Archive for April 2009
The White House as a Creative Common
Photo: The Official White House Photostream
So we all know Barack Obama loves social media and Government 2.0. He also has an official White House Flickr stream, from which the pic above is taken. Not only is this a sign of openness and personality, but we're all also allowed to share, copy, distribute and remix it – as long as we attribute the licensor. Since Barack Obama chose to use a Creative Commons license saying so.
Obama spreads the love of sharing on the Internet. I'm in love.
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TidyRead – Another Blow to Online Advertising Business Model
TidyRead is a new service to remove ads and other clutter from web sites to create a readable site. Check out the tutorial below – it seems ridiculously simple. This is another blow to advertising online and creates more demand for new online business models.
The Next Level of Social Media Skills
Photo: Kiel Bryant
When it comes to learning (and you know I feel social media curiosity is the key to success), I have always focused on one or two topics that I consider the most important at the moment.
Right now this is search engine marketing (SEM) and measurability. I think these two areas are incredibly interesting and increasingly important and that they make up the next level to reach for people who want to understand social media and what you can do with it.
When it comes to SEM I am still on the lookout for more and better blogs, but Swedish Jesper Åström is always worth a read. He has deep insights not only to SEM but also to more web techy topics such as visitor conversion.
Yesterday he posted his thoughts on how to convert a digger into a buyer. While it may seem technical, it is highly related to all forms of digital media.
It is All About the Details
Today is showroom day at Jung. Lots of people visiting the office checking out clothes, bags, shoes etc. This is the goodie bag in black and pink with an at Heart logo.
Domino's Reparing Their Reputation With Social Media
I missed this post by ReadWriteWeb, displaying numbers on people's opinions on the brand before and after the nasty stuff as well as after they posted the defense speech video.
That was a quite horrible video, but they still seem to have repared a lot of damage with a quick and honest apology. And they used video in a no nonsense way to get the message through.
Malmö is One Fast City
Photo: Rutger Blom
Business magazine Fast Company named Sweden's third city, Malmö, to one of the world's Fast Cities of 2009. According to Fast Company a fast city "helps our communities go greener, be safer, live smarter, and invest for the future".
Looking at how US-centric the list is (only three non-US cities are on it), Malmö must doing a good job getting the magazine's attention.
Crisis Comms through Twitter and YouTube
Domino's Pizza is going through a pretty deep communications crisis after a couple of employees posted a video doing nasty things to the food they were preparing. The interesting thing is that Domino's put up a CEO defense speach on YouTube and created a Twitter identity to answer questions.
Obvious you might say, a sign of social media reaching main stream is what I say. And an excellent example of how video should be used as a complement to basically any kind of pr.
To: Kissies.se, Re: Hej på er där hemma
Talented Martin of I Love Brain recently did his own remix of one of Sweden's most popular/prominent video blogs — Kissies.se. The blog is quite an ordinary day-to-day one, written by a Stockholm based teenager, spending her days going to school, hanging out with friends, cleaning her room.
I Love Brain kept the original voice but animated the appearance of the central character.
A More Functional Internet Browser
Being a browser addict, Firefox's Ubiquity project gives me the chills. Mozilla launched a video displaying what a more task focused Firefox could look like when the browser has reached version 3.6. Awesome I say.
Taskfox Prototype from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Via ReadWriteWeb.
Who is Chris Collins?
Keeping an eye on the contemporary internet/multimedia art scene isn't an easy task. There seems to be tons of talented ones out there, and surprisingly enough — many of them are totally brilliant.
Chris Collins is one of them, and "The Letter" (as seen above) is a hypnotizing odd clip, and "Don't Forget Your Sweater!" is almost as good.
And I think you shouldn't miss out the 2009-take on Michael Jackson's Black or White —"Webcam Panthers".
Transparency Gone Too Far
Vimeo's Casey Donahue portraying his co-worker Blake, when he needs to talk to Jack about the homepage... or at least he tries to.
(Vimeo is my all time favorite multimedia community. Known for it's friendly approach and top notch users bringing tons of great videos).
What Would Happen to Twitter if Google Bought it?
Photo: tao_zhyn
The rumour is out that Google is negotiating an acquisition of Twitter. As the post is from April 2nd, it shouldn't be an April's fools.
Twitter is still a start-up (I read somewhere they have 50 employees, however CrunchBase says 27) and it shows when you look at the development of new functions. With millions of users they need to focus on uptime and stability rather than the development of e.g. threaded replies, something a major company like Google could take care of.
However, we all remember what happened the last time Google bought a micro-blogging platform. Jaiku was forgotten and more or less eliminated within a year and a half. This is what TechCrunch wrote October 9, 2007:
"Google’s ability to add scale and marketing muscle to Jaiku should be putting Twitter on the back-foot right now."
Let's just hope they don't put the same team from Scale & Marketing Muscle as they did on Jaiku.