This Facebook marketing stunt by Ikea reminded me of this. Pretty smart, getting people to talk about Ikea to their network and letting people win stuff, which then spreads, based on the insight that people tend to trust reviews by their friends and family more than any advertising – which ultimately is a win for Ikea. I wonder what’s next. The #moonfruit stunt has already happened on Twitter, so that’s done. Hmmm…
Watched Rodrigo y Gabriela live 2 nights ago. They blew me away. I seriously recommend them to anyone who likes music even the tiniest bit. They began their career busking on Grafton Street in Dublin, like many others before them, and now pack in thousands. Sometimes all you need is the right person to notice you.
Mansi made an interesting comment on one of my posts, about where the web is heading:
‘instead of having multiple social stops, we’ll all have one social home, so we don’t have to leave. ever.’
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and though that is logically where we should be heading, I wonder if it will be possible in practice. I’m thinking of a service that is like FriendFeed and houses all your social presences in one place, but it should have one crucial difference: users should be able to control their privacy levels. So something along the lines of Facebook from the privacy point of view, but it should allow asynchronous following of people, like on Twitter. Currently Twitter offers only two options: on and off (via protected updates). Facebook is simpler from that point of view but requires approval when anyone ‘friends’ you in order to have them in your network. Another key issue in the service I’m talking about would be needing to use only one password to access everything, instead of having to remember multiple passwords for every site you log in to.
Of course, single sign-on would need to work, and that can only happen when one company owns all the sites in question. Google is the closest so far. Yes, it does beg the question of monopoly – power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So maybe all this is just a pipe dream, and someone needs to invent a smarter way to save passwords, which automatically gets updated when you change them on any of the multiple sites you use – which will in turn need a password of its own!
I can’t stop thinking of the potential of the single web home idea though. It will be like your digital passport – the only document you’ll need online.
PS: Read this really informative post by Tim O’Reilly on the subject of the coming War of the Web.
I don’t think I’ve seen the words ‘cut out and keep‘ used in a digital sense lately. It’s an interesting reminder that people actually used to cut out and keep announcements of noteworthy events from newspapers and magazines not too long ago. I used to myself – but can’t remember the last time I ever did.
I suppose the equivalent of that on a digital level is bookmarking.
Indian news channel NDTV has launched an interesting website that aims to make themselves more social. Called NDTV Social, it has groups for every news anchor on the channel, and their popular news programmes, and readers can, Facebook-style, become fans of either or both and initiate discussions with the news anchors, many of whom are very popular in India and have their own Twitter accounts. It is integrated with Facebook, Twitter and Google. There doesn’t seem to be much of a take-up at the moment – the community seems fairly small. But I think it is an interesting model to look at. Facebook fan pages do the same thing to a large extent, but this website allows NDTV to become the media owner, rather than a third party site like Facebook. It’s certainly a new model – I can’t think of any other news site that offers this kind of interaction. I’m not sure if it will be successful, but it certainly looks like NDTV is, at the very least, evolving with the changing times.
I was walking in the Fleet Street area the other day and suddenly spotted a series of stickers on the footpath that spoke about the lost river Fleet. My curiosity aroused, I tried following the trail but lost it after a point. I came home and tried to see if I could dig up any more about it. I found this Guardian article about how the Environment Agency is indeed resurrecting, so to speak, the lost rivers of London, and this map. And then finally this Wikipedia article that says that in January of this year, the River Restoration Centre was set up as a partnership between the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Greater London Authority as part of a plan to reinstate underground rivers of the city by the office of the Mayor of London. Nice one, Boris.
I went to the She Says Golden Stiletto Awards a couple of weeks ago. Most of the entries weren’t very inspiring, but thankfully the winning entry was quite interesting. It was a campaign by Lean Mean Fighting Machine for the Department of Schools, Children and Families. The idea was to encourage 13-14 year olds to study foreign languages in the 6-month run-up to their GCSE choices without sounding preachy. LMFM based their campaign on a phenomenon they observed in Flickr where teenagers take photographs of their rooms and tag the contents. They created 3 foreign teenagers’ rooms, which were decorated according to their different interests. The objects in their rooms were tagged in their respective native languages and linked to external blogs or videos in those languages.
I’m increasingly tiring of microsites and am relieved this uses an existing service (Flickr) to speak to its audience. I was also quite impressed with the insight behind it all.
Priyanka has a great summary here and here of Playful, which I went to as well last Friday, so this post won’t be a summary of the event – more an observation of the stuff that I liked from the event.
First, the Playful newspaper, which was put together by the Newspaper Club people, Russell and Ben. It had, among other things, bios of the speakers and a section next to them for notes, which I faithfully put to good use, as you can see above. Very neat idea.
Second, Wordr, which is a sort of one-word Twitter (uses the Twitter API). I like the fact that people make up words – that’s such a fun thing to do. I’ve invented ‘pluggy’ and ‘growlsome’ so far. Nonsensical to some but meaningful to me!
I really really want to read Leila Johnston’s ‘Enemy of Chaos‘ now. She spoke at Interesting too and though I was keen on reading it then, I’m even more keen now. Sounds like exactly the kind of book I would fall off the chair laughing with.
The Snowflake project from the Tinker.it! team looked really cool and I wish I had the chance to play with it when it was going on in January. Basically passers-by could tap their Oyster card on to the reader and see what kind of snowflake they were. Here’s a quick video that shows you what I mean.
I was amazed when Robin Burkinshaw said that his project with the Sims 3, Alice and Kev, led to 16,000 people donating money to homeless charities. Quite an impact for a game.
Russell’s talk on how pretending lends a whole new perspective to your world made me want to be a kid again. I also went and spent some time on Noticings on Flickr after his talk, a game for people who notice stuff around them. I’m always clicking pictures of random things so I really should give it a go.
I was pleasantly surprised to be informed recently that I’d won, from Wallpaper, a copy of the collaborative project between Dom Pérignon and Karl Lagerfeld. Dom Pérignon’s Oenotheque Vintage is produced ‘once in a generation’, as Wallpaper says. To celebrate, Karl Lagerfeld, much revered in the fashion world (especially for his designs for (sigh!) Chanel), collaborated with his muse Amanda Härlech to produce ‘Visions & A Decision’, a photographic Wildean tale of ‘an old money Dom Pérignon heir on the hunt for the perfect woman’. Brad Koenig and supermodel Claudia Schiffer feature, and all in all it is a lovely addition to my slowly-growing collection of coffee-table books.
If you’re interested in seeing a behind-the-scenes video of the making of the book (yes, I really like back stories), here it is.
As promised, here’s the video that captures how the Guinness folks made their latest ad, ‘World’. It tells a story, and the reason I like it is because I think story-telling allows the viewer to be spoken to and entertained. Or at least, I was!
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