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Archive for the ‘2.0 +’ Category

PSFK London

23 May 2007

PSFK presents a series of presentations and discussions by leading innovators over the course of a day on June 1st. They have invited some of the most brilliant thinkers who will lead tomorrow’s businesses to speak to an audience from the creative, media and marketing communities. In the morning the speakers and panelists will explore new trends and ideas in areas like digital media and eco-consciousness; and in the afternoon the speakers will provide inspiration on how to apply the insights gained from looking at trends and ideas and applying them for new marketing, branding and design. Sign up today and be part of this event!

PSFK London

Speaker List:

  • Niku Banaie, Naked Communications
  • Mike Butcher, TBites
  • Russell Davies, Open Intelligence Agency
  • Regine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art
  • Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin Books
  • Karen Fraser, Ethical Index
  • Santiago Gowland, Unilever
  • John Grant, BrandTarot
  • Tamara Giltsoff, OZOlab brand
  • Jessica Greenwood, Contagious Magazine
  • Hugh MacLeod, GapingVoid
  • Beeker Northam, Bloom
  • Steven Overman, Lowe Worldwide
  • George Parker, Madscam
  • Simon Sinek, Sinek Partners
  • Stan Stalnaker, Hub
  • Iain Tait, Poke
  • Diana Verde Nieto, Clownfish
  • Timo Veikkola, Nokia
  • Johnny Vulkan, Anomaly
  • Faris Yakob, Naked Communications

Check out the site for the full program and the list of attendees that have signed up so far.

 

Scratch Yourself

14 May 2007

Pretty cool stuff coming up: here’s a fun way to spread your love to your friends and relatives. Instead of sending them those boring images of the lastest family gig in attachment, why not make it interactive and add a chance to win some money at the same time? ScratchYourself is a Flash application that lets users upload an image and build a lottery-style scratch card from it. Once a scratch card has been created, users can email it to friends or embed it on their site. Users could create and embed these on their blogs, MySpace page, etc. The only downside is that the card has a 550 px width and it’s just a little bit too wide to fit in the template.

Product Details:

  • Scratch card creators can email their scratch card link to other people or use a code snippet provided to embed the scratch card on their Web site.
  • Scratchers move their mouse over the scratch area to reveal the message underneath.
  • Every day, Scratchyourself chooses two winning times. The first person to scratch after each winning time wins an Instant Prize of US$10, and the scratch card creator wins a Bonus Instant Prize of US$10. Scratchers may reveal a message entering them into a Daily Draw for US$50. Users can scratch multiple times to win an Instant Prize but can only enter the Daily Draw once per scratch card per day.
  • Winners can choose to be paid via PayPal, check or Amazon gift certificate.
  • The current Scratchyourself promotion runs until June 7, 2007. Scratchyourself intends to run a second promotion from June 8, 2007, with bigger prizes.

Example (unscaled version – click here) :

The setup is very easy. First you provide the name of the ticket (the blueprint stamp you see before you scratch) – Next you upload an image (300k limit) and write the caption (text in the bottom left corner), then you pick a color panel and then you login or register for free, to send it off. (took me 20 seconds). Simple, cool and very nifty.

Get your own at: Scratch Yourself

 

Twingly ScreenSaver

26 Feb 2007

When I first read the name, I was thinking about Bonzy Buddy or something alike. But when I checked it out, I was very impressed by what it does and how fast it does it. In their own words: “Twingly screensaver is visualizing the global blog activity in real time. Forget RSS readers where you see only what you’re interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen.” – Yeah. Forget seeing only what you’re interested in. See all the rest you’re not interested in too (?) – No. Seriously. It’s for the effect. It has a better effect when you see ‘everything’. Otherwise the screensaver is kinda dead. Would be better as a stand-alone app though.

To use the screensaver you need a PC with Windows and a graphics card supporting OpenGL. Enable Asian language support in Windows, because we all know there’s lot of that stuff in the blogosphere.

Produced by PrimeLabs

Via: CrossTheBreeze | UpStream

 

Post-It StopMotion

25 Feb 2007

If it’s true that companies should embrace the consumer generated things people do and publish while using their product, the way Coca-Cola and Mentos embraced the geyser effect, then I think these guys are entitled to a life-long stock of free Post-it notes. It’s not the best stopmotion ever, but it’s fun to see what you can do with a pack of simple sticky notes and a large window.

 
1 Comment

Posted in 2.0 +, Geek, Humor, Video

 

Live From The IAB Blog Event (3)

22 Feb 2007

Sven Marievoet from Adhese gives a presentation about how they have a growing portfolio to advertise in blogs. Currently they manage 60 blogs, and they’ve already ran a number of campaigns which turned out to be successful. Although Adhese got quite some negative feedback when they first started, they’re beginning to make a change in the opinion of those who didn’t think it was possible.

There’s still a lot to be done, but they’re on their way. The main thing that caused their growth is the personal approach they maintained, to contact every blogger single handedly over email and negotiate the ad placement.

(disclaimer, Adhese runs ads on this blog from time to time)

Kris Hoet from MSN EMEA: Everyone is a customer.

How can a company engage with bloggers? How to connect and build long term relationships? There’s a lot of blog trackers and product trackers out there (technorati, tailrank, …)

The first thing you should do is READ! If you don’t care for reading blogs, don’t bother contacting them to promote your brand. Use RSS readers to track your bloggers, follow links to discover more blogs. Comment on blogs, where it makes sense. Don’t kill a bad blogpost, but stay factual.

Stay on track of your comments with tools like co.mments.com or cocomment.com, don’t comment to never look back. People will answer and expect you to come back and follow the conversation.

Set up meetings, invite people to come over and get to know you and your purposes. It helps to get your message out. Word of mouth is still the most powerful form of brand communication. It’s a natural thing that needs to grow in a natural way. Forcing it, or even worse: trying to force it, will lead you further from your goal than you’ll ever wished for.

Kris closed with some cases like the guy who got to drive with an Aston Martin because he wished for it, the Gillette 5 blades disaster and the famous Dell Hell.

 

Live From The IAB Blog Event (2)

22 Feb 2007

Julie Opstael from Skynet presents a number of social interest cases, she works as a product manager of ‘Blogs’ (yes they have a product category for it) at Skynet, one of the leading blog platforms in Belgium.

She presented a lot of human stories, to illustrate that behind a lot of blogs, real people with real stories live their daily lives and are willing to share it. It’s not always about the high traffic numbers, but very often about ‘what’ is written and for whom. A lot of people write for a small audience and love that, they don’t feel the need to become famous. They do meet in small blogger events, and they love to socialize, but most of all, they love to blog.

The funny remark here is that Skynet started with an ‘everything about skynet blogs’ blog and that shortly after that their ‘top blogger’ started with a mirror blog which is called ‘bloggers about skynet blogs’. Every official announcement the Skynet team launches on their blog gets an instant feedback on that blog, and it’s most of the time razorblade sharp. A nice example of how blogging works.

Jesse Wynants from i-merge and Gunther Boutsen from Fishtank are talking about the conversation that ‘happens’ when people use blogs. About opinions everyone has and everyone’s dying to share with the rest of the world.

People blog to become an authority, to be invited to speak at events, to connect with others (clients). People want to meet other people, bloggers want to meet other bloggers. Companies want to create transparency and want to share their ideas, their thoughts. Companies want to share knowledge, engage in conversations. CEOs blog to share their vision.

This presentation is really interesting and in fact goes a little too fast to live-blog. For every reason of blogging, they give an example. They give tips to blog like: create a style, send lots of linklove, set up a schedule, blog every day and keep up the frequency, write original content and don’t copy-paste too much. Personalize your blogposts and blog so that people can identify theirselves with you and your life. Try to organise a battle, start a debate and invite people to participate.

One of the best links I just discoverd is the IKEA hacker site, the perfect example of what ‘anti-consumerism’ means. This blog tells you everything you can do with the stuff from IKEA when you don’t want to follow the papered how-to guidelines. Sweeeet :)

You can also use technology to make it more easy to blog. You can use tools like Flickr, and blog those pictures. With tools like LiveWriter you can create posts offline in an editor that looks and feels like Office Word. You can use Media (audio and video) to make your content more catchy, or aggregate content from other bloggers or users or from yourself (del.icio.us, podcast feeds, video feeds). You can use widgets to make your blog look more ‘alive’ and to discover new things you weren’t aware of yourself. If you start moblogging and send pictures from your mobile phone to your laptop, the spontaneity increases and gives your blog a more ‘human’ face.

If you use metadata, you can strengthen your content and give it date/time/location tags, so the content has more context.

Then Jesse talked about degrees of participation. First degree is just the IP’s, the readers who come by and don’t interact. Next you have the Subscribers, the fans, those who keep coming back and are dedicated readers. Lastly there’s the groupies, the user group who interacts. These are the most valuable people, the ones who drive your community. These are the ones you need to love and praise.

 

Live From The IAB Blog Event

22 Feb 2007

What can the 1 million Belgium bloggers do for you?

Maarten Schenk, Six Apart. Blogging since 2002, that’s worth a t-shirt.

A lot has changed in a short time. Back in 2003 people thought it was either a forum, some sort of Geocities homepage or a community site. Nobody understood the purpose of RSS. But nowadays, the word weblog is in the daily news, all the major newspapers have blogs with RSS feeds, or are launching them as we speak. Companies treat bloggers like journalists… They’ve come a long way, and they’re here to stay.

Introduces ‘Blogoloog‘, a pet project that ran out of hand. Blogoloog is basically a rough project setup that runs on an old computer at Maarten’s little house. It has a full index of a number of Flemish blog services, and keeps lists of the blogs that have been updated recently. The list has been completed with ‘tips’ that have been dropped in Maarten’s comments.

Stats today:

40.000 blogs, between 9.000 or 12.000 outgoing links, 4000 daily blogposts…

Most of the blogs are hosted with free services. The backend of the state of the Flemish blogosphere looks like this (in order of all-aroundness): MSN Spaces, Skynetblogs, Bloggen, Blogger, Seniorennet are the most popular services. But, self-hosted blogs and foreign blog services are under-represented, so it’s difficult to keep track of the exact online activity.

MSN Spaces is overrepresented, because feeds of this service contain also the updates in picture galleries, which are very often more updated than the actual blogs.

A lot of popular blogs choose for self hosting, because they can avoid third party advertisement and by using paid services, they have more control over their uptime and the backend on which the blogs run.

The popular blogs of the Flemish blogosphere consist of small “blog clubs”, it’s the same people who react on each other’s blogs, add the same blogs to their blogroll… Much like it happens with the international A-listers.

The number of blogs keeps growing, because it’s become really easy to publish for anyone.

 

Live Blogging At The IAB

22 Feb 2007

After a short while of inner combat, I decided to go to the IAB meeting at the buildings of DePersgroep, one of Belgium’s leading media holdings. I tailed my fellow-EMEA-colleague Kris Hoet from our office in Diegem to here, and right now I’m waiting for the show to start.

From what I’ve heard, there’s going to be 6 presentations of each 10 minutes, all about blogging. What better way to cover that than to live-blog the entire thing?

There’s a Flickr account where everyone can upload pictures and a dedicated blog where we can cross-post our thoughts. Pretty good organized, this event.

It’s been a happy rendez-vous with a bunch of ex-colleagues from i-merge and I also saw Robin Wauters and Ine ‘Wow’ Dehandschutter and Herr Tom De Bruyne, the 2.0′d devil of the famous interactive agency. Also Maarten Schenk from SixApart and Jesse Wynants, who’re both going to give their best on stage.

Let’s see what the show brings. I’m looking forward to this.