Web Stuff
Long Read – The New Propaganda
Long and very bleak but very important piece from The Guardian: Information Trap. My jaw was dropped for most of it. This blew my mind. In the case of the vote to leave the EU, Borwick, who seems to approach such challenges like a Rubik’s…
Found this random SWF on my HD. Made me all Poke / Orange / Balloons nostalgic.
My Search for an Interactive Music Video with Windows in it
Last night I was trying to find a particular interactive music video. I tried mailing a couple of people: “You know, the one where there’s a window in the middle, and objects come out of it in other windows, and I think you could buy them…
ZOMG Japanese Knife Porn
Man buys rusty old Japanese knife for $3 and transforms it. Stick around to the end. Ridiculous. It’s been seen by 24m people (at the time of posting). But that means there’s still a lot of us who hadn’t seen it. Including me. Until just…
The Outline is an antidote to the shitweb
I don’t fully agree with all of it all the time, but The Outline is a wonderful thing. A publication that’s well written and beautifully designed for phones and computers. Loved this piece that came in the email yesterday: Productivity Is…
Experiments in Medium-ing
Why am I interrupting the deep slumber of Crackunit to talk about Medium? I think it’s about time I gave it a go. I’m reading Medium content more and more every month. And over the last couple of years I’ve started to feel like I’m missing…
Advertising Has Grown a Penis on its Face
I did a talk the other day at Here London. I had a truly lovely time. The other speakers were all – without exception – amazing, talented, interesting and passionate. I felt spectacularly un-worthy. I whanged-on about what I reckon might…
Waiting in Line 2 Hack You
I was chatting to Jordy van den Nieuwendijk at Here on Friday. And he mentioned that he’d worked with a guy at W+K NYC who was responsible for Waiting in Line 3D. WIL3D is one of my favorite things of all time, and having the warped mind…
The Small Things That Make the Difference
I’m visiting a mix on SoundCloud (this one if you care). The top of the page looks like this: Then I start playing the mix, and look what happens to my tab: Spot it? If not let me make it clear… SoundCloud have always been very good at…
Microsoft and Yahoo! Ads
In under 24 hours I’ve noticed these 2 ads for what I suppose are Google’s nearest competitors in a bunch of things. First this Yahoo! ad. Now I’m not crazy about the chick with the Social Media Tattoos. I’ve seen her around a bit and I…
Blogs is Back
I got inspired by Ben writing this piece about good old fashioned blogging and how we should all try and make it good again: http://noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com/design/2010/09/lets-make-blogging-good-again.html It made me realise just…
My Talk at Under The Influence
Here’s the talk I did at Iris’ excellent Under the Influence day. It’s basically about digital experiences and magic and how the two are interconnected. Hope it’s OK – from my perspective I think it wanders a bit at the end (I sort of ran…
Google Visualisation Gadgets – Cool
I discovered the world of visualisation gadgets through this excellent blog: http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/ They’re things that can basically turn a table full of boring data into interactive gadgets that you can publish and share as…
The Single Most Brilliant Single Web Page in Recent Memory
Artist David Horvitz has a load of really great things on site site. Really do go and have a poke about it’s great. The best bit is a page of things called FOR YOU… It’s a list by the artist of “THINGS FOR SALE THAT I WILL MAIL YOU” For…
Judging Viral – Viral in 5 Words
I’ve been doing some bits and pieces of awards judging for various folk this year. It’s all been interesting so far. The one I’m most worried about is the D&AD Viral Category. I’m the chairman of the jury and I’m guessing that there’s…
Adobe Downloads Cost More Than Boxes – WTF?
I feel bad posting bad stuff about Adobe being as they’ve just launched 2 really cool things: Buzzword.com is an amazing online word processor (the export functions are dead tight and you could almost survive without MS Word), and…
My Balearic Muxtape
Everyone seems to be Muxtaping today. They’re calling it the easy way to create and share mixtapes. And it is. You just upload your tracks and it puts them together in a nice webpage where people can just click to listen. They’ve got a…
URLs Out – Searches In
I was watching TV last night and an ad came on for continuing education. It’s one with fingers walking around the place. The ad was OK. I didn’t really pay much attention. But at the end of the ad the call to action was – “search for EMA…
Make Mine a Builders – Superb Blogger Relations
In the post the other day I got a package of brilliant stuff. You can see it above. It contained a pack of “Make Mine a Builders” tea and a stylish silver mug with one of those climbing clippy things (I can never remember their proper…
Oh My Good Lord
Sophie’s brother introduced me to the work of Larry Carlson yesterday. Half of me wishes he hadn’t. It’s like a portal into a strange dimension that makes you feel kind of odd. But you can’t help sticking around to see what happens next…
Is It Broken?
Brilliantly simple. We’ve all had those moments when a site’s not working. And you wonder, is it down for everyone or just me? http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ answers the question for you. You enter a URL and it tells you. Smashing. I…
The Rise of The Ad Man 2.0
[I’ve written this post once already. I got to the end of it just as someone phoned me up. I picked up the phone. Fumbled it. And dropped it on my laptop which duly crashed in a spectacular fashion. The second revision is slightly shorter…
Absolut Machines
Dickon from work pointed me at: ABSOLUT MACHINES. It’s so killer it’s not even funny. They’ve got a load of top drawer interactive music machines that you can play with over the internet. And the way they’ve done the queueing and stuff is…
Techno Viking in Oil – Painting Internet Memes
This guy paints scenes from Internet memes. He used to paint scenes from video games. But he’s moved on. You can buy them at Etsy. Unfortunately Techno Viking has sold out, or else it would be mine right now. Thanks Jonathan for the
Spamsoup
Sometimes I can see how and why spam ends up being a jumble of nonsense. They’re trying to fool spam filters in obscure ways. But this one I just look at and scratch my head. A lot. It’s just like a soup of words. Dear Pokelondon Account…
4×4 Meme: More About Me
I got tagged by blackbeltjones with the 4×4 meme. So I rolled over and became a part of it. Plus it gives me a chance for some totally self-absorbed and pointless blogging. It looks like this meme has mutated a bit over time, but I’m going…
Facebook Add To Friends QR Code
This is bloody great. Facebook app + QR code. Sounds like someone playing ‘cool shit mashup’. But here something’s been made that is much greater than the sum of its parts. It’s really simple. You add the Facebook app. Click ‘make my…
AgencyTart – Nice Contact Page
A superb use of ‘punch in the aorta’ when applied to blog spammers: From a new site on my blogdar – agencytart.wordpress.com a sweetly vitriolic blog with a passionate hatred of lots of bad things. I hope the author finds their negativity…
NewsGlobe
Charticles one day, NewsGlobes the next. It’s all getting a bit ‘Day Today‘ round these parts. NewsGlobe is a project that’s come out of the next.yahoo.net stables. There’s a description of how it came about here. For last month’s Yahoo!…
Coming To Crackunit to Score Shecock?
You should be ashamed of yourself! This popped up as a search term people use to find the site in my stats. I’m shocked and appalled to have such filthmongers visiting the site.…
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…
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…
Hot or Not Still Hot
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Understanding Art for Geeks
Very funny Flickr set by Paulthewineguy. Number 43 had me ROFLMAO. Thanks metafilter.…
One Of Those Days…
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…
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…
What The World Needs Now
Is thing-a-day 2! Get over the winter blues and commit to creating something every day in February. I’m going to do it. It’s just what I need to force me into some mindless creativity for a month. Inspired by a an idea by Ze Frank, so how…
For the Twitter Haters
If I didn’t have Twitter I wouldn’t have had these nuggets delivered to me. Two of the most important things I’ve read in some time… You can’t say that Twitter’s useless now. This proves it. I hope Russell and Hugh don’t mind me posting…
Photojojo – A Smart Thank You
If you’ve not come across photojojo and you use a digital camera a big chunk of your life is missing. They deliver some of my favourite online content. So I did an odd thing this morning, I switched from using their RSS feed to getting…
All Loading Devices are The Devil’s Work
OK, I can bitch about circular loading devices. But I swear now that bars are no bloody better. I’m trying to archive off a whole chunk of my iTunes library that I don’t like so much. And it’s taking hours and hours to do it. But what’s…
The Webbys – A Trip Back In Time
Nik’s written a piece on why he likes the Webbys over here. I like the Webbys too. For me they’re the awards that get closest to recognising the important things online (in the English speaking parts of the interwebs anyway). It tends to…
The Curse of Circular Loading
I know these kind of circular ‘loading’ devices are very trendy. But they should only be used when the delay is likely to be a couple of seconds maximum. They are absolutely shit at everything else. I’ve just been faced with a screen which…
Funny 400 Error
Well it made me chuckle anyway. I found the error by typing in a bad URL at the MacRumours site.
Facebook and ‘The Man’
This article from the Guardian seemed to be the most visible thing on the Internet round these parts yesterday: With friends like these… by Tom Hodgkinson Facebook has 59 million users – and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won’t…
3d Video
Wow. This 3d flash video (using papervision) is simply stunning. I predict a lot of this technique being over-used a lot in the next year. But it’s perhaps a glimpse of what Google’s street level mapping might become in the not too…
Write Like a Email Scammer Day – 06.02.08
Following on from last year’s ‘Speak Like a Pirate Day’. I’m proposing that the world embark upon a ‘Write Like an Email Scammer Day’. I was motivated to propose this course of action resulting from a recently inbounded email communication…
The Rise of the Idiots
Dan Ashcroft on Idiots (from the post-retro-ironic-futuristic Nathan Barley). “They use the word cool, it is their favourite word… Thinking is rubbish and rubbish isn’t cool… Stuff and shit is cool…” See the rest here. Still painfully…
Page Not Found – You Moron
Sometimes when a website is broken it feels like the computer blames you. That’s a bad thing. It’s rarely your fault. I’d been joking about making a 404-page featuring Igor (our head of technology and sys-admin dude) telling off site…
Quote of the Day
A very senior and experienced person in the digital world who is normally a vocal advocate for web 2.0 type stuff and who has multiple blogs just said: “I should do more with things like del.icio.us, but I just don’t like sharing stuff”…
How To Do Digital Planning
I’ve been trying to post something like this for a few months now. But it kept morphing into a badly researched history of planning mixed with a poor how-to guide. And of course I kept veering off into bloody flag-waving about how digital…
How To Do Digital @ Scampblog
Great post by James Cooper (creative director of Dare) over at Scampblog. I particularly enjoyed his skillful deployment of the 180 degree handed complement: 2. Be original. Same rules apply to when all you lot who moan about whether…
Facebook Group – How Much Would You Cost?
I’m trying to figure out the value of a whole person (on Facebook). It seems that everyone’s talking about how we’re all being sold off bit by bit. So why not all flog ourselves whole to the highest bidder. Come along join in. Sell…
3 Killer Blog Posts You Have to Read
http://www.skelliewag.org/ is a great find. I’m really liking it a lot. 25 Headline Formulas That Have Plagued and Blessed Web 2.0 by Skellie is a great article. As is The Top 20 Ways to Come Up With Amazing Ideas. And who could ignore…
Why Marketeers Are Too Excited About Facebook
I almost can’t bring myself to write about Facebook. Everywhere I go I overhear people talking about Facebook. From people in the street on their phones talking to people about how they’re going to Facebook them to arrange a night out, to…
Forgive Me Rock Father For I Have Sinned
Dearrockers.org is great. They say: Many of us own music that we didn’t pay for. We don’t feel guilty about shafting the record company, but what about the musicians themselves? Here’s how it works: 1. Pick a musician 2. Write them a…
Animation That Freaked My Groove
This guy Cyriak lives in Brighton. I’m not sure I’d like to meet him… He has got some crazy skills going on though, kind of like B3ta meets Chris Cunningham. And if that doesn’t scare you. Check this: And to prove that it’s not all scary…
Vectorizer – WOW!
Check out VectorMagic it’s a fantastic online vectorization tool (I’m not sure why but I like vectorization better with a z than an s – I’m sure I’m not allowed to choose willy nilly like that, but this time I’m just going to). Basically…
Asi’s FaceBook Apps Analysis
Asi’s gone and done one of his mega posts. Now he’s moved from looking at the top 100 YouTube clips to looking at the top 100 FaceBook apps. Nice work. And very useful for lots of people… No Man’s Blog – Facebook Applications Trend Report 1…
Pani Puri – Food 2.0 @ Slideshare
I love Pani Puri. So I was really delighted to see this presentation on SlideShare. | View | Upload your own My prediction for the day: Online viewing of slideshows set to overtake video by 2010. Nah, not really. But there are some really…
The Internet (now in handy book form!)
David McCandless has been doing bits and pieces for Poke as long as Poke’s been around. In fact he’s written lots of the funnier words on the funnier projects that we’ve done. So it’s nice that someone gave him a book deal. And if he can…
The Crimternet
Image pilfered from here. A Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from “rooms” in Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website. The BBC cover the story here. It’s slightly more sinister than you might…
The Nerd Handbook
Do you live with a nerd? Do you have friends who are nerdy? Do you sometimes wonder what’s going on inside their heads? This blog post is perhaps the definitive glimpse inside the brain of a nerd: The Nerd HandbookI nodded too many times…
Fire Video Gets Honours, But Why?
The video from yesterday of the fire got a link from the Guardian’s News Blog. Their embedding of the video in their blog meant that the clip had over 6,000 views yesterday which meant that it got the following ‘honours’ on YouTube. I was…
FreeRice.com
This is great. Improve your vocabulary and donate rice to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). Really simple interaction. And it’s double compelling: you want to play more (if you’re a word geek) and it’s a really easy way to give…
Sometimes I Just Want to Cry
Or alternatively just shout really loud bad words in public. This morning I’m not going to cry. I’m going to shout. CAMPAIGN MAGAZINE PARTS THE SEA OF ONES AND ZEROS AND LEADS THE ADLANDERS INTO THE NEW LAND OF OPPORTUNITY. WHERE THERE’S…
Making Good Shit Stick Is Tough
Don’t get me wrong. I love the meritocratic world of the web. Good stuff floats, average stuff gets suspended in the sea of mediocrity and bad stuff sinks without trace. And that’s the way it ought to be. It used to be really easy. Back in…
Cliff Does a Radiohead
From The Times today – link to online version of the story. So Cliff is taking 1p off the price of his new album for every person that pre-orders (down to a minimum of £3.99) – the starting price is £7.99. Do the simple math and you…
Tony Wilson and Eva Pascoe on the Internet
Awesome footage. Eva Pascoe (founder of Cyberia and member of the digerati) tells Tony Wilson all about the internet. [Update: Thanks to Steve for the link to the newer better version of the video – nice one mate]
Twitter / cookbook
And for anyone who doubted the usefulness of Twitter, the Internet brings you… Twitter / cookbook – 140 character recipes. via: kottke.org
Sony’s RecYou
There’s been mutterings of recyou.jp around for a few days. It’s a very slick Japanese flash site for Sony Walkman. It’s quite hard to navigate your way through it, I managed by trial and error rather than a knowledge of Japanese…
Web 3.0 Doesn’t Sound Like Much Fun
I wasn’t going to post this as it’s not all that enlightening. It’s from a few months ago and is Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) talking about web 3.0 as a bunch of lightweight free distributable micro applications / services. Which is all very…
Mini – Learn in Your Lunchbreak
I love this a lot. Mini are putting on a bunch of lunchbreak experiences. Where you can learn something new in a lunchtime. The list of things that are up there at the moment are: Bruce Lee for beginners Beat a lie detector Be a spy Deal…
Investing in Content
Jib Jab – US peddlers of funny animations and stuff (my description not theirs) have just raised another $3m in funding from VCs – in total they’re reported to have raised $6m. Read/Write Web have more on the story. I found myself nodding…
The Changing Nature of Information
By the same guy who did the great thing about Web2.0 in a similar style. Very nice. It’s a really good quick summary of a lot of the things talked about in David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous.
Digital vs Advertising
I did my talk about ‘10 Reasons that Digital is Better than Advertising‘ again the other day. I enjoyed it, and I did feel that bits of it are true. But at the same time it also felt a bit futile, It was never designed to be an important…
Drive Thru Rap
I’m late to these judging by the dates that the videos were posted, but I’m not sure how widely they’ve been seen. Just another one of those ‘funny’ ‘little’ online things that feels really odd and not particularly outstanding (to me), but…
JML on the Internet
I don’t know why I love JML, I just do. It’s something about their no-nonsense straightforward approach. As well as the fact that all their products are miracles of modern innovation! Next time I’m confronted with a bunch of people fawning…
Hype Machine Stunt – Boo :-(
Shame. It appears that the Hype Machine stunt that I liked yesterday sort of failed. They couldn’t get enough people to do what they asked so they launched it anyway. Oh well. I guess that’s life. I still like the principle of what they…
Hype Machine Stunt
Like this a lot. Hype Machine are going to launch their new site once 10,000 people are looking at this page: http://hypem.com/new Brilliantly it’s not when 10,000 have looked at it cumulatively, they’re waiting for 10,000 to have the page…
WTF WWF – Massive Paper Plane and Boat Project
Here’s the short version of the story: With the WWF we’re building a massive paper plane and massive paper boat. We’re then going to fly / sail them (somehow) to the Houses of Parliament. If you sign up to the online petition your name…
Google Vanity Ring
Too good. An project that looks at jewelery and status in the digital age. The creator Markus Kison says: Update of the ring as a status symbol. It shows the number of Google hits you get, when you search for the name of the person who…
Flickr ‘Adult’ Content
Someone (who shall remain nameless) sent me a link to some images on Flickr that were perhaps slightly more ‘saucy’ than normal. Not a lot, just a bit. What I loved (not the pictures incidentally) was Flickr’s ‘turn on my safety fliter’…
Nike, is it Supersonic?
Right now you can’t move in London without seeing some kind of ad for Nike Supersonic. According to the blog spam I got the other day: “Nike is launching an exclusive invitation only event for 3,000 people in London to push their pace…
Britain’s Brainiest Family on Wii
Spotted this on TV the other night. I thought it looked like a really cool integrated campaign for Big Brain Academy on the Nintendo Wii. What I took out of the ad was that you’d get to play networked Big Brain against other families and…
How Much For An Ad On A Bus in Google Street View?
If you’ve not seen it yet Street View in Google Maps is amazing. Lifehacker reports that it’s now in 15 US cities (and it’s coming soon to the UK judging by the fact that we saw a Google cam car driving round London the other day). I’ve…
The Most Creative Website Ever
I’m doing some pitchy type stuff and ran out of inspiration so I typed into Google “most creative website ever” hoping that I’d find something to inspire me. And I came to this post about the most creative website I’ve seen in a long time…
Blogger Relations – Learning By Doing
I just got a nice mail from the people I mentioned (or rather didn’t mention) below. It went a bit like this: With head hung suitably ashamed, a very valid response to my earlier request – you’re right, blogger relations is certainly an…
Blogger Relations – Digital Agencies Suck at it Too
In retrospect I shouldn’t have had a go at the Ogilvy PR Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics – incidentally they’re back with a V2 which you can find here. Having looked at some of the things I’ve been getting recently, people involved in this…
I Like Radiohead More Than I Like Their Music
It’s funny, I sort of want to like Radiohead. But I’m just not that keen on their music. I don’t not like it, but it’s just most of it isn’t that appealing to my ears. But I like the ‘idea’ of Radiohead. They seem smart and like they’ve…
My Favourite Post in Recent Memory
The Logic+Emotion blog is consistently good. This post about execs not getting ‘new media’ is so spot on it hits the middle of the spot in the middle of the spot at the centre of the bullseye. An extract: “The industry has brainwashed us…
My First Post…
As a mature 35 year old. And I’m celebrating already. Not because it’s my birthday (today the 28th Sept, if you’d like to send gifts). But because I’ve been given the temporary accolade of ‘Best Link’ on BuzzFeed (for a bloody obscure post…
Skate – Nice Game, Nice Campaign
There’s a new game coming out called Skate. I think you should be able to guess what it’s about. It looks absolutely stunning, not sure that this clip will do it justice. I think they’ve also done some cool stuff with the control system by…
Will It Blend vs Invincible Chuck Norris
Two meme mashups in just one day. Internet you are really spoiling us… Thanks Knotty!
Lolcatz vs Post Secret
A mashup so good I almost burped pure joy. For lots more visit: http://lolsecretz.blogspot.com/ Of course for it to make any sense at all you need to know about Post Secret and Lolcatz…
Social Networking Invitation Tips
Tim O’Reiley gives some good concise (much-needed) advice on Social Networking invitation etiquette. I remember when people first started using email, and there was a flurry of publications on “netiquette,” the etiquette of how to use…
Best ‘Interactive’ Website
I felt some mistrust towards a ‘digital’ awards that had a category for best interactive website. I was almost expecting a ‘best e-brochure’ category… But at least Cock-a-doodle got shortlisted (for best campaign):…
Marc Ecko’s Latest ‘Stunt’
Marc Ecko, he of ‘Tagging Airforce One‘ fame, has come up with another big noisy stunt. He’s bought a baseball for 3/4 million dollars. It’s a controversial baseball. It’s the ball that was hit by some dude (Barry Bonds) who got 756 home…
Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics
So near yet so far… I was really getting on well with this Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics – Take 1 from Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence Blog. It seems to have some decent principles that make sense whether I’m wearing a blogger hat or a…
Sharing Audio On YouTube
It’s interesting that people are using YouTube as a way of sharing audio. Obviously it’s not designed as an audio sharing site, but it does the job pretty well. I’m guessing that people are using it this way because: 1. YouTube has a…
Researchers Hip 2 Da Kidz
This from today’s ‘The London Paper’: Yup that’s about the size of it… And entries to the Tiddlywinks championships have been down this year, researchers blame YouTube.…
Cravendale Do a Very Very Good Thing
W+K London and Unit9 have made a really brilliant thing. It’s part multi-player interactive game/muckabout. Part UGC. Part video editor… http://www.milkmatters.co.uk It follows on from the really nice Cravendale ads that are on TV. You can…
Fosters Do a Bad Thing
I clicked on a banner today. I probably click on 2/3 a month. I’ve no idea if this is low or high or average. I’ve never seen any stats about the number of banners that the average person clicks on. Has anyone else? Anyway, I digress…
My Stereo Thoughts On FaceBook
I’ve got lots of thoughts about FaceBook, some positive some negative. And I was trying to come up with a way to encapsulate it all. I sort of think I have, but there might be some holes in my analogy… For me, this is FaceBook: It’s like…
I Love Unlikely Internet Heroes
I always feel a bit lame blogging stuff that’s been on BoingBoing, but I couldn’t resist Ronald Jenkees. Read their post for more details.
Why My Last Post Was A Load of Rubbish
Motorola just did a very nice ‘sponsorship’ of http://explore.twitter.com – the tone of it, the way it’s been done and a genuine feeling of connection between the sponsor and sponsoree. And it feels like something that could legitimately…
I’ve seen the future of Marketing 2.0 and it’s rubbish (but don’t worry, it’s in Beta)
[Please note: none of the brands mentioned here have ever done anything like this (as far as I know), it’s a purely fictional story of an imagined future from my slightly fuddled brain] Imagine if last night everyone who worked in the…
The Best Thing Online Ever
I know I do one of these ‘ best things ever’ posts quite often. But when I make them I’m usually genuinely excited. And this is no exception. Fuzzwich.com have created a really simple tool for creating and sharing animations. You don’t…
A Whole New Mind – Brilliant Book
I read a book yesterday in one sitting. Well a couple of sittings if you include changes in mode of transport from bus to train. It’s very rare that I do that. It’s also very rare that I find a ‘business’ book that grips me like this one…
A Tale of Modern Blog Blagging
I got an out-of-the-blue email a couple of weeks ago asking how much I’d charge for a text link from my blog. I thought about it, then realised that I had no idea. I know a bit about CPM and CPA numbers and I know how much traffic I get…
Managing Expectations
I liked this. It’s on the back door of the Oxfam bookshop in Brighton. You kind of get a sense of what’s going to happen if you press the button (not much pretty slowly). Perhaps web interfaces should take a lead out of this kind of…
Nike Nooooooooooooooooo!
New Nike Vintage site. And it uses page-turns. I guess perhaps it’s a retro-vintage thing. But no. Just no. Didn’t you read, it’s one of the 7 Deadly Sins (almost)…
SFMGFiPod
This made me LOL. It’s a music blog post. Normally the guy posts up decent music, but he’s got a thread called SFMGFiPod (which stands for ‘shit from my girlfriend’s iPod’). He’s basically posting up the stuff that his girlfriend is…
The 7th Deadly Sin – We Have a Winner!
I’m absolutely flabbergasted at how many comments the 7 Deadly Sins of Digital has had. It’s up to 85 comments and still growing! But I figured it was time to pick my winner for the 7th Deadly Sin. Trouble is, there are so many great ones…
Funny URLs – I’m Sad
You know you’re a bit of a geek when… …You chuckle to yourself at a URL. I was just visiting the T-Mobile site and got this error page. Fair enough it’s very early in the morning and they’re probably doing some kind of update so I’m not…
Heroic Ads – New Bravia
I can’t help myself. I’ve been contacted by the online PR guys who are ‘seeding’ the new Bravia ad. Part of me wants to not play ball, but the other part of me wants to see what’s going on. I do like the ads and I’m interested to see what…
Weinberger vs Keen @ Supernova
Really interesting 50 minute presentation and discussion by David Weinberger (Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Everything is Miscellaneous) and Andrew Keen (Cult of the Amateur). I’m not going to try and sum up the…
The 7th Sin Personified?
I don’t normally like highlighting specific pieces of work and picking on them. But in the context of the 7 Sins of Digital I had to post this. It’s Interflora’s new eBrochure. For starters anything called an eBrochure should be put…
Recruitment Musings
This is a tough, slightly reflective post to write. It’s very much a brain dump, the start of some thoughts rather than anything resolved. I’m hoping that some of the smart people out there on the internet will add to it and help these…
7 Deadly Sins – It’s on Fire!
There’s some great comments coming in on the 7 Deadly Sins post. It’s going to be a struggle to pick a winner. I’ve got a couple of favourites already though. Problem is there’s going to be nothing left that we can do online once the list…
Shift Happens – Watch This Video
The second thought provoking animation of the week… Watch it. It’s good. Makes me realise that understanding and appreciating bits and bytes is really important. And maybe one day I’ll be able to apply it to something that makes a…
Faris and Me on TV
Well not really TV, but it is sort of like TV on the Internet… This time I’ve actually managed to watch myself, so I’m making progress. I didn’t like it, but I did manage to stomach it. It’s from the Ideas Forum thing that Faris and I…
Firefox eBay Edition
This could have been around for ages, but I just saw a banner for it today for the first time… It’s basically a version of Firefox for people who do a lot of eBaying – it’s basically just a load of extensions for Firefox that have been…
The Mullet Strategy
Business up front. Party out the back. MySpace, Youtube, Wikipedia they’re all employing ‘The Mullet Strategy’. Genius, read a bit more at: http://buzzfeed.com/buzz/The_Mullet_Strategy
Prison Dancing
The clip of prisoners doing the Thriller dance has been featured all over the place, in case you missed it, here it is: But I looked about and found these two which are less impressive from a choreography point of view. But somehow I found…
The 7 Deadly Sins of Digital
There’s a bunch of things that people who are just getting into digital always seem to propose at some point or another. I guess they’re things that are part of the learning process. Things that a lot of us have done, and hopefully learned…
ToyotaSpace – I Don’t Like This
To me this shows exactly how not to approach bloggers to get them onside. I’ve not put in a link to the site, and I don’t want one back from them. But if you do want to visit the site you can figure out the URL from the text above. Reasons…
What I learned from ‘We Love Technology’
&tI promised to write some more about We Love Technology 2007, but I’m not going to write that much about the content of the talks. There are much better bloggers out there doing that kind…
How to make unique Moo Invite Cards
I love Moo Cards – they’re great. But I’ve always wondered how they could be made more ‘useful’. This blog post on how Adegga.com managed to print unique invite codes on a bunch of cards shows how, with a tiny bit of imagination you can…
I Can’t Watch…
This is me presenting “10 Reasons Why Digital is ‘Better’ than Advertising” at the PSFK conference in London. I can’t even bear to hear recordings of my own voice so there’s no way that I’m going to be able to watch this… (I tried watching…
Smiley Semantics
I posted this a couple of weeks ago and commented on how I found it a big unsettling. Then this morning I think I twigged as to one of the reasons why I found it so odd. It’s this sign that I walk past every morning on the way to work…
Twitter Serendipity
I was looking at Dan’s Twitter feed earlier and I saw that he’d noted (whilst at Glastonbury) that the Klaxons sounded like, as I think he put it: “a bag of cats”. I went back to try and find the tweet as I agreed with it so wholeheartedly…
Adam Crowe – How Ants Do It
I love this. Adam, thank you for such a concise and brilliant analysis of FaceBook: Adam Crowe » Blog Archive » How Ants Do It [By the way I am on Facebook now. But I don’t like it. I find it all a bit yucky. I’ll post my thoughts on why…
Awesome Blog
It’s not that often that I just link to a blog and say that it’s just really great. But that’s exactly what I’m about to do. http://www.ohmythatsawesome.com/ It’s just a blog where the bloggers write about really cool consumer products…
Vimeo Ads
Vimeo have just redesigned their site (they’re a video sharing site a bit like YouTube). They’ve always had a nicely designed site and I think I quite like the new version too. One thing I really liked was their approach to ads – they’re…
Big Second Life In My First Life
Last night I went for a quick drink in the T-Bar near work. When I got there I noticed that someone was ‘doing’ Second Life massive on the wall. It was quite odd being the same size as the animated characters who were all doing some messed…
Project Management for Web Geeks
Effective Project Management for Web Geeks Great article about project management. I particularly liked the bit about striking a balance between the science (what you should do) and art (what you need to do) of project management. Meri…
I do like Vimeo!
Following my post about 20 seconds ago asking if I liked Vimeo I got a comment from Jacko from Vimeo. He doesn’t sound very angry at all. And he had a problem with Quicktime, so I guess he can say that. I had a problem with Virgin Media…
The Slowternet
I’ve been using a ‘high-speed’ Internet connection in a Romanian hotel. Thing is, it’s not really high-speed at all. I hadn’t realised just how much I take broadband (at decent speed) for granted. I’ve been trying to think of a good way to…
Ideas Forum in Bucharest
I’ve been in Romania for the last few days. Which has been really interesting. I’ve been getting to hang out with Russell and Faris, which is always a nice thing. We’ve been talking at a thing called the ‘ideas forum’…
Do I Like Vimeo?
I like the player of Vimeo. I quite like the design of Vimeo. I like the fact it’s smaller than YouTube. I like the thing that shows activity on the homepage, it’s nice and it makes it feel active and stuff. But then I saw this: And I…
I Got An Ecard!
An ecard from a scammer. Don’t you think it’s a bit grim to use an ecard with jolly balloons on it to tell me that someone has just died, along with his wife and kids in a bomb. But I guess I am going to be $7,500,000.00 Million richer, so…
Loop Festival Brighton
A celebration of Digital Culture they say – I reckon some crappy music coming out of laptops and a knackered old projector that no-one can see properly in the sunlight. Actually I reckon it’s going to be rather good. Some of the musical…
PSFK Today
I’m enjoying the PSFK conference in London right now. I just did my talk about 10 Reasons Why Digital Is Better Than Advertising. But you’ll all be bored sick of that by now. It was quite nerve racking. But I got through it. Hugh MacLeod…
Last FM Bought by CBS
Someone had to buy them at some point: BBC NEWS | Technology | Music site Last.fm bought by CBS
Flying Elephant Spam
Perhaps the most creative spam I’ve received. It’s very surreal.
Designer Web Site’s
Cool. A £100. But I’ll write the copy, OK?
Spot the Bull
This is one of my favourite projects of recent times. It ticks all of the boxes that get me excited about the work Poke do. It’s a simple idea, that hasn’t been done before (as far as I can tell). We were basically tasked by Orange to come…
Noise Map – A Great Idea Terribly Done
If I told you there’s a site where you can find out where to get a bit of peace and quiet in London, you might think “What a nice idea”. And it is. I was dead excited when I read about Noisemapping.org. A government department, DEFRA, have…
Digital Lepers
If you read my rubbish regularly you know that I have a funny relationship with advertising. But as I’ve tried to stress before I don’t have anything against the advertising industry. I just think that the digital world has perhaps an…
I’ve been TaxiBlogged!
My thing about YogaLadder has been lifted by the London Taxi News: There’s a YogaLadder in My Taxi | London Taxi News I feel special. As I’m now on the TaxiWeb here’s something else taxi related. I saw this parked near Old St yesterday…
LOLwhut?
It’s silly season. I don’t know where to start with this. I don’t think I can describe it. Basically there’s a new trend for putting ‘baddly spelld capshunz’ over odd photos. If they’re photos of cats (or katz) they’re called LOLcats, if…
Zopa Wins a Webby
I found out yesterday that Zopa won a Webby award. Which made me happy. I’m not normally all that excited about awards. Having been on the judging side a couple of times you start to see how ‘the system’ works. And to be honest I think…
I take back what I said…
The MySpace community is alive and well. Under this clip (which really is the ultimate in nerdism) I spotted this comment: wow some one shuld have checked some numbers before making something like this, (un less its was made just for kicks…
For Sure
Well it’s had 4831 Diggs. So it definitely shows the value of a very simple single-minded idea: http://www.d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com/
Is YouTube Really a Community?
I’ve often argued that one of the things that ‘makes’ YouTube is its community. But I’ve just been looking at the comments around one particular clip and wondering just what kind of community it is. It’s less like a close-knit rural…
I don’t hate advertising. I just like digital better.
Well I finally did it. I finished my list of “10 Reasons that Digital is Better than Advertising“. Which is a personal triumph. It’s the longest sustained thought of my blog so far. Even longer than my ranting about Virgin Media! Even…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising – Number 10
Of course there are brilliant people in advertising who ‘get it’ too. And blatantly you don’t have to be a web-obsessed geek to come up with interesting interactive ideas. But naturally it becomes easier to consider this world if you spend…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising – Number 9
[Sorry I’ve been very rubbish at putting up these last 2 reasons – they were written, but I’ve been suffering from a semi-crippling case of uncertainty…] If you’re ‘a creative’ you either want to write a novel or make films. If you’re a…
MP3s Out of Stock?
I love Boomkat – it’s a great niche online electronic music store. The content is great. It gives you a real sense that the guys running it are totally in love with the music. Plus the previews of tracks are long enough and they load…
Webby Awards Vote
This is a shameless attempt to sway voting in this year’s Webby Awards. But being as it’s a People’s Voice vote I guess that’s the name of the game. Everyone else seems to be doing the same. You can vote here. This year Poke have got 2…
The 7 Qs of Viral Content
As you might know I don’t really like the term viral. But neither does the author of Modern LIfe is Rubbish so I’m quite happy to link to this post on: The 7 Qs of Great Viral Content, which is a nice roundup of stuff that good content…
User Generated Signage
I deliberated about posting this because of the very bad language in one of the photos. So if you’re easily offended stop reading and leave the page now… Then I reconsidered when I realised that there’s actually an interesting point in…
Online Drama – Prom Queen
I didn’t really know where to start with this one. Prom Queen is a new 80 episode Internet-only drama. Here’s the facts: Each episode is just over 2 minutes long and features pre and post-roll ads – a couple of seconds pre and about 10…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising – Number 8
There’s a whole bunch of stuff that makes online audiences great. They’re immediately measurable. You can see how they heard about you. You can see what things they’re searching for in order to find you. If people are talking about you…
Kate Moss for TopShop
A new Poke project (nothing to do with me really): Kate Moss for TopShop. I like the fact it mixes up old style web stuff with flash video and things. It’s all a bit ‘fashion’ for me, but I still quite like it. Plus you know it’s going to…
Widgets, Dials, Switches and More
Yesterday I was looking for some pictures of ‘counters’ to use in a presentation, Nik sent me this blog: No Ideas But In Things It’s a blog of photos about real-world interface elements. Incredibly single-minded and focused. But for me…
Searchmash (from Google)
I think I’ve found the perfect search engine. Or pretty close anyway. It’s SearchMash. If you look at the T&Cs it’s a product of Google Inc. If you do a search you get Google-like results. Apart from a couple of handy little differences…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising – Number 7
Actually I’m not sure that working at somewhere called Dream Digital, Stick or RazerBlade, is necessarily any better than having to answer the phone: “Good afternoon, Benson, Christ, Smith-Fellow, Hasbeen and Shagalott”. But the point is…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising – Number 6
It’s interesting to see the difference between digital people and advertising people right now. There’s a whole lot of smugness going on. Ad people are smuggly going “we’ve got the clients” ears (hopefully not in boxes in a gangster way…
Toronto Zoo Again
After Jealous Animals, a site I blogged about before, comes Bugsrock the tale of some cool cockroaches. Toronto Zoo do good stuff again. I can imagine kids and adults loving their work in equal measure. Which is surely the aim of Zoo…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising – Number 5
As conventional advertising revenues decline, programme makers have less and less cash to spend. So TV gets more shit, so fewer people watch it so ad revenue goes down again. Conversely the web’s audience is steadily increasing in volume…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising – Number 4
Success in network media isn’t about ego. No one cares who you are, or what you’ve done before – unless you’re Jonathan Harris or Joshua Davis ;-) Audiences care about whether they like your thing or not. More honest and ernest cultures…
Feedburner’s ‘Headline Animator’
This is cool – Feedburner have got a neat thing where you can create a dynamic RSS fed banner for your site. Mine is rubbish because I made it very quickly (and I’m not very good at that kind of thing). But it’s dead easy and quick to do…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising – Number 3
Maybe this won’t last forever. And of course lots of people got their fingers (and worse) burnt in the last .com fiasco. But because the cost of entry for digital stuff is low, and the technology is cheap (or rentable) it means that people…
Websites and Company Culture
I liked this article: Ryanair vs JetBlue – reflecting company culture – Articles – iQ Content. It sums up how a bunch of factors, some quite subtle, help to reinforce your views of a company on their website.
Haters Extreme
One of the best and most inspirational bloggers around, Kathy Sierra, has been rightly scared and upset by a bunch of vile stuff that’s been written about her online. She has an amazing blog and a network of incredibly strong supporters…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising – Number 2
OK, you have to know some stuff to put things on the Internet, but not that much. Just look at the people in 80% of YouTube videos, do they look like they know how to do complicated computer stuff? Or use a VCR? Or open a tin? In spite of…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising – Number 1
Digital agencies sometimes do advertising. But only a few of them call themselves ‘digital advertising agencies’. This means that we’re given permission to do lots of other things. If you work in advertising you are typically expected to…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising
Photo borrowed from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurelfan/46008873/ I started writing this list of 10 things after I chaired a debate at the D&AD about ‘Consumers In Control’ which basically turned into a mass venting of frustrations…
Horrible Misguided Integrated Campaign
Basically this site: http://www.information-revolution.org and it’s associated advertising try to position this organisation as a sort of free choice organisation campaigning against the dominance of Google. But it’s a campaign for Ask…
Some More Thoughts On Twitter
From Ian Curry at frog design: Twitter: The Missing Messenger He makes the connection between Twitter and Tumblelogs too. But there’s two bits in his post that I especially like. It’s basically blogging reduced to what the Russian…
Blogging Without Writing
I don’t think I’ve ever written about Tumblelogs before. Partly because I didn’t think I could figure out what they were or why they existed. But I think I’ve finally sussed it with a bit of help from this Wikipedia definition of…
Sky vs Virgin – Good Sky Online Ads
I’m not sure where I stand on this whole Sky vs Virgin thing. I’m not really that bothered I suppose, I never really liked Sky channels or Rupert’s thing anyway. But I did quite like the Simpsons now and again. Which is why I thought that…
Free Joost Invites, Who Wants Them?
I’ve got 2 invites for the beta of Joostâ„¢ up for grabs. Anyone want them? In UGC style complete the following in 12 worlds or less (in the comments): I’d like a Joost invite because… OK – Compo Closed – I’ve picked the winners. Dan and…
First UGC Win In The Bag
Well the evil plot to pillage the world of UCG has begun. Nothing major, just 2 tickets to a club-night on Saturday. But worth 30 quid. Not bad for 5 minutes spent writing a 50 word response to something… Interestingly I sat down and…
Sorry IMified Chaps
Dave from IMified left a comment that the message I got was an AOL limit thing. And as such is not their fault. Fair play to them. As he indicates running a service on top of someone elses platform is always going to be a tricky one! Keep…
IMified
Now this sounds good – IMified! I like Instant Messenger. I like the fact that IM clients are lightweight applications that can be accessed anywhere (as long as I’ve got mobile or web access). And the promise of opening up applications so…
ZeFrank on Waves
I liked this. I’ve been thinking about the notion of ‘surfing’ a bit recently, and this just felt good
RSS Readers
I’d assumed that lots of people use Netvibes as their RSS reader (because I do). But this chart shows that it’s way down the list. Almost half of the people who subscribe to Crackunit’s RSS Feed do so through Google Reader or Google…
Bandwagon – iTunes Backup
Bandwagon is an iTunes backup software / service combo. I read this and thought of me: Bandwagon is for smart people that have a huge music library that has never been backed up. At least the last bit’s true. Another nice – ‘link to us…
Boo point Oh
I posted about the return of Boo.com a while ago. Being a connected company someone’s been out doing the rounds letting ‘interested’ people know that Boo are moving to the next phase of relaunch – see this comment. I don’t mind people…
Joost on the Mac
Joost for the Mac got properly launched on Saturday (well into public beta anyway), so like a good little nerd I rushed off and downloaded it straightaway. First impressions… Very slick piece of software Very intuitive Video quality is…
I’ve never seen this before…
I was searching for “Sothern Trains” and I got this error from Google. Quite a surprise. Google is one of those services you expect never to give you an error. And when something odd happens it doesn’t feel like a brand letting you down…
More On UGC Cash
Thanks to everyone who’s offered to join – as Russell says, we are ‘The User’… But for goodness sake, keep quiet! What if the marketers hear about our evil plot?
Plundering UGC Cash, Who’s In?
I’ve just been flicking through New Media Age. And after my earlier comment about User Generated Content, I was dismayed to see how many column inches have been given over to terrible UGC ideas – but with MASSIVE cash prizes. I did a quick…
Nice Altoids Idea
I think this is really nice. In the swamp of dirty UGC ideas that we have to endure, here’s one that floats to the top, like cream, not a turd. It’s got a limited lifespan, but that’s OK. Simple idea, you can leave a valentine’s message on…
Twitter Mobile – It’s the Little Things
Just set up Twitter to work with my mobile. And this just exemplifies the thought and smartness that have gone into the application. And what’s so good about it? The code that you have to text in, is all made up of letters that are on the…
Twittering On, and On
Seems like the world is going Twitter crazy at the moment. I’ve been signed up for a while now, but was a little confused about what it’s actually good for. I love the simplicity of it. It’s really easy to get it up and running and very…
Flickr Romances
Funny article on ‘How to turn your Flickr crush into real romance‘, specially posted for Valentines day over at Wired. Starts off with a story of a real life Flickr Romance, then gives you the 10 steps to finding love on Flickr. I…
The Best Online Advertising Ever?
This is one of the only banners in recent months that I’ve actually clicked on. I knew I shouldn’t, but I just had to… But you know what the real f**ker is! It doesn’t even make a bloody noise. I felt so cheated it’s untrue. The least they…
Virgin Media – Customer Control?
Well, Virgin Media launched today with a big old shout: a full wrapper of the Metro and putting Richard Branson in a box in Covent Garden (as only he would do). I like the way they’ve simplified some things, and all their talk of customers…
iCal and Google Sync
At last a 2 way sync between Google Calendars and iCal on my Mac. Now wherever I update my calendar it can be reflected between the two places. And you can sync up multiple calendars. Seems to work really well. Still in beta, and soon to…
53 o’s – Amazing Lo-Fi Site
One of the best sites I’ve seen in ages. It’s very old-school and very very lo-fi. But also some moments of real genius gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/ or as it’s otherwise known: 53 o’s Particular moment of…
I’m Not The Only One With Haters
This post over at Russell’s blog entitled: Bugger made me rather depressed. All of the criticisms levelled at Russell are the precise same things that makes his blog so damn good! I’m affectedly bumbling and luvvie in my writing style, I…
I Got My First Haters…
I knew it would happen someday. It was only a matter of time. But I’ve got my first haters! Sam and Highly Miffed are upset about the post and subsequent comments around on the Youth Marketing conference that I didn’t like. See their…
More wi-fi sharing
Whisher are another new player in the global wi-fi sharing thing. It’s simple, you join up, share your network, and you get to use other people’s shared networks wherever you are. It’s not a new idea and there’s a few more established…
Boxes Not Blogs
Sorry it’s a bit quiet round here. I’m busy packing up all my things to move house so my life’s in boxes at the moment which is a bit stressful. And I’ve not got much time, or space, to do blogging-like activities. Just in case you’re…
User Archived Content
From my occasional series of ‘here’s something from the musical archives that’s pretty cool’ posts. I love the fact that YouTube allows for the sharing of this kind of content. It’s probably not strictly ‘legal’. And it’s not strictly…
Computers Behind Blogs – Intro
Here’s a little pet project I’ve been thinking about for a while. I wanted to do something that shows the computers that people blog from. I reckon it might give an interesting, non-verbal snapshot into the bloggers’ world. So I’ve gone…
Semacode Update
Blogs are great. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I asked a question about semacodes on websites. Went to bed. Then I woke up and someone’s left me a great answer. It’s like a big huge collective brain that goes on thinking…
Website with Semacode, Why?
Semacodes are pretty cool. The all knowing Wikipedia with it’s dazzling array of cross-links describes a semacode thusly: a URL can be converted into a type of barcode resembling a crossword puzzle, which is called a “tag”. Tags can be…
Google Australia Puts People on the Map, Nice.
Damn Google being able to use their own technology to be able to do something really really cool. Google Australia is celebrating Australia Day 2007 by photographing Sydney Harbour from the air, and we want to make sure as many of us as…
Better than Tufte
Everyone always bangs on about Tufte and his books about displaying information. And yes, they’re very nice books. But I’ve got a new heroine: Jessica Hagy and her Indexed blog. Never have so few well-chosen lines on so few index cards…
Second Life Sex, Get it Here…
Yuk. I just looked at my stats. And it turns out that the Google search term that brings most people to my blog is… “Second Life Sex” Damn, I’ve just realised that by even writing the term again, I’ve probably increased my google ranking…
WikiHow Wow
Do you want to see the real face of user generated content? Or at least what happens when you open a geeky Wiki to the world. Well, you end up with… How to Make a Starship Enterprise Out of a Floppy Disk How to Make SIM Card Earrings How…
Blog Recruitment Rules, OK…
Buzz and me with our new ‘mystery’ creative director A follow up to the Poke Seeking Creative Director post… In short, rather than doing normal job advertising, or going through recruitment consultants, I wrote a ‘job ad’, then Nik and I…
Google Maps Adventure Game for Penguin
If you’re into adventure type games. Or just want to win some great prizes. Or are a real nerd and want to see how we’ve used Google Maps as part of our quest interface. Head over to MaliceBoxQuest.com, something Poke have put together for…
I’m in Viral Shock!
Bumped into this piece for Mountain Dew over at Faris’ Blog. As I commented over there. I’m in shock. It’s a ‘viral’ that I like. And I liked it so much I passed it on. Making it really and truly ‘viral’. I’ve got to go and lie down
Wii Gets You Fit – It’s Official
Absolutely awesome. I was waiting for someone to come out with the ‘Wii can get you fitter‘ story, but I had no idea it’d be done so brilliantly thoroughly. Results: It works! With no other changes in habits a drop in weight, a drop in…
Venice Project Becomes Joost
The project formerly known as The Venice Project has now turned into Joost. It’s the latest venture from the guys behind Skype and in a nutshell it hopes to do to television what Skype did to telephones. As they put it: ‘taking the best of…
Media Organisations of the Future
Faris has a good write up of a presentation by Simon Waldman of the Guardian: What is a media company? I saw the same presentation (or a version of it) at a Microsoft day late last year. And I have to say I thought he put forward a really…
CMOs on Digital and Traditional
Following the BBH Lynx win post I thought this research into the attitude of CMOs(commissioned by Sapient) reported some interesting stuff. LIke the fact that 68% of CMOs prefer to work with multiple agencies, to derive the benefits of…
The Dumbness of Crowds
I’ve not linked to Creating Passionate Users for a while. As it’s probably the smartest blog in the entire universe I like to link to something now and again. This post on the misappropriation of ‘the wisdom of crowds’ is a classic…
Second Life Sex
An interesting perspective on sex in Second Life: The ins and outs of a Second sex Life | The Register Written from the perspective of someone who seems to understand and enjoy ‘cybersex‘, this article explains the limitations and problems…
BBH Wins Lynx Digital Account
An interesting ‘moment’ in online advertising. BBH win Lynx digital account. To my mind Dare have done some really amazing online advertising for Lynx (Feather and Blow to name but two), and I’m really surprised that the account has gone…
Naming Babies the 21st Century Way
On my way to work this morning I was pondering the notion of Googlability. I’m quite lucky that both of my names are spelled in odd ways, it means that there aren’t that many Iain Tait‘s out there. Apart from Dr Iain Tait at the University…
Tag-5-things-o-rama
OK! OK! I’m going to do it. I’m gong to succumb to the blog tag 5 things meme. Thanks to the following for tagging me. I might have missed some others (if I have let me know and I’ll add you to my thank you list). Oakie Dan Burgess @ Tap…
Another Apple Post
This will just be one blog post about probably the most blogged about thing ever. The new Apple iPhone. Here’s a couple of thoughts… It is the ultimate in gadget porn Features some proper interface wizardry Looks like another…
Spam of the Day
Checking my spam-box this morning, this one caught my eye… A new and novel way to look at love and life perhaps.
My Top Stuff of 2006
I’ve been thinking about doing a post on stuff I’ve liked in 2006, if you’ve got a blog it seems like you have to. But I didn’t know what to put in it or how to organise it. But I got re-inspired by The Design Conspiracy annual (a thing of…
2 Interesting Blogs
It’s nice when people you know start good blogs. It’s sometimes an interesting way of finding out more about someone than you used to know. Cookie has started up made-in-england.org (I really hope the title isn’t a reference to that crappy…
Yahoo! Mail Championships
Here’s a little Poke project. To promote the new Yahoo! Mail we’ve set up the Yahoo! Mail World Championships. Starting with the theory that everyday challenges became competitive sport over time (e.g. hunting became Javelin throwing…
Tea for 2.0
Teabuddy.com (our social web app for managing tea-making and preferences) has come to the boil again. It’s one of those odd sleeper projects. We did it ages ago and at first it got picked up by Wired, then a bit later by The Guardian. Now…
Crisp NPD for Kettle Chips
I’m a bit of crisp junkie as I’ve said before (even post the drinking oil advert that put me off a bit). So I’m a bit biased, but I like this thought. Buy this Kettle Chips party box online for $19.99 which contains: Five 5 oz. bags of…
Breaking the Cycle of Depression
A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was de-motviated. Then I got some lovely comments (and a couple of emails) from nice people, which re-motivated me :-) Then I posted something over on Faris’ blog about how certain trends (like…
F**K you and your Second Life ‘firsts’ you bunch of Adf**ks
I’m glad that someone with some heritage and history in Second Life has come out and said this: Second Life Herald: Gallery of Lies. And said it very loud. I’d have loved to have written this piece, but as my Second Life consists of about…
The Geekiest T-Shirt Ever?
I’ve seen a lot of geeky t-shirts in my time. But this one is pretty much the king of the nerd-castle, awesome… (As you might have spotted, I’m struggling a bit with blogging at the moment. A combination of lack of time plus a general…
Microsoft Live Local – Birds’ Eye View of London
I was attempting to write something about Friday’s Microsoft Day that I went to. But I visited Live Local search to look something up, then realised I could see my own house from the air, from multiple different angles. And it’s, dare I…
The Value of Experimentation
I agree with Russell when it comes to the value of experimentation and play. Asi also brought it up in relation to the video-fronted search engine I mentioned yesterday. I’m all for play and doing new stuff. But there is a degree of…
Amen to That
This is a long video clip. 18 mins in total. And it might bore you if you’re not a music geek. It’s all about how a 6 second drum loop from the B-Side of a single by The Winston Brothers, released in 1969, has become a cornerstone of…
Nerd Recruitment
Saw this recruitment ad on the MediaTemple site. It made me chuckle. In case you’re interested (and are a ‘picked last in gym’ kind of nerd it links here. Incidentally, if you run your own website and are looking for hosting that can…
Spam Names
Checking my junk email folder this morning, to make sure nothing important had been misplaced, I noticed just how great the names of these junk mailers are. (I know, I know, they make up the names so that the junk mail filters don’t spot…
Aaaargh!
Could this be the most pointless thing ever? Probably not. But it’s a massive folly of some description. Someone has spent a whole heap of money creating a video based ‘human face’ to a search engine. Type in your search and Ms Dewey makes…
One Day in History
I liked this idea about capturing a day in history through blogs: ‘One Day in History’ is a one off opportunity for you to join in a mass blog for the national record. We want as many people as possible to record a ‘blog’ diary which will…
Participation Inequality
Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities. Jakob Nielsen’s piece on the split between lurkers, synthesisers and creators. He puts it at a 90-9-1 rule. But has some other interesting examples, like blogging…
Second Life Primer
This video makes Second Life look pretty interesting (although I do sense a bit of hyperbole in there…). Personally I still can’t get my head into Second Life. Changing my outfit was by far the most interesting bit. via Big Picture
Crackunit is One!
Hooray. This current version of Crackunit has made it to the age of one. That’s more than any of the other versions did… I was thinking about the history of Crackunit and my blogging and I couldn’t remember how long I’d had the domain for…
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…
Email is for old people
At least that’s what teenagers think, read more at Arstechnica: Teens: E-mail is for old people
YouTube Haters
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…
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…
Forrester: YouTube is goin’ down
A 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…
Organic Blog
Not 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…
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…
Families and Technology
This press release from Yahoo! and OMD apparantly shows a resergence of traditional values among tech-savvy families. Stuff like eating together being important and things like that. There’s a lot of interesting nuggets in there, but my…
RSS Explained…
…the Oprah Way! I’ve been a real bugger sometimes and asked people to explain what RSS feeds are in an interview. Not to see if they necessarily know or not. But to see how they respond to answering a tricky, techy question. Now if…
It’s all too (point oh) much
I think New Media Age journalists must have some kind of autocomplete thing turned on in their word processors – just stick 2.0 after everything, regardless. Unless they know something about Apple’s plans that no-one else does?…
Help me find someone
Not in a Where’s Wally kind of way! I need to find someone for a project I’m working on. It’s a type of person I’ve not really worked with before. A kind of person that I don’t know where to find and how to reach them. So maybe, just…
YouTube Value on TechCrunch
Even though their site has issues with it’s error messages (see below), it’s undoubtedly worth quite a lot of money. This article on TechCrunch has a good top line discussion on how much it might be worth and outlines the big challenges…
Moo.com – flickr cards
Great great great! Get your Flickr photos printed onto mini-cards (they’re like 1/2 height business cards). They look a bit like They are v2.0 of Pleasurecards (thanks Stef) which I have some of and are great quality. The application which…
Fizzy Web
I had a meeting with a prospective client yesterday (I hope she doesn’t mind me posting this, I am keeping it anonymous). And in our conversation she said that she wanted their site to be ‘fizzy’, at first I almost laughed, then as we…
Application Love
After an earlier gripe about YouTube’s shoddy error message, here’s a beautiful piece of application design that’s cheered me up no end. From the brilliant and ever useful backpackit.com and their writeboard (collaborative document editing…
Errors in Errors
It’s been a wee while since I posted an interface gripe. So here’s one I got today at YouTube: So, what’s wrong with this? 500 Internal Server Error. That sounds like a lot of waiters with gut problems. Serious. What did I do wrong? I must…
I love London (a little bit)
Some of you may have seen my ‘I love London’ blog – an experiment to try to get me to love living in London a bit more. And whether having a blog that makes me look out for good things would help me to see good things. After a strong start…
Zopa Interview
Tom from Zopa said some nice things about Poke and did an email interview with me about the new Zopa site (which will soon be live, fingers crossed). It appeared in their monthly email newsletter. You can read it here if you like: This…
MySpace Murder Foiled
I’m sure this is going to get a lot of coverage: MySpace Murder Plot Foiled – September 14, 2006 And I’m not going to bang on about it too much, but it reminds me of a conversation that I’ve had with a few people recently about online…
Home Cooking…
After mulling over Steal this Film as mentioned previously I’m still not any surer about where I stand. There’s one frame from the movie that keeps flashing back into my mind though: Of course it’s not the same as digitisation and…
MyHeritage – Face Recognition
For quite a while now MyHeritage have been offering a ‘see who your celeb lookalikes are’ applicaiton online. I’d always ignored it (too much effort finding a photo and stuff, plus you have to register) until someone at work sent it round…
Disintermediating Citizen-Media Podcasts
It had to happen really. Web 1.0 had it’s own bullshit generator, now Web 2.0 gets one too: Emptybottle.org – The Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator I also find some perverse pleasure in the web 2.0 buzzphrase generator.
Geotagging in Flickr
Very cool new feature in Flickr, you can geotag your photos using Organizr. Simply drag your photos onto the Map (provided by Yahoo! Maps) and they immediately get a location attached to them. It’s really really simple and works…
Steal this film
Following on from the Darknet post the other day, here’s some more on piracy in Sweden (and beyond). This 30 minute film gives a view of the P2P landscape (and especially the ‘bust’ on PirateBay – a major bittorrent site). Visit the Steal…
Something Wonderful
On YouTube. It’s true. A thing of beauty. Simple, elegant, straightforward beauty… Via noodlepie.
Mod Your Mob for Orange
Here’s a little something that we’ve been working on for Orange. Called Mod Your Mob it’s all about creating freakish versions of mobile phones. I’ve not had much to do with it, and I’m not quite sure if it’s a pisstake or not. I’m not…
A Conversation on Participation
“Why don’t we let people get involved. Give them a way to upload their short movies / photographs / demo-tracks / homages to our product / ideas / knitting patterns / kazoo melodies / etc. They can win prizes.” “Would you do it?” “What do…
Yoga Today – Karma Rich Video Podcasting
Yoga Today – Start each day with a new Yoga lesson (for free). That sounds nice doesn’t it… If you’re using a PC you can get the lessons in HD, if you’re on a Mac they’re in lower res iTunes format. If only i could figure out a way to rig…
Clipart Art
I’ve always had a strange passion for clipart. It’s pretty much the most lifeless form of illustration that exists. But ironically people use it to add life to presentations and documents. I have my own idea for a clipart project that I’ll…
New Design
Stan Lee suggested that maybe I should consider a new web 2.0 logo, and pointed me in the direction of the Web 2.0 logo generator. What do you reckon?…
Digital Frustration
Just in case it gets lost in the comments. I thought it was worth blogging the fact that Tony Davidson left a comment in response to my ranting the other day. Thanks. It’s always nice when a monologue turns into a dialogue. Stops you…
Digital Creativity Revisited
Yesterday I posted this: Tony Davidson on Digital Creativity I got into a bit of a rant about it. You’ll find it’s easy to bait anyone who works in digital in this way. In fact there’s probably a good sport in there somewhere. It’d be…
Join the Darknet
The Swedish Pirate Party has launched a service that lets anyone send files or information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged. Technically they say, this is called a “darknet”. I could spend a lot of time…
Tony Davidson on Digital Creativity
The above image is blatantly stolen from the excellent DigitalAgency blog. But short of retyping the whole thing I couldn’t think of any other way of doing it. It’s from the D&AD Student Annual, written by Tony Davidson (Creative Director…
Clerks 2 – A socially networked film
The Social Customer Manifesto: Silent Bob Speaks I liked Clerks when I first saw it. I liked its low-budgetness, especially the fact that the store in the film had a broken shutter (to hide the fact that the only time they could afford to…
Goggles
You know those thigs that seem glaringly obvious once you’ve seen them, the ones where you go: “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that”. Well here’s one: Goggles :: The Google Maps flight sim Take Google maps and turn it into the landscape for a…
Coke do good
Coke have been getting quite a lot of slating for various things that they’ve been doing online. Poor user generated content, ill conceived non-virals, etc. Not sure where this came from, but for me this is a ‘viral’ movie. I bet it was…
Channel4Radio.com
Channel4Radio.com is a new Channel 4 venture offering a range of podcasts. Some of them look pretty good. They’ve got a series of 30 daily downloads from the Edinburgh festival, which is nice. Plus Richard and Judy’s Audiobook Club! But…
I lied
I know I said I’d shut up about a certain topic, but… Kevin left a comment asking what I thought of his opinions on the Agency.com thing. So I thought the least I could do is take a look. He makes some very good points, however, as I said…
Roll Over
I think this will be my last word on the Agency.com Subway thing. But I’m never one to say never… I got a nice mail from Tom at Agency (he of “Roll Big” fame). The gist of the mail was: They’ve been reacting to things as they unfold (and…
Microsoft Brainwash
Whilst watching the demo of this interesting new Microsoft product: Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth – Video I noticed that the guy had a bottle of Microsoft Brainwash on his desk. Surely a funny gag that’s been put in there by some kind of…
Personality DNA
This is great, from the same people who brought you Buzzvote and Riffs, (see below). Hats off to ATTAP (All things to all people), they’ve made some really nice online things, some of the best things I’ve seen in a while. Keep up the good…
Thumbs up for Riffs
Riffs: Your Social Recommender – Ratings, Rants, Raves, and Reviews It’s like “hot-or-not”, but applied to everything in the world. A really simple ratings engine for life, the universe, and everything else. Nicely put together and has…
WhenWeRollWeRollBig.com
A response from the Agency.com camp regarding the Subway video. It’s basically saying: “we did it, we got people talking, that’s the whole point”. I’m sure the debate will rage on around whether this is just a good piece of…
It was viral…
Now it’s a phenomenon! The immortal line from the Agency.com Subway viral comes alive. Check out the “if we roll, we roll big” t-shirt. With snappy, “corner office, now” detail on the back. Printed on high quality American Apparel garment…
Agency.com ‘viral’ pitch video
OK, I’m going to give credit where it’s due: hats off to Agency.com for nailing their colours to the mast (in a very public way) and for using web stuff to talk about web stuff. Credit over. Maybe it’s just a cultural thing. But this video…
Gamers vs Avatars
Great online gallery of gamers alongside the avatars that they use to represent themselves. The fact the commentary is in German kind of adds to it in a strange way. Tip: click the images to move on to the next pair. Via We Make Money Not…
Companies get 2.0ed
The YayHooray community get all over redesigning big corporations in the style of web 2.0. It’s all over Digg and del.icio.us, so you might have seen it already. But it is pretty funny (if you’re a design geek). All the cliches are there…
More Viral Stuff
Faris from Naked talks about the fact that viral ‘just is’. Also uses the nice ‘real world viral’ example (oh, hang on, that’s just a virus isn’t it?) of the 118 vests. Also mentions a foul Coke example of labelling videos as ‘viral 1…
My New Blog Experiment
I Love London Actually I don’t. That’s the whole point. Me and London haven’t been getting along all that well recently. So I thought I’d try a little experiement. To see if blogging about great things in London can inspire me to think…
More on Zopa – Speed Blogging
Following my earlier post on Zopa. Dave, one of the Zopa founders, had picked up on my post and responded in the comments section within 15 minutes of the original post going live. I’ve always been impressed by Zopa’s use of their blog and…
Trial By Blog
As I’ve mentioned before, we’re working with Zopa at the moment to do a redesign of their website. It’s a great company and a great project. I was in a meeting last week when Dave from Zopa said “Oh, I’ve stuck some of the designs on the…
What's hot on YouTube
Really useful breakdown of the 100 most viewed clips on YouTube. Nice work: No Man’s Blog: YouTube trends report #1 The top line is that of the top 100: 58 are user generated content 31 are music videos 4 are commercial adverts 3 are…
Big Chill / iTunes Promo
Nice promo idea – when my Big Chill tickets turned up they’d suck in a ‘free 3 songs from the iTunes shop’ card. Sweet. What they hadn’t done is create a page of ‘recommended’ tracks or anything like that, which might have been a nice…
Dell Blog
I’m a bit behind on this one but Dell have started a corporate blog. It’s getting very mixed coverage: Good(ish): Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger » Four little links say volumes at Dell site Pretty bad: Micro Persuasion: Dell Starts…
A Pot of Infogold
Online developments – a photoset on Flickr Lynette does an amazing, amazing job of collating astounding facts, figures and quotes about what’s going on in the digital world. Subscribe to her Flickr RSS feed and you’ll be much better…
Social Notworking
This makes me want to weep. Wal-Mart’s ‘Hub’ for teens that allows them to ‘express their individuality’ (and win cool stuff!). Ths writeup in AdAge highlights most of the issues… Advertising Age – Wal-Mart Tries to Be MySpace — Seriously…
Where I work is OK
Poke have just been rated the top Digital Agency in the UK by Revolution Magazine. Actually more importantly we weren’t rated by the magazine, but by clients (as reported in Revolution Magazine). This is the second time in 2 years that…
BT luvs Bebo
TechCrunch report: Bebo Shuns $550 Million Acquisition Offer San Francisco based social network Bebo, which recently raised $15 millionfrom Benchmark Capital, rejected a £300 million ($552 million)acquisition offer from British Telecom…
Yahoo! Podcast Mystery
I’ve got no idea how this happened. But I noticed that Yahoo! Podcasts were starting to send people to Crackunit. So I traced the link back and found this page: iain tait | crackunit.com – Episode Page on Yahoo! Podcasts It looks like I’ve…
Flock Irony
Actually I’m not quite sure if it is irony. But it felt a bit like a kind of irony. I’m using my favourite thing of the day, Flock, to blog about my new favourite thing of the day, Flock. It’s basically a version of Firefox that’s been…
Google vs Ebay
eBay Bans Sellers from Using Google Checkout – I think that says it all… I smell war.
12 Reasons Businesses Don’t Blog
Useful list at eConsultancy of 12 reasons why UK businesses don’t do blogging. Some good thought in there.
Mentos Do Good
Mentos Turns Coke/Mentos Geysers Into Video Contest – this article says it as well as I could, so I’m not going to repeat it. But I suppose you need to know what it is, so here’s a quick summary. Put Mentos in Coke. Booooooosh. Quite…
Fail Fast, Fail Cheap
Ged’s comment reminded me of a great quote that someone once made in my presence. I wish I could remember who said it so I could credit them. But I can’t, sorry. It was someone VC-like from around the time that I was working at First…
We’re fucked
OK, not totally. But this is an interesting development. A startup that will take your designs and turn them into coded web pages by outsourcing it to cheap places around the world (returning your pages within 5 days). Prices from $150. If…
Jealous Animals
Jealous Animals. I’m not quite sure why I love this site so much. But I do. It’s a really simple little site. Hardly a transformational opportunity to engage the user. It doesn’t rely on the normal whiz bang of a lot of web suff. It’s just…
Garfield (not the cat) on Cyber Lions
Although I would be interested to see what Garfield the cat would have to say about Cannes. Anyway. You’d expect a geek like me to talk about the web being a “transformational opportunity to engage the user”. But when someone from…
Blog Shares
Not quite sure how it all works, but it looked like a bit of fun and something I should at least know about. I’m preparing to have my ego crushed as this proves my blog is less useful than a blog about something really useless. Oh yeah, my…
Ether: Sell what you say
A new site. In ‘zeta’! (Via TechCrunch) Yoiks. This sounds interesting. And a recipe for disaster if done badly. Basically you set up your Ether number (a freephone number) through the site, and set your rate in $. Then when people call…
Flickr Enabled LCD Frame
ThinkGeek :: eStarling Wi-Fi Gmail / Flickr Enabled LCD Frame I’ve seen this kind of thing before and there’s something really nice about the thought of having a frame that you can subscribe to a Flickr RSS feed of your photographs, or…
Reflecting on Reflections
As Cal rightly says, reflections are going to end up as the blink tag of web 2.0 (or perhaps one of them). I started using Keynote instead of Powerpoint and was excited to find that it had a automatic reflection generator. I got bored of…
Scalextric World Record – Zootube
Here’s a little site I’ve been working on. I’ve been keeping it a bit quiet because it’s a bit laddy (well a lot laddy in places). But it is appropriate for the target audience. It is for Zoo Magazine after all! The site documents the…
So much good stuff…
I should be going to work right now. But I keep finding amazing things that I feel the urge to share… Following on from ‘convert your website into a pattern’, here comes ‘what does your website sound like’. A site that turns your website…
I Hate Viral(s)
I’ve grown to hate the term viral: I hate the fact that it’s overused. I hate the fact that it’s misused. I hate the fact that ‘viral’ appears as a line on media plans. I hate the fact that people now call them virals. With an (s) as if…
Netvibes Rocks – Harder
Netvibes (my favourite Web 2.0 personal homepage maker) has just added a whole raft of brand new features and enhancements. The most significant of which is a whole new ‘community site’: eco.netvibes.com It’s like a feed directory, but it…
Web Dogma
It’s been a while since I’ve read Boxes and Arrows, it’s a very good collaborative blog about information architechture and related jiggery pokery. One thing caught my eye today: Dogmas Are Meant to be Broken: An Interview with Eric Reiss…
2000 Bricks
Brian kindly left a comment pointing to 2000 Bricks, a project not 1000 miles away from 1000 Paintings. There’s an interesting graph on his site that shows activity on 1000 Paintings has changed over time. He calls it the Short Tail. I’m…
Turn Yahoo RED and Raise Money
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!…
Social Networks = New Media
Nice piece about Social Networks and audience/users as ‘cultural products’. GigaOM : » Social Networks are the New Media Robert Young talks a lot of sense about how self expression is key to peoples use of these sites. And there’s a nice…
Making Friends in 2006
So this is how people are making friends nowadays. This MySpace friend recruitment drive was spotted in a tunnel in Shoreditch on my way to work. Also spotted this in the same tunnel, it’s becoming quite a little creative hotspot… Graffiti…
PSFK: Chris Anderson on Longtail
Worth reading this short interview with Chris Anderson, Lord of the Longtail. PSFK: Interview With Chris Anderson, Longtailier My favourite quote: Finally, are we going to see the Longtail effect on Chris Anderson and his book? ;) Many…
We Feel Fine
It’s taken me a while to put together this post. It’s been sitting in my drafts folder since early last week, and in the meantime lots of you have probably seen wefeelfine.org. I’ll try to summarise why I think it’s such an important site…
Interview With Me
Piers asked me a few probing questions about Poke‘s Webby winners. I answered them as best I could. Hope it all makes sense. Seemed to at the time of writing. Inspiration From IF! : Interview With Iain Tait, Poke
Nobody Reads Ads
I just read this Guest Essay from the 2004 Gunn Report by Fred & Farid. There’s some really interesting stuff in there. I particularly like the way that they talk about consumers: The marketing strategy talks to the consumers; but we are…
Teabuddy – Still on the Boil
Teabuddy.com – Poke‘s solution to teamaking shirkers in the workplace, got a mention in Saturday’s Guardian Magazine. Looks like they’ve just lifted the quotes from an earlier Wired interview that Nik and I did. I still love the fact that…
New Flickr Layout
Eek! I guess it’s just because I’ve been using it a lot recently. But I just logged on to Flickr and the new design really freaked me out. I guess that’s what happens when something that you use all the time changes without warning. If…
More on Participation
Following on from the earlier post about people participating in communities I thought this post contained some great stats: The 1% Rule: Charting citizen participation. Points to the fact that 1% of Yahoo! Group members start groups and…
Online Community Motivations and Reputations
Faris left this rather good link about motivations for contributing to online communities to in the comments. I’m not going to summarise it here. But there’s a couple of thoughts I had about how this might change in the future… It’s…
Webby Awards
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…
Sphere – Blog Search
Sphere: a useful new blog search engine. Seems to index things very fast. My posts from yesterday were already in there. It’s got a particularly nifty ‘custom date range’ function which shows time and volume of posts in a nice way…
More on Ziki
After posting about Ziki a couple of days ago I got this email (Severine, I hope you don’t mind me posting this): Hi Iain I’m Severine from Ziki. Just wanted to thank you for signing up! Thanks also for your post about Ziki :-) I didn’t…
Box.net
I was looking for a free online storage thing for Sophie (so she could share stuff between home and work). There’s loads and loads of them around right now. But I wanted something with plenty of storage space and that’s easy to use. After…
Animated Gifs
I love animated gifs. They’re wonderful things. 10 years ago you couldn’t really have animation on the web without them. So I was glad to read on we make money not art, that someone’s put together a show in SF that celebrates the art of…
Ugly Design Works
This is an interesting debate. I think I might not share it with some of my colleagues for fear of inciting a mini-riot Ugly Design Works… Most Web Designers Miss the Point. I do think there’s some truth in it though (eBay anyone?). It…
Ziki – Social Networking Plus
I think this is an interesting new service. But I’m still not 100% sure. They describe themselves like this: Ziki connects people, businesses and groups based on who they are, what they’re interested in and what they’re looking for…
YouTube’s Big Bill
In the last 6 months video has really started to take off online. There’s a whole host of new video sharing sites springing up. But hosting video costs money. Lots of money. This article: Your Tube, Whose Dime? – Forbes.com estimates that…
Help Me Create a Del.icio.us Network
A new feature of del.icio.us is the ability to create your own networks. It’s a replacement for the slightly confusing inbox feature. I’d love to create a little network of like-minded people so I can keep in touch with the hot stuff that…
Flickr Mashups
I’m pretty sure I’m way behind the curve on these (as per usual). But here’s a couple of amazing uses of the Flickr API (if you don’t know what an API is, this might help. Or then again, it might leave you baffled). Tagnautica – A really…
Longtail Recommendations
Supersmart Ged (who I know from Yahoo!) pointed me to the longtail recommendations engine on last.fm. I’d been to the page but I’d never noticed the slider: have a play, it’s really good (you might need to be a user to access it). It’s a…
User Generated Content
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…
Free AppZapper
One digital life reports on a really neat promotion run by MacZot. They reduced the price of the Appzapper application by 5 cents for every blog that linked to the site. Mac bloggers went nuts for it and the price went down to completely…
That’s not very nice…
Spotted this on the wall of Weiden & Kennedy’s London office. Not sure I agree 100%…
First Download Only No.1
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…
Constant Partial Attention
Interesting article about always being on. It doesn’t say anything massively new really, but I think it neatly crystalises some of the big issues. Not having full concentration on any one thing at a time is something that I’ve been moaning…
Pandora x Last FM
TechCrunch » Pandora and Last.fm Together…sort of – I couldn’t work out which one of Last.fm and Pandora I liked best for my music recommendation needs. Now someone’s sorted out my dilemma, they’ve mashed the two together. Hoorah!
Using iTunes to backup your music
Now here’s a tip I’ve been waiting for. It’s not rocket science. It’s iTunes science! How to backup your iTunes music library, and most importantly of all, keep it backed up. I used to walk around in a constant state of paranoia that all…
Big Companies Do Nice Stuff
I’ve had two good experiences today. Both nice things that companies have done. So in the spirit of helping to spread good stuff I’m going to talk about them. First I’m going to praise O2. I’ve had some relatively poor experiences with…
Feedburner – RSS + nice touches
I’m now going to attempt a cunning blog maneuver, I’m going to try and join two recent posts together (admittedly in a bit of a clumsy way). Feedburner is a really cool service for bloggers or web site owners. It allows you to make your…
RSS what?
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…
Smart Error Page – Odeo
You know those pages that come up when a web page has moved, or you’ve typed the address in wrong? (For the technically minded they’re called 404 errors, but you don’t really need to know that unless you’re in the business). You don’t see…
Videos From the Googleplex
Google have released a heap of videos from their internal archives: In addition to helping distribute content from across the world, Google would like to share videos featuring our company. Some great stuff in there, especially the…
Original iPod announcement
37 Signals pull out some highlights from the original iPod announcement thread at MacRumors. You can normally judge the reaction of Mac fanatics to Steve’s announcements by dipping your toes into these forums. This snapshot from 2001 show…
Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users
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…
BannerBlog
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).…
Run London – RouteFinder
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…
Diablogue: Life takes….
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…
Google Image Hoo Ha
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…
Why youth heart myspace
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…
Tate Online | Net Art
Tate Online | Net Art – once again I’m probably about 5 years behind the curve. But nice to see that the Tate are doing a series of Net Art projects. I’m only a day late on discovering The Dumpster – a project to visualise the romantic (or…
Viral Promotion
Saw this on iamcal.com. threadless are doing a secret sale – buy 3 or more shirts and enter the code ‘tenbucks87’ at the checkout and you’ll get them for $10 each. you have until feb 25th – tell everyone you know A really nice example of a…
Flipping the Funnel
Flipping the Funnel (ebook) – as ususal Seth writes in a way that makes you think, “duh, of course, who didn’t know that”, but then you realise that you didn’t, and he’s just implanted something new and brilliant in your brain. A really…
Evil Google logo
When I’m tired and not feeling on top form I can never really be bothered to look at stuff online. The one site that always cheers me up a bit is Boing Boing, you’ll never fail to find something interesting, odd, funny or inspiring. I’m…
Zombie Infection Simulation
Sometimes I see things online and it makes me think. “I love the Internet”, and I love the crazy, crazy, eccentric freaks that inhabit it. The Zombie Infection Simulation is one of those things. I’ve got no idea why this exists, apart from…
Guns ‘R’ Us
Psssst. Wanna buy some guns? A brand new microsite by Poke. The film’s been done by Mother. We’re trying to get it seen by as many people as we can. So we’ve put together a microsite and have done some interesting distribution stuff…
Boo.com
Oh shit. It’s coming back. Just the thought of it is going to give me sleepless nights, and the girl on the front page will give me daymares! Boo.com…
dumb, crass, stupid, sexist lavazza
Interesting thoughts on complaining via buzz tracking. Russell doesn’t like the Lavazza posters with busty women on them (russell davies: dumb, crass, stupid, sexist lavazza). I think the image, as a photograph, is middle-shelf…
PowerPoint Kills
I’m not someone that believes PowerPoint is inherently evil, it’s not. It has some flaws (as does most software), but I reckon the thing that hurts it the most is the use of templates. The whole thing is set up with bullet points as the…
Directions on your iPod
Mash-up alert, it’s not perfect, but an interesting service combo nonetheless. Get directions onto your iPod (video, photo or nano). http://www.ipodiway.com/. Unfortunately is US and Canada only (for now).…
HassleMe
HassleMe – nice little online app that reminds you to do stuff. Not as fully featured as rememberthemilk.com or backpackit.com (my online reminder/to do service of choice right now). But, I do love the fact that it offers: If you add more…
PumpPod
Saw this poster collection on the streets of NY – Pumppod.com. Damn, there goes another one of my brilliant money making ideas, if only I was quicker and better at things.…
iTunes Signature Maker
iTunes Signature Maker – this is a fantastic idea. A small online app (java I think) – that creates an audio signature based on your iTunes library. The site suggests: Load your iTunes signature onto your iPod, e-mail it to some friends…
justcurio.us
justcurio.us // strangers helping strangers – I don’t know if I’d just missed this. But it’s a great site. You can ask a question and people will answer, but you need to answer somone else’s question first. Done in a really simple and…
Mobile Marketing
Yesterday I spoke at the Mobile Marketing 2005 conference. I actually quite enjoyed it which surprised me. It was a tricky old thing. From speaking to lots of people later it’s obvious that there’s a lot of different levels of knowledge…
Why Google Rule
Something that makes Google so cool is the fact they recognise that their competitors (or deadly rivals), have an important part to play in peoples’ lives. See how they’ve listed Ask Yahoo! in fun. Most other sites would rather kill…
Asian Backstreet Boys
Asian Backstreet Boys – the full story. They’ve got a deal to do Motorola ads now. Yoiks!
Frog Review
All usability reviews should be carried out by talking frogs. And no, I’ve not spent the weekend licking toxic toads! Check this site if you don’t believe that frogs are the future of usability: Frog Review: Ticketmaster. I can see these…
Honda Element Game
i really like this site. The Element and Friends Web Site – 2006 Honda Element Yes it’s for a car and yes it’s a game (2 thing that I’d normally not get at all excited about). But it’s really charming. The tone of voice and style are…
Celeb Map Mashup
In the seeming endless wave of Google Maps mashups comes Celebrity Maps. Of course, we all want to know where celebs live, so we can go raid their bins, clone their identities and create an elite army of celeb lookalikes that take over the…
PodDater.com
Oh my word. The world has come to this: PodDater.com it’s like one of those late night TV dating shows. But you get to choose whose profiles you see, in your own time, on your iPod. Now where did I put that clip of Cheryl… “I’m 24 and into…
Yahoo gets Flickrd
Business 2.0 – The Flickrization of Yahoo. It’s a long article, but makes for interesting reading about how social software is begining to spill over into many aspects of Yahoo!s business. One point that they make that particuarly…
Levi’s Antidote
Levi’s Antidote is, in its own words: “…a living, growing snapshot of what people are thinking and doing across Europe.” Now, as the guys at SMLXL so rightly point out, this is theoretically a great idea. A campaign that supports…
Google Analytics
Google Analytics – Google offers free web stats through its new service. Based on the popular Urchin software this is a great way for site owners to get detailed site analytics (for free!). I still like my simple to read Mint stats too…
Bouncy Balls!
Sony Bouncy Balls TV advert. For me this is one of the greatest ads of recent times. Not only is it a thing of great beauty. It’s executed brilliantly. It demonstrates, in a way that everyone can understand, the key product benefit. Oh…
Sorrell vs. Murdoch
Interesting Reuters article from a couple of weeks ago. Martin Sorrell talks about how media companies are running scared of the new new media. But perhaps most interesting is his criticism of News Corp’s recent acquisitions.…
Technorati Tags Plugin
I’ve finally got around to getting my head around just how good Technorati is. I knew it was powerful. But not that powerful. So I’ve installed BunnysTechnoratiTags on my blog. Meaning that I can make sure I’m properly hooked up with the…
Account Planning School Of The Web
All round smart guy, planning dude and greasy spoon fan Russell Davies has set up the Account Planning School Of The Web – IMHO a properly wired idea. He’s putting effort in, and helping people out, but at the same time potentially getting…
Talking Point for Orange
Here’s a little something I’ve been working on for a good while now TalkingPoint for Orange. It’s a hybrid between a poll and a discussion forum. The objective being to give people a chance to leave their opinions on issues in an…
Email is distracting – shocker!
Blimey! Discover magazine reports on how email and IM are distracting! Well you don’t say… But it does make some interesting points about using multiple windows and the distractions it can cause. Much as I love Expose on my Mac it does…
43 – The Magic Number
Well there’s 43 Things which I’m a huge fan of – a community based around ambitions and things we’d like to do, genius. And really nicely done. Then there’s 43 Places – a community rooted in the places that we’ve visited (or would like to…
Backstreet Mime-a-long
Who? Why? 2 Chinese dudes, sing along to the Backstreet Boys. It’s funny. It gets funnier as you watch it for longer. The guy in the background appears to be just going about his business, unperturbed by the maniacs freaking out to boy-pop…
Collaborative writing online
Collaborative writing software online with Writeboard. Write, share, revise, compare. Well that’s what they say! It really is a lovely little collaborative app – great if you’re trying to do the old ‘to and fro’ with a bit of copy. Those…
PC Magazine: Top 101 Web Sites
PC Magazine: Top 101 Web Sites – really annoying laid out. But a good reminder of some of the best sites out there, and you might even discover one or two new ones. I did.
BugMeNot.com
After running around excitedly telling everyone how much I love BugMeNot, someone told me I’m way behind the curve on this one. I was slightly crestfallen for about a nanosecond, then I remembered that I’d just found one of the most useful…
The State of the Blogosphere
David Sifry (the founder of Technorati) gives his view on the state (and size) of the blogosphere. Some interesting numbers in there. Perhaps naively I had no idea of the scale of fake blogs as used by spammers. It’s true that you learn a…
Growing pains for social bookmarking?
Broadband Stars – Covering the social media revolution: Growing pains ahead for social bookmarking? Interesting comment on the growth of web 2.0 apps and how the democratisation of them may ultimately lead to problems. Also refers to the…
The best thing about Web 2.0
Creating Passionate Users: The best thing about Web 2.0 – As per normal Kathy Sierra makes some amazingly valid points over on one of my favourite blogs. Isn’t it bugging when you read articles that express what you’re thinking so much…
Burger King Gets Farked
Adrants covers BK getting ‘Farked’ – an interesting story of a brand getting stacks of exposure though an online community running away with their ‘icon’ and co-opting it in their own way. The article kind of makes it sound as if BK had a…
Web 2.0 (obviously)
If anything is hot right now it’s web2.0 – it’s starting to feel like mantra for a massive new bubble that’s swelling as I type… Some people might say it’s a lot of fuss about nothing, and that there’s essentially nothing new in web2.0…
Yahoo! and MSN up a tree…
…K.I.S.S.I.N.G. (well maybe). Interesting report on MSN and Yahoo! joining forces on the IM front to present a united front against the ‘Google-Threat’. Interestingly they appear to be leaving poor old AOL out. Almost makes me feel sorry…
Papa Stour
I don’t know why really, but I love this little site. It’s only wee, but it’s perfectly formed. Kind of like one of thost little boutique shops where everything has been hand picked by a shopkeeper who cares. It’s just nicely designed…