I’m Not a Felon

I had a good thing going with this blog. When you put my name into Google, things related to me and only me dominated the results. I’m sure the other Kara McIntosh’s of the world were angry, but unless they wanted to put the time and effort into it, they were just going to fall down in the results.

Then this happens! Some woman in Maryland commits mortgage fraud and suddenly my whole image is tainted. (Not that this post is helping).

Hopefully this will blow over quickly and I can go back to to front page domination.

Auf Wiedersehen Fjordian

As a thank you for my time at Fjord, I’ve put together a collection of my special “moves” that have been the secret to my success.

A shout out to ze frank for the inspiration.

Microsoft Succeeds, Fails

If you haven’t heard about the Mojave Experiment, basically Microsoft told a bunch on unsuspecting users that they had a new operating system called Mojave and asked them to check it out.  The trick is that it wasn’t a new operating system at all, it was just Vista.  The idea was to challenge peoples assumptions of what they thought of Vista.  Basically, to combat the negative press in the blogosphere and bring it back to the regular user.

I saw an ad for this and was totally intrigued.  I clicked on the ad, watched a bunch of videos, then clicked through to the “Learn More about Vista” link.  Basically, I had Microsoft’s ideal user interaction.

The problem came when I got to the Microsoft site.  Instead of being able to learn more about Vista, I saw this image.

Turns out, on the Microsoft site, if you’re browsing with anything other than IE on a PC, you can’t see any of their Windows Media videos.  On a Mac?  No video for you.  On a PC but are a power user who trusts the blogosphere and uses Firefox?  No video for you.

Basically they miss 2 of the key targets they were trying to get.  My experience turned me off.  I’m sure I’m not alone.

At Infinity, It’s All Free

It is becoming more and more apparent to me that eventually, everthing that is available for a price, will be available for free somewhere on the internet.

Case in point, free conference calls.  Ok, so Skype basically has been doing this for a while, but this service is virtually identical to the conference calls any company uses except they’re called “free.”  You don’t need to sign-up or be tech-savvy, saving you from the inevitable problem when the one person who can’t figure it out sucks up all the time with asking for help.

Some of this free stuff is given away because it’s too much work to build a business model, sometimes it’s advertising supported.  So here’s my question, in 10 years, what the heck will we actually be paying for?

Obviously, anything physical we’ll still need (but with digital books and digital games, what will still be physical other than the machines that play them?  Oh and hugs.) but I also think we’ll pay for status.  If everything is free somewhere, we’ll be shelling out for the status of the more expensive whatever.  Just like people pay stupid prices for Louis Vuitton, in an increasingly digital culture people will pay for the status of the better software.

Next big idea: Luxury browser.

Ajax on Your Desktop

I discovered something that made my day yesterday.  Have you ever been using a PC, then right-clicked on your desktop, then hit properties, then hit desktop, then hit Customize Desktop, then hit Web, then noticed you can add web pages as active elements to your desktop.  No?  Really?  But it’s so obvious!

Well if you had, but decided that just having a web page hanging out not doing anything on your desktop wasn’t really that useful, because the minute you wanted to interact with it at all it had to launch a browser, WELL THEN, I’ve found 1 instance where this incredibly obvious feature actually works. BACKPACK.

You see, BackPack uses Ajax which is a fancy way of saying it can submit forms and change things on a page without having to refresh which makes it the only website worth keeping on my work desktop.

I’m doing things like making to-do lists, then checking them off on real check boxes. It’s so satisfying.

(Oh, and lest you think I’m really crazy, BackPack has a free version, I didn’t pay to check off boxes on my desktop, that would be madness [This post is dedicated to Kat]).

The Case for Less Interactivity

In case you don’t know what I do for a living, let me explain in a nutshell. I find ways to make more money on top of things we already do for MuchMusic. So we have a website, and we also sell ringtones and music on that website. We have TV shows, so we also have chat or SMS games over those tv shows which cost $.75/msg.

The premise under which I do all this stuff is that people want to be able to interact with TV, so it’s not such a one-sided medium. We take advantage of new technologies to give the user control, more information and more services. Now, that must be true, because we make money off these services.

But there have been a couple instances recently where I question how far this can go.

The first is the general discussion about radio. You’d think with TV on demand, the internet and all the other services people would have moved away from a linear, 1 sense media. But they didn’t, just like people didn’t stop reading books. My interpretation as to why this is so? Radio is the ultimate low-maintenance media. You can be doing 18 other things while listening to the radio and that’s ok. TV can be very passive if you don’t change the channel, but you still have to look at it to get it, which is a higher level of commitment.

The second thing is watching Maxie use the internet. Maxie is a very intelligent person who knows enough about the web to use Firefox and customize her blogger template, which is more than the vast majority of users can do. Yet when Maxie is on Facebook, she’s never rolled over and the names of the people tagged in an image to see where they are in that image. To me it seems totally obvious to interact with everything on the page to see what the functionality is. To Maxie, not a necessity at all. Maxie is happy when the functionality of the page meets her needs and doesn’t feel the need to go any further than that.

Taking both these things together, than kneading them together in my mind, you get a picture of a world where not everyone actually wants more control over the media they interact with. It might be only a small fragment of people that really want to go further with their media. While I think we absolutely should capitalize on this small subset, but I feel that we’ll hit the limit of diminishing returns quickly if we just hold to the value of simple interactivity.

Basically, I think we have to start marketing to the uninterested if we’re gonna keep growing this thing.

Blame the CRTC

After my experience with having this blog quickly picked up by google and sending out an alert to someone who was named in the blog, I decided to google alert “MuchMusic” just to see if any forums or bloggers say anything about it or the work that comes out of there.

My findings are interesting.  It seems to me that not a lot of people blog about MuchMusic, but many use the word “MuchMusic” as a quick indicator of all things pop in Canada, and often in the past tense.

This isn’t totally troubling, since the kind of people who blog often are not the people who watch MuchMusic.  The Much audience is a little more passive – they want help finding and sorting through music, while I think active bloggers are probably also the kind of people who will go out and search on their own for new music.

But I wonder why MuchMusic can’t have something for both?  And that’s where I think the CRTC comes in.  On-air they’re limited by a license that says they have to be all music all the time, however, they have a legacy of being a youth brand.  But in an environment where the youth market is fragmenting, in order to still be about Music AND Youth, Much has to become the anti-niche channel.  All this while the internet becomes highly niche skewed.

Seems like a rock and a hard place to me.  The easiest way to reach youth?  Online.  The easiest way to attract people online?  Being niche. (at least, that’s the received wisdom).

Let’s see if they can’t give people online something to talk about.

Proof That Humans Ain’t Built For 3D

Ok, that title probably sounded loony, but check out this site http://www.mb3dengine.com/

That is digg.com, in 3D.  I dare you to not get lost and have to crawl your way back along an axis within 30 seconds of trying to navigate this site.

I submit that people understand 3D things in terms of 2D planes, and that we don’t really conceptualize most things in 3D.

Money or Fame?

Sites like this are awesome http://www.youparklikeanasshole.com. This guy isn’t advertising on this site, but he maintains it out of interest, and if you read the comments, other people are interested too. Simple fun idea. Simple fun design. It’s a nice day on the internet 

TV on the Web

This site is awesome. http://www.utvpc.com/

It basically just aggregates the free video available elsewhere on the net. I can’t imagine that it’ll last very long, but it’s awesome that it’s there.