Digital Truthiness

Financial crisis rant

2009-01-19T18:47:00.000-08:00

i know everyone is having a rant on this stuff, so i thought i'd be no different and give an entirely subjective and simplistic description of how i'm seeing things.

01. inflation & recession
how is it possible that deflation is occuring when all this money is being printed by the govs?
doesn't that normally cause inflation?

we're in a weird place where the value is dropping, but there's more actual money in circulation.

but the additional money injected actually has already vanished because it's already been consumed/lost. the money printing is just a time-shift correction, essentially to devalue what was previously overvalued.

if my apple is worth $1 when there is $10 in circulation...
and the government prints another $10. what happens?
the apple is (maybe) worth $2?
(of course, the apple is only worth $2 if the market will pay that)

and the $1 i worked hard to save is now worth relatively half. great!

which is maybe what leads to deflation/recession?
if noone will pay the $2, people have to start lowering their sell price...
to say $1.50 for the apple.

so everyone loses: the guy who had $1 to spend initially needs to borrow 50c to buy the apple.
and the guy selling the apple loses 25% of the value just to sell.
capitalist government rules, with a controlled population.

02. lending practices
the extra cash that caused it's way may its way into the economy via borrowing...
if i save $100 at the bank, they can lend 90% to someone else.
so if they lend the $90 to another bank, then that bank can re-lend $81 to someone.
which now means that the original $100 is looking scarily like $271.

plus the assets the money was borrowed against inflated to an unsustainable level and are now having to deflate.

the extra money being printed is being used to protect the lenders (aka risk takers) and to ensure they keep on lending. people were only borrowing on the premise that the asset they were buying was going to continually increase in value. there is now no cash left in the hands of consumers to drive growth (whatever growth means!).

03. peaking
so who/what decided where the peak was? i guess it happened when a large enough percentage of borrowers could no longer meet their commitments. then the highly speculative share market reacted, causing a house of cards. the whole thing relies on being able to find some chump to pay more for something than you did.

04. risk
now-days, the margin for error has evaporated. if you're only able to buy something based on the future value of something being a lot more than it is now... there is such a massive risk!

in the past, things weren't that heavily leveraged. you needed 20% down on a house and needed to be able to service the loan, without much reliance on the future value.

the time needed to save this deposit wasn't such a big deal because property value wasn't exponentially inflating. but because the lenders made incredible sums available, it's driven inflation through the roof. and instead of these lenders needing to deal with the problem, the government just bails them out else the whole system falls over.

chicken/egg. or maybe more cat chasing tail. bottom line, like steve waldman says, kill the lenders!

Currency Conversions

2009-01-12T17:10:00.000-08:00

Why is it that every article written that quotes a financial value outside USD, feels the need to restate the value in at least one other major currency?

With the availability of XE.com and all the other information & tools on the Internet, surely this approach to quoting is out-of-date. Plus, with the fluctuations in currencies, the quoted information is wrong almost as soon as it is written.

Make it stop!

Internet TV: The future today

2008-11-16T03:31:00.000-08:00

TV & Movies
Anyone who hasn't heard of Hulu should probably be checked for signs of brain damage, obviously caused by the weight of the rock they were living under for the last year or more. Basically, it gives you access to American TV over the Internet without needing to install anything except Flash.

But the problem is that it's only available to if you live in the United States. Or is it...

Proxy servers aren't a new thing, but they're typically a mess to find and configure, and often they've been taken offline before you find them. That's where Hotspot Shield comes in quite handy. And here's a little YouTube video to back me up.

Live Sport
The other thing I like to do is watch live sport. The easiest way I've found is to install SopCast which is a P2P video streaming application. This means that when I want to watch Chelsea smash every other Premier League or Champions League team about, I can.

All I have to do is find a SopCast link for the content, in much the same way that you would look for a BitTorrent link.

The sites I use for football are:

Tangible Enthusiasm

2008-11-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

On a recent wine tasting trip out to Coonawarra (think Australian Sideways), I ended up at Rymills - a nice modern building with a viewing deck over part of their vineyard.

After tasting some typically great Cab Sauv and a surprisingly coiffable Sauv Blanc, I decided on the ideal mixed case. The guy who was manning the cellar door sales was this great old guy, full off insight and armed with more than a little cynicism.

So after insisting he'd walk the case out to the car for us, he thanked us for visiting and for our "Tangible Enthusiasm", ie. actually purchasing something and not just drinking a load of free samples.

Brilliant.

MCs are to DJs what are tits are to a bull.

2008-10-28T21:42:00.000-07:00

I listen to a decent amount of electronic music - drum'n'bass, dubstep, minimal, electro, dark... As a result, I download loads of mixes.

But I've yet to figure out what purpose the damned MCs serve. Whether I'm at the gig, or just on my iPod, MCs are just plain annoying. I'll eat my hat if someone can show me a mix where the MC actually makes it better.

Web vs Books: The Road to Victory

2008-10-20T16:37:00.001-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7667610.stm
Use it or lose it.
Love it.

But remember, every day you live, it gets harder to use the damn t'Interwebs:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/middle-aged-users.html

And like Peter Gibbons says:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-81WdyD-8Ro
"Each day that you see me... It's the worst day of my life."

Nokia 7610 Supernova Campaign

2008-10-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

brand tvc introduces central concept "my phone knows everything about me" and the main characters...
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=K7K7NvxnnfI

web video (from stills)...
http://www.scaryideas.com/video/8933/

anna's facebook...
http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Anna-Randall/57295095008

voyeuristically look through the characters life via their phone...
http://annasphone.com/ --> http://www.somebodyelsesphone.com/anna/

think the whole thing is really well written - the language really fits the audience.
plus it's a nice way of creating a short-format digital media soap opera.
tv works really well when it's just an entertainment teaser with more detail in short & digestible pieces online. plus the potential for 2 way story development through user interaction is really interesting.

wonder how long before a tv content creator creates a proper tv show using the same core concept?

Microsoft Seinfeld v1.0

2008-09-21T21:27:00.000-07:00

Had heard this was being produced. And I must say, I do like this trend where advertising is becoming entertainment, loosely based around a brand. Like the Cadbury's chocolate stuff from last year. And with the limitless media available online, you can get formats like this 4min 30sec piece from Microsoft.

So the model moves toward using traditional TV advertising just for short & focused teasers that lure the viewer online to experience the rest of the entertainment. Obviously TV itself is changing too, with more interactivity being available in the social atmosphere of the living room.

I see this stuff as being extremely positive for consumers. However, if TV advertising keeps getting less effective and revenues keep declining, how will good programming be paid for? Will everyone need to pay, or do we rely on the government initiatives like BBC, PBS or ABC? *eek*

iPhone

2008-09-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

Today I caved in and bought an iPhone.
$70/mnth with Virgin buys me:

Free phone
$520 calls/mnth @ 80c/min
1Gb data

Firstly, I had to restart the wireless router to connect it to the webernet.

Also... I called Virgin to check if I needed to enable the 3G data stuff, and apparently you do (?), but they didn't actually tell me whether it was already connected or 3G coverage was lame where I am. Mobile coverage here is generally poor anyway, so I thought calling them couldn't hurt. Bottom line: it now works.

The interaction is really nice but, as everyone knows, the keyboard is a tad difficult - we'll see how much I get used to it.

After syncing my Gmail, which is dead easy, I discovered you can only natively sync Outlook Calender (lame!). Thankfully there's NeuvaSync which converts your Gcal to an Exchange format. Ez.

And then there's meebo.com so you can instant message or the AIM application.

Fun fun fun.

Introducing Digital Truthiness

2008-09-09T20:19:00.000-07:00

Hi. My name is Sam. Sam I am.

I've been fascinated by the Internet since first playing with it during my Microelectronic Engineering degree in the mid-Nineties. Particularly, I'm interested in the psychological processes involved when humans interact with computers, and ultimately when these human-computer interactions facilitate further interaction with other people.

How could anyone not be fascinated?! It's all so shiny and new - think how far we've come in a little over 10 years. Plus the pace at which things keep evolving might even startle Darwin.

So with all the tension implied in growing pains, I thought I'd start documenting the talking points that we throw around at Bland, where I work.

Welcome to Digital Truthiness.

The Laziness of the Book Metaphor

2008-09-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

Why is it that every advertising creative thinks that branded interfaces need to have a 'real world' metaphor? You wouldn't open a book and expect to see a "Next Page" button to turn the pages for you. So why would anyone expect to have to click and drag the pages of an on-screen book in order to progress through some silly survey-type questions on a website. This approach just makes everything more complicated (to design & build, and for the user to learn) and slows down the whole experience.

Ok. So I'm being a tad simplistic. Sure. I'm well aware that metaphors can actually be quite powerful in creating mental models for users. But I guess my frustration is the general advertising approach to dressing up wolves (ie. an online survey) in sheep's clothing (ie. a linear book metaphor).

Digital is not TV. Shock, horror.

With passive media, like TV, creating a narrative is important in helping to deliver a message. Whereas interactive media, like Digital, forcing the linearity of a narrative can often be frustrating.

Remember: Most users don't read online; they scan. Add to that, the fact that people online are normally distracted by other media - scanning other websites or applications, the TV is on, music is playing, people are talking, etc. Who can be bothered with a narrative? Especially when it's probably just for some dull FMCG brand that no customer gives a toss about in the first place.

FWIW...
There's a good little Wiki on the dangers of terms like 'lean back' & 'lean forward' for differentiating between TV and computer interaction. Put simply, the lines between the two are blurring.

--- Update ---
And here's an example of someone using a metaphor well:
http://www.peepshow.org.uk/