YouChoose
Here’s a neat little idea: You Tube turned interactive adventure, using The Godfather. The premise is simple: you watch a short clip of the film then are given 2 choices, each giving you a different route forwards.
Very simple, very immediate and it highlights a gap in most companies’ usage of YouTube: the site is used as a way of hosting content, but individual pieces are rarely linked together. Beyond letting users take control of stories, it points to a simple way for a brand to tell its own stories through different pieces of video.
Posted by: Tom at teatime on Monday, 23rd June 2008
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How to win friends and influence people
Everyone is banging on about the Influencer: the magic, fee-free solution to spreading brand messages. Most of the debate is polarised around the existence of these amazing individuals. A long with everything else in marketing that claims to make selling bad products easy I’d postulate that it’s utter rubbish.
It does seem more than obvious that some sources influence my decisions around a given subject more than others.
Duncan Watts work is getting a lot of press and thankfully knocking the magic-influencer notion. But some might criticise it for considering that influence is equal to connectedness. Onalytica have an interesting take on the matter and do some great work using influence measurement.
Hyper advice: Watch the space but don’t believe the hype.
Posted by: Ben at slope on Wednesday, 16th April 2008
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WTF is the semantic web?
Manu Sporny of Digtial Bazaar has created a wonderfully simple video which explains the ambition of the semantic web.
I'm not going to try and explain it here, suffice to say that a truly semantic web would mean that your browser/reader/search engine would understand that this post is an explanation of the semantic web rather than that this post contains the phrase semantic web. Wonderful! I might even have to remove WTF so your computer doesn't get offended.
[image from foundphotoslj]
Posted by: Ben at Haribo-devour-hour on Monday, 11th February 2008
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Power politics
Any political scientist will tell you: where a single player looks to
be in a position to impose their will on the rest, the other players have a clear incentive to redress the balance of power [define].
On Friday Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! Without ever using the G- word, Microsoft have made little bones of their rationale: to create a more effective competitor to Google and thereby grab a (much) bigger slice of the growing digital advertising pie.
The overall growth in digital is such that it can be easy to overlook just how dominant Google is: in the UK the total online advertising market in 2007 was worth around £2.7bn; Google’s share of this was 43%.
And yet it is Google who argue that a combined Microsoft-Yahoo juggernaut would be anti-competitive and stifle innovation.
Posted by: Sam at Lunch time on Wednesday, 6th February 2008
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I heart clicking
Since the very first hyperlink the web has been poked and prodded, a practice commonly referred to as clicking. But video was never clicked all that much. And now it is.
More pieces are appearing which really blur our definitions of website and video.
Thank you for Arcade Fire, Breaking Bad and the many others.
People love clicking.
Posted by: Ben at not much left time on Friday, 11th January 2008
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