Blogless

Andrea (pictured left) with Mongodeco partner Timothy Furstnau.

Andrea brings a wealth of experience bridging business and design with an emphasis on local and socially responsible projects.

She is currently a Strategist for Google and recently received her MBA from the Ross Business School at the University of Michigan. In addition to these pursuits, she is also a practicing artist, musician, and owner of MONGODECO, a design practice specializing in interior renovation using reclaimed materials.

Please join us in welcoming Andrea to Design Less Better!

Rollover the image to see the parody version. Caution: Language is NSFW.

Diagram of the AP’s new Protect, Point, Pay Scheme

To add insult to injury, after studying the initial press release, Ed Felten determined that the technology AP plans to use can’t actually do any of the things they claim it can!

Lest we forget, Techdirt reminds us why any strategy that depends upon DRM is doomed to fail:

This has been said before (multiple times) but you don’t rescue your business model by “protecting” against what people want to do. You don’t rescue your business model by wasting resources trying to hold back what people want to do. You rescue your business by providing more value and figuring out a way to monetize that value. Putting bogus DRM on news does none of that. It only hastens failure.

Dimbulb’s take is this: “the franchisee is trying to tell the local base of customer [sic] something that matters to them, albeit unrelated to the business or experience of retailing fast food…Buy BK if you’re a stalwart for burning oil and coal; hell, let’s split some atoms while we’re at it!”

That might be a good analysis (of a seriously whackadoo franchise owner, among other things) if the author hadn’t failed to connect the two bits of text on the sign. As it stands, in other words, I think he just missed the joke. For those who also missed it, here it is:

1. Global warming is baloney;
2. therefore, we can conscionably and will facilitate your ability to drive your wasteful, fossil-fuel-powered cars through our wasteful, fossil-fuel-powered restaurant. 24 hours a day. 365 days a year.

Ha ha, right?

Now, the fact that this message is less likely a contentious non sequitur political statement than a one-liner, less neo-conservative psychosis than tastelessness, doesn’t make it any less an advertising misstep. But it does disabuse us of the seemingly inexplicable belief that the franchise seriously asserted a value proposition like this (“rather a Whopper at 2AM tonight than a planet in 10,000 years”) in such a bald-faced way.

1. New Media Artworks: Prequels to Everyday Life

In a story related to Paul’s piece last week, Golan Levin writes:

some of today’s most commonplace and widely-appreciated technologies were initially conceived and prototyped, years ago, by new-media artists.

Comparison of Aspen Movie Map (1978-1980) and Google Street View (2007).
Image arranged by Golan Levin

2. Lessons from a failed meeting with a Social Media Guru

Matt Daniels chronicles how not to pitch a client your expertise.

3. Making Money with Flash Games

Lost Garden has an extensive article about revenue streams for independent game publishers. Even if you’re not into selling Flash games, there are some good thoughts to consider.

Ads are a good secondary source of revenue, but surely there are richer sources …? There is an obvious one, used for decades by all other game industries…why not ask the players for money?

4. The New Yorker Critiques the Kindle

Those used to reading blogs don’t often see design criticism of this magnitude: Nicholson Baker of the New Yorker has 6,300 words on the Amazon Kindle.

I forced myself to read the book on the Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks. But never mind: at that point, I was locked into the plot and it didn’t matter. Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos had promised it would.

This piece is a really nice article by about the value (pro and con) of Facebook for non-profit organizations.

Gilbert’s piece addresses three concerns, of which all agencies using Facebook groups, pages, and causes to organize stakeholders should take heed:

1. The upsides are unclear: More agencies fail trying to use Facebook than succeed, and often the successes are untestable as described.
2. Facebook gets your list: By asking your volunteers and friends to join Facebook, you are ostensibly licensing Facebook to advertise to them.
3. Facebook is a walled garden: The more an organization commits time to building Facebook content, the more of itself it shuts off from the general public (as opposed to those signed up for Facebook).

But, of course, we can’t just abandon Facebook, which — like it or not — is an important communication medium for many people. Smartly, Gilbert concludes that the best reason for a non-profit to invest in Facebook is if its existing stakeholders are using it, especially if they’re using it a lot.

Detail from Andreas Gursky, Schiphol, 1994.

If that’s the case for your agency, your Facebook effort is significantly more likely to be a success. Even still, though, the concerns addressed above loom. Gilbert has some useful suggestions for regulatory guidelines to apply to your Facebook communication strategies. Here’s my distillation of that:

1. Ensure that no one has to join Facebook to interact with you in a particular way. Be mindful of peer pressuring your stakeholders!
2. Whenever possible, make your network’s content visible to the general public.
3. Use Facebook as an entry point to more open media, not the other way around. Remember that Facebook is a tool in service of your social networks, and not the other way around.

Why is this relevant to BlogLESS?: On the one hand, this is important to DLB because good communications strategy shouldn’t be available only to companies with deep pockets. On the other, I think Gilbert’s points should be interesting to any communication strategist, corporate or otherwise. -Pt

This is great.

Reading Lamp

Reading lamp, designed by French designers Jun Yasumoto, Alban Le Henry, Olivier Pigasse and Vincent Vandenbrouck, is wonderfully simple: it’s “a lamp that shuts off when you put a book on it, and that turns on when you take your book to read it.”

Hat tip to Core77.

1. Packaging Design at Its Worst

Treehugger has a gallery of packaging designs that are wasteful and, in one case, downright dangerous.

2. What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About Twitter

One of the better articles I’ve read on making effective use of Twitter. I appreciate the fact that the authors use real tweets as examples instead of simply making broad, unsupported generalizations.

3. Want more sign-ups? Don’t lead with “Free” offers

In user testing, 37signals found that a call-to-action button with the copy “See Plans and Pricing” resulted in a 200% increase in sign-ups over variations on “Sign-up for a Free Trial”.

It seems that people are weary of “free” things online as they are often a gateway to unwanted subscriptions and opt-out schemes.

4. How to Monetize a Free Service

Okay, that title’s a bit misleading.

But we could learn something from the actions of Pandora CEO Tim Founder on how to make the move from free to freemium. Founder broke the news to his customers in a sensitive and well-reasoned letter that’s worth reading.

Make a great service and treat your customers like intelligent people. That’s something we can all subscribe to.

You shouldn’t follow me on Twitter. I rarely post an update and often when I do it is hopelessly cryptic and pointless.

If you follow me on Twitter, my avatar will be like the smug mouth of a fish, surfacing almost imperceptibly in your Twitter stream and then quickly resubmerging.

I lose Twitter followers constantly because I fail to reply to their perfectly well-meaning @messages. Like rude wallpaper.

You definitely shouldn’t follow me on twitter here.