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What Matters Now: ideas, predictions and navel-gazing

If you haven’t already done so, it’s worth checking out Seth Godin’s eBook What Matters Now.

Available as a free download from Seth’s blog, the eBook brings together ideas, predictions and a healthy dose of navel-gazing from 70-odd top bloggers, marketers and entrepreneurial types.

My favourite entry so far is a reality check from Howard Mann. Reactionary? Maybe, but worth bearing in mind nonetheless:

Connected

There are tens of thousands of businesses making many millions a year in profits that still haven’t ever heard of twitter, blogs or facebook. Are they all wrong? Have they missed out or is the joke really on us? They do business through personal relationships, by delivering great customer service and it’s working for them. They’re more successful than most of those businesses who spend hours pontificating about how others lose out by missing social media and the latest wave. And yet they’re doing business. Great business. Not writing about it. Doing it.

I’m continually amazed by the number of people on Twitter and on blogs, and the growth of people (and brands) on facebook. But I’m also amazed by how so many of us are spending our time. The echo chamber we’re building is getting larger and louder. More megaphones don’t equal a better dialogue.

We’ve become slaves to our mobile devices and the glow of our screens. It used to be much more simple and, somewhere, simple turned into slow. We walk the streets with our heads down staring into 3-inch screens while the world whisks by doing the same. And yet we’re convinced we are more connected to each other than ever before. Multi-tasking has become a badge of honor. I want to know why.

I don’t have all the answers to these questions but I find myself thinking about them more and more. In between tweets, blog posts and facebook updates.

Download What Matters Now for free here

Flavors.me – bringing together your content from across the web

UPDATE 18/12/09: Get your free Flavors.me invite code here:
Just go to flavors.me/signup and enter invite code ‘nextlevelideas’ to try it out for yourself.

In the spirit of seamless segues, I’m kicking off the new blog design by mentioning a forthcoming social media enterprise that is also all about the content – Flavors.me.

Currently in beta, Flavors.me is a surprisingly simple way to create a homepage bringing together all the stuff you’ve created on blogs and social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm etc.

The Flavors.me page of co-founder David Marcus
The Flavors.me page of co-founder David Marcus

Other than the Americanised spelling, what stands out about Flavors.me is its Apple-inspired design philosophy. The antithesis of MySpace, its strict but stylish templates ensure a consistent look and feel and keep the emphasis firmly on showcasing content from elsewhere. While sites like FriendFeed have covered similar ground, flavors has a greater emphasis on creating a personal web presence than simply aggregating feeds.

Does anyone really need yet another social media presence? Maybe not. But if you’re looking to create a simple homepage or microsite that easily integrates Twitter, Flickr etc, Flavors.me is worth checking out.

See what flavors dragged up on me.

Redesigning the blog around the content

Like many people with a blog, I don’t update it as much as I’d like.

Recently I’ve been trying to convince myself that this was not a result of my own laziness. Rather, I concluded that my previous image-led, magazine-style design was better suited to long-form articles than short posts and links. Predictably, this realisation resulted not in hard-hitting features but deliberation and inactivity.

The old site
The old site

The obvious conclusion was to go back to basics and redesign the blog. So here it is, hopefully with the help of Thesis, unmissable regular content will become the norm.

Infomercials: still treating consumers like morons

As winter draws in down under, it’s tempting to spend more time in front of the TV. The downside is that you’ll find yourself subjected to a worrying trend: the rise of the infomercial.

While infomercials are hardly a new concept, in recent months, they seem to be interrupting prime-time breaks with alarming frequency.

At a time when consumers are increasingly choosing to fast-forward ads or rejecting traditional media altogether, isn’t there a danger in bombarding those that are still watching with infomercials?

Google: the limitations of design by data

The recent departure of Google’s Head Designer, Doug Bowman, has sparked a flurry of debate across the internet on Google’s design philosophy.

Google’s ability to efficiently harness information has been central to its success as a search engine.

However, there are question marks over whether an over-reliance on data in design has hampered Google’s visual identity and ultimately its ability to create a brand that people will pay for.

Breathtakingly pretentious? Pepsi rebrand document

I hesitated about featuring this as I thought everyone had already seen it. However, apparently that’s still not the case and this is a must-read for anyone involved in marketing or brand strategy.

There’s a great PDF doing the rounds which purports to be the Arnell Group’s strategy doc for the much-derided new Pepsi logo.

You get a hint of what’s to come from the bombastic title: “Breathtaking Design Strategy”, with namechecks ranging from the Mona Lisa to the theory of relativity…