Trapped on Hyper Island

I just finished a three day master class in all things digital. It was taught by Hyper Island, a two-year university course in Sweden focused on on-line related technologies, products, services and businesses. The Hyper Island Master Class is designed to increase knowledge and competence among its participants, through short-term and intensive courses, when it comes to understanding interactive and digital media and the effective use of it. We spent three days from 9 AM to 7 PM, in the W+K cafeteria (luckily it was rainy outside, so we didn't feel like we were missing too much). There were several guest speakers and a lot of small group exercises, but the most productive part in my opinion was the talk amongst the group about how we can change our business to be more digitally savvy.

Since I have been back at work a lot of people have been asking, what did you learn? This is a hard question to answer as there was a lot of stuff we covered and most of it was big picture. How would we staff or organize the agency differently to be more digitally focused? How can we think about things differently, so we make sure we are addressing digital in everything we do? That said, here are a couple of interesting things to think about:

How good is your network? If all you are getting from your network (twitter, facebook, etc.) is boring updates on Mafia Wars, then change it. Start following people that are pertinent to your life and work On twitter you can follow anyone, so look for experts in your field or people who are doing things you find interesting. It is amazing how much cool (and free) info is out there.

Speaking of interesting free info, check out quantcast.com and kosmix.com. These sites give you lots of interesting info about your competitors sites, who is using them, how they got there, and other interesting demographic info.

Lastly, start thinking about how you can combine existing technologies and ideas to make better stuff. Bread and slicing had both been around for a while before someone put them together and started selling sliced bread. If you combined concert info with your iTunes library, you could get an alert on your iPhone whenever tickets were going on sale for your favorite bands. Unfortunately, that one will have to wait until Apple loosens access to iTunes by outside apps.