Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

As brands fall over themselves to get into SecondLife they are just beginning to find out that the “residents” of SecondLife are not just passive consumer avatars, and SecondLife is not a virtual-mall. It really is a co-creative environment where many of the residents are constituents, virtual citizens that have a hand in shaping it. On SecondLife’s third birthday the residents put on some protests about Linden Labs lifting the requirement that you need a credit card to enter SecondLife.

Well the residents are now fighting for the right to vote, virtual civil rights for avatars. What represents a watershed moment a group called the Second Life Liberation Army (SLLA) has begun millitary operations, and has taken over the American Apparal store and is stopping any residents from shopping there.

We are “so” not in Kansas anymore

Tip of the Hat - Ilya Vedrashko

Uncommon Uses is a series of posts where I talk about different ways an emerging technology can be used. My previous post on uncommon uses for wiki’s was rather popular, and I thought another technology that could bare some Uncommon Uses attention was podcasting. Sometimes in the early adoption of new technologies they are pressed into service in similar ways to previous technologies, for instance when television first came many of the early shows resembled radio plays, but were on television.

Podcasting is very different from radio though, it’s on demand, and not only can you listen to it when ever you want, you can also discover it at any time as well. What would most podcasts be like if you discovered them a year later? Not great for news then, but really good for serial content, and even more interesting for contextual content ie. stuff you listen to in a certain context or situation.

Serial Plays - Shadow Falls of course is the first professionally produced podcast drama (podrama), and it’s apparently some scary shit.

Podcast Novels - You would think this would be a no brainer, audio books right? But this Sci-Fi writer Scott Sigler lays claim to being the first podcasting novelist and with over 80,000 downloads (for his 3 books) he’s generated a hell of a lot of demand for his actual books. My good blogging friend CK of CK-blog.com has just posted a very interesting interview with Scott that provides some really fascinating context as to how and why he got into podcasting his novels.

Audio Tours - The first example of what I’ll call contextual podcasting, walking tours. Great example of course the Sweatshopper walking tours of two walmarts in Maine. Another example is Adam Curry (the podfather) walking tour of South Beach, Miami. Also check out Itoors who seem to be dedicated to this, but this idea is limitless.

Learning a Language - Podcasting is an amazing format for education, great example being the folks over at ChinesePod where they provide a series of free lessons, and a subscription service that will build your own RSS feed lesson. Related: MSNBC just wrote about learning languages on your ipod

Music Lessons - iplaymusic.com is a video podcast that teaches you guitar, they give away the first 35 lessons for you to try out. I downloaded them ages ago and have only been through a couple, I guess I need a motivational podcast.

Powerpoint Presentations - Ouch I know, but hey, with an enhanced podcast you can add screenshots of the deck and sync them with bookmarks on the audio track. Great thing to hand out after a conference or lecture. If your on a mac here’s a nice little app that does it for you called ProfCast

Children’s Stories - StoryNory, of course any story can be read for a podcast, but I’m sure Mum’s and Dad’s will love a service like this. Although, i loved having stories read to me by my Dad when I was a kid.

Cooking lessons - Couldn’t find many examples but I’m thinking this would be huge. Shopping list in the shownotes, some background information to listen to while your shopping, and then talking you through the techniques. If someone can figure out the script i’ll narrate. Ok I found a couple, campfire cafe: meals cooked over an open fire in realtime. Also Crash Test Kitchen Looks like my cup of tea “real people cooking real food”

Update:
Performance Venue My friend and colleague Seth Palmer is using a podcast to publish a series of piano recitals, even more interestingly is he is transcribing/playing classical music using GarageBand and the orchestral JamPacks. I found it hard to believe that Antonín Dvořák: Piano Quintet in A was done in garageband, incredible.

Excersise Class Anyone that listens to the Daily Source Code will know this one, the fitness attack podcast, and the soon to come Assercize Podcast

Narrate public domain books Librivox is an amazing example of what can be done by a passionate group and an internet connection. It is essentially a collection of audio books of public domain books that you can download for free.

So what else?

Car Maintenance?
Cycling tours?
Alternate commentary on movies, kind of mystery science theatre in your ipod.

What do you guys think? Anyone found podcasts that go beyond the radio format and really take advantage of context and time?

Even better click here to send me an audio comment and I’ll post a podcast of suggestions

Cheers,

Karl

In a sad fizzling of a hotly debated advertising/agency/viral topic, agency.com has decided to withdraw from the running for the subway pitch.

Ad-Week

An unsatisfying end to the debate as many, even the detractors used the outcome of whether agency.com got the work or not as the touchstone of success.

David Armano wins best headline for this story with “It’s-Not-You-It’s-Me.COM“

My agency-deathwatch post is an evolving post that continues to grow (basically anything I bookmark in delicious and tag “agency-deatwatch” is added to the post).

I wanted to highlight two entries that are worth reading:

First from David Armano of Logic+Emotion: Advertising: Innovate or Die. Vol. 1. Davids article clearly lays out the need for R&D and innovation in advertising, and how the traditional agency model just does not fit.

Second The Agency Model is Dead from BlueFlavor Blog. Blueflavor lists five nails in the coffin of the agency model:

Both of these articles talk about the issues that are subverting the Agency business model, and why agencies need to change to survive.

Related:
Five Implications for The Social Media Agency

3 Rules For Managing Viral Marketing - What Every CMO Needs To Know

A NYT story on how the teams for the new survivor episode will be divided into blacks, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and whites. I guess file this under the WTF category, were they slipping in the ratings or something?

read more | digg story

Yesterdays episode included the OK/GO video of the treadmill (4 million views wtf), and even had Damian Kulash as a guest on the show

A few days ago he started a star wars kid like competition after someone mashed up his greenscreen lightsaber bit

Currently leading the pack is Steven vs the Rancor:

He included “crumbelievable” as the ad that should define modern culture (anyone that listens to the American Copywriter podcast know thats a fav)

His Wikiality experiment

Yesterdays episode provided some great commentary on the fragmentation of culture, and the rise of the niche. Steven asks the question why don’t we all like the same commercial, why don’t we all like the same book.

Hense “American Pop Culture: It’s Crumbelievable!”

UPDATE: Colbert on Kittenwar

UPDATE: Steven’s writers have even pinched material from Zefrank, although it has been pointed out the doughnut joke is pretty obvious.

Also Chris Anderson, author of the brilliant book the Long Tail, comments on this Colbert episode Colbert on pop culture: It’s Crumbelievable!”

And Ze tells Steven off in this episode

Also Paul at HeeHawMarketing has some additional commentry on the death of common experience

My sister is the one in the family that can draw and paint, I on the other hand was born with less obvious talents, anyway, I’ve got her into flickr and she has taken to it like a duck to water. She’s far more hooked into the flickr community than I, she’s got one painting with over 50 comments, and that IMHO is officially a shitload.

Anyway, I just found out that Flickr is quietly turning off the visability of accounts that have more art than photography on them, and thats even for paid up “pro” accounts. It’s called NIPSA (Not In Public Areas).

This is from some Flickr customer service corrospondance with an artist called Roy Blumenthal

Here’s a longer post documenting an artists back and forth with flickr customer service after he found out his account was now NIPSA.

I understand that flickr is trying to avoid becoming storage for the flotsom and jetsom of screenshots like photobucket or imageshack, but I wish they would be cooler with the people adding original artwork, I mean that’s life enriching stuff right there. Fiona’s photo stream is all artwork, but is way more interesting than a lot of people photos
So what can we do to save artists of flickr from becoming NIPSA? A SaveFlickrArtists tag maybe? What do you think?

The Future of Web Apps Sep 13-14, 2006 organized by Carson Workshops, and the folks behind the amazing online magazine for web developers/designers Vitamin. With speakers from Digg, Google, Technorati, Wordpress, Flickr, Yahoo, Feedburner it should be an amazing conference, and for $295 for two days you could not get a better deal. It’s in San Francisco, so if you’re on the west coast you have no excuse

For a little less 2.0 hyperbole in October the excellent Peter Merholz is organizing the IDEA conference (IDEA stands for Information: Design, Experience, Access). It takes place October 23-24 in Seattle, WA.

Read more about the program and speakers here, the speakers have a wonderfully diverse and cross disciplined background. I think this is a must for anyone interested in the realm of “designing for experience” or customer experience.

UPDATE: Atomiq has a good write up on the IDEA conference as well.

flaggrantdisregard.com has put a great page together that monitors the EXIF data of photo uploads to flickr and extracts camera information. Here’s the top ten list of camera models:

They have also extrapolated top manufacturers, and what is pretty amazing here is that 2 of the top ten are mobile phone manufacturers, Sony Ericsson and Nokia respectively.

Also here’s a post with a graph of the top DSLR camera uploads

It’s amazing what people will do with data if they can get their hands on it.

Nice little video from Amex, and i guess an example of “integrated viral” because along with the video Amex has also created an online flash game at http://stoppong.com.

Clearly they had some scaling issues as people logged on to play the game as I got this error when I tried to play it:

In my 3 rules of managing viral marketing I had said “Experiment, Monitor, and Respond”, so i’m not sure if this would fall under the “Respond” header, or maybe there’s a 4th rule, “prepare to scale”.

BTW the 3 rules for managing viral marketing sound great in French:
trois règles du marketing viral que tous les chefs marketing devraient connaître and Marketing Viral, encore quelques articles

Merci beaucoup
Update: Just noticed Joseph Jaffe blogged about this as well