Karl Long

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September 19, 2011

Fear and Creativity

BrainPickings is a recent fascination. Each article is a wonderful curation of ideas and different points of view. I just enjoyed the article they posted on Fear and Creativity.

In it they quote Shaun McNiff’s Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go

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creativity, Karl Long
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August 21, 2011

Innovation in Africa

In Africa and other developing regions electricity is not always a guarantee so these bicycle mounted phone chargers from globalcyclesolutions.com are making a big difference. The dynamo isn’t new but this is a new application and it has spawned quite an enterprise.

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Karl Long, Africa, innovation, social change
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July 3, 2011

Hostages, Users, Evangelists and Experts

I have never really been a user of Facebook or Linkedin, but more of a Hostage. I didn’t use them because they made me feel warm inside or helped me kick ass (as Kathy Sierra would say), I used them because everyone else was there.

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Karl Long, user behaviour, user insights, social networks
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June 16, 2011

What Attributes Do You Value about Tweets or Status Updates?

I’m in the process of designing a survey to get an understanding of what people value about certain behaviors on twitter and would love to get some ideas about questions to ask. I have some particular pet peaves and pet preferences that prompted me to think about this question but I’d love to get some input to broaden the conceptual frame I’m working from here.

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Karl Long, social media, Twitter, status
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March 27, 2011

Cross-cultural Video Gaming

The video game industry might have a market that spans the globe, but that’s not to say that the same game will sell in the same form in, say, Germany and Malaysia. There’s a lot that goes into localizing a game for foreign audiences – from translation and rewiring hotkeys, to cultural preferences and visual understanding.

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Karl Long, gaming, video games, localization, cultural differences
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January 11, 2011

Narratives in Games: the Recipes of Alex Kennedy Creator of Echo Bazaar

Guest Post by: Josselin Perrus

Attending the Playful conference in London last in September 2010 I had the chance to meet with Alexis Kennedy, founder of Failbetter Games, the editor of Echo Bazaar, a text game that has received lots of appraisal. He had very enlighting thoughts about how to articulate games and narratives.

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gaming, games, narratives, storytelling, Karl Long, game developing
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December 22, 2010

Multiplayer Experience

With the recent success of so many multiplayer/social games and the emergence of the gamification of services it’s worth thinking about what makes multiplayer gaming so powerful. Games can be applied to anything and in many ways humans often make games where none existed just due to our amazing pattern recognizing abilities. Games and play are an old form of communication almost certainly pre-writing, possibly even pre-language, one could hypothesize that games themselves might be one of the oldest forms of cultural communication (especially when you see animals learning through play).

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Karl Long, customer experiences, games, gaming, gamification, MMO, social games, social networks
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December 21, 2010

Are Early Adopters Temporary Ties?

I posted a tweet yesterday inspired by the recent Details article on early adopters that generated a fair amount of conversation which was:

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Karl Long, early adopters, relationships, connection, social networks
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December 20, 2010

Starting a Movement Is Social Leadership

I wrote recently that about the next important step for organizations to learn on the social web is leadership. I had characterized it as cultural leadership inspired in many ways by Reed Hastings (the Netflix CEO) presentation on “Freedom and Responsibility in Culture” (my post on that Culture as Competitive Advantage).

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Karl Long, leadership, social media, online communities, cultural movements
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December 17, 2010

The Market for Things and Ideas Not Being Talked About

Many people and organizations have identified “listening” to the chatter on social media as an enormous business opportunity. Listening to customers, voice of the customer, sentiment analysis and even semantic technologies designed to understand the meaning in what people are saying.

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Karl Long, social media, listening, conversations, participation
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