Open up your mind and say, ahh...

I think that when marketers and PR practitioners talk so often about “engagement” and trying to understand its mechanics, I feel that what most people seek is “attention” and then “intention” and not exactly engagement. As the parent of two young children, I can tell you that “attention” is a valuable coin. Instead of “pay attention,” I wish the phrase were “invest attention,” because I feel that the more attention I give to my children, the more they see that I’m seeking to understand them and see them fully, the more they open up to being who they intend to be with me.

I shot a quick video about this, as well:
If you can’t see the video, click here.

When I put my little boy on the bus this morning, the other two kids wanted desperately to show me their Halloween costumes. One was a vampire girl from Monster High and the other was a biker, complete with a goatee. When I made extra special care to compliment the boy with the goatee while stroking my own to show that we were two of a kind, he lit up with a big proud smile. When I shared with the girl a few lines that her character from Monster High would have said (my daughter’s watched the show a few times), she lit up inside knowing that I knew exactly who she was.

The same experience is exactly true for adults. We all stumble around hoping to be understood. We all feel like we don’t belong somewhere. We all slip into that awkward feeling. It might come when we read something we don’t fully understand. It might come when we are pushed into a work environment that doesn’t suit our personalities. But we find ourselves there as adults, and those very rare moments when someone breaks the barrier and shows us that they see us, that they are giving us attention, that’s the magical moment.

Attention into Intention

To me, once you’ve invested enough attention, then it’s much easier to seek an intention. If you want someone to read your stupid PR pitch, they will be much more likely to do so if they feel like you know who they are, and like you know each other’s work, and maybe even a little bit more about each other. This is clearly not fast work. This is clearly not easily measurable work. And yet, it’s how these things go best.

When I walked into Jason Kintzler’s booth for PitchEngine at a recent PRSA national event, I was checking in with someone I’d known for a few years, and whose progress I’d followed. Jason didn’t have to push me for engagement. We had had each other’s attention, so he earned the ability to execute on his intention: in this case, to show me his product’s updates.

What Does This Mean, Practically?

Here’s the rub. No one in the management cares about this. The CEO and CFO give you a marketing budget and they say, “for that amount of money, I expect this many sales.” They don’t say, “I’d love it if you get to know the people before you try to sell them.” And this method I’m talking about isn’t especially efficient, if you’re still seeking only transactional experiences. But this is really just a part of the method, a part of the Way. How does it fit? Depending on your position and responsibilities, it’s something like this:

Advertising
SEO
Attention/Intention
Traditional PR
Customer Service

Okay, so in my world, Marketing owns customer service. It’s not a reality yet, but it’s something I’m striving to make real. But, depending on how one puts their budgets together, to me, Attention/Intention is somewhere around where you’d put your social media efforts, your blogger relations efforts, and matters like that. To me, the beauty of working on attention is that you can work on finding people who might love what you sell, and who might have communities of their own, and you can embrace them and work towards their intentions. In a way, this is a mix of what people are already stabbing at with social media plus blogger relations (which continues to be horribly broken).

One Last Thing: The Enemy

The enemy of Attention is Impatience. This isn’t something you try to rush, try to game, or try to expedite by some electronic means, at least not all of it. One part of attention is providing interesting content for conversations and consideration. That can be somewhat automated, obviously. But responses, interactions, and the like, are meant to be non-scalable environments. You can talk as much as you can talk, and that’s about it. If you can’t get to everyone, you can’t get to everyone. But you cannot (in my not nearly humble opinion) revert to a bunch of electronic means to try and skip some steps in this regard.

What do you think? Are we seeing this the same way?

Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conferences, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga along with Zen teachers and others to explore living with awareness and wisdom in our modern age. You can follow him at @SorenG on Twitter.

If you’ve been spending much time on the new Facebook, you’ve likely been asking, “Do I really care that my friend just listened to Lady Gaga on Spotify? Is this worth my attention?”

Facebook, of course, is insisting that you do care.

We have moved into a new era of sharing. With it comes the opportunity to better know the interests and activities of friends and family on a moment-to-moment basis. At the same time, so much utterly overwhelming information has the possibility to destroy the beauty of the platform.

Possibly at no other time has the question, “Just what is the purpose of social media?” been more relevant.

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From the Intentional to the Automatic

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With new Facebook we are seeing a shift from the Intentional (“Wow, this is an awesome song. I’d really like to share it with my friends.”) to the Automatic (Many of your actions, such as listening to a song, are posted without your direction.). Don’t take this shift lightly; it’s potentially a game changer, though in what direction is uncertain.

The Ticker streams our friends’ activities in our face like never before. This activity will surely expand as automatic posting applications multiply. Facebook is anticipating that more of such content will encourage more engagement, but is it a big risk?

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The Balance Between Relevant and Irrelevant Content

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The potential danger is that there will be too much information to make the site useful. It sets up an increasing flood of content, making it more difficult than ever to find what is relevant. The shift forces more people to ask, “How much of my own time do I want to spend reading about the activities of someone else’s life?”

Reports show that more and more people are feeling overwhelmed by technology, and a recent National Sleep Foundation study found that a whopping 63% of Americans say their sleep needs are not being met during the week. We may be increasingly connected, but that does not mean that our quality of life necessarily improves.

It’s not likely we will see a mass exodus from Facebook in the coming months, but people will need to spend more time and effort weeding through irrelevant information. The service may increasingly tax our attention and patience.

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Why Facebook Has Never Been Free

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It’s important to realize that there is a cost to social sites like Facebook. Recent posts rumored that Facebook planned to charge users for maintaining accounts. Others countered that Facebook would always be free. However, Facebook has never been free, at least, not since it began displaying ads. We pay for Facebook with our attention.

Even though most of us try to avoid the ads that appear on the side, we don’t. If we were all masters at ignoring ads, businesses would stop displaying them.

I have nothing against an ad-supported site, but the quality of content needs to be high enough to outweigh the intrusion of advertisements (which seems to be increasing). My time is worth it.

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The New Era: A Question of Attention

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Our handheld devices allow sharing in ways few of us could have imagined five years ago. In less than 15 seconds, we can upload a mobile photo to all our online friends. This is both a blessing and a curse, and poses enormous challenges that the social media of today must address.

I’m guessing you, like me, find yourself asking, “Just how much information about that high school acquaintance do I really need?” Of all the things we can dedicate attention to – exercising, spending time with our children or family, reading a book – why spend it on social media? What purpose does it serve?

In a broad stroke, the answer is that it must strengthen, not decrease, the quality of our lives. Therefore, simply increasing the quantity of information about our friends is not the answer. In the short term, pageviews may increase as people try to keep up with the increased content, but inevitably there is only so much time and attention we can spare. The question of relevancy will become evermore important.

So, while there may be no financial cost in spending time with social media, in many ways we pay with something far more valuable: our attention. How we dedicate attention is essentially how we choose to spend the limited heartbeats of our lives. This is a lesson the social networks of our time would benefit from.

Jonathan Rick is a social media strategist in Arlington, VA. You can follow him on Twitter @jrick and read his blog at JonathanRick.com.

The pace and power of web-fueled innovation is stunning. One day we’re swearing by Outlook, the next, we can’t live without Gmail. These changes exemplify the beauty of the Internet — the possibility that greener pastures are but a click away.

On the other hand, the list of tech innovations that could have been is quite long. Before we get into those, a few caveats:

• Some of the companies below may not have missed the boat so much as skipped the ride. Oftentimes, these businesses simply chose to perfect their core businesses instead of tacking on new features.
• None of these companies has been “MySpaced.” To the contrary, each remains well-regarded and innovative in its own right.

So, how did tech companies miss the boat?

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1. Google Docs missed the SlideShare boat. Sure, Google Docs can display PDFs and PPTs, but documents are slow to load, maximized by default, and can’t easily be shared or embedded. By contrast, SlideShare is known as “YouTube for documents” because it’s fast, user-friendly and social.

2. Google Docs missed the Dropbox boat. The search giant passed on adding synchronization to Google Docs (or GDrive). Meanwhile, Dropbox pioneered this feature, for which it’s now the gold standard. And, in an ironic twist, during a five-day, company-wide hackathon, Dropbox developed the ability to sync its accounts with Google Docs. (Although Google may soon unleash a Dropbox killer.)

3. Microsoft Office missed the Google Docs boat. Only after companies, governments and non-profits had “gone Google” did Redmond release a cloud-based, collaborative version of its cash cow, Office (along with a few videos that contrast Office with Docs).

4. iTunes missed the Spotify boat. Apple cornered the digital music market years ago, but besides the all-important $0.99 per song price tag, Cupertino never really innovated with iTunes. Specifically, the software’s lack of social and streaming services created massive opportunities that Spotify — and Pandora, Amazon, Google, and Facebook — pounced on. Apple now is playing catch-up with Ping (pathetic) and iCloud (promising).

5. Mapquest missed the Google Maps boat. When I was in college, “Mapquest” was so popular that we used it as a verb. Today, it seems the only people who use this site are those who still have an AOL email address. The reason: thanks to relentless innovation (mash-ups, Street View, GPS-enabled mobile apps), Google Maps has presented itself everywhere you want to travel.

6. Google Latitude missed the Foursquare boat. Ironically, the founder of Foursquare was a former Googler who left because Mountain View wouldn’t allocate enough resources to his team, “leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.” Google still hasn’t made it with Latitude, whereas Foursquare’s points system, partnership with American Express, and merchant features have generated growth of a million users per month. (Perhaps this is why Google may want to buy Foursquare instead of compete with it.)

7. Facebook missed the LinkedIn boat. When I learned of LinkedIn, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Well, yes, but not without some hassle. Reed Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, recognized that, while we want to be hip in our personal lives, we strive to be practical and maybe even a little boring in our careers. This is why we use one email address for pleasure and one for business, and why we use Facebook to socialize with friends and LinkedIn to network with colleagues. Recognizing this, Facebook continues to hype its business pages, while such professional credibility comes naturally to LinkedIn.

8. Facebook missed the Twitter boat. When I learned of Twitter, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Indeed, at its core, Twitter is merely the Facebook status update. Yet Facebook lacked Twitter’s simplicity and pith, a void that ascetic Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, was keen to fill. Apparently, 100 million people agree.

9. Blogger and WordPress missed the Tumblr boat. Finally, when I learned of Tumblr, I thought, can’t you already do this with Blogger or WordPress? Just write shorter. Again, you could, but not with Tumblr’s base-bones simplicity, dynamic community and effective reblogging feature. Microblogging, it turns out, is different from blogging. (No doubt, this is why Blogger just announced Dynamic Views.)

10. Yelp missed the Foodspotting boat. Even though Yelp remains the top social network for restaurant reviews, it overlooked an essential facet of the dining experience: pictures. Foodspotting seized this opening, made it mobile, and now is expanding its focus beyond foodies.

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So why do these examples matter?

The beauty of the web is that it dramatically lowers the traditional barriers to entry, so an entrepreneur can penetrate an already saturated market. For instance, despite heavy competition from the likes of LinkedIn, Yahoo, Facebook, Google-owned Aardvark, and Answers.com, Quora plunged into the Q&A fray. In short order, it carved out and capitalized on a niche.

Examine the above list and you arrive at an under-appreciated conclusion: Internet innovation is so fierce and constant that it undermines the notion of zero-sum market share. Instead of vying for a piece of the same fixed and static pie, webtrepreneurs bake whole new pies. Not for nothing does Jeff Bezos insist that the Kindle comprises a “different product category” than the iPad. Just because a company maintains a seeming monopoly on a market doesn’t mean the market is devoid of opportunities. When there’s an innovator, there’s a way. With the web, Goliath is always vulnerable.

Sure, tech giants are somewhat limited. Just reference the lawsuit from the Justice Department, the investigation from the Federal Trade Commission or the hearing from Congress.

Internet innovation comes in tidal waves, big and bold. By contrast, when’s the last time your microwave got a radical upgrade? Or your shower head? And how’s that electric car coming along?

In the end, the web’s rising tides lift the only ship that matters: the user’s.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, aluxum

Solutions to modern problems sometimes can be found in a distinctly classical place. The Magnolia Special was built to recapture the grace and romance of 1930s European roadsters — internal combustion and all — yet it emits 40 percent less CO2 than an equally powerful gas-burning automobile. And it does this using technology as old as internal combustion itself.

The Magnolia Special is the first bespoke, hand-built car built specifically to run on compressed natural gas. If nothing else, it proves eco-friendly need not mean boring.

“I really don’t think that environmentalists are worth a damn as car designers,” says J.T. Nesbitt, who designed and built the Magnolia Special. “They just lack passion. If the problem of global warming is left only to them, our cars are really going to suck.”

Nesbitt is a talented and passionate motorcycle designer strongly influenced by his adopted home of New Orleans. You may have seen his work ridden by Ewan McGregor in The Island. His representation of the arc of a whip, realized in a carbon fiber frame and fuel tank, created a motorcycle that perfectly fit into a high-tech future despite its old-school aesthetic.

Nesbitt is doing so again, this time for real, by capturing the beauty of the past in a vehicle relevant to the future.

Nesbitt started sketching the car in 2008. It’s his first take on an art-deco roadster theme. Think vintage Alfa Romeo or Jaguar and you won’t be far off. In fact, the car uses an engine based on Jaguar’s fabled 4.2-liter inline-six, the same one that powered the original E-Type. Nesbitt chose the engine because its torquey nature and strong internals work well with CNG. It also helps that the long, narrow engine looks great beneath the car’s louvered aluminum hood. It’s only making 200 horsepower, but with 300 pound-feet of torque, the performance won’t disappoint, particularly in a car that weighs just 2,700 pounds. That torque-to-weight ratio beats the Porsche 911.

“The Jaguar six only won Le Mans like what, five times?” Nesbitt says of the engine. “The 4.2 is such a great torque motor and CNG is really a torque fuel, so it’s a great pairing.”

Nesbitt says the octane rating equivalent for natural gas is 130, so the engine required specially forged high-compression 12.5:1 pistons and high-lift, short-duration camshafts.

“That setup allows the highly stable fuel to achieve complete combustion,” he says.

CNG is a popular conversion for fleet vehicles. But the gaseous fuel requires bulkier tanks than those designed for liquids. This presents a problem for automobiles, because the tank typically eats up a lot of space. By incorporating those tanks into Magnolia’s fundamental structure, Nesbitt made that drawback into an advantage: The tanks add torsional strength to the thin aluminum body. That’s a first in automobile design and construction, and a big part of what makes this vehicle so unique.

“The CNG storage tanks are really the only piece of high tech on this car,” Nesbitt says. “Everything else could have been made 100 years ago. They’re made from a carbon composite wrapped around an extruded aluminum core. The burst pressure is 4,800 PSI, but they’ll normally be filled to 3,600 PSI. They’re incredibly strong, yet very lightweight. I can actually pick one up and walk around the shop with it. That’s amazing.”

If CNG is cleaner than gasoline — the natural gas-burning Honda Civic GX is consistently ranked the greenest internal combustion car on the market — why isn’t CNG a more popular vehicle fuel? Nesbitt has a theory.

“In 1903, H. Nelson Jackson drove from coast to coast, cementing gasoline as the fuel that would power the automobile for the next century. You have to understand that back then there were gasoline cars, steam cars and electric cars, and no one was sure which would prove to be the standard. Jackson proved the viability of gasoline with his record-setting trek, and the rest is history.”

“I think that a true test of an alternative fuel now, just as then, must be endurance,” he adds.

With that in mind, Nesbitt and his friend Max Materne, who helped with the electrical engineering of the car, plan to drive the Magnolia Special from New Orleans to New York to Los Angeles this fall. He plans to prove the fuel’s viability and raise awareness of CNG along the way.

Magnolia’s 700-mile range — the equivalent of 30 gasoline gallons — will help, but finding CNG isn’t that hard. There are CNG filling stations coast-to-coast, and the average cost is 85 cents a gallon. If you have a natural-gas line at home, such as for your stove, you can even buy a converter to make your own CNG.

“Kinda cool to have your vehicle’s fuel bill show up every month on your utilities bill,” says Nesbitt, who fills up the car in his French Quarter studio.

So what’s a motorcycle designer, land-speed record racer and gasoline-fueled hedonist doing worrying about the environment? Hurricane Katrina awakened him to the need to address the causes of global warming.

“Magnolia stems from that concern, but satisfies my passion for real cars, too,” he says.

And make no mistake, this is a real car. Nesbitt built the boxed steel chassis himself. Then he called in Tim George, a renowned Porsche race engine builder, scooter racer and furniture builder from Denver, to help hand-form the aluminum body.

Despite the classic design, Magnolia benefits from thoroughly modern suspension. Up front you’ll find pushrod-actuated inboard coil-over shocks and rack-and-pinion steering. At the rear is a four-link suspension with adjustable shocks. Disc brakes are used on all four wheels.

A steel cage encases the passenger compartment for safety and the underside is sheathed in aluminum to increase aerodynamic efficiency. All the bodywork is easily removed via brass fasteners, making repairs a snap.

No detail has been left untouched. Just look at the steering wheel, sheathed in hand-tooled leather, and the gorgeous hand-turned aluminum dashboard. Another feature you don’t typically find in environmentally friendly cars: a five-speed transmission and posi-traction rear differential.

“Just think about how many custom cars get built in this country every year,” Nesbitt says. “All of that talent, effort and money. What if some of that were harnessed to solve greater problems? It seems like the guys who build cars are inherent problem-solvers and a truly underutilized resource in this country. Simply put, no one’s ever asked them to sit down and work on something like this.”

“We’ve all been sold this idea that to be green we have to be high-tech,” he adds. “I reject that notion. Now, I am not a technophobe, but you’ve got to concede that the future is not going to be a videogame. Things will still be mechanical, people will still work with their hands. There will always be room for craftsmen. I know that a digital wristwatch keeps better time than a wind-up equivalent, but there’s very little romantic connection to them. Electric cars may represent a piece of the environmental puzzle, but I have a hard time getting excited about electrons flowing through circuit boards. I like camshafts and pistons and valves. I like things that make a wonderful noise. CNG satisfies my love for that animation without the guilt of damaging the environment to such a significant degree.”

Nesbitt isn’t driven by profit, but passion. He has no plans to commercialize Magnolia.

“For now, the object is to have fun,” he explains. “I just want to be a part of the solution and make beautiful things in the process.”

Photos: Amy Jett Photography, New Orleans

The CNG tanks provide additional rigidity to the hand-formed aluminum body.

The Magnolia Special is replete with gorgeous details.

We use social media tools for different purposes. We might use it for distribution of media, for marketing, for customer service, for promotion, for communication, and most likely, for all of the above. How you use it depends on your end goals, obviously. But most times, people are being thrust into using social media without really knowing what the goals are, and without knowing what kind of workflow should accompany the use of the tool. Instead, they swing by Facebook to see if anyone commented on the wall update, and they visit Twitter to reply to a few things, retweet a few other things, and they end up feeling like they’re not sure why they’re doing this, let alone how it’s going to serve the cause.

For the sake of this post, we’ll talk about the marketing aspects mostly. Oh, and this is just PART 1: AWARENESS AND CAPTURE. Depending on how it’s received, I’ll add more.

Here are some thoughts on developing social media workflows (including the first building blocks).

Goals First

Where most people get tripped up with social media is that they don’t have solid and clear goals in mind. Goals for using social media for your business can be varied. A few sample goals:

• Increase subscribers to our newsletter by __%.
• Increase sales.
• Promote community engagement (measured by comments and other touches).
• Improve awareness (measured by site visits or video views or similar, and better still, next actions taken).
• Gather customer feedback for product and service enhancement/improvement.

You’ll note that the goals listed above also have tangible measurements attached to them. Showing up in social media to dip your toes in the pool isn’t all that useful. It’s fun and it might prove that you’re using all the cool kid toys, but if you’re not building on something tangible, then there’s nothing worth doing. Caveat to that: it’s okay to not understand how you’re going to achieve these goals right out of the gate. Part of the process is to actually understand the medium and figure out how to best use it.

Thinking in Blocks

If you and I were drawing this together on a white board, or using post-its and an easel, we’d be drawing blocks. The blocks would be like recipe elements, or like bits of code, or like building blocks for kids. I’m a visual thinker, and I think it helps the process. Because I’m too lazy, it’s up to you to get out some sticky notes and make some blocks. Everything below this should be a block to consider.

Awareness

Unless your goal is to support and satisfy an existing organization (for instance, if you’re an association or if this is an internal project), the next thing you’ll want to work on is understanding how to raise awareness of your project. Creating amazing and compelling content is excellent, unless no one sees it. Awareness is tricky these days. YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world, and it serves billions of video views every year. That sounds promising until you realize that means you’re competing with billions of other videos, so just putting up a video there won’t help. This will be the problem with most every project you work on.

To gain awareness, you’ll have to find the people you need to target. To do that, you’ll need to understand the landscape.

Landscape

If I were building something to accomplish these goals, I’d first need to understand the landscape and which tools I’d want to use. For instance, if you’re doing something heavily B2B, there might not be a lot of value in hanging out on Facebook and Twitter, and maybe not even LinkedIn. Acquisition of new people would be the first and foremost thing to consider in that case, actually. If your product faces consumers, then you know that you might want to approach them on a series of mediums. Finding people could be as using a service like Rapleaf or Flowtown. You’ll note something (and we’ll talk about this more): these services all run on email as the hinge. You’ll note that email addresses are the true coin of the realm of understanding and using social media, at least from a marketing perspective.

Figuring out the landscape and the awareness are probably the first two blocks in any workflow, in my mind, or else you’re kind of wasting your effort.

Database

Once you know how you’re going to tackle awareness, and once you have a sense of the landscape where you intend to find people to appreciate and admire your projects, you’ll want a way to capture information about them and do something of value with it. You need some kind of database. If you’re a larger company, then you’re going to want to integrate these people into your existing CRM. Products like Salesforce already have spots to put people’s social media identities. ACT might, as well. I know that Batchbook has that built right in. What you’re looking to create in your database is a kind of Rosetta Stone of people’s social map. So, once you’ve done your work, you might have my Twitter account, my Facebook account, my LinkedIn account, my YouTube account and whatever matters to you.

You’ll obviously also want to store some information that you glean from those channels. Perhaps on YouTube, you’ll note that my daughter does product reviews with me, and maybe you sell a kid’s product. You’ll note that on Twitter, I talk about hip hop, and maybe that will be of value to you. Who knows? But salespeople understand the value of such information. The point is, that without a database, you’re just making stuff and setting it free on the world.

Capture

If you’re looking to build awareness and you’re looking to do something with it, you’ll need to think in terms of capturing these new potential leads so that you can understand which of them can be turned into prospects. Remember that not everyone who interacts with you is a lead. Not everyone who watches your video is a lead. Remember that you have to do some good community work to convert any of these people into buyers and that their response to your efforts to engage doesn’t mean that they want to buy. (Please repeat this over and over to eager salespeople and hungry marketers.)

Just the same, we have to do some things to seek out and find people to add to our database.

Listening is a great capture. If you learn how to grow bigger ears, the results of such efforts will help you find people via the listening channel. As people start voicing their needs, they aren’t exactly saying your name every time, so you might have to work on finding what phrases and words people will use that identify what you sell. Note: it’s rarely what you put on your marketing materials (though maybe it should be?).

Creating good media is a great way to seek capture. For instance, if you write a really useful newsletter, people will sign up. If you create free webinars, people will sign up. These aren’t immediately prospects, but they are at least leads that you can run down. With a social media perspective to capture, perhaps what you do after gathering up these new email addresses is you run them through RapLeaf of Flowtown and find out where these people spend time online. From that, you might learn a bit more about what these people are into and how that might apply to determining if they’re a useful prospect, and also possibly helping you better understand how to market to them and eventually sell them your product or service.

Capture is one of the steps that I feel most people miss with social media workflows. They create interesting stuff and then don’t do much to try and build a follow-on step, OR they go for “sale” as the next step. In most workflows offline, sale is the fourth or fifth action. I never understood why people thought it would be truncated online.

Here Endeth Part One

The awareness and capture elements of a social media workflow are something that will take some time to ingest and work through. I think we’ll stop here and see what comes of this. If you find it interesting, please comment. If you disagree or want to rebut, by all means, please do. These are just some serving suggestions. If you want to write your own version of the article with some more steps, by all means, please do, and consider linking back to this post.

That’s the beauty of this stuff. We can all collaborate and contribute. What say you?

Volumes of professional photography have long been reserved for the coffee table, but Fotopedia, the maker of an online collaborative photo encyclopedia, is bringing this type of content to the iPad and iPhone. The company’s third photo app launches Tuesday and contains 1,300 photos of 40 unique cultures by professional photographer Jaime Ocampo-Rangel.

The app is one part of Ocampo-Rangel’s 12-year-long project, Memory of Colors, which also includes a book, a movie and an exhibit. The project was first on display at UNESCO’s headquarters in 2010. Ocampo-Rangel says he hopes the app will bring his work to new audiences.

“Fotopedia has allowed me to introduce these civilizations to an unprecedented audience that would otherwise have no idea of their existence,” said Ocampo-Real in a statement.

The new app allows users to browse photos by country, culture or color (“In my photography, I associate them with the dominant color of clothes, their skin, their spirituality or their way to perceive beauty,” Ocampo-Rangel explains in a video about the project). Each photo can be shared to social networks or set as wallpaper. For a limited time, the app is available for $0.99.

Memory of Colors is Fotopedia’s third app. The free app Fotopedia Heritage launched in October and has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times, and the first paid app, National Parks, launched in December.

“We don’t think of our apps as books and we don’t think of our job as about perfecting books,” says Fotopedia CEO Jean-Marie Hullot. “…Our job is to help people explore and discover the beauty of the world.”

Designing and critiquing logos for web-based companies and startups is a pursuit of endless fascination for many of us. Over the years, we’ve seen enough startups come and go (and rebrand and merge) to fill a volume with how and how not to develop and execute a logo for a web company.

We’ve also picked up some knowledge about trends in this field. Some of the trends are good; others, regrettable. Others still are simply overused, which is the saddest scenario of them all. We hate to see a good design trick or typeface grow hackneyed over the course of a few months, but it happens all the time, unfortunately.

In this article, we’ve identified 11 trends in web company logo design. Hopefully, you’ll see a few here that apply to the startups and web apps we write about every day. And of course, we’ve included some handy illustrations as a sort of field guide to the logos of the web.

Take a look, and let us know what you think of these trends — and what trends we should have included — in the comments.

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1. Badges and Buttons

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We’ve moved away from the once-ubiquitious BETA! button, but location-esque badges, app-like icons, and “play” buttons are still showing up all over the web. These logos tend to be quite “shiny,” thanks to a few carefully-blended white gradient layers. The square logos have rounded corners. Some appear to glow as if lit from within, which is a compelling and trendy effect in itself. All in all, the badge-and-button set look quite touchable.

Still, this trend’s days may be numbered, if only due to overuse and association-bordering-on-marriage with the Apple/iPhone brand. See also: Wet floor effect.

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2. Speech Bubbles and Megaphones

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If social web apps are all about communication, then it stands to reason that many social web company logos are all about talking. We see fewer logos that revolve around listening (if you happen to see a giant ear logo in the wild, do let us know), but megaphones and speech bubbles abound.

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3. Fun With Opacity!

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Remember the first time you discovered Multiply and Overlay blend modes in Photoshop? If that moment changed your life forever, then you probably understand the beauty of a simple, elegant logo that delicately plays with opacity.

While this logo treatment won’t work for every web app, it’s a versatile and timeless way to present classic shapes in a new light. We’re seeing this basic effect used simply in MasterCard-reminiscent designs, and we’re seeing much more complex opacity effects used in logos for HTML5 and Microsoft Silverlight, for example.

Playing with blending modes, opacity and overlapping shapes can also be a fun way to experiment with analogous color schemes.

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4. Kawaii Illustration

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Calling all woodland creatures: You’re wanted on the Internet. In fact, the only time you’ve been in greater demand than you are now was when Disney was making those saccharine “princess” films.

Why are these wide-eyed, adorable critters making their way into logo design? Apps are for adults, right? Especially apps such as Seesmic, a powerful web app dashboard for power users and the enterprise, and GitHub, an industry standard for source code hosting.

We don’t know exactly how, when or why kawaii made a comeback into serious-business logo design, but with logos this cute, who are we to complain?

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5. Scripts, Slabs and Other Cool Fonts

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Say it with me: “I will not use Archer for a web company’s logo design.”

Archer and its ilk were used to great effect over the past couple years on a number of memorable web company logos. That being said, the Year of the Slab is definitely not over. In fact, it’s more of an epoch than a traditional Gregorian year at this point. Slab serif fonts — if they’re unique fonts — are still a viable alternative to been-there-done-that sans serifs in logos, and the web community still enjoys them.

That being said, a good, juicy script can be one of the liveliest, most unexpected logo choices yet, particularly if your logo is solely typographic. Rephoria uses my personal favorite, Candy Script, a swash-heavy number that’s almost too voluptuous for work but which still makes the cut for a single-word logo.

Just remember: When using more unusual fonts for logo design, restraint and legibility are key.

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6. Verdant and Plant-Inspired

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Plants and leaves aren’t just for green tech companies, folks. When you’re trying to project growth, one of the most obvious logo choices is flora. A shy set of leaves, a furling bud, a sprouting seed — what could better convey your company’s fresh problem solving and rapid expansion?

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7. Quadrangles

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It’s not a rectangle, it’s not a square, but whatever it is, it’s popping up everywhere. Quadrangles are, if the web is to be believed, the new dots. From rhombuses to parallelograms to indescribable yet angular blobs, these shapes strive for post-modern and consumer-friendly.

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8. Retro Game References

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Perhaps it’s because the newer crop of web designers are also children of the late eighties, but we’ve been seeing a lot of pseudo-retro, video game-inspired logo work lately. While these designs are definitely quirky, geeky and cool, beware using them for a general audience; not everyone feels the same nostalgia we do for an 8-bit, pixelated graphic of a mushroom.

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9. Color-Coordinated Compound Words

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Web startup names and logos are inextricably linked. We’re a couple years past the compound word phase (which was most virulent right before the tragic “missing vowel” phase that gave birth to web companies with names like “Packg” and “Clevrr”), but we haven’t left behind our love for merged-word logos in two snappy, coordinating colors.

This trick is one of the oldest in the book. It was notably used for Vignelli Associates’ 1967 rebranding of American Airlines, whose two-word name became a one-word logo in red and blue.

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10. Logotypes

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The big boys of the web, sites such as Google and Facebook, have inspired the logo design of a generation with their utter simplicity. In many cases, those initial logotypes were less legitimate logo design and more “put our startup’s name in a simple font and stick it up on the web, we’ll deal with branding later.”

The name-in-a-sans-serif look says your company has nothing to prove and that you focus on product over promotion. If it’s well-executed, it’s a powerful statement to make. However, if poorly executed, it looks hasty, sloppy, juvenile and amateurish.

Logotypes can also be a great excuse to play with exciting typefaces and trendy treatments, such as the embossed or letterpress look that’s getting so much play these days, thanks to CSS3.

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11. Nodes, Spokes and Hubs

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Between concepts such as linked data and the synaptic web, you had to see these designs coming. They remind us of molecular structure and K’nex, an updated take on the crop of mid-century modern Sputnik-inspired designs of the 1950s. These logos are usually intended to represent the interconnectedness of people and content on the web, or, in a more literal interpretation, computer hardware circuitry.

An excellent study of this concept is Bernard Barry’s designs for the 2010 f8 conference.

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What Trends Are You Spotting?

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What trends are you seeing in web company logos these days? What are you already sick of, and what do you want to see more? Please share your observations in the comments.

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