My friend Stilgherrian did (yet another) fun experiment with social media recently. He made “fisting” a trending topic. (Yes, “fisting” is a naughty word. No, I won’t draw you a picture.)

Read the full account here.

But seriously, this has interesting implications across many aspects of life and business – the ability to influence, to inspire group (mob?) action, the willingness to participate, the naughty streak, simple actions …

If printed matter were people, we could draw the following comparisons:

A book = an expert
In-depth knowledge.
Strongly focused on specific and clearly delineated subjects.
Slow to access. Requires dedicated study.

A magazine = a generalist
Short, light, “that’s interesting”, bites of information.
General, diverse knowledge. Like flipping through TV channels.
Quick to access. Does not require a significant investment of study time.

Neither offers the ideal combination of: Just deep enough, expert, …

So much of our day to day communications is based on the assumption that most of us within a community operate on the same wavelength. And that we operate within the same cultural context. We latch on to keywords, key visual and aural cues, and our brains fill in the rest.

In the globalised world where communication boundaries are unclear, where communities can span the globe and cross multiple …

A report from The Nielsen Company’s new TV/Internet Convergence Panel said TV watching and Internet use are complementary activities (ie people are using the Internet while watching television).

This is interesting. Personally, I rarely watch – as in devote my full attention to – TV. I do things with the TV on, such as iron, clean, sort mail (physical and electronic) etc. Often, I will surf …

Nice tagline – inexcusably crappy execution. Like this recent cockup by the Max Planck Institute.

The obvious fail aside, there are other wonderful lessons nicely demonstrated by this one sign.

No hierarchy of reading – the actual information on this sign (the text and logo) more or less have the same visual weight. They are all jammed in to the top edge of the …

Thanks to Mark Swivel for this pic.

I go to a Friday morning ideas group organised by Natasha Golding. We talk about all sorts of interesting things.

In a session several weeks ago, Natasha drew this “circular spectrum”. We were talking about polar opposites (which branched off from another conversation about bipolar disorder).

My putting the two “polar opposites” at the same pole, this diagram neatly illustrates …

Have a look at Dan Roam’s site. He is the author of The Back of the Napkin – which is about how to leverage the power of visual thinking.

His site has some great presentations – doodle on a virtual napkin of course – on visual thinking. Definitely well worth a look.

I also liked how he used the same technique of …

Some people seem incapable of valuing thinking and ideas. They want all of the benefits of the ideas, but are not prepared to pay for it. And they don’t seem to see the disparity of holding these two beliefs concurrently.

Consider this real situation:

A potential client wanted several ideas for a new service he wants to create. He wanted these ideas fleshed out and written up …

Odd sticker next to all the urinals in a mens room – in some big modern glass tower in Singapore.

The copy reads really oddly. The “no flushing” part presumably refer to the auto-flushing mechanism, I think. There is a fine for not flushing in Singapore, so it cannot possibly be advocating this. But why? All urinals in modern buildings auto-flush as far …