Uneven Distribution. | Uneven Distribution is a collection of thoughts on the digital world, its future and current trends, and the effect they have on brands, advertising, and people.Uneven Distribution. | Uneven Distribution is a collection of thoughts on the digital world, its future and current trends, and the effect they have on brands, advertising, and people.

The beginning of chair piracy.

27-01-2012

Creativity, Data, Personalisation, The future

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

And with that, The Pirate Bay created a new category on one of the world’s largest piracy outlets – a category for physical objects. 3D Printers are now under $1000. And while the resolution, size and materials still leave a lot to be desired, it’s worth casting your mind back to your amazement at first seeing a domestic printer spit-out a colour printout that sort of resembled a photograph. Because that was likely less than 20 years ago. A few quick points on this:

This is the future. I love it when the future actually arrives.
Any (likely) arguments or discussions around IP are completely pointless. The piracy of objects is well an truly established across the world already. It’s not just fake handbags either, the Chinese have pirated a Rolls Royce. That Eames chair your sitting on is more than likely pirated.
This will eventually change how we look at products – the free availability of almost any design we want will ultimately lead to people thinking about their needs rather than their wants. Instead just buying what we are told too from the limited range available, we will consider what we need and how that need could be fulfilled through the infinite possibility of design customisation.
This won’t be a huge challenge for brands – firstly because multi-material 3D printing is still at least 10 years off, so you’ll be waiting a while to print out those Nikes. Secondly because even in a world of downloadable (and piratable) objects, the same fundamentals remain – brands are a heuristic, a shortcut to something we know and are comfortable with. If brands are providing good service, customer-centric customisation, and simplicity, the world of 3D printing is far more of an opportunity than a threat.

In the meantime, if you really can’t wait, your 3D printed shoes are available here.

Social media is killing conversation.

By: nichodges

11-01-2012

Uncategorized

So what has digital culture brought to the conversational dinner table? Quick-fire and efficient online talk – which is more about exchanging information than emotions – threatens to send the quality of conversation back to the MiddleAges.

I realise the crushing irony of grabbing a snippet out of this brilliant piece by Roman Krznaric at The School of Life, so please head over and read the whole thing.

Do paywalls have to work for journalism to survive?

By: nichodges

10-01-2012

Uncategorized

There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism. In that mass market, the opinions of the politically engaged readers didn’t matter much, outnumbered as they were by people checking their horoscopes. This suited advertisers fine; they have always preferred a centrist and distanced political outlook, the better not to alienate potential customers. When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come to matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.

Clay Shirky – Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users

This isn’t the shortest read on the topic, but Clay Shirky dissects the challenges that Newspapers are facing better than anyone. The core problem is that if paywalls are to work (which they must do for classical journalism to survive), newspapers need to acknowledge that their audience has fundamentally shifted (and shrunk).

It’s interesting that Crikey has pretty much nailed this model, and New Matilda is battling hard to make it work. Due to our size, I wouldn’t be surprised if Australia manages to be the first country to emerge with a working model of new journalism.

On the Information Superhighway, Destination Unknown

By: nichodges

22-12-2011

Uncategorized

More and more people are looking to computers to save the world, but the people who run them certainly don’t know how. Nobody’s in charge, not even Google, though everyone in the dot-com world pretends. They’re all too busy with I.P.O.’s and market share, trying to start fads or come up with idiotic names.

via Theodor Holm Nelson – On the Information Superhighway, Destination Unknown – NYTimes.com.

On the changing blog.

By: nichodges

20-12-2011

Conversations

A few people have noticed that this blog has recently become more of place where I’m posting interesting bits that I’ve read, rather than writing long (and dull) articles about media and advertising. There’s a couple reasons for this.

First being that I’m not writing as much for the trade press. There’s a pretty simple explanation for this – the Australian trade press just isn’t as interesting any more. Gone are the original thinkers of the industry, and in their place are the anonymous comments and knee-jerk pieces on social media. I’m still writing the odd piece for Business Spectator / Technology Spectator, so expect the odd long (and dull) article still.

Secondly, we’ve just launched the MediaCom Labs blog (and site). Labs is the home of the MediaCom Innovation & Technology team in Australia. We’ve got big plans over the next couple years, so I’ll be putting a bit more energy into building robots and apps and writing posts over there as well. We’ve just launched our 2012 trends report, so there’s another reason to go have a look.

So that’s about it. I’ll be posting more frequently on here now, but just with little interesting snippets. So please do stick around if your’e finding those interesting.

The impending (but slow) death of the banner ad.

By: nichodges

02-12-2011

Advertising, Media

Two nice thoughts from this rather good bit by Felix Salmon:

“So one of the big reasons why online advertising has done so well is simply the negative one: online micropayments were a disaster, and never took off. But they’re much more compelling as a business model, and there’s a decent chance that at some point in the future the financial system as a whole is going to get its act together and put together something which actually works and which people are happy to adopt.”

This is an interesting stance to take given paywalls are still unproven (and in fact the Fin Review almost halved it’s paywall price yesterday). But I don’t think he’s too far off the mark, it’s just the timing of it all wil be slower than a lot of people (and publishers) assume. Once we get used to contactless payment in the real world via NFC, I think we’ll start to get used to the same sort of fast and invisible payments online. But this won’t be for mainstream news on the desktop – it will be for content or information people need and want immediately on their mobile. This is already happening with Angry Birds levels. Once we change this fundamental payment heuristic, we’ll see a big change in how we experience the internet. Display ads will (hopefully) fade away, but advertising certainly won’t disappear.

“It’s the measurement fallacy: people tend to think that what they can measure is what they want, just because they can measure it. And it’s endemic in the online advertising industry. In fact, with very few exceptions, I’ve never even wanted to look at online ads: its quite astonishing, the degree to which we’ve collectively trained ourselves to ignore ads when we bring up a web page. And what that says to me is that online advertising is missing something really huge.”

Nothing to add to this. He’s dead right.

Less architects, more gardeners.

By: nichodges

22-11-2011

Art, Creativity, Music

“What the composer had was a kind of menu, a packet of seeds, you might say. And those musical seeds, once planted, turned into the piece. And they turned into a different version of that piece every time. So for me, this was really a new paradigm of composing. Changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds, hopefully, and watched them turn into something.” – Brian Eno, on Edge

Brian Eno is talking here about a musical movement that happened in the last couple decades of last century. He talks about himself (and others such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and John Cage) as gardeners, not as architects. These guys wrote some amazing music back then (and still do), but they created it not through trying to control every single piece of their work. They created a system, and stood back and watched what grew out of those systems.

I think the vast majority of creative people working in this industry are architects. And yet in an age where you have absolutely no control over your idea once it’s out in the wild, we all need to be thinking a lot more like gardeners.

The problem with prediction.

By: nichodges

18-11-2011

The future

“It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.”

This interview with William Gibson is full of brilliance. But I really loved his ideas around imagining the future. Particularly given a few recent videos, like this one on the future of work, and this one on the future of human interfaces, and the fact that we’re about to hit that period of the year when every man and their dog puts forward their “trend predictions” and “visions” of 2012.

Enough with ugly squares.

By: nichodges

10-11-2011

Mobile

Towards the end of the year I usually find myself doing lots of “the future of…” presentations.
This year, unsurprisingly, the big focus is on mobile, tablets, NFC, and Big Data.
I almost never mention QR Codes, but I always get asked about them. – “Will NFC replace QR Codes?” “Should we still be using QR Codes?” ” Does anyone in the real world actually scan them?”

The Telstra Smartphone Index in June 2011 reported that only 1% of Australian smartphone internet users regularly use QR codes to access sites. That’s compared to 23% who type a URL to their browser, and 16% who search. Yet it’s hard to find a print or outdoor ad without them these days. So why are we still seeing QR Codes everywhere?

— Uneven Distribution.

The beginning of chair piracy.

Social media is killing conversation.

Do paywalls have to work for journalism to survive?

On the Information Superhighway, Destination Unknown

On the changing blog.

The impending (but slow) death of the banner ad.

Less architects, more gardeners.

The problem with prediction.

Enough with ugly squares.

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