As if there were any more reason for us all to love Google and Wikipedia today they both announced that they would be actively showing their support of the anti-SOPA campaign.

Tomorrow will be a dark day for the web.

That's right - whilst wikipedia switches off the lights and goes black for a full 24 hours, Google will be providing a link declaring its opposition to the SOPA and PIPA legistlation in the US.

The legislation, which would give the US government the right to switch off any website that they suspect to include pirated material... a worrying concept concidering the number of sites that are compramised of user generated content.

This has, as you might expect, got the tech world sweating... however outside of those of us who spend our lives reading blogs such as this. That's why stunts such as these by Google and Wikipedia are so important to the cause.

Mashable has been encouraging Wikipedia, Google and Facebook to "switch-off" in support of the campaign to try and rally support from the general public.

Hopefully after tomorrow we will see a more people talking about this possibly web-changing legislation.

I've been waiting an AGE for the 4th 'Everything Is A Remix' installement. It's due out this month... but in the mean time this (very similar style) blog-vide-max-up hybrid is pretty damn sexy.

Moosejaw X-Ray App from Gary Wohlfeill on Vimeo.

There has been some controversy about this app.... whether or not it's a little 'pervy' or in bad taste is irrelevant. As Mashable points out the app has acheived "up to 1 million impressions on Twitter, 160,000 video views and 75,000 downloads in five weeks."

Additionally due to the app, Mossejaw's sales are up 37% on the same period last year!

I'm a firm believer in creating apps with purpose... and this is exactly what I'm talking about - an app, that couldn't exist as anything other than an app, that is fun, exciting to use and has a purpose (the purpose, by the way, is to generate sales).

I'm just sad that I've only been able to view it through videos rather than first hand!

The curse of the digital world, if there is one, is the speed at which it changes and develops. Facebook releases a new layout ever year, Apple release a new device to view it on (and a new operating system to go with it) at the same speed and the digital world, in general, panders to the ever switching tides of change.

Don't get me wrong.... this is great - it's why I love digital and the reason I do what I do on a day to day basis.

However, for many, it creates an impression that they can be this wind of change. By many I don't even mean just the individuals (like myself) who write part-time blogs or hobby sites... I also include large corporations and projects with hefty financial backing.

This, again, isn't solely bad. I've written before about this pattern (in regards to Flash) and how now we have now have a subtle progression rather than designers spewing animated gifs left right and centre to dramatically transform the digital landscape. However, the issue is not ours (the visitor), but rather theirs.

Let me give you an example:

This morning I tied my shoe laces. I can't remember doing it. I've tied them so many times it's like second nature to me: the movement of my fingers, the feel of the laces, the sharp tug and pull that keeps them in place... I've performed this task on so many occasions I don’t even register it any longer.

But if someone were to change the way laces work tomorrow I would be lost. Recently I had to change my login for my work computer (we have to every few months for security reasons). Every morning I still input my old password... because that's what I'm trained... neigh... conditioned to do.

This is why people complain so vigorously when Facebook alter their layout. Suddenly their whole (digital) world has been turned upside down (remember - people are, on average, spending between 18-30% of their time online on Facebook). Similarly, when new sites (and I'm including sites that have undergone redesign) are built that defy all previous conventions they better be prepared for users who don't know where to click.

Time for another example? OK...

Recently a new site was made open to the public. You might have heard of it. It was called Google+. Now I actually rather like Google+ except for one thing... where you log out. (I'd like to point out at this stage that post Google+'s launch this has become standard across all Google products.) Along the top nav bar (when you are logged in) you are shown a picture of yourself (pretty much in the same place you are on Facebook) – this is where you click to logout. However, on Facebook, you are required to to use a menu two tabs to the right of the image to log out

What’s the issue? You may be asking. Well not much. Except that every time I use the site I click in the wrong place. I have been conditioned to look to the right of my profile picture to log out. I have been accessing Facebook far longer... it has far more users world-wide and is, many believe, the most visited site on the web. As such it makes Google’s process seem... well... unnatural.

And I think that’s just it. We now have this sense that digital processes should be natural or innate. We live in a post iPhone world – a world that has been introduced to the concept that products should be intrinsic – you should just know how to use them. So this, I suppose, is the question... should we be copying other site’s layout when building our own?

I don’t think I have an answer to this one. It would be irresponsible to leave it to the industry giants to forge the paths of change. However it’s almost impossible for the ‘little guys’ to make themselves heard. (On a personal level I also hate the idea of fitting design to a pre-built structure or formula.)

The solution, I believe, may be to concede to our inadequacies. To admit that we don’t know... but we want to. If we know we want to take advantage of our users’ previous conditioning so that we might make our products intrinsic to use, but don’t know how we’re going to do it (bar copying someone else), we need to test. We need to trial ideas, pitch multiple wire frames, multi-variant test and bring in focus groups.

However, we would be foolish to forget where convention comes from and to ignore the best practice of others. The one question we should always be asking of our users is "where do you want to click?" Because if we know how our audience want to use our products they will be all that more likely to do so.

Let me know your thoughts using the comments section below.

The problem with working in comms, I’ve discovered, is precisely this.

Maybe that doesn’t make a whole heap of sense as a statement. Mainly because I have yet to reveal that by ‘this’ I mean language. I am writing this using language that you, in turn, are reading and (I would hope) understanding. We start to pick it up at an awfully young age – earlier than we can remember and use it on a day to day basis.

This is called communication… and it has got a whole lot more complex than it ever used to be.

We IM. We Twitter. We Facebook. We write emails. We talk (shock horror). We make phone calls and send texts. We read newspapers. We write blogs… some of us even write letters.

In short we all communicate… every day… nearly all the time. Which is what makes it so hard to work in a communications department… everyone’s doing it – so what makes us special?

There is a line in The Incredibles that I’m reminded of: “…and when everyone’s super… no-one will be!"

I think there’s definitely an air of that in comms… especially digital comms. People seem happy to concede they don’t know how to write a press release or navigate their way around Photoshop (I’ll admit my naivety in the first instance but like to think I have a little knowledge of the latter). However most people I come across in my day-to-day life (in and outside of work) believe they have some kind of insight into digital comms.

Why?

Let’s look at the facts. 800 million people in the world use Facebook at least once every 30 days. There are over 175 million twitter accounts out there (although it’s thought that there’re only around 70 million active Twitterers). Online shopping accounts for well over 10% of all retail activity in the UK and… maybe most shockingly of all we Brits (on average - not even just the techies) spend a day… twenty-four whole hours… each month online.

Which means people are writing posts, liking statuses (and, they pray, creating statuses that are liked), reading blogs and generally surfing the net a LOT. And, as they say, practice makes perfect… and when we’re all spending this amount of time doing it who isn’t going to think they’re closing on perfection.

I don’t think that anyone believes that this makes them an expert at ‘digital’ (at least I hope not) but just having that solitary finger in the pie seems to have created quite a few semi-professional-amateurs.

So what’s the problem?

Let’s go back to Syndrome. “When everyone’s super… no-one will be!” It becomes increasingly hard to explain a vision of how our digital provisions can progress when everyone else has a differing vision backed up by their amateur expertise. I can’t count the amount of times someone has said something like “What we need is an app” or “We need to make this go viral.” The answers (in case you’re wondering) to these questions should always succinctly be “Why?” and “How?” respectively.

(Recently I was told of a person who sent an email to a digital marketer that simply said “Have you seen this?” and contained a link to Google. I’m still unsure if they wanted the marketer in question to create something similar or just generally thought they’d stumbled over a hidden gem of the net.

This attitude (that for the pure awesomeness of it I’m going to label ‘Syndrome-Syndrome’) can be, I believe, one of the biggest time wasters for a digital dept. As well as ensuring that our days are filled up replying to these Google-type-emails, building unneeded apps and striving to make something viral it is often the cause of the triple stage brief.

What’s the triple stage brief? Let me tell you. It happens (unsurprisingly) in three stages:

1 – The digital department puts together a brief (or spec) for an imminent project. This is usually well thought-out and reflects the current trends of the sector, nationally and internationally. It often includes developments in new and immerging technologies and, one would hope, will be in the best interests of the organisation.

2 – Soon after everyone meets and the digital team pitch their idea. Then, as if from nowhere, someone else (maybe a member of another department or a manager – usually someone who’s recently been to a conference) pitches their idea. Don’t get me wrong, these aren’t always bad but they are normally always different to the original pitch. Exasperation sets in as you start to wonder why you have even been invited to the meeting in the first place.

3 – All parties spend the remainder of the meeting fighting for various aspects of their idea until a Frankenstein’s monster hybrid is settled upon.

In short – it’s a bit of a pain… but shockingly it can actually be one of the most positive things for any digital department.

Up until this point I’ve painted Syndrome-Syndrome as something crippling… horrifyingly frustrating to all within digital. However there is one silver lining to this cloud: People are interested in what we’re doing.

This may seem like something obvious but lets take a moment and consider what this means. Lots of departments often have to battle for budget and buy-in… however in digital others are actively engaging (In fact my current employer has made digital in general a high priority area of the organisation).

Create digital ambassadors.

Turn these people with an active interest and making them digital ambassadors. In my digital department have a number of roles (including social media and case study officers) that we give to interest employees that are able to provide a localised service that we would otherwise be unable to do.

Seth Godin described in his book Tribes how he created buy-in for his first project post-college by sending out bulletins detailing what he was doing and how people were getting involved. Godin describes how at the culmination of the project most of the organisation had, in part, contributed to its success.

Digital departments need to take heed of this example. By nurturing and developing the skills of those internal stake holders who show an interest any organisation can quickly and easily develop a digital department that far outnumbers those in the office.

Share your knowledge.

Create regular reports about what’s going on. Each month I create a digital stats reports which details, through easy to understand infographics, what has been happening within the department. More and more we have other departments getting in contact to enquire about SEO, AdWords, social media and the website in general.

Before each meeting do some research and produce a short document on current trends that may have some kind of affect on the project. I’ve done this at a few meetings recently and it has improved the quality of the meeting endlessly. We’ve also been providing training on things digital to those interested – meaning we have an abundance of S-S sufferers (SSS-ers?) that actually know what they’re talking about.

Have you had any experiences with SSS-ers? Got any good stories to tell? Any thoughts on how to engage these interested employees? Please use the comments section below to share these thoughts.

I'm running the London Marathon next year for chairty.

Find out about how my progress is going and how you can support me (and my chosen chairty - The Blue Cross) at my Marathon Blog.