Problem: many people - men in particular - fear offering up a seat on the tube/subway/metro for fear of confusing a pregnant lady with a non-pregnant fat lady. The result is that it's prefereable to be inconsiderate to the expectant mother than risk offending the merely overweight. 

Solution: London Underground came up with this genius bit of choice architecture to help us all: a button badge that broadcasts your status as mum-to-be. If I know you're definitely pregnant, I can offer my seat risk-free.

And - despite the odd fling with the likes of Netvibes and Google Reader - I've been with Bloglines ever since. Yeah, I know. I'm a creature of habit. But it looks like I'll finally have to join the rest of the world on Google Reader because Bloglines' owners, ask.com, have decided to wind down the service.

That's the theory, at least. Ask.com keep extending the drop-deadline, but I suspect that they really will turn it off sometime soon. So as a little farewell to my trusted RSS reader, here are some highlights and oddities amongst all the "keep as new" posts I've accumulated over the years.

1. From Acejet170:

On 23 April 2007, The World As We Know It, some lovely photos of The Reader's Digest Great World Atlas. I particularly liked this because we used to have one when I was a kid.

Richard has an unwaivering eye for fine graphic design, old and new. So much so that he's even managed to make bog standard typepad look good.

2. From Pixar artist, Alex Woo:

On March 18, 2008, Analysis of a shot - All The President's Men, an illuminating dissection of, er, a single shot from All the President's Men.

Alex's blog is great for a peak behind the curtain of the Pixar machine (there's also an interview with him here, at The Art of The Title), mostly as a reminder, via his regular gesture drawing classes, that it's not all about CGI and an absence of 'proper' drawing.

See also a thoughtful analysis of the TV trailer for Revolutionary Road.

3. From Decision Science News:

On May 30 2008, How lemonade changes the decision made. Strictly speaking, it talks about how reduced blood glucose levels influences people's ability to make decisions. But lemonade (which is high in sugar) makes a better soundbite than high blood sugar levels changes the decision made.

The blog is aimed at academics, so often it's about the next symposium on the lecture circuit or a call for papers to some learned journal. But in between the goings on of academia, there's the occasional nugget like this.  

(Love the accompanying pic, too. Reminds me of the beer glasses chez Faris).

4. From Hitwise Intelligence (Heather Hopkins):

On August 9th 2006, Second Life Visits Double in Two Months. I couldn't resist this window into the insanity of the hoopla surrounding Second Life.

Coincidentally, I'm currently - and rather belatedly - reading the 2008 edition of Wikinomics. Even in this updated version, it devotes a large chunk of a chapter to describing, somewhat admiringly, the vibrant, self-organising communities in Second Life. A couple of years is a long time on the interwebs.

5. From radio's James Cridland,

On July 4th, 2007: Radio’s main strength: portability, a rumination on Alan Johnston's release and the fact that his kidnappers gave him a radio to listen to while in captivity.

I got out of the habit of reading James' blog but I'm going to get back into it becasue he always has something interesting or illuminating to say about radio or the internet or beer or radio.

**** UPDATE ****

This just in from ask.com/bloglines towers:

"We’re happy to announce that Ask.com has entered into an agreement with MerchantCircle to keep Bloglines up and running! That means your news feeds will remain available (with your same password) indefinitely."

Another stay of execution. This time permanently, apparently. So I don't need to join the 21st century after all.

In much the same way that successful TV or magazine content is formatted - either the whole publication or show (Come Dine With Me, Britain's Got Talent...) or a section within it (think "Relative Values"...) so too is some of the most popular content on the social web. At least that's the thinking.

And there are loads of examples, from Phil DeFranco's monologues to the apparently throwaway remarks of Shit My Dad Says and the simplicity of What's in your bag?

But RSA Animate has to be one of the the best illustrations of the power of a format. And the reason that it's such a powerful demonstration is that we can compare the same content in different formats, because Dan Pink's talk about Drive has been uploaded as a straight-to-camera piece and as part of the RSA Animate series.

So here's the basic version (c. 40k views at time of writing):

And here's a chunk of the same talk with added animated doodling (c. 2.5m views at time of writing):

Admittedly, the Animate version has enjoyed and benefited from a lot of attention on the interwebs. And you might argue that it's shorter and therefore more accessible. But beyond this one direct comparison, a broadly similar pattern can be seen across all the RSA's straight-to-camera videos (views in the hundreds and low thousands) and the RSA Animate videos (which tend to have views in the hundreds of thousands). Clearly, the Animate format is adding something to the viewing experience so that these videos are being enjoyed and shared more than the non-formatted talks.

Now that's what I call a world class content format (in the style of the bald one in Masterchef).

I am obsessed with Conrad Shawcross' Space Trumpet.

A 9x9x9 meter installation in the atrium of Unilever's Blackfriars office, Space Trumpet is four giant gramophone horns suspended from the ceiling, and appears to be a larger version of an existing work.

It's mesmerising partly because it's awesome in the purest sense of the word (it's 9 meters square, after all), partly because it moves. When you're not looking. At least that's how it feels. As Mr Shawcross explains:

"The space is very white and clinical, and I like the way the wood of 'Space Trumpet' contrasts with that. It's built for that space – a series of tulip shapes that rotate a certain amount throughout the day – and it's on a constant cycle. You get a constantly changing view that takes two months to repeat; by that time hopefully you will have forgotten how it looked at the start. I wanted to do something that was for the people working in the building. I wanted it to be almost like looking out of a window, like the effect the weather has."

Unfortunately, "throughout the day" seems to mean at some point in each 24 hours and that point is mostly outside regular office hours. Which means it's hard to catch it moving. It's like a cartoon where a character moves only when the other isn't looking.

But thankfully its perambulations are not exclusively out of hours. For at least one day in that two month cycle, Space Trumpet moves at lunchtime. And last month I managed to catch it in the act with my dirty-lensed iPhone:

More Space Trumpet from patricksyms on Vimeo.

Perhaps if there was a twitter feed like @towerbridge, I might get to see it move more often.

Now there's an idea...

The thing that caught my eye was this: every single bottle, all of them - including the one intended to keep your dark clothes dark - featured a cleanliness signifying sun burst or light flare.

But there was one exception; one brand that zigged when everyone else zagged; walked its own path. Which one? It was...

...Method, of course.

This is the soundtrack LP to the 1976 Hindi movie, Laila Majnu.

As you can see, it's octagonal; a modification that is, as far as I can see, absolutely pointless.

Not only is the shape pointless, the eightsidedness means that the bit that hinges is considerably smaller than a normal gatefold and will, with use, start disintegrating.

The rational bit of me thinks that an innovation that does not improve upon its predecessor isn't an innovation at all. It's a stupid idea.

Despite this, I couldn't care less. Because the somewhat larger, pushier, irrational part of me absolutely loves it.

(Incidentally, if there's a narrative or cultural reason for the eight sides, please leave a comment. I'd love to know).

By that I don't mean brand planning for social web brands. I'm talking about the way we describe and define brands in general and how that plays out on the social web.

Onions, triangles, keys, whatever shape you want to use: if we're honest, these frameworks often end up containing sets of words which don't always make complete sense.

Or rather, they make sense in a hyperbolic context like advertising. The words "more refreshing than any other beer" are understandable and make sense within the confines of the sentence. But many people would - in a conversation in the pub, for example - challenge the idea that one weak, watery lager could be more refreshing than one of the many other weak, watery lagers. But wrap that idea up in some advertising that claims the said beer "refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach", and suddenly the tenuousness of that original idea no longer matters because the ad is funny.

However, when we come to think about how the same brand might behave on the social web, that model tends to fall down. We're not creating a dramatisation of a thought that we then fire at people. We're talking to people. And that means you have to make sense. At least it does if you want people to listen and respond with something vaguely relevant or connected to what you've just said.

It's a waifer thin observation but one that is potentially quite useful because it helps answer the question: should my brand be actively using social platforms? If your brand is based on an opinion, such as dirt is good, that people can talk about and debate, then chances are social stuff will work for you. If your brand believes it's so good you'll have magical powers over the opposite sex, then it probably makes sense to stick to translating your advertising hyperbole into digital things for people to play with and share.

And, by extension, if you're developing a new brand that you hope will live in the always-on social web, then consider defining it in terms that people can understand and talk about.

I'm currently doing lots of thinking about taking FMCG brands into the digital world. Which is not as clear cut as it sounds, given the brands in question are laundry and household cleaning products. Not, on the face of it, the kind of brands people gravitate towards when surfing the interweb.

The received wisdom - at least, received within the digital marketing world - is that we all need to get off the campaign trail and demonstrate our commitment to the people who buy our brands by engaging them in an always-on, conversational, [insert your favoured buzz phrase here], relationship.

The weakness in this commitment not campaigns thesis is that not everyone wants to have a conversation with your brand. Many people don't want a conversation with any brand. So why throw away a form of marketing that has worked very well (though not without fault) for many years and that is still relevant for large numbers of your audience?

What we need is a bit of both. Or rather, we need to work out if our particular brands are best suited to one or the other or whether they can do both.