Think & Play
Thoughtplay is the creative team behind various popular websites and other projects. At this blog we give away bright ideas regularly, and comment on interesting trends both online and off. The thought channel is for more business-related trends, play looks at entertainment and leisure, and thoughtplay introduces our own creative ideas, as well as news about our projects.
Big in Sweden? | 220207
Obsessive trackers of web user statistics will know this already, but Alexa has added some new traffic measures.
For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Alexa tracks the relative popularity of sites by monitoring the browsing activity of users of the Alexa toolbar. It is far from perfect, but it is still the best way of tracking the traffic to a website if you can't get hold of the actual weblogs.
The new features include showing what proportion of the Internet community visit a particular site, and what the national breakdown of visitors is. We have been surprised to learn that our Whatshouldireadnext site is (relatively) most popular in Sweden.
Categories: thought, thoughtplay
It's not so hard to hunt and peck | 210207
Is democracy better for having constraints upon it?
We're not brave enough to discuss this in political terms, but here's a smaller-scale instance of the tension between freedom and constraint. Marketing blog Below the Line recently asked Is HTML the new typing? (hat-tip to Seamus McCauley for the link), making an analogy between the transition between typing as a specialist province and typing as a general skill without which people would be disadvantaged. Popular web services such as Blogger and MySpace, although straightforward to use, expect at least a basic understanding of the markup concept.
Meanwhile, somewhat on the other side of the fence, is Jason Calacanis, who says Wikipedia keeps contributors out by what he calls 'technological obscurification', demanding familiarity with specialist MediaWiki markup. One of the comments at Calacanis.com also draws the typing analogy, reminding us of when keyboards were originally made to slow people down rather than speed them up.
We commented ourselves recently on the participation inequality of user-generated content in general, but concluded that at least people now have the option to participate, which is more than they did in the past. We'll say it again now. Markup is a simple concept to grasp, but also, we suspect, an effective gatekeeper to put off people with only an idle interest in contributing to the data seriously. It's not just geeks who know the markup concept now anyway, so what's the problem? If editing Wikipedia really was an entirely transparent process, it would be much more exposed to abuse than it is currently. Is it so bad to expect people to have a basic element of formal knowledge beforehand, much as a journalist has to know how to type?
(By the way, there's an enjoyable web comic about the history of typing you can read - it's also propaganda for the sensible-but-overlooked Dvorak keyboard system.)
Categories: thought
Are things becoming more perplexing? | 110207
The hunt for the 'The Receda Cube' is over, with the prized object being dug out of the Nothamptonshire mud last week.
The cube - an 'artefact' 'stolen' from the alternate reality game (ARG) Perplex City - has been hunted for by more than 50,000 players around the world over the last two years. Clues to the location of the cube were revealed in the solutions to problems on 256 puzzle cards, hints within the the game and real-world events and media.
What makes Perplex City interesting is the financial model adopted by Mind Candy, the company behind the game. Rather than relying upon a subscription based model, the revenue required to run the game is generated through the sale of the essential cards and to a lesser extent generic merchandise. Could this be the next big thing for gaming? Index Ventures (an investor in Skype amongst others) are sufficiently convinced to have invested $3m in Mind Candy. At Thoughtplay, we have our doubts that this type of game will really gain a mainstream profile. Even though we are inveterate puzzle solvers and games inventors, we believe that the population of fellow travellers is orders of magnitude less than the market for Facebook or YouTube. We would however be happy to be proved wrong.
Yahoo's piping hot | 080207
When Tim O'Reilly describes something as a 'milestone in the history of the internet' it's definitely worth listening. The something in question is Yahoo Pipes, a clever, visually orientated way of plumbing together data and news feeds into new ways and applying filters to them. This essentially means people can create mashups without knowing how to use code (well, kinda) - take your favourite sources of news and so on, link them together and output only the stuff you're most interested in reading.
It's a cool idea and there are already some interesting uses in the first day or two - though given that, as we've said before, the world at large is still not really hugely aware of RSS and so on, it threatens to be another gimmick that the world of Web 2.0 adores but 95% of humanity doesn't understand. The real world is where most people accidentally type a URL ('whatever that is') into a field for search terms, or vice versa, and where people read the news that Yahoo's home page gives them in the first place.
Nevertheless, it is a great idea, and we'll be watching the way people use it closely.
Categories: thought
WSIRN/TON monthly update: Feb 07 | 050207
The top ten books at the site haven't changed this month, so here's some different data. We've spent ages analysing three months' worth of the data from the second half of 2006, and can now show the top ten books that people entered into the site - in other words the books that people enjoyed and have prompted them to seek recommendations for something similar, regardless of whether they're registered users. Here they are:
1. Harry Potter (all titles) - J K Rowling (2,10,12, etc)
2. 1984 - George Orwell (4)
3. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (1)
4. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (29)
5. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (16)
6. The Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkien (20,27, etc)
7. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (14)
8. The Life of Pi - Yann Martel (15)
9. Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk (36)
10. The Catcher in the Rye (5) - J D Salinger
The figures in parenthesis show the current position in the top ten of books listed by registered users.
Categories: thoughtplay
Pointed travel discoveries | 050207
We're keen psychogeographers at Thoughtplay, and heartily recommend The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel. It was there that we came across the wonderful idea that is Yellow Arrow.
The idea is that you place a yellow arrow sticker somewhere, eg on a lamppost, pointing to a place that interests you, and you register some text to associate with it. People spotting the arrow can then send an SMS to the code on the arrow and receive what you wrote. Sadly the site doesn't seem to have posted any news since 2005, and the most recent arrow registration we could find was September 2006, but it deserves a new boost. A great way to get a different view of the place - maybe they should integrate with OpenStreetMap.
Categories: play
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