Freakhog Cool Cadbury Egg Crushing Machine

This is so freakhog cool! plus i think it makes a great "user-ad" for Cadbury eggs, much like what Coke Lite and Mentos were in a past life.

you've found your answers, i've found mine

if only we could laugh like the way we used to
sing for those that love us so
and love those that loved us first

Applying Maeda's First Two Laws of Simplicity to My Daily Living

It was a public holiday today, and i did the one thing that was most pressing on my to-do list:

clean my room.

quite literally, this is another of my attempts at thoughtful reduction, and i must say, it's a success. i have a bed to sleep on, my basses are nicely tucked in a corner, my computer space is neatly marked out to handle my macbook, midi keyboard, amplifiers and power points to house all my stompboxes.

this also brings into play simplicity law number two: organization, and by doing so, living in my room seems so much simpler and enjoyable, and in due time, productive.

yes. i also finally filed all my financial statements that had been accumulating, and my financial planner is going to be so proud of me.

70 Millions Blogs and Growing.. Influencing The New Generation

I used to wonder if i had Attention Deficit Disorder, now i know.. the markerters have given me a label. I'm part of Generation Y (Why?)

I'll be blogging in direct response to this post:

Great, I now have a label to explain everything that's wrong about me, we're Generation Y with short attention spans, we want a balance in life. Work and our careers are everything to us (in that we want to be successful), but it's not everything (in that we want a social life, friends and all the trimmings that life has to offer.)

Great by-product of the generation that grew up on Cable, Video on Demand, Broadband Internet, MTV, Mega Malls, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Designer labels, Ecstacy, Blogs, Review Sites, Amazon, EBay and heaven knows what else.

Can you really blame us for not giving your brand the time of day when you try to reach out to us with your ads, pamphlets, sales promises and emotional brand experience?

How then is the best way to get your message to the people that matter?

I've probably already failed to influence in the length of this particular post. If you've given me the time of day to read this far, then maybe we've arrived at something.

connection
if for some reason, you feel that what i have to say is important, it might be because of a mixture of knowing me, we've interacted in some way, and your life somehow benefited after coming in contact with me.

attention
i still read yongfook.com to this day. his blog has evolved into a well designed lifestream.

he captures my attention with great content, short blurbs and funny videos & monologues. meaning i don't have to spend more than 5 mins on his site to hear what he has to say, and decide for myself if it's important or not.

too many times, important things are lost in a sea of noise, or they're not very popular things to begin with. (take a look at ping.sg and hazard a guess at what the average pingster finds important in the "top 10 posts for the last 24 hours".)

now of course, all great brands want to be popular, and they'd like to be in that top 10 posts of pingsters.

community
but we have to remember that ping.sg is not the only community group there is. it's a sizable community, and they've done some really great things, built on uzyn's API platform to aggregate the most popular posts in their community.

but what about social networks and forums that house already existing brand advocates? how about other separate undiscovered blogs that might serve, 20 - 50 committed readers daily? what can we do as brands to help their lives and connect connect with them?

merely reading information online rarely influences a reader. Gen Y is a bit more savvy to believe everything they read. but i think we will consider the expert opinion of someone we know, close to us or at least in our social circle.

fragments
with this amount of choice and clutter, is it in fact possible to have your message carried by every single one of these different voices? let's remember that when someone tries to tell us something in a language we don't understand, it's garble, noise, meaningless and ultimately spam.

is that how you want Gen Y to remember your brand?

Do you really care about social media?

Slightly more than a year ago, the term 'social media' was foreign to me. I had no idea that

1. chatting with my friends online was considered 'Word of Mouth Marketing'
2. uploading blog entries, photos and videos was 'user generated content'
3. connecting with friends and other local bands on Friendster and Myspace was 'social networking'
4. downloading a Radiohead album would change the way the recording industry saw itself
5. sharing knowledge on wikipedia and forums would be 'crowdsourcing'blo

i was just a user, and i'm still a user. i find it strangely hard to accept terms like 'social media strategist' or that this blog will end up being a 'guru' blog that will tell you how to do great 'blogger relations' and that my opinion could be seen as an expert opinion.

i just happen to be in this space, where the tides of information are changing at such a rapid rate that people are becoming increasingly connected that i don't really know what to expect, except an explosion of signal and noise.

more wisdom will be shared with the rest of society, we'll be able to put our brains together and come up with solutions much faster. information will travel at the speed of light, that today's news will be yesterday's news.

and the murky depths of the human condition will also be more apparent as we upload all the filth that has accumulated in our unplugged lives, and everyone's opinion will seemingly matter. everyone will suddenly become an 'expert'.

i think signal will be harder to find, so hold on to the current signals that you have today, i think they'll come in handy tomorrow.

Predictions of the iPhone's impact in Singapore

So here's what i think.

i think that the iPhone will make social media tools more ubiquitous to Singaporeans when it's finally officially launched in Singapore.

why do i say that?

1) seamless wireless coverage around Singapore and 3G connection.

2) people will have near 24 hours connection to the net on a mobile device that has true web experience and user experience (screen touching! how intuitive can you get?)

this means that people will (hopefully) start subscribing to RSS feeds, receiving content via the iPhones, using Twitter a lot more, and actually blogging more on the go.

And one other reason why i think this will be so, is because so many of us travel by public transport, and there'll be a lot of downtime. traveling, waiting for friends to show up.. etc. i dare not think when WiMax becomes a part of all this.

The recipe is this.

ubiquitous network coverage + ubiquitous mobile internet device = ubiquitous net usage and a need to aggregate information faster, and on the fly.

we'll see come september

My little blackbook

Say hello to my little friend:


okay, what i really meant to show you was this:




they really know how to tease you when you open the box.


everything in it's right place.


many purists don't like the blackbook. i however, am sold on black tech.


pr0n


this could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship


call it a mild obsession.

sparingly incredulous reminiscing from a sea change that we all have grown up

not the usual title you might have expected of me if you've only been reading my blog for the past year.

however, if you started reading me back when i started in 2003, this might seem vaguely familiar, something like a past life. Brian before he started in all this Social Media hullabaloo.

things changed in April 2007. i was blessed enough to find a job in Ogilvy's Global 360˚Digital Influence team, and have been working there ever since.

as i reflect, what a great ride it's been! ups and downs, but it truly is one of those things where i can say, i learn something new everyday. and the people i've met! colleagues, clients and bloggers! i really value the lessons that have been learnt, how much i've matured, and actually better manage my time.

don't ask me how i manage to work a full time job, play in a band, dabble in currently 3 side projects for music and serve in church.

something's got to give, i haven't managed to lose the 10 extra kilos i put on in my my last year studying in Perth. just check out my friendster profile if you don't believe i wasn't this size before!

thing's really came full circle in what i believe to be engaging bloggers. we launched The Open Room last week, and actually got bloggers to meet clients in a social setting. this isn't for us, but for bloggers and clients, to know where each other is coming from, to see down in the trenches, what's changing and taking place in the market place.

some see the value, some don't. to those who see the value, i know we'll be having a lot more valuable conversations as we enter the new communications and information age together.

well, from 2003 - 2006, you'll get a sense of what this quirky little blog used to be. in fact, it was a wonderful colour of purple and pink! it kind of reflects the colours in my mind, because it mixes different base colours to form something extraordinary, something different from the norm, something like "red makes my car go faster" sorta norm. zzzzzz. if you want to know the guy before he donned his corporate colours, this will be an interesting journey for you, the reader.

so i'm a little dichotomised right now, just where does harmless?bananas! stand in the grand scheme of blogging with a purpose..? well, i think i finally have the opportunity to go back to being a bit more personal, and definitely the place to experiment new applications that get launched everyday. i think, this blog is finally me once again.

i'm just taking something i found off uniquefrequency's blog. it's a meme, but it's been awhile since i did one, so here goes -)

7 Things You Didn’t Know About My Social Media Journey
1. i started blogging because i admired two bloggers: styra and yongfook

2. my ICQ number was 5635761. 7 digits. only 5 digit people rule more than me!

3. i used to go into mIRC as |PhaseR|. i was 16 and i'm 26 now.

4. after napster died, i found solace in soulseek and found tonnes of great music there.

5. my first website was actually everlasting peace, but the link is dead. my second website is single scene evolution that contains poetry i had typed in HTML from the years 2000 - 2004

6. harmless? bananas! was birthed from a night of playing Counter Strike, the words seemed to rhyme and i was drawn to the use of symbols. call it an early lesson in linguistics and semeotics

7. litford has absolutely no meaning apart from the acronym i gave to "laughing in the face of death" and added an 'R' to make it look not so ridiculous and actually phonetically pronounceable.

and if i may add an eigth point.

8. my spelling still sucks after all these years.

feel free to continue the meme! and thanks for stopping by! feel free to contact me from a variety of methods in the side bar -)

No rest for the weary

Sometimes the powers that be, make it really difficult to fully express yourself, and you find that change is not something that people look upon willingly. I was really excited about a new concept on Tuesday, a way of doing things, but by Thursday, i find my enthusiasm waning at the uphill task it'll be to convert the masses.

maybe that's a key insight into Social Media, and rings true for the prophecy of Loren Feldman, that the most important voice on the Internet is always your own voice, not those that you follow.

Nobody likes to be told what to do, we're pulling in the information that shapes our worlds. Why then do establishments still bombard us with their truths, when everyone has already established their own?

These are troubling times indeed.