The future is already here...

It's just not evenly distributed yet... said William Gibson (a Canadian science fiction writer, in 1999).

George Orwell published his visionary work 1984 in 1948. Futurology is a fun field to play in.

Yet, increasingly the stuff that dreams and films are made of are becoming reality. Remember the film Minority Report? There was lots of stuff in there that made me go WOW when I first saw the film. In 2002. I watched it again recently. 7 years later and an awful lot of those futuristic notions are now possible or accessible to the masses.

Mobile search is just one of those areas of rich opportunity, and a clever Dutch company have recently launched Layar - an augmented reality mobile browser / search tool, combining location based technology with search for super-relevant search results whereever you are. This is seriously clever stuff, but real. Already. It's just not evenly distributed yet, but it's coming to a smart phone near you, very soon.

The implications for brands and services is pretty exciting for those prepared to spend some time getting their head around something that seems pretty futuristic. Watch this:

Taking prisoners is awfully bad manners

It's hot in London. Or at least hot for London. Over 30 degrees Celsius and the city starts falling apart. Tempers flare as temperatures rise. I like hot sunny days so I am not complaining but I may just use it as my excuse to RANT.

I've had an AOL email account since 1996. That's a very long time in the digital world.

At the time I acquired it, it was a no-brainer: either have a sensible username@aol.com email address or fgasljrhpw4895247@compuserve.net plus my 56.6kbps dial up access.

These days I have Gmail accounts, Yahoo accounts, Hotmail accounts, other personal and work accounts but my aol address has been my default email forever, simply because I had it first. I've been paying then £5 a month or thereabouts for the privilege of running that (and a couple of accounts for my parents) even though I've only accessed it via webmail and not required dial-up/broadband access services for years.

Yes, arguably I should have cancelled it sooner but the cost of reproducing business cards, teaching my parents how to use a new browser etc was greater than the £60 p.a apathy cost. Then recently they wrote to me to say my dial-up tarif would no longer be available and they'd move me to a £10 a month tariff. Which was enough to nudge me out of apathy.

So I wrote to them and asked them whether I could cancel my access service I've not used for 5 years but have been paying for, but retain my account / email address etc, given that by logging in I am seeing their advertising so my eyeballs still have value against advertising impressions.

They wrote back and said yes of course I could cancel my access, but no I couldn't retain my email address, contacts, filed mail etc, instead I'd have to migrate everything to a username@aol.co.uk. Now what's the point in that?

Nor can I export my contacts via csv or other means to other accounts. I feel like I am being held hostage.

Taking prisoners in the digital world is very bad form. Making exit, transfer, account deletion, email unsubscribe etc easy should be a pre-requisite of an e-crm programme.

AOL have failed. Badly. They could keep me and my eyeballs or they could lose me & my parents and make a very vocal enemy in the process. Once I've found the time to transfer my contacts and key filed emails over it will be Arrivederci AOL.

Foolish and shortsighted.

Did you get your Facebook URL?

It's not big nor clever to boast but sometimes you can afford to be smug. In an earlier post I forecast a landgrab and stressed the importance of securing your Facebook vanity URL as soon as they were released a few weeks ago.

500k usernames went in the first 15 minutes after Facebook had enabled the vanity URL registration. 6 million were signed up for in the first 48 hours. You have to pity the smart Alec who ignored advice and forever forward will be facebook.com/rickrolling. Doh. That's what I call a CLM: career limiting moment!

However, if you did miss out, and you are not that precious about exactitudes you can get a near-ish Facebook vanity URL of sorts here.

Although you will of course have marked yourself out to the digerati as having been caught snoozing ;-)

Mashing Michael Jackson

Mashing: The art of digitally re-purposing something to create something new. It's the online equivalent of Play-Doh, where the possibilities are colourful and endless.

A leading Hollywood script writer I once had the opportunity to meet said that in the movies there are only ever 7 storylines, but an infinite way to tell the same basic stories. So I love finding things that scrape or re-purpose content created elsewhere. It's clever, and a brand should be flattered if people are taking the trouble to mash or repurpose your content - it's a compliment and means they've engaged with it.

One of my favourite, favourite websites is Twistori, a visually well presented scrape of Twitter using 6 key words. It's mesmerising. It can't have cost much to create but it is fascinating. And in itself it's based on an interesting project called We feel fine. Both have been around for a while now but I keep coming back to them.

In the same vein, I've just come across a very topical mash-up. Unless you've been at sea or hiding in a cave all weekend it will have been hard to have escaped the news that Michael Jackson died. Yes, really! The dubious taste jokes have been circulating by email and text for days now, and to add to the fun some enterprising developers have created this "tribute" which sets Tweets featuring words that form the lyrics to Billie Jean to the rhythm of the song and the video on YouTube. Clever!

Addicted to the web?

Think yourself lucky you aren't in China where they have some rather questionable approaches to changing people's habits. Owch.

True, we all get what I call "digital indigestion" from time to time. The pace of change on the web can be overwhelming even for the smartest and geekiest amongst us. Last time I felt like that I discovered this amusing antidote...



But it's important for everyone to be AFK (away from keyboard) from time to time. In a world where written communication is overtaking the spoken word and "talking" to people via IM, Skype, Facebook, Email, blog posts, texts etc is increasingly frequent and convenient, but it should never replace face to face contact! We don't want everyone to end up like "the Grey bloke" now do we?

Who needs a website these days anyway?

First we had Boone Oakley - an ad agency doing entertaining things with tagged video content in YouTube enabling you to nav around their "site" that wasn't a site in the traditional sense; now the Webby's (the web's equivalent of the Oscars / Grammy's/BAFTA's etc), have jumped on the bandwagon:

Have a pootle around this... http://www.youtube.com/webby

Media's evolving...

There is no doubt the media landscape has changed irrevocably over the last few years, and will continue to do so. Many of the old models are being questioned and we're all trying to get our heads around this brave new digital world that's changing so fast we're running to keep up.

So with thanks to a friend of mine in the US who sent this to me, here's a well made piece of UGC (User Generated Content) that made me smile today and made some valid points along the way.

Grab a coffee, apply your headphones and watch for 8 minutes. Long by many video standards but a story well told



And if you still need convincing that publishing is in a tricky place, and old models have to change, read this article about USA Today's plans to attempt to monetise some of their digital content.