Social business and the interest graph are both really important subjects, useful phrases, ones which may deserve to last. I realise though that I’ve been filtering them out of late, basically because they began to bore me.

Blame it on my being a neophile – too ready to move on to the next idea – or just a realist when it comes to neologisms: most of them won’t last, won’t leave much in the way of meaning or memory – gameify, phygital, blahblahnomics – so best not get attached, not to invest too much.

We have now passed through the trough of waffle with social business and interest graphs. They have stuck.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a mound of waffle or digital churnalism being hacked out on them, just that meaning seems to have attached to both, they have taken somehow, and interesting things are being written about both.

In an “ideas stand up” session in a Hoxton basement the other day I blurted out as much on stage. Social business had been in danger of being overused beyond the point of usefulness”, butthere is a useful point to it in my line of work: it describes the value, the discussion and the action in social media projects – they happen just adjacent to to marketing functions, in the bits where comms connects with rest of the organisation.

So, I like this from David Armano on social business: Social business: where it’s been and where it’s going

And the interest graph? Well that’s becoming very, very important indeed, isn’t it?

On that subject, I like this on the interest graph from Patricia McDonald at The Social Practice: The interest graph is the future of social commerce.

: : BTW this blog post was by way of testing out Blogsy, the iPad blog editor – it seems so good, I wish the did a Mac version. Hat tip to Adam Tinworth.

“A database of intentions” is how John Battelle described Google. It is a thrilling concept, at times unsettling, that you can see into the searching soul of the connected populace by seeing the words they use t find things.

Google Trends is one of those miraculous tools of the web that has quickly become commonplace. With a prophylactic time-lapse to keep its powerful advantage of insight, Google lets us see what people were search for by year and by region.

The other day I came across the Google Ngrams Viewer for the first time. This gives a slightly longer trends view in language, taking all the books since 1800 as its data set (actually up to 2008, I think).

I took a look at my first name, which is often misspelled by others as there is more common variant “Anthony” rather than my “Antony”. The latter is the Roman spelling, the former a Medieval version. In this Ngram chart though you can see that, in published works at least, the decline of the of the h-less version was confirmed only in the 19th century…

There are hours of fascination to be spent playing with this tool, uniting my love of data data with an even stronger obsession with words. Here is war and peace, as it were: note the relatively brief upticks in the trend for talking about peace after the two World Wars of the twentieth century, and the perhaps tragic falling away of peace as something that we write about since the 1980s, while war trends upward…

Over-simplifying the analysis like that is dangerous: this data is more likely to be useful in understanding the fortunes of words and phrases than instant snapshots of the forces of history playing out. Fun, nonetheless…

While the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon that cried “verbing weirds language” made a startement both wry and true, there are times when we can legitimately make the case for a new verb.

I’m not thinking of an unwanted and uninvited new word like “medalled”. That awkward verb will be said over and over this summer during London 2012, and I will feel a little pang of loss for our language every time. “Medalled” serves no new purpose – the nature of winning medals in sporting events has not changed noticeably – but it has manage to settle itself in to the vocabulary of our journalists and commentators almost unchallenged.

The verb I am going to put forward and test in the bear-pit of conversation and blogging is “to screen”.

Kevin Kelly offered this new verb in a talk he gave last year about the future of books.

“We are people of the screen,” he said, explaining that screens are appearing everywhere, that many people spend most of their time with them. “Publishing”, “posting”, “broadcasting”, “sharing”, all of these verbs dance awkwardly around what we are doing when we add things to great information machine that is the Web. Others then – we hope – go to that massive tangle of content, pick their way through with search engines and filters and feeds until they find something they want to screen.

It is always the screen that we use to see, to take in, to make sense of this world, what Kelly calls the windows into the machine.

While I like “to screen”, and I will use it, I can’t be sure that it will become a part of our language, of course. Just giving you fair warning that I will be weirding some language near you soon…

: : Another thought: looking through my Flickr photos for an image to accompany this post, I noticed there were very few pictures of screens. Of course I was looking at them on a screen, just as you are reading this on a screen (please raise a virtual hand if you reading this on a print out, or have your blog reading transcribed into wet sand or some other rmedium), but there were few pictures of screens…

The best screens are invisible, hardly noticed, the cleanest windows, forgotten as we look through them. I remember thinking that about the first iPad and again with the newest one – the brilliance of it is that it is all screen – that the machine gets entirely out of the way of the screen.

Image: The Rosetta Stone replica at the British Museum

The good news is… I’m blogging more. This is, I appreciate, mostly good news for me – as I’ve often noted, blogging works really well as a way of thinking and exploring ideas for me.

However, slightly confusingly, I am blogging a fair bit over at my digital strategy and earned media agency, Brilliant Noise.

I’ve not quite worked out which blog posts go where. Part of me thinks the more contentious ones should live here, but then I went and published a state-of-my-brain rant over at Brilliant Noise, and maybe that’s no bad thing.

This blog remains my public notebook, but I will post links to new posts here, but not re-posts as I’m reliably told this is frowned on by the Google.

Anyway, if you’re interested, here are my two most recent efforts:

• Earned Media Marketers Unite! – In which I talk about earned media and the need for leadership and integration rather than competition between PR/SEO/social/content/UX.
• Language, insight and luxury – Taking a look at some ideas from networks-focused research firm scenarioDNA about luxury brands and the need for brand taxonomies to use more appropriate and effective language in communications.

Falsche freunde. False friends. You hear a phrase that sounds like one you already know and misinterpret it…

As I’ve said before this happens all the time with the word “networks”. We’re so used to hearing it, prefaced by social-, computer-, broadcast, etc. that we think we know what it means.

Read the “five rules of human social networks” bit of Connected, by Christakis and Fowler for the merest glimpse of how hard it is to comprehend these things called networks and how they work. You can read the words, but can you grasp threshold concepts like – we have free will and influence our networks, but networks are also super-organisms, acting with an apparent mind of their own?

I read a brilliant presentation by network analysis research firm scenarioDNA today. I’s good because it doesn’t hide the complexity that we are dealing with when it comes to networks.

Once slide that had me exclaiming out loud (EOL, anyone?) was this one…

When I see something like the complexity of how influence boiled down to simple scoring system, I’m sceptical. When that simple scoring system is skewed by the fact that the data is incomplete – it can’t see all of their online conversations and relationships, never mind their offline ones – I am super-scpetical.

It’s ersatz insight. Smells like meaning. A stand-in for usefulness.

The apparent simplicity of quick-fix metrics simply muddies the waters, makes it harder for the real meaning in our metrics to stand out, to be grasped and acted upon.

Via Ross Dawson

Feeling a bit queasy from the over-chatter about Pinterest, I had it relegated to my list of “wait and see” web services (which Fourquare still sits on, while other less fortunate services have since faded into obsolesence).

Today, though, I actually found a use for the thing. Putting together some thoughts and a presentation around a metaphor about engines I developed a strong but powerful desire to collate a lot of images of Victorian engineering (this is not unusual, I could probably describe atavistic frenetic gathering as part of “my process”).

Once I would have dragged and dropped these into Curio, or perhaps saved them to a Posterous blog (well done them, by the way – couldn’t think of a better buyer than Twitter).

But Pinterest is absolutely perfect for that task. Love it. Maybe even finally understand it a little…

Now if you have any favourite Victorian machine images you’d like to drop in there for me, I’d be most grateful…

:)

I have a playful rule of thumb: If you wish there was an app or site for something, more often than not there is…

This happens so often it reminds me of the whole simultaneous invention phenomenon.

Feeling in the mood for some calm music this afternoon, I thought: “wouldn’t it be great if Spotify would play stuff by mood”.

I open up Spotify and there is the Moodagent app on the front page.

I click on the nearest calm song in my collection and ta-dah!: the perfect playlist…

Love it when that happens…

It isn’t social unless it’s shared.

I came across the phrase “for anything to be social, it must be shared” on JP Rangaswami’s blog today, which is a lovely meandering, insightful post and worth a read for its own sake.

That’s quite a useful way of thinking of the alchemical moment when content is transmuted into social media. It is the moment it is shared.

Shared, not spread. Spreadable media like viral videos is something you think about when you dehumanise networks, when you look at them as odd little organic conglomerations that you want your marketing message to spread through.

And you really don’t want to dehumanise networks – that’s when it all goes wrong…

The consequence of dehumanising social networks is that you create rubbish for them. Rubbish content, rubbish campaigns that you would think poorly of yourself, your partner, your best friend, if they shared it with you in your Facebook feed, email inbox or whatever.

You create it because you’re creating something for an audience you don’t really understand and don’t care about enough to find out about them, apparently. You just want them to spread the stuff, “Like” the stuff, retweet it to high heaven… You want the numbers, without the humanity.

“Social = shared” also reminded me of someone from one of the brands I admire most in digital, who says that in his team they quite often find themselves talking about “shared media”, a category apart from the Paid / Owned / Earned Media model which caught the imagination of the marketing industry a couple of years ago.

Shared media. Not ours, not theirs: shared.

Shared media works for me right now because it reminds you that you don’t own any of this – the spaces, the content, the attention – you are sharing it all with other people. And if you are doing anything really worthwhile it will be shared.

Sharing stuff is a mark of humanity. A mark of quality. A signal that something – an idea, a space, a network – is actually alive.

Via Adam Tinworth.

Thanks to the brevity and immediacy of Twitter I have already Tweeted saying everyone needs to read the sources of inspiration for this post. So you’ll forgive me for opening with some tangentilish thoughts…

Or maybe you won’t.

One of my favourite observations about change and the web is what I call “the fog of revolution”, a phrase that became very popular last year in a different context. When you’re in the middle of a revolution it is very hard to know what’s going on, not least when there are so many voices close by telling you exactly what is going on, and generally being very wrong.

You’re not sure where it’s going, what the outcomes will be – you’re riding the wave, charging through the fog with a roaring crowd, swept along by events, every now and again suspecting you might be influencing them, or at least involved in them – but you can’t be sure…

Revolutions do strange things to your perspective, to your sense of time passing and the velocity of change.

Alan Patrick notes in his post Snake Oil and Strategy

…as Bill Gates said about the Internet in the late 1990′s, the changes are less than you will expect in the next 2 years, but far greater in the next 10.

To give a couple of 2006 examples from my own experience…

You think that in the next year or so, Google will defeat black hat SEO marketing because of its superior resources and mission to find content. Five years later you’re right.

To give another: you think Techmeme is a beautiful model for organising buzz, for not only finding interesting things but getting a sense of what’s going on. Aggregation and curation will a major focus for brands and media companies alike – they will create content on their front page and offer a complementary page showing what everyone else in their network is saying. Six years later you’re still not right (although curation’s being taken more seriously – see Adam below).

You think social media as a term will most likely disappear and everything will just be called the web. This just the latest chapter in the evolution of the web. Social media’s just a term describing it. So wrong. Six years later, social media seems to be used as a proxy term for all things digital…

One insight I still find useful that was drawn in those heady days is this: the revolution we are living through will bring constant disruption for the rest of our careers/lives (whichever ends first)…

Adam Tinworth, a comrade in connectedness from all the way back then, wrote an amazing summary of the themes from Social Media Week London.

This has been followed by some further thoughts from Alan Patrick, who I consider the antidote to any bubble-headedness that my occur in my thinking.

Read both their posts, but Adam’s “five lessons” are these:

1. This is just the beginning
2. Practical advice is thin on the ground
3. Beware the noise
4. There’s lots of work left to do on curation
5. Events are the new media

Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. But the fact that it is the same as it ever was in incredible in some ways.

Oh yeah, when I say “same as it ever was” – let’s say except for “Events are the new media”.

That is huge.

The Brilliant Noise crew did some work behind the scenes on big events recently, and this rings very, very true.

Adam’s talking about people using social media to find ways meet face-to-face, but I think the phrase “Events are the New Media” also speaks to the importance of events in social media as a focus for conversation and community.

Take live television. The Grammys and The Brits – long format TV events – have both enjoyed the largest audiences for a very long time recently this year, after years of decline. In the case of the former, a lot of this was perhaps down to the death of a major pop star, but both shows took place in social media as much as they did on TV.

More on that another time, anyway…

The last thing the world needs is another jeans brand. Isn’t it? With so many companies competing in so many different ways – price, name, heritage, exclusivity  - you better have something pretty special to bring to the market…

When David Hieatt opened the proceedings at the Firestarters event at Google the other evening, he told us that a new jeans brand was exactly what he was building.

In the process he was bringing back to life a factory in his hometown of Cardigan that had been closed for 10 years and giving 400 (10% of the town’s population) people their jobs back was his vision.

That’s a nice story, but maybe not enough of a nice story to make you buy a pair of his jeans. Well, he had some ideas about what might add enough story…

In telling us how he decided to start up Hiut Denim, David related a lot of experiences and insights that were useful to any entrepreneurial soul. Previously, he and some partners started the clothing brand Howies, which they sold to Timberland and then regretted doing so deeply: ”We sold the thing we loved to people who didn’t… It wasn’t bad luck it was bad judgement.”

Interestingly, Howies was recently “released” by VF Corporation, which had in turn bought Timberland…

He decided to start Hiut after two years in the career wilderness. Sort of. He busied himself running long distances and organising The Do Lectures, one of the top ideas festivals in the world.

So a fairly fertile wilderness, then..

David had written a business plan for a jeans company, but sat on it for two years. He couldn’t quite motivate himself to do it.

Then he realised that there were many talented people in Cardigan who had spent their lives making jeans. He realised he wanted to do it, to have the town making jeans again and give them their jobs back.

He painted a picture of someone in San Francisco 10 years from now buying a pair of secondhand Hiut jeans. They would be able to access the “history” of the jeans, by scanning the “History Tag” with their smartphone.

Hiut Jeans are not cheap, they are aimed at the denim geek fraternity. People who will buy selvage denim jeans, go through six months of breaking them in, not washing them, popping them in the freezer occasionally, and all that jazz, so they are “just right”. Each pair of jeans wears differently, takes on some the character and history of its owner.

So Hiut owners may just be geeky enough to record bits of history and attach them to their jeans.

And there’s more meaning to this approach than gimmick. As David said… ”If you make something to last it will have more stories to tell.”

These are designer, flash-for-the-sake-of-it, one season and they are out of fashion items. They are designed to last, and while they last to accrue meaning.

“In the beginning, they will be like a blank iPod with no songs on it,” said David, “It will take two or three years for them to mean anything.”

So there’s meaning that grows over time, there’s history being made, there’s love and craftsmanship.

That starts to sound like a powerful product story to me…

What I really liked though, was that he was ready to find another way of storytelling, of making meaning around the jeans if the label idea became tired or didn’t do the business: “If it’s not enough, we will have another idea.”

That was something echoed in Adil Abrar’s talk later when he said : “Vision changes, values don’t.”

Hiut started production yesterday. Good luck to them, I say…