The industry for personal informatics is certainly one to watch. There’s even been talk of a ‘movement’ and unsurprisingly, the iPhone has spawned a host of personal informatics applications. These applications are tantamount to an omphaloskeptics’s dream: pretty much any variable of life can be tracked to the most granular degree. Users of personal informatics sites can log everything from vegetables consumed and number of migraines suffered to variations in mood and their feelings about particular places.

Perhaps evidence that consumers are seeking certainty in these uncertain times, the sheer number and variety of personal informatics applications suggests not only a rising interest in self-analysis (or an increasingly narcissistic society) but a desire for more control over one’s personal life. For starters, these tools help you to learn from the past and plan for the future – if you ate too many calories this week, you know exactly how many to remove from your diet next week. However, much of the allure of personal informatics lies in the visualisations these sites can produce with the raw data. Sites such as your.flowingdata.com allow users to create custom visualisation pages for what they’re most interested in and encourage you to ‘play’ with the data.

In theory, brands could have an enormous pool of data at their disposal should these tools become mainstream enough to attract sufficient users. While many personal data tracking accounts monitor health and leisure habits, many others track brand usage, product usage and attitudes towards brands. Personal informatics could help brands spot emerging competitors faster and track whims and fads with more agility than conventional methods. However, criticism of social networking sites that have deployed their members’ data for commercial gain mean that brands need to tread carefully: an assumption that you own the data simply because it is publicly available is imprudent.

On the other hand, brands are beginning to wake up to the potential of incorporating personal informatics into their business propositions – most notably Nike, through its joint venture with Apple and a handful of health clubs to produce the Nike + iPod package. It’ll be interesting to see how others follow suit.

The above image comes from Mapmaker, a user of the Mycrocosm personal informatics website, and is reproduced here with thanks.

Russ Wilson writes:

I wrote a post last year on the attempts to promote the use of Gaelic across Ireland, so it’s interesting to note the closure of two Irish language newspapers in the last year, one in the last few days. Foinse closed down at the end of June, following the demise of La Nua at the turn of the year, despite the existence of Foras na Gaeilge, which is responsible for promoting Irish throughout the whole island of Ireland.

This raises interesting questions about reasons why ‘endangered’ languages are promoted and protected.  The Endangered Languages Project, based at SOAS, argues that every lost language or word is a lost insight into how people view their environment and that ‘every last word means another lost world’.  The Irish Government may be attempting to promote a view of Irish history and heritage that is, in part, dependent on the notion of a thriving national language.  With language forming such a strong part of concepts of identity, it is easy to see how they reach this conclusion. The Irish Government might not appreciate Irish being called an endangered language, but according to the UNESCO taxonomy, it is.

Those close to the newspapers say that more could have been done at a higher level to support them and blame Foras na Gaeilge.  There have been protests. However, the closure of these two Irish language papers suggests that even with strong political support, languages need to embedded in everyday life and culture if they are to survive in the long term.

The photograph, from the Foinse website, shows the paper’s newsroom after its closure was announced.

Russ Wilson writes:

Following on from the earlier post on the subject of ‘nudging’, I was recently in Dublin and Limerick and found the variable dominance of Gaelic and English intriguing- It appears that there has been some attempt to promote the use of the Gaelic language in both public and private life – similar to the Welsh renaissance and the protectionist policy in France.

The result of this seems to be that the majority of public information signs are now either exclusively in Gaelic, or with both Gaelic and English present but the Gaelic very much foregrounded.

However, where it was more important that the sign was immediately accessible – warning signs, security messages, or temporary diversions on the motorway, the signs were exclusively in English. So it seems that the policy of promoting Gaelic is secondary to public safety.

Although there might be some teething problems, I’d have thought that a policy of making all the really important signs exclusively Gaelic would be a pretty strong incentive for people to  to learn and use the language.

Rachel Kelnar writes:

I’ve been interested to see the noise generated by Barack Obama’s decision to deploy and maintain staff in every US state during the current US presidential election campaign. Leaving aside the politics of such a decision (there’s a useful overview of this here) what’s most intriguing is how this decision will play out within each state, in light of reading Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort, recommended to me by the Yankelovich CEO J Walker Smith.

Bishop writes about the growing clustering of like-minded individuals in small neighbourhoods across the US. His crunching of the data shows that over the last 30 years Americans have sorted themselves into homogenous neighbourhoods, where culture, economics and politics are alike. Individuals look to move to and settle in neighbourhoods of ‘people like me’, and so the political clustering has followed.

The big sort helps to explain the wonderful quote from the playwright Arthur Miller on the 2004 presidential race: “How can the polls be neck and neck when I don’t know one Bush supporter?” It’s about the company one keeps, locally.

The fact that people are less likely to have their views challenged or questioned, because they are less likely to come across individuals who disagree is a serious political (and indeed democratic) concern. Where we shop, who we meet at the school gates, and those we socialise with (physically and virtually) are all likely to share our views, rather than challenge them. And by reinforcing each other’s views our collective position becomes more extreme and more certain over time – thus shrinking the middle ground where political decisions tend to (have to?) be made.

In light of this ‘clustering of like-minded Americans’, it seems sensible decision for Obama and his campaign team to contest every state. For while one might think that California is a ‘blue state’ and Texas a ‘red state’ this simplification hides some real pockets of electorally significant dark red in the blue states, and dark blue in the red states (such as the liberal Austin in Texas, where Bill Bishop lives). So Obama has substantial pockets of support in some strongly red states.

But it’s not enough to know these supporters are there, deep in ‘enemy’ territory, and expect them to vote after getting a bit of attention from the campaign. Obama will need to work very hard to get such individuals to actually vote. That’s because, as Bishop illustrates, individuals are less confident about making their voice heard when their view is in the minority. Bishop quotes survey research on past presidential voting data by a fellow researcher, and concludes:

“rather than buck the majority and risk social sanction, citizens in the minority simply stayed away from the polls. They didn’t vote. In communities with large political majorities, people tend to give up battling over ideas…”

So, from Obama’s point of view, making such people feel that they are not alone and that his ideas are worth fighting for, should increase the likelihood that they will vote come November. If he succeeds, by Bishop’s account, Obama would have the significant challenge of trying to govern a country of ever more extreme groups, each of which is increasingly sure of its own extremist views.

['Measuring cups', (c) Christine U'ren]

Becky Rowe writes:

We all live our lives on different planes and engage in diverse activities. As a consultancy we call this repertoire living – the idea that people are not defined by one interest, one value or one perspective, and instead engage in what can sometimes seem contradictory activities, often switching roles in a moment.

The starkness of the different roles I play came to the fore recently, when almost exactly 24 hours after the Millennials breakfast briefing I found myself in Oldham to interview two 19-year-old single mothers about their precarious financial situations. This is repertoire working in extremis. When we think of the Millennials in terms of marketing, we think of bright young things, Topshop shoppers, chatting away on their mobiles, playing on their Wiis – the children of affluent Britain. The reality of living at the other end of the spectrum hit me hard when I interviewed these two young women.

They shared with me how they manage their day-to-day lives on £60 a week. They dream of going to college to further their education and get jobs (one wants to be a social worker, the other a nursery teacher), but can’t afford the £3.90 bus fare it would cost them to get to college, let alone the additional money for childcare. They feel everybody hates them and judges them:

“I would stack shelves, sweep floors, make tea. I don’t want to be on benefits, but nobody will give me a chance. They turn me away before they have already seen me.”

These Millennials aren’t the target audience of big brands. They aren’t the most articulate or the most entrepreneurial. They are not ‘doted on’. I got the impression that our research interview was the first time anyone had listened to their perspective on anything for a long time, although what they said was sensible, interesting and practical.

Yesterday my work was about selling more computer games or jeans. Today it’s about the future of two desperate, young mums. I feel lucky that I get to wear so many hats in my professional role, but on this occasion, the contrast was disheartening.

The picture is by artist Christine U’ren, from her ‘Still Lives’ series. This picture, along with more of her work, can be found on her website.

Jake Goretzki writes:

As a closet vexillologist, I have always had an inexplicable fascination with flags. Flags are brands with armies and navies. Just like brands, they can be relaunched, repositioned and stretched. They can suffer from all the hazards facing any consumer good: lack of differentiation, poor on-shelf standout, out of step with current values, and so on.

Indeed they are probably the most powerful expressions of graphic design and branding anywhere. Try to imagine the brief to a flag designer: “Zac, mate, we want you to unite a people – or at least try to foster cohesion. Can you also try to convey a sense of mission, reference history and national allegiances? And differentiate us. Make it visible from a distance too? Is Monday morning okay? We’re presenting on Tuesday morning”.

There’s no better recent example of a wholesale brand relaunch than the new flag of semi-recognised Kosovo (top left). The use of blue and yellow – to say nothing of the stars – intentionally references the EU flag (top right), with EU membership being something of a national mission for Kosovo. Meanwhile, the new branding has wholeheartedly dispensed with ethnic Albanian symbols and colourways – the black eagle on a red background. The hope – the optimist might say – might be to engage (or at least pacify) new target markets: the Serb population, along with EU opinion. This is one to watch, and the most recent off the catwalk.

Kosovo wasn’t however the first to adopt those go-faster-stars. The flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina (top centre), adopted in 1998, also donned an ‘EU’ colour scheme, reflecting similar aspirations to membership, and also a similar brief to avoid favouring any of B&H’s constituent ‘nationalities’. The result is not very Serb, nor Croat, nor Bosnian. Looking at it another way, both these new flags might be seen as EU brand stretch.