BigShinyThing

We love the muppet wiki… and not just because thanks to it, we now know which episode our favourite muppet number ever is in (it’s Episode 401, hiking pigs). No, we love this particular wiki because it shows what wikis are all about: sharing knowledge.

People often complain that wikis aren’t ‘visual’ enough and that (ouch) they are even ugly. This is a typical web 1.0 vs 2.0 argument. Take that much-loved beast of web 1.0: Flash. We’ve written before about how misappropriated flash actually hides knowledge from both search engines and users. For evidence, see… oooh, pretty much any ad agency website you care to think of! At the core of what makes wikis tick is sharing knowledge and unless your site was designed by Eric Gill, concentrated knowledge (generally) ain’t pretty: it’s functional. Even a wiki about something as visually brilliant as the muppets on first look, looks, well a little vanilla. It’s only once you start to engage with the content (i.e. search ‘hiking’… the key signifier of our favourite muppet skit) that you start to see the real beauty of the knowledge within.

The history of invention is littered with brands that had it all, and lost it all. Sadly, Polaroid has just become one of the victims. The iconic instant photography brand announced this week that it is shutting down film production, bringing to an end the era of polaroid photos.

So what went wrong? In short, Polaroid backed the wrong innovation pony. In the late 1970s, sensing that some kind of seismic shift was coming, it invested heavily in Polavision – an instant movie camera system. Not only was the product a complete turkey, Polaroid missed the real market shifts to come: first the videocassette, then digital. In 2001, Polaroid filed for Chapter 11 and in 2005 was bought by a private investment firm. The brand isn’t completely defunct — it will now focus on producing flat-panel TVs and digital photography gear — but its time as an innovator apparently is. Expect a buying and selling frenzy of dead stock on eBay — we’ll be there.

This has also enabled brands to appropriate bygone glamour like never before. Witness Alexander McQueen’s referencing of Hitchcock blondes in his Autumn/Winter 2005/06 collection. And Cointreau’s latest twist on the ‘be cointreauversial’ (ouch) campaign features classic Getty images reappropriated for the brand. The prom blurb for the exhibition reads, “Cointreau and Getty Images Gallery present a tantalizing exhibition of photographs celebrating cointreauversial women with strength of spirit and a timeless sense of style”. Coincidentally, of course, it features archive images of icons such as Liz Taylor quaffing cocktails.

In the meantime, video iPods are seeing a rush for obscure 1960s shows that the networks no longer show (as well as the obligatory porn) and AOL have announced plans to release loads of classic TV online — maybe the first sensible thing the company has done as a result of its time up with Time Warner.

Now that everything is accessible — and so easily — what’s left to plunder?