A Wider Net

Gas prices. The most common answer to “what’s up?”

Take a look at this map from gasbuddy.com, a cool zoomable mashup of gas prices across the continental USA. As a “temperature map”, the hotter the color, the higher the price. So you can look at this and divine two painful facts instantly: Gas is expensive as hell, and you’re probably in a rougher hell then most of the country. Visualizations like this are designed to tell a story, and I’m not sure what story this one is best designed for. It’s not like you can afford to drive from a red area to a green area in search of lower gas prices.

Colorful heat maps like this help support the irrational backlash against the oil companies for their “record profits”. I’m not a big fan of oil companies by any means, but their margins aren’t very big when you compare them to other massive corporations like Coca-Cola, who sells us flavored water that dissolves our teeth and makes us obese. If the oil companies gave all their profits back to the consumers, it would amount to a relatively small adjustment at the pump. Then, because the oil companies would have no profit to reinvest, it would ultimately lead to higher prices as their fields ran dry and their equipment failed. We don’t want another Valdez so let’s make sure they have enough money to build safe tankers.

I don’t know, maybe I’m extra sensitive to misleading information as a result of all my years in marketing and communications. But consider this: If you were to plot this same heat chart on a global scale, and include areas like Europe where gas costs $9-10/gallon, and the Arabian peninsula where gas prices sit below $.50/gallon, then it would plunge the entire USA into a uniform shade of pale green. That would tell another story entirely.

Disney has apparently created a testing lab to determine how advertisements affect viewers physiologically. By tracking biometric measurements they can optimize content to produce the most positive physical (and presumable psychological) response. I guess I have a hard time believing this hasn’t been going on for decades already, especially since the concept was so optimistically laid out in “Max Headroom.” In this futureshock comedy, an evil network had developed a sinister brainwashing technique using rapid firing subliminal video suggestions called “blipverts” that resulted, occasionally, in the viewer exploding.

Looks like we will have to add this to our web design usability studies. Next we need to figure out how to measure the physiological response to any kind of customer experience. Can you imagine if they could measure this sort of biometric activity at, say, the Registry of Motor Vehicles? How about on a typical United Airlines flight or, more likely, a typical United Airlines DELAY?

Disney creates laboratory for biometric testing of advertisements - Engadget HD

Gizmodo has a nice top 10 booths of CES roundup. I would bet this is the only gallery of its kind in which Peter Frampton is depicted as a “top booth”.

EDIT - And Engadget added something of a booth gallery, too.

Or you can just check out the rapidly growing Flickr pool tagged CES2008.

Saw this note among the Engadget CES feeds:
Xerox has unveiled a new logo which, for the first time in 40 years, eliminates the signature capital X from their brand. Engadget wasn’t very nice about it, claiming that it’s just like everyone else’s. I’m not so sure about that, but what a bold move. The New York Times has a nice historical view on the logo evolution which was capped by the recent change by agency Interbrand (Omnicom). The change was the result of 18 months of work and 5,000 customer interviews. Here’s the full press release.

The effects of Second Life on individual websites and desktop applications is starting to show in dramatic ways. Here are three examples:

First, retailer Brookstone has announced that they plan to launch a 3D Second-Life-like store using technology from Marlboro, MA-based Kinset. According to a ComputerWorld article, Brookstone plans to be the first to deploy the new technology, followed soon by Tweeter. It appears, however, that you may not be able to see or interact with other customers which would be a real shame since that’s much of the 2nd life appeal.

Next, Doppleganger has created vSide, a social network for music lovers that has a 3D nightclub front-end. Users can buy credits and use them to buy outfits, just like in Second Life, but the goal of this site is to bring music fans together, help them discover new music, and click through to the iTunes store to buy. Additional neighborhoods are being built for “after parties”.

Last, here is an email application that produces three different intricate and clever 3D visual metaphors - your 3D Mailbox. First, you can elect the “airport” metaphor where your email is depicted as airlines flying in and out of a massive airport. Email with attachments always fly in on a carrier like Fedex or UPS. It has sophisticated spam and junk handlers, too. In the second example, a beach scene, your email is shown as bathing-suit-clad beach-goers. If they don’t pass the spam filter, they literally get thrown into the virtual water to be eaten by virtual sharks. That just feels right. I may download it just for that experience alone.

I’m sure there are others and many more to come. Some analysts feel this is just the tip of the iceberg - that sites will all go 3D over time. It sounds crazy, but so did the WWW with all it’s heavy graphics and dependency on a visual “browser” to those of us who remember the days of Arpanet and Bitnet. And Peter Gabriel. And Vinyl Records.

Found Doppleganger’s vSide via Wired.

Newsmap: How to turn a news feed into a compelling intuitive at-a-glance newsmap. How can you re-organize your content?

Key:
The larger the story the bigger the news, based on traffic
The darker the color - the older the story
The different colors refer to news segments - world, sports, business, etc.
Click the image to enlarge or the link above to play with it yourself:

Information Aesthetics points us to an interesting set of proposed designs to completely rethink the Bloomberg website. I really enjoyed seeing how wildly different the three approaches were. In one case, the designer went for an extremely clean approach, largely white, and in another case the designer went nuts with lava-lamp-like visualizations and color-coded social networking. I have no small amount of empathy for the poor Bloomberg people who would be sitting there asking “but which one is right?”

I guess righthas a different meaning for everyone, right? What’s right for one company isn’t necessarily right for another. And I’m sure the user experience designers and information architects could pick these designs apart from many different angles. As long as the people who are supposed to use it can figure it out quickly, find what they need, and use it efficiently without fatigue, then I would rate it a success. Regardless, I love these examples. It’s sort of like concept cars - it makes us step back and look at things differently. In fact, I’d love to see some designs for events that are this creatively off the beaten path - “concept events”. If I find any, I’ll let you know

Hellvetica… Helvomita… Helvetica is the most widely… er…. regarded font next to Arial, which only get’s it’s notoriety because of it’s homonym-ity with a half-naked Mermaid.  The anorexic font gets it’s big screen debut as Helvetica makes it’s way around the globe.

Check out the Helvetica vs. Arial game.

Also see the rest of the links to other Helvetica goodies at Buzzfeed.

Those of us in the Boston area will have to wait until May to catch it at SEGD.

From this nice list of (possibly) underappreciated blogs, you might want to take note of a few in particular (ripped right from the list):

23. Ypulse You can count the number of people making a living by blogging on a couple of hands, but be sure to add a digit for Anastasia. If you think you know what teenagers are talking about today, you may reconsider after reading this blog, which tracks everything that the kids (Generation Y) are into.

25. We Make Money Not Art
There’s an easy way to get me to fall in love with your blog — just link to a meat chess board, and I’m all yours. The international talent on this blog covers topics in the digital arts: social media, electronic design, wearable computing, etc.

8. Subtraction
An editor from The Atlantic who was doing a story on buzz-building recently contacted me about finding the source of a meme he saw on Fimoculous. He asked where I got it, and I said Subtraction, to which he replied, “that’s what everyone else said too.” A blogger’s blogger, Khoi Vinh is the new design director at the NYTimes.com, which might sound high-brow, but his personal site has the quality you most desire from a blogger: curiosity.

WillItBlend

For those who have ever had a bad day on the course – check out willitblend.com and see what happens when golf balls are put into a Blendtec blender.

I saw a link on youtube and clicked through to watch a pseudo-scientist show us how this consumer blender can mince up golf balls. Beyond the fact that the power of this blender is quite astonishing, I am blown away but the simplicity of this marketing effort. This video alone has been viewed 1,371,935 in the last 5 days. Now, I realize that a lot of that traffic is not ‘the right audience’ for the proto-typical blender buyer but, at the very worst; Blendtec has definitely used youtube as an engine for creating awareness. I picked up the video front the front page of youtube.

We discussed in our Ad 2.0 session at Innovation Day the concept of ROI in this case. Specifically we asked, does this type of media have a better ROI than a Superbowl ad? The answer of course is that it depends on the purpose of the campaign. Each medium connects to another (tv to internet to internet to commerce) but I would argue that the willitblend approach is interesting as it all ties into an end point to purchase the blenders within 2 clicks – pretty compelling. Of course, for mass awareness, 90M plus impressions during the Superbowl (400M pre and post) is going to be hard to beat but I am not sure that’s exactly what the blender folks had in mind. Plus, I am only guessing here, but the price tag of the Superbowl spots may be a little expensive for a division of this size company (82M gross revenues for KTEC, Blendtec’s parent company)

Regardless of the marketing goals and tactics chosen, pretty fun to watch someone throw things into a blender.