Seth Godin, author of Small is the New Big and The Big Moo, gave this “remarkable” presentation at TED.

Seth talks about the immediate need for companies to start re-thinking the way in which they market their products and services. The Information Age has killed Television as an effective medium for selling ideas, what he refers to as the TV Industrial Complex.

Businesses used to market to the average person, or the largest population making up a market. In a world where the TV Inudstrial complex is broken, organizations need to start marketing to the people who care – the people who are obsessed with your products or services.

At the end of this presentation Seth points out that being “very good” is no longer good enough. Very good is boring. Very good is just average, resulting in no one noticing or caring about what you’re selling.

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to ignore the ordinary stuff.

Be remarkable – or be ignored!

This is a hilarious video about how Starbucks labels their coffee sizes. The semantical differences between even the “smallest” words can have a huge impact on understanding.

Starbucks labels “small” coffees as “tall”. Doesn’t “tall” imply “large”? A medium is called a Grande. When I read or hear the word “Grande” I think extra large. And what exactly is a Venti?

Yet another shining example of why plain language needs to be integrated into every aspect of our lives to avoid confusion; and more importantly, so we can all get just the right amount of caffeine in our system every day.

I received an email from my CapCHI colleague J.C. about this TED video, looking at implications for Interaction Design.

At the VizThink conference the founder of Autodesk showed similar touch-screen technologies. Including a design program that could take a “virtual clay model” of a car and have the designer pinch and mold the car to the shape they wanted in the same way one would with an actual clay block.

This video will look familiar to anyone who has purchased the iPod Touch. I think this technology has the capacity to assist designers and developers in several areas of their work, beyond what has been shown here.

As an Information Architect, I look at technologies like these and think about my experience in learning Object Oriented programming languages like Visual Basic, back in the day. Imagine if we could take content objects and have them appear in a touch technology, as Mr. Han demonstrates.

Working with key stakeholders, collaboratively moving content around, developing a complete understanding of how users will find everything; talk about building stronger lines of communication and community on teams!

I would also hazard a guess that the number of iterations required for the delivery of such web services would be cut dramatically.

In this demo, Jeff Han shows off (for the first time publicly) a high-resolution multi-touch computer screen that may herald the end of the point-and-click mouse. The demo, which drew spontaneous applause and audible gasps from the audience, begins with a simple lava lamp, then turns into a virtual photo-editing tabletop, where Han flicks photos across the screen as if they were paper snapshots.

After the I.A. Summit in Miami, I’ll be attending the Mesh Conference in Toronto again this year. Last year I was able to have a round table discussion with several of the facilitators and attendees at the conference about User Experience and Community. This year I hope to be able to do the same.

The organizers of Mesh are developing ideas for “Mesh U”, a one day event prior to the start of the conference:

What we have in mind is a one-day event – which we’re tentatively calling meshU – that will be filled with small, focused workshops by those who have earned their stripes in the startup game; people who can talk knowledgeably about everything from interface design to using Amazon’s S3 distributed server network.

This one-day event – which is scheduled for May 20th, the day before mesh – will be taking shape over the next few months, and we’re hoping you can help program it by telling us what kind of content you want and/or need.

Mesh was a great experience last year and it’s shaping up to be another fantastic event for 2008. This year’s event is scheduled to take place May 21st and 22nd in downtown Toronto at the MaRS center. Looking forward to seeing people from last year and others for the first time.

This year the Information Architecture Summit is being held in Miami Florida from April 10-14, and I will be attending for the first time.

It will be great to finally meet several people from Boxes and Arrows and other colleagues from around the world. I’m hoping to be able to do a Podcast with Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld for the IA Podcast. After all, how can I call it the Information Architecture Podcast without having the fathers of IA on a show?

The website for the summit offers a unique application that I hadn’t seen before called Crowdvine. This allows you to look at the profile of any person attending the summit and tag them as a “fan” or “wants to meet”. This sends an email to the person letting them know someone at the Summit is a fan of theirs or that they would like to talk with them while at the Summit. The application also builds a “My Network” area within your own profile so you can see all of your connections.

I think this application should be in place for all conferences. Normally when you go to these events, if you’re not seeing the same people, it can take a while to connect with others. With Crowdvine, you have pictures of the people you are going to meet, and it kind of breaks the ice prior to the event.

Looking forward to meeting everyone at the Summit, and I’ll see you in Miami.

I came across this article the other day and was intrigued by the title, Refereence Books? Give me Wikipedia

The article talks about how some traditional educators believe that the only truly valuable educational experience is one where students roam through libraries spending hours looking for the correct books, selected by the professor, to complete assignments.

I’m old enough to remember having to do this for all of the papers I had to write in University. I also had to walk both ways up hill 5 miles in the snow to school – but that’s another story.

The article goes on to talk about how Wikipedia is becoming as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica:

A year ago, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was outraged when the magazine Nature carried out a comparison between it and Wikipedia, and concluded that the service offered by the two were more or less on a par (Britannica had 2.9 minor errors per article, Wikipedia had 3.9)…The difference today is likely to be even less, because Wikipedia can correct itself so swiftly.

I can’t believe that those who love education, teaching, and of course learning, would be so opposed to students using different tools to learn!

I think the author of the article, Magnus Linklater, draws an excellent conclusion about both approaches; what I’ll call “the library way” and “the wiki way”:

If they are encouraged to believe that predigested information is an end in itself, and if they are then given high marks for the result, they will simply conclude that that is the outcome that society requires of them.

If, on the other hand, they learn that they have a gateway to knowledge unprecedented in the history of man, and that this opens up access to sources of information that they might never have glimpsed as they struggled with poorly equipped libraries unhelpful staff and unimaginative lecturers, then they will realise that, far from blunting curiosity, it sharpens it.

We need to start looking to the benefits that the Information age has brought our society. If knowledge is power, then we’re all powerful. We all have access to information about anything and anyone. How does this not change the way we learn at work, play, and of course, at school?

I wish I had Wikipedia back in the day; but I’m sure happy that it’s here now!

Sachi and Lee LeFever from Common Craft presented their video ideas at the VizThink conference on the second day to an audience who loved their work; and rightfully so!

I’m always looking for unique ways to explain technical concepts to clients in plain language. I think the challenge has always been how do you describe these things in both an educational and entertaining way?

If done properly, as Common Craft has done with all of their videos, the message is both clearly communicated, and allows those who are not comfortable with technology to feel at ease when working with such tools.

I wanted to share this video by Common Craft about RSS; another important yet commonly misunderstood process on the web. Check it out and many thanks to Lee and Sachi for taking the time to present at VizThink.

One of the many revelations I had at VizThink was the frightening accuracy of Larry Lessig’s TED speech on copywrite law. How can this combination of Japanese manga with the classic rock tune, “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Rock legend Bon Jovi, be characterized as anything other than great art!?

Why would we have laws in place that would put restrictions on such things? As Larry points out, his generation watched movies, the younger generation makes movies. By not changing with the times, we’re telling our children that their desire to create is actually piracy, and illegal.

I mean seriously, are the music and film industries so arrogant as to believe they can define and subsequently restrict the creative process? I fail to see how this does anything other than promote both the Trigun series and the music of Bon Jovi?

I have never seen the Trigun series but really enjoyed the video because of the music. In my mind it’s a win / win.