Radiohead FTW

Love this - Radiohead tells Prince to stop blocking YouTube clips of his Coachella "Creep" cover.

Yorke added: "Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our ... song."

New Second Life board member: ex-VeriSign CFO

Second Life recently updated their corporate website to announce a new board member - Dana Evan, the ex-CFO of VeriSign. First woman on the board which is kinda cool and more finance/operations firepower.

The Technology of Air Transport

In May's issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows documents DayJet, a new on-demand short-haul regional airline for travelers. Their sweetspot is relatively short notice trips that by car would be 3-5 hours. Fallows describes how DayJet is essentially a technology company, although it has less to do with aerospace breakthrough than with their Russian mathematicians who have created one of the world's most complex Traveling Salesman models:

"In the few seconds it takes DayJet to price your trip, a system called RTR (for “real-time routing”) is figuring out how your request will affect the placement of planes, pilots, and passengers for all other flights that day, and exactly how much the company must charge to make a profit on your flight. The mechanics of making all of this work are what have made the Russians famous within the company—along with a vast computing system called ASTRO, which runs round the clock, constantly looking for more efficient­ ways to combine planes, pilots, and the time windows requested by passengers."

Big Co's: Understand the Top 20 websites or you're missing the boat

I have several friends who end up doing informal social media consulting for various large companies. In relating their conversations with top brands and media co's, several were still trying to get a handle on their YouTube strategy and a few were holding off experimenting until they had "figured it out." Holy cow, the only way you learn about this stuff is by doing.

And digging a little deeper I heard that it wasn't just YouTube but many other consumer experience (social networks, twitter, flickr, virtual worlds, etc) that still confounded these larger companies.

Ok, obviously i'm biased here given my SecondLife/Google/YouTube background but people, if you don't understand and experiment you are very likely to miss opportunities. Or at least end up paying inflated amounts to digital agencies and consultants who don't know anything you can't figure out for yourself.

Here's my advice - and i think it makes sense for companies of every size - if you don't know how the Top 20 consumer websites can help or hurt your business then you are behind. You don't necessarily need to be participating in all of them but you should have a general understanding and hypothesis about how you might get involved. Then prioritize your experiments and get to work!

Second Life: New CEO Day One

So according to Philip Rosedale's previous blog post, May 15th was Day One with their new CEO Mark Kingdon. Very exciting - i'm swinging by Second Life next Wednesday morning so hoping to meet Mark. Give him some encouragement like a good shareholder should! :-)

Iron Man: The Avatar

How many brands are willing to give up total control of a key asset to their fans? [crickets] Well, Marvel did something incredibly cool as part of the Iron Man marketing strategy. They released a fully modifiable Iron Man avatar skin into Second Life and the output has been tens of thousands of people running around dressed up as the superhero. Oh yeah, and some pretty neat machinima. [via New World Notes]

Handy Celebrity Trick #129

When a photographer tried to snap a nightclub shot of Justin Timberlake and Madonna, "Timberlake signaled to his bodyguard, who shined a flashlight at the camera, making a photo impossible." [via New York magazine]

The ole' flashlight trick. So much for me to still learn before i enter the world of celebrity protection.

The Unspoiled Notebook: Overcoming Fear of Imperfection

Unbounded possibility can be daunting- and not just because of decision paralysis. A blank slate can be formidable especially if it's well-designed. Take Moleskine notebooks - many folks can't bring themselves to write on that first page. Why? Because of the unbounded beauty that an unspoiled Moleskine represents. The fear that whatever you start writing and recording is not going to be worthy of the container. Empty = potential. Whatever you write can be judged and there's no turning back.

After assuming I was alone in this neurotic predicament (sometimes a notebook is just a notebook), coincidentally several people mentioned to me recently that the nicer the notebook, the worse their work. This got me thinking about interface design and whether users face the same stress when encountering the customization of a profile page or other default template? Drawing on my personal experience there were at least a few instances where people seem to carry this same baggage to digital world, but also some ways that designers can help us out.

Fear of Looking Silly

• At Second Life we found that users were really self-consciousness about seeing other people until they felt presentable
• a) changing some of their basic appearance
• b)learning enough about the key controls to move around and avoid embarrassing bumping into others
• So we moved avatar customization up in the orientation flow and also made it clear that people could practice in a safe space where they weren't seen by others, then could debut when they were ready.

Fear of Making Things Worse

• Clearly marked "undo" button that works reliably plus "restore defaults" (the nuclear undo), seem to make people more willing to experiment because restoring to order is just a click away.
  

Great banned album covers site

Fun site showing banned or controversial album covers.
For example, did you know some folks thought Bruce Springsteen was pissing on the American flag?