Web Design Evolution: Two Decades of Innovation

Here is an interesting infographic about web design thanks to Mashable.

There are two trends to note:

1. The digital experience is getting richer. Buh-bye 8-bit days. At some point soon, we will begin to ask ourselves, wait, is that real?

2. The digital experience is getting more personal. In a similar way to how the telephone became a ubiquitous means of communication because hearing the other person's voice in one's ear was very personal, the internet is becoming more and more customized. At some point, how we visualize the internet may be personalized to each user.

From an advertising perspective, will advertisers learn how to customize creatives by users? (Hint: it's not one size fits all. So stop just putting TV commercials online, please.)

Don't know. But only time will tell.

On a side note...

For those of you who are following along my adventure to learn how to make infographics, I  now have a list of free (or relatively cheap-ish) courses that can teach me Adobe Illustrator.

For the next month, I will be trying Vector Diary's Illustrator Training Crash Course. It uses an earlier version of Illustrator, but I believe it's a good place to start.

Charitable Checkin Turns Your Good Deeds Into Rewards

Fake Tracy Morgan said it best on Twitter, courtesy of Bits &Pieces:

“Facebook asks what I’m thinking. Twitter asks what I’m doing. Foursquare asks where I am. The internet has turned into a crazy girlfriend.”

What fake Tracy is pointing out so eloquently is just the beginning. Another player has come into the space: dailyfeats. What’s different about this one is that there is more of a focus on social awareness or community consciousness. 

Users self-report good deeds and receive points, give and receive props to other users, and receive some discounts from advertiser supported feats. (So far, the advertiser/content fit has been good. Keeping my fingers crossed that it will remain that way.)

What makes this social network particularly interesting is that it attempts to tap into an idea that can sometimes be considered an oxymoron in the online world: ethics. Aristotle and Socrates more or less believed that people can and are willing to do good. This social network is taking that idea and is now attempting to allow us to do this online.

If I see that my friends are doing good works, then I should be more willing to do good works, too, right?

The Achilles heel for making this work is twofold: 1. Users need to self-report honestly about their good deeds and 2. Users need to be diligent about updating their good works.

As for the honesty, people will choose to be honest or not. No amount of policing can make all users online be honest, so I’ll let that be. As for the diligence part, that’s where I struggle.

Fundamentally, I am not interested in constantly recording what I’m thinking, doing, saying, eating, (insert verb here), etc. constantly online.

However, the temptation to show how “good” I am online is quite appealing.  Even if it can get me to be a little nicer even for a short period of time, I’m sure my husband would appreciate it. I can now check my “Be Kind” feat, yes!

The Fall of MySpace And The Rise of LinkedIn

Social networks are cool. They are so cool that I’m part of at least five of them.

The trouble with social networks is that they are fickle. What is popular in one moment is not necessarily popular in the next.

I’ll be honest. When I first joined Twitter in 2008, I wasn’t sure if it was going to take off. I actually don’t remember the original account name because I logged in once in 2008 and haven’t since. At the time, I thought that the “texting” like structure of Twitter wouldn’t work online. Given today’s date, I was wrong.

I came across an infographic about social media from Mashable, “The Winners & Losers of Social Networking”.

I think infographics are cool. They are so cool that I’m going to try to learn Adobe Illustrator. We’ll see how far I go.

I’m passing along this infographic because it’s cool and it combines two things I think are cool.

Augmented Reality

So have you heard of the book, "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez? If not, read it after you finish reading this. It is a wonderful story in so many ways.

One of the concepts in the book is augmented reality (AR), where a virtual layer is added on top of what we see normally. It is similar to the idea of a HUD in flight simulator games. A more detailed explanation from How Stuff Works is here.

- Imagine being able to do mobile search by taking a picture of a pair of shoes that someone on the street is wearing and have the information about cost and where to buy immediately layered on top of the picture of the shoe.

- Or imagine being able to know when it’s time to put milk on the grocery list by just looking at the fridge through eye glasses.

- Or imagine being able to identify a plant in nature by seeing its name on top of it and whether it is poisonous through a contact lens.

I’m somewhat iffy about sticking anything in my eye. However, the possibilities of this type of technology are tempting.

Recently we’ve taken another step in making Augmented Reality more ubiquitous. A New York Times article, “Augmented Reality Comes Closer to Reality” touched upon the subject.

The article summarized some of the advertiser opportunities for this type of technology via Google or Apple. One of the early players, Autonomy, is “hoping it can create something similar to Google’s AdWords network in which it is possible for potential advertisers to buy particular objects and have an advertisement displayed whenever that object is recognized.”

While very exciting for advertisers, I do have a word of caution.

I suffer from ad blindness, and I’m not alone. When I’m online, I know exactly where not to look to avoid looking at ads. I know exactly how to time 30 seconds to avoid the video ads before I watch something online. I also use a DVR to avoid commercials on TV. (Yes, I timeshift the way I watch TV.)

As a consumer, I see the potential of Augmented Reality as a means for providing more information about the world I experience. I see it very much as a tool for more information first.

There can be cool entertainment or gaming applications, (how about a scavenger hunt that uses AR?), but I think they are secondary.

If I’ve learned where to not look to avoid seeing ads, what happens when every object I see potentially has an ad attached to it? I would prefer to not to have to blind myself to avoid seeing ads, but I understand it is a little extreme. I could just take out the contact lenses.

But the allure of what can be is too exciting. So I kindly ask advertisers to put some reason into their campaigns while the technology is still being adopted.

I’ll promise to learn to stick something in my eye.

Social Media Identities

I am one person. Or at least in real life I am one person. Online I am two persons, sometimes three, sometimes more. The number of identities depends on the website/social network.

A recent article on GigaOM, “LinkedIn and Facebook: Personal vs. Professional in the Identity Wars,” by Mathew Ingram shed a light on a few things I’ve been noticing:

- Everyone is trying to be like Facebook.
- I have separate accounts for everything.

As for the Facebook phenomenon, it is what it is. Convergence and divergence is an eternal cycle, so it’s no surprise that user interfaces and functionality on social websites are beginning to look similar. Facebook is just lucky that their model is the winner, for today.

As for the separate accounts, it is true. I have a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook profile, several Blogger profiles, several Reddit profiles, and the list goes on. Part of the reason for the separation is that I don’t really want everyone at work to know everything about me personally and vice versa. For the people who know me personally, I wouldn’t want them to know me professionally. (Let’s just say I behave differently at work from at home.)

So if LinkedIn is trying to be more like Facebook, does this mean that our social digital identities are also converging? Digging deeper into the subject I came across some interesting research by MyWebCareer.com stating that roughly 23% of LinkedIn connections are also Facebook friends. (Press release here.) While the merits of research against a self-selecting panel of users can be debated elsewhere, the idea is interesting.

Conservatively speaking, 1 out of 5 people I “know” on LinkedIn, I also “know” on Facebook. So I’ve broken my cardinal rule, I’ve mixed professional and personal, business and pleasure. Is it so bad? I’m beginning to think not.

How often is the case that colleagues go out for drinks after work?

Or how often is it the case that colleagues with similar interests outside of work meet up on the weekends?

How about the cases where friends are freelancers, so friends offer to commission work from their friends to help them out?

The idea of self is complicated, and it changes over the course of a lifetime. So why not have my social digital identities mix a little bit? Afterall, I am the same person offline. So, now I just need to introduce my FLinkedInbook profile.

Emergent Systems

A New York Times opinion piece by David Brooks, “Tools for Thinking”, piqued my interest in the sense that I am interested in the way people process information. Selfishly, I am interested in ways to make me think “better” and “smarter” than everyone else.

Below is the link to the piece.
Tools For Thinking

The bits about Path Dependence and the Einstellung Effect were interesting in their own rights. (I vaguely remember these concepts from some article long ago.) What really interested me was the concept of Emergent Systems.

I work in Advertising, in Media to be precise. Eh, to be even more precise, I work in a Media Agency. Unless one is already familiar with the Advertising industry ecosystem it is possible to have never heard of a Media Agency before. It’s ok. I didn’t either until I started working at one.

What made me have a further think is that as I was reading David’s summarization of the concept it reminded me of my industry. Upon further investigation (i.e. Wikipedia search on the terms “Emergence”. Here is the link.), I realized that this concept is not new but its relative application to the internet is new. Now, what if the argument was extended further to try to describe advertising today?

I'd venture to say that the advertising world is complicated.

A thought experiment...
- 1. If I watch a TV commercial for McDonald’s during my morning news check, and then
- 2. I see an print ad for McDonald’s while reading the paper on my way to work, and then
- 3. while I’m updating my status in Facebook in my local Starbucks I notice that my Google maps on my iPhone shows a new McDonald’s near my office, and then
- 4. my office mate and I go to that new McDonald’s for lunch....

Which exposure to McDonald’s branding deserves the credit for me buying my lunch? Does it matter? (Well, yes. My industry depends on this information.)

Traditionally, measurement has had a very top down approach. Let’s build a model. Let’s see what the model says to do. Let’s do what the model says. With the advent of the Internet (and really the movement towards consumers actively choosing what content they will consume and when), there is now a gluttony of bottom up measurement. The Internet is trackable. Now we can have a lot of information (in aggregation, of course), about how users are choosing and consuming content.

So taking the concept of Emergent Systems, how do we begin to better understand this complex system knowing that it is basically a consumer seeing some kind of advertisement of some brand somewhere? What does it mean that more and more content is being delivered digitally? Is it possible that the steps towards a solution are within the realms of biology? Or maybe the humanities?

I see steps moving in that direction but they are baby steps. It is my hope that someone else in my industry has read the opinion piece and is starting to think twice about how we approach of these problems. Either way, the article was interesting to me.