kip/bot/blog

I’m getting up to speed on the upcoming tech wave by reading the finally published “HTML5 Up and Running”, by Mark Pilgrim. That sentence just feels sad (though necessary), but the first chapter of the book is really, really interesting. In a section titled “A Long Digression into how Standards Are Made”, Pilgrim walks us through a three week email thread that covers the origin and (pretty much) final resolution of the IMG tag.

The thread begins on February 25, 1993, with Marc Andreesen writing:

I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

Required argument is SRC=”url”.

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag’s occurrence.

An example is:

<IMG SRC=”file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.xbm“>

(There is no closing tag; this is just a standalone tag.)

This tag can be embedded in an anchor like anything else; when that happens, it becomes an icon that’s sensitive to activation just like a regular text anchor.

Browsers should be afforded flexibility as to which image formats they support. Xbm and Xpm are good ones to support, for example. If a browser cannot interpret a given format, it can do whatever it wants instead (X Mosaic will pop up a default bitmap as a placeholder).

This is required functionality for X Mosaic; we have this working, and we’ll at least be using it internally. I’m certainly open to
suggestions as to how this should be handled within HTML; if you have a better idea than what I’m presenting now, please let me know. I know this is hazy wrt image format, but I don’t see an alternative than to just say “let the browser do what it can'’ and wait for the perfect solution to come along (MIME, someday, maybe).

Let me know what you think………

Cheers,
Marc

–
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu

For the next three weeks, a number of programmer types, including Tim Berners-Lee, discuss a whole range of ideas for how this much-needed tag should be developed. It’s worth a read or two, since it highlights several open source, design, and software dynamics. Even in the note above you see a bunch of things:

There is very little preciousness — about ideas, implementations, territory, intellectual/engineering integrity — to be found. I’ve worked with engineers, and written code myself, for almost a dozen years, and was surprised to the point of shocked to see how matter of fact, and yet rigorous, a group of programmers could be, especially on a medium (email) that was at the time new and where etiquette was still evolving.

The book is worth a read and this chapter is really illuminating.
You can view the Andreesen post and click through the thread here.

A colleague (Ed) walked into my office today saying something about “becoming a doctor” when he came through the door. Slow on the uptake, I needed the explanation that this was a reference to Field of Dreams, specifically the scene where Burt Lancaster, playing Moonlight Graham had to leave the eternal youth of the field to save Kevin Costner’s kid who was choking on a hot dog. All of which brought to mind the tidbit I had to tell Ed: Moonlight Graham was a real player and the story was true!

I always assumed that W. P. Kinsella, the author of Shoeless Joe the novel on which the movie was based, was a baseball nerd who browsed the sadly no-longer needed Baseball Encyclopedia and found that one line of data that inspired a story.

I owned a copy of Baseball Encyclopedia and got goosebumps when it occurred to me to look up Moonlight Graham and see if he really existed. There it was. This guy got to put on a uniform, get on the official scorecard, maybe even took the field, but didn’t get to bat. Out of that line of zeroes, a string of non-data, really, Kinsella imagined a whole potential person and life story. Dig it.

Way too many Venn diagram sweet spots and quad graphs (up and to the right!) in my life right now. For the next month, I will not reduce any thinking, people, or concepts to a two-axis or four overlapping point construct. Watch the awesome take-down by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society:

Start at the bottom (and, keep in mind, that @kipbot and @thegaf do have a legitimate point. #FFusMrPrez

And happy birthday to Ms theGaf!

Links from the week, worth bubbling up for future reference:

A really great analysis of how Yankee closer Mariano Rivera manages to dominate pitchers with a single pitch (cutter + the fastball). It’s what multi-media should be about — useful graphics explain pitch distributions, ball motion, how a batter perceives the pitches and the grip. Really great stuff. Must watch.

Fun old video of a dude demoing a Creative Labs keyboard with keys mapped to drum sounds. “This is rock and roll.” You need to watch the whole thing. Ferrealz.

A disgusting old advertisement in which sugar tries to convince parents that sugar, “isn’t just good flavor, it’s good food.” That segues nicely into a redemptive piece by advertising creative guru/pioneer/wizard and other stupendous word Alex Bogusky in which he argues that advertising should give awards for not doing things — start by refusing to advertise to kids.

Interesting piece for advertising types in which ad creatives are interviewed at Cannes about big ideas and trends in communciations.

be a dremel, not a hammer.

After doing a BDW workshop in Toronto, BOARDS magazine, a co-sponsor of the event, invited me to do a piece about a slide in one of my presentations. The slide said “Utility is the only emotion”, an overstatement for sure, but not by so much. BOARDS is sadly closing down, but the piece is still up here. For archival purposes and my own traffic, however, here it is (without the picture of me):

Utility is the only useful emotion in a post-microsite world
Rapp Collins planner says consumers make decisions without encountering any big idea messaging
May 6, 2010

For years, emotion has been the most important, even solitary goal, of advertising. Over and over, planners look for the single most important thing we want customers to feel, briefs call for key emotional takeaways, and ECDs and EVPs look for the emotional climax in every piece of work. Emotion seems to be one of those enduring truths of the industry, immune to digital reality. But, as we move into the post-microsite phase of digital, where the voices of customers, trade press, and reviewers determine the fate of brands in real time - this exclusively emotional approach is reductive and ultimately counterproductive.

What we need to recognize, and adjust our work to, is that utility - how well a brand performs valuable functions for its customer - outweighs any emotion advertising can generate. The sense of satisfaction a customer feels with a product - its utility - is not only the most important emotion; it’s the only emotion that counts. Utility is what takes customers beyond fleeting, reflexive response and into meaning - direct evidence of how a brand fits into/enhances one’s life. And any brand that fails to be, or present itself as, consistently useful will #fail in the digital space.

Today, it’s possible, and increasingly likely, for a customer to go through an entire consideration and decision process without encountering any emotional, brand-generated messaging at all. Example: last year, I was going to Make magazine’s DIY event Maker Faire and needed a video camera to record it. I wanted something small, HD, durable, and that cost less than $400. I Twittered a call for advice from friends (and, via Twitter, Facebook statused as well). A user named @gadgetboy told me he was loving his new Kodak Zi6. I had thought Kodak was a dead brand, and was skeptical, but @gadgetboy is savvy so I heard him out. Another friend on Twitter pointed me to Zi6 videos he posted on Flickr. I also got some recos in response to retweets about the Flip and few other models. Within 24 hours, I had a solid consideration set - all from friends (and friends of friends) and including a brand (Kodak) I had previously dismissed out of hand.

Over the course of the next week, I went to blogs Engadget and Gizmodo and read the reviews. Then, at Amazon, I looked at the accessories and explored potential hidden costs. I was already leaning toward the Zi6, so I checked out Amazon’s customer comments on it and saw lots of !!!s and very few WTFs. I bought that camera, loved it, and now recommend it to others.

Was there emotion? Hell yeah! People said, “I love it!”, “Look at the picture!”, “I cracked the viewfinder and they replaced it overnight!”, “Didn’t read the manual cuz I didn’t need it!”, “Battery lasts forever!” But all the emotion arose from utility, rather than aspirations, segment beliefs, or cultural insights.

As a person who came up in digital in the mid-90s and is trying to break into the trads tribe, I feel compelled to talk about some ads to help make my point. Start with the obligatory Super Bowl reference and you can point to Google’s ad. What was it about? Accurate searches. The searches led to lovely emotional things like romance, love, and life fulfillment. But in the end, it was about the effectiveness of the algorithm, its utility.

Then you have last year’s iPhone commercials. They were all about task completion - finding a restaurant for dinner before going to the movie you just bought tickets for after checking the weather to see if you needed an umbrella. If you take the iPhone spot, drop the catchy tune, stick in my grubby fingers instead of a hand model’s, and make the lighting less pristine, you have what interaction designers call use case scenarios - demonstrations of the product’s utility.

These ads also highlight another dimension of digital - the increasing importance of ideas that aren’t so big. While I don’t doubt that a big idea can be found in both ads, the real energy behind each comes from the little ideas behind the brand’s utility. Watch the Google ad closely and you’ll see not only affirmation of the search algorithm’s accuracy, but the spell correction suggestion, Google Translate, and the presentation of search results as content. The iPhone ad is a presentation of one great app idea after another, with the promise of more apps. The creative here wasn’t a pay-off on the big idea so much as a narrative of little and medium-sized ideas that speaks to more people on a more personal level.

Brand story, message, and emotion can trigger conversation and consideration. But utility triggers decision, action, trust, and passion for a brand. It is the only emotion consumers ultimately respond to. And it’s the one that lasts.

What could be more interesting than a newbie fantasy fanboy blogging about the life lessons baseball has to offer? This is my second, and I have a third teed up. Now I can chase away the remaining one dozen readers.

Last night I was watching the Giants Opening Day home game against the Astros, and saw Houston’s middle reliever Sammy Gervacio. It’s kind of a quick incantatation: Gazes to the side, holds the ball upright, bent elbow as if in salute, snaps it down and then throws. Pretty trippy.

Lots of pitchers can throw hard, or have a pitch, but somewhere along the line, they need a pitching coach who helps them find their groove - the style or mode that maximizes their talent while helping them with concentration and control. It can be as unconventional as Gervacio’s or as classic as Clemens, but every talent needs to find it.

I just picked the guy up in my league . . . easily distracted.

From Sports Illustrated baseball preview this week, the story of how Blue Jays pitching instructor Mel Queen helped Roy Halladay get his mojo back after a disastrous 2000 season:

“Look at you! You’re stupid! You’re an idiot with no baseball intelligence and no guts! You’re a pussy!”
Halladay … kept his mouth shut. Queen kept insulting him. “I don’t think I ever talked to anybody I hated worse than I talked to him, and I liked him,” Queen said. “It was unbelievable how bad it was. He should have knocked my head off and walked out.”
“Now, you can walk out of here if you want. You have a guaranteed contract worth millions. You can walk right out of here, and you’re not going to pitch in the big leagues ever again. But if you want to pitch in the big leagues again, you will do everything you I tell you without question.”

Halladay agrees and, within two days he was improving.

Queen calls this approach “vigorous leveling.”

I love this passage from Hot, Flat, and Crowded and keep forgetting to just post it:

The only thing that can stimulate this much innovation in new technologies, and the radical improvement of existing ones is the free market. Only the market can generate and allocate enough capital fast enough and efficiently enough to get 10,000 inventors working in 10,000 companies and 10,000 garages and 10,000 laboratories to drive transformational breakthroughs; only the market can then commercialize the best of them and improve on the existing ones at the scope, speed and scale we need.

But markets are not just open fields to which you simply add water and then sit back in a lawn chair, watch whatever randomly sprouts, and assume that the best outcome will always result. No, markets are like gardens. You have to intelligently design and fertilize them so they yield the good, healthy crops necessary for you to thrive.

More here.