Serendipity Book

Our changing relationship with media - some recent commentary

A quick roundup of some interesting recent articles from around the web on the subject of the changing nature of our relationship with media.

1) First out, a nice infographic from The Guardian (pictured below but do go here for the interactive version ) showing the surge in Google's ad revenue relative to traditional media:

2) Chris "Long Tail" Anderson explaining why he believes that news aggregators have a limited future:

Every day I get most of my news from blogs. I don't visit "news sites" or use a "news aggregator". I use a generic feedreader (Bloglines) and a totally idiosyncratic RSS subscription list that includes everything from personal posts from friends to parts (but not all) of the WSJ. When it comes to the web, I have no interest in someone else trying to guess what I want to read or "help" me by defining what's news and what isn't. My news is not your news; indeed, you probably wouldn't call most of it news at all.

3)Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everyone, explains how people find the time to engage with participatory media:

[I told a TV producer about Wikipedia and] she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

4) Rachel Donadio explores the rise of the author and decline of the reader in the New York Times:

53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year [but] in 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day  7 percent of U.S adults did some form of creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

5) Last week The Sunday Times reported on a study which estimated that some of us now cram 31 hours of life into 24 thanks to multitasking and our increased connectivity and access to useful gadgets:

Patrick Moriarty, one of the authors of the report said: "On the one hand it’s good – you get more done. On the other hand, when I left university seven years ago, life was much simpler. There was more talking face-to-face and more time spent over dinner. I suspect smarter phones may add another couple of hours but we are probably at the limit of multitasking for this generation."

6) According to AP, Bertelsmann is to start printing an almanac of Wikipedia.  Hmmm. And Bertelsmann likes to think that they really get the web.

7) A great round up by Aqute of the (lack of) innovation being shown on the web by UK publishing houses.

8) Brand Republic reports that a survey of 1000 people by online survey provider Ciao Surveys has revealed that 65% of people in Britain think that social networking sites should be banned at work, even though 56% admitted to being a member of at least one. Furthermore, a quarter of respondents believed that social networking sites are a 'passing fad

The role of boredom in creativity and innovation

This is a great post from Regine at We Make Money Not Art which documents and explores the idea of 'Strategic Boredom'.

Following from Kierkegaard, Molly Wright Steenson sees boredom as an inspirational and provocative state of mind that demands a response and spurs creativity. In her talk she reports on the historic role of boredom in bringing about innovative thinking.

Interactive Architecture - some experiential inspiration

Stuck for experiential brand activation ideas? You could do worse than browse Interactive Architecture for stimulation.

This fantastic site is run by Ruairi Glynn of UCL's Bartlett School of Architecture and Central Saint Martins and it does a great job of bridging the specialisms of digital media, architecture, textile design and industrial design.

The Funky Forest installation pictured above makes for a nice starting point. But be careful you could lose a whole day to this site.

Renewed calls for transparency on tipping

It seems that my local branch of Pizza Express in Wimbledon is at the centre of a row about the lack of transparency in the way that restaurants distribute the tips given to staff.

It has been alleged that some restaurants (the example given by the BBC was Tootsies) keep up to 60% of the tips given to staff and the money that staff do receive is used to make up their salaries to the minimum wage.

Pizza Express (whose website proclaims that it's "a place where people matter") stands accused of firing a whistleblower for revealing that they take an 8% rake from tips.
Surely it is about time that those in the hospitality industry realised that they cannot continue these sharp practices without causing damage to their reputations?

As Dave Turnbull, a rep for the Unite union said: "I’m sure Pizza Express customers expect that the tips they leave for good service go to the staff and would be upset that the restaurant are creaming money off the top." Too right.

Video on Flickr - too little, too late?

So, I see from Popurls that Flickr have made a foray into the crowded online video hosting market. 

They are now offering their 'Pro' members (US$25 a year) like me the facility to upload 90 second video clips ("long photos") to their Flickr profiles.

Here are some of the videos that have already been uploaded and as you can see from this embedded film it is a nice implementation:

I think this is too little, too late but TechCrunch seem to be sold on it as do Boing Boing and I'd certainly rather have the facility than not.

Flickr have been keen to distance themselves from YouTube by emphasising their focus on archiving and sharing within private networks. Direct competitors are therefore the likes of Vimeo and Motionbox who, like Flickr, allow you to restrict who gets to see your videos.