Not having reached my forties yet, the first person that springs to mind when I think of a woman of this age is my mum. However, when my mum was 43, there was no such thing as social gaming or social networking.

In fact, being almost twenty years ago now, there was barely such a thing as ‘the internet’. For her social interactions, she would have had to go elsewhere. And, with two small children, socialising would often be with other parents.

Coffee mornings with fellow mums or dads allow parents to interact with one another while their children are at playschool or school, within the constraints of precious little available time.

Social gaming, and indeed social networking in general, also serve this function, in a much more flexible manner. Your average social gamer can communicate with people she knows in the ‘real world’, without being constrained to a certain time frame; ideal for a busy business woman and busy mums alike. And we don’t even have to be online at the same time as one another to ‘play’.

But what have social games like FarmVille got that social networks don’t already provide? The obvious answer is the added element of competition. If your farm is doing well, your achievements are published on Facebook for all to see, as are those of your fellow Facebook/FarmVille friends.

So, as well as the social nature of such games, is this element of competition a virtual version of another long held tradition: keeping up with the Joneses?

Instead of the best kept garden, the highest achieving children or the shiniest four-wheel drive, our social gamer can now compete over who’s got the highest earning cattle, the healthiest crops and the biggest farm.

And, unlike many video games, there is no element of violence involved; instead players are rewarded for their nurturing skills. The more time you put in, the bigger your farm gets and the more you have to look after it. It might not be real, but it requires real time and attention to keep maintained, and this can prove addictive. One of the girls here at Swamp went so far as to check on her farm while on holiday. (She’s since gone cold turkey and probably for the best.)

We’re veering into stereotypical implications of what appeals to men and women of certain ages, but it’s certainly worth noting that many of the most popular video games (Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, etc, etc) are violent, and that the average video game player is a 23 year old man. (Whether this in itself is due to the way that girls and boys are raised and taught to behave from a very young age, however, is a much bigger debate!)

Another appealing factor of FarmVille in particular, is that it involves very little additional effort if you’ve already got a Facebook account. No need to purchase a video game or even a console, simply log into your Facebook from your work laptop, home computer or mobile phone.

Social networking has, for many, become a virtual coffee morning on the move, allowing us to socialise wherever we are, whenever we please. Social gaming allows us to do all this as well as introducing additional elements of competition and nurturing, keeping fans coming back for more.

Perhaps social networks are our new living rooms and social games are our new caffeine?

It’s fair to say though that, just as not everybody is a coffee fan, not everybody is a FarmVille fan. You can find various articles online on how to block FarmVille and, when I asked around the office, the majority of the responses I got were from people telling me why they didn’t like or play FarmVille.

What do you think? What’s so good about FarmVille? Why do social games and video games appear to appeal to very different kinds of players? Will the two types of gaming converge in the future and, if so, how?

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It’s quite clear that the gimmick of 3D is much stronger than the messages it conveys. So, this is how 3D is going to end civilised society as we know it.

There will be a point in the future when someone creates an ad that changes everything.

Picture this: Saturday morning TV and your children are sat in front of the TV when an ad comes on. It’s pretty terrible; there’s no narrative, or message, just a really, really good piece of 3D CGI that makes your child put their hand towards the screen.

They are mesmerised by the fact that this product is coming out of the screen and landing in their hand. There is no sound; it’s deadly silent. The product just spins in their hand and then quickly disappears. They quickly turn their hand around and check under their sleeve and then they look at you. This look changes everything. This look spells the end.

Using the following process you can work out how 3D advertising will end society as we know it:

• Increase in consumer spending = more jobs
• More jobs = less time spent in the home
• Less time spent in the home = homes get dirtier
• Homes get dirtier = rats and mice get bigger
• Rats and mice get bigger = their brains get bigger
• Their brains get bigger = they begin hatching plans to take over the world.

Eventually, and before you know it, we’re living in dusty holes foraging for mouldy cheese and carrying disease. And, as nice as cheese is, no one wants that.

So, in conclusion, 3D = rodent master race. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Image courtesy of www.unc.edu/~cmbaker/ROUS.jpg

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The Chip Shops celebrate the idea, not its context. Good ideas win. Bad ideas don’t win. End of.  They’re about fostering and recognising creativity with no boundaries and no rules.

Now in their seventh year, we anticipate that this year’s international Chip Shop Awards will be the best ever. Why?  Well, because Swamp’s Creative Director, Andrew Brown, is judging them.

Andrew is no stranger to judging top awards, having already been on the panel for Cream, New York Festivals, FAB and the D&AD. For the Chip Shops he sits on an another esteemed panel which includes the likes of JWT, Glue and Leo Burnett. You can see them all here (cool pic Drew!).

So why not dig out that ace project you made for a client that never saw the light of day? Or resurrect that great advertising idea you had for a brand that you don’t even work for.  You can enter the Chip Shops with anything. In fact, it’s only limited by your imagination.  If it’s a great idea, it might win.  Tell your pals (and buy Andrew lots of lager).  http://www.chipshopawards.com/

Chairman's Award Winner - The Sun does The Economist by The Black Hole

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Steve Jobs (apparently) doesn’t like Adobe. He called them lazy and says that Flash is buggy and causes systems to crash.  Flash is notoriously slow on a Mac and in its 3 year existence the iPhone has never supported it, now it appears the iPad won’t support it either.  Apple lovers better get ready to see a lot of blue Lego blocks.

Though, according to Jobs, this needn’t be a cause for concern; HTML5 is coming to the rescue. Driven by the w3 Consortium, it promises to be a worthy successor to Flash.  It can handle complex screen interactions in a similar way to Flash.  Have a look at these experiments for the best performance try running them in Chrome.

Which brings us to the next point, Google doesn’t have a great love for Adobe either; the nature of their products makes it more difficult for their search engine to identify content.  They have certainly optimised their own browser, Chrome, to focus on JavaScript and HTML5.  Strangely it appears that Apple and Google are on the same side on this one.

One place Adobe seems safe is video: Video platforms like Youtube, iPlayer and Vimeo all use Flash to deliver their videos, Adobe have practically taken over from Real, Windows Media and Quicktime.  Though HTML5 has thought of this and can run video too; YouTube and Vimeo are already experimenting with new players.

And  it doesn’t end there, one potential problem with HTML5 is that Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t support it, so it Microsoft are drawn into it as well.  Google are blaming the elderly browser for its recent security breach and are lobbying governments and large institutions to phase out the browser and let it die in peace, thus releasing the developer community from having to support it and making the world a happier and more secure place.

So what will Microsoft do?

They have said they are going to continue to support IE6 for several years yet, but will they bow to the pressure of Google and the developer community?  What about their own platform, Silverlight?  Does holding up HTML5 give them a chance to push that a bit more?  Is this getting complicated or what?  It’s like a crazy web with four spiders pulling strands in different directions and IE6 as the lynch pin.

Who knows how long it will be until something gives? Not me that’s for sure.

First image courtesy of starchild1.co.uk/shadowfax/?p=1552

Second image courtesy of http://theflashblog.com/images/ipud.jpg

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Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Sigmund Freud argued that it’s our memories that make us unhappy – remove the past and we have no further reason for anxiety.

In Douglas Coupland’s new book Generation A, he describes a future where we have removed anxiety by removing the future.  His new drug SOLON delivers users into a pure state of newness…no past, no future…just NOW.

In Generation A, Coupland comments on society’s move to newness – the world we are starting to inhabit -  the world of always on, continuous emotional update, hyper news, where nothing exists apart from now. Global fads are invented, embraced as the answer to everything, and forgotten about in 24 hours. Really Important campaigns for Christmas Number Ones are headline news then gone in an instant. People get up earlier and earlier to make sure thay have not missed out on Facebook sensations. People get up earlier and earlier to create Facebook sensations.  Email must be accessible all the time, anywhere.

Life is good in the now – you are permanently entertained, permanently emotionally fulfilled, continuously aware of everyone….you just have to react – LOLZ

Image used under Creative Commons - www.flickr.com/photos/hotpixelaction/

Many religions aim to deliver their followers to a state of perpetual bliss – a place of now forever.  Borrowing from this,  Utopian / Distopian sci-fi futures also remove the need for food or bodily functions – just climb in your pod, plug in and experience the now with no distractions….and when you die, just hand over to your self-learning neural networked AI, fully charged up with an eternity of ROFL’s, WTF’s, FTW’s and FAIL’s.

So…welcome to the future….the future is NOW…there is no future….and we will all be very happy.

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I’m not talking about ‘incetivizing one-to-one mindshare’ or ‘productizing intuitive niches’ (thanks web economy bullshit generator http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html) or even particularly the jargon that comes with tweets and fupdates.  I’m really talking about the names of things.

My son lost his dongle the other day, much to his mother’s amusement.  The digital age has given us lots of fun names, from joysticks to bluetooth and hard drives to rasterisation.

One of the things that always makes me feel most future-sexy though is talking about doing things in 3D software packages.  I love binding a torus knot to a space-warp or lathing a nice nurbs curve.

Neal Stephenson’s last book Anathem did a cracking job at inventing new words suitable for the alternative universe it is set in.  And it’s amazing how quickly you adapt to it.  For the first five chapters or so of the book it’s difficult to actually work out what the hell’s going on sometimes, but if you let the speak wash over you there seems to be a tipping point when you suddenly know what everyone’s talking about when they’re using their jeejah’s as a speelycaptor and by the time you’ve finished it seems to take some effort to stop thinking about some of the things in our universe in the language he’s invented.

One of the things I swing and roundabout around though is the modern penchant for just spelling things ow eva u lik.  I quite enjoy the way that in the digital arena where people are expected to deliberately flaunt the rules of spelling and grammar it can act as a leveller, taking the high ground away from scholarly types who have bothered learning how to spell, but in the same breath I also enjoy a bit of L337 5P34k and the way it can act as a schoolyard kind of 53(r37 (0d3 parents don’t get.

I can get a bit prudish about spelling sometimes, but on the other hand I like a good living language and I’m happy to spell ‘through’ as ‘thru’ for example (thanks to Bob Dylan probably).

I wanted to wrap these observations up some witty, insightful and intelligent point, but the truth is I don’t really have one and it’s Friday so I might get away with a more flippant blog post.  So I’ll just leave you with one of my favourite jokes about words paraphrased from Rob Newman when he was with the Mary Whitehouse Experience.

“Why is it that I have to buy a dictionary costing something in the region of £20 when most of the words in there are words I already know.  Why do I need the print, ink and paper taken up to include words like ‘tree’, which, let’s face it might as well have the entry:Tree n 1 It’s a tree, isn’t it?  It’s a f***ing tree.  You know what a tree is.

What I want is a pamphlet, costing around £2.50 which just contains all the words I don’t know.”

Well, I was reading an article recently about SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and their ongoing conquest to prove that we are not alone. Fascinating in itself, but what really grabbed my attention is the fact that they blamed digital television for being the reason that aliens couldn’t find us and have a theory that, for similar reasons, we can’t find the aliens.

I thought this was quite interesting so dug a little deeper and thought I would share my findings with you all.

The problem is that digital TV is making Earth invisible.

The process for converting analogue to digital offers more stability, as it is less vulnerable to noise. This means that, whilst we’re happy because we get a nice viewing experience at home, it does make life very difficult for the aliens trying to find us.

In the world of analogue, a digital transmission looks like noise, and radio astronomers have to filter out noise to locate signals indicative of extra-terrestrial life. However, with the complexity of digital signal processing (DSP) to measure or filter continuous real-world analogue signals, this noise is getting crowded and indistinguishable. So, whilst sticking astronomers on a lunar observatory on the moon may help us look for ET, the Digital Switchover could be making it harder for ET to find us.

So, if you don’t want aliens to land on Earth, keep watching digital TV!

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No better time.

First up, who remembers Bodger and Badger? A children’s TV show about a man and a badger who lived together and ate mashed potato a lot. Perfectly normal, everyday situation. Bodger had a funny squashy face with lovely sticky-out ears and Badger was, we can only assume, visually impaired in some way. Judge for yourselves below.

Put the two together and what do you get? That’s right folks, Jim Branning off of Eastenders (Dot’s piece, if you’re not a regular viewer).

Now, we can’t be the only ones to have noticed that Jim Branning became a regular on screens in 1996, the very same year that Bodger and Badger mysteriously disappeared from them.

Coincidence? Or irrefutable evidence that Branning is indeed the result of an ill-advised scientific splicing experiment involving the afore-mentioned mashed potato lovers?

We know which explanation we believe.

Another too-freaky-to-be-ignored lookalike situation that’s been bothering us here at Swamp is that of the much-loved Mrs Spoon, of Button Moon fame.

Anyone seen her recently? Didn’t think so.

But you know who we did see an awful lot of in the run up to Christmas don’t you? That’s right, Jamie Afro who didn’t win the X Factor.

Even their poses are the same! The sheer audacity of the man beggars belief, bearing in mind he is undoubtedly a body snatcher.

It’s the elephant in the room people; the secret so dark, so terrible, that no one dares to speak its name. Well, we dare. No longer will we stand by and let TV personalities and talent show contestants body snatch or scientifically splice our beloved children’s TV characters under this terrible shroud of secrecy. The truth will out!

So, if you have any unnerving lookalikeys, particularly if they involve kids’ TV characters, do your duty and share them with us.

Together, we’ll shatter the silence.

Enter Chrome

It was launched in the Olympic year of 2008 and from a comic strip oddly enough. Its main selling point was both speed & simplicity. It was launched with a powerful JavaScript engine (v8) which could deal with complex websites much better (a website entitled Chrome Experiments showcases what it can do).

Integrating Search

As expected Google wanted to integrate Chrome tightly with search (as this is their primary service and is where they make their vast profits from!). The address bar acts as both an address bar and a search box which becomes second nature after a while.

Add-ons

The one thing that Firefox had above the other browsers was a huge directory of plug-ins which were easy (and addictive?) to install. These plug-ins integrated social networking, tools to help work flow, aid web development and so on. Speaking from an SEO perspective I know how useful they are in my job. In the last couple of months Chrome launched ‘extensions’ which aims to fill the plug-in void. Whilst there is some way to go to reach Firefox’s plug-in directory and community it is a good step forward.

Browsers on the Catwalk

Style is just as important as substance. One thing that I really like about Chrome is the fact you can completely redesign your browser. Bored of the same old greys? Simply apply a cool designer theme. It makes opening the same thing every single day a little more inspiring.

Brand Awareness

It’s got both style and substance… but how is Google getting it out there? You may have noticed the self promotion across Google’s own sites (including YouTube) and online display ads across other sites. You may have also seen something that Google doesn’t do too often – offline advertising. It’s been seen on billboards, newspapers and even on the tube. Has this had an effect on brand awareness? Well, yes. Internet searches for Google Chrome have almost doubled and overtook those of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

UK Internet searches for Google Chrome following advertising campaign

However they have some way to go to reach the level of brand awareness that Firefox has achieved.

UK Internet searches for web browsers Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

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