7 posts tagged “trends”

I had a chat with a friend last night about what “Web 2.0″ is.  He, a young marketing exec, thought that it was basically a programming term and that since he wasn’t hearing it that much anymore, it’s kinda a dead trend.  Oh no, I told him.  It’s much more than a marketing term for programming.

Basically I separated Web 2.0 into 3 areas: Design, Programming and Community.  I said that any one of the elements, done correctly, could qualify something as up for a Web 2.0 label, but a combination of the three ensured it.

• Design
• I am writing a creative brief today and started digging around to see if I could find some references for aesthetics I am partial to.  In doing so, I uncovered this nice writeup that summarizes some of the typical design elements found in a “web 2.0″ site.
• http://f6design.com/journal/2006/10/21/the-visual-design-of-web-20
•  Programming
• I told my friend, if you hear the words Ruby, Python, Drupal or AJAX used, you are dealing with a Web 2.0 site.  Of course, many other programming languages are used to achieve the kind of drag and drop feel of a Web 2.0 site, but these are the big ones lately.  These are also nice languages to see on a developer’s CV if you are hiring them for a job, as, even if they are not experts in any of the languages, they are forward thinking.
• Community
• How happy am I that the accidental career path that I wandered onto has become such a superstar in the industry. :) 
• Users are #1 in the Web 2.0 era.  You have to figure out a way to not only provide ways for your company to hear and communicate with your audience/users, but to actually listen and value their input.  Voting, focus groups, user enhances product design - the list is becoming infinite in the ways a company can immerse itself it it’s audience and become better for it. 

Let me know if I missed any major facet of Web 2.0.  I think most characteristics will fall in these buckets though.

Now that Web 2.0 has become normal, the fun begins.  Virtual worlds, user-centric design and strategies, MTV and video game raised kids becoming executives and generally blurred lines between companies and users are just the beginnings of a new era of business.  Web 2.0 isn’t dead, it was just the beginning. And I am excited for things to come.

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Tags: web2.0, design, mtv, video games, virtual worlds

I know it’s been a while since I posted.  My new job has me busy working now.  Not that strategizing isn’t working, but the next phases are more resource intensive and allow less time for blogging.

That said, I am researching production blogs now, especially aniamtion/cartoon ones.  If you know of any more, let me know.  Also, any production blogs in video games, virtual worlds and toys would be great, too.

Frederator Studios - http://newtoons.frederator.com/
•    Industry Veteran Fred Seibert (Hanna Barbera) started his own company a couple years ago with a main teme of get the word out for free no matter how.  They have tons of tangent video casts, etc and multiple posters.  Their posting frequency is a bit high for me, but a great animators blog.
Yo Gabba Gabba - http://brobee.blogspot.com/
•    One of my favorite preschool properties that I have been tracking since 2005.  The production blog is a mix of animation, behind the scenes with eccentric staff and fan submissions.  They also use an open blogging tool (Blogger)
Wow Wow Wubbzy - http://wubby.typepad.com/wubby/
•    Another property that implemented a production blog early in their development and allowed us to track progress until they went on air and then after.  They also use an open tool (Typepad).
The Muppet Newsflash - http://muppetnewsflash.blogspot.com/
•    Older property that is using new techniques to keep fans up to date on property news.  As their franchise is much older and more established, their updates are more on the caliber of new DVDs and Macy’s Thanksgiving float announcements, but the tone is the same as the others – light, excited and fan-centric.  They also use an open tool for posting.
South Park - http://www.southparkstudios.com/rss/
•    An old intern of mine is now one of the PA updaters on this blog.  Not one of my favorites due to tone, content and length of posts, but worth looking at for reference on scope of production blogs in this industry.

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Tags: cartoon, animation, frederator, muppets, yo gabba gabba, wow wow wubbzy, south park, plog, blog

10. Virtual worlds set up by toy manufacturers.
Another point from Lord Puttnam’s keynote, casting doubt on whether it’s such a good idea for toy firms to be launching their own virtual worlds - Mattel (with Barbie) and Lego being two examples. The idea of child entertainment funded by toymakers isn’t new (He-Man and Transformers, anyone?), but Lego’s Mark William Hansen had an elegant and considered response, pointing out that a virtual world launched purely to sell products is bad - but that kids will see that most quickly, and desert it.

Virtual Worlds Forum Blog » Blog Archive » Top 10 takeaways from the first day of VWFE 2007

I completely agree with this.  The first question that that needs to be asked when the topic of a virtual world (or any community initiative) comes up is “Why do we need/want it?”  It is the job of the web strategist to find the root of the request and to deal with the answer frankly. 

If the goal of adding community is to increase sales of offline product alone, community is probably not the correct strategy.  Starting a community is difficult work, maintaining one is even harder.  And there are risks involved that have to be dealt with in much more faster and comprehensive ways than just releasing a press release.

If the goal is, rather, to engage your audience in a very personal way with your brand and/or product, then you are starting on the right foot.  Sure, selling products is a fine goal, it’s the easiest way to sustain the community and makes complete sense, especially if the community is involved in some way.  But it shouldn’t be the primary goal - if it is, there are easier ways to achieve it.

Creating a community or virtual world is not a small decision, nor is it a finite decision either.  It’s funny to me how the enormity of a concept diminishes when the words become more common.  “Community” and “World” are BIG concepts - they are (or should be) big strategies for a company to adopt as well.

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Tags: marketing, virtual worlds, toys, vwfe2007

Those of us who understand the positive aspects of online play need to help shape the climate online in the next couple years. Gone are the days of bragging about how your child knows so much more about technology/computers/internet than you do. More and more of our lives are being spent online. Let’s treat that sea change with a bit more respect than simple awe/wonder.

If we don’t want EVERY brand space online to be blatant consumerism with no message or goal, we have to be proactive about preventing that from happening. We must work toward not just calling out the bad sites, but creating and commending the good sites. And not just ones that give lip-service to more holistic goals - ones that actually step up and do it.

I ducked out of the Kids and Teens talk at the Virtual Worlds conference last week in order to see a young girl doll brand case study. Oy vey, was that a hard one to sit through. The developer giving the talk continually talked sarcastically about the girly brand that he developed, which showed me that he didn’t respect the audience and community the site was trying to develop. How can you create a great community if you don’t care about them?

Through his talk, he talked a couple times about the core values of “Empowerment” etc that the site’s founders wanted to convey in the virtual world. But almost in the same breath, he would reiterate multiple times that the only purpose for the site was to “sell more dolls.” Makes you wonder if the brand managers of those dolls know and care how their brand is being conveyed to conference audiences and their online community.

If “to sell more dolls” is truly the reason that the parent company wanted to launch this world, fine. They certainly are not alone. But that doesn’t mean all the other sites that will be developed in this category have to be like that.

Sesame Street’s Panwapa world is a cool approach to get into a space that is bound to be crowded in the next 2 years - preschool to early readers, 4-7 year olds. Kudos to them for being there before anyone else with a solid idea for a world (and not just the mindless wandering and silly games that make up almost every world in this space).

Whether we like it or not, a child is assimilated into the tech space earlier and earlier as the years go by. To pretend that this isn’t happening or block the kids from sites on a micro level is not the way to improve the situation. It’s the ostrich effect and doesn’t improve anything for anyone, especially the kids.

People who grew up with technology are now having kids. These younger generation parents have less or no aversion to introducing their kids to the online/tech coolness that they have grown up with. As producers of content (be it for a marketing purpose or pure creative), we have to develop for the parents AND the kids. These younger parents will still want the educational aspects that the past decade of attentive parents wanted, but the younger parents understand all of this on another level. Many of them understand that you can have fun, build relationships, and develop as a human online. They also understand the importance of design, navigation and user interface in your online experience. AND they will, directly or indirectly, teach these concepts to their kids.

Hopefully the content will start to catch up with paradigm shift that is happening world-wide as I type. Is your content up to the task?

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Tags: panwapa, sesame street, proactive, virtualworlds,

Visionary Panel - Where the Platforms Are Going Next
The media has been largely dominated by one virtual worlds platform but innovation is coming fast and furious on multiple fronts from multiple vendors. This one-of-a-kind session brings together the visionaries of the major platform companies for an interactive discussion on the future of the virtual worlds platform.  Join us for a session you won’t want to miss.
- Christopher Klaus, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Kaneva
- Raph Koster, President, Areae, Inc.
- Michael Wilson, CEO, Makena Technologies
- Hui Xu, Founder & CEO, HiPiHi Co., Ltd
- Stephen Lawler, General Manager of Virtual Earth, Microsoft
- Corey Bridges, Co-founder, Executive Producer, & Marketing Director, The Multiverse Network
- Mark Wallace, blogger , 3pointD.com (moderator)

What does the future look like?
- A Common App is needed - so that all the worlds are not so compartmentalized and there is greater portabilty
- More incorporation of Social Networking features and games
- Usability hurdles need to be dealt with - the average person still finds most VWs to be too difficult and there is little being done for the mobile platform
- Controlled Identity management to all you to manage all of your identities in all of your worlds, with your own criteria for privacy and transparency

3D/Social Search Fans
    - “3D is a red herring” Raph Koster
        - we should be talking about 3D not as the next big thing, but as an aspect
        - More important question is regarding what we are using these space for and ding inside of them
        - 3D doesn’t work for everything - shopping market

Hui Xu, HiPiHi CEO, brought up how non-multiculti the crowd was
- he felt that culture blending and learning form other cultures was the biggest potential for these worlds
- No standard language exists to discuss these spaces yet, we don’t have a multi-lingual tool to bridge the gaps and we don’t have the world view mind set to talk theoretically yet.

The web migrated monetization models
= Subscription > Commerce/Ads
- vws have to do the same
- Migration needs to be Ads > Goods > Services
    - new toys are helping this transition
   
QQ (?) service - IM, Virtual E-commerce

Mobile Phone banking is very big overseas now

Local search is an opportunity to monetize
- ads need to excel in AI to raise relavancy

Mirror worlds will be the link to the Mass market
- Education contexts
- MS Live maps - Accurate to 4 inches
- Real versus Imaginary
- Melt content - reenact a bank robbery from earlier

“We are in the bookstore business - not the fiction or non-fiction business” - need to stop seeing everything as mutually exclusive

“Blogging in 3D is dumb” - Raph Koster

Representationally Agnostic
- data will show up how the user want it

3D is hard form many populations to grasp
- kids, older, etc
- it is not the holy grail

We need to jump over the now and next and think about later

Wii-mote and Hardware is helping innovation
- 3D mouse

Multiverse is sketchup compatible

Language - vulcanization of cultures
- there are translators for vws

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Tags: areae, hipihi, multiverse, kaneva, future, kids, tweens

Been catching up with my podcasts.  My favs of late are Cynopsis Kids and Digital ( I just can’t listen to the regular Cynopsis lady), Buzz Out Loud, and Game Theory.  (professionally, of course - my personals include FIight of the Conchords, Ask a Ninja, Slate Political Gabfest and This American Life)

But in listening to the block of Game Theories from the past 2 months, there has been tons of reminiscing over games that are 10, 20, even 30 years old. (My fav moment was when one of the podcasters realized his recent birthday of 35 launched him out of the demo he writes about, 18-34).  Some of this is born from the new serial releases that are coming out, mainly Halo and Star Craft.  Others from the question “what was your defining moment of gaming?”

Made me start to think about where games and online experiences are going.  One of the hosts commented on how Elite and even Eve Online seem like MMOGs, even though they were single player, simply because of how expansive they were.  They reflected on how some of the old games, before online interactivity, were just as immersive as the ones where the real-time multi-player aspect nowadays. 

An earlier Game Theory podcast (I dunno which one, I have listebed to so many today) talked about how if you can make a cell phone game fun, then you are almost guaranteed that the larger platform games in the spectrum, from hand helds to console, will be fun as well.  If you can capture fun on the root level of game play, you have the most valuable jewel needed in game development.  They also talked about how they were excited that the newer games coming out are not only focusing on graphics enhancements and getting back to that spirit of play and fun.

Finally, the last point they talked about that I found interesting, was the aspect of social gaming in the live space.  They began lamenting the plight of the hard core gamer and how console game companies, especially the Wii, are focusing too much on the casual gamers of late and not enough on the hard core gamers.  I merely roll my eyes at the porr hard core gamers at the on that point. 

I would rather spend more time on their other points that there is a new phenomenon happening of gaming as social activity.  I have had some FUN evenings playing guitar hero, ddr or Wii sports late night with small groups of friends.  I LOVE this new cultural phenomenon.  Blending the passive with active and throwing a little social in for good measure.  If the Wii is the second, social console in the house, only played 1 or 2 times a month - yay!  Tat;s a good thing, not a bad thing for the gaming industry.  It’s still a great investment, I would argue more so than one that you clock 10-50 times that in solo gaming.  Sure your hard core gamers are going to buy more and more often, but expanding your market is never a bad idea, especially when the newbies could easily become just as rabid of fans.

Now, I want to take all these interesting ideas and figure out how to take them to the next level and online (and younger demographics…)

technorati tags:gaing, elite, game-theory, wii, nintendo, guitar-hero, ddr, cynopsis, buzzoutloud

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I called it at least 6 months ago, possibly a year ago. But I will put it here in writing for proof: Bebo is the “next big social network”. That’s right. I said it. Hopefully I am not wrong, as I hate being wrong. But I think I am right here. And Molly Wood from CNET’s Buzz Out Loud apparently said the same thing as well.

You want proof of my prophecy? Well, the tea leaves show:

• Nice user interface that feels like a mashup of Facebook and Myspace.
• although virb.com is much nicer in this space, they don’t have the critical mass in users yet.
• Community voice that is a little snarky, but not to an annoying degree.
• Rates of growth that are equal to or greater than Facebook
• Itunes integration coming soon
• Proof of concept is strong in Ireland and England where market penetration is rather high in the teen/early-twenties demo.

So, if I am wrong, it won’t be the first time. But signs are pointing toward it.

I’m on there at http://fizmo.bebo.com

Joi Podgornyhttp://fizmo.bebo.com/

technorati tags:bebo, myspace, facebook, itunes, apple, online-community, tween, virb, teen, music

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