Dear Photograph:

A wonderful site where people post photographs that feature locations along with old photos of people in the exact spot and held at an angle that mimics the original setting. Each photograph is accompanied by a brief caption that states its significance or story to the contributor.

I am so excited by what the internet and sharing are doing with Photograpy as well as opening the floodgates and turning on all the taps…

A chance to link to one of my favourite sites: Aesthetics of the invisible world.

A breathtaking article which made me stop in my tracks, mostly because as the son of a Swimming teacher I did a lot of Lifesaving badges up to and including The Royal Life Saving Association’s (RLSA) Bronze Medallion and got to know Rescue Annie quite as well as any 14 year old boy should.

In full:

“In the late 1880s, the body of a 16-year-old girl was pulled from the Seine.  She was apparently a suicide, as her body showed no marks of violence but her beauty and her enigmatic smile led a Paris pathologist to order a plaster death mask of her face.

In the romantic atmosphere of fin de siecle Europe the girl’s face became an ideal of feminine beauty.  The protagonist of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge writes, “The mauler, whose shop I pas every day, has hung two plaster masks beside his door.  [One is] the face of the young drowned woman, which they took a cast of in the morgue, because it was beautiful, because it smiled, because it smiled so deceptively, as if it knew.”

Ironically, in 1958 the anonymous girl’s features were used to model the first-aid mannequin Rescue Annie, on which thousands of students have practiced CPR.  Though the girl’s identity remains a mystery, her face, it’s said, has become “the most kissed face of all time.”

Internet 1 RLSA 0

Put simply, my most shared/forwarded article of 2011 although coming late – Nov.

I’m a big user of pinboard and a fan.

Let’s just say it’s a must read.

It’s not a graph – “When you start talking about building a social graph that transcends any specific implementation, you quickly find yourself in the weeds. Is accepting someone’s invitation on LinkedIn the same kind of connection as mutually following them on Twitter? Can we define some generic connections like ‘fan of’ or ‘follower’ and re-use them for multiple sites? Does it matter that you can see who your followers are on site X but not on site Y? … This is supposed to be a canonical representation of human relationships. But it only takes five minutes of reading the existing standards to see that they’re completely inadequate”

Privacy is another sticking point which I think will be a massive portent of things to come

“There’s another fundamental problem in that a graph is a static thing, with no concept of time. Real life relationships are a shared history, but in the social graph they’re just a single connection.”

Declaring relationships explicitly is a social act: “Your best friend from high school surfaces and sends a friend request. Do you just click accept, or do you send a little message? Or do you ignore him because you don’t want to deal with the awkward situation? Declaring connections is about as much fun as trying to whittle people from a guest list, with the added stress that social networking is too new for us to have shared social conventions around it.”

Leaving aside the technical issues of how to implement, how does cutting ties actually work socially? Is there any way to be discreet, for example, or have connections naturally degrade over time? In real life, all relationships fade naturally if you don’t maintain them, but right now social networks preserve ties in amber until we explicitly break them.

“Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.”

And my favourite : “The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done.”

“My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.”

Amen.

Very interesting Fast Company article about discarding the idea of an ‘Average Customer’.

“It turns out the secret to unlocking demand for classical music–as for most products–is discarding the Myth of the Average Customer. Designing a product offer to appeal to one archetypal customer is always wasteful–one size fits few, not all. Instead, demand creators have to constantly focus on demand variation, asking how customers differ from one another and how those differences impact demand.”

With regard to orchestras, and following some rigorous research:

“It turns out the quality of the orchestra, magnificence of the hall, and virtuosity of the conductor were not particularly important attributes. What was? Drum roll!

The most powerful “driver of revisitation” was parking! As with other orchestras, veteran members of the core BSO audience had figured out where to park, but trialists identified it as a huge hassle–so they didn’t come back.

Another driver was the ability to exchange tickets; trialists found the “no refunds, no exchanges” policy a deal breaker.”

The process of ‘de-averaging’ offers big opportunities.

Pure wonder from Joanne McNeil over at Rhizome

In the world of superabundancy of information including images, there’s something as valuable as our privacy that we could lose.

(My unease with aspects of the ‘new photography’ are well known to my peers!)

Full article after the break but here is the final paragraph and sentence:

“We could accumulate hundreds of thousands of images throughout our lives but they will never taste like anything. An image represents and verifies a memory but the rest is left to imagination. Every essential moment of a child’s life is documented if he was born in the West. With digital album after album for every birthday, every Christmas, he will never struggle to remember what his childhood home looked like. That reaching, that vague warm feeling for a place one remembers but cannot see; that is a sense now growing extinct.

A child today grows up in a never forgotten house.”

…Several weeks ago, I was leaving a party in Park Slope. As I waited to cross the street, I recognized two places across the way and realized I had eaten meals at both. I had brunch with a friend in the cafe at the corner last year. I met another friend for dinner two years earlier at the Thai restaurant at the address next. I remembered two separate phone calls with each friend explaining how to get there from the 7th Ave station. The second call, and the second walk from the stop didn’t remind me of the first. It took a third visit to that intersection, and from that vantage point –across the street –to discover the venues were neighbors. Two pleasant but very different conversations came back to me at once.
I had a decade’s worth of weekends in New York City before I finally made the move last year. Chinatown buses from Washington, DC and Boston; cheap flights out of Chicago Midway that left Friday evening and arrived before work on Monday. Sometimes I visited as often as twice a month, for special events or a guy or no reason. With the insouciance of an out-of-towner, I never bothered to follow how a taxi gets from one point to another or which direction the subway train was headed when we got to the stop. Now that the city is my home, I’m constantly uncovering another fragmentary long forgotten memory.

I will never know if some of the places I remember from these early New York trips have been torn down or exist on streets I haven’t walked by again yet. I refuse to google one cafe in particular with the fear that the top result will come from Yelp and say “CLOSED.” I want to believe in the possibility that some rainy night in the East Village, I will open a door and take shelter in the same place that once with someone very special to me, I escaped a prior storm. Several times, at several different places I have experienced just that. Odd clues like the uncommon shape of a bathroom faucet or the sound of a door slamming bring about memories of a holiday, birthday party, or another magical evening gone by. But even closed venues and forgotten spaces grant me with a keen intuitive sense. Lost in seemingly unfamiliar streets, I might have a hunch which way to go without consulting Google Maps on my phone.

Watching the sun set from the rooftop of a friend’s condo on the Williamsburg waterfront recently, I thought the tower must have been constructed on the ashes of an old building where a friend of mine lived back in 2003. The view of the skyline was the same. That friend I haven’t seen for about as many years. There is no Street View archive I can look up to double check. An advanced search on Flickr of photos before 2005 doesn’t yield much of anything. All I’ve got is a strange hazy feeling of familiarity that this wasn’t the first time I looked across the East River from that spot.

There are just over 2,000 Flickr results for “chrysler building” before 1/1/2005. Now there are over 47,000 images, and that doesn’t include the photo sharing that now takes place on Instagram, Facebook, and elsewhere. There haven’t been more tourists in several years to gaze upon that particular site. What has changed is the way we look. We are more accustomed to seeing the world through a viewfinder. Photographing is a thoughtless gesture. We document in case we ever need a reminder.

I rarely hear anyone boast about photographic memory anymore. It’s less impressive today as we can all supplement our own brains with an algorithmic search and the internet’s seemingly infinite archival capacity. But this is still a period of transition. Google Street View and the iPhone both launched in 2007. Lost now is any ceremony to the act of adding an image to the ether. We batch upload our photographs; which are also unencumbered by the scarcity a roll of film created a decade earlier.

Someday soon, the internet will fulfill its promise as a time machine. It will provide images for every space and moment so we can fact check our memories. Flickr and Facebook albums will only accumulate. Google rephotographs streets and has the potential to build a Street View archive with which we may one day rewind to see the buildings that existed on our streets before we got there. Until this happens, Street View is commonly used to show us what has changed about the places we remember. Old homes, former schools. Is that little coffee shop still around?

Last summer, Arcade Fire’s interactive video “The Wilderness Downtown” (directed by Chris Milk) rendered mainstream the practice of looking up a childhood address on Google Maps. With your personal input, the video customizes rolling shots of Google Earth satellite aerials and Street View images showing the neighborhood near your old house. This plays along with multiple screen windows featuring animations of things like birds migrating and a child running. The screen activity grows more frantic as the chorus cries, “We used to wait!”

Who doesn’t wait? Who doesn’t hate it? Waiting for a check to come in, for a text from a boyfriend, to grow up, for the post office queue to hurry up. We are all waiting for something. Like the lyrics — so easily relatable– the video’s gimmick feels a touch exploitative.

“Poetry gives not so much a nostalgia for youth, which would be vulgar, as a nostalgia for the expression of youth,” Gaston Bachelard wrote in the classic phenomenology text on memory and homes, The Poetics of Space. Clever as it is, The Wilderness Downtown plays more like a “vulgar” nostalgia rather than an “expression of youth.” The mashup of images is literal rather than evocative. The interactive film might show you the exterior of your childhood home, but it is nothing like a bite in a madeleine.

We could accumulate hundreds of thousands of images throughout our lives but they will never taste like anything. An image represents and verifies a memory but the rest is left to imagination. Every essential moment of a child’s life is documented if he was born in the West. With digital album after album for every birthday, every Christmas, he will never struggle to remember what his childhood home looked like. That reaching, that vague warm feeling for a place one remembers but cannot see; that is a sense now growing extinct.

A child today grows up in a never forgotten house.

Anyone wants the original – let me know.

PS No I don’t own the original photo either but I can’t even remember where I got it from. If you do and object I can take it down.

Shamelessly ripped from fast company.

It its a bit squinty and/or you can’t be bothered screengrabbing yourself, drop me a mail and I’ll send you mine…

Basically Apple/Google will fight it out after everyone gets sidelined due to great consumer relationships, retailer pull and market leading smartphones. (Spoiler alert) And the Googleplex will probably win.

Specifically a Supply Chain Point of View on the new channel from the rather dodgily titled ‘supply chain shaman‘. (Oh dear. Add another one to the ‘first up against the wall when the real revolution comes’ along with the Advocates, Gurus, Jedi and Ninjas (blackbelt in stupid anyone?)

Notwithstanding, a good list of what comprises social commerce:

Geospatial.
Gaming.
Mobile Applications.
2-D Bar Codes.
Virtual Currency.
Shopping with Friends.
Facebook as a Channel.

As well as a good list of why supply chain should care”:

Redefinition of customer service.
New ways to sell to loyal shoppers.
Channel proliferation.
A new need for new type of supply chain transparency.

In essence a plea for departments outside of Marketing to welcome the digital consumer.

Bang your drum shaman.

and

Sitting in a darkened room after a free lunch on day two of a conference….

My advice to avoid this follows.Stab yourself in increasingly painful places with one of the inevitable free pencils.

Try and get caught in the eye with a laser pointer

Choke on a free mint – it’s impossible to nod off if you’ve got 17 mints in your mouth – I’ve tested it.

Call up a flashing box (on mobile/laptop screen?) Here’s one for free:

Try to sit in an uncomfortable position – trap increasingly sensitive folds of skin in increasingly tight places.

(as a last resort, and if its dark enough – you can attempt the ‘sterilizer’ and punch yourself in the testicles)

Seriously though – chewing gum is your friend, followed by drinking water frequently.

Keep adjusting your posture and trying to listen to write notes like I’m doing nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

image from here

A real diamond amongst the pile of shiny things that is Seth Godin. I couldn’t agree more.

“Notice me“

If the new web has a mantra, that’s it.

So much time and effort is now put into finding followers, accumulating comments and generating controversy… all so that people will notice you. People say and do things that don’t benefit them, just because they’re hooked on attention.

Attention is fine, as long as you have a goal that is reached in exchange for all this effort.

Far better than being noticed:

Trusted
Engaged with
Purchased from
Discussed
Echoed
Teaching us
Leading

However what I would like discussed is whether the items on the list lead to being noticed… ?