Archive for July, 2013

7 words

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

An idea totally ripped off from NYU’s Journalism School where they ask guests to summarise themselves in 7 words. I asked a few people for their 7 word bios and got great results.

Liz Nolan, lover of chocolate and music, presenter on Lyric FM:

Failed cynic, fusspot mama, insatiably longing for…?

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Allan Cavanagh caricature artiste:

Drawing faces since hand could clasp pencil.

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Kathryn Reilly, Sinn Féin Senator:

Ballyjamesduff born and raised. Senator. Nickname: Biddy.

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Pat Phelan, CEO of Trustev, Corkman:

I solve problems on a global scale.

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Dylan Collins, man of many tech investments, foodie:

Blows up companies while listening to rap.

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Rick O’Shea, yer man on the radio, Twitter addict:

Wifey
Books
Kids
Food
Travelling
Vino
Universitychallengemastermindonlyconnect

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Fiona Kearney, Director of Glucksman, super-awesome Cork person (again):

Curious about this and other worlds. Lover.

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Annette Clancy, consultant, creative, OIB: original Irish blogger:

Curious, creative about what lurks under the surface

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Suzy Byrne, and trouble is never far away:

Nosey Feminist passionate about rights and wrongs.

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Liam Geraghty, documentary guy, hand in everything including puppets:

Wields a radio mic like a lightsaber.

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Jim Carroll, the original Irish Times blogger that makes lists that infuriate. *ducks*

I ask questions that no-one else asks

Media in your timeline – The GIF Economy

Monday, July 29th, 2013

Media Producers, you need to up your multimedia game.

It’s amazing to see the GIF have a resurgence in the past few years, with the past 18 months especially interesting.

Some media producers are adapting and adopting it, most have no clue of the value of short multimedia content.

Twitter’s Vine video app, where you create six second videos uses the GI format. I notice that GMail is now supporting GIFs in emails. When I get emails now from General Assembly, their images can be animated:
General Assembly email

This multimedia piece on the Silk Road via train from the New York Times is beautiful, useful and it’s going to be very hard for the likes of the Huffington Post or BuzzFeed to rip that off. Note the use of large images, a subtle background and 15 second video/gifs to share information. Look at the way the photos have a line going to the map that moves as you scroll. Wow.

Timelines:
And why GIFs and short videos now? Tumblr is certainly a reason, this talk from SXSW suggests so. Them, IMGur and Reddit were the driving forces and I guess it became apparent that even a short GIF is dense with information. It’s all in the game yo or all about the uninterrupted timeline yo. Our lives are revolving around timelines. The Twitter timeline/feed, the Facebook timeline.

We spend more time in the timeline and less time elsewhere. This journey through constant hits of information seems to mean we don’t want to be pulled away from it for too long. Continuous partial attention. Not sure how well researched the six second video length from Vine is but it works very well. Short enough to not distract me from the work of scrolling down, long enough to add a lot of rich context that conditions me to know this format is worth looking at again.

Richer data please
When time is precious, we want richer data. As in the education/learning industry, text can work to pass on information but sights, sounds and text allows us to learn faster as we can process more data. Text is good, text with images is better, text, images and sound is better again. Video is better than images alone. Vine shows this and now Instagram video. We all know changing the angle in a photo can change the message entirely because we only have so much context. A very short video is immensely better than a photo of the same thing.

Vines are 6 seconds, Instagrams are 15 seconds. Vines auto-play and loop. Instagram videos are rumoured to auto-play in Facebook timelines soon and oh, how funny, Facebook will be unveiling a new 15 second video ad format that auto-plays in a timeline. Slide 12 and slide 18 from Mary Meeker’s state of the net slidedeck shows the surge in video consumption and production. Vine is doing well too.

Consider how much text is needed to explain this 5 second video?

Tying shoes

So videos are best? Well, maybe not. We don’t have the time for long videos if the game is shorty snappy bursts of information. It’s suggested that your marketing or otherwise video needs to be short to maintain attention. I think Twitter and Facebook has distorted this and pushed this way down. Quick, rich data please. Vine is being used a lot now.

We’ve moved from text and a few photos to videos, away from videos to infographics, to short videos and GIFs. People might be really put off a timeline in Facebook or Twitter that looks like Lings Cars but 1 billion dollar Tumblr shows that certain demographics don’t mind it too much.

Hopefully more media outlets will embrace these new formats from infographics (becoming a bit too abused) to Vines/Instavideos to GIFs. I’m not a sports fan but now and then read sports news, I’ve spent time marveling at great goals displayed as GIFs on Backpage Football as I want the money shot as quickly as possible so I can go back to things that might interest me more. Finally, the best thing about GIFs is I don’t need flash, I don’t (yet) see shitty overlay ads on them, I don’t have issues with plugins crashing or chugging along videos not fully loading.

Backpage Football

Via la GIF.

I found the following two pieces after writing this that are worth checking out. One from Kathleen Sweeney and one from The New Yorker.

Fluffy Links – Sunday July 28th 2013

Sunday, July 28th, 2013

Never Enter The Kitchen Empty-Handed and other productivity mantras.

Those new tabs in GMail are definitely impacting on newsletters. Wonder will a premium tool be used by Google to help marketing people?

Some good stats from Karl about Broadsheet.ie, iPhone app is dominant. Facebook and Twitter very good for traffic.

Public Service Broadcasting does not just mean RTÉ: Nice piece by Jim Carroll.

Of course, given the plurality of media in 2013, there are many more media organisations than RTE who could claim to be doing that

The advantages of putting your prices on your website. I may try this,

BoingBoing writer describes a hypnotherapy session. Very interesting.

How Twitter deals with rumours. Note many of the sinners in this are media people:

Distilled Media (Daft) doing fairly well in website traffic. DoneDeal.ie and IrishTimes.com look pretty even, traffic wise.

The Indo group is structuring their papers to be more like channels for a single news production entity it seems. A group head of news, group business editor and group sport editor are due to be in the jobs before September.

The iPad totally and utterly dominates tablet website traffic in the U.S.

A love letter to Tommie Kelly

Thursday, July 25th, 2013

It’s Tommie Kelly’s birthday today, he’s 40 or something. So instead of the usual posting of “Happy Birthday” on his Facebook, I thought I’d do a bit of gushing about what a great guy he is.

I first encountered Tommie via Twitter and later was reminded of his work when he was locked in some course where some amateur was teaching him, the pro, how to use photoshop. I’d been following some of the comics he posted online. Roadcrew etc. Around that time I was thinking about getting personalised stationary done (since I’m that kind of jumped up shit) but wanted something different (since I’m that kind of jumped up shit) and thought Tommie’s style would be fun on letterheads. I got on to him asking about this.

Of course then I stopped myself and thought, the hell, Tommie is a comic book artist. Why get a landscape painter to paint your walls, why waste Tommie’s skill? So Mulley Comic 1 was born and it was a joint effort as Tommie educated me on what could be done. He also contributed a lot to all the ideas in it. Then there was Mulley Bucks and my first Christmas Card. Then came Mulley Comic 2 and my next Christmas card. Everything we do is a joint effort.

Recently we worked on a few panels of me being killed in really horrible ways and so far the highlight of my career was a book for my mother’s birthday. It’s a children’s story she told me as a kid turned into a book. Tommie did the illustrations and it’s blown everyone away that’s seen it.

Ben the Rabbit by Vivienne Mulley

Ben the Rabbit by Vivienne Mulley

Tommie has a special offer on his site. His birthday offer for his new work “Them”. So take a punt on it or wish him a happy birthday on Twitter. And Tommie also does commissions.

This is some of the work myself and Tommie did:

Tommie Kelly and Damien Mulley work

Tommie Kelly and Damien Mulley work

Fluffy Links – Thursday July 25th 2013

Thursday, July 25th, 2013

Learning.
Two online learning organisations just starting out.

LearnLode in Cork.

PBLearn was built by two NUI Galway Students.

Youth entrepreneurship in order to tackle youth unemployment. This seems to be only the first of three posts and not much in it, just yet.

Shirts.io – An API for t-shirt printing. Plug your website into it and they do printing, handling, shipping. US only. Worth doing in Ireland maybe?

Smartphones are leaky data devices. They’re insecure portable computers with cameras, microphones and Internet connections. We won’t wear a tracking device on our ankles but yet…

Souvenir Art Trail on Saturday in Dublin. A sprint to get cheap art is what it really is.

Fuck Buttons playing Dublin on September 14th. New album is out now.

Jay Brannan also playing on the 14th of September.

Richard Feynman – the graphic novel

Fluffy Links – Tuesday July 23rd 2013

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013

Data helps to show Team Sky cyclist was actually consistent and not doping.

LastFM, better than Spotify for making money for artists.

The family and company that manages/parents the gang from Odd Future. They sound more like guardians than managers. Very interesting how the deal with the record company isn’t about singles but creating a cross-channel production group. This could apply to other industries too I should think.

Snail facials. Next up, deer lick leg waxing.

Landing pages tip: work backwards.

What is Red Bull? The Red Bull strategy. The author calls this “Storydoing”, honestly, another fake word that you can claim ownership of. If you forgive that though, it’s a good piece:

Red Bull has become a packaged-goods company that is also a content creation company that is also an events company that is also an adventure sports lifestyle company.

Text for a coffee. ZipWhip text enables various devices.

Ketil Bjørnstad and David Darling – Upland

No credible evidence that plain packaging…

Monday, July 22nd, 2013

I got a press release from Forest Éireann (they represent smokers) about the latest study on plain packaging and them debunking it.

The study provides no credible evidence to suggest that plain packaging will reduce youth smoking rates or have an impact on adult consumption.

At the end of the release was this:

Forest Éireann is funded by Forest UK which receives donations from tobacco companies in Britain and Ireland. We do NOT represent the tobacco industry. We have a completely independent set of goals that are centred around the right to smoke a legal product without undue harrassment or discrimination.

So when I did a Google News search for the “credible evidence” line…

Huffington Post

Forest (UK) which runs the Hands Off Our Packs campaign, said there is no credible evidence to support plain packaging.

Philip Morris

there’s no credible evidence to suggest that plain packaging will be effective and plain packaging will not reduce the number of young people who start smoking

Imperial Tobacco UK says:

there was no credible evidence to support plain packaging

Australian service station group to Australian Government

there is no credible evidence to support plain packaging

Great minds. Thank you for smoking.

Fluffy Links – Wednesday July 17th 2013

Wednesday, July 17th, 2013

Well done J.K. Rowling.

All of this. All. Paul Graham on making every customer count and how you go WAY out of your way to sign up customers especially at the start. See the Collison example.

Pinterest generates foot traffic to stores.

Running a Social Media Strategy workshop with Gina Bowes on July 30th.

Nice API for on-demand printing for posters, prints etc. Printful.

Yarrly. Remix photos. Android only, for now.

Two new naval vessels named after male writers. James Joyce, Samuel Beckett.

Instagram is good for sales in Kuwait.

Online PR and Social Media fundamentals. From Michelle Goodall.

Social media Return on Investment measured at 3:1. Obligatory question mark goes here so as not be for this or against this statement in case I’m questioned.

Detailed talk/report from Alastair Campbell on how PR is changing massively.

So if PRs were so good at PR, why did PR get such a bad reputation? Answer, in my view, partly because some PRs aren’t actually so good at it, but also because the real spin doctors in the modern world are journalists, broadcasters and bloggers

Written and acted by a 17 year old. Amazing talent. Beautiful language.

Fluffy Links – Monday July 15th 2013

Monday, July 15th, 2013

UCC and IMI Diploma in Management at a massively reduced price for SMEs. You can also do this course in Dublin.

And on management, Beacon is there to help SMEs in Cork County. Sign up for a virtual management team.

Quick piece in The Economist on how Democrats and Republicans use language when campaigning. I always notice that the Republicans are on-message and have the better catchphrases. Especially when in opposition. Death panels, eh?

Little Lady Fauntleroy. Oddness.

I wasn’t really switched into 500px before but some amazing work on it now. Too many filters and touching ups though. Great blog post on this Ricky Chapman project.

Food Herp. “The spreading of a craving/desire for a specific food or restaurant from person to person. ”

Gerald Manley Hopkins – Now in festival form.

Heartbeats of those in a choral group will synch with the music. So much of ourselves we can adjust with the mind alone.

Digital Strategy 101 from Bud Caddell.

How to Stay Sane.

Fluffy Links – Wednesday July 10th 2013

Wednesday, July 10th, 2013

Gummy bear popsicles. You can also add booze but soak the gummy bears in them otherwise the popsicle won’t freeze due to the booze.

Crisis Comms. A playbook on the EPA website.

Cork Chamber are doing an event on July 30th. Social Media Wake-up Call.

Advice on making apps also applies to building anything, including a company. “Find something in your life that is broken and write software to fix it.”

Workshop – New Business Models: Digital Marketing Strategies and the New Distribution Landscape

Great photo-bomb.

Irish people and funny signs, the Feck one.

Tile. Find your stuff using Bluetooth. I want one that alerts me when I’m going too far away from the item. Sore experience when leaving a laptop in a cab.

Cartoon labels on cigarette pack warning stickers might work better than normal warnings.

Via Dangerous Minds, Doctor Who theme slowed down and stretched to 21 minutes. Pretty good.