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Bill Clinton on Saturday in North Carolina:
"Jesse Jackson won in South Carolina twice, in '84 and '88, and he ran a good campaign. And Senator Obama is running a good campaign."
Jesse Jackson, reached by phone in India by the New York Times:
"I don't read anything negative into Mr. Clinton's observation."
Riiiiiight.
A few things of note from the week, somehow all related.
First, Russell Davies' post on 2008 being the year in peak advertising. "If the online advertising promise comes true (though I have to admit I'm skeptical about that) then increased relevance and targeting means you won't get attacked by so many irrelevant attention seekers. So even if there isn't actually less advertising online, it'll feel like there is."
Next, Mark Chu-Carroll's piece Databases are hammers, MapReduce is a screwdriver. "Just because you've got the best hammer in the entire world doesn't make everything a nail. If you've got a screw, even a cheap, old, rusty screwdriver is going to do a better job."
Next, WD-50 in Manhattan. Enjoyed the popcorn soup and the Wagyu flatiron with coffee gnocchi. But the real surprise was the beer ice cream, which was delicious.
Next, Lost Maps, because I'm more than ready for the (abbreviated?) season to get started. Also, the little tidbit highlighted on the Google Maps team blog: " It seems that whenever someone mentions Canada, they are in fact lying." Canada == giant Mystery Box.
Finally, the game Passage. A twisty maze, all alike. "The world in Passage is infinite. As you head east, you'll find an endless expanse of constantly-changing landscape, and you are rewarded for your exploration. However, even if you spent your entire lifetime exploring, you'd never have a chance to see everything that there is to see. If you spend your time plumbing the depths of the maze, however, you will only see a tiny fraction of the scenery." (Emphasis mine. And I should have followed .tiff's advice back in December.)
From the "short messages not sent" department.
OK, that second one up there wasn't so short.
Business Week's Jessie Scanlon covers The Designers Accord, "a call to arms for designers to engage in the environmental movement with optimism and creativity." The core of The Designers Accord is a set of principles around bringing sustainability principles and practices to the product design process. From Scanlon's piece:
For clients this is significant because it means that sustainability is going to be part of the conversation regardless of what studio they're talking to. Core77's Chochinov draws a comparison to LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design), the rating system introduced by the U.S. Green Building Council in 2000. "Today, you can't have a conversation with an architect without the question of LEED coming up," he says.
LEED obviously has a head start, with its well-defined set of ratings and processes for project certification and professional accreditation. It will be interesting to follow Designers Accord to see if there is a similar path to follow w/r/t product and packaging design...
This is pretty much the definition of a first world problem, but I know I'm not the only one who thinks the new Gmail UI for the iPhone isn't all its cracked up to be. They moved basic transactions like reading and archiving messages into asynchronous calls, and it creates this incredibly disjointed and sluggish user experience. Case in point, archiving a message.
Look, I'm a big fan of asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Just like I'm a big fan of HTML and CSS. And heck, HTTP for that matter. But the team made the technology they used the lede of the story, which leads me to believe that the requirement wasn't "make Gmail faster for iPhone users, especially on EDGE," but something like "port UI to AJAX."
On the plus side, IMAP setup is now much easier, so maybe I'll switch to that.
...sometimes content management systems produce pure poetry.
Just because, an entirely selfish list of five AppleiPhone-related things I'd love to see come out of Macworld this week. Not being a shareholder (you idiot --ed.), these matter to me more than some 0.3" thick flash-RAM based tablet multitouch Macbook bundled with free EVDO for life as long as you consume all your media through iTunes.
Hey, three of the five meet the "something in the air" criteria, don't they?
Timed perfectly for the pre-Cloverfield marketing cycle, TED.com has posted J.J. Abrams' talk from last year's conference:
J.J. Abrams traces his love of the unseen mystery -- the heart of Alias, Lost, and the upcoming Cloverfield -- back to its own magical beginnings, which may or may not include an early obsession with magic, the love of a supportive grandfather, or his own unopened Mystery Box.
I'm queuing that one up for the weekend.
Relatedly: Over the past several years, Bay Area painter Squeak Carnwath has routinely contributed Grab Bag Mystery Boxes to fund-raising art auctions. Here's the description of one from a 2002 di Rosa Preserve auction:
The object contained inside this box is presently a mystery to all. You, the bidder, are now taking a risk similar to the creative risks that artists take when they make a work of art. You, dear auction bidder, are experiencing the UNKNOWN. For the artist, making art is an exercise in trust. Trust that the unknown will reveal insight. You, like the artist, do not know what your desire will reveal to you. The item contained herein could be an artwork of my own making, studio archeology, an artwork by another artist, a grocery list, a sculpture, a drawing, jewelry, photos, materials to make your own artwork, a lock of hair, etc. etc.
Yesterday American Public Media's Marketplace ran a segment on the death of the plastic shopping bag and the rise of the reusable. Here in San Francisco plastic shopping bags have been banned, and when you're around town you see more and more folks trucking around their consumables in their own bags.
The Marketplace story featured Vincent Cobb, president of the ecommerce site Reusablebags.com, which sells, obviously, a wide variety of reusable shopping bags -- from ultracompact to thermal to heavy duty. They're also venturing into the "Fashionable" category, with about 15 SKUs that are a little less utilitarian and a little more "high design." The entire category of reusable shopping bag is relatively new; though Reusablebags.com was started in 2003, searches for similar product on eBags.com, the gorilla in the bags space, came up empty.
Which brings me to the opportunity: designer and custom-printed reusable shopping bags. The trend setters in the major cities (where banning or reducing the use of plastic shopping bags is likely to happen) are going to look at the shopping bag as another outlet for self-expression. In the near term, look for boutiques in these cities to start carrying limited run high-design reusable shopping bags.
And then, look for the shopping bag to jump to the mass-customization and community-designed segments. How long until Zazzle or Qoop offers custom printed shopping bags? Wouldn't you just love to guilt your friends and family into adopting a reusable bag with a bag that features pictures of their kids? ("Do it for the children...") Or how about skinnycorp spinning out a threadless or Naked and Angry tailored for shopping bags? The clever illustration opportunities are endless...
More Wednesday coverage of what New Hampshire Tuesday means: Ad Age looks at the shift coming in the campaign from on-the-ground flesh pressing organizations to a necessarily more media-driven campaign. After all, there's no way in hell the candidates will be able to shake hands with every single likely voter in all of the Super Duper Tuesday states.
"They'll be looking at tactical media strikes in select markets vs. a national effort," [Democratic Media Consultant Steve McMahon] said, predicting that national cable and some network TV news and public-affairs programming could be the beneficiary of any national buys.
It's even more interesting for the Republicans than the Democrats, according to Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, especially if there's no clear front-runner.
"Feb. 5 is potentially going to be a problem for most of the Republican candidates," he said. "Unless Romney wants to take all his [personal wealth], competing in all 20 states is going to be prohibitively expensive. They don't have $40 million to $50 million in the bank, so what you are going to see is a very different process and a different kind of ad strategy where they are going to do national cable and look for other places to target."
