Well the holidays are upon us, and if you're anything like me, it's a chance to do some of that reading you've been wanting to do all year.

So we at Reactive thought it would be nice to put together a list of holiday reading recommendations. Oh and some of these would make nice Christmas presents!

1. THE TIPPING POINT, by Malcolm Gladwell (or his new one OUTLIERS)
2. PENS ARE MY FRIENDS, by John Burgerman (a bit of fun)
   
3. SERIOUS CREATIVITY, by Edward De Bono (oldie but a goodie)
4. HERE COMES EVERYBODY, by Clay Shirky
5. THE WISDOM OF CROWDS, by James Surowieki
   
6. CLUETRAIN MANIFESTO, by Rick Levine et. al.
7. THE INVISIBLE FUTURE, by Peter J. Denning
8. SPUNK AND BITE, by Arthur Plotnik
9. THE TOYOTA LEADERS: AN EXECUTIVE GUIDE, by Masaaki Sato
10. THE WHITE TIGER, by Aravind Adiga (can never go past the annual Man Booker Prize winner!)

Happy ready and mind expanding.

(Thanks to our team who gracefully allowed me to crowd source their ideas via Yammer, our internal Twitter service.)

Carl Panczak, General Manager, Sydney

With a bit of negative news bouncing around at the moment, I figured it was time to focus our attention on some of the amazing stuff that I have stumbled across in the past few months.

Hobnox
First up is Hobnox, which is a relatively new digital youth channel in Germany/Europe and in my opinion is the MTV of the future. Do you need any more proof that TV is dead, sell, sell, sell...

Watch for the translation of UI methods used on TV for online content delivery..
http://tv.hobnox.com/index.1032.html#/en/Sly-Fi/iNterview/ufzmk

The most exciting part however AudioTool, built by Andre Michelle et al to help users create and share content and I’m guessing as a point of difference tool. Imagine being able to use these tools to collaboratively create tracks with your friends all over the world.
http://www.hobnox.com/index.1056.de.html

Sourcebinder
The next things is a component based flash system that allows you to add/edit/delete objects and effects within flash in real time with some pretty amazing effects, for those who don’t have

Check out the video here:
http://www.sourcebinder.org/vidplayer.html

If you want to geek out you can play with a sourcebinder demo (not the best user experience, but conceptually pretty amazing)

Labels: Technology

A subtle yet profound shift on the Google search results has probably gone unnoticed by many, particularly those without Google accounts. Called SearchWiki it lets logged-in users rank up, remove and comment on search results. Google are currently stating that it will have no impact on search results but given that this now allows users rank results I would place bets on it eventually informing the public result set.

Google have kept the tool simple at this stage, basically as you come across websites that you like you can promote them to the top of the pile, remove ones you don’t like and leave comments.

This has interesting ramifications on the tagging methodology employed by competitors like del.icio.us, diigo etc because it utilises the users natural language to record results. For example when you think of bicycle paths it could be; bike paths, bicycle paths, bike trails, riding trails, riding paths etc, by taking advantage of the public understanding of using search and your natural language your results are tailored to your mental model.

Here is video demonstration of the tool from Google and the Official Google Blog on SearchWiki



There is very little information about how Google are going to protect this new tool from abuse or how they intend to develop it moving forward. However given that Google have called it SearchWiki and Ward Cunningham said that, "Collectively editing thoughts is what leads to the unique wiki behavior and I didn't see that demonstrated in the video [source]" you can bet that they will be developing those features in the near future.


Dan Oxnam, Interaction Director

Labels: Google, Technology