Change is coming
I can’t blog much at the moment, due to spectacular technological circumstances…
My laptop has contracted a fantastic piece of malware that, in claiming to be ‘anti-virus’, prevents me from doing anything, claiming the thing I’m trying to do is ‘a virus’… Even opening the task manager, or an Internet browser.
So on the London Brighton Blogging Express I’m left with an iPhone, using the pretty shitty Typepad app.
But here’s the first bit of change that’s coming…
I’m switching to a Macbook Pro. Did I spend a long time researching, reading the apple site, looking at advertising? Course not, I asked lots of friends, through facebook, through Twitter, and through email. Anthony Mayfield even sent me a detailed email on switching from PC to Mac for ‘plannery types’.
It’s the second piece of change; It occurs that we no longer have to do all the research ourselves on the Internet when shopping for goods… by connecting to enough people we trust, who will be more informed and opinionated on other subjects than ourselves, we can save that time too (assuming we trust our specially assembled crowd).
So when the said Macbook Pro arrives, I will no doubt turn into one of those scary evangelists and bore you all senseless, tweeting this, blogging that.
But in turn, no doubt it’ll slightly help convert a few more folk in the way that I was converted.
I used a Hive Mind metaphor in my IPA dissertation last year; the more connected we all are, the less we have to know about everything as the information is being ‘stored’ in a different part of the hive mind.
It might have always been true, to Gladwell’s point about ‘mavens’… There were always people you’d ask about cars/computers/cooking etc.
But by speeding up the connections between people, we’re actually starting to live in a world where we can make quick, efficient use of that information, like a brain would.
Which brings me to the third piece of change… Where does the ‘advertising’ model sit in a world like that? Russell Davies once said (as Neil Perkin reminded me last week) that…
“All this web stuff is going to look like a picnic compared to the horrors that will be dealt to the agency and media businesses when every product has a communications channel built right in”
Now every customer you have has an inbuilt media agency, ad agency, an PR agency. But they’re not being paid by you to spin positively on your behalf. They call it as they see it. So you’d better be as nice as possible, and make amazing things for them…
…sorry, I’m going on, I know. The lesson here, I guess, is that macro blogging doesn’t really work on an iPhone unless you want to write long train-of-thought diatribes.
Normal service will be resumed next week, when the Mac arrives. Consider this the ‘rail replacement service’ of blog posts… 🙂
