A thinner you!

This is a simple and I imagine very popular business idea - get skilled digital artists to alter personal photographs to illustrate what you would like like if you lost a certain ammount of weight.
It's a vain concept, but people are vain, so I think it will be popular. I think they should do 'a fatter you' as well, so that you get an image of youselef as you currently are, plus the thinner you as a motivator to lose and a fatter you as a deterrent to eat that extra cake. They could also overlay terribly depressing statistics about how your life expectancy, chances of getting diabetes, etc are all going to change by x% depending on whether you're fatter or thinner.
God, how depressing. I'm off for lunch now.
Thinner You via Srpingwise

Social media vs. Advertising analogy

John V. Willshire runs a great blog out of PHD London office called Feeding the Puppy. One of his recent posts includes an interesting presentation that manages to use every istockphoto image of a bonfire to build an analogy of how social media campaigns differ from advertising.

Advertising Fireworks, Social Bonfires

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

You should check out John's blog and keep it bookmarked, there's a lot of thought provoking stuff gets posted there.

Population sizes of virtual worlds from KZero

Here's a really interesting graphical representation from KZero of the population sizes (based on registered users) of many different virtual worlds. A wonderfully simple to understand chart that shows how long the world has been in existence, the size of the population base and the average user age.
It's clear immediately how popular these worlds are with kids and teens, with Habbo being the most popular overall world very much in the 10-15 year old market and sites like Poptropica and Club Penguin doing very well in the 5-10 year old segments.
A few years ago all the buzz in the market was about Second Life and it is interesting to see that their population of registered users is still relatively very small - only a fraction of the bigger kid focused sites.
This all has long term implications for how todays pre-teens develop their social skills and the 'norms' they become accustomed to. Mark Holden of PHD wrote a brilliant book recently about the future of the media agency and one of the things he hypothesises is that today's kids will have a complete blur between their virtual and real world identities, where they don't separate the two in the way that the 'analogue generation' do. You can read Mark's full ebook here.

What does 200 calories look like?

This feeds my fetish for all things visual as well as a mild obsession with food. A really simple but very interesting way to show the calorific content of different foods by showing an actual image of that quantity of food that delviers the 200 calories. From infosthetics and wisegeek

Infographics

I love infographics. It seems like such an amazing skill to have, to be able to take lots of complex data and graphically represent it so that people who often have little understanding of the complexities of the subject can easily grasp the core information.
In the world of media, there is a lot we could learn from this discipline to get us away from the endless charts and numbers.
Check out this slideshow on Flikr below.

British Airways brand experience - it's the little things that make the difference

I had to fly to London from Beijing via Hong Kong overnight last night and straight into the office in London. I'm lucky enough to get to fly business class and am a bit of a geek about comparing different airlines. The BA flight from Hong Kong to Heathrow was on a brand new plane with their new Club World cabin. It was interesting that half the seats in business are rear facing - one of them mine. I've never sat facing down the back of the plane and as we jetted off, it was a bit strange. The flatbed seat was the comfiest I've been in and I managed to get quite a bit of sleep, but what really made the flight was the breakfast. I think for anyone Enlgish, especially if you live overseas, there's something symbolic and indulgent about a full English breakfast.
I'm not usually too hungry when it comes to airline food, but this breakfast was fantastic. As I was enjoying it we flew over the british coast as dawn and they might have well piped "Rule Britannia" thru the cabin.
There was a lot of nice things about the BA product, but the small thing of getting the breakfast just right - and serving it with HP sauce - really made it a great brand experience.

Are magazines really dying?

I was thinking of subscribing to Wired and the above is their offer (US residents) - US$10 for 12 issues and they give you a T-shirt as well. GQ had a similar priced offer (below).
I know that times are bad for publishers but when magazines with good quality content, like Wired are virtually having to give their product away (I'm sure $10 wouldn't even cover their p&p costs) and most magazines circulations and readerships are still falling at the same time, do people really value them anymore?
The magazines are obviously existing on the ad revenue alone which seems like a very, very risky model because when you're clearly this desperate for readers, it's hardly a convincing story for those advertisers to give bukets of cash in return for a few pages of ads next to more ads.
I think the big publishing groups need to seriously innovate and should be looking to aggregate their content and make it simple for people to build custom published magazines which pick out only the specific content they are interested in from the whole portfolio of titles. I think many pwople would pay for this as long as the content was good and you could select to do it either with or without ads or possibly set an advertising / content threshold.
We're hoping to get an experiment like this off the ground soon with one of our clients. Hoping to...

The story of mini laptops (netbooks)

There's an interesting article at Wired, talking about how the popular mini laptop computers came to be. They make a really interesting point that the netbooks totally buck the 'laws' of the category which has always been an evolution of performance, storage and capabilities. The netbooks are essentially stripped down laptops, probably of about equal performance to a laptop from 5 years ago. They are proving incredibly popular though because 1) they're cheap 2) they're small and light 3) their performance is perfectly fine for most general usage.
This last reason is interesting and I've been struggling with this myself for some time. I've been thinking about whether to upgrade my 4 year old Acer laptop now for a while and when I was on holiday in the States went into a Best Buy fully intent on walking out with a shiny new toy.
But when I was in there the sales guy killed it by asking me "so, exactly what will you be using it for?" After a bit of a pause, I admitted it was for casual internet surfing, putting photos onto Faceboook (I never PS them) and occasionally writing a letter. No photoshop. No WOW. No 3D AutoCAD. No Kung Fu Panda animation.
He still tried to sell me the latest laptop with bells and whistles but even he couldn't come up with a reason why it would genuinely benefit me. So I left with a packet of M&Ms instead of a new laptop.
I did recently buy a nice white HP Mini but for the same reason most people are buying them I think - for my wife primarily to use and take out with her because it will fit in her bag. I also think our daughter will love using it and will be handy for when we're in cafes and restaurants. I'm curious to see how much use it actually gets and what role it ends up playing in a household that already has an iPhone, a 'big' laptop and a wii. Let's see.
Back to the article... the issue that software companies now have is also that the vast majority of people don't need the functionality of the lastest applications (eg. Adobe's CS4) and can use free online apps instead. This further reduces the need for a big hard drive or quad core processor. It's quite easy to imagine the netbooks very soon just coming pre-loaded with a suite of useful links for free online apps to cover 99% of user needs.

Interesting media

This is an interesting example of new media. In the right instances I think this could be used very creatively.