Call them on Skype, on their mobiles. They’ll set your messages freeee:

This is nice. I’d love to see someone creating an entire song by quickly repositioning the notes for each loop. Anyone?

‘People like me’ got very excited when Nike Plus arrived. Although many of us didn’t buy it or try it.

But we still love the idea of adding this new dimension to physical experiences. Having an ‘actionable information trail’ that turns an act that leaves almost no trace (apart from smelly gym clothes) into an on-going, archived narrative. Blah blah.

Anyway, ‘people like me’ love the idea of The Internet of Things in general. A couple of weeks ago I saw (on breakfast show Something For The Weekend) what must surely be the perfect example of such a product that could really hit the mainstream. Even more than Nike Plus. It’s called Body Trace: a “bathroom scale connected to the Internet”.  It’s basically Nike Plus for weight measurement. Stand on the scales, the data gets logged. You can imagine the rest. Or read about it on their site.

I’m not posting this because it’s spectacular. It’s far less sexy than Nike Plus and far less interesting than geekier examples. But it’s important because I can imagine a 50-year old woman who’s never heard of Nike Plus or Spime buying it in Boots.

That makes it culturally very interesting.

Egg Watchers is a slippy idea. It’s been firing round the web like a bar of soap.

It got me wondering what makes this idea so transmittable. My top-line conclusions are that it is:

Easy to understand
Easy to describe
Smart / cheeky, but not immersive

It made me think of Nik Roope’s ‘Fast Food For Thought‘.
(Currently a holding page; soon to be a blog), but more importantly a string of words that help describe the ’slippiness’ of the eggwatchers idea. It is both throwaway but smart at the same time. A silly, light idea but with just a smidgen of substance, causing you to think of greater possibilities.

People talk about ’sticky’ ideas. The ones you can’t put down, that leave a mark on you and keep you coming back. Sticky is hard to do consistently.

Slippy ideas are attractive, but with little or no friction. They ask nothing of you, but they are great social currency. We want to share stuff – that energy already exists. A slippy idea is ready to go.
Like communal bars of soap in the web’s shower-room (cough) they are propelled between people effortlessly. There are natural paths of communication that are gagging for slippy ideas; like Barclaycard waterslides shooting between twitter accounts, friend feeds, blogs and EVEN real people.

Of course, slippy AND sticky would be nice. But that metaphorical path looks hazardous.

I love this kind of thing. But I’m going to hold back from philosophising about it. Although it would be nice if Facebook could detect the relationship between these two things and alert me.

MUST I DO EVERYTHING MYSELF??

We really need to rethink how we use the word “like” these days. The smiley face in particular seems ill-placed.

As data becomes more and more extractable from the pores of culture, it should not really be surprising that technologies are being developed to track even our bodies’ internal workings. Meet Proteus Biomedical – the Nike Plus of guts; makers of ingestible technologies and intelligent pills. According to the Economist:

“When one of Proteus’s pills is taken, stomach fluids activate the edible communications device it contains, which sends wireless signals through the body to another chip worn as a skin patch or embedded just under the skin. That, in turn, can upload data to a smart-phone or send it to a doctor via the internet.”

Ummm… wow.
Fascinating, odd, scary, exciting. I could go on, but the Economist still has a point to transmit:

“Various studies have estimated that a third to half of prescription drugs are not taken as prescribed—or at all. This leads to poor health: one study estimates needless hospitalisations as a result of such failings cost $100 billion a year in America alone.”

You can read the full article here. If you’re freaked out, you can watch a video of Bizkit, the sleepwalking dog here, instead.

All-round clever bugger, Marco hacked the Kindle he bought for his wife so it had a tailored message when she opened it:

Very sweet, but more importantly (given I don’t know the happy couple) it made me wonder if this kind of thing will be the norm in the future, given that coding etc is the new literacy. Will hacking a device become the equivalent of writing a message on the inside of a book cover, say?

Either way, by the time I have kids I’m going to be essentially illiterate. Oh dear.

I find things like this extremely difficult to not watch.

QWSUSHYVA6VF

I’m delivering the last of my favours a day late because I’ve been sick. Anyway, #favour5 was was to write something for you.

Dezza – clearly thinking long and hard about how best to take advantage of this opportunity – asked me to write him a poem about fish. But not just any poem:

“Something darkly humourous perhaps. Like Bukowski of the deep? Sea-bass may lend itself well, otherwise a Perch or Bream will be fine”

Darkly humourous is tough. I read some Bukowski and it’s not something I thought I could replicate well. I decided to listen to some Radiohead to get me into the right state of mind. And it quickly hit me. There was a ‘remix’ just begging to happen.

So, Dezza, I have created a tweaked version of Radiohead’s ‘Nice Dream’. I call it ‘Nice Bream’. It’s a moving, tragic tale of a Bream’s final moments.

And actually it helps if you listen to the original song while you read. So click play and read on…

Nice Dream by andywhitlock

Nice bream

They love me like I was a salmon
They measure me, photograph me
They made me my very own tank
Bashed my head in, made me dizzy

Nice bream, nice bream
Nice bream

I notice my friend, the yellow perch
But she’s out cold; her eyes are closed
She murmured some nonsense real quiet
“The sea would electrocute us all”

Nice bream, nice bream
Nice bream, nice bream
Nice bream, nice bream
Nice bream

If you think you’ll be back in the sea
You don’t know what they’re planning for tea
If you think you’ll be back in the sea
You don’t know what they’re planning for tea

[Just as well Just as well Just as well]

Nice bream, nice bream
Nice bream, nice bream

Nilesh then asked me to craft him some ‘about’ copy for his blog. I know Nilesh very well and he told me what he’d like to get across, so it was pretty easy to do it in his voice:

“This blog is mostly made up of cooking, coding, surfing, and photography. Because that’s what I’m mostly made up of.

I’m a 26 year-old back-end developer at Poke in London. I like to wang on about Django, http and Nginx, but I’m also a normal human too. So, apologies to the geeks for having to see photos of my dinner and sorry to everyone else for buzzing about web architecture ;)”

So that’s it.
My week of favours comes to an end. It was a little exhausting at times – and possibly monotonous for readers – but it was fun. And actually I like doing things for people. So if I can ever help you, drop me a line.