Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

A few of my favorite links, photos, and videos from the week on my Tumblr blog. Lots of happy fun and smart posts and articles.

When I was up in Cape Cod last weekend I stumbled across this strange little scene. Luckily I had my camera with me. So I threw together this cheery little image macro. (Click image for full-size image)




Thoughtful and fascinating story about journalism, blogs, and the internet, by Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books.

This image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die. In their sweep and scorn, however, such statements seem as outdated as they are defensive. Over the past few months alone, a remarkable amount of original, exciting, and creative (if also chaotic and maddening) material has appeared on the Internet. The practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news. And unless the editors and executives at our top papers begin to take note, they will hasten their own demise.

Jake Bronstein, the man behind Zoomdoggle, is engaged! This is probably the funnest and sweetest marriage proposals you'll ever see. And on top of that they set the world record for the longest successful whisper chain.




Big Spaceship blog looks at Spymaster.

In late May, arcane tweets about buying weapons and assassinating people began showing up in my Twitter feed. I asked what was up and received an invite to join a spy ring and play Spymaster. Opinions are divided on how ‘social’ social networking is. This Twitter-based spy game presents an opportunity to look at why.

BBH Labs talks to Jeremy Ettinghausen about interactive storytelling.

Launched last month under their Puffin label, We Make Stories is the latest in a long line of digital publishing innovations masterminded by Jeremy Ettinghausen (@jeremyet), Penguin’s Digital Publisher. In short, we’re witnessing a radical re-shaping of an industry we believe we can learn a lot from. An industry which - aside from its sheer cultural importance in the first place - has been experimenting with new creative & organisational solutions for some time now.

One of my all-time favorite sketches, from the brilliant Mr. Show:

Collecting my favorite links, photos, and videos from the week on my Tumblr blog.

Incredible collection of classic graphic design, typography, and diagrams. This diagram shows how news used to work in the olden days.




Xiaochang Li, at MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium, breaks down the discussion around YouTube stars and sponsored content.

What this ultimately means for brands is that the best way to integrate your brand into communities online and launch campaigns that depend on social media participation is to offer yourself as a resource and let the participants decide how to make you valuable. It feels risky, but people build a more lasting relationship with your brand if you let them use your brand as a means to build relationships with one another, in their own voices, on their own terms. And at the end of the day, when you're talking about vloggers or fan producers or other people who are remixing, remaking, and creating in these new media spaces, consider what vlogger Alandistro points out: "You really can't go wrong asking creative people to be creative."

Beautiful video of the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan, the 2nd largest aquarium in the world.




The Onion shares some great tips on how to add that Wow! factor to your next presentation.

When we first finished the PowerPoint, the content was all there, but it still lacked that certain something," head market researcher Jeremy Batson said. "For example, we wanted to drive home the fact that, in the age of Twitter, we as a marketing company have an obligation to harness the power of distinct thoughts within a limited space. So we spiced that section up by including pictures of celebrities who use Twitter. The Ashton Kutcher photo we found is freakin' hilarious.

And Tumblr gets some love from Brandweek (with a quote from me), "Tumblr: What's in it for you?"

Marketers trying to keep pace with Twitter and Facebook may want to check out another emerging social media platform: Tumblr. At first blush, Tumblr, described as a “blogging platform,” which aggregates online content on a particular theme (like, say, skateboarding), doesn’t seem to have an obvious marketing application. But IBM, EMI and Universal Music have all discovered that creating a tumbleblog (a term that preceded the two-year-old Tumblr’s existence) is a good way to help control the message online, reward fans and, in IBM’s case, position oneself as a thought leader on a given topic.

There's a vicious little rumor that keeps going around that the relationships we foster online are somehow in conflict with the relationships we foster in real life. I keep hearing unfounded concerns that all this time we spend clicking around Facebook is stealing quality time away from the moments when we connect with people offline. That Twitter is breaking up loving couples(John Mayer!? Jennifer Aniston!?) (Guess what? Their problems probably went a little deeper than Twitter use...)

First let's agree to scrap the entire concept of "online" and "in real life." The two are no longer different from each other in any meaningful way.

[Just to be specific, and in spite of its inconvenience, I'm going to refer to these two states as "relationships unmediated by digital technology" and "relationships mediated by digital technology". I'm happy to entertain alternative suggestions : ) ]

Relationships mediated by digital technology - be it a website or a cellphone - are mostly continuations or extensions of relationships that exist without the aid of digital technology.

Rather than getting in the way of relationships unmediated by digital technology, relationships mediated by digital technology either foster or create unmediated relationships. Most of the time digital technology either enhances and extends relationships that already exist without the aid of digital technology, or it serves as bridge from mediated acquaintanceship to unmediated relationship.

If you know of any research out there that either supports or disproves this assertion, please link it up in the comments.

Our brains are wired to enjoy learning new information.

Digital marketing needs to be designed to feed this desire. Digital technology has created the most voracious information seeking entity mankind has ever seen. And the people who power it thrive on the exchange of new information. Monolithic campaigns with one idea that is repeated hundreds of times over across every possible channel die in this environment because the participants have nothing new to add to the conversation.

If you want two people to talk about your brand, they each need to bring something unique to the conversation. Otherwise the conversation runs into a dead end.

(Click for full size image)


An experiment by Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka has shown in primates that simply getting information can be as neurologically rewarding as getting a tangible reward like a drink of water.

Getting satisfaction from learning new information is innate to being human.

As Jonah Lehrer puts it:

These experiments elegantly demonstrate an essential feature of the human mind, which is how evolution bootstrapped our penchant for ideas to the same reward circuits that govern our animal appetites.

My favorite links, photos, and videos from the week on my Tumblr blog.

Yesterday, July 16th, was the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon mission. The Big Picture has some beautiful photos from the trip.




New York City artist Dash Snow died this week at the age of 27. Snow was a close friend of photographer whose work you may recognize from the new Levi's ad campaign. I first heard about Snow is this NYMag profile from January 2007. I can't help but think that we'll look back on this as a marker in The Death of The Hipster.

This collection of photos gives you taste of Snow's life/work. (Some images NSFW)




An oldie, but a goodie. In 1976, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a camera on the front of a sports car, and had a race car driver friend of his speed through the streets of Paris at dawn. This is real and amazing.

C'etait un Rendez vous




3 references on Swoopo.com and the psychology of gambling.

The Crack Cocaine of Auction Sites, by Mark Gimein

Swoopo, by Jonah Lehrer

The Dollar Auction Experiment, Wikipedia


This article in The Atlantic looks at how the internet, drugs, and artificial intelligence, as ways to evolve human intelligence: Get Smarter, by Jamais Cascio

Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge. But this time we don’t have to rely on natural evolution to make us smart enough to survive. We can do it ourselves, right now, by harnessing technology and pharmacology to boost our intelligence. Is Google actually making us smarter?

What happens when the tools and skills of propaganda are available to everyone?

Rob Walker's article on the evolution, rediscovery, and recent remixing of this British poster keeps echoing in my thoughts.

Digital technology and the internet have made writing, publishing, journalism, photography, and video-making mainstream abilities. You no longer have to be schooled or experienced in order to do something that makes a significant impact on our culture.

And now, a generation that grew up hacking and customizing their MySpace profiles and creating lolcats is now re-purposing the skills once reserved for trained advertising professionals, and spreading their own messages.

The ability to combine words and images in affecting ways to communicate meaningful, powerful, and often humorous messages to a wide audience is going mainstream. Most importantly, people now have the ability to spread messages about things that are personally important to them and their own community.




(Remind you of a recent Levi's ad campaign?)

Our job is to design for behaviors, not for websites.


(via Faris' Transmedia Presentation)

We need to be careful when we talk about digital media, that we don't get the tools mixed up with the behaviors. Obsessing over the significance of one site over another, or arguing the importance of participating on a site while not even considering what you're going to do when you get there or if it's even the right place, is a waste of time.

Facebook.com is not important. What's important is that more and more people are actively building and managing a personal network of relationships that can be accessed at any time via digital technology.

YouTube.com is not important. What's important is that more and more people are sharing original videos with other people all over the world at will.

Twitter.com is not important. What's important is that more and more people are developing a habit of broadcasting every experience and piece of information that they think might be of interest to their network.

As these tools evolve (and capabilities and uses merge), let's remember that the tools we use aren't as important as the behaviors they create.

(Click for full size image)

My friend Brian Fountain told me about Swoopo. This auction site must be the most clever and innovative - albeit ethically dubious - idea I've heard of in a long time.

Swoopo hosts auctions, much like eBay, on tech-ish stuff like laptops, TVs, game consoles, and digital cameras. These items are new, and get sold on Swoopo for a small fraction of their regular retail price. The difference is that the bids go up at $0.12 increments automatically, and it costs the user (player) $0.60 for each bid that they place. So, essentially, the users are buying $0.60 lottery tickets that give them a chance to win a huge discount.

Mark Gimein has a great overview of the site, and why it's so brilliantly devious, "The Crack Cocaine of Auction Sites: Swoopo.com is the most efficient, addictive way to separate people from their money."

There's some serious psychology driving the success of this site. Jonah Lehrer adds his thoughts about what Wolfram Schultz's experiments have to do with Swoopo.

His experiments followed a simple protocol: He played a loud tone, waited for a few seconds, and then squirted a few drops of apple juice into the mouth of a monkey. While the experiment was unfolding, Schultz was probing the dopamine-rich areas of the monkey brain with a needle that monitored the electrical activity inside individual cells. At first the dopamine neurons didn't fire until the juice was delivered; they were responding to the actual reward. However, once the animal learned that the tone preceded the arrival of juice -- this requires only a few trials -- the same neurons began firing at the sound of the tone instead of the sweet reward. And then eventually, if the tone kept on predicting the juice, the cells went silent. They stopped firing altogether. Schultz calls these cells "prediction neurons," since they are more concerned with predicting rewards than actually receiving them.

What's interesting about this system is that it's all about expectation. Our dopamine neurons constantly generate patterns based upon experience: if this, then that. They realize that the tone predicts the juice, or that betting on the laptop might get us a discounted reward. This means that our dopamine circuitry isn't just titillated when we win the auction - those predictive cells are excited every time we bid, as they wait to see whether or not the reward will arrive.

More on the neuroscience of gambling here on Mind Hacks.

And finally, what is the Dollar Auction?

The dollar auction is a game created by economist Martin Shubik, in which an experimenter auctions off $1 to two competing bidders. The catch is that they have to pay for each bid. Each penny you bid, actually costs you a penny. The bidding starts at $0.01, and each bidder thinks that they can walk away with a deal, paying some fraction of a dollar and getting $1 in return. But, then they hit $0.99, and things start to get really interesting. Each bidder has now already payed $0.99 just to be in the game (and the auctioneer has already recouped his initial investment of $1). And at this point the players start to chase their investment. "I've already spent $1 to get $1, but if I back out now, I'll have spent $1. On the other hand, if I win, then I've only lost a few cents, over $1."

Collecting my favorite links, photos, and videos from the week on my Tumblr blog.

Good Magazine has all the important days covered.




Rob Walker covers the story behind this internet-famous poster in last Sunday's NYTimes Magazine.




New York Magazine has the story behind the P.S. 22 chorus. - How Staten Island's P.S. 22 Chorus Got Famous With a Little Help From Perez Hilton

The kids dissolve into giddy laughter. “Poker Face” has become a predicament for Mr. B, now that high-profile fans like celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, Ashton Kutcher, and Mikey Way of My Chemical Romance have helped catapult the P.S. 22 chorus from pride of Staten Island to the best-known elementary-school chorus on the planet. Hilton adopted the group after seeing one of its handheld videos of another Tori Amos song (like Breinberg, Hilton is a Tori-aholic); he later requested a version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” That video, released in May, attracted more than 300,000 YouTube hits and an invitation from Stevie Nicks to sing the song for her, in person.

I made this. Will someone put it on a t-shirt?




This is one of the most beautiful stop-motion videos I've ever seen.

(Click to view full size original)

This is the greatest infographic of all time. Designed in 1869 by Charles Joseph Minard, it tells the story of Napoleon's march to Moscow during the War of 1812. The tan line shows the invasion of Napoleon's army, and the black line shows the retreat. Key dates are annotated across the bottom. And (the most brilliant part) the width of the line shows how many people in Napolean's army were still alive. When they started, their army was 422,000 strong. When they finally returned, defeated, they only had 10,000 soldiers left. And this whole story, the battles, the weather, the frozen rivers, it's all here in this single image.

Have you noticed that you've been seeing more infographics lately? As digital technology floods us with information, and the graphic design tools become available to everyone - not just professionals - the visual display of information is becoming the next frontier in communications talent.

Here's a few inspirational bits I've seen lately. Please list your own favorite sources for learning and inspiration in the comments.

NYTimes.com has been doing a lot of fantastic interactive infographics lately. This one, about economic cycles, was one of my favs.


Nicholas Feltron is a New York designer, who produces his own personal annual report each year. I love this super simple graphic from his 2005 report.




I love this beautiful and effective graphic by Density Design depicting statistics about the poor population of Italy.


(Click to view full size original)


For further reading, I recommend buying one of Edward Tufte's books. Tufte's the master.

And some great blogs:
flowingdata.com/
infosthetics.com/
visualcomplexity.com/vc/

What do you recommend?

(Check out my face-recognition concept from June 22nd here.)

This is a new concept, and I'm predicting that we will see in the near-ish future.

The basic functionality of this is similar to other recent augmented reality apps that show you dynamic information about the places around you. But, what if you combined that location aware capability with all of the opinion and status broadcasting all of your friends were doing across the web?

The user receives information about the places around them filtered through the lens of their social graph.

This is obviously a good fit for urban environments; but could work well in more rural areas, too. Wouldn't it be great to have this in your car's GPS as you drive cross-country? Discover the local favorite diner of a Twitter friend that you've never actually met in real life.

References/Inspiration:

London Tube Info App




Layar, worlds first mobile Augmented Reality browser




Foursquare to Twitter




Yellow Arrow Project

(via the always inspirational booooooom.com)

Collaborating isn't the easiest thing to do; but, when it's done well, with this much creativity and imagination, it pays off.

A few of my favorite links, photos, and videos from the week on my Tumblr blog.

Noah Brier linked to this fascinating article about how the human brain teeters on the edge of order and chaos, in a good way.

They build on the observation that when a single neuron fires, it can trigger its neighbours to fire too, causing a cascade or avalanche of activity that can propagate across small networks of brain cells. This results in alternating periods of quiescence and activity - remarkably like the build-up and collapse of a sand pile.

I finally finished watching The Sopranos, and I completely agree with this interpretation of the ending: "If you look at the final episode really carefully, it’s all there.”* These are David Chase’s words regarding the finale of the Sopranos. He is right, it is “all there”. This is the definitive explanation..." (SPOILER ALERT)


A great satirical piece on McSweeney's by Frank Ferri, "Welcome to our Branding House"

You sure look the part. Short beard, tight-fitting thrift-store shirt, slim-fit jeans and large-framed glasses that scream "I'm hip!" I should hire you on appearance alone. But legally, I can't. Besides, there's a lot more to our shop than how we look and dress.

Wonderful and strange paintings by Scott Listfield.




Trailer for a documentary about how digital technology is changing how we live.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Rob Walker talks about the phenomenon of the surge in sales of Michael Jackson songs and albums.

Yesterday evening, Cult of Mac predicted a surge in sales of Michael Jackson music. Correct. Indeed as I type this 9 of the top 10 albums, and six of the top 10 singles, on the iTunes chart, are Jackson material. Not exactly. It’s not the death but the “high-profile” part of the equation (the attendant media/web coverage and chatter) that matters. This is for the simple reason that it makes such figures highly salient. Salience is certainly not the only element in a consumption decision, but it’s an essential one.

Yesterday, as I was poking around the Game Studies page on Wikipedia, I came across this articulation of a very significant debate within the game studies community:

This disagreement has been called the ludology vs. narratology debates. The narratological view is that games should be understood as novel forms of narrative and can thus be studied using theories of narrative (Murray, 1997; Atkins, 2003). The ludological position is that games should be understood on their own terms. Ludologists have proposed that the study of games should concern the analysis of the abstract and formal systems they describe. In other words, the focus of game studies should be on the rules of a game, not on the representational elements which are only incidental (Aarseth, 2001; Eskelinen, 2001; Eskelinen, 2004).

This made my brain happy. I love a good debate. And this sounds like a great one. It's a healthy debate in which both sides have valid points. On the one hand people love a good story, and many people get sucked into games because they're enthralled by the story. Yet, where would any good game be without rules? And isn't it the structure of the game that ultimately makes us feel like we're actually playing something?

Debates, arguments, discussions, can be an essential part of making our work better. The key is to seek out the most worthy debates, and not argue about inconsequential details.