Says it all… From website called flowing data

Designers Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth looked at ink usage of some commonly-used typefaces, by hand-drawing them with ballpoint pens.

Scribble, scribble, scribble, and they got this simple bar chart with ink usage measured by, well, ink:

mpact font is such an ink hog. Such a drama queen.

See all the shots here.

[Thanks, @bambock]

design, ink, pen, usage

This is just a great – yet simple – idea: put a tiny tax on bankers, which in turn would give billions to tackle poverty and climate change, here and abroad.

Christian Guthier is a graphic designer, working on Social Marketing campaigns, adding a new element to the media marketing mix that already exists.

bankers, campaign, debt, poverty, Robin Hood, Robin Hood Tax, Tax, viral

A great little article from pingdom.com

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

After all, if we can look back on March 10, 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell initiated the first phone call with the words “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” we can surely have a look back at some more recent events that have shaped our lives.

These 15 firsts have been divided into three sections:

• Internet firsts – Notable firsts on the Internet.
• Web firsts – Notable firsts on the Web.
• Web service firsts – Firsts for a few notable web services.

Let’s get going!

Internet firsts

The first email

Ray Tomlinson is credited to having sent the first email back in 1971, and is also famous for having introduced the use of the @-symbol in email addresses to separate the name of the user from the name of the user’s machine. There had been similar systems since the early ‘60s but those had been limited exchanging messages with users on the same mainframe computer, but it wasn’t until 1971 that email started to look like it does today and could send emails over the network. Note that at this time, the Internet didn’t even exist, but its predecessor, ARPANET, did.

The first domain name

The first domain name ever registered on the Internet was “symbolics.com”. It was registered on March 15, 1985, by the now-defunct computer manufacturer Symbolics.

The first spam email

The first documented spam message was sent out to 393 recipients on ARPANET on May 3, 1978. The message was sent by Gary Thuerk and advertised the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computers. In other words, Gary Thuerk has the dubious honor of being the world’s first email spammer. It even earned him a spot in the Guinnes Book of World Records. Back in 1978, the term “spam” didn’t yet.

The first mobile phone with Internet access

The first mobile phone with Internet connectivity was the Nokia 9000 Communicator. It was launched in Finland back in 1996, but in truth the viability of accessing the Internet was at first limited by very high prices by the operators. In 1999, NTT DoCoMo launched i-Mode in Japan, which is considered the birth of mobile phone Internet services.

Web firsts

The first website

The first website (in late 1990) was info.cern.ch and ran on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page had the address http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html which contained information about the World Wide Web project. That specific page no longer exists but a later copy from 1992 is available on W3C’s site.

The first ecommerce site (and transaction)

Although it’s Amazon and eBay who became really big and famous, they weren’t the first ecommerce sites. Online retailer NetMarket claims to have conducted the first secure retail transaction on the Web. On August 11, 1994, the site sold a copy of the Sting CD Ten Summoner’s Tales for $12.48 plus shipping. Another contender for the crown is the Internet Shopping Network, which claims to have sold an item a whole month earlier.

The first online bank

The first financial institution to offer online internet banking services to all of its customers was Stanford Federal Credit Union in October, 1994.

The first search engine

Although Internet search engines had been around even before the WWW, they were limited in nature and usually only parsed page titles. The first full-text web search engine (like the ones we have today) was WebCrawler, launched back in 1994.

The first blog

Justin Halls started a web-based diary called Justin’s Links from the Underground in 1994. It offered an early guided tour of the Web, but became increasingly personal over time. New York Times Magazine has referred to him as the founding father of personal blogging. Of course, the term “blog” itself wouldn’t be introduced until years later (“weblog” in 1997, which led to “blog” in 1999).

The first podcast

Following discussions in October 2000, blogging pioneer Dave Winer added functionality to RSS to include references to audio content inside RSS feeds, making syndication of audioblogging possible. On January 11, 2001, Winer demonstrated the new RSS functionality by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News blog. The last part of the equation, downloading the sound files to an iPod to listen to them, started to gain popularity in 2003. The term “podcasting” for portable listening to audioblogs was introduced in 2004.

Web service firsts

The first item sold on eBay

Back in 1995, when the site was founded, eBay was called AuctionWeb. The first item sold on the site was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. When asked in an email by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar if he was aware that the laser pointer was broken, the buyer replied that “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.”

The first book sold on Amazon

The first book sold on Amazon.com (which started its service in 1995) was a book by Douglas Hofstadter called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

The first edit on Wikipedia

The first edit on Wikipedia was a test edit with the text “Hello, World!” made by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, but it’s no longer available. The oldest surviving edit on Wikipedia is from January 16, 2001, adding data to a list of countries. (The exciting stuff obviously came later…)

The first video on YouTube

The first YouTube video was uploaded by YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005. It’s called “Me at the zoo” and is a video of him at the San Diego Zoo. It has been viewed more than 1.5 million times and is still available on the site.

The first message on Twitter

The first tweet recorded (and still existing) on Twitter was Jack Dorsey’s “just setting up my twttr” on March 21, 2006. Jack Dorsey is the man who came up with the idea for Twitter. And no, twttr isn’t a typo. For a short time Twitter was referred to as “twttr”, partly inspired by Flickr, and partly because its five characters could be used as an SMS short code.

Final (not first) words

Unfortunately it’s often easier said than done when you want to find out the first occurrence of something. Even for “young history” such as this, the details have often been lost in the mists of time. So, if you’re launching something innovative today and expect to make it big, make some notes for posterity to make articles such as these easier to make.

curious, first time, firsts, firts, fun, internet, stats

This is a great article by Sean Carton

What do people want online? That’s a question we all ask ourselves constantly. Whether it’s developing a new web site, a new online campaign, or a new web-based business, understanding a consumer’s motives once they log on is a necessity.

Yet, in many cases, we don’t seem to agree on what people want. Some folks out there see the web as a vast, new field for advertising messages, assuming that while people may want to do something else, if we can entice them with flash (lower-case and upper-case) we can sort of trick them into paying attention to our products and services. Other folks seem to subscribe to the notion that people online are looking for entertainment and construct messages aimed at persuasion-through-playing. And, in other cases, the direct-response model wins out: Grab people when you can, get ‘em to take an action, and then market, market, market. The answer may be that the consumer has (and wants) a lot more control than we give him/her credit for.

Recently, two new studies were performed. One was conducted by Zatso (formerly ReacTv) using questions previously designed by theRadio and Television News Directors Foundation. The other was conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, part of thePew Research Center. Both shed some interesting light on what people want to do online. The answer, it seems, is very utilitarian: People want to accomplish something online. They’re not aimless “surfers” looking for a fix or a novelty. Instead, the average Net user seems to be a goal-oriented person interested in finding information and communicating with others.

Look at the Zatso study. Not surprisingly, “A View of the 21st Century News Consumer” looked at people’s news reading habits on the web. Surprisingly, though, it did discover that reading and getting news was the most popular online activity after email. One out of three respondents reported that they read news online every day, with their interests expanding geographically local news was of the most interest, U.S. news the least. Only one in ten respondents said they didn’t feel that it was important for them to keep up with events.

Personalization was seen as a benefit, too. Seventy-five percent of respondents said that they wanted news on demand and nearly two out of three wanted personalized news. Overall, the subjects that were surveyed liked the idea that they, not some media outlet, controlled the news they saw. They makes them feel that they’re better equipped to select what they want to see than a professional editor.

The Pew Research Center study (as part of its Pew Internet and American Life Project) garnered a significant amount of media attention when it revealed that regular Net users were more connected with their friends and family than those who didn’t use the Internet on a regular basis. Yet, other data also revealed some additional interesting insights about online behavior.

Almost two-thirds of the 3,500 respondents said they felt that email brought them closer to family and friends significant when combined with the fact that 91 percent of them used email on a regular basis.

And what did people in this study seem to be doing online when they weren’t doing email? Half of them were going online regularly to purchase products and services, and nearly 75 percent were going online to search for information about their hobbies, or about purchases they were planning to make. Sixty-four percent of respondents visited travel sites, and 62 percent visited weather-related sites. Over half did educational research, and 54 percent were hunting for information about health and medicine. A surprising 47 percent regularly visited government web sites, and 38 percent researched job opportunities. Instant messaging was used by 45 percent of these users, and a third of them played games online. And even with all the hype in the media, only 12 percent said they traded stocks online.

Interesting numbers, especially when you look at how closely some of them correlate to the news study I mentioned earlier. But what’s really interesting is that in all these cases, what people are doing is looking for information (news, product information, hobbies) and transacting business. They aren’t surfing, aren’t aimlessly wandering, and definitely don’t seem to be focusing on “entertainment” specifically. Remember, 47 percent said they were visiting government web sites on a regular basis!

So what does this all mean to us e-marketers? Mainly, it means that if we’re constructing sites for goal-oriented consumers, we’d better make sure that we can help facilitate their seeking. Rather than focus on entertainment, flashy doodads, and useless splash screens, the most effective sites are those that help people get the information they want when they need it. Straightforward data, information that invites comparison, and straight talk are going to win the day.

I once had a participant in a focus group damn a site my company was working on because “with every click [he felt] we were getting halfway to the truth!” Let’s use the clue that people want to accomplish something when visiting our sites.

looking, people, search, want, web

Shopping is a buzz, an energy, but it uses energy too, all the energy needed to make all the things we shop for. So if you’ve got to shop but want to see the global temperature drop, buy the green thing that took lots of love to create but zero energy to make. Shop your sustainable heart out and Buy Nothing^TM

Love this spoof Amazon site:

amazon, creative, ecological, fun, idea, nothing, spoof

Why we need to think smarter when manufacturing, and producing marketing materials, fit for the future.

“As economist Herman Daly once commented, he would accept the possibility of infinite growth in the economy on the day that one of his economist colleagues could demonstrate that Earth itself could grow at a commensurate rate.

“Whether or not the stumbling international negotiations on climate change improve, our findings make clear that much more will be needed than simply more ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. This report concludes that a new macro economic model is needed, one that allows the human population as a whole to thrive without having to relying on ultimately impossible, endless increases in consumption.”

climate change, economic, economy, future, growth, poverty, wealth