Mint Digital

Sometimes Tom likes to work in private.

I have just come back from Digital Hollywood where I spent the whole of last week. Highlights included:

• Listening to Chuck D, founder of Public Enemy speak. I reckon he might be the best speaker on digital publishing that I have heard. Some highlights included:
• Don’t worry too much about contractual terms and other barriers to getting stuff out there. If you have a good idea its most important that you just get it out there. The deal will fall into place;
• When somebody compared UGC to McDonald’s and said that people prefer editorially selected content (fine restaurants where people were prepared to spend big money) to UGC (McDs), Mista Chuck pointed out that whilst nobody ever reheated a Big Mac, if you bite into a fresh one, it tastes really good (and so it is for UGC).
• What was most special was that Chuck D used 10 words when most people would have used 100 and he clearly had not just read a bunch of blogs and regurgitated the consensus. Maybe not surprising given that he has a track record of innovation in music. Afterwards I got the chance to trade a few stories with him from back in the day (him from Long Island, me from the Swansea Valley) as per the photo (apologies for picture quality but this was taken on a 59p hamburger of a camera phone);

Just in case anyone is looking for something to print off and read in the park, here are two articles that have inspired us Mints recently:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky
Is Mint trying to solve this problem or make it worse?

Sign Up Forms Must Die by Luke Wroblewski
We’ve been designing flows along these lines for a little while now. It is nice to see someone voice this approach.

The last two days were demanding. On Thursday each team worked on the presentation of their idea.

Friday was pitching day. It ended on a high. The BBC commissioned Different and Mint to develop the “Doctor Who: In Parallel” idea.

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I’m at the BBC Innovation Labs in Yorkshire this week.

The Labs are made up of 10 teams, 5 mentors and 1 Development Producer from BBC Research & Innovation. 5 BBC commissioners arrived today.

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We have got a vacancy for someone to dream up and develop mass-participation web ideas.

More details here.

Well, a few other Mints and I are just back from Scotland on Rails and what a good time we had! First, it’s always good to be back in the homeland. Second, it was a great conference.

What made it for me was the size. It was big enough to have decent talks but small enough to get to meet everyone you wanted. Out of the talks I saw, the JRuby talk on Saturday was particularly interesting. I’ve been meaning to give this more attention for a while and this has definitely reinforced the reasons for doing so.

Jonathan Weiss gave an interesting talk on Rails patterns which crossed over with our work at Mint. It’s great to see someone else talk about ideas we’ve been playing with internally. Image processing and asset storage are things we deal with in almost every project.

We also had a great post-conf meetup in London on Tuesday. I wasn’t aware at the time but it was actually a music and Ruby hacking meet. Writing Ruby to make music anyone? Combining two things you love is always good!

Anyway, a great conference all round and I’ll be back next year (if it’s on!). Well done guys. Check out the photos.

Added by Andy Bell: Two Mints were speaking at the conference. Paul Dix was speaking on collective intelligence. Thomas was speaking on high performance rails apps. I added the photo too, in case anyone is wondering why Thomas is posting pictures of himself.

I’ve just returned from Crossing the Void in Bristol. There was an interesting session on Picture This, a cross-platform photography project.

The discussion was between Preloaded (the web producer) Renegade Productions (the TV producer) and Channel 4 (the commissioner). Here’s some notes:

• “I had hoped the web and the TV would be more integrated” said Alan Hayling from Renegade. This frustration was echoed throughout the team. He said that budget had been part of the problem but also there had been a conservatism on the part of the TV production crew. He would fight that harder next time.
• 11.4% of web sessions are 30 minutes or longer. The average session includes 14 page views. These stats are helping when Channel 4 considers whether to recommission.
• A community web site is a supportive environment. A modern TV show is conflict driven. It was hard to reconcile this tension. Flickr, who provided the web infrastructure, had to be handled with care. The TV show ran counter to their corporate belief that “no photo is better than another”.
• Flickr were keen to keep all branding and traffic off their core site. They care passionately about their community and wanted their members to have to deliberately opt-in.
• Preloaded repeatedly iterated designs with target users (in “lab conditions”). One surprising discovery is that many potential users were intimidated by Flickr and felt their work is somehow “not worthy”. Armed with this insight, Preloaded focused on making the website approachable, constructive and friendly.
• The plan for one sequence was to film the judges and the mentors reviewing web photos, and to incorporate this footage into the TV show. This didn’t work well in the edit. So it evolved into this budget being spent paying those people to comment directly on photos on the website. This proved popular.

On the train home everyone agreed that Katz, the organiser, is a great “curator of people”. In particular, it was inspiring to meet Monterosa (mass-participation TV) and Team Rubber (viral marketing).

I just spent 4 days in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. It was a spectacular event.

With over 140,000 attendees, CES is the largest trade show in America.

In addition to the latest gadgetry, including the biggest and thinnest plasma screens and the smallest HD cameras, CES also hosted Digital Hollywood, a conference program dedicated to content, entertainment and technology.

Despite some interesting topics, the sessions consisted of the usual industry rhetoric and hyperbole. Cutting through this, one panel made some predictions for how digital media will evolve in the coming year:

Eyal Hertzog, Founder, Metacafe: “More content owners are going to realize the value of the long-tail and make their material available online. There are still millions of hours of content out there and there’s no reason not to make it available.”

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Just before Christmas I watched all 20 episodes of the web series Rush’d on ABC Family’s Virtual Rush social website.

Mint built Virtual Rush to support ABC’s Greek. At the end of each show the stars laid down a challenge to the audience.

And boy did the audience respond… The amount of original and compelling content uploaded has been phenomenal. Over the 10 weeks of the show, a gargantuan battle to be crowned one of the six Virtual Rush finalists ensued.

But what happened since then is even more interesting. Once the six finalists were chosen, ABC Family flew them to LA from their homes in Ohio, Chicago, Florida, North Carolina, Wichita and New York. They were given the week of a lifetime. They hung out amongst the stars. They took acting lessons. They even met the cast of Greek.

Rush’d is a 20-webisode series charting the finalists’ journeys. It makes great viewing.

If you are a regular on Virtual Rush, you feel like you know them. You have a deep affinity with them as you have been with them since the beginning of their journey.

This is a genuine cross-platform, 360 degree (call it what you like) format. There’s been lots of talk, yet I am not aware of a single social website that has spawned a mini-series (talent and all). If there is another one, please tell me I’m wrong. ABC Family are true innovators in this much talked about space.

Note: Virtual Rush is geo-blocked outside the US. Europeans will have to take my word for it!

So, I spent the last couple of days learning about ‘the future’ at the Future of Web Design conference in wonderful New York City. It was great fun. There were lots of interesting topics and inspiring people. Here is a brief run down:

Day 1

There were talks on a wide range of topics including designing for mobile, flash design, AJAX, finding inspiration and CSS3. My personal highlights were Ryan Singer’s talk on web usability, Ryan Sims’ (Virb) and Keith Robinson’s tag team approach to redesigning a site like IMDb. Also Jeffrey Kalmikoff had an excellently presented chat about community-centered design.

The evening finished off with a Media Temple hosted party in the heart of NYC offering free booze and 3 floors of DJs. I chatted to, amongst others, Tyson an awesome designer at Virb and Keegan from The Big Noob.

Day 2

The day was made up of two workshops. In the morning Ryan Singer talking through his approach to usability for web apps. The main theme was focus on keeping the design as close to reality as possible. For instance, no lorem ipsum, keep the content real.

In the afternoon, I went to Lea Alcantara’s branding workshop. This touched on many things I was already aware of from the web design sphere, but it was interesting to hear it from a branding perspective. A highlight was having to interview her as an Italian chef.

All-in-all it was an inspiring couple of days. I look forward to future events arranged by Carson Systems, along with getting back to a good round of Photoshop back in the UK.

I’ve just returned from Cross Creative in Glasgow. It was interesting to hear Andrew Chitty discuss Illumina’s approach. In some areas it is quite similar to Mint, in other areas quite different.

For Empire’s Children, Illumina built a map for users to submit their histories. Illumina felt it was important to bridge the gap between professional quality of TV content and amateur quality of much web content. From what Andrew showed, they did a good job of this.

When Wall to Wall saw the site, their immediate reaction was ‘it would have been great if we’d had a tool like that when we were making the TV show’. Currently they are working together on a project to make that happen. That elusive ‘genuinely 360 idea’ edges closer.

Recently, Illumina have taken on some projects for museums. Like TV, museums group people together by shared passion. Unlike TV, museums exist in the physical world. This is interesting. Lots of the
most interesting 360 ideas in advertising (e.g. Nike’s RunLondon or Innocent’s Fruitstock) exist mainly in the real world (and only secondarily online). I think this trend towards the real world will extend into TV cross-platform ideas. The MobileAct project we are working on for Channel 4 has a massive real-world element.

For the new Centre of Cell experience, Illumina created a website that you need to visit before and after visiting the museum. The museum itslelf becomes one part of a bigger experience.

For Kew Gardens, Illumina noticed there were 4 million photos on Flickr tagged ‘Tree‘. This shows a tremendous level of interest. Illumina’s aim building the new site is to bring this conversation within the Kew site.

This half of Illumina’s work is about user-generated content and the participatory web and is similar to what Mint do. The other half involves narrative and video production and is a whole different world.

Just back from RailsConf Europe. These were my three top moments:

1. Jason Hoffman’s session on scaling was really superb. Over the last few months we’ve had to deal with scaling a Rails app urgently. Jason had sound advice and interesting perspectives.

The headline is scaling isn’t a Rails problem but a network and hardware issue. Interesting things Jason suggested:

• Use multiple asset hosts to get more connections to the browser (e.g. most browsers will open only 2 connections per host, if you set up media1, 2, 3 and 4 for assets even if they all point to the same box, the browser will open up to 8 connections.
• Use DNS in a major way.
• Make separate apps for each controller and keep them on their own boxes/processes. This may sound strange, but Jason said most apps could have the following DNS (either on the same box or different ones):
  • Dynamic (domain.com)
  • Static (assets1-4, 5-8)
  • Uploads (break into separate app)
  • Downloads (unauthenticated to static servers, 60 secs urls for authenticated)
  • Admin

2. Evan Phoenix spoke well on Rubinius the new Ruby virtual
machine. It was a really fun talk with some carefully made up graphs and stats. The bottom line is that it is much faster, takes less memory and is much easier to fix bugs or extend as most is written in Ruby.

3. For me, the real highlights were the events surrounding the conference. Both Bratwurst on Rails on the Sunday and Reject Conf on Tuesday night were great places to meet with loads of interesting people, including the guys from SoundCloud and my fellow countrymen from Scotland on Rails.

An interesting quote from Julian Michon, Director of New Faces at Models 1:

“Scouting for new models used to involve hanging around shopping centres and airports. Now the best talent is online.

“The modelling industry is moving very fast, competition is very high. When we came across Islandoo, we were blown away! The site allows us to see a lot of people quickly. It means we are more likely to find the next superstar.”

Other news:

• At Mint HQ, the consensus is that Say Everything is one of the best articles on social media we’ve read for a while:
  

  “As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.”

• A new version of the BloomBox website is now live, designed by new Mint recruit Tom Harman. Welcome, Tom!

I’ve just returned from Future Media.

On my panel, everyone was running social media sites. Some interesting perspectives:

Celia Taylor from Trouble Homegrown is working hard to get advertisers and musicians (including Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake and Oasis) more closely involved in the creative challenges that Homegrown promotes. Reading between the lines, it sounds like Trouble are seeing similar opportunities to the ones we are seeing with Islandoo.

Patrick Uden from Four Docs noted that it is remarkable how their community responds to constraints. When Four Docs launched, there was concern that four minutes was too short for a decent narrative. That has proved no problem. Recently Four Docs had a great response to a Mini Docs competition which invited members to create 59 sec documentaries.

Simon Gunning from Yahoo described how Yahoo Video is a giant mass of content. Advertisers are only interested in getting involved in parts that are closely monitored and editorialised (for instance The 9). He also enthused about the important of competitions - as witnessed by Kittenwar).

In other news:

• Adrian Hon said Perplexcity is being taken in a web 2.0 direction. It will be intereting to see what that means.
• In their talks, both Claire Tavernier (Fremantle) and David Fischer (MySpace) mentioned Islandoo as an example of exciting developments online.

We are looking for a super talented designer. Someone who doesn’t just make things look nice, but who also thinks deeply and cleverly about user interaction. If you know someone who fits that bill, please point them to this job description.

The lucky candidate will be working on Islandoo and a couple of exciting BloomBox projects in the pipeline. In my biased opinion, it would be hard to find a more exciting, interesting and challenging job if you are a designer with a passion for the opportunities of the social web.

Our latest session interviewing MySpace teens turned up a bit of a different pattern of MySpace usage. Check out the contrast with a previous, perhaps slightly male-dominated session here.

Main use of MySpace
The girls we interviewed this week said they spent around 70% of their time on MySpace looking at the profiles of and communicating with people they know well. They communicate through private messages, public comments and a bit through their blogs.

Minor uses
They spend about 20% of the time finding new bands and listening to music. The remaining ten percent or so is divided between surfing profiles of those they don’t know at all and keeping in touch with those they know vaguely offline.

No time spent on profile, then?
They put absolutely minimal effort into their profiles. So they either have a profile with basically no information and no design, or have a more complex one that they did put some time into originally but now don’t bother to modify. Despite (because of?) being good-looking in person they have only jokey, appearance-obscured photos on MySpace.

Jokey eh?
In fact irony and in-jokes play a huge role for much of the time they are on the site. Sarah described what they do on MySpace as “just joking, just messing around. The comments we leave are pointless, really”. Katie echoed this, “It’s just a big joke. We use it out of boredom”.

So why not just use email or SMS?
MySpace is seen as being more convenient for communication. Also, particularly leaving a friend a public comment is seen as more enjoyable than, for example, an SMS text. One of the group, though, still uses email as much as MySpace for communicating with friends.

What’s the most important thing on a profile?
The song… although that can be a joke too.

Attitude towards MySpace?
“If everyone keeps themselves to themselves then its great” said Sarah, “I am wary, but that goes with everything on the internet”. This group didn’t feel guilty about spending time on MySpace. The feeling was that although from one perspective using MySpace could be thought of as a waste of time, at root it is good fun.

Will you still use MySpace when you are 30?
“Probably. It’s a fantastic way of having a laugh… plus I’ll use it for music”.

MySpace friends? Meeting people through MySpace?
They would never communicate (now) with people they haven’t met. All get a steady stream of friend requests from strangers, but either delete them without looking at them or leave them unopened. “In the early days” (i.e. 8 months ago), one girl met someone who has now become a collaborator in music and good friend offline, but that could never happen now.

Other social-networking sites?
Bebo had never been used by any of them. Faceparty and hi5 had been used for a little while but no longer: “MySpace is where my friends are”.

“So, the thing you do most on MySpace is check out profiles of people you don’t know. Do you ever communicate with any of these people?”
“Never!”

Notes from a recent session interviewing teens about MySpace.

Breakdown of time spent on MySpace
(figures are percentages, names are changed)

[However all said they spent a lot of time setting up profile initially]

Attitude towards MySpace?
People are slightly embarrassed/ guilty about spending time on MySpace. A few hours spent on MySpace is seen as wasted time. Someone might sarcastically joke when going home from pub, “I am going on MySpace now”, because its kind of a sad thing to do. Charlie feels he has kudos from having deleted his MySpace account.

Meet new people through MySpace?
Very rare. Only Charlie met someone for real having first met them on MySpace, and that was something to do with music. Fred spends time communicating with MySpace-only friends, but could never imagine meeting them in the flesh.

Develop peripheral friendships through MySpace?
This seems to be a way MySpace changes peoples’ offline lives. It’s possible to develop a friendship with someone you met briefly at a pub/club. Phoning would be too much. But you might become friends with them through communicating on MySpace.

How do users surf?
Often/usually they spend time looking through friends’ networks of friends and then those peoples’ friends, with no interaction. Usually limit it to people in the same geographic area. So if they reach a profile of someone who lives far away, they will retrace their steps to return to profiles of local people. Mostly surfing seems to be about checking out how good-looking people are.

What’s the most important thing on someone’s profile?
Definitely the photo.

Useful tools?
You can save as ‘favorites’ profiles you like to look at (without the people who own those profiles being informed). Fred didn’t know this but was very excited on hearing about this tool. Also, they thought being able to see number of times a profile has been viewed would be a good feature.

How realistic are profiles?
Users very selective about photos they use. People always significantly less good-looking in real life than on profile.

MySpace also used for?
Charlie said the one thing he will miss is not being able to keep track of club nights and bands on MySpace. Lucy used MySpace a lot to check out clubs and pubs; what’s on, opening hours, entry price.

Attitudes towards businesses using MySpace for marketing?
Not worried about it at all. No feeling of intrusion. Users often hear about things being marketed through ‘bulletin’ on MySpace homepage (e.g. X-men), but easy to ignore.

Use MySpace in 10 years time?
Charlie said “I don’t have time to have a life and be on MySpace”. They indicated they only used it because they had a lot of time on their hands. None could imagine spending much time on a social networking site when they are 30.

Other social networks?
Basically they just use MySpace. Charlie and Fred thought Bebo maybe for younger people. Lucy hadn’t heard of Bebo.

Emails enticing you to join social networking sites…
Considered really annoying. Charlie said if he received such an email he will delete it straight away and make a point of not joining the site concerned and advised us, ‘Stay away from emailing people’.

Promotion of social networking sites in other ways?
They were of the opinion that either a site would work organically, or not at all. Advertisements for a site would make no difference.

Use of MySpace forums and chat-rooms?
None of 3 used these.

On 19th July, 100 or so interested parties from broadcasters, TV production companies, web firms, newspapers and advertising agencies travelled to UGTV ‘06 from as far as Germany and Spain to meet, chat, eat, drink and discuss. Some highlights from the speeches:

Gavin Newman, Deputy Head of Interactive, Trouble TV

Gavin talked about Trouble Homegrown.

Trouble Homegrown is a website that gathers and makes available for view user-generated video clips. It is part of Trouble TV which is a British satellite/cable channel aimed at 15/24 year olds.

Trouble is one of four channels owned by Flextech, which is itself owned by Telewest.

Gavin was charged with making Trouble first-to-market in the UGTV field.

The thinking behind the website was to give viewers/users as broad a brief as possible and see what kind of video they came up with.

So far footage uploaded to the Trouble Homegrown website has been used in continuity slots on the TV channel, but soon there will be a half-hour programme every week showcasing the best of the submitted clips.

Also the website is being used to select contestants for “Bump & Grind”, a talent show on Trouble TV.

He said making the website “was not easy”. It could not just be bought off-the-shelf […at that time, he hinted that if he was starting the project now he would use BloomBox - Ed] and so had to be made bespoke.

Another point he made was that the technical quality of clips has not been much of a problem - the clips on TV “look great”. In fact, that they are a little low-fi and not glossy works well.

All uploaded video is screened - in fact watched all the way through twice - by outsourced moderators Tempero - before being put up on the website.

At present there are 5000 clips on the site with another 200 being added every day.

Matthew Kershaw, Head of Interactive, MTV Networks UK & Ireland

Matthew Kershaw (standing in for Angel Gambino) said MTV, with its upcoming major user-generated initiative, is basically 3 months behind Trouble TV.

MTV aims at the same demographic as Trouble and so he was heartened by the apparent success of Trouble Homegrown.

MTV has been a pioneer of viewer-interactivity, via texting and message boards (for example, one show has a presenter who reads out a lot of message board content).

Up to now MTV has had websites about channels (and it also has MTV Overdrive, a website which is a channel) but having a channel about a website is completely new.

He reckons the key is to be a facilitator - a crucial part of the success of MySpace is that it hasn’t tried to dictate what its users do.

Also, Matthew related hearing a 14-year-old talk about how a video-game triumph seemed meaningless because there was no one watching him do it. “Kids don’t want to do anything without being watched”.

He talked about how we are now seeing a ‘long-tail for celebrities’ or ‘niche celebrities’. There has been a proliferation in the number of celebrities in the last five years and perhaps user-generated content can be expected to accelerate this trend.

Nevertheless though its great to be famous in an underground community, people would much prefer to be famous on TV. That’s still seen as real fame. In the same way even though the Arctic Monkeys had a high profile on MySpace, they still wanted a mainstream record deal. Getting your footage onto a channel is like getting into the VIP room of a club.

Matthew talked about the legal problem he sees UGTV as having. He said ripped-off content is not such a big deal for websites, which can just take the offending clip down when notified, but it is a big deal for broadcasters. Once such a clip has been shown on a TV channel, the rights’ holders will be owed possibly a lot of money. Equally, he said the RIAA is “on the warpath” right now about publishing rights violations in all the user-generated videos that involve lip-synching.

He said UGTV is not just a fad. He brought up the example of talk radio, which has stayed with us despite all the competing forms of media. He said ultimately being able to create your own content taps into a fundamental human need, the need to communicate.

Tim Morgan, Commercial Director, Mint Digital

Mint’s very own Tim Morgan explained how producers and advertisers can easily solve the technical side of any project involving user-generated footage by using BloomBox. I’ll limit what I write about this speech for fear of casting doubt on the objectivity of this blog, but suffice it to say that it was pithy, uproariously funny and extraordinarily well-received.

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A big thanks to Dug Falby from Donkey on the Edge. The three smaller photos are taken from his UGTV ‘06 Flickr photoset.

We’ve been bowled over by the enthusiasm for UGTV ‘06
and have filled the venue. (There’s a waiting list in case people drop out, email events@mintdigital.com if you would like to be added.)

Confirmed attendees include executives from: Ogilvy, Mindshare, Wieden + Kennedy, Grey London, Tequila\, TMW, Emap, SonyBMG, BBC, Channel 4, ITV, The Guardian, Variety Magazine, RDF Media, ThamesTalkback, Endemol and Monkey Productions.