Archive for December, 2005

Is it me or is the BVG web­site a lit­tle funky? Haven’t paid atten­tion to any UI-issues but I like it a whole lot bet­ter than DSB’s.

Pol­las ønsker glædelig jul.

pollasjul2005.mov — 0:15

A vacant flat, a tip from Nico­laj and a promise to myself to take more time off: I’ll be at the 22C3, CCC’s annual Con­gres in Berlin.

The 22nd Chaos Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Con­gress (22C3) is a four-day con­fer­ence on tech­nol­ogy, soci­ety and utopia. The Con­gress offers lec­tures and work­shops on a mul­ti­tude of top­ics includ­ing (but not lim­ited to) infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy, IT-security, inter­net, cryp­tog­ra­phy and gen­er­ally a critical-creative atti­tude towards tech­nol­ogy and the dis­cus­sion about the effects of tech­no­log­i­cal advances on society. 

I’ll be catch­ing a bus from my christ­mas get­away on won­der­ful Lol­land and fly­ing back on Decem­ber 30. Hope­fully I’ll get time to think and find a bal­ance between attent­ing the con­fer­ence and hang­ing out with a lap­top and some of the projects I’ve been neglect­ing for the past month.

In related news, we did a silent ‘launch’ over at blogtid.dk (link added to the mess that is my ‘involve­ment side­bar’) — the plan is to pro­vide a decent alter­na­tive to avistid.dk which shouldn’t be too hard.

If you’re in Berlin between christ­mas and new year for one rea­son or another, ping me.

“Don’t just con­sume, cre­ate!” — or why BBC is sooo ahead of any of the tra­di­tional Dan­ish media cor­po­ra­tions: BBC News The Open News Archive.

Stop every­thing you’re doing. This just in.

For en gang skyld er Ekstra­Bladet og jeg enige: Break­ing news: Alex er langhåret. (deres time­stamp anty­der de var først ude, faktisk)

While look­ing for Jon Lunds url for my pre­vi­ous post on DIA06 I stum­bled upon a post on Jon’s old blog about the cam­paign Avis­tid. The title of the post claims “Top dan­ish direc­tors in cutting-edge online-only cam­paign”. Which I actu­ally thought was a joke. After read­ing the post, I’m not so sure. For the record, by the way: This is by no means “talk trash about Jon Lund”-day. I just missed a post some time back, found it and decided to post my com­ment here as opposed to in the com­ments as it appears Jon is now blog­ging some­where else.

Any­way. A lot of blog­gers have writ­ten about Avis­tid (can’t be arsed to link to it all, just search for it — you won’t be both­ered with any other hits ;-), most of it being about the clue­less­ness with regards to the rea­son the cam­paign is even launched. Which is, by the way, where it con­nects to my pre­vi­ous post about online marketing.

So just a few thoughts on the claims Jon is making:

Top-“dogme” direc­tors: True. But this isn’t the same as their films are any good or sup­port the aim of the cam­paign in any way. Actu­ally, I’ve found them pretty bor­ing so far, the first by Søren Kragh-Jakobsen define­nately being the worst.

Web-only: Yup, all other media is try­ing to drive traf­fic to the (hor­ri­ble) web­site, try­ing to get peo­ple to watch the films. For what rea­son I ask? Please keep in mind that the Dan­ish news­pa­pers aren’t try­ing to sell just any prod­uct, they are actu­ally try­ing to sell news­pa­pers — and could ben­e­fit a great deal if they would please explain us what they are good at.

Cutting-edge: Bull­shit. Being cutting-edge for the rea­son of being cutting-edge.…is not cutting-edge.…

As BMW before them: Mmm..no! BMW’s films were semi-viral pieces being linked because of the qual­ity of the films. Which I haven’t expe­ri­enced with the films from Avis­tid. Also, Sell­ing cars and sell­ing news­pa­pers isn’t the same. At all. It’s obvi­ous, how­ever, that they’re try­ing to get it to be the same; going ‘lifestyle’ on the con­sumers poor asses.

The link to my DIA06 com­ments is this: If you want to respect your cus­tomers and not stuff what­ever down their throats, you should take a good, hard look at the con­text in which you’re ‘com­mu­ni­cat­ing’. Noone gets offended if peo­ple sell­ing jeans, soft drinks or cars pull the ‘lifestyle’ card on them. After all, this is a lot of what you buy. When you are a news­pa­per, how­ever, sell less news­pa­pers due to — among other things — the inter­net with its user empow­er­ment, con­ver­sa­tions and free niche-content and then decide to mar­ket your prod­uct as if noth­ing has hap­pened and you just need some flashy adver­tis­ing and some promises about ‘being cool when you take the time to read a paper’ — you are tak­ing the piss.

I’m will­ing to talk shop any­time, focus­ing solely on craft­man­ship, tech­niques and what have we. But in cases like this where the mes­sage you’re try­ing to con­vey so clearly goes against every­thing what’s right while wast­ing a lot of money and treat­ing your (for­mer) cus­tomers like stu­pid sheep — espe­cially when you’re in a busi­ness who should have no trou­ble man­ag­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion and high­t­light what’s good about the prod­uct (and not the lifestyle sor­round­ing it) — then I think it’s time to take a step back and look at what it is you’re try­ing to do. And admit you’ve failed miserably.

Jakob has posted some addi­tional thoughts on DIA06 after com­ments and more time to think.

I totally agree; the peo­ple of the jury seems to be good peo­ple — and that’s not the point. Just as mar­ket­ing on the web — and new and bet­ter ways of doing it — is defi­nately a wor­thy cause. But not the point.

When we’re pok­ing fun at DIA06 it’s not because all mar­ket­ing is bad — and peo­ple work­ing with online mar­ket­ing there­fore are bad peo­ple. It’s because the fram­ing of the whole event is no where near the good thoughts Jon Lund is lay­ing out in the com­ment to Jakob’s first post. And while I whole-heartedly sup­port inno­va­tion in the area of online mar­ket­ing, I also believe in prac­tic­ing what you preach and treat­ing your peers with respect. Flash-sites, award shows and poorly cre­ated sites doesn’t run along those lines…

So: 100% sup­port in putting focus on bet­ter online mar­ket­ing from me. How­ever, I’m pretty con­vinced (as a com­ment to Jakob’s clos­ing remark that maybe they the agen­cies do need an award show) that they don’t need an award show.

Boxes and Arrows launched on Pub­lic Square.

Can’t wait to see Pind’s new we media-product Pub­lic Square hit the streets.

The prod­uct is designed specif­i­cally for we media, or peer-produced online pub­lish­ing. No more try­ing to do shoe­horn your site into soft­ware designed for blogs or generic online com­mu­ni­ties (what­ever that is). 

Con­grats!