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Archives - January 2008

Immersive games, collective intelligence, and making the world’s most elaborate album cover

08.01.08 | Permalink | 1 Comment

Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails was stumped as to how to create context for his latest album, since mp3s lacked the artwork and liner notes of the 12″ concept albums of the 60s…the solution ended up being the development of a fully immersive ARG (alternate reality game) which involved and was shaped by the fans who partook in it.

Reznor said he wanted to wanted to give his fans a taste of life in a massively dysfunctional theocratic police state - both through his music, and through the ARG which ended up involving millions of players worldwide.

Hints and clues were seeded in t-shirts sold on the band’s tour, in USB flash drives left in the toilets at tour venues, on websites and in phone messages - fragments of which were assembled to form an interactive narrative which told a story to contextualise and complement the story told in the album.

Although Reznor says it wasn’t intended as a form of marketing, there’s no doubt that it created enormous excitement about the album - and in fact helped to create the narrative of the album itself. It’s also another fantastic example of collective intelligence working together to create something greater than the sum of its parts - in this case the audience pieced together the clues to solve the mysteries posed along the way - and in the process told and shaped and reformed the story online.

ARGs aren’t anything new (my friend Dan Hon’s work on Cloudmakers and Perplex City being two shining examples) but the collective intelligence and participation which drives them is now being used more frequently and in more exciting ways - and it’s particularly gratifying to see big brands such as P&G, Dell and Intel are recognising the value of the hive mind in driving innovation - with the minds of the many undoubtedly eliciting far greater results than the minds of the few.

[via Wired ]

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Even better than guitar hero with Slash…

07.01.08 | Permalink | 0 Comments

You have to love the quintessential nerd - even better than playing guitar hero with Slash, in case you haven’t seen it, featuring (amongst others), rapping with Jay-Z, working out with Matthew McConaughey, and auditioning for Steven Spielberg, check out Bill Gates figuring out what he’ll do with his post-Microsoft life…

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David Lynch on the iPhone

06.01.08 | Permalink | 0 Comments

David Lynch is not a fan of watching content on his mobile…

[ via Good Magazine ]

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Upingme - Social Networking Via Mobile

04.01.08 | Permalink | 0 Comments

Upingme (as in, you-ping-me, but you knew that already) has now launched, and I have to say it’s definitely most intriguing.

In a cross between social networking and mobile SMS, in what is apparently a world-first, it delivers a mobile-phone specific location (rather than a more generalised spot triangulated between signal masts).

It allows you to broadcast where you are via texting your location to the given number. This is then sent out on a feed (rather like RSS) to all users who’ve subscribe to your location feed - who can then query your location and see it pinpointed on a Google map.

It strikes me as potentially extremely cool, although it of course does depend on your mates subscribing to your feed for it to actually work…and (not yet played with this to know if it’s do-able) the ability to moderate who subscribes to your location feed, in the event that you’re concerned about stalkers.

Although the service actually positions itself as classified ads via mobile, it’s the exact positioning which seems to be the killer part of the app - I guess time will tell if it actually takes off

[ Via Pocket Lint ]

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David Byrne & Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music

02.01.08 | Permalink | 9 Comments

There’s a fantastic discussion up at Wired between David Byrne and Thom Yorke where they ruminate on the music industry, distribution and Radiohead’s ground-breaking decision to release their most recent album ‘In Rainbows’ online, asking customers to pay what they thought the album was worth.

I’m a big fan of both artists musically (and can vouch for the fact that the former of these two is an absolutely fantastic bloke, as the other half has been recording with him recently) but it’s a fascinating exploration of the value of music, and a brilliant example of really putting the consumer at the heart.

A brand only exists in the minds of consumers, and is defined by what consumers think about it - consumers are the true brand guardians, no matter what brand values the brand ‘owners’ might set out to communicate. In this case Radiohead have taken a bold step to show that the value of their product doesn’t lie in record industry bumph, or in reviews, but in the substance of what the listener thinks about it, and what they’re willing to pay for it.

A fantastically brave move, but one which has paid off admirably for the band - and yet another example of a distribution model for releasing music which puts the product directly in the hands of consumers. It’s going to be really really interesting to see how alternative models for distribution are explored in 2008, both from the point of view of an interested bystander, and from the point of view of someone who’s other half has made his living to date from the traditional distribution model!

I’d also highly recommend checking out David Byrne’s amazing powerpoint work Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information- ingeniously creative, and a brilliant twist on a tool primarily used for work-related stuff ( and sadly rarely used to create visually fulfilling experiences).

[Photo used © Wired]

Update:
Just spotted on the BBC, an interesting follow-on from above, Thom Yorke has now come out to say whilst the online trust model was a worthwhile one to explore, to have done so without any kind of physical release would have been “stark raving mad”. I don’t think it necessarily undermines the decision to release it online as I can wholly understand the desire to have a physical release…as surely anyone who wanted to get it for free could get it online anyway. I’m pretty old school in my love of album artwork (I still find the CD sleeve a poor cousin to the 12″ LP!), so I can totally relate to his point of view about people wanting a physical product!

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DIY ambient using robots!

01.01.08 | Permalink | 2 Comments

Happy New Year! And what better way to start the new year than with one of my favourite things….robots! Someone has modded an iRobot create by adding a dot-matrix printer to blast talcum powder onto the pavement in the pattern of your choice … which can then be controlled wirelessly.

Not quite as practical or environmentally-friendly as the clean ads that SAS developed, and probably not likely to be adopted on a mass scale, but it uses freakin’ robots to make street art! Which qualifies it as pretty bloody cool in my book at any rate.

[Read more about the mod at Engadget]

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