“Social games aren’t new–they’re just games you play with other people”. Jon Radoff explains in his beautifully designed “History of Social Games” going back from 5000 years ago to the present day.

The Conspiracy for Good #cfg is a pilot game/story/something-a-bit-different that I’m working on. It’s pretty innovative - Heroes’ creator Tim Kring is writing the plot with Company P who make games, with Nokia supporting the technology and enabling everything to happen. The whole premise is around “gaming for good” and the project will support charities including Room To Read and the Pearson Foundation - building 5 real-world libraries in Zambia will be interwoven into the story.

The story started in Africa and now it’s about to land in London… There’s 4 actions happening that you can be part of - you’ll try and sneak around the city avoiding the evil Blackwell Briggs security and use Nokia Point & Find (provided) to find location-based clues. Sign up now, as places are filling up fast.

Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games…

Love it. Two mins from my house in Homerton. Looks no different to now.

fuckyeahhackney:

2 girls, Wyke Estate E9 1987

From chrisdb1 on flickr

.@justdoit: A climate change tragicomedy featuring 3 organisations, 2 loose affiliations & 1 domestic extremist. No longer Swampy-driven clichés, activists are now people we all know - your neighbour, a friend’s brother, your mum! This new trailer shows a few snippets of the upcoming film, created throughout 2009 leading up to Climate Camp, to promote its new crowdsourced funding campaign to get the film edited and launched by 2011.

.@artangel & @V_and_A Late feat the twitter typewriter @typertweet

Friday 28 May 2010, 18.30–22.00, Admission free

Dressing up, summery drinks in the garden, giant speed scrabble, crossword hunts, legendary Peachy Coochy presentations, DJs and films. Inspired by Artangel’s The Concise Dictionary of Dress now running at Blythe House, the V&A’s working store of its collections,the evening plays with ideas about the meaning of words, collections, dress and how we feel about what we wear…

Typertweet, Grand Entrance
Interact to make a live dictionary! Typertweet sets out to overcome the transience of online communication and make the actual message important again. The unique typewriter has been programmed to turn digital real-time messages from twitter into the printed word. Your tweets will become a crowd-sourced dictionary of new definitions of the words from The Concise Dictionary of Dress which are: ARMOURED, COMFORTABLE, CONFORMIST, CREASED, ESSENTIAL, FASHIONABLE, LOOSE, MEASURED, PLAIN, PRETENTIOUS, TIGHT.

Add your own definition or usage of one of the words by simply sending a 140 character tweet to @typertweet and add the hashtag #vamlate at the end.

For example: @typertweet PLAIN: without whipped cream, icing, cherries or chocolate sprinkles #vamlate

Typertweet concept, hardware and electronics by Benjamin Tomlinson

Twitter integration by Greg Reed

Event concept  and management by Katy Beale

Beautiful Oregon indie-folk sounds of Laura Viers accompanied by a stopstart animation featuring peachy fireworks and woodland animals toasting marshmallows. ahhhh… Apparently the song was inspired by a type of peach called July Flame.

My recent article in Arts Professional commenting on digital access in the arts, talking about Tate, Arnolfini, MuseumNext and Art of Digital, and how to set up an engaging and inclusive process to get arts organisations up to speed on the social web.

In the Tory stronghold of Godalming, Arthur Price (@arfprice) gives the most witty, humurous and downright honest hustings I’ve seen so far. Shame he doesn’t want people to vote for him. I think him becoming the local MP would do more for democracy than people spoiling their ballots.

Filmed on Hackney Marshes, evoking the dreaded cross country run of our youth, this muddy video for The Temper Trap’s single Love Lost makes shivers down the spine with the Yorkshire sounding teacher hollering “round t’wood - Colliers Wood - past the farm and back in 30 minutes. you got it? - now get on with it!”

The pot hole gardener: the green antidote to the lumps and bumps in our roads. East London cyclist Steve Wheen featured in the Metro this week, planting flowers in potholes as a protest to the state of roads. His website the pothole gardener has had 25,000 hits in its first month. People are happily suggesting new locations for these mini - and often very temporary - gardens. ‘I am following up some suggestions. One is that I try and turn Edgware Road into Kew Gardens,’ he said, somewhat ambitiously, ‘Now I can’t stop looking at potholes wherever I go.’

Have pop stars got too big for their boots? Watch LCD Soundsystem get ritually humiliated by pandas whilst singing about “Drunk Girls”. Reminds me of the scene in  Gremlins when the “bad ones” take over the town. There’s no putting pandas in the food blender in this video from Spike Jonze though.

More great work from Poke… I still don’t get why/how Foursquare enables you to check in places when your GPS doesn’t match….

Prove you’ve been to the manliest guy-den by checking in to the most eye-catching venue. Have you been to B&Q recently? Or a burlesque parlour? Or a prison?

Here’s how you do it…

#1Download the FourSquare app

#2Become our friends by clicking here

#3Check into…

We tweet whilst we watch TV. Starling launches social TV to build on that idea.

The app will showcase streams of comments from a user’s friends and the wider community around any given show and will allow rating via a star system a bit like Digg.

A Mobile Entertainment interview with Starling CEO’s Declan Caufield states an Ofcom stat that 90% of Britains use their phones while watching TV. It’s another layer to vent our amusement/shock/anger/sympathy (delete as appropriate whether watching Question Time/election coverage/Masterchef/American Idol). 

Starling sees programme makers of the future tapping into the conversation and bringing it, real time, into the show. Wisely it will use facebook and twitter logins, with an iphone and ipad version in alpha and android version out soon.

Confirming the validity of services such as Starling: Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s director of media partnerships, talked about how “real time engagement is changing content” at the MIPTV conference on 12 April.

Presentation from WeAreSocial’s @simoncollister on third sector social trends - moving on from broadcast structures to networking.

Monitoring Social Media bootcamp coming up this Weds. Looking forward to hearing Marshall Sponder (self professed web metrics guru and the only peson I’ve met who actual fits the title). I’ve high expectations for a really hands-on useful conference, that will forego all the usual basic fact wowing of social media and just get right down to telling us how we can develop the best monitoring and evaluation processes. Here’s my write up on the last monitoring conference I went to held by Our Social Times.

@ciaranj made a beautiful, professional looking infographic, inspired by my comment on this digital buzz blog post about infographics. I’ve had to blog it to make sure it’s down on (digital) paper forever. The comment was, of course, “Did you know that 99% of infographics are made about social media and that 9/10 people surveyed thought that they would be seeing more infographics in 2010?”

Data is beautiful. Ad agency Wieden+Kennedy’s new “data range” of jewellery inspired by graphical data - such as the graph for gold prices since 1979. A planner noticed that the data could be seen as something quite artistic and suggested making necklaces from the patterns that formed. 

Facebook causes syphillis! As reported in The Telegraph, Metro, The Sun and the Press Association. Dr Petra dispels the myth for us. Oh - we’re safe, it’s only in Teeside. Carry on as before.

Twitter growth (now 10 billion tweets in total) infographic from @mashable Looks like 2010 is going to be the year of the infographic!

Tate tweets: a short article I wrote for Arts & Business about Tate’s tweeting practices. I was restricted on space, and would have loved to add what happened next - the creation of a new role of a Digital Communications Manager, which Jesse Ringham started in post in January 2010. In his dedicated digital role, he’s been able to up the resource on twitter, plus look at a somewhat neglected facebook fan page and correlate the content across the two platforms. His main remit at the moment is developing the e-comms platform - driving sales, on a marketing proposal that combines all online channels and will be evaluating spend – comparing offline with online – in terms of traffic, ROI and datacapture.

Chat Roulette - a guide explaining all about the random global webchat connector - popular amongst teens, perverts & the curious. Casey Neistat explores it so you don’t have to. Will you be “nexted”?

I’m trawling through YouTube at the moment doing research and this little cartoon from xkcd just seemed to ring very true.

Brilliantly complicated cause-and-effect video for the OK Go single, This Too Shall Pass, coming after the contraversial decision of their record label to not allow sharing of their previous marching band themed video. This resulted in an open letter from the lead singer trying to explain the situation to a storm of enraged fans - basically the reason was something about EMI, contracts and money.

This new video has a sponsorship deal set up with State Farm so their record label still makes cash even when the video is viewed outside of youtube. A taste of things to come?

If you like their visual style, check out their first video filmed on treadmills (yes - in 2006! Before Berocca ripped them off). If you watch the cause and effect video closely, you’ll see an ironic reference to the treadmills video showing on a TV that’s smashed with a sledgehammer.

Remember Speak n Spell, Rolodex & ViewMaster toy? Nokia teamed up with V&A to create a set of (nostalgic yet pointless) 80s inspired hacker culture treatments of the new N900 PUSH.

Crumpled City Maps are soft, yet hard-wearing, waterproof and meant to be creased and crumpled. Perfect for cyclists, I’d like to see the newest London Cycle Route maps printed on these - I’d pay for a copy!

Information is beautiful: The Guardian’s BBC-O-Gram showing BBC spending in an easily digestible format. A response to the recently announced cuts including the binning of the fantastic digital radio station 6Music and being told to stop buying in content like gripping drama Mad Men. Click to see more detail.

Live twitter visualisation from @stamen design of the Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010. Check out their other live twitter streaming experiment for MTV Video Music Awards in NY where Kanye West and Asshole were trending topics for a while - these words were pulled out before it went live on TV…

TED 2010: Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft Live Labs talks about their new augmented reality maps - a live concept in AR with a geo-location aspect.

With nod to the blog paper, the newspaper club is currently testing in beta. It taps into the idea of merging the online and the offline - being aware that although digital content might be expanding at an exponential rate, people still love to hold a chunk of printed paper in their hands. I’m intrigued by the possibilities of pay per page printing (rates go down the more copies you print, natch) and aggregating the best content from the web to read at your leisure - preferably on Sunday morning, in bed.

It is funded 4iP and made by those creative people at the Really Interesting Group who are into “post digital thinking”.

Fun Theory: I’d seen the musical piano stairs, but just caught this brill bottle bank arcade (Volkswagen initiative)

Architect Keiichi Matsuda gives us a very imaginative (and slightly scary) take on augmented reality. Is this the way we are heading?

Lego creates an online community - Lego Click - with this lovely animation. The website is fun and stylised into a lego world, though I’m perhaps unsure how the viewer contributes at the moment - maybe this is coming. Content interlinks between twitter, facebook and iphone app.

Spot on stats and predictions on next generation media and its consumers, presented in a sharp way from digital marketing agency Harvest Digital

“CultureLab monitored social media chatter during the last quarter of 2009 to get a grasp on evolving trends. We also conducted in-market explorations in Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York. Finally, our Trend Summit in December was a success and helped us glean even more about the trends expected to make an impact in 2010! From lifestyle, technology, media and fashion to music, politics, consumerism and street culture, we explored it all. We’re pleased to bring you CultureLab’s Top Ten list of the areas we believe will be noteworthy and notable among the “New” general market — the young adult, hyper-fragmented, tech savvy, diverse and cross-cultural group of consumers. Enjoy!”

What to Look for in 2010

CultureLab Trend Summit from Philip Moore on Vimeo.

In late 2009, TrendsSpotting asked key social media influencers to give them their take on 2010 - in only 140 characters. Here’s the best.

Smashing Magazine present some brilliant examples of bloggers smashing the barriers of blogging with blogazines…

Scanning through my pages of notes from yesterday’s Monitoring Social Media Conference, I know that the conference producers did something right. Highlights for me were:

Katy Howell from Immediate Future who captivated the audience, referencing Greggs the baker and Compare the Meerket campaigns. She was very clear with her recommendations about reclaming accounts and making sure you define which social media sites are official/unofficial.

Celia Pronto from STA travel gave a case study on their integration of social media and UCG into their website STATravelBuzz which offers anyone who’s booked with STA a “starter guide” to social media and gets them creating their own content which is then aggregated to the website. Another great tool - they match up people with questions with people with the info - therefore becoming the go-between rather than the company with all the answers.

Giles Palmer from Brandwatch was a energised Duracell bunny in the mid-afternoon slot, sporting a Movember tache, he talked through the definitive processes of what we were all there to hear about - “monitoring” social media. His steps were: Gather (crawl or buy in), Search (rank by relevance, create streams), Analyse (inbound links / author tags), Check sentiment. His recommendation for measurement of sentiment was, put very simply - small volumes: crowdsource; large volumes: use bots.

Sentiment seemed to be a key word coming up around analysis and Marshall Sponder went into more detail about this (he stepped in last minute, so his presentation was even more impressive). Now things ramped up toa techy pace that everyone appreciated. He quoted the Forrester Wave report and confirmed what other speakers had been saying - a stat is not an insight, you need to drill down into the stat to get the insight.  He stated that there are currently no standards on sentiment - positive, neutral and negative and the only company managing sentiment properly is Crimson Hexagon. He argued that in “most social media platforms are not capable of advanced semantics analysis or meme clustering”.

@jennielees was liveblogging from the event and wrote an some an excellent summary post of the event, which I can’t even try to better.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of work recently trawling the internet for up to date demographic and usage stats on different social media platforms and have just found this blog post from Xposure which looks at UK stats - brilliant resource as most sites, including Quantcast, just reference US  and global stats.

I’ve found out that UK participation in social networking usage is the highest in Europe, with 24.9 million unique visitors – 78% of the total UK online population – now belonging to the country’s social networking community, rising to 90% for those aged 25-34 with an internet connection.

Figures gathered by monitoring service Nielsen show that social networks are more popular than email.  They state that there has been major growth in Facebook over the last year, a subsequent decline in Myspace and that Twitter has exploded onto the scene.

Peer Lawther, Science Museum London’s Senior Online Marketing Executive explains their twitter methodology (@peerlawther @MuseumID)

Social Media is changing the way brands and consumers interact with each other, and therefore changing the the advertising industry - Social Media “guru” Erik Qualman explains.