American Express RED are trying to rasie £10k to fight AIDS in Africa today. All you have to do is click on a banner on the front page of Yahoo.co.uk (and it doesn’t even take you anywhere!). Each click raises 25p.
Click here to do it! (31st May only)
And the fun bit, once they hit £10k the homepage of Yahoo.co.uk turns red. (May only be available to UK IP addresses).
Confession – I may have had something to do with this (sorry).
UPDATE: We did it, hooray! See below.
Cool Hunting blog the Gnarls Barkley video for UK chart smash number one hit – Crazy. It’s top. A really simple idea beautifully executed. Based around a morphing set of Rorschach ink blots it’s a worthy accompaniment to the track. I don’t know quite why I felt compelled to write about it, it just moved me. But I guess there’s a few things that I really liked:
Anyway, you can watch it here if you like: Gnarls Barkley – Crazy (Quicktime)
This year’s Webby Award winners have just been announced. And I’m chuffed to say that Poke have managed to bag a couple.
One for Talking Point for Orange, and a People’s Voice for Feed Me Better for Jamie Oliver.
I’m personally really happy that Talking Point got awarded as it’s a project that caused me a lot of sleepless nights, and involved a lot of tricky client meetings. [See original blog post here]. As a platform I think we could have done lots more with it, and maybe we still can. Nonetheless it’s nice to see it get commended in this way.
Great to see that the UK is well represented across the board.
Well this is the reality of it.
This lovingly crafted piece of home-made UK hip-hop has spawned absolutely loads of mashups / remixes / re-edits. Just shows there’s nowt as queer as folk eh. Oh, and just to prove that entrepreneurialism is alive and well you can now get your own Kersal Massive hoodies, etc.
(Note to self – must get back into reading the B3ta newsletter so I’m not 3 weeks behind the rest of the world)
I know I’m a day late, but forgive me, I’ve been away.
The BBC write about how history was made on Sunday: Crazy by Gnarls Barkley went into the UK charts at number 1. Even though it’s not even available in physical shops yet.
It’s one of those tracks that’s been hammered on the radio for months and months before being released properly, so there was obviously a massive latent, constructed, demand. Cool though.
According to a report from Marketing Sherpa:
Currently at least 75 million consumers and businesspeople in the USA and UK use RSS on a regular basis. However, depending on which study’s stats you believe, only 17-32% of RSS users actually know they’re using RSS.
I don’t find this at all hard to believe. I use RSS all the time, lots of people I know use RSS, but without knowing what RSS actually is or how it works. Before trying to write a definition of RSS I did about 10 minutes of fruitless searching, attempting to find a definition that you didn’t have to be a techie to understand. I couldn’t. I’m sure that there are simple definitions out there. But all the ones I found tended to stray off into scary things like XML definitions.
Having tried (and in most instances failed) to tell clients about RSS feeds the most useful description of RSS I’ve found is something like this:
“Using RSS you can make your website content very portable. It takes the most important information: titles, text, links and images. And makes it easy for you, or other people to display it in the way they choose. An RSS feed enables people to view your site content on their phone, on their computer, on other websites (MyYahoo, Google personal home page, etc.). It gives you extra distribution channels for your content with almost no extra effort.”
That’s the fundamentals (as I see them). Of course there’s loads more you can do with RSS, but as a basic description this sort of works for me. If my dummies definition misses lots of important things please let me know.
From Boing Boing: BBC report on UK gamers from 6-65 – contains some amazing figures.
“59% of 6 to 65 year olds in the UK are gamers. In total there are 26.5 million gamers in the UK. The average age of a UK gamer is 28 years old, and the gender split is almost even, averaging out at 45% female and 55% male”
I was shocked at the volumes, the average age, and the gender split. The report is well worth a look and contains some great info-graphics – see above.