The designs range from the batshit-crazy (but, yes, I want one):

to the *cough* aspirational:

to the only-slightly-bizarre:

to the really rather useful. (The Big Thunder is intended for farmers, who might need to work a hundred meters away from wherever they left their phone, rather than teenagers on the bus, I’m hoping).

There is also a semi serious point here.

One of the big ideas raised is that these crazy phones just don’t appear in the West. Manufacturing is so expensive here that only big, serious players can get started. However, in China, these devices can be built to order in tiny batches for a little as $40 a unit; and then sold for $150.

Innovation in product design is really expensive here in the West, and so a lot of would-be inventors have turned to the Web instead as a platform for their creativity. Hence the whole Web 2.0 thing has been a magnet for startups. In China, though, as mad as some of these products may appear, they reflect a raw creativity and inventiveness that we just don’t see here when it comes to the design of electronic devices. Many of these models will, of course, sink without a trace. But how much higher are their chances of coming up with a formula that genuinely catches people’s imagination and meets needs that no-one anticipated? The people behind these phones are rightly described as “hacker entrepreneurs”: next Dysons of the world.

This is not to write off Western phone designers, of course. Our phones are – on almost all measures – ‘better’ than these devices. But the products we have demanded and the market we’re in make this spirit of carefree, creative experimentation (without a care for focus groups, brand continuity or err… electrocution hazards) unlikely to happen very frequently.

(via. Mobile Monday)

with this, which arrived in my spam box today:

I wonder if it’s always true that a new area attracts charlatans? I suspect so. There have been plenty of medical charlatans in recent years. You look back at the history of science and there’s all sort of whackos.

In the case of social media, though, I think we’re all aware that there are an especially large number of hucksters out there. Why?

• It’s easily faked. Put some ‘read-write’, ‘paradigm change’ and ‘transparency’ into your presentation and everyone’s game.
• Multiple Personality Cash Order. Create a load of fake accounts and your client will be delighted that so many people are commenting on their blog post about goat collars, or something.
• Preying on the fearful. There’s still an idea, among some execs, that the web is very new and very scary. Show someone a negative review on a blog and they shit their pants.
• The basics are *so* easy. Whacking up a twi/fac/mysp/4sq/etc account is a piece of piss. So is blogging. I am living proof.
• People fall for these crappy formats = easy again: You wouldn’t stand for a ‘top five reasons why’ post in your favourite newspaper, so why are these silly lists continually at the top of social media tracking charts? I think it’s because we all want easy rather than hard, even though hard might be better for us.

Doing these things well is an entirely different matter, of course. Despite reading about social media and practising it in some ways every day for five years, and as a social web user for 20 years, I’m learning new things every day. And I’m still rubbish.

Notice anything unusual compared to the normal Nokia/Blackberry fare?

Answer below – but have a close look and a guess first…

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10 points if you spotted it’s got an A-Z keyboard rather than QWERTY. “Who would do a stupid thing like that?” you might ask.

Well, you’d do it if you were creating mobiles for an audience that had never used a typewriter, let alone a PC, like ermm… the 500mn Indian users that still haven’t got a mobile but will probably get one in the next few years. (India already has half a billion mobile users, btw).

Remember, there’s nothing natural or clever about the QWERTY key arrangement. It was supposedly invented to stop users of manual typewriters from mashing up their striking bits (name?) if they became too proficient. Apparently, though, that’s an Urban Myth. Nonetheless, anyone who types will have become used to doing so with a QWERTY layout and find that layout most convenient and easy to get to grips with if they get a button-based mobile. That’s not going to be the case if you live in rural areas in India.

In developing countries, it’s very often mobile-first. Before PCs, or typewriters or televisions or any of the historical progression we’re conditioned by in the West. If it was the first time you ever saw a keyboard – and, quite possibly – you were learning to read at the same time as using your mobile, wouldn’t an A-Z layout work better for you?

Lava’s site is here. You’ll also notice a lot of dual-SIM phones. Different operators offer different rates depending on the type of call and time of day. The cost-conscious with no intention of taking on a contract could make good use of that sort of adaptability. In situations where very impoverished people are involved, then it also allows people – even different families – to share one mobile phone.

We make a lot of assumptions, don’t we, about what is ‘best’ for interfaces to hardware and software? Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more A-Z phones in the worldwide market than QWERTY phones before the end of next year.

(via Unwired View)

Should people be allowed to be anonymous online? World of Warcraft developer Blizzard seems somewhat undecided. Earlier this week, it introduced a Real ID scheme that would force people to post under their real names on its forums. Following widespread protests at this movement of goalposts – from pretty-much 12mn of the game’s 12mn subscribers – the company has today backed down on the idea.

The anonymity debate on web forums is a timeless classic. I last tackled the subject here, where I argued that being able to hide your identity is a key, important characteristic of web communications and ought t0 be protected with as great a fervour as net neutrality, if not more.

According to Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, in his statement announcing that the move was to be retracted, the idea was to improve the quality of interaction on the forums and make them more welcoming to new users:

Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as conversation threading, the ability to rate posts up or down, improved search functionality, and more.

I think we all understand why a community manager might be tempted to outlaw anonymity. Web comic Penny Arcade pretty much nails it here, back in 2004:

You may also have come across Godwin’s Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

People are asshats on the Internet. Quite a lot of the time. As a gamer, I’m sorry to say that this is especially the case in the gaming community. By forcing people to reveal their true identity, the thinking goes, they are made to regard other people as human beings. Calling David Browne a “f**king ret**d idiot” is a bit harder than saying it to DethSlay84. Similarly, when you make that remark, as Eric Smith, rather than h8core666, you might pause to reflect that this will appear against your name in Google searches forever. [Names invented off the top of my head].

Or not. When people get upset, drunk, slighted on the Internet, then they tend to pretty-much blow caution to the wind a lot of the time. Look at any number of horrible hate campaigns on Facebook for plenty of evidence of people behaving badly despite their comments being linked to their own name. Unlike in real life, of course, the consequences don’t blow over after a week or so, though. They’re Googled – but people don’t often seem to think about that at the time. I’m not lecturing there – I have published some nasty posts right here that I later regretted. I think it’s the lag between regular social norms and the cybernetworked future: it’s just bound to happen.

I’m also bound to add that there are a lot of weird people out there. Some of whom are really unpleasant in their off-screen life, as well as on-screen. Having them able to track you down because you didn’t like the look of their Shaman’s buffs might well be a little off-putting to people. Remember, this isn’t a closed, consensual community, like your Facebook friends: it’s 12mn frothing lunatics. ;-)

Women and minorities have a pretty tough time as gamers. Take a look at this tremendous post on Metafilter for some education there. Short excerpt:

If you do post a picture (I never did) people either go nuts over how hot you are and won’t leave you alone — and the guys that perv on you treat you in a condescending way because hot=stupid; having to hear that shit addressed to other girls on Vent was really infuriating and uncomfortable — OR they make a point of constantly telling you how ugly you are and won’t leave you alone. There is no middle ground. They either want to fuck you or deride you. And it actually doesn’t matter how hot or how ugly you are, either; the hottest girls will get called ugly (and FAT, ALWAYS FAT), and the ugliest girls still have to deal with lonely guys who aren’t superficial. Any time the girl posts something thereafter, people will comment on her appearance, even though it has nothing to do with whatever is being discussed.

Now go read the rest.

Anonymity gives a lot of people a freedom they would not otherwise have on the Net. That’s worth something, isn’t it?

Finally, I so loved this in the RPS wrapup on the issue, despite the fact that it undermines my whole argument:

Plus the obligatory Downfall skit (totally inpenetrable to non-gamers, I suspect):

De-activating the plugin disables all the articles connected to it, as shown here, changes the title of your post, removes the tags, all the content (not just the feed content, but whatever you had to say about it, too) and the extract.

I wasn’t thrilled about the amount of control it was exercising on my blog’s content in the first place: dictating the title of the post, the tags and the excerpt. It also reverted these when I tried to change them. So I disabled it, whereupon it’s added insult to injury.

So, nice idea. Horrible in practice. Sorry.

You’ll have come across the stories, talks and interviews about Clay Shirky’s new book: Cognitive Surplus.

I think that all of us get – and recognise – the basic idea. Most of us spend/waste so very much time watching television. That’s typically pretty passive. However, an increasing number of people are doing something different.

We’re online, but not surfing. We’re making. Making videos and blog posts and discussing photos and creating reviews and all sorts of mad stuff. Here’s the man himself, explaining it all:

That is good:

• It engages the brain – to a greater or lesser extent. The couch potatoes are sprouting!
• It is intrinsically social. When we create stuff, we try to find audiences for it – for feedback, reward, because it deserves it (or not) – and the best way to do that on the Web right now is to do it in a social manner. Maybe making leads to social in an intrinsic way.
• We’re making fabulous stuff as a result. The whole of Wikipedia involved 100mn man-hours. But Americans spend that amount of time watching adverts in a single weekend. Open Source is typically unpaid. The possibilities are endless!

I’ve got to broadly agree with that. Brains, making, social – they’ve got to be good things. Shirky anticipates a trillion hours a week of time that people will spend on doing good stuff apart from watching TV. Woot!

But… I feel like I’m running out of cognitive surplus since I got a new job. The same way I did in 2008 when I started my last job and every time that happened before I started blogging.

And I find I am not alone. The majority of blogs contain the expression ‘sorry for not posting’… blah blah blah I’ve got a new job. The majority of open source projects, forum communities, web memes – run dry when the main person behind them gets a job.

Bertrand Russell recognised that there was a conflict between the productive use of leisure time and working life when he wrote his fantastic essay In Praise of Idleness in 1932. He writes of a wonderful vision:

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

But Russell recognised the conflict between working and doing cool stuff in your leisure time in a way that Shirky appears to be oblivious to. Most people are knackered at the end of the day. Are so many people under-employed that this is not self-evident? (I also enjoyed this spirited defence of TV by Tess Alps, representing the concerns of commercial TV, that appeared on the Guardian website today).

So yes, cognitive surplus. Wonderful notion. And when most people’s working hours are reduced to four a day, as Russell proposed, we might genuinely start to see what those trillion hours can do. But we need time off, too.

picture credit: Karen Norburg (found here)

Update:  I meant to include this terrific quotation from Milan Kundera, but I got lazy: “Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy”. Is this a fair description of some social media enthusiasts? ;-)

Regulars will have noted that things don’t stand still for too long here on twopointouch. Apart from the post count. Fiddling with new themes and plugins is almost compulsive behaviour. While I’ve only had around four long-term favourite themes over the last five years, there’s every chance that you’ll have dropped in at some point when I’ve been doing something totally different – for about five minutes.

This continual urge for dalliance when it comes to off-the-peg themes has now led me in a totally new direction. Actually making something for myself. It’s all a bit scary and random, but one of the things that I’ve learned is that there’s lots of info and tools to help you out.

This is how I started.

I like the functionality of the Hybrid theme for WordPress. It’s got tons of page templates, plugin-compatibility and SEO right out of the box. So let’s start there.

It’s built for designers, and one consequence of that is that it looks a bit drab when you use it ‘naked’. The author, Justin Tadlock, encourages people to develop child-themes. For a while, I used his Structure template, which I customised very slightly to allow for full posts on the home page and the spaceman picture that I stole from the wonderful artist Jeremy Geddes.

Then I managed to break that, while trying to upgrade something else. I know how I broke it, and I could go back. But the breakage made me feel that I ought to be doing something else. That I should be trying to make something of my own.

So I reinstalled Hybrid and created a child-theme. This means that it takes everything Hybrid has to offer, but then gives you a blank canvas at the same time. By a blank canvas, I mean a new CSS file that can override every element in the theme.

Looking around recently, I liked the look of a theme called Clean Simple White. Up to a point. I liked the clean and simple bit, but there seemed to be loads of lines all over the place (according to my simple aesthetic sensibilities). It also didn’t work with the pages I’d already made and I like serifs for body copy – sue me.

So, I thought, I could take some of that look and remake it with Hybrid. You have to learn a tiny bit of CSS (this site makes it really easy) and you really want the Firebug extension for Firefox for testing and stealing things. And then it’s just trial and error.

I’m quite pleased with the look so far, but it’s maybe a bit wide and I want my spaceman back – maybe as a sort of ghost image behind the header area. Let’s see how we go.

You might not realise it, but Xara is one of the real grandaddies of software development, having been formed in the UK in 1981. Nowadays, the company is owned by the German Magic AG group, though they’re still based in Hemel Hempstead, north of London. Over the years, they’ve produced all sorts of stuff: they made Snake, Wordwise and Space Invaders for the BBC Micro, for example, and continued to support the Archimedes range of education-focused computers over the 90s.

Since 1994, however, they’ve been best-known for their Windows-based design software. It’s always had a couple of advantages over the ‘industry standard’ software tools, which remain as true now as they were 15 years ago:

1. it’s really fast. That’s less of a concern nowadays, under most circumstances, but until recently, doing anything with high-res photos was a pain in the neck;
2. mixing photos and vectors is really easy. While it’s predominantly a vector illustration package, it’s always been possible to edit photos in place, non-destructively;
3. it’s really inexpensive. The basic version costs £69, with the pro version costing £249. Adobe and Quark might sell you a beermat for that sort of money.

So what’s new in this version? For me, three things in particular. The last version – Xara Xtreme – introduced web page design options: these are now much improved. Second, Photo-editing no longer requires separate applications for 90% of what most people want to do. Third, working with longer chunks of text is a lot more powerful. There’s dozens of other things – you can check the list on the site.

It also looks very smart indeed.

Blogs are dead, right? The cool kids are all doing micro-messaging and video instead? They’re missing out on a world of value, if that’s the case.

I’ve been swotting up on mobile as fast as I can – the industry, companies, technology, the apps scene, for obvious reasons. And one of my most valuable sources is Tomi Ahonen’s blog.

Over the last couple of days, a terrific debate has emerged between Tomi and Steve Largent, the president of America’s CTIA, its leading mobile association. Here’s the highlights so far:

• Tomi lambasts the US mobile industry, claiming despotic activity.
• Steve punches right back – Tomi’s facts are wrong, he claims.
• Tomi redoubles his efforts – with a swift right-hook to Largent’s stats and a belly-punch to his argumentation.
• How will Steve come back in the second round? Is the fight over for the plucky Yank? Only time will tell.

This is bloody fascinating. It’s also long-form, packed with facts and learning for people like me and basically a great testimony to the art of the blog. You cannot do this stuff in any other format.

So I met this guy called Max in the pub – he’s a pal of some long-time cronies from the now-somewhat-dormant UK laptop business ACi.

Max suffers from hayfever – he’s known as ‘snotty Max’ in some circles. He’s tried all the drugs and cures you’ve ever heard of – as you would if your nickname was ‘snotty Max’.

Anyway, he came across the recommendation of rubbing Vaseline around your nostrils. It sort-of worked. But it smelled nasty and was all greasy, as you’d expect. Max, being the sort of person he is, wasn’t prepared to settle for ‘sort-of’.

The next bit is kind-of surprising. He started messing about in his kitchen to see what he could add to or change in the ingredients or process to improve the effectiveness and experience. And he came up with something that he reckons works. “I could sell that,” he decided and turned it into a product called HayMax (geddit?). He started visiting retailers – and he’s a pretty compelling guy – so he brought home orders regularly for 10-20 pots. They had to work double-time in the kitchen at nights to keep up the supply. Word-of-mouth was filling up as much demand as he could supply.

Then, after a lot of hard work, he got enquiries from a couple of large chains. Waitrose were interested; they’d do a trial. And then the first big order came through for 20,000 units. So Max had to get a dedicated factory/lab going pdq, which he did.

All this time, Max has been buying media in relevant press – at cut-price, last-minute rates. Having met him, I can believe that Max gets the best rates in the industry. But there’s a little bit of a brick wall. They got this video ad shot:

…but they couldn’t afford to put it on TV, anywhere that mattered.

So he’s sending the link out to everyone he meets, hoping social media can trump TV when it comes to results. Can it? And what should he do next to achieve his goal of world hayfever domination?

image credit: Smelter Mountain

Updated: with added factual accuracy.