1. Get MP3 player
2. Shuffle songs
3. Leave a comment with your 7 song shuffle

So, here it goes.

7 Song Shuffle

1. P.Diddy & The Bad Boy Family – Bad Boy For Life
2. Nas – No Idea’s Original
3. Lupe Fiasco – The Map
4. Queens of the Stone Age – Gonna Leave You
5. Kelly Clarkson – Because of You
6. Prodigy – Shoot Down
7. The Jam – That’s Entertainment

If you want to play the game as well, leave a comment.

Follow the journey I took when interacting with this QR code from a Co-op leaflet

QR code in a Co-op leaflet

Then I saw this on my phone:

The Co-op website on my phone

Now, given that they created the QR code, they knew that people would be looking at it, most probably, on a mobile device. So why not optimise it? All the link did was take me to their website. It didn’t entice me in, they didn’t focus their message, and I lost interest.

Here is what I would have done

Mockup of a Co-op mobile website layout

It is a quick example of how much more inviting it is to a mobile viewer.

Take note where you take people to with a QR code

If you do fancy using a QR code, next time, think about if you can create a page specifically for that purpose. You might find it has more impact than a regular page.

“Every agency wants a happy client.
There are two ways to do this.
One: do the best job possible.
Two: do what the client wants.
They are the short-term view, and the long-term view.
In the short term the client will be happy if you do what he wants.
If it doesn’t work, he won’t be happy.
The alternative is you insist on doing what you believe to be right.
In the short term the client may be unhappy.
But if it works, he’ll be happy.”

A quote by Dave Trott in the book Creative Mischief. It’s a fantastic book; it reminds me of the books Paul Arden wrote.

It is clear that this is a problem not unique to me. There have been many attempts made to make the experience a better one. From Safari’s built in Reader mode to Readability, designed to ‘zap online clutter and save web articles in a comfortable reading view’.

Focus Mode

The purpose of these systems is to remove the other distractions of adverts, additional links or related stories. At a much deeper level, Information Architects understood this whilst building their iA Writer they created what they called Focus Mode:

Thought goes into writing, not using: Focus mode allows you to think, spell and write one sentence at a time. This lowers the temptation to cross edit and keeps you in the flow.

I like the idea of keeping people ‘in the flow’ and so created a very quick mockup of a ‘focus mode’ for reading posts, not just writing them.

http://prandall.com/experimental/focus-mode/

This could be made into a JS snippet, or as an idea for someone to use on their own site.

Because the script uses :hover this wouldn’t currently work on a phone, but I’m open to suggestions.

There seems to be the feeling that, especially at the start, without many followers you are talking to no one, and have no one listening. In discussing this, I hope some of these points help you get the most out of Twitter.

Create, Curate, Comment

Create content

You’ve probably heard that content is king. Well it’s true. Good content will always find readers. So spend time to generate great content. Now Twitter can be tricky to get your point across in just 140 characters, so if you don’t already have one, setting up a blog should be the next thing to do. It allows you to go into a bit more detail and elaborate on your points.

Then, by tweeting out the link, your followers may want to retweet (publish your tweet to their followers) or promote it themselves.

Curate content

Now, generating posts like that takes time, so not every tweet will like that, so follow your peers, and follow industry leaders and link to their posts.

You may be initially sceptical about this, but becoming a curator, and reposting other peoples good content makes you a valuable person to follow. If you constantly talk and link to interesting stuff, people will want to listen.

Comment, join in on the conversation

One of the fantastic things about Twitter is its instant, real-time feedback so if people are asking questions, or looking for an opinion on something, converse with them. Firstly, they’ll notice who you are (if they don’t currently follow you) and if your opinion is a good one, you’ll be known as someone with a decent opinion.

Conclusion

• Have a voice, have an opinion and people will want to listen to you
• Create, curate and comment
• Tweet predictably and with rhythm. Try not to be quiet for a few days and then tweet 10 times a minute

Tips and Tricks

• Use a URL shortening service (like bit.ly) to keep track of how many people click your links
• Add ‘tweet this’ and ‘follow’ buttons to your site, to allow others to promote your content

Part history book, part modern day news stories, the editing makes the book feel awkward; like a cobbled-together school project made up of historic articles and personal opinions by the Author, Simon Garfield.

It is clear that he has an admiration for type, but having read and watched a fair few pieces on typography, very little of the content felt new. I would find myself remembering stories I had read in Type: The Secret History of Letters, or being reminded word-for-word the interviews with designers for the documentary film Helvetica.

By this book if…

You want a beginner-level book to read about type origins, type history, and some of the modern day stories about type, then this book is for you. But if you want a bit more substance I would recommend Type: The Secret History of Letters. In fact, I think I would suggest reading that book, and watching Helvetica over getting this book any day.

Technology today means we can gorge on content from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep, constantly throughout the day without hesitation; But how much of it can we actually take in? Does it reach a saturation point where we keep consuming even though our minds are full?

All you can eat information

For me personally, this information overload means that I generally cannot remember many of the things that I have read. This is because our brains are not programmed to hold lots of short-term memories.

We can use various tools to overcome this. Services like Delicious and Instapaper mean we don’t have to commit it all to memory, but it still takes an involved process to catalogue all of the content we read on a daily basis.

So what is the answer? Reduce the number of people we follow on Twitter, or RSS feeds we subscribe to? Rebalance the signal-to-noise ratio and remove some of the more superfluous things we read? Or have a system in place to catalogue online consumption for future recollection? I’m keen to hear your thoughts on the subject: You can either leave a comment below or reply to me on Twitter.

Stopgap technology

So I get it, you can go from viewing an advert for a game or DVD on a poster to hovering over the ‘buy it now’ button on your mobile in seconds just by taking a picture of a barcode; I see the benefits, but this is just interim technology stuff.

In an ideal world, if you simply looked at the poster with your mobile phone you could be downloading the demo of the game, browsing the movie trailer, or making a purchase instantly. This is, sort of what you can do now, but what makes this an interim measure is the fact that people have to go out and download software to scan these codes. This really limits the audience, and until software is built into the operating systems, it will always be a niche thing.

Regardless of this, QR codes look too technical anyway. Even if they turned into designed objects like these barcodes from Japan they aren’t sexy; and who wants to see black and white barcodes over everything? How about if you didn’t need a barcode? What if you could just look at the advert through your phone?

Removing the need for barcodes completely

Recently I stumbled across Aurasma that does this, in a sort of clunky prototype way, but the technology is promising. Again, the downside at the moment is that you need to download the app, but if this was built into camera software, and the practice became widespread (so that people almost expected to get something if they looked at it with their phone), no longer would you just look at a printed advert, or watch a 30 second TV clip, you could further immerse yourself into the advertised item, but only if you were interested. This is the key. These things are only popular because people want to find out more.

Final thought

The end result of this becoming mainstream is a deeper connection between what you are consuming in the real-world and the digital realm. This happens at both a social and software level. In an age when we go on to IMDB whilst watching a film to find out what else that guy has been in, to reading real-time comments on twitter when watching X-Factor we can link this together to make things we are interested in easier for us to consume, creating a much more fulfilling scenario.

Feedback

I’d be really interested to find out what your thoughts are on this technology, and how you might think we could interact these things in a better way, if we need to at all.

Screenshot of Twitter when it first launched

I joined the site on the 27th February 2007 (it launched in March 2006), which seems a scary long time ago in the web, and so I was hunting around for a review of the site when it first launched. This post from Techcrunch is pretty interesting to read — here are a few quotes from the article:

I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.

If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I’d give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea.

Now, it has over 200 million registered accounts, with over 1 billion tweets posted every week, and whilst it first promoted itself as an SMS-based update of course the rise of the smartphone has meant that much more could be achieved on the go, but its focus from the very start has remained of realtime status updates, wherever you are.

“We decided to recommend a straightforward sans serif font. Predictably, this recommendation was greeted by complaints. It was too generic, too mechanical, too unstylish, too unrefined. I had trouble responding until I added two more elements to the presentation.”

Does this look stylish to you? Does it communicate anything about fashion or taste?

The next slide…

Now what do you think?

It worked every time.

I’ve really enjoyed reading this book so far, and because they are short essays, you can pick it up and read a section in just a couple of minutes.