Missing gorilla viral
I don’t often post agency work on here, but this loving homage to the Cadbury’s gorilla ad, for IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare) is just too good not to stick up. Congratulations to Magnus Thorne and Paul Turner who came up with the concept, persusaded a production team at 2am to film it for free and are currently seeding the thing like mad. Respect to IFAW too, for having the courage to run such a cool piece of work.
You can find out more about IFAW and the missing gorilla campaign here.
Free data and analytics tools
For data-driven businesses the web offers a rich variety of incredibly powerful data tools. Some of these tools offer richer insight than many more expensive industry platforms, and can be deployed quickly, effectively and imaginatively to create unique measurement models against which the success of communications can be judged.
I thought I’d stick up a few starters for ten. Some of these are things I use, others are suggestions from Russell Marsh. What I hope will happen is that the comments section will fill up with other tools that you find effective.
My current number favourite tool is Yahoo Pipes – a browser based platform that allows you to aggregate, mainpulate content and create detailed data mash-ups in seconds. If you’re a planner or work in data and haven’t played with Yahoo Pipes – SHAME. On a slight side note here are some other mashup editors: Popfly from Microsoft and the Google Mash-up editor.
Dipity I’ve blogged about before, but this tool can easily be deployed to measure the effectiveness of social media campaigns across a number of platforms (youtube, vimeo, digg, flickr, stumbleupon, twitter and many others) – all free, again set-up in seconds. For an idea of how rich a platform this is check out my free dipity feed.
Want to check out free public data sets? Amazon Web Services provide free online access to lots of public data, including the US Census Bureau’s databases.
More?
Blogpulse – to monitor the blogosphere and buzz metrics (from Nielsen).
Twilert – what are micro-bloggers tweeting about a brand, person, idea, etc. Think Google Alerts, but for Twitter.
Alexa – to understand web traffic stats.
This is a very brief ten minute, starter. Over the next few days I’ll attempt to build this post up into a resevoir of many more tools.
Note: you can find lots more tools on the rapp delicious page.
New media is old news – Mouse 40th anniversary
For anyone who still hopes the digital revolution will pass by (and there are still some), it’s worth pondering today’s 40th anniversary of the mouse.
Forty years ago today, Douglas Engelbart tgave a presentation where he demonstrated the world’s first mouse. Recently Logitech has announced it’s shipped it’s billionth mouse. But the mouse wasn’t the only revolutionary thing Douglas demonstrated on the day he revealed the mouse to an audience of geeks in San Francisco.
He also demonstrated hypertext, object addressing, dynamic file linking, and showed how two people, at different locations could collaborate on a shared computer screen. And he did this by allowing the people to communicate over a network using video and audio.
Video and audio over a network. 40 years ago. And my point is?
Well, simply put new media is old news. Digital is not a passing fad. it’s been here for ages. It’s beyond mainstream now. For anyone under the age of 16, they’ve grown up with the net as part of the world’s furniture. Here some more examples of how old, new media is (thanks Alex Balfour – head of digital at London Olympics – for these facts):
The first email was sent 37 years ago
Online forums (usenet) have been around for 29 years
Chat for 20 years
The web as we know it started 14 years
Internet telephony 13 years
Web Ecommerce has been up and running for 13 years
The first social networking site also appeared 13 years ago
Ebay launched 13 years ago
Online video has been around for 11+ years (admittedly quite stuttering for a while)
Myspace is now 10 years old
As is Google
And Wikipedia launched 8 years ago.
So, let’s stop talking about this stuff as if it’s somehow cutting edge. Let’s treat it as normal. And if any of our colleagues or clients are struggling to appreciate the full relevance (or are nervous about their lack of understanding) then perhaps it’s past time to say, get over it.
Jay Z – typographic animation application
Ethan Roth, the director of this excellent Jay-Z video, created a neat application which allows him to play with typography to very cool effect. He’s also kindly donated the source code which you can find here.
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