If you don’t use del.icio.us, start. Now.
OK, now you’ve started, before you get too carried away, read this article: The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users » Slacker Manager.
There’s so many powerful uses for this amazing application. One I’ve just started is to track research on given topics – then it’s really simple for me to share the links with my colleagues. But becuase they’re live, and collaborative, it opens up loads of possibilities.
BannerBlog.com.au : Where Banners Click – nice site from Australialand. A regularly updated feast of online advertising with contributers from lots of agencies around the world (including Poke’s very own Tobie Cameron).
Compare and contrast: French Connection’s new advert is not a million miles away from this pop video from last year (damn, that song is really really bad!).
Thanks to Emil for the tip – came up in an IM conversation about originality in ideas.
Update: Song is by GrooveCutters (sorry guys, the track’s just not my thing), and they’re not all that happy about the whole affair; according to Ad-Rag.
Funnily enough a second post about an AKQA piece of work in one day, they must be doing something right. And in this case they really are: Run London – RouteFinder. An extension of the undoubtedly great brand property Run London, this time a trendy mash-up with Google maps.
But this isn’t just a fashionable me-too, this is a really really smart utilisation of Google’s mapping API. It allows users to overlay and share their running routes. You can search for routes by postcode, type of terrain, whether it’s well lit at night and more.
Nice work.
Diablogue (a new find on the blog trail; thanks Russell) pointed me in the direction of a new online Visa campaign produced by AKQA. Life Takes Visa
As the Diablogue guys say there’s some sweet moments in there. But I can’t help but feel that this is just a load of nice little ads glued together into a website.
For the money that was spent on this piece of interactive advertising, I’d have thought they might have taken the opportunity to do something, well… ‘interactive’? Instead it’s just a load of nicely produced FakeReal scenarios, which support the offline advertising brilliantly. It’s a really nice piece of ‘online advertising’ in that sense. But it left me wanting more.
The thing that really puzzled me though was the copyright notice at the bottom of the page:
How come an advertising website is copyright Microsoft?
I did a bit of digging around and found that there’s a version of the site that you can get to via http://lifetakesvisa.msn.com/visa.asp which has an MSN frame at the top. Not sure how ‘exclusive’ the deal is, and how it came about.
From where I’m sitting I see a lot of the big online media owners trying to get closer to ‘creative agencies’ so that they can deliver richer, more extensive, online advertising that’s exclusive to their network. It’s almost like good online advertising could be considered content. Imagine that ;-)
BBC news reports on this rather odd story from the US. A judge in the States has ruled that Google have violated the copyright of Perfect 10 magazine (a high end ‘adult’ title). The violation results from the fact that Google shows thumbnails from the magazine on their image search site.
The only upside for Google in the whole thing is:
The judge said the search company did not gain financially from the thumbnails.
Instead the websites hosting the pirated images were at fault, meaning that a damages claim against Google was unlikely to succeed.
To my mind the whole case should have been built around this. The whole point of Google is to index stuff online. To expect them to be able to filter out anything that may have a copyright infringement is absolutely insane. If you look closely almost every single website in the world will have some form of copyright infringement somewhere.
Just look at the image above. I haven’t got permission from Google for that screenshot. And even more worryingly I’ve got no permission from Perfect 10 (those scaled down thumbnails are images from their magazine). I guess that makes me guilty too…
I get why MySpace is popular, but I don’t get why it should be 30 million people popular. So I was happy to read this article by Danah Boyd at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
It’s a rough transcript of a really well considered talk on the nature of spaces (public, private, controlled and uncontrolled) and the way in which adults and youth inhabit them. I won’t try to precis is here; you should read it yourself. It’s one of those articles that I’m storing bits of in my brain. They’re going to make me appear smart sometime soon. Maybe.
Her blog post that introduces it is here:
OK, OK, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I managed to read a book. I can read, and I like reading. But so often I start with great intentions; I order a book from Amazon (or heaven forbid pick one up in a real bookshop). I tuck into it with great enthusiasm. But then about 1/2 or 2/3 into it I suddenly come to a halt. Not because I’m not interested, but because I run out of momentum. The stuff of everyday life gets in my way. Or perhaps more commonly my magpie vision spots something newer, something more interesting.
But not this time! For the first time in a while I actually finished reading a ‘business book’. Why Business People Speak Like Idiots captivated me from the back cover to the end, and I suppose that it’s a good job that it was readable, otherwise their whole premise would be shot to bits.
It wasn’t stacked with ideas that revolutionised my life. But it was really nicely written. Charming, and it somehow helped to reaffirm some of my views on the business world. The single thing that made me love this book was one simple concept. The fact that our weekend-selves (friendly, interesting, passionate, smutty, fun and REAL) get ditched on Monday morning and replaced by a greyer, less interesting, less real version; the one that we think our clients and colleagues want to do business with. We’re wrong.
Nothing new for people who work in creative jobs surrounded by creative people. But I realised that I’m very lucky. I don’t have to pretend to be a different person very much. I’m allowed to be me (most of the time). However, this book shows how even in very ‘straight’ environments there’s a lot to be said for staying true to yourself.
I think I might have rambled a bit, sorry, I think I’m coming down with a cold, which for some strange reason has made me more verbose than normal.
I ran into these the other day on the ThinkGeek site. Giant Robot Stickers. I thought they were pretty special. So I did a bit of digging around and found that they make loads of cool removable wall stickers. Blik is the name of the company. I’ll let you know how I get on…
Simple, cheap and pretty. These LED Throwies stick to any metal surface and make it look pretty. Can imagine some really nice interactive type applications with these at the core. Check the video at the Graffiti Research Lab (their re-use of Jose Gonzales made me smile).
Only downside, someone’s got to clean up the mess…