Interactive goes beyond online communication and starts to explore new frontiers, from outdoor advertising to context sensitive ads (Minority Report, anyone?). Take for instance a shopping center in Portugal, promoting a witchcraft fair with an outdoor taking sensors and measuring the amount of people who walked underneath the ladder.

Would you call this digital? maybe. But interactive it definitely is.

If Leo Burnett did the above being a somewhat traditional agency, you can expect digital agencies to do the same. R/GA is breaking down walls, exploring new areas such as event marketing or data visualization, while creating and producing commercials. But they surely kept their interactive background.

It’s the evolve or die time for digital agencies, and they could start by dropping the digital.

On a side note, the same thing happens regarding ‘social media’. Even if the most experienced web professionals call it ‘social web’, the former has become so popular with the press, that it’s hard to escape from this broadcast view.

Digital or social is not about the media. It’s about how people behave on those channels. Or as it’s often called, culture.

In one more example of multiples or synchronicity of ideas, today i tweeted an idea for turning 404 pages into a charity opportunity. Well, a few hours later i found out a campaign by Fischer+Fala for AACD (The Brazilian Handicapped Association).

When browsing to a partner website with an incorrect URL (which have over 17million of uniques), instead of the usual “Page Not Found”, the user is surprised with a plea for help by AACD, inviting donations on AACD’s website. And if your organization wants to do the same, just download the 404 page assets on the website.

Turning a browsing error into a charity opportunity is a great example how we don’t always need big budgets, but rather be ingenious with what we have available.

That didn’t work, as McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” was mostly fit for a broadcast age. Enter the Cluetrain Manifesto, Tim O’Reilly’s web 2.0 and a new conversation age: from mass media to social media.
With this new communication paradigm, people shape the medium: from Twitter lingo to collaborative platforms, media became social, with many online citizens entering the conversation.

Photo by purplemattfish CC BY-ND 2.0

Paper.li, The Daily, Flipboard or even your regular iGoogle are the first wave of personal media, with users and algorithms adjusting the media stream. These new personal media platforms draw upon mass media and social media (our social graph to be more precise) and combine them to create personal dashboards with our own set of preferred media.

We’ve come a long way, from blogs to new forms of publishing such as Storify. To truly become the media, both producing and curating our own content, a new kind of service that adjusts the output to our media habits should appear.
Update: it’s rather telling than one of the few ways of making something go viral is to make it personalized. From Elf Yourself to Uniqlo’s UTweet, there’s plenty to choose from.

The question these days is: will it come from Facebook or from Google? Considering that we’ve been crossing the media the past decade, I for one would appreciate that publishers took the lead. Both the Guardian and the New York Times have been brave enough to experiment, but considering the mass media potential for online video and the upcoming TV platforms, i wouldn’t be surprised if some major network decides to take a radical leap for the next decade. If they don’t, Google will disrupt as usual.

Personal media and the platforms to aggregate/create it are worthy of more attention than the social media echo chamber. Yes, we’re social beings. But we’re also individuals, searching for better ways to cope with our desires, interests and yes, media. And as we cross our media, we atomize it: more personal, smaller but always part of a bigger system. So, where’s my media microscope?

On the web, this trend was assimilated by popular websites like MySpace or Yahoo allowing customized homepages where registered users could setup their own layouts and snack-sized information blocks. On MySpace, this feature reflected a desire for self expression, even if the features and technology were rather limited. The liberal customization eventually caused the downfall of MySpace’s popularity, a rococo of visual design and high signal/noise ratio not very friendly to ensure loyalty amongst visitors and seduce newcomers to the service.

Personal aggregators become popular around 2005 with the launch of Netvibes, later followed by iGoogle, structured around the key concepts of data syndication and widgets. Similar models emerged such as PopURLs, which led do Guy Kawasaki’s internet newstand AllTop.com, that act more as filters than customizable services.

From 2008 on, with the growth of lifestreaming services (Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook), social profiles become themselves information filters, both personal (social recommendation) and public (e.g. CNN’s @breakingnews), with users shifting their media consumption habits to where their friends were.
Personal aggregators at the time had almost no social features, targeted for a tech savvy audience, who used them as a start page but choosing to read information on Google Reader or dedicated apps and services (caveat: this is mostly anedoctal evidence gathered from my circle of friends and some web analytics data, being my blog one of the default subscriptions on Netvibes for portuguese users).

Referrals from Netvibes to this blog

Google trends for Netvibes, PageFlakes and PopURLs

With the launch of OpenSocial and skins, iGoogle tried to innovate, but this space reached maturity, and as with most technologies, we’re now witnessing the decay. Users started to choose a different kind of aggregation and knowledge management services, based on different platforms such as Tweetdeck (desktop) or Instapaper (mobile). Social filtering also kicks in with web services like Digg, Reddit or the more recent Paper.li.

If things look harsh for personal aggregators, it doesn’t help that RSS subscription isn’t in a good shape either, not being understood/used by the early and late majority. It should suffice as evidence the shutdown of one of the most popular subscription services, Bloglines. Information consumption shifted from push to pull, and we’re in the real time age.

The biggest challenge facing personal aggregators is to limit themselves to a classic customization and not a true, valuable personalization: focusing on the superficial (colors, layout, widgets) and not the essntial (information filtering, personal recommendation). While customization is easy to achieve with current technology (cookies, personal settings), personalization is a whole different game. Some notable exceptions come from Google: Priority Inbox on Gmail or “More blogs like this” on Google Reader are only possible thanks to network effects, by aggregating behaviors of millions of consumers and learning from daily habits.

Photo by Jinho Jung, under a CC license

The way i see it, for personal aggregators to survive, they need to evolve from classic Lego to Mindstorms.

Even web companies with true fans reach a point when branding becomes necessary to grow a market that’s getting crowded. With many people starting to explore Google’s products and services, an ad that is relevant and tells a powerful story only helps to conquer more users, responding to needs that later get extended to their professional choices (think AdWords or Google Apps).

This need for branding for web companies will become even more evident the next few years, as startups try seduce advertisers by getting more reach and visibility. But instead of using the eyeballs approach, we’ll have a more combined branding approach.

Foursquare, the location based game, and their recent partnerships with Zagat or Marc Jacobs is an example of this sponsorship leveraging a web brand, . Other examples include ExecTweets with Federated Media and Microsoft or even more tactical approaches like the Let It Shine commercial for Honda and Vimeo.

Larger brands should take notice of these opportunities, by teaming up with web brands on relevant, win-win partnerships. As for web companies, Branding, even on a different form, is one step to leave their Beta label behind.

PBS Frontlines’ Digital Nation: from information overflow to virtual worlds, Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff do a great job on highlighting some of the challenges of the Millennial generation.

Also engaging was BBC’s 3D Documentary Explorer for “The Virtual Revolution: How 20 years of the web has reshaped our lives”.

Even with the 3D eating the CPU, the videos (with plenty testimonials of key web figures) are worthy of your next lazy Sunday. Beats watching American Idol anytime.

Photo by Julia Manzerova, under a CC License

The discussion on how these values translate on a Business-To-Business scenario is quite recent, with companies like Dachis Corporation or recent initiatives by SAP exploring these brave new waters. But one thing is to have a 10000 feet view on social business, another is having to deal with day-to-day operations, from procurement to human resources.
We all have heard stories about greedy managers or other forms or corporate assholes, that don’t care about the latest social technologies and are usually control freaks, oblivious about our oh-so-noble concepts of social capital, long tail or crowdsourcing. And worst, they push businesses into a new form of Prisoner’s dilemma.

The prisoner’s dilemma is a fundamental problem in game theory that demonstrates why two people might not cooperate even if it is in both their best interests to do so

Even if we have the best intentions and try to collaborate with other business, the fact is that the amount of effort we put on using social technologies isn’t returned with the same level of commitment by other companies which we deal on a regular basis. Much to blame is the selfish need for maximizing shareholder value that still prevails on many companies (despite having caused the recent economic crisis), forcing stakeholders not to invest in values and technologies more supportive of innovation and social responsibility.

Unlike Business-To-Consumer markets, the reason why i find this dilemma still stands on B2B is because of low adoption of public publishing platforms. Even if we consider Yammer or Linkedin, most of business conversations are shielded by corporate guidelines with a veiled interest on lack of transparency.
When will we see the corporate equivalents of Facebook and Twitter? Where companies cooperate in their best interests, with no hidden payoffs and in a transparent market, where the conversations are regarded with the same importance as in consumer markets. It’s time to replace the traditional industrial complex of pushing goods for the markets with a more design and socially responsible model, where hidden agendas are hard to maintain under public scrutiny.

Yes, i know it’s a dream. But so was landing men on the moon.

The study points to more than 3.8 million people age 15 and older, spending an average 1.9 hours online per person during the month, numbers that will probably be discussed the next 26th November at CAEM i-com National Roundtable (on Twitter @icomglobal).

The last few months i’ve also noticed a renewed interest on giving solid data about Internet behavior, as the market grows bigger with droves of new users consuming more bandwidth (either broadband or mobile).

The data on social networks is finally shedding some public light (disclaimer: Fullsix Portugal has also some panel data on user behavior), with no surprises on the top place for Hi5.com. Facebook numbers show some solid growth, but i’m still a bit far on my prediction that Hi5 would be surpassed by the end of 2009 (even if i seriously suspect that already happened in terms of active users). Twitter is a lot bigger than i expected, and something that most marketeers in my country have been ignoring.

Source: ComScore

Yesterday, the quintessential online ad resource BannerBlog featured two ads for Smart. Both pulled dynamic data — weather and maps — to build a display ad unit. I could be wrong, but the data source was probably some sort of API. For those not so versed in acronyms, Wikipedia to the rescue:

An application programming interface (API) is an interface that a software program implements in order to allow other software to interact with it; much in the same way that software might implement a user interface in order to allow humans to interact with it.

Flickr Mosaic: Crayonbox, constructed with Flickr API. Released under a CCommons license by krazydad

Like digital bridges, API’s request standartized information from public (and sometimes private) web services. From USA Spending to Fedex tracking, from Flickr to Google Maps, the interest for APIs has been traditionally confined to B2B/ERP and the Social Web. But lately the concept is extending beyond these areas: with developers creating exciting and unexpected uses with the new data available, and with consumer brands and the ad industry starting to let go of their closed silos, in essence “letting one thousand flowers bloom“. A good consumer brand example of this trend is the UK grocery chain Tesco, who announced a new API at TechForTesco and invited developers to tinker with its data, search for nutrition facts or send ‘ideas’ to the customer’s ‘ideas inbox’.

Web development frameworks have long been using these large building blocks to enable rapid development by a larger interested audience. They not only ignite the engine of innovation, sometimes stalled by internal corporate politics, but also allow brands to have a comfortable degree of control. With new data sets available, we could start thinking of new kinds of mashups, such as business data built directly into communication solutions, CRM programs feeding custom content or display ads with real-time data, as mentioned in the beginning.

Before a brand dips into this space, it’s challenge is to question which data set respects legal and privacy issues, while at the same time being interesting enough for developers and consumers to act upon. What they shouldn’t be asking is if an API is useful (it’s useful when the data is right).

If you’d like to know more about what’s being done with such web services, I highly recommend checking out the website Programmable Web. It’s a useful resource with over 1500 APIs that have been used in thousands of mashups.

The low-cost data glove (under $300) allows 3D interaction with virtual objects in augmented reality (AR) environments, with accurate 1-to-1 tracking of ones entire arm from shoulder to knuckles without external reference infrastructure .

Despite all my pet peeves with all the hype surrounding AR, i’ve been lately more thoughtful of the subject and there’s a few interesting projects being hacked, like this one from @noazark, who’s looking for investors.