Magazine Monitor: 100 things we didn't know last year. Gis.to: Welcome to Gis.to. Online Personalization Creates Echo Chamber to Affirm Biases. Britain's back-room negotiations to establish a national, extrajudicial Internet censorship regime. Ed Vaizey, the UK Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries has admitted that he is in talks with ISPs to create a voluntary national firewall. Big copyright companies would petition to have sites they don't like added to the secret national blacklist, and the ISPs would decide -- without transparency or judicial review -- whether to silently block Britons from seeing the censored sites.
Peter from the Open Rights Group adds, "Website blocking is a bad idea, especially on a self-regulatory basis where vital judicial oversight is bypassed. The good news is that he has promised to invite civil society groups to participate in future discussions on the matter. You can help explain the problems by writing to your MP at ORG's website. " Minister confirms site blocking discussions (Thanks, PeterBradwell, via Submitterator!) Why Your Inner Critic Is Your Best Friend. The Inner Critic gets a lot of bad press, especially among blocked creatives who wish the nagging critical voice at the back of their mind would disappear. No wonder there’s so much creativity advice on how to banish, silence, or obliterate the Inner Critic. By the time the creative thinking gurus are done, the Critic’s had a tougher pounding than an extra from Kill Bill. But do you ever wonder why the Critic keeps coming back for more? Could it be that the Critic is actually a very important part of your creative process?
If you think about it, you’d be in big trouble without an Inner Critic. A good producer and a great producer have the same number of ideas – some good, some great. And the great producer’s Inner Critic is the difference that makes the difference. So the Inner Critic isn’t the enemy, just an over-zealous friend who’s delivering the criticism too forcefully and without considering your feelings. Criticism and Creation Are Not Mutually Exclusive You and Your Critic. What Makes a Good Creative Director? (Part 2)
Not every CD will possess every quality, even greats like Bernbach, Burnett, Abbott and Ogilvy had a few chinks in their substantial armor. But this is a good ingredients list of traits. Leave one or two of the minor ones out, no biggie. However, miss out on most of the key ingredients and you have a steaming pile of McDonald’s. The creative director produces workI once asked a very, very senior creative team (they were both in their late 50s and were legends in the industry) why they never took the illustrious role of CD. They said, “We like doing the creative work too much.” Creative directors have an awful lot on their plates. But a good CD will still want to do some of the work, usually about 25% of it.
But the fact remains, creative directors should still have the ability to take a brief and produce some terrific work. A former CD of mine was still collecting copywriting awards after 12 years in his role as the boss. The work was always solid and effective. Written by Felix Unger. Infographic of the Day: How Rapleaf Spies On Your Online Habits | Co.Design. Rapleaf describes its services innocently enough -- standard boilerplate about "personalized experiences" and "help[ing] Fortune 2000 companies gain insight into their customers. " But The Wall Street Journal took a closer look at the San Francisco-based company and came up with this doozy of an infographic, which shows how Rapleaf sucks up hundreds of personal datapoints about web consumers and feeds it to a network of advertisers--often linking the data to consumers' real names in the process.
[Click for larger version] To collect the data, Rapleaf uses browser cookies--tiny digital homing devices that record your activity as you surf the web. Just about every company on the web uses cookies in some way, and like many others, Rapleaf slots users into categories based on their top surfing habits over time. Rapleaf claims not to connect users' real names to the data it collects, but there it is in black and white html code. Rapleaf - The Wall Street Journal Online - Interactive Graphics. Mobile. Razorfish Disses the Big Idea, Pushes Iterative Model. Zachary Rodgers | August 2, 2010 | 4 Comments inShare14 "Agile" program emphasizes repeated rough drafts of a campaign, website, or application. Razorfish has created a new design practice with the premise that marketing execs should give up on big ideas that produce mostly one-off campaigns.
Instead, it's asking clients to embrace an iterative test-and-learn mindset that gradually refines a website or marketing effort over time. Called Agile, the program is geared mainly toward online projects that require complex application development. The Agile design approach generates repeated rough drafts of a campaign, website, or application, breaking long product cycles into smaller increments. "Creative people were always willing to let the direct response end of the business be subject to optimization," said Joe Crump, Razorfish's group VP of strategy and planning. Crump added, "Marketers are getting smarter and more demanding about the effectiveness of the work. " Long Bets - The Arena for Accountable Predictions.
Design With Intent. Over the past several months, I’ve been fortunate to meet and talk to a number of people — among them Jan Chipchase of Nokia, Peter Whybrow of UCLA, and Caroline Hummels of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands — about the role of the designer in behavior change. Our conversations echoed the pent-up ambitions I’ve often heard from the young designers I teach and work with. They also reinforced my belief that we’re experiencing a sea change in the way designers engage with the world. Instead of aspiring to influence user behavior from a distance, we increasingly want the products we design to have more immediate impact through direct social engagement. Institutions that drive the global social innovation agenda, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have shown an interest in this new approach, but many designers hesitate to pursue it. Using the UCD approach, designers are one step removed from the action.
Russell M Davies: The value of metadata. This article was taken from the April issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online I'm having a spectacularly bad hair day today. It needs cutting. It needs washing. Want to see it? Go to bit.ly/4rrdvf. That's my hair, taken just after I typed that question mark a couple of sentences back. One of the things Ben discusses is the way magazine-making fails to harness the metadata that gets spewed off by the digital creative process. (current listening: "Echo Sam" by Holy Fuck) Ben discusses how this makes it harder to repurpose content, but it made me think about the problems of archivists and scholars and wonder if maybe they're about to enter a world of glut rather than impoverishment. (lat/long: 40°40'23" n, 73°58'14" w) And may be what these scholars should be buying and looking at are the data-y exhaust fumes writers put off while honing their words.