I just ordered an excellent new pair of Air Max 95 customised via the Nike Store. The customisation stuff is excellent (and not exclusive to Nike of course) and breathes new life into shopping for trainers (sneakers to my American friends). I’m a bit of a trainer aficionado but my lack of proximity to London town these days means I don’t get to spend the same amount of time looking for rares.

Anyway, Nike have presumably built quite a lot of infrastructure (besides the little interface) to support this personalised commodity approach so it’s a bit of shame that the best they can offer for me to share my kerrr-azy designs is this bit of embedded code:

Check out the
Nike Air Max 95 iD Shoe
I designed at NIKEiD.com

It’s a fairly low-res image which could have been executed as a Silverlight/Flash object.

So “almost getting it” is where I think we are here – a nice piece of challenge and control offered up, but falling at the final hurdle of really allowing me to share my creations with friends and thus propagate brand awareness and value into my social networks. (Not my designs particularly – which are dull).

Anyway, you can also go to the site and vote for and comment on my design too: Air MEH.

The Archivist has been around for a little while, but if you haven’t used it yet, then here’s a quick example of how it works. The Archivist is, essentially, a tool to provide rapid analysis of Twitter activity against a given search term. For example, against the hash tag #zombies.

It overcomes a little of the drawbacks of Twitter search in that it maintains an archive (naturally) of the search term beyond the 7-day-ish horizon of Twitter search.

Kicking it off is as simple as bashing in the search term to the box shown above and clicking start analysis. Then you sit back and wait for the analysis to occur. The service is ‘elastic’ which means it needs a fangled explanation of how it works, but essentially the service will begin building up an archive from this point on.

If you log in with Twitter credentials then you can save the archive and return to it later. Logging back in, you’ll probably see something like this.

Here we can see two different archives I kicked off in mid-July. I became slightly concerned after hearing Jer Thorp’s talk at Thinking Digital that he used an Arduino kit connected to Twitter to warn him about impending alien invasion that I thought I’d set up a similar intelligence system.

Oddly, there are a lot of people tweeting about Aliens and Zombies, though from the volumes it seems like a zombie attack is more likely. We can then drill into a given archive, which gives a lot of simple information such as: top words in the search term, top users, and top urls.

Which we can then further drill into. Here we can have a look at the top #zombies tweeters.

Where we could explore a little more if we wanted to.

Finally, you can download the archive as a Zip, or view in Excel so you can take the data away and perform your own analysis. You can also compare two different archives. Here we can see #aliens compared to #zombies and frankly that spike at the end of July is a bit of a worry.

So it’s a useful tool as a bit of fun, or more likely as a simple way to analyze and retain tweets for an event or ongoing hash tag meme. Just don’t forget to set up the archive BEFORE the event starts!

(I used Microsoft ICE to composite this image)

If you’ve been following my twitter feed you’ll know I’ve been at Thinking Digital this week. Microsoft were sponsoring the event – in particular the WebsiteSpark and BizSpark programmes for web agencies and startups. We were relatively mob handed with myself, @stevecla, @dsumner, @bindik, @will_coleman and @saraallison/@ubelly there for at least most of the event. Sadly @markjo couldn’t be there, but we didn’t really miss him…

This is my attempt to round-up the things that stuck in my mind before they fade into the general haze of experience.

Firstly, I should say that @herbkim and his Codeworks crew put on a fantastic event overall at a great venue. The theatre environment felt suitably smart and intimate. Well done to them.

Secondly, the attendees were a generous bunch in terms of their participation and additions to the experience – lots of tweeting under the #tdc10 tag, and it was great to catch up with @paulfabretti, @jas amongst a host of others.

As to the programme, the things that stuck with me:

• I attended an Origami for Beginners class run by Robert Lang who patiently took us through the construction of cranes and other paper-fold objects that any Japanese infant could create. Key takeaway from Robert: “We are smarter than a piece of squared paper”
• Chris Payne (@Documentally) gave a great talk on his general use of social media in the crazy world that he calls his life. I didn’t learn anything here other than that there are some people really exploiting life to the full – Chris is definitely one of them. He’s a great storyteller and evangelist and certainly switched a few folk onto Audioboo following the session.
• We (+ @will_coleman) bumped into Don Levy, a VP from Sony Pictures, in a bar the night before his session. Fantastic guy and very generous with his time with idiot movie fans like me. He told some great stories on visual effects in cinema and left me with a great quote from Jerry Bruckheimer: “We are in the transportation industry” and talked about humans being “storytellers by nature”. Also bumped into him again in the afternoon by which time he probably thought I was stalking.
• Next up was Andy Hobsbawm of DoTheGreenThing – a favourite site of mine – who told the story of Green Thing and how it came into being: focussing on actionable, non-preachy ways for the inclined population to go a bit greener. Judging by immediate Twitter buzz, this felt like one of the most inspirational of the sessions. See more of Andy at TED.
• The morning – yes this was still the morning of Day 1 – was then rounded out by @rorysutherland of Ogilvy who told (mostly hilarious) anecdotes of behavioural and complementary marketing: extracting/reclaiming value rather than “adding value”. (You can see him at TED here) An example:
  • Eurostar spends £6Bn upgrading the track to improve journey time by some percentage or other. He asked his teams what they would do to improve Eurostar experience for £6Bn. Favourite answer: hire supermodels to walk up and down the train serving free Chateau Petrus and you’d still have £5Bn left over. AND people would ask for the trains to be slowed down.
• He left us with the #diamondshreddies meme (see here), and on the perception of value he said: “If Louis XIV looked round your house he'd say it was shit but he'd give you half of Burgundy for your TV”
• Following lunch we had Luis von Ahn – opening line “You know Captcha? Do you hate it? Well, I invented that…” – explain all about the Captcha system, the Recaptcha system for digitising books (instead of just wasting your time) and a hilarious story of Recaptcha hackers and spam sweatshops. Too much to repeat here. As @documentally said: “Luis Von Ahn co-creator of Capatcha and now re-capatcha is a genius doing great work”
• The next speaker was @juliantreasure and his presentation was on sound – an unusual subject – but one which captured the room as he was able to deliver his point viscerally through the sounds he was talking about. Fantastic session and made a lot of folk think about the lack of focus this sense gets. Soundbite: “Your ears are always on.”
• Finally, the day was wrapped up by Robert Lang (the origami guy) who told us more of his backstory – a physicist at NASA – and how origami was used to fold solar sails and so on.

End of Day 1 and my brain ached.

Day 2 was a little bit weaker (in my opinion – many I spoke to disagreed) but still some great stuff:

• Mary Anne de Lares Norris described spatial interfaces and showed some great videos of it in action (think Minority Report) using the phrase “Emancipating Pixels”. Soundbite: “Generals don’t wear gloves” when talking about the need for a wand-based interface for the military.
• Jer Thorp (@blrpnt) a data visualiser working for Wired magazine talked about mining data and using http://www.processing.org to produce some fantastic visualisations. He was inspired by Mark Lombardi and reminded us all that “data is pattern”.
• Our own @rherbrich from FUSE Labs (Future Social Experience) talked about Twitter and the need for filtering – how in the real time web has meant that “the latest” has become “the most important” – before unveiling a Twitter filtering service: Project Emporia.

Aside from that we had some great music from GiveWay and Let’s Buy Happiness

Plenty to think about. Great event. Well done Herb.

I’m still at Gateshead and Newcastle for #ThinkingDigital (#tdc10) which I’ll write up a little bit later on once my brain has processed the info. Anyway, @paulfabretti just showed me his very cool personalised TweetNotebook. Excellent stuff! Love these kinds of personalised commodities.

Nice infographic from DataViz

Whilst I’m learning about VS2010 and all that goodness down at TechDays, worth remembering to stay on top of current operating system knowledge. This handy training course is available on 16 full-length VHS cassettes. Excellent!

An interesting post providing a series of distinguishing characteristics that provide “fame, fortune and loyal followings”. Apart from some interesting aspects of blogging, there are a load of great blogs referenced in there (as you might expect).

For me, blogging has always been a haphazard affair, and the purpose has changed over time, from education, to conversation, to catharsis and varying combos of those things. As a tech, I’m not sure how I’d operate without some form of social media outreach these days – though that wasn’t the case not so long ago. As an evangelist – well -  it’s the tool of the trade. Some obvious stuff works immediately: be consistent with a post or two a day and drive increased reach (and ultimately long tail search around specific items). The reverse of that is temporal relevance which drives a lot of immediate traffic, though possibly at the expense of long tail over time. We see these effects in our traffic analysis frequently – amongst others.

Across my team, I see the traits listed below in different measures depending on the person and their outlook. (Sometimes, their Outlook – which hampers us all…) Here’s my own view. How do you fare?

• Consistency. I’m working harder at this and it is increasing traffic.
• Eloquence. Never really been a core skill of mine.
• Uniqueness. In aggregate perhaps.
• Specific. No – I’m the arch-generalist.
• Personal. Interesting – I do write personal stuff every now and again, but actually the thoughts are always my personal views.
• Analytical. Sometimes.
• Detail. Not often.
• Thought-Provoking. Hopefully. Every now and again. (Consistency with this requires time and space.)
• Passion. I’m not sure I appear passionate. But I am.
• Instructional. Used to be. Not so much any more.
• Networked. Getting there.

A way to go (by my own judgement). A useful report card and/or direction for any blogger though.

Have a look at the post for a the full detail.

This will probably be old hat by the time I embed the video, but nevertheless here is a piece of genius…

And success.

Last year, you may have noticed that I started using Posterous (http://marcholmes.posterous.com) as my primary posting point which then cross-posted to this blog, my MSDN blog (and I threw in a Tumblr (http://marcholmes.tumblr.com) version too). Also, statuses were updated at Twitter and latterly, LinkedIn.

That’s worked pretty well, but it has meant a slightly troublesome workflow. Mainly:

• The MSDN cross-posting wouldn’t work (not supported by Posterous).
• Tags aren’t carried from Posterous.
• There are some limitations to the posting mechanism in Posterous: it’s very clever but it’s not built for layout of multiple screen shots and so on.
• I miss using WLW as my blog writer.

So, I’m swapping the stream to return this blog as the initial publishing point and then:

• Using Ping.fm to hook up Posterous, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Using the WLW add-in: xPollinate to handle cross-posting to MSDN, and informing Ping.fm to post to the other locations.

Net result: back to using WLW and require only one extra click to push content to all of those other channels.