Category: Web Stuff

Comments and Community on YouTube

Knotty commented on the YouTube Cyber Haterz thing with:

I don’t know why people even bother with YouTube comments… Imagine if you had to listen to every bitchy comment people made to their TV?

I was thinking about that when I posted the clips.

I was thinking how sorry I felt for the kids that had posted the original clip. They were only having a laugh.

Then I thought about how they’d just have to not look at the comments and responses. I think if I was them I’d just move on and ignore it. Or at least I’d try to. But it’s really hard not to look at what people are saying when you know they’re saying something. I guess that’s just human nature.

But if you didn’t have comments on YouTube there would be no sense of community. And there are plenty of people who do think that YouTube is a proper community. These guys from the SouthTube get-together certainly do. And a couple of them acknowledge that even the haters have a sort of role in the community.

I’m not saying that I agree with them, they certainly feel pretty strongly about it though.

Powerpoint Karaoke

All this Pecha Kucha stuff is starting to get a bit dreary.

The idea of PowerPoint Karaoke seems a lot more random and challenging.

Basic idea is: people stick real presentations ‘in a hat’, then presenters get allocated a random presentation and have to present it as best they can.

There’s a great description of how to do PowerPoint Karaoke at Heathervescent.

There doesn’t seem to be many of them on popular video sharing sites (yet). There’s a few in German, but here’s one in English from BarCamp LA. You’ll get the idea:

Who’s in?

Oh and if you want to ‘do PowerPoint Karaoke’ there’s a nifty presentation randomiser that works with Slideshare, you just enter a tag and it pulls in random presentations for maximum randomness…

Hot or Not Still Hot

hot or not

I forgot Hot or Not. Well I didn’t forget it as such. Who could forget the hottest site of the early noughties. But at the same time I’d assumed it was pretty much stagnating in Internet history. But according to Techcrunch: HotOrNot Apparently Very Hot: Acquired For $20 Million

Their annual revenue is estimated to be around $5 million, with $2 million in profit. According to Comscore, the site has around 5 million monthly unique visitors and 200 million page views.

So they seem to have flogged it for 20 million dollars.

Go back and have a quick play with it: http://www.hotornot.com/. It really does have some incredibly simple and sticky interaction going for it.

The ‘rate and move on’ one-click interaction is just beautiful – even if all the people on there aren’t.

Just shows the power of a simple, social, well executed idea.

The Best Online Music Toy Ever

This is the simplest and best thing I’ve ever seen for creating music fast. It’s massively usable. You can literally get into it by clicking a few keys – admittedly you’ll be making derivative euro-dance. But it’ll sound totally competent no matter how incompetent you secretly are. Go there and have a play, it’s blooming awesome: http://www.tony-b.org/. Really. Do. It’s great.

Even thought the music is really cheesy playing with this put a real smile on my face!

Via: Beatportal

Advertising Ads

In spite of the heinous typo I love this sign (from a little newsagents just off Brick Lane).

I haven’t seen anything that encapsulates quite so wonderfully the problem with a lot of the online advertising that is floating around aimlessly in cyber-space. There’s so many things (good and bad) that no-one has ever seen (or will ever see).

Some obvious causes of invisible web marketing properties:

  • It’s just not plugged in to the rest of the web properly.
  • Or it’s not interesting or talk-able enough.
  • Or sometimes it’s just plain rubbish and no-one wants to see it.

The answer: Advertise your ad(d)s – and it’s only a quid!

Do You Want to Do Digital?

Scamp asks the $6m question:

Most above-the-line creatives claim that most digital creative work is poor, and they will be able to do it much better, when they’re asked to. However, my question to above-the-line people is… do you actually want to?

Did you come into this business to sell, by any channel necessary?

Or did you come into it to make ‘films’, and quite frankly you’d rather someone else took care of the banners, just like they take care of the DM?

Head over to his blog and vote now!

EDIT: just to clarify, this poll is ONLY for people who aren’t already in some way digital. As Scamp rightly points out in the comments it’s not a poll for us digital types – I haven’t voted and neither should you if you’re already in the biz.

Be really interesting to see how it pans out…

Pownce Errors

I’m not convinced that I need Pownce (yet), but I did like their error message:

I wonder if they’ve got clearance for the image use?

if you’ve got a web business these days you need to have a great error page. I bet most brand consultancies haven’t cottoned on to this yet. Next time I see a branding presentation I’m going to raise it…

One Of Those Days…

Aaaaargh...

I’m sure everyone has those days. But I proper feel like I’ve just had one.

I’m not sure why I feel that way. I just do. I’ve had a couple of good meetings. In fact a couple of really good meetings. And some pretty good news too.

I’ve just got this horrible nagging feeling that we all need to do more stuff better. And quickly. All the time. Starting yesterday.

Clients are caring more and more about what we do. And real people are caring less and less. And it’s getting more like that every day.

Anyone else know what I mean? Or should I just have a nice cup of tea and a lie down?

Last.fm Goes Fulltracktastic

Big news. Last.fm gets full track listening capabilities.

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Interestingly you can play each track 3 times, then you get an alert about their forthcoming ‘subscription service’. But I think that sounds pretty fair. If I want to listen to something on-demand, more than 3 times, I think it’s about time I started to make some commitment to it.

The more you play stuff the more the artist gets paid. That sounds pretty fair to me too.

Nice one chaps. Good luck with it.