Month: October 2006

Shoes on Wires

I’d always wondered why you often see shoes hanging over overhead cables. I saw loads of them in the Lanes in Brighton at the weekend. Wikipedia has the answer (as always). But this time I’m not convinced about any of their stories, or any of the reference links. I do ilke that fact that it’s called shoefiti though…

Birthdays

I totally missed Google’s birthday (28th September). But I picked it up today thanks to Mike at DigitalAgency

Perhaps the reason that I missed it was that it was my birthday on the same day and I was too worried about being old. I like having the same birthday as Google. Not sure why but oddly I do.

I also realised that Crackunit, in it’s current form, is one year old on the 10th October. Not sure how to celebrate, maybe I’ll have a blog party. Everyone’s invited. It’s BYO btw.

Mmmmm Crisps

As far as vices go crisps is a big one for me. I’m not a chocolate person. I like salty stuff. With fat.

This ad haunts me. When I look at the lovely colourful packs I can’t help but think of drinking oil.

It works.

YouTube Haters

Youtube
Asi who writes the excellent No Man’s Blog left a comment yesterday about the fact that slating YouTube is very much the in-thing to do right now. And he left me a link or two.

Having read a bit more around the topic it seems to be shaping up into an interesting-ish debate. There seems to be a few camps forming, broadly lovers, doubters and haters. I think I’m a lover / doubter fence-sitter. And here’s why:

I love YouTube because…

  • It’s made online video easy and accessible. No hassle with special software.
  • It’s easy to upload stuff in almost any format.
  • It’s set the bar for quality at an attainable level for most people.
  • Access to amazing things that have been languishing in archives.
  • As far as I’m aware they were one of the champions of portable video (i.e. you can take it and embed it anywhere you like).
  • The community is there (if you want to engage with it), you can almost ignore it if not and just use it to host your clips.
  • It feels like it ‘gets’ its place on the web.

I doubt YouTube because…

  • There’s a lot of complicated rights issues that make my head hurt.
  • Lots of big established companies feel threatened, even if they do deals with many of them, there’ll still be plenty left out in the cold, looking for their payout.
  • Lawyers like making money.

A thought: Assuming that the YouTube community is a big part of its value. How much do YouTube users (viewers and publishers) love YouTube? If it came to a massive legal battle how much would people pay to save it? What’s the perception of value of unlimited (arguably low-grade) video entertainment?

Would people chip-in $5 each, $10 or $50? Or would we hear the plops of millions of video-rats diving into the sea as the good ship YouTube sinks? (And I’m not saying it will, just to be clear…)

Communities didn’t really act in any meaningful way when Napster and Audiogalaxy were shut down a few years ago. But in those cases the legalities were much more obvious. And the communities far more niche, and (from memory) smaller.

I’d quite like to see ‘The Entertainment Industries of the World’ vs ‘The People of YouTube’ as a court case.

Netflix Prize

This must be one of the most blogged about stories of the last week. But I’m going to do it anyway because I think it’s really interesting and it spans the worlds of geekery and marketing perfectly…

Netflix are offering $1,000,000 to someone who can come up with a way of improving their recommendations engine. All you have to do is increase the accuracy of their recommendations engine by 10%…

A really smart, noisy promotion. Not sure how it works in terms of driving sign-ups, but in terms of making Netflix a very very talked about (and innovative) brand it works a treat. I was thinking to myself what a Marketing 2.0 type idea it was.

But, thanks to the collective smarts of the blogosphere I’ve changed my mind a bit. As pointed out on the O’Reilly Radar, if they’d just opened up their API in the first place so that people could do interesting stuff with it, the million bucks could probably have been saved and they might already have the answer they’re looking for.

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Forrester: YouTube is goin’ down

youtube going downA Forrester blog (Devices, Media, And the Future of Everything) has a post from one of their analysts that predicts that copyright will be the downfall of YouTube. He draws parallels with what happened to old-Napster. Certainly an interesting point of view: YouTube is goin’ down

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Organic Blog

organic three mindsNot a blog about stuff with no pesticides. Stuff about the web agency Organic. Actually they might be pesticide free too, in fact they probably are.

They’ve got a nice blog: Three Minds @ Organic. A smart blog with interesting things in it. Surprisingly not that many agencies have great blogs, Poke included (but we’re working on that right now).

I also quite like the reason they call it Three Minds:

Why the name? Great advertising was often created in “pairs” — a
copywriter and an art director. In the digital world, the creation
process is more complex. Strategists, designers, information
architects, media specialists, and technologists must come together to
create great experiences.

Quite simply, it takes ThreeMinds.

I’d argue though that maybe it should be called ManyMinds, three is far too absolute for me ;-)

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M&Ms Dark

M&Ms Dark

I like this. It looks lovely. It’s nicely produced. And it’s always tough to do something in the least bit interesting with chocolate online.

M&M’S® Dark Chocolate

But…

It does owe a big debt to the Virgin Radio promotion from last year (which probably owes a massive debt to something else).

via Random Culture.

South Bank Show Podcasts

Irvine WelshI’m highlighting these podcasts because watched the South Bank Show on Sunday night for the first time in ages. Specifically because Irvine Welsh was supposed to be taking Melvin Bragg around bits of Edinburgh. I lived in Muirhouse where lots of Trainspotting was set for some of my early life and thought it’d be interesting to see his view of it now.

But it turned out to be much more interesting than just a tour of Edinburgh. Welsh talks about his new book and covers some really interesting themes. Drugs and alcohol (suprise surprise), love and hatred, the class system and rebellion. I have total admiration for the gritty academia of people like Welsh. I know some people will struggle with his accent, but he speaks concisely (and to my mind eloquently) about big stuff that affects real people.

More about the South Bank Show podcasts.