. I call the authors of these blogs “mad scientists” because their creative license, freedom to experiment and ask “dumb” questions, latitude, and diversity of content reinforce my perception of them as profound thinkers, which in turn reinforces my trust in the quality of their firm’s work. They probably don’t talk about work they’ve done as much as work they want to do. They probably talk about tomorrow more than yesterday. They don’t use much marketing language. And they never try to sell “innovation.”

Design is one of those disciplines that must aggregate knowledge from a wide range of other disciplines in order to properly inform its execution. In turn, good designers are deep thinkers and lifelong students of other areas of knowledge. So it tends to be the case that every good firm has a “mad scientist” on staff, either in a particular person or personified by a stated and supported core value of practice. This person’s thinking influence the kind of client a firm attracts, the kind of work it does, and the kind of people that come there to work. A person who fits this description should probably be one of your active bloggers because the ongoing story they tell will be an extremely valuable one to the perception of your firm as a thoughtful, cutting edge practice with a vision to guide its clients into the future.

Examples

Here are a few people I read that fit in with the “mad scientist” description (in no particular order other than how they come up in my feed reader): David Sherwin, Jack Cheng, Paul Isakson,Russell Davies, Jonathan Harris, Michael Babwahsingh, Steven Frank, and Craig Mod.

Voyager Golden Record - awesome.

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:03:52 -0500

Voyager Golden Record - awesome.

booktwo.org made this FieldNotes book for SXSW 2010. Great use...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:04:57 -0500

booktwo.org made this FieldNotes book for SXSW 2010. Great use of Lulu.com self-publishing.

The original manuscript of Albert Einstein’s...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:04:52 -0500

The original manuscript of Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking theory of relativity, which helps explain everything from black holes to the Big Bang, went on display Sunday in its entirety for the first time. Einstein’s 46-page handwritten explanation of his general theory of relativity, in which he demonstrates an expanding universe and shows how gravity can bend space and time, is being shown at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part the scholarly association’s 50th anniversary celebration. First published in 1916, the general theory of relativity remains a pivotal breakthrough in modern physics.

Standard Time: A Clock Rebuilt Every Minute

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:03:52 -0500

Standard Time: A Clock Rebuilt Every Minute

"The state isn’t a universally representative phenomenon today, if it ever was. Already,..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:02:54 -0500

“The state isn’t a universally representative phenomenon today, if it ever was. Already, billions of people live in imperial conglomerates such as the European Union, the Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the emerging North American Union, where state capitalism has become the norm. But at least half the United Nations’ membership, about 100 countries, can hardly be considered responsible sovereigns. Billions live unsure of who their true rulers are, whether local feudal lords or distant corporate executives. In Egypt and India, democratic elections have devolved into auctions. Delivering security and providing welfare aren’t just campaign promises; they are the campaign. The fragmentation of societies from within is clear: From Bogotá to Bangalore, gated communities with private security are on the rise.”

- Parag Khanna on “neomedievalism”

…a giant head in the forest… (by Simparch)

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:01:56 -0500

…a giant head in the forest… (by Simparch)

Nurturing a Website Imagine you had to depend upon a backyard...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:33:53 -0500

Nurturing a Website

Imagine you had to depend upon a backyard garden for food. You wouldn’t just plant a few seeds and then hope for the best. You’d research the types of crops best suited for your environment and how to best prepare the soil. You would plan well in advance when to plant your seeds and then follow a strict schedule to nurture your crops. You would constantly be asking, Are they getting enough water? Enough sun? Too much water? Too much sun? In short, you would think about your garden all the time because you need it to produce for you.

Today’s websites are built to produce results. Whether those results are sales or leads, you’ve built your website for a purpose and you’re depending upon it to succeed. But its success depends upon you actively nurturing it. Nurturing a website means more than just filling it with content. It means engaging with users, measuring the site’s success using analytics and tracking data, adding new functionality, adjusting existing functionality, performing repairs, and planning for future redesigns. Depending upon the importance of your website, management of it could easily be a full-time role, if not the responsibility of an entire department. You need to be ready.

Engaging

Depending upon your website content strategy, you’ll have many different opportunities to engage with your audience. If you maintain a user or customer forum, your engagement will be fairly traditional (i.e. responding to and participating in discussion threads), but most of today’s opportunities are centered around monitoring how people discuss your brand in online spaces you don’t control. On the other hand, if you maintain a blog or a regular on-site newsletter that allows reader comments, this is your best opportunity to bring those discussions to you. Don’t squander that opportunity. If you receive a comment, respond to it directly and quickly. Find out all that you can about the person who left the comment and find ways to connect with them. A simple Google search will probably help you to locate your commenter—perhaps on Twitter, LinkedIn, a company bio, or their own blog. Once you do, start to build a relationship by reading their blog and contributing to discussions around its posts. Remember, this is not to build incoming links to your site for search engine optimization. This is to engage and bring some humanity to your brand.

For those discussions and mentions of your brand offsite, make sure to participate in them as well. You’ll need to either use reputation monitoring tools or do it yourself using Google alerts and other RSS feeds to watch for mentions of your company, product or keywords related to them in blogs or on Twitter. You’ll probably have to set up a Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook account, too, if you haven’t already. If you’re groaning, I understand, believe me. But the reality is you can either build your online reputation yourself through this kind of engagement, or let others determine it for you.

For more information on engaging with readers, check out our newsletters,Monitoring Your Online Reputation and A Practical Guide to Social Media, or our blog posts on Using Social Media to Connect Professionally, how my blog comments attracted INC Magazine’s attention, and Allowing Un-Moderated and Anonymous Blog Comments.

Measurement

The importance of measurement is so clear that I’m not sure I need to put forth any argument for it at all. Keeping a close eye on on traffic and tracking data will help you to adjust your website to best serve its purpose and provide the best experience for its users. But the only way to do this well is to make it part of your weekly (if not daily) routine. The more activity your website gets, the more closely you’ll need to monitor the data you’re collecting. If you’re using Google Analytics, you have an incredibly powerful tool at your disposal, and a mountain of knowledge offered by Google themselves to help you use it to its full potential.

For more information on measuring your website, check out our newsletter onHow to Use Google Analytics and our blog posts on measurement (there are many).

The Cost of Complexity

The more complex a website is, the more work it requires to manage day to day—not to mention the more people required to do this work, the more functional upgrades or changes it will need over time, and the more it will cost to maintain. This is a simple principle that I call “the cost of complexity.” If you are planning for a website project or are getting ready to launch a new site, you will need to realistically plan for the amount of time and money you will spend on it in the year after it is launched. Yearly budgets for complex and active websites are often commensurate to the cost of the initial project; if the initial project cost $30,000, managing the website over the next year is likely to cost the same or more. If you are engaging and measuring to the extent you should be, you will discover many reasons to adjust and improve the design and functionality of your site moving forward.

Many websites quickly exceed the expectations of those who create them, in terms of lead generation and on-site activity, which is certainly something to celebrate. However, it’s also something to respond to quickly in order to make sure that a website’s architecture can sustain continued growth of the kind it’s already seen. In some cases, it may be necessary to rebuild the underlying architecture of a website, or at least a particular portion of it, in order to improve its performance given the level of user activity it has reached. For example, websites that allow user-generated content may become sluggish once the number of users or the amount of data they submit begins to exceed its initially expected capacity. It’s at such a point that reconfiguring its database would not only radically improve its performance, but also prevent it from becoming unusable.

The Long-Term Life Cycle

We have clients that we’ve worked with for over a decade. During that time, some have redesigned or completely rebuilt their websites multiple times. Beyond the cost of complexity issues I already mentioned, the long-term life cycle of a website typically involves various points at which business decisions or new technologies will make major update necessary. This could be an aesthetic facelift, a redesign based upon new branding, or a complete rebuild of the site. Whatever the case may be, we’ve observed that the normal pace for this sort of thing is every three to four years. If that’s shocking to you, consider that the Facebook was first opened to the general public only 3.5 years ago in September, 2006 (and redesigned multiple times since). A lot can change in just a few years!

On that note, we just redesigned and rebuilt our own website in January, which was the 7th version in 10 years!

If you’ve just gotten started with a new site, don’t worry too much about the next one yet. As I hope you’ve learned from this series on how a website is built, you have plenty to think about right now in order to get the most out of your website. But, it doesn’t hurt to think ahead, either.

Thanks to funding from Renaissance London, visitors to...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:04:56 -0500

Thanks to funding from Renaissance London, visitors to Rotherhithe have a last opportunity to experience one of the wonders of the Victorian age before it closes forever. One of Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s engineering triumphs, contemporaries of the age called it the Eighth Wonder of the World. The Thames Tunnel has been closed to the public for 145 years and will now reopen as the impressive finale of London’s EAST Festival. To mark this incredible occasion and the Brunels’ remarkable feat, the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe will host a recreation of a Fancy Fair, originally held in the bowels of the tunnel deep beneath the Thames in 1852.

"You already know the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, born from a lower..."

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:04:59 -0500

“You already know the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, born from a lower barrier-to-entry to publish. New modes of storytelling. Less environmental impact. A rise in importance of editors. And, yes — paradoxically — a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed.”

- Craig Mod on Books in the Age of the iPad

Glitch Studies Manifesto

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:03:54 -0500

Glitch Studies Manifesto

“A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 09:02:51 -0500

“A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.”

Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

Slideshow: The Ancient, Distant, and Dead

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:03:57 -0500

Slideshow: The Ancient, Distant, and Dead:

SEED:

Signal-to-noise ratio is the relationship between meaningful information (a signal) and external factors (background noise). In a broader theoretical sense, it can refer to seeking out meaning from complexity. We do this in our daily lives, constantly and without thought, each time we take mundane actions and, ultimately, whenever we attempt to make sense of the world we live in. The young Scottish artist Katie Paterson toys with this balance. Whether it’s hacking a mobile phone and burying it deep in the Arctic to capture the dying murmurs of a melting iceberg, or working with astronomers to capture the earliest known light of the universe, Paterson’s work—with a nod to scientific research—explores the curiosities within some of our universe’s infinite blips: remote ones, old ones, ones long gone.

"I feel like there’s this tension that goes on in business and especially in marketing, this..."

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:03:53 -0500

“I feel like there’s this tension that goes on in business and especially in marketing, this conceit that we can take humans—you know, messy, irrational, organic—and somehow cut them open and figure out the binary, rational, predictable, money-making algorithms that determine what they do. You see all this harnessing of science, you know, whether it’s neuro-this or lie detector-that or psychotherapy-this that gets used in the service of, not helping people, but helping marketers crack the nut of what people want, where is the desire center in the brain. You know, that we can learn things about people in a way that is “true”—that is predictable and true, and will determine consumption patterns. I find the idea that we should be able to do that just fascinating, because that’s not the world of people that we live in as people, so why as marketers or designers or producers do we think that we should turn people into things that they really aren’t?”

- Steve Portigal, from a fascinating discussion transposed here.

From the Cartogrammar Blog: Granted this map is more interesting...

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:01:58 -0500

From the Cartogrammar Blog:

Granted this map is more interesting if you know the area, but nonetheless it’s fascinating how much something like this can indicate about the patterns of human settlement in a typical American city. It’s not too difficult to see where settlement has followed or been bounded by highways and rivers. Industrial areas are discernible from residential areas, and city from suburb from rural. (By the way, this map only shows a sliver of Greene County—including my hometown of Beavercreek—where a good chunk of additional suburbia is located.) Owing to its simplicity, I believe this map shows urban patterns much more clearly than a satellite image or a road map.

By Hiroyuki Hamada (and interview here)

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:01:54 -0500

By Hiroyuki Hamada (and interview here)

HYPERITY Yesterday, the entire Newfangled team gathered for a...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:04:52 -0500

HYPERITY

Yesterday, the entire Newfangled team gathered for a one-day mini-retreat. This is something we do each winter as a sort of state-of-the-company event, where we go over company news, talk about various topics related to what we do as a group and individually, and think about where we’re headed.

As part of that event, I gave a brief presentation on the notion of hyperity—that we’re in a state of being connected all the time, and everywhere—and how that affects and will affect our company.

Hyperity

After a particularly intense work week recently, I remember coming coming home and thinking the word “insanity” over and over again in my mind. I was frustrated by what seemed to be a generally accepted expectation that we all be connected and available all the time, and receptive to unceasing input—emails, instant messages, phone calls, text messages, alerts, etc. I think I had just hit my threshhold for it all, and as I repeatedly thought the word “insanity,” it began to morph a bit—insanity, humanity, hyperhumanity, hyperity…

I checked the entry for hyper on Wikipedia to make sure this made sense. According to their entry, “the prefix hyper- (comes from the Greek prefix “υπερ-” and means “over” or “beyond”) signifies the overcoming of the old linear constraints of written text.” Seems pretty suitable for my new word, meaning “the state of being over connected, all the time, everywhere.”

You can see the slides and read about the rest of my presentation here >