Ian On The Red Dot

Last night was the game between Singapore and Uzbekistan. I went to watch the match alone. When I reached there at 7.45pm, this was the sight that awaited me:

I was not to be discouraged and decided to join the queue.

There was great atmosphere among those of us queuing to watch the match. We knew there was little chance of us getting in before half time but we didn’t care. Some people were keeping track of the score by calling or messaging those in the stadium or those watching from home. We cheered when we heard Singapore equalized to make the score 2-2.

I had hope we could pull an upset. I also thought that the stadium must have been packed.

After 30 minutes of queuing, I finally got my ticket. Guess what..the tickets were being sold by young kids. I think that’s so wrong. I know they are earning their keep but somehow it just felt exploitative.

Anyway, when i was walking up to the seats, this was the queue that remained:

When I got in, two things greeted me which left me deeply disappointed. The first was that we were now down 4-2. What happened!!!! I called my Uncle and he told me we let in two soft goals. Then I saw us let in what was a really cheap goal from a corner kick. Sigh.

The second thing that greeted me was the half empty stadium.

Only one side was anywhere near full.

I know I’ve said it many times, but I’ll say it again - I miss the days of the Malaysian Cup and League.

What I don’t get is this. Why were we playing so many long balls that night. I mean, let’s face it, if we want to go to the World Cup Finals, then we must know we will be facing teams with individuals bigger and taller than us. Long balls doesn’t seem to be the optimal strategy against such opponents. Sure, we could hope our players get bigger or maybe, just maybe we could work on another style of play.

Anyway, last night, three English guys sat behind me and made disparaging remarks about the team’s fitness and skills. I felt like turning around to say, “Your England not so much better. They didn’t qualify for Euro”. But I didn’t. I realized why what they said hurt so much was because there was truth in what they said.

We weren’t on par with the players from Uzbekistan in terms of fitness and skill. We also didn’t have the gamemanship that those players had. I mean, come on lah ref, how kayu are you? Those guys can easily muscle any of our players off the ball, but when one of ours touch them a bit, those jokers fall to the ground in the kind of agony that is only warranted if they had been knocked down by a bus.

The performance didn’t even deserve a Golden Globe nomination. It was that bad.

Sigh.

This loss didn’t hurt as bad as the one against Malaysia. Maybe it was because there was a certain resignation that this team was way better. Or maybe I’ve lowered my expectations.

But I think last night, the team had a little bit of fight in them. Despite the soft goals, they did play with a certain amount of pride.

Anyway, I need some help here. Can anyone remember when the Singapore World Cup 2010 initiative was started?

I remember how my father and uncle would talk about the legendary Quah Kim Song and his generational of exceptional footballers. I never got the chance to watch these players but managed to experience a little bit of the Kallang magic growing up. The highlight was when we did the double - that season I would watch the matches on TV and for the occasional game go to the stadium. The nights of the Kallang roar were unforgettable experiences.

Then came an equally unforgettable night though I wish I could remove its stain from my memories. The night that Singapore was trashed 4-0 by Malaysia. I think I left the stadium almost in tears.

It is one thing to lose. It is another thing to lose to a bitter soccer rival. BUT the greatest pain was watching our national players collapse in cramps. Some people would say it is because they gave their all, I say they didn’t prepare enough to play for the team. I’m not sure what anyone else will remember about that night, but that was the night I saw a team of players wearing the Singapore flag over their chest with no respect at all to what that means.

That flag means something. The right to wear that flag means something.

Anyway, like any love affair, I’m going to allow myself to be hurt again. So tonight, I’ll be heading down to the National Stadium to watch Singapore play Uzbekistan.

All the best Singapore. Do us proud.

Two weeks ago, a bunch of my colleagues and me trained for the lost sport. It is all part of trying to find the lost ring.

The video from our first run is below. I used my mobile phone to capture the event so the quality is much to be desired.

If you’re from Singapore, and part of the team trying to find the lost ring and also keen to train for the lost sport, do drop a comment here.

You can check for events over at Upcoming’s Labyrinth Training Events.

Earlier this evening was an event organized by TDM where Vinton Cerf from Google shared this thoughts about the future of the Internet. Some people might say his visions of the future, he joked that it might be hallucinations. You just got to love a guy who is self-deprecating.

Three things about Vinton Cerf. The first was that as he walked pass us, he made the first move to acknowledge our existence. The second was that he made a comment that he didn’t want to be the guy who comes to talk but not listen. The third thing I’ll touch on soon.

SimplyJean liveblogged the event here. Some tweets from the event here and here. Someone was videotaping the event so I’ll leave you to watch the video when it comes out to know what he shared tonight. The reason is this - I could try to summarize what he said, but it would be meaningless, because tonight while partly was about what he had to say, it was how he said it that really mattered and you should watch the video to get a better experience of what happened tonight.

Here is the third thing about Vinton Cerf. He demonstrated tonight that no matter how intelligent you are, or how brilliant your idea is, everything is for naught if you do not have the power to communicate it. I’m not sure how other people would describe Vinton Cerf, but if I had to describe him in one sentence, I would say he is a brilliant communicator.

He is undoubtedly a brilliant guy. When he spoke, it was in a way that didn’t make any of us feel stupid. It wasn’t that he spoke about simplistic stuff but that he was able to distill and communicate his thoughts in a way that we could understand and actually feel smart, if not become smarter, because we understood his reasoning, his feelings and his thoughts.

He spoke brilliantly, clearly and eloquently.

As we were leaving the room, my ex-coursemate from NUS and me commented rather wistfully that if we only had more professors like that in NUS.

But no matter, tonight was a really special night for me. It isn’t often that I feel that I have been in the presence of greatness. Tonight was one of those nights.

I am sincerely grateful to TDM for organizing this event and creating the opportunity to listen from someone like Vinton Cerf. Hopefully, there will be many such nights to come.

For now, I will never forget the experience I had in room 325.

Added: James brought up the Starhub blocking of BitTorrent incident after Vinton Cerf talked about net neutrality. Vinton’s response was amazingly balanced and reasonable, almost sympathetic towards Starhub - It really says something about him as a thinker.

Beware: This is a long long post. Longer than usual. I think.

So, I was invited to The Open Room event hosted by Ogilvy. Daryl Tay from Unique-Frequency shared about his interactions or rather lack of interactions with the people from the companies. By his standard of using namecards, I think I was slightly luckier than him.

I think it might help going for such events alone. Why? For brief moments of the evening, without the support group of friends, I did feel slightly isolated. Damn that room. There was nowhere to hide! Thankfully for me, Brian and his colleague Mel really are the consummate PR professionals. They introduced me to a bunch of really interesting people.

One of them was Keith from Nokia and he demonstrated Nokia’s sharing platform Ovi.com. Seemed easy enough to use. Sadly, my phone doesn’t come preloaded with the software. I really should explore my phone more besides just using it for phonecalls, messaging and taking photos.

I lamented to Keith how each new variation of Snakes on the Nokia phones just disappointed me and I really preferred the original 2d Snakes on the Nokia phones. Keith was helpful enough to suggest a site I might get that version. I realized while I am perfectly comfortable tinkering with the hardware of my desktop and installing new software on my MacBook just to test test play play, I really haven’t gotten into the mindset that my phone can be ‘messed’ around with. Hmmm…

Anyway, Keith also showed me the pictures of his kids. I think his oldest was like 9 years old. And he didn’t look old enough to be a father of such a big kid. Apparently the products of NiuSkin really work.

Ok. The one thing I really took away from that night was the Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics shared by John Bell.

Ogilvy PR’s Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics

* We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.

* We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.

* We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.

* Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.

* If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.

* We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.

* In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.

* We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.

* We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.

* You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)

* If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.

* If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.

* Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

I think this is a brilliantly conceptualized Code of Ethics. Why? Because they are applying the principle of “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”. Secondly, they show the understanding that blogs have their place in a marketing campaign, just another tool to use, but isn’t the end all be all of online marketing. One of the problems with people peddling ad spaces on blogs is that they hype up the effectiveness of blogs in online marketing. We don’t get it from these guys. Nice.

Pause.

What exactly is a blog? Is is a word that describes a tool or a form?

Take TechCrunch for example. Is it a blog? Well, it uses a blog as the publishing tool. But the form? By the way, what is the form of a blog post? Can it even be defined?

Is the form of a blog post distinguished by its relative informal style of writing as compared to that of an article on a newspaper or other more old-school, mainstream media properties like nytimes.com. Or is just the bad English, limited vocab and grammar like this blog.

Ok. Where am I going with this. It would probably be superfluous to note that there are many types of blogs. One of the types which I suspect constitutes a high number in Nuffnang’s community of bloggers is exemplified by blogs like Xiaxue, Estee and Dawn (list compiled in increasingly level of hotness).

Firstly, Nuffnang is used as an example because they are the highest profile local blog advertising network (at least in my view of this world).

Nuffnang has this pitch for bloggers:

Firstly, there are the monetary gains! We’ll do all the groundwork looking for advertisers and link you in with them. Once an ad is served on your blog, you start making income!

It is our sincere belief that Blogs should be credible and rich sources of information. Correspondingly, we will do our utmost best to ensure the ads served on your Blog match your content and readership as closely as possible. What this means is that your readers will be up to speed with the best deals in the market place!

How people using Nuffnang can try to monetize their blog:

1. Cost Per Unique Visitor Ads
2. CPC Ads
3. Advertorials

What Nuffnang is doing for the bloggers:

1. Blogger Partners
2. Blogger Outings
3. Affiliate Programme
4. Networking Sessions
5. Sponsorship for Blogger Related Events

The stuff Nuffnang is trying to do for the blogging community isn’t new. It resembles a lot what a manager running a Rewards / Loyalty Club Scheme might do. The monetization strategy for blogs is the same as any form of media advertising. Get something which pulls in lots of traffic / eyeballs and stick ads. Of course, we can make the ads more relevant. Really? Are these ads any more relevant then the sort I see when I watch soccer on ESPN. The conceit of people plying the online advertising space is that contextual advertising and demographic targeting is way better than say what we get on radio, print and tv. Really?

Seriously. Really? Think about your experience with Google ads on blogs.

If you need a reminder, see this post - Christian blog against gay lifestyle has Google Ad promoting the gay lifestyle.

Even if it is better, what ad networks like Nuffnang is doing is basically just turning blogs into ad spaces that do not take advantage of the uniqueness of blogs as a form and tool. Sure, blogs give more people a voice. Opinions of most of these bloggers wouldn’t have had a chance to be heard before blogs and these opinions do matter. But, what this just means is that you got more people producing content at more places, and more places to stick ads.

Nothing done so far seems to be born out of the uniqueness of blogs as a medium and form. What do I mean? What am I actually looking for?

Blog based marketing shouldn’t just be about bloggers talking about your products in advertorials or reviews or posts after an event.

Blog based monetization shouldn’t be about ads or about writing advertorials, reviews and post-event news.

Then what should it be about? The key was this line - We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.

See, if you read my blog, you will know I am interested in Christianity. If you really read my blog, you will know more about this interest - that I’m not a hardcore Christian who will faithfully go for Festival of Praise nor am I a person who wants nothing to do with Christianity. My feelings and thoughts about Christianity is somewhere in between and if you read my blog to understand, you will know where exactly in between.

My point? Contextual advertising probably can understand the content for individual posts. Maybe even understand what the whole blog is about. But as of now, it cannot understand me as a person. The algorithm does not have the ability to meet me in person over a cup of coffee at Starbucks below your office to talk shop (hint to someone mentioned above).

So, here is why I think the future of blog (and here, I’m referring to a very specific form) monetization (and I believe there are many ways a blog can benefit you monetarily without exactly putting dollars, and in Nuffnang case it seems, cents into your bank account) and blog based marketing isn’t more algorithms for contextual advertising or more ad networks just to treat blogs as ad space and bloggers as anonymous content producers that draw traffic but PR companies like Ogilvy who bring their offline skills in understanding people and connecting people in the online world.

Now, Nuffnang lovers, I do recognize Nuffnang is trying to connect people. Maybe even understand people. But let’s take a look at some numbers - they have thousands of blogs in their network. If you tell me they have a relationship with everyone of those bloggers and understand them as individuals, either you are lying or you are on some narcotic (hint. I might like some cos whatever it is, it seems to put you in a happy happy place).

Nuffnang business model is about numbers.

Ogilvy is talking about people actually reading the blogs. Obviously there are limitations. It might not scale so well. Now. The key then is to build the (or just tweak existing) tools for PR people to do their job easier and better.

Now, here is something I want to add. When I get to know a person better, I stop caring so much about their interests. I do of course. But more importantly, I care about how their life can be better. The last line is a hint where I think the new companies focusing on blog based marketing and blog monetization should focus on.

Was invited by Brian for The Open Room event hosted by Ogilvy. The goodie bag was nice to look at, but the contents were the same except for one small surprise. The N-gage box was empty. Now, I know what was supposed to be inside. A thumbdrive!

Karma’s a bitch.

Via Tomorrow.sg, I learned of a Singapore group that is carrying out Improv Everywhere inspired missions. You can see the video of their first mission here.

You can join the Singapore based group here.

There is something interesting about the group and I wonder if it mirrors the society we have come from. The IE Global site was started on 24th Jan 2008.

21st Feb, a post was put by the guy who started the Singapore group on the site. The emphasis in bold is mine.

I’ve realise that there have been an overwhelming increase of people who are interested in doing improv acts here. So for the sake of keeping order and most importantly peace, I am proposing a system of organisation for Mission:Singapore.

The Hierarchy will be as follows:

This will be the tentative structure of our group so do leave your comments if you want any suggestions for improvements.
Implementing a structure is important as to avoid an eventuality where missions cannot be carried out proper due to disruptive admin cockups. haha.

I will try my best to organise missions on a monthly basis. In the event that i cannot oversee a mission due to other commitments, the second incharge will have to take my place.

Ok. I’m going to try to tread carefully here. It is cool that someone took the initiative to get a group going. And it is totally justifiable to display a sense of ownership for the group that was started. I understand that if you are the founder of a group based on your own ideas and since your name is associated with it, you would want some amount of control and while people can join in to play, it will be only by your rules. But there seems to be the assumption that the only system to effectively organize such a group (inspired by another group) is to establish a hierarchy.

Now, I understand the times when a hierarchy is needed because there are times when the buck needs to stop somewhere. But can’t this be applied at a mission level and not a group level?

Of course, some people will say I’m stirring shit and that if you want to own the missions, just start your own group. Is there really a need to start your own group just for that? Why can’t everyone play nice in the same group and take turns to be the ‘boss’.

Well, I guess everything you need to learn about human society, you probably learned it when you were playing at the playground. The rich kid with the ball always gets to be the striker. If you argue, you are a trouble maker and asked to sit out. You don’t get to play. And no one will play with you because you don’t have a ball.

Then again, this probably isn’t just a Singapore thing. I found one other group where a committee is also being formed to organize and manage stuff. There are probably more, but I don’t have the time to read through all the groups’ discussions.

Anyway, it is great that this is happening in Singapore. I’ll definitely squeeze in time to be a participant for their missions if they would let me after this post. The comments on the system of organization is just my way of feeding the interest in how groups are managed. There isn’t just one right way, I’m just interested in the way that got chosen.

A friend shared on Facebook about this event which is pretty interesting.  Note, you would have to log into Facebook to get the event page.

A description of the event:

Well…it’s very simple! We just wear a really loud bright colored t-shirt and board on the MRT (Singapore train service)! Starting off at Boonlay station, we stop and get off at every MRT station to buy cheap drinks. Be it a pub, coffeeshop, supermarket, or even a 7-11, we grab whatever we can and down as many drinks as possible. Why pay for expensive drinks at clubs when we can get them at cost price outside? The last stop will be at city hall in which we’ll go to a club of choice. Having built up a party momentum, we’ll party the night off with a blast! Its something like a drinking marathon + a tour around Singapore + pre party drinking + Valentine’s day celebration all combined into one!

The event reminds me of events that have been organized by lori kufner and kevin bracken of Newmindspace in Toronto and New York.

What does Newmindspace do?

Newmindspace is interactive public art, creative cultural interventions and urban bliss dissemination based in New York and Toronto.

One of our goals at Newmindspace is to make these unique happenings in public space become a significant part of popular culture, partially replacing passive, non-social, branded consumption experiences like watching television.

Newmindspace is committed to reclaiming public space, inventing new ways of having fun, and creating community.

The i.Jam co-spaces event was yesterday. I only arrived in time to hear the pitches from startups looking for funding so I can’t comment on what was said about the co-spaces initiative. I’ll just used what was put on SgEntrepreneurs:

As technology advances towards digitization, we see an increasing coexistence of physical places with dynamic virtual environments. IDM’s new initiative centers on Co-Spaces, the nexus of the physical and virtual worlds, where physical spaces are virtually enhanced with information, and virtual spaces which allow users to process and manipulate real-time, real-world information.

After hearing the last pitch titled ‘Mobile World’, based on what I could understand from it, I was wondering why anyone would want to replicate the real world in the virtual with 3D-technology and allow it to be accessible via a mobile phone. The idea reminded me of the type of websites that were built when the Internet first hit mainstream - people were trying to present the world online the same way they see it in the physical. Take for example a website about books - the website would use an image of a bookshelf with images of books stacked on it. As we became more familiar with the Internet, we learned how to describe a set of books with just the images of their covers and their titles arranged in a list - we didn’t need to use the bookshelf metaphor.

Trying to build a virtual world that looks like the real world and map it directly to physical locations sounds a lot like what happened in the beginning with the World Wide Web. If you are already physically at a location, I’m sure there are other ways to map and visualize data tied to the location.

“And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well”

The quote above is from the site REAL TIME ROME and sort of explains why I question the idea behind ‘Mobile World’. The project REAL TIME ROME used data from cellphones and other sources to understand the urban dynamics of Rome in real time. On a side note, I think it would be beneficial to Singapore if we embarked on a similar project before we start the overhaul of our transport system.

The project was done by MIT’s SENSEable City lab. Similar to the projects that SENSEable City lab is doing is this project MIT Media Lab did where cellphone usage provided data to understand the complex interactions between individuals in social networks. Technology Review has an interview with Alex (Sandy) Pentland about the project.

The scary thing is the models created with the data from the cellphones could understand the social networks better than the individuals in them because the data provided was raw unfiltered information while individuals provided information that were susceptible to distortions.

The above labs are involved in projects in the field of ‘reality mining’.

It’s about making the “dumb” information-technology infrastructure know something about your social life. All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in. Things are never up to date, and unless you consciously know about something, you can’t put it in. Reality mining is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help you do things like set privacy policies, share things with people, notify people when you’re near them, and just to help you live your life.

The company IMMI working in this field has developed technology that can help measure outdoor ad effectiveness without the consumer needing to ‘type stuff in’.

The field of reality mining is made possible by the availability of improved sensors to collect data, improved ability to track physical objects and ubiquitous connectivity to the Internet. The social and commercial implications based on our understanding of data derived from reality mining is enormous.

An example of the social implication from the above mentioned interview with Professor Pentland:

With reality mining, you can actually see social integration, as it happens or doesn’t happen. Once everyone can see it, then you can start to have transparent political discussions.

I think if any of our startups from Singapore would like to move into this space as part of the co-spaces initiative, there are 3 areas they could work on:

1. Improving tools and processes for the collection and aggregation for certain sets of real world data.

2. Improving the tools to understand and visualize the data.

And the last one, which is the one that I’m most concerned with since reading ‘1984′, implementing a technological and regulatory framework where the collection, aggregation and use of such data respects an individual’s privacy (which of course is arguably a myth in our current society).

Link: Nicholas Carr’s post on ‘Reality Mining’. He does a much better job at explaining stuff.

I had to stay back late today and as I was going home, I saw a crowd outside Tampines MRT. Being curious at what was going on, I decided to stop to take a look instead of rushing for the train. The crowd was appreciating the art of Jordan, an artist who uses spray paint to create beautiful sci-fi like space scenery.

He allowed me to take photos of his work.

The last piece was done in less than 2 minutes.

This really talented guy will be outside Tampines MRT this thursday around 6pm so if you’re around the area, do go down and check out his work.