I'm a digital advertising creative living in Sydney. This is a collection of my work and some stuff that interests me. If you don't like Courier you should subscribe to my RSS Feed.
I recently watched a documentary called We Live in Public, about an internet entrepreneur called Josh Harris who physically predicted future online trends. In the 90s he was often compared to Andy Warhol, but Josh knew people didn’t want 15 minutes of fame, they wanted to be famous all the time. In the days of dial-up he invented social media by creating an underground “hotel” where residents interacted through 24/7 surveillance. When he got sick of that project he and his girlfriend moved into an apartment with cameras everywhere and crowd sourced their lives.
Yes that’s right he did that way before rubix cube guy had the idea.
The amazing thing is no one has heard of Josh Harris. Even the CEO of MySpace had no clue who he was, and yet he pioneered web 2.0. Go watch the movie.
I feel Wave has fallen to a similar fate, too advanced and bold for it’s time. Sure it probably would have taken off it had integration with Gmail, but that’s not really the point. People are saying they predicted it would fail because of various faults with the interface, but the interface did no justice to it’s working capabilities. The back end of Wave was far beyond anything else currently available and I sure hope in 10 years the whole internet functions the way it does.
Will be interesting to see what the talented team behind it end up doing. Josh Harris has been long forgotten and is currently living in Ethiopia, it would be sad to see the Google Wave team fall into the same obscurity. (Hopefully Greg leaves Google to become the next Willy Wonka.)
To all you haters, I hope in a few years you have the hindsight to see Wave pioneered Web 3.0.
Or rather, I used to wonder how I could work in the Google offices without knowing software engineering… and doodling was the answer. Although creative labs would probably be a better fit.
Also I have added a menu to the site with some popular links. Enjoy it while it lasts as I don’t particularly like it and it may vanish soon.
Speaking of site features, I have a comments section after every post. After receiving several emails and facebook messages about a post the other day I thought maybe no one had noticed it. Well it is there and am happy for you to use it as a soapbox.
1.This should be on gmail as well, the option to have a message delivered to the recipient at a set time in the future. This would be useful for sending reminders to other people, digital time capsules and at least a million other things. Such a technology existed in the late 90s when e-cards were popular, the options were “send now” or “send at future date”.
Why is this not standard these days?
2. As seen in this video, it would make cooking so much easier and creative. Pamela Fox suggested it be a gadget not a bot (as I originally concepted). Currently rethinking it and more on that to come…
As far as I know there are tons of interior design applications and all of them are rubbish.
My idea is you upload photos of areas of your house to a Wave gadget and change the colours of the walls/ carpets etc straight onto the photos. You would be able to add furniture into the picture straight from an Ikea (for example) catalouge and if you gave dimensions of the walls, this could be used to position things as well as feng shui. Being on wave means you could work with family and housemates to find colours and furniture everyone likes.
4. Whenever you leave a job you get a big card signed by everyone in the office, which you lose at work drinks before getting a chance to read it. Wouldn’t it be better to have that card online so you could access it later?
My proposal is a wave gadget with ecard templates which coworkers can decide on and then decorate using photos or drawings of the person leaving. When everyone signs the card with their personal message there is an option to leave a link to your facebook or linkedin account so you can stay in touch. When everyone has signed it a designated person would publish the card and add the leaving person to the wavelet.
5. Imagine if Protools or a similar company made a Wave Gadget which allowed multiple musicians to upload and mix together their tracks in one place.
No more emailing different parts to each other just one place to mix the music, discuss the lyrics and potentially even publish straight to Myspace/ Purevolume/ Lastfm when finished. Instead of paying for expensive mixing software each song could just have a 5 second soundbite at the end promoting the brand who made the gadget. Would be perfect for start up bands and school music projects.
This is my idea to use Wave to make my life easier. A Wave bot which detects food names from your conversation and adds them to a gadget which suggests recipes. If a supermarket chain built this they could deliver the missing ingredients to your house!
“It’s unlikely that ad blockers will get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising needs to get less annoying.
“There will always be some group of people who want to block ads for personal reasons. But if we do a good job on the advertising side, people won’t want to block ads. People will find them actually useful.
“I think there will be a nice equilibrium. If people get too aggressive with ads, then ad blockers will become more popular and companies will get less aggressive with ads. The market will sort itself.”
Digital Creative Director for the world power in their NYC offices. Now I just have to work on fufilling the requirements:
BA or MFA degree in Design or related discipline
- I have a BCS in a related disapline, but already know my acedemic scores are not high enough. Thinking of maybe doing a MFA or a MPhil in new media, which university?
At least 12 years of agency/in-house experience leading digital creative for iconic global brands.
- Well I have total about 3 weeks worth of this. Might need to work on that, if I start now that means I can have this job in 2022 when I am 33.
Ability to work in a rapid paced environment on multiple projects in a scrappy, start-up atmosphere.
- Done! Although I don’t think it will be very “scrappy start up” by the time I get there.
Proven expertise at highly creative, global, interactive, innovative online marketing techniques.
Ability to communicate and sell ideas in client like setting and apply strategic thinking to our most innovative challenges.
- I’ll work on these ones over my 12 years of experience.
Knowledge of Flash, ActionScript, HTML, CSS, 3D, motion graphics and computer programming.
Advanced skill in InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop.
- I can do all that! Although not so hot on 3D…
I hate this ad so much that I blocked it from coming up near my content. They must have saved so much by getting a 4 year old to design it in paint that they can now afford to spam it across the internet… but on the New York Times? Since when were they using Google Image ads? Guess they aren’t doing so well with the new membership platform to resort to such cheap ads.
Speaking of Google ads though, my RSS subscriptions halved when I put ads in my feeds. It’s like people don’t understand that it costs money to publish content online and if you’re not willing to pay for membership then you pay by seeing ads. Similarly when people complain about TVCs, okay annoying that they are on SKY/ Foxtel where you already pay for content, but if you don’t want to pay to watch free to air channels the least you can do it sit through an ad break every once in awhile.
This old advert aptly describes my Halloween. Went to Google and ended up carving a pumpkin and a long with it my thumb (same thumb which got stitched back together in hospital last year when I cut into that instead of a pomegranate). Ended up finishing the job with a spoon (pictured left).
On Saturday James and I dressed up as a tiger and a circus master and went to dinner and a party. Got lots of stares at dinner, some place voted “Best Italian in Sydney” last year and it was terrible. Food took forever and came out burnt. Most pretentious blogs contain photos of meals at classy eateries, so I may have to start doing the same and writing actual reviews.
Going to have lunch with our account manager at Google today, and it’s Halloween tomorrow so I think there might be a few trekie outfits around the office. I am going as a tiger. Kind of a cop out as I already have a tiger hat and I seem to use it for all dressup parties. Tomorrow night though I will be accompanied with a trainer in sequined vest and whip! I love it.
Also here is a Halloween idea from Mac (makeup not computer):
