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.
Food for the future | 011107
While we're on the subject of environmental issues... this site about food waste is a great idea and very tastefully implemented, with lots of practical advice.
Oh, and a hat-tip to Undying King Games for drawing our attention to Predictify, an interesting new take on the growing betting-on-real-world-futures phenomenon (ie the 'wisdom of crowds').
Categories: play
I sing the city electric | 181007
It's got a New Zealand-specific bias, but ElectroCity is a great idea: a city sim game in Flash that's based around environmental and energy constraints, teaching some useful lessons about how power is generated and energy sustained in the content of global warming. Oh, and it's pretty and fun.
Categories: play
Make your own entertainment pt 2 | 151007
Wikinomics, Microtrends, Long Tail, Tipping Point... there's good money in coming up with some dubiously-argued premise for How Everything Works in modern society. Now Wired magazine has provided a handy concept generator for rolling your own.
Categories: play
Make your own entertainment | 250907
Here's more on crowdsourcing entertainment: (a) the enjoyable collaborative sitcom Where are the Joneses? (watch the episodes here), where episode ideas were discussed on a wiki (b) Crude is a documentary about climate change and the oil industry which has been 'crowd-funded' - and contributors have also been invited to appear in it.
Categories: play
Taking on Lulu | 090807
Interesting to see that Amazon has launched its own on-demand publishing platform, CreateSpace, covering video and audio as well as books. this could be a serious challenge to the main player so far in this field, Lulu.
Categories: play
A picture's worth a thousand free reproductions | 110707
Schmap's creators have had a smart idea. We came across them through an email requesting use of an image we'd put up at Flickr, in this case of a place in Edinburgh - Schmap publishes travel guides and is hunting down images people have posted publicly to use in them. They don't pay, but promise acknowledgement and possible exposure. They're the ones who gain, though: free content, already tagged and labelled.
Categories: play
Not getting things done | 090707
There's a huge wave of 'productivity' sites on the web, notably Lifehacker, Merlin Mann's 43 Folders and David Allen's Getting Things Done movement. But we rather prefer the approach of structured procrastination advocated by philosophy professor John Perry: in essence, procrastinators are often incredibly productive while putting off what they're actually supposed to be doing. In this vein, there's an early (1949) essay by Robert Benchley, and some interesting alternative productivity roundups at blog.pmarca.com, plus Richard Oliver's purposive drift project.
We only wrote this entry, of course, because there was something more important to get done.
Get your spoilers earlier | 050707
We were intrigued to discover Minisodes: old TV shows condensed down from half an hour or an hour to no more than six minutes. Of course, many YouTubers are doing this for themselves already, and often with rather less stale source material. But could it be a glimpse of the mobile future of TV?
Categories: play
Crowdsourcing movies and bands | 110607
From the beginning we were fans of the idea of A Swarm of Angels (though the idea of a swarm of angels might alarm anyone who saw the latest episode of Doctor Who, 'Blink') - though it's hard not to see it as a classic example of trying to achieve something by committee - at times it seems like nothing's ever going to happen. Hats off, then, to the team behind Four Eyed Monsters (which also sounds like something from Who), who have decided to focus on their own project, but leveraged the internet to make it work. We look forward to watching it this week. Broadly in this vein, but for music, Sellaband is one to watch, too: get 5,000 fans and they'll take things further. (However, thanks to Thoughtplay correspondant RGL, who comments: 'if you've really got 5000 fans, then you could do a whole lot better for yourself than you can with Sellaband')
Categories: play
Slow but careful reading | 250507
Here's a good idea which has been doing the rounds of the net this week: reCAPTCHA. Web users are now largely inured to using 'captcha' systems which oblige them to verify they're not computers (ie spammers) by entering a displayed word or some gibberish correctly. reCAPTCHA leverages the concept to help digitisation of books - two words are displayed, one from a scan of an old book; enter the captcha correctly and it assumes you've read the other word right too. Presumably more reliable than OCR, and a classic example of crowdsourcing. Tie it in with Gutenberg's distributed proofreading program, and this could make inch-by-inch but valuable progress through the archives. (Read the reCAPTCHA creator's original post here.)
Categories: play
Worth the wait? | 140507
Swapaskill is another 'gift economy' site worth watching - though it has been a long time coming since its somewhat premature announcement in The Guardian back in November. It seems to be working now, though you have to register to see how it works, which is pretty annoying.
(On that cool-idea-but-annoying-wait-etc theme, the beta of much-awaited online TV provider Joost is finally rolling out to the world - but woebetide you if you're a Mac user with a pre-Intel model...)
Categories: play
Wikipedia goes offline | 270407
Wikipedia has become available on CD, with a selection of around 2000 articles. The URL and common sense would suggest DVD would be a better format, presumably on its way - though given the increasing availability of WiFi (and the fact that you can already put Wikipedia on your iPod (we've got it running nicely on an old iPod Mini), this does in some ways seem a pointlessly retrograde step. Maybe a book version next? (There were rumours of one years ago.)
Categories: play
Viral marketing | 200407
Here's an interesting idea: Who is Sick? invotes people to (anonymously) post details of illness to get an idea of epidemiological spread - it's mainly US-focused, but does also cover Europe. John Snow's famous 19th century cholera map meets Web 2.0 mashups. (link via BoingBoing)
Categories: play
Is Scribd too cribbed? | 180307
Scribd has been described as 'Youtube for documents'. Users upload text documents to the site in pretty much any format - then visitors can view them in a nifty embedded flash viewer on the webpage. The intention is that it opens up all of those documents you have lurking on your hard drive to a global audience of potentially interested readers. Even better if someone wants a printed, bound hard copy of content by using a tie up with Print(fu) - with Scribd and the uploader taking a cut of the revenue generated.
So far, so neat. But what happens if someone disobeys the rules, and uploads content that they don't own the copyright to? Well, for the item to be removed Scribd require "A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
To put it bluntly, Scribd will allow for uploaders to potentially make money from copyrighted material that they have no rights over unless the copyright owner takes the time and trouble to continually check the site for infringement. We're no IP experts, but we think it safe to say that our tame IP lawyer would have kittens if we tried something like this - the $300k Scribd got in seed funding won't last too long if (when) someone takes issue with this. If publishers are up in arms about Google enabling segments of texts to be read online they are going to totally lose it with Scribd.
We imagine that the rationale behind this approach is that it is too hard to actively police the uploaded materials - and that a wiki-type group monitoring approach is open to abuse. This might make practical sense, but it won't stand up in a court of law. Surely using the precautionary principle and allowing the flagging of dubious material would make better sense? Thoughtplay finds it hard to believe that Tom Morrow owns the copyright to both Asterix and Dilbert - or that it really should take a letter from the trustees of the estate of Bertrand Russell to get Mega Therion to take down A History of Western Philosophy.
Categories: play
Mashing up the stats | 120307
Further to our observations on correlating T-shirt sales to political success, data fans will love Swivel - a site which invites users to submit sets of data of any kind, and then make daft (or possibly insightful) comparisons between them. For example, this chart want to suggest wine drinking and violent crime are mutually exclusive. No great surprises there, perhaps.
Categories: play
X marks the spot | 070307
There an awful lot of Google Maps mashups around (visit Google Maps Mania for a huge list of them). But for simplicity we particularly like Pin in the Map: zap the location, add some text, and send the link to your buddies.
Categories: play
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.
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
Second Life is precisely as dull as a dictionary | 310107
Clay Shirky offers a very interesting analysis of why Second Life, in view of our expectations of it, is doomed to disappoint - and the fact that many people try it and then don't go back is the proof. He contrasts it with virtual game environments (such as World of Warcraft), which have demonstrated much more success in terms of user loyalty and satisfaction.
Shirky's point is that games create, in the terms of Homo Ludens author Johan Huizinga, a 'magic circle' - a microcosm governed by clear rules. It may mirror some aspect of the 'real world', would would never attempt to reproduce it entirely.
Isn't this, at heart, an argument - which we'd support - that computer games are an art form? This is exactly what novels do. Second Life is not so much an art form as a peculiar sort of reference book - as is common with dictionaries, people look up sex first and, after a few moments of dull titillation, away they go. Unless they're sociopaths...
Categories: play
Amazon plays tag | 250107
Read/WriteWeb offers an interesting post about recommendation systems. They say: "The Amazon system is phenomenal. It is a genius of collaborative shopping and automation that might not be possible to replicate. This system took a decade for Amazon to build and perfect. It relies on a massive database of items and collective behavior that also 'remembers' what you've done years and minutes ago. How can new companies compete with that?"
True it's impossible to compete with the amount of data Amazon has, but as we explain at WSIRN, you don't always look for stuff you like yourself at Amazon - it might be a gift for someone else, or you're just researching something.
In a subsequent post, R/WW draws a useful distinction between item-based and social recommendations. Now that Amazon is embracing tagging, it will be interesting to see which turns out to be best.
Categories: play
Electronic books update | 220107
The Sunday Times reports that Google and publishers are working on a format to make books readable on screens both desktop and mobile. Why is this noteworthy? Don't we have suitable formats already, notably PDF? (In related news, it seems even the Sony Reader has a long way to go to catch on. It will do of course, though at Thoughtplay we won't really be happy until there's a technology that can be read in the bath. So far e-Ink seems the most likely bet.
Categories: play
New models for search... Not yet | 160107
There have been many attempts to come up with new angles on the search engine format, of course. Two recent ones have caught our eye. One is ChaCha, which adds the option to have a real human being assist you as a guide. Interesting idea, though it hardly seems like a revenue winner (services such as the UK's SMS-based AQA work because of people's needs when mobile [or drunk]). Also, when we tried it, the guide went totally quiet for ages, and never came up with anything; user patience is eggshell thin.
This week now sees the launch of WikiSeek, which aims to offer a search purely of Wikipedia and the sites it links to, thus theoretically maintaining a high quality. Nice idea, and maybe it'll work out - but the vast majority of WP users are going to stick with the search facility there, aren't they? WikiSeek surely needs to be integrated directly.
That's if it works, of course. We tried a search for 'Captain Scott' (this week sees the 95th anniversary of the polar explorer's famous death). Absurdly, none of the results on the first page at WikiSeek were for the Wikipedia page on the captain himself; and only the fourth result had a passing reference to him. Contrast a search on Wikipedia: straight to the correct page.
The beauty of the commons | 110107
A few months ago there was much, largely downhearted discussion about 'participation inequality' (usability guru Jakob Nielsen) on the internet, focused around a general principle that websites relying on user-generated content show a similar pattern. The rule of thumb (Nielsen again) is "90% of users are lurkers... 9% contribute from time to time... 1% of users account for most contributions". Media commentator Seamus McCauley comments for example that "Wikipedia in 2006 isn't substantially more participative than Britannica in 1911" (the latter had around 1500 contributors; two-thirds of WP is created by a third of its users).
(The same general trend is observable at our own site, What Should I Read Next?. As little as 5% of traffic comes from registered users - though they account for around a fifth of activity at the site, and of course all of the data. Among those registered users, the pattern repeats: 27% of registered users generate 82% of the content. By the way, Ross Mayfield provides a nice analysis of the 'power law of participation' [thanks, jvvw].)
While the 1911 Britannica is a work of beauty, and the expertise of its contributors more clear than that of the eager Wikipedians, it was compiled under an authoritarian philosophy. The beauty of the participative commons is that we all have the choice. If only a small minority actually contribute, that's the way people clearly like it: more people want to consume than provide. We have only ourselves to blame if we don't like it - and isn't that better than railing at an authority - whether an encyclopaedia or newspaper editor, or indeed a dictatorial government - who we have little or no control over?
Categories: play, thought, thoughtplay
Can Apple do it again? | 090107
Steve Jobs has just announced the new iPhone from Apple - a video iPod with a wide touch screen, only one button, that's also a mobile phone and internet device. It looks very impressive, and possibly the revolution this market needs - in his keynote address at Macworld, Jobs made a big deal of how 'smart phone' keyboards are a sticking point. If they've genuinely beaten the fiddliness of phones, it's exciting stuff. (Though not available until June in the US and the autumn in Europe...)
Free to good homes - a list of gift economies | 030107
At Thoughtplay we're fascinated by gift economies as well as commercial ones. Here's a quick roundup of websites based around the idea of free exchange of goods, services or just friendly communication where no money changes hands:
- books - Book Crossing
- books,music,games,films - chanceXchange
- any goods - Freecycle (local groups worldwide)
- skills and services - the LETS scheme (UK) (see here for links to similar schemes in other countries)
- postcards - Postcrossing (send to and receive from strangers)
- digital text/images/audio/video - Wikimedia Commons and Creative Commons
In broader terms, blogging, geocaching and of course Wikipedia are all gift economies too.
Simplify, simplify | 151206
Every day we're faced by what author Barry Schwartz calls The Paradox of Choice - we're inundated with consumer options, often so subtly gradated that we can't decide which is what - check out mortgage or cellphone plans, for example. So maybe new site what.shouldiget.com makes good sense: enter a type of product (inkjet printer, digital camera, that sort of thing) and it will suggest just one recommended brand. A nice idea, maybe even inspired by our What Should I Read Next?, perhaps!
Categories: play
Free books! Cheap sheep! | 051206
Science fiction author Cory Doctorow has long been an advocate of 'copyleft' and using Creative Commons licences to offer his books as free downloads. There's a new article by him in Forbes magazine explaining why. Of course, he does have the advantage of being one of the contributors to the second most popular blog in the world, BoingBoing...
Meanwhile, here's the other side of the coin: an artist getting people to make his work almost for free. He is Aaron Koblin and he paid 10,000 people a mere 2 cents via Amazon's Mechanical Turk system to create The Sheep Market - and now charges $20 each for sets of stamps based on them. (Thanks to SB&LB for this item.)
Categories: play
Hic transit gloria mundi | 011206
This might turn out to be a marketing experiment that the perpetrators will regret (or one they planned to go like this...): UK-based wine store chain Threshers is offering 40% off all wine and champagne (until 10 December) via a coupon distributed across the internet. If you're in the UK and fancy filling up your rack before Christmas, you'll find the Threshers voucher here. Apparently the firm's website has been experiencing serious access problems already due to the massive surge in interest. The BBC has also picked up on the story - which is hardly going to help Threshers.
You can find loads of other vouchers doing the rounds (many expire on 3 Dec), covering Borders, Selfridges, Gap and more - see a list here.
Categories: play
RSS: read all about it | 271106
We're keen on RSS feeds at Thoughtplay - and we have our own feed of course (if you're an existing reader, please note the link has changed to enable us to track usage with FeedBurner - the old one still works, but it would be great if you can spare a moment to update it!).
Mainstream awareness of RSS though is disappointingly low (though significant numbers of people get newsfeeds through services such as a Google Personalised without knowing RSS lurks behind it). Interesting services that can help mediate it to people used to older media include Zookoda's RSS to email service, the new FeedCycle which provides preset serialised information feeds (get travel stories, for example, or old Sherlock Holmes tales in regular episodes, regardless of when you subscribe) and the worthy but not-quite-right 'glossy RSS' of Idiomag. We've got some cool RSS ideas of our own - but for another time!
Modern manifestos | 211106
We'd like to recommend ChangeThis - a collection of modern manifestos largely in PDF form. In the collection you'll find Chris Anderson's original article about the long tail of product sales, and a sequel, Hugh MacLeod's encouraging essay on 'how to be creative', and much more. Manifestos are disseminated with Creative Commons licences to encourage the free spread of ideas. Inspiring for business and life alike.
Medium-tech batteries | 131106
Fresh from a small survey in Wired, in which 67% of respondents suggested batteries are the main technology most in need of an upgrade come two new (or at least improved) developments - water-based and paper-based batteries.
Categories: play
Another image search development | 081106
Further to previous discussion on image searches, there's a new twist in this field from Live.com - as well as offering text-based searching for images, it allows you to upload an image and then looks for common elements in other images (via TechCrunch).
Categories: play
Alternative ways of analysing image content | 051106
Image searches on the web are a tricky area: filenames don't always relate to content, and it's hard for computers to identify what they depict. Until now: new research at Penn State University has come up with a software method for recognizing image content. This could be a major breakthrough (if it works).
If you prefer to trust people, there's always Google's crowdsourcing Image Labeler.
Categories: play
The tragicomedy of the commons | 041106
The UK's Institute for Public Policy Research has published a report on copyright policy (see Ars Technica for a good summary).
In brief, it says there are four legislative models for intellectual property available, and encouragingly advocates the third:
- all knowledge is private property (US)
- knowledge is primarily private property, but some has public ownership (UK at present)
- knowledge is public property first, and secondarily a private asset (eg academic research papers)
- knowledge should be entirely a public resource (eg open source software)
Whether the mapping community would agree with this analysis is moot: the US offers its mapping data to the public domain, whereas the Ordnance Survey in the UK is notoriously litigious, and the Royal Mail overprotective of its postcode data.
Projects such as OpenStreetMap and the New Popular Edition Maps are thankfully trying to liberate cartography here too.
Bringing the long tail to retail | 021106
Here at Thoughtplay we've been watching the development of 'electronic ink' products such as the Sony Reader with great interest. But there's something else we've longed for, and now it's here: a book printer small enough to fit in a store. This is great, long tail stuff. It could give small independent bookshops a new lease of life - though the chains will probably beat them to it.
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