We at Made By Many are a bunch of interesting people. Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed quite a few cool links being sent between us. I thought it would be fun to put some of them down here:

1. Google Flu Trends: Someone at Google realised that certain search terms are a good indicator of flu activity. The output of that discovery: Google Flu Trends! (courtesy Matt)

2. Five Second Test: This one’s for the designers - a quick test to gauge how good your user interfaces are. (courtesy Elin)

3. Tim Brown on play and creativity: Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, speaks about how creative thinking and play are tightly woven together. It’s one of those very insightful TED videos, though this talk was originally presented at the 2008 Serious Play conference. (courtesy Matt)

4. Hotel 626: Spooky Town, here we come! Hotel 626 is only open from 6pm to 6am, and was ostensibly created to give you a chill. You check it out and decide. (courtesy Elin)

5. BNP Near Me: For all you registered members of the British National Party, this one identifies you down to your postcode!! It’s very Big-Brotherish, but the site promises that no personal information is disclosed. (courtesy Matt)

6. Tweetbomb: Hopefully the intended victims of tweetbombing are not going to read this, or it would spoil the WTF element. If you’re on Twitter, start following Tweetbomb and follow his/her command to ‘bomb’ the heck out of one unsuspecting poor fool every day! (courtesy Tim)

7. Is it Christmas: Ask, and your question shall be answered. Pointless, but fun. (courtesy Yours Truly)

8. Remember The Milk: An online diary for your iPhone. (courtesy Yours Truly)

On Saturday I did a presentation at Ruby Manor on using recommendation systems in production featuring our plugin, acts as recommendable (AAR).

This was, without a doubt, the best conference I’ve been too - and the icing on the cake was the leftover £500 behind a students bar afterwards - ginger beers for everyone!

Graham Ashton has done a write up of all the talks and Chris Lowis has converted AAR to use the GNU scientific lib.

I was going to use Slideshare, but they seem to have broken it, so you can download a pdf of the presentation here (video will be up soon). The slides don’t make much sense by themselves though.

One of the issues that is gaining salience today is that of companies being generous and positive with their work and their information if they want to stay in the game. Jeff Jarvis has a piece in the Guardian on why Google defines the new economy in this matter. In his opinion, there are three main reasons why transitioning to a ‘Google economy’ is inevitable: 

1. The fact that they are digital: No one in their right minds would want to, for example, do something physical like sell CDs in today’s world, compared to setting up an online space, if they had a choice. (I genuinely feel bad when I go into a HMV store, for example - in the age of music-at-your-fingertips, selling CDs must be a difficult proposition for them). Information is migrating online, people need information - ergo, people need digital solutions. 

2. The fact that they are transparent: Google is open about the way it functions, and thereby forces businesses working around them to become transparent as well. Jarvis notes how a situation like the financial crisis, which created an artificial value, is unlikely to re-occur because people will demand knowledge, having burnt their fingers. If a business wants to succeed, they can no longer hide behind curtains. They’ll be sniffed out. 

3. ‘Don’t be evil’: Relationships between consumers and companies are built on trust, and trust comes from relinquishing control. Google’s tools, for example, are free to use - they have no desire to be in control. 

This last point links very well to a presentation by Neil Perkin that captures thoughts of many bloggers on the topic. Worth taking a look at.  

Iplayer, Hulu, Vimeo and Youtube have made it manifestly evident that TV is facing a huge challenge from the web, not just for revenues and mindshare but also as an alternative channel to market. But it’s not just a quantitative ‘cheap and many’ channels issue; there’s likely to be a profound qualitative change in how we watch television that threatens the value of things that conventional TV people hold as given: things like scheduling, channel brands and the primacy of television commissioning.

I’ve noticed that when TV execs talk about ipTV they focus on the pipe and the device and assume that the content and the viewing experience will stay much the same (a mass media experience). I came away from The Guardian’s Changing Broadcast summit at the Mayfair Hotel last week with the strong impression that they believe that by pushing event-based TV and ‘combining the creative skills of UK TV production with the ubiquity of the UK digital market’ they can confront the multiple threats they face from digital. 

I think it would be interesting to mull over these questions first:

• How can the value of scheduling and channel brands remain intact when we make decisions about what to watch (whatever, whenever) by what our friends and other people we trust are watching?
• What happens when national barriers fall down (and I can watch Hulu in the UK and BBC iplayer in France)?
• How will a long tail of television (with geographic spread, not just historic) change what I watch and how I decide what to watch and the habits I fall into?
• What will be the impact of more access to shortform have on TV viewing behaviour (just check out five.tv/fwd). 
• When I can respond instantly to what I’m seeing, in lots of different ways to different people or just everybody watching with me, over an interface that’s easy to use, how might my viewing habits and - just as interestingly - TV formats change? (And has the failure of red button created a false sense of security?).

My guess is that across diverse viewing contexts and audience segments some very wide differences in behaviour, formats, channel branding and tv discovery will emerge.

It’s easy for the hangover of a lifetime of past perceptions to shroud us from future reality. It’s interesting that most of the people adopting the comforting approach that nothing will fundamentally change were over the age of 40.  At the end of the day there was a panel of thirtysomethings representing Endemol Digital, RDF Digital, Channel 4, BBC3 and Bebo with a completely different mindset because they started their careers at a time when the old models were already looking tired. Here are some refreshing snippets: 

“Everything done on television is done online simultaneously - commissioning is multiplatform” (BBC3)

“What success is like is really hard to get at” (BBC3)

“We are experimenting to try to find out which models work” (Bebo)

“The web allows us to challenge the old model where we got paid by the cost of what we made, rather than by its value” (RDF)

and most intelligently of all:

“We’re having to learn very fast to keep up with the audience” 

Dave Birss of Unchained Guide was a Creative Director at Poke London before leaving to take on more responsibilities at his own company. He has just re-posted a very interesting post on the future of digital agencies on his blog, originally written a year ago, that is very useful and still relevant - especially because we at Made By many work in the digital world. You can read his entire post here.