Five finger discount

What ho! Apparently, today is blogday, so we have to recommend 5 blogs. All right then:

• The art life is funny, merciless and - whaddya know - Australian. Um, it's about art.


• The IABC Café may not have a snappy title, but it's great to see that the International Association of Business Communicators has its finger on the pulse, so to speak. Hang on, that's two links for the price of one. You guys owe me.


• I have recently switched my 'vicious animal' obsession from sharks to crocodiles. This, however, has nothing to do with Christopher Hannegan's Employee Engagement, which is totally unrelated to razor sharp teeth and all that terrible, terrible thrashing around, but spot on when it comes to effective internal communications.


• I have always loved the Onion, but that's not a blog. I also harbour secret feelings for their special friend, The AV Club - which has recently morphed into a blog. Hmmm, I've done that 2 links thing again, haven't I?


• One for the Francophiles/ TShirt addicts: LaFraise makes cool TShirts, and talks in French! Zut alors!

Finish. Go home.

 

more language shenannigins

Just because we work in an industry which likes to invent silly new words, I thought I'd include this report from the Annual Neologism Contest... (with thanks to the Washington Post). (Read more...)

 

Parlez-vous progress?

I read two things yesterday that set my synapses spinning:

1. The golden age of British creativity is over from Adverblog (Hi, Martina!)


2. This BBC News report: Language exams in sharp decline in the UK

So BBH's Chairman and Worldwide Creative Director John Hegarty blames globalization for the decline in British dominance of the creative scene, while David Hart, general secretary of the UK's National Association of Head Teachers, bemoans the collapse in modern foreign languages as a catastrophe.

I'm putting deux and twee together and coming up with quattro. What's going on is that Britons' quietly casual assumption that they are superior to everyone else doesn't cut it any more... the attitude that their creative ideas/ language are somehow inherently better is a red herring. In our brave new networked world, the real rewards come from engaging in the global conversation, which means working harder to ensure that everyone's ideas are properly communicated and appreciated.

Which is where the ability to speak foreign languages pays off in spades. Learning a foreign language goes way beyond vocabulary, grammar and funny accents. It's about listening, understanding, and the art of respectful self-expression. It's about connecting with people across cultural divides and appreciating value in different ways.

"The golden age of British creativity is over" - great! Good riddance to laziness, snobbery and in-jokes; Hello to diversity, crazily massive ideas and learning more languages. Пошли!

 

China blocks online gamers from playing for more than 3 consecutive hours

The Chinese Government unveiled a new system Tuesday to prevent individuals from playing online games for more than three consecutive hours, which must be installed for every online game in the country. (Read more...)

 

Viral Campaign Greenpeace

While looking for examples of viral campaigns, I ran into this one where Bush and Blair hook up...

http://feelfilms.co.uk/smiths/index.html

 

Sneak peak to the new Sony Ericsson phones?

Sony just launched a new model in their walkman series the "Walkman Bean", Will the organic look be the future for Sony Ericsson phones?

Check out the complete story (in Dutch) on Audiofreaks.

http://www.audiofreaks.nl/nieuwsdetail.php?itemID=231

 

Opera Mini browser

Opera have announced a new mobile browser: Opera Mini. It brings their style of reformatting standard html pages to 'normal' phones, formerly it was limited to Symbian

(Read more...)

 

Blog Business Summit presentations

Quick! Get over to Frankwatching (he's Frank Janssen, and he's watching) and check out his Powerpoints: The best of Blog Business Summit summary article.

The article's in Dutch; the presentations are in Eeengleeesh.
Plenty of stuff about blog design, selling, building networks, measuring success, corporate blogging strategy etc.
Nice one, Frank.

 

Ajax research

Together with Leo Plaw (www.guildmedia.net) I've been doing some research on Ajax (no, not the football club). Here's an overview of interesting links &c.

http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php
Good introduction article for people who don't know what all this is about

http://www.webpasties.com/xmlHttpRequest/
Building an ajax-app in babysteps

http://www.twinhelix.com/javascript/htmlhttprequest/
It uses the XMLHttpRequest browser object as well as its own custom IFRAME-based transport layer for excellent cross-browser compatibility (Martijn thought of a similar method independently).

http://www.ripcord.co.nz/behaviour/
Not Ajax, but very useful for implimenting it.

http://prototype.conio.net/
I think this is a good Ajax frame work. Has support / implimnented by a number of different projects. Good becuase it  just offers you Ajax methodology, and none of the bells and whistles the others offer. Meaning it allows you to add what ever you want on top without committing to a complete system.

http://script.aculo.us/downloads
Uses the Prototype code base. Very nice demos. Very useful stuff. However, some of the demos use Ruby. Don't know if all of their stuff can be seperated from it. I think so. Not all of their  demos use Ruby. I want plain HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, MySQL systems, no other add ons.

http://openrico.org/rico/demos.page
Similar to the above, but with fewer examples. Also uses Prototype. But I think I prefer Scriptaculous. Rico has a few too specific features added to it, bloating the code file. I'm looking something that provide basic building blocks.

http://dojotoolkit.org/
This could be the answer for basic building blocks, however it is really let down by some decent demo pages. You can find some if you dig around on the site: http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/tests/  I haven't explored this full yet. Your input on this one would be valuable.

This page shows a number of other alternative systems. Some I've mentione above are listed here, including BackBase.

If you are interested I did SOME (certainly far from thorough) testing on various Mac browsers with the following code systems:

               script.aculo.us    openrico.org

Firefox 1.02    OK                   OK
Safari 1.3        OK                   not all works
Sunrise 0.7     OK                   not all works
Opera 6.03      fail                   fail
IE 5                fail                    fail

Sunrise is a new open source browser that uses the safari rendering engine. Hence the same results.
Opera and IE are no surprise.

 

"Share and enjoy"

I just read an article over at Adrants called Agency websites suck, launch a weblog.

"It is the same old q. for a scientist. Should he make his knoledge avalable to everyone?"

We're currently in the middle of a rebranding exercise, during which we're thinking about the roles that our website and (recently-launched) blog play in our communications. I should mention that we're not a traditional "spend and pretend" advertising agency, but a wholly independent "share and enjoy" digital marketing agency.

• Our website demonstrates our ability to create beautiful, functional, engaging online brand experiences. This is what clients ask for when they come to us. We also advise them to start blogs (amongst many other things), but you know what? They're pretty scared of them at the moment. So we're doing one ourselves to show them what it's like. And...


• Our blog creates a conversation space where we can offer our ideas to the world. By inviting everyone to participate in our thought process, we fuel our passion and expand our network. The blog also expresses who we are and how we work, both to ourselves and to the rest of the world. Inside-out.

The trick I'm hoping we pull off is to combine the two (or three, if you add a mobile site to the mix) so that our overall communication thoroughly represents Media Catalyst and what we can do. Authenticity with style.

 

Slanguage/ y00t$p33k

As a linguist/ writer I was very pleased to find this article, Mind Your Slanguage in the Observer, Sunday 14th August. It's about a new documentary which studies modern slang and its origins. Go ahead and read that, then come back.

So... it's all very well attributing much of the etymology of current slang to hip hop slang an' t'ing, but what about the internet? Huh? Answer that! Email, texting, writing for websites etc. etc. has fundamentally changed the way we express ourselves (the Observer article only picks this up to note that kids are explaining slang terms to each other using MSN Messenger). Meanwhile, our messages are shorter, more focussed and may contain all manner of acronyms and jargonistic shortcuts that an outsider just wouldn't understand. OK, so slang is primarily born in spoken conversation, but to my mind, the internet generally makes people communicate more in writing - and makes writing more conversational.

Is anyone working on this? I know that Wired published a dictionary of tech/geekspeak a few years ago, but I can't recall seeing any studies about the changing use of language online and its effect on spoken language in the real world. I'd love to hear from anyone if they know anything about this. Anyone who compares the internet to the rebuilding of the Tower of Babel will win a special prize.

Meanwhile, in a callout box not featured in the online version of the above article:

I was touched to notice that my name (Ben Blench, in case you were wondering) has a new and not entirely inappropriate connotation: I am muscular!

 

pong on the office

Part of design is to take familiar elements out of context and put them in a new one. These guys did this with the godfather of all games: Pong!

(Read more...)

 

Creative challenge!

Attention members of the creative team! (sounds good huh!)

I have a (very good) Baseball team that is sponsored by MC and we are about to become the champions in our league this year. So doing good! However our website is over 2 years old and the design is starting to look boring (for me at least). Also because of lots of new functionality the navigation is a bit messy.

Please let your creative minds have a look and hopefully you can give me a beautiful new design.

The website can be found at http://www.dsshonkbal.nl/

 

Media Catalyst's blogging guidelines

Dear Catalysts: allow these thoughts to guide your minds when you’re writing stuff on our blog.

Dear world: this is how we work. We hope you like what we have to say and stick around for good conversation and stimulating new relationships.

• Any Catalyst may blog


• All Catalysts are 100% personally responsible for their words


• Make it clear who you are and what you do here


• Don’t be afraid to express your ideas and opinions


• Keep entries short and to the point


• If you make a mistake, clean it up directly and honestly


• Don’t pick a fight with someone just because they disagree with you


• Don’t lie


• Never reveal confidential information about clients – check if unsure


• Never reveal confidential company information – check if unsure


• Get out into the blogosphere and find some new friends: quote others in your posts, connect with people and create conversations

The above is subject to change when I realise I've forgotten to say something that turns out to be crucially important.

 

Media Catalyst inside out

So, we had a company meeting yesterday where we talked about all the usual clients/ projects/ finances/ staffing stuff. All very interesting... amazing how far we've come in four years.

I closed the meeting by presenting a high-speed tour of the world of blogging and networked communication. With inimitable style I performed my biggest mass-delegation yet, devolving responsibility for internal communications to every single Catalyst - all 42.8 full time employees.

Starting with this as my opening slide:

I went on to illustrate how strengthening our internal communications is central to our continued success, and how blogs and other such networked comms tools are the ideal way to get things going in the right direction. Why? Because their networked/ open/ entrepreneurial nature is in perfect harmony with Media Catalyst's company ethos. Timing-wise, this also coincides rather neatly with our about-to-bear-fruit rebranding exercise. I expect the combination of the two to launch us into orbit round about November this year...

So, from today, all Catalysts can post entries on this blog (for the past four months it has only been open to the Creative team and a couple of special guests). So you can expect to see a wider variety of topics being covered here, in addition to our existing mix of new project announcements, links to cool sites, new technology info, online stats, market/ industry developments, MC social event reports and occasional random nonsense.

We're a sensible-if-a-bit-mental bunch, so while I doubt that anyone will say anything really damaging here, I've posted our 'corporate' blogging guidelines, just to make it clear what's tickety-boo, and what's poo-poo.

Over time, I expect that we'll refine our strategy, maybe making separate blogs for different topics, and - I hope - using blogging internally as e.g a project communciations tool. For the immediate future, I expect to see an explosion of chaotic, erudite, confusing, eclectic, contradictory, dynamic and passionate conversations right here. It's who we are, and it's why we're so good at what we do. I think it's worth sharing with the world.

So there you have it. Eat it up!

 

Nifty experiments.

 

Interesting web statistics.

(Read more...)

 

Sony Ericsson WTA mobile site

Monday 25th July saw the launch of the Sony Ericsson WTA mobile site. MediaCatalyst Amsterdam did the Information Architecture and design of the mobile site.

The mobile site features links to match schedules, scores, etc, plus image galleries shot by the competitors using their Sony Ericsson K750 camera phones. It also links to downloads and services on Sony Ericsson's existing Fun & downloads site (also designed and built by MediaCatalyst Amsterdam).

You can check out the site either by entering www.sonyericsson.com/tennis into your mobile communication device, or by installing this rather nifty user agent switcher for Firefox, then making your computer pretend it's a phone.

 

Viral marketing... whu?

Interesting bit in last week's Campaign magazine (OK, OK, I've been busy, all right?) announing the launch of Tomboy films new division, Tomboy Virals.

They've certainly hired the right kids for the job: Rob Manuel, Joel Veitch and Ben Wheatley are all regulars and/ or the masterminds behind the immensely entertaining B3ta.com.

But, my friends, I have a niggling fear that this new venture might not work out as planned. Why do I say that? Well, for me, what makes the b3tan's stuff work is that they're not trying to make a point. I wonder how happy clients are going to be tying their expensively defined brands to such irreverent/ scatalogical/ downright mental ideas. Exhibit 1, ladies and gentlemen, is the Quiznos Subs advert - right at the end of the showreel on the Tomboy Virals homepage, which is ace until the cheesy corporate voiceover bit at the end.

And there's another thing: marketeers tend to want to see things like instant and obvious return on investment. Virals may not satisfy that sort of thinking - they're funny beasts that tend to come and go in waves. See for example the reporting this week in AdLand and Adrants of the Lynx lips campaign, which was designed by our very own Cyrus Vantoch-Wood and launched several years ago (check the b3tan version of the same meme - Buffy's swearing keyboard)

Anyway, good luck convincing the clients, lads.