Irreverent Thinking

Back after the summer (what summer!) break, it’s a great time to be around - the world’s financial markets are crashing, bad advice is coming home to roost and solid thinking is back in fashion. Ace.

I registered my I-name (=dower) today to simplify my OpenId world and it got me thinking back to the future of the web. We are living more and more in an information age but we are limited by our human ability to sift and transfer information and this seems crazy. My PC and the various places (pods) that I inhabit on the net has lots of information about me, letting potential suppliers (retailers, insurance companies) see this information makes a huge amount of sense; they could better tailor their offers and even (on a mass scale) create products and services just for people like me. So why don’t they?

TRUST. No-one seems to trust anyone. So lets go create a framework for a trust network? It seems to work well enough in the social networking world so why not across all web-platforms? OpenID and I-name seem to be part of the solution, a form of machines trusting machines to share the right data at the right time, I’m sure it will evolve once the in-fighting within the various technical steering committees is resolved.

Ignoring (for the moment) the nay-sayers fears about abuse, privacy and control it would certainly make my life a good deal simpler if my (common and public) information was available to every web-resource I visit so it could tailor my experience. Better still, if the i-brokers could provide real secure trust in the same way that credit-card companies do online then you as a i-surfer could choose your provider based on personal preferences. In this world of mass-collaboration it seems a shame that machines cannot yet collaborate in the same way us humans are starting to.

A world where every web-resource knows exactly what it needs to know from you to give you exactly what you want. Sounds like nirvana to me

The current experiment of running a (YouTube) video on our site has been met with a mixed response. But it has gone rather viral (in a small way). Frames have been grabbed and photo-shopped by a number of people outside of my immediate network. This made me realise that, in a small way, we had created a viral storm - or a viral storm in a tea-cup as I now call it. These storms are quite interesting as it does drum up interest in our company. Which is a “good thing”.

Those that had a negative view came, primarily, from the “old money” agency economy. The gist of this view was that the “production values were too low”, “you must use an autocue”, “look at better post-production”, “it’s all in the editing”… You get the drift. Interestingly the view was not “the content is rubbish and you are spouting poo” but just that the production value (i.e. the video) was not up to the standard used in a 30 second Guinness advert.

And then on Wednesday I watched Manchester United beat Chelsea in the Champions League and saw an advert for Ford Football. What the hell? Are Ford now manufacturing footballs or are they simply copying Nike’s move into vertical markets?! But I digress. The advert was a series of (low production value) videos shown in a (YouTube style) frame. So maybe it’s true, and shock video has taken over the world. Maybe people simply no longer trust over-produced, over-glossy videos. I somehow prefer the real world version and don’t trust the gloss.

The upshot is that we are going to have a crack at recording more videos for our site, based around environmental and personal information. This forces the production values to be non-glossy, immediate and very relevant. No doubt we will see a polarisation of viewpoints. First one goes up today, have a look and pass a comment. I’d love to hear what you think about this experiment!

I have been using OpenID now for a year or so. It’s really good/useful because it lets you have a single identity across multiple websites, which massively simplifies the login and register procedure and also makes me feel warm and safe that this data is held centrally by ONE trusted company. Not having to worry about whether I will trust a site encourages me to sign up.

The problem I have is that not every site supports OpenID In fact very few do, and those that do tend to be a bit geeky!

It would be a real shame if OpenID was thrown on the pile marked “geekdom” and didn’t make it into the mainstream.