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Tuesday, 11 June 2002 |
Long ago when I was living and working in Perth, I discovered that there were two words that if raised in a conversation with a business client meant deep serious trouble. It’s as if the alarm siren had gone off, red lights were flashing, and the Dalek was saying “Exterminate! Exterminate!”.
I call them red button words, because the reaction is like you had hit the red button in a nuclear reactor. They are Creative and Interesting. You know you’re in trouble if a client utters either one. Both in the same sentence are a major disaster.
I learned a new one today—Concept. That one set off all the sirens, bells, klaxons, blaring horns, flashing lights and Daleks at a meeting. I’ll never use it again, at least in Perth.
I hope it is still safe to use the word Idea.
7:37:42 PM 
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At the very beginning of the designable Web, when I was roaming the streets of London looking for firms of designers designing for it, the usual thing was that two or three people would set up a little office somewhere near the centre, link up with a large group of skilled collaborators around the world, and then present themselves as a large virtual firm.
That way, they would get access to all the high-priced specialist skills they needed, wherever they were, and without the overheads of keeping them in fulltime employ in an office in the centre of one of the most expensive cities anywhere.
When the dotcom boom was on, such firms sought venture capital and became real instead of virtual. The overheads are what killed most of them off.
Now the evidence is strong that we are back in a new age of the virtual firm.
1:53:29 PM
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This is the last minor revision before I rewrite this piece completely.
Then, there will another one on the “Fine Art of The AdBook” and one on the “Fine Art of the Web Ad”.
1:39:40 PM
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Actually it looks like it will take longer to catch up with those two days lost to the computer crashing, as there is more to do during weekdays than on weekends.
11:11:23 AM
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The World Wide Web is a classic example of the fable of the blind men and the elephant. People see it as they want to see it, based on prejudices and existing technologies.
Thus, when television appeared advertising and program-making people saw it as radio with pictures, and acted accordingly. When the Web came into being, designers and corporate communicators saw it as a medium for brochureware. Advertisers thought that because it was low-res and to be read fast, that it had to be for the digital equivalent of bus-side posters.
Computer technologists, known as IT professionals in Australia, or IS people in America, thought the Web was an IT solution. They love the word solution.
And as always, the understanding of things in Australia, and especially Western Australia, lags several years behind the UK, Europe and the United States. That is despite the existence of the Web and easy access to current thinking. Old habits of thought die hard.
So we have many consultancy firms that still see the Web as an IT solution, an IT problem, and in a longstanding and popular tradition claim to specialise in everything, especially the Web. So unsuspecting clients come to them wanting something done for the Web, and it gets turned into an IT exercise. And it fails.
The Web is NOT an IT solution. It is a medium of communication, a storytelling medium. Story is fundamental to the Web, whether you are a corporation that makes a million widgets and gadgets, or an individual writing a daily weblog about their personal experiences and deepest thoughts.
Readers come to the Web every day for stories, not brochureware, screaming huckster banner ads, IT solutions or a message from our CEO.
Even people who use the Web to buy things want stories, about the things they want to buy.
9:55:46 AM
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I have just finished downloading all 8 of Apple’s new Switch TV ads. They’re damned good. Now when are we going to see them, or Australian equivalents, in Australia?
9:25:59 AM
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While out and about in the streets of Perth meeting people and making contacts I have been seeing and hearing about a large group of newly graduated unemployed, coming out of TAFE level multimedia courses in private and public colleges.
The multimedia era was also known as the CD-ROM era, and was the boom and bust that happened several years before before the dot.com boom and bust. It had reached its end just as I moved to London to live the last time. I used to wander the aisles of the HMV and Virgin megastores then, amazed at title after title of CD-ROM products that dealt with all sorts of esoteric, mostly useless, topics. There was a couple of CDs by a firm named Voyager, that looked interesting, but I didn’t buy them because I didn’t have a decent computer capable of playing them back then. I was carrying around a Windows portable at the time.
I often wondered what happened to all the people involved in that short-lived boom. I met one, the Technical Director at Malcolm Garrett’s AMX Studios, several years later, and before that dropped in by chance to a studio in Soho where the people were still hanging on by their fingernails building a strange little CD-ROM magazine that failed soon after.
I have been told that most of the CD-ROM era boom-and-bustees have ended up in teaching in those colleges teaching multimedia here. I spoke with a few of their graduates, looking for someone who has a knowledge of advanced Flash 5 and MX ActionScript, to work on some projects coming up. Their consensus was that Flash was a cute little animation product, but quite useless for real multimedia.
Instead of being taught skills and programs that would gain them real and current jobs, these people are still being taught products common to the multimedia, or CD-ROM, era.
Director, Pascal, Authorware, stuff like that—good products in their way for stuff few people do any more. Don’t get me wrong—I love immersive interactive multimedia that is done well, but this kind of stuff is being delivered over the Web now, not on shiny plastic disks, and the method of building had to change radically.
Director is a good product, and may well come into its own again when broadband is universal, or may be supplanted by easy to use crossplatform freeware like iShell.
At any rate, these people are being taught the methods and products of another era, and they and us are losing out.
Multimedia ain’t just multimedia. Another era’s multimedia is not the multimedia of this one. Academia has always lagged 10 to 15 years behind contemporary reality, and the time it finally gets its head around Flash and related modern technologies is probably going to be the time that Flash itself has gone the way of the CD-ROM.
Even now, the few firms left in the world that publish old-style multimedia products are doing it for delivery on DVD for playback in home DVD players and the occasional in-computer DVD drive. CD-ROM as a media delivery product has been dead and buried for a long time. CD is now the cheap, throwaway medium you use for backing up your data, and sharing files; a contemporary version of the floppy.
9:04:42 AM
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I just heard an interviewee on the ABC Radio National morning radio show make a common mispronounciation, one that radically alters the meaning of the sentence being uttered.
It put me in mind of an ABC TV comedy show, Kath and Kim, about a suburban Anglo mom and daughter, who speak in that manner so typical of the suburbs, with a rising inflection at the end of every sentence.
I don’t actually watch the show—the characters are too excruciating, too familiar. But one phrase I remember from the prelaunch advertising was the junior character declaring that “I want to be effluent!”
Other things the characters say? The senior female has a habit that I am sure the comedian acting the part observed in real life, in a shopping mall no doubt, of constantly saying to her daughter “Look at muy, look at muy, look at muy!” before launching into some ill-pronounced tirade.
8:30:21 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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