Swine Flu – Rhiza Labs

A month back, I wrote about Google maps influenza tracker following the H1N1 Swine Flu and its course across the world. With the continual focus on the spread of this virus, it was refreshing tonight to hear that Canada is treating the spread of the disease like it would any other seasonal flu outbreak, choosing to ignore the hoopla about the virus having crossed the primate barrier from pigs to humans. Maybe the Canadian’s know something we don’t, because they’ve decided to go the other direction and give their pigs the flu instead, as reported by CNN Health, with a farmer passing the flu to his heard of pigs. Cop that!

Rhizalabs has taken over the Google Maps official H1N1 Swine Flu tracker, with a more detailed and comprehensive breakdown of the location and stages of the virus.

http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/

My Space vs Facebook

Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch fame noted on his blog a couple of days ago the fact that My Space’s growth is stagnating compared to its arch rival Facebook .

Getting too it – why is My Space in decline?

Simply put – Usability. It sucks. I never got onto My Space because almost every time I visited it, I encountered the following problems

• Navigation moved around. One My Space site is different to the next, and the lack of consistent representation of the User Interface made it a nightmare to move through the site. I’m time poor as it is – I don’t want to spend it wading through and wrestling with navigation.
• Readability: Fonts and the use of crazy colours like white font on a yellow background (or vice versa) made it tough to read. Add to this the personalised backgrounds which varied from grim dense photos across to riotous  patterns made it nigh on impossible to read.
• Rubbish: Many My Space pages I came across were rubbish. I mean not even interesting rubbish. Just rubbish.
• Profile Picture Inconsistency – Portrait, Landscape, Big, Small – your friends lists looked like a mish mash of images stacked on each other. Amateurish.

I’ve always been of the opinion that My Space’s popularity stemmed from 2 key areas – Celebrity and Personalisation. The Celebrity aspect is that Hollywood A-List types, Rock Bands, Rap Singers, Soccer, Aussie Rules all got onboard, as the benefits from a distribution point of view and the relative low cost for the publicity and doing the “in thing” were all tangible and measurable in their benefits. Everyone flocked online, as the iconisation and ability to “friend” aspect were easy, accessible and straight forward. The Personalisation side is the ability to build your own page “just so”. That’s where the “Usability that sucks” enter.

Facebook on the other hand is positively anodyne in its austere interface. I’ve been on it for about 2.5 years now and watched it go through 3 changes. The current interface leaves alot to be desired, so much so, that I barely login anymore unless I’m wanting to see what is going on with friends who are travelling overseas. On the upside, the community is cohesive and a proper closed garden if you set your privacy settings correctly. The other strengths, or they were in the past, was that the interface was relatively persistent and most importantly, it was readable, putting the content as the focus. Usability and the subsequent User Experience went up, because, well it was easy to use.

And then when Facebook released the developer API in early May 2007, all hell broke loose, as Facebook’s own way of personalisation had entered the market, driven by the hot trends of the day – beyond the walls of the Facebook employee group, who whilst smart, could never hope to compete with the groundswell of applications from the global developer community racing to commercialise the next hot idea. Smart move Team Facebook.

And look who else has done good by releasing the API – Apple. iPhone. App Store. Is Good. RIM (Blackberry), Nokia & Sony Ericsson are playing catch up.

My Space has a MASSIVE user base. Right now. They need to start utilising it to maximise revenue by creating a community within its boundaries, one that embraces the individuality. They just need to fix up the Usability for it to work.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/18/myspace-is-in-real-trouble-if-these-page-view-declines-dont-reverse

Palm Pre

I will freely admit that I have had a huge number of mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s) in the past 15 years. Before smart phones existed, combining PDA’s and Mobiles into the one unit just wasn’t a possibility and working around computers, lots of data and lots of people made for hundreds of contacts, necessitating some serious organisational capacity requirements. By contacts, at its peak I had over 3,000 individuals and with SIM cards at the time not being able to hold more than 99 entries, was far in excess then what the venerable paper address book could cope with.

Enter the PDA.

As a consequence, through various roles and personal circumstance, I’ve been fortunate to have run through my possession an original Palm Pilot 3,  Palm IIIx, Handspring Visor (remember them!?), Palm Zire 71 and the pinnacle being a Palm Tungstan T3. The T3 served duty for some 4 years and I only sold it last year on eBay to make way for my first smart phone. It was an awesomely well sorted piece of kit with a rock solid operating system and fantastic functionality, battery life and ergonomics. Hand in hand with this, my mobiles of choice since 1995 have ranged from  what would surely rate as an antique analogue Nokia 100, Ericsson GH337, Ericsson T10, across to what I thought at the time was a very cool Ericsson T39, Nokia 5110, Nokia 6230, Sony Ericsson T610, Motorola V620 (AWFUL Ergonomics) and a Sony Ericsson K610i. The key thing with all of these devices was that they had good battery life, were stable, secure and kept me productive whilst on the road and doing my job, staying in touch with friends and family.

I made my first foray into smart phones in 2007 with a O2 Atom Exec, which was a nice device, aside from running Window’s Mobile, which frankly, was appalling next to the smoothness, stability and functionality of the Palm OS. To say that I had grown spoilt by Palm’s excellent operating system is a gross understatement of the highest order. The unfortunate situation with Palm going across to Windows Mobile for their Treo range of Smart phones only jaded my faith with Palm and what had been a memorable relationship. The honeymoon was over.  Since that time, I’ve graduated to my current device, a Blackberry Curve 8330. A significantly different beast from my previous phones, I became a Crackberry addict from day one, as it has the same level of stability, battery life, functionality and robustness I had come to enjoy with the 2 device lifestyle I lived for so many years.

Then along came Apple’s iPhone.

I’ll paint a picture. I work in a Digital Services agency and suddenly 7 of them appear within a matter of days, 3 of them within 2 meters of me with the MD, GM & Dir. of Ops. cajoling, daring and taunting me to “upgrade”, because of the App Store, because of the usability, because of the gyrometer thingy, blah… blah… blah…. They said it was inevitable. In fact, the MD said too me at one time “Come on Col, just give in. You know you want too”. You’d think I’d been teleported and had landed in Apple’s Cupertino HQ and these guys had shares in Apple the way they were selling me the benefits. You can guess who was left defending RIM’s finest against the arm bending/dipping maniacal actions of my App Store talking, pick one: Urban Spoon, Weather, Word Scramble, Flight Control,  smug colleagues.

Then my wife get’s an iPhone and I have a really, really good opportunity at trying this “Smart” phone out. 1st thing. I get 80+ emails a day. Big attachments, often long, lengthy audit trails of response. There goes my data plan. Big time. 2nd thing – battery life or lack there of. It’s downright awful. 1 day??? I thought I was downgrading from 10 days standby/5 hours talk time with my T3 & K610i to the Blackberry’s Herculean 5 days/5 hours next to the Apple’s paltry offering. And what’s with the aversion to “Cut & Paste”? And not being able to send multiple SMS at once nor receive MMS are also big downsides in my book.

The upsides? That App Store – it IS fantastic. Web Browsing on 3G/Wireless. The fact it HAS wireless – what drugs were the Blackberry guys on when they neglected to include Wi-Fi with a Generation 4 phone? The web browsing experience is superb, font and image rendering, page caching in slide screens, zoom view, the whole lot. Contact’s integration with both Outlook & Mail is great. Contacts handling on Mac’s (we have one at home) is something Apple have had down pat for years – change the contact in any location – Address Book, Mail, iCal, it syncs and just works.

I had resigned myself to the fact that I was going to join the Apple masses and ditch my email connectivity, in favour of all those pesky games.

But then I saw the new Palm Pre tonight.

http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre

Check out the Video’s in the “Meet the Pre”. THAT’s usability. Merged Contact & Diary’s between Google Gmail, Outlook and Facebook all at once? That’s contact management.

If the User Experience is 50% of what is shown on this site, I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these units.

Welcome back Palm.

Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa

This beautifully crafted Ferrari designed by the famed Scaglietti design hous is one of only 22 in the world, as reported in Wired last night. It has recently fetched a staggering $12.1 million USD, making it apparently the most expensive motor vehicle ever sold. Wow.

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/05/vintage-ferrari/

Gruen Transfer – The Pitch

ABC’s Gruen Transfer, which screens each Wednesday night at 8:30pm charts the thinking, actions and rationale that drives the brightest lights in Australia’s advertising industry. Chaired by comedian Wil Anderson The Gruen Transfer has an industry based panel of notable Australian ad agency heavyweights, including Leo Burnett Sydney CEO  – Todd Sampson, George Patterson Chairman & MD – Russell Howcroft, Freelance Advertising expert Bridget Taylor and Neon Pidgeons Bram Williams. The program has received critical acclaim for its thought provoking commentary, observation and insight in bringing the formalised system and process which makes up the advertising industry.

One of the highlights each week is “The Pitch – Sell the Unsellable“. Top flight competing agencies are given a chance to show their inventiveness and creativity in communicating a succinct and clear message within the confines of a 30 second TeleVision Commercial (TVC). The opportunity to showcase creative talent for the respective combating agencies with more than 1.2 million viewers each week is an enticing draw card, particularly for the smaller, more agile and no holds barred outfits. Previous submissions to the Pitch have been creatively met, with some of the most memorable including: “Invade New Zealand” produced by the Marmalade & 303 agencies.

Invade New Zealand #1 = Produced: Marmalade

Invade New Zealand #2 = Produced: 303

In last nights episode, JWT & The Foundry were given the challenge to work out a way sell the concept of “Fat Pride” with the underlying premise of ending discrimination because of your body weight.

Fat Pride #1 = Produced: JWT

As can be seen by the above screening of JWT’s TVC, The Foundry’s own submission was kyboshed by the ABC’s censorship panel on the premise that it was racially, religiously and sexually discriminatory. The TVC was however posted on this ABC endorsed website, with the requisite bunch of warnings and cautions.

http://www.antiprejudicead.net

The entire 15 minutes is worth watching, as it has a spirited discussion with the incumbant panel members and the TVC’s creator, Adam Hunt from The Foundry

As stated by the above website, the below TVC was prefaced with:

“To provide a clear context for the ad, The Foundry and JWT agencies were asked to come up with a campaign for the idea of Fat Pride, to end shape discrimination and make overweight Australians feel less humiliated by the constant public disapproval of anyone who isn’t a size 10 or under.”

Fat Pride #2 (Banned for TV Broadcast) = Produced: The Foundry

A confronting ad by most peoples measure. It is confronting to mainstream society because of the visual composition and the context that every single one of the stated “jokes” or comments is something that as the TVC’s producer Adam Hunt has pointed out, something we overhear in conversation, whether contextually “as a joke” or in the undercurrents of fringe behaviour. The requisite reaction of disgust and dismay at the first three dialogues is placed into sharper context by the ending Fat Pride commentary and it makes you pause and think. What adds significant gravitas and impact is the context with which each dialogue is shot – it’s not in the school yard with the peer group pressure of inflated bragadoccio or the pub scene where a bunch of inebriated red necks are jostling nor the locale of “that suburb” out west. They are shot in your face, directly, with stark backdrop, which reinforce the conveyance of  intense facial expressions of hatred, contempt and derision. As noted by the panel, you flat out don’t like any of the people in the ad. The impact of this dislike is so palpable you are left feeling dirty, nauseous and ashamed. This baseline message of dislike and contempt is clear for all to see and interpret.

Interestingly, something I found curious was that in the above extended discussion with Todd Sampson, Bram Williams, Wil Anderson, Russell Howcroft and The Foundry’s Sydney Creative Director and producer of the TVC – Adam Hunt was that these guys actually spend in their day to day a whole lot of time thinking up ways to create TVC’s that are memorable, engaging and in the literal sense “safe” so that they don’t suffer reprisals and recrimination for their agency from the wider public. The Foundry’s approach by Adam Hunt in tackling the hard hitting approach would have tweaked the sensibilities of this particular audience as they are hyper tuned and aware of the currents which affect and influence popular opinion. His very real, black and white, no argument assertion that making “fat jokes” is wrong, no matter which way you cut it, and there being no shades of gray strikes at the very heart of what everyone is objecting too. The panels general consensus of belief that he has crossed the line by rendering being fat with the same gravity as discrimination against Jews, Gays and Blacks, is jarring their senses brecause they don’t see it as being offensive to joke about fat people in the first place. The point is, that in portraying “Fat Pride”, the notion that ANY sort of commentary about someones weight is just as serious as the previous comments is the hard hitting point he is not trying, but succeeds in making.

The argument that people who have spent their lives being prosecuted don’t want to see/hear such behaviour perpetuated, is a strong one, however more directly to the point, I think it is fair to say that the most important aspect is that they don’t ever want it to be forgotten. Ever. Take myself as an example, I went to a very Anglo Saxon primary school on the outer fringe of Melbourne and rocked up in Grade 3. Consider that my sister and I were the only Chinese students, so much so that many of my peers had never ever met a chinese person before. I had my fair share of being beaten up, teased, taunted and singled out. But you know what? It wasn’t any different to the red headed kid, the kid that smelt, the kid that had that weird lunch. But my character was such that I knew at the core, the jibes were on the whole born from ignorance and a lack of perceived understanding. True minority singling out that Jews, Blacks & Gays endure is in a different realm in that they have been persecuted to the point of extinction and forced to occupy the fringe. I think that that existence, which still in parts of the world extends to this day, is behaviour and a history that no one should ever, nor would want to forget. Being Fat in today’s society is met with prejudice, inconvenience and ostrasisement to the extent that people who are fat are often documented as being so depressed and locked in their homes that this in itself is tantamount to a lifetime of misery, solitude and little hope. This can be construed in one sense as a societally imposed torture. A big call, but being fat for some, if not most people is not an option. Society has put them there, so society should be responsible for it.

Whilst I understand the ABC’s view on not broadcasting the TVC and applaud the release onto the Internet, in a very real sense, it is a shame that they caught this one and prevented it’s broadcast, because the very mainstream behavior of deriding people for being fat is that same audience who would have benefitted immensely in watching this hard hitting commercial. Having seen this, and the rationale that Adam Hunt put forward, I’m left in no doubt why The Foundry has been nailing so much work lately.

It is a brilliant TVC and deserves due recognition for raising in a mainstream context the fact that being Fat still remains a societal stigma.

Boston Globe – Big Picture

The Boston Globe Newspaper website http://www.boston.com is to Boston what http://www.theage.com.au is to Melbourne. I love reading it every day, to get a sense of what is happening on the other side of the planet, with what I term a more balanced and less “All American” view of the world i.e: there is an inherant presentation from the Boston Globe  team that their backyard is somewhat bigger than Boston itself and as such they don’t have a problem with naval gazing and self congratulatory discourse like some of the other US based newspapers can sometimes err towards.  Having visited Boston in 2004, I just love the whole city and this paper is a reflection of what a great place it is.

A reflection of this more mature world view is shown in their daily pictorial article feed – The Big Picture – which runs on the old premise “A picture is worth a 1000 words”.

The photography is stunning in each and every instance which Alan Taylor as the page’s editor chooses, with sharp, concise and poignant commentary on what are at times challenging and emotively charged issues. A mix of syndicated feeds from the major news portals around the world, Taylor’s take on topical issues has a knack of balancing up each different post day to day with entries which present the best of human endeavour and frankly, make you thankful for the world that we live in and how damn lucky we are and should consider ourselves day to day.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

Notable Entries in recent times:

Earth Day 2009, April 22nd 2009 – http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/earth_day_2009.html

Today is Earth Day, a day set aside for awarenesss and appreciation of the Earth’s environment, and our roles within it – this year marking the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. As a way to help appreciate and observe our environment, I’ve collected 40 images below, each a glimpse into some aspect of the world around us, how it affects and sustains us, and how we affect it. Happy Earth Day everyone.

Refugees in Sri Lanka, April 27th 2009 - http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/refugees_in_sri_lanka.html

It has been just over a month since the last time the Sri Lankan conflict was featured here. In that time, government forces have put further pressure on the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and hundreds of thousands of civilians in the north of the country have been trapped in a war zone. Press coverage is still very limited, and conflicting stories are the norm, with LTTE representatives claiming the ethnic Tamil civilians are staying willingly, fearful of government forces, and the Sri Lankan government claiming the civilians are being held against their will by the LTTE. According to the UN, over 6,500 civilians have been killed, thousands more injured, and a stream of over 100,000 refugees has recently left the LTTE stronghold, and the Sri Lankan government has halted the use of heavy-caliber weaponry.

Bushfires in Victoria, Australia, February 9th 2009 – http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/bushfires_in_victoria_australi.html

The state of Victoria in southern Australia has recently been hit with hundreds of bush fires during a record-breaking heatwave – temperatures well above 38°C (100°F). Unfortunately, these fires have proved to be the deadliest in Australian history, with at least 166 deaths reported so far. The fires mostly appear to have been started by lightning – however a few appear to have been arson, and are under investigation – entire towns being declared crime scenes. Twenty-four fires are still burning, and authorities warn that the death toll will likely rise.