Archive for October, 2006
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Were Open!
As part of our on going work for Middlesex University, we have just produced the 2006 Open Day material. This project was also the first implementation of the Middlesex ‘Brand Toolkit’ which Precedent have also just completed. Items for the Open Day included a 20 page brochure, postcards and a big, bright poster shown left. -
Could you be a Zookster?
Having taken control of the TV remote yesterday afternoon in order to forestall arguments, and find a programme that suited the tastes of the whole family I happened across a programme on the BBC named ‘Bamzooki’. “Yea, I like this” my 7yr old declared. Dubious, but openminded, I stopped flicking and let it roll.
For the uninitiated Bamzooki is a children’s programme in which two teams of youngsters try to predict which ‘Zooks’ - computer generated creatures - will most efficiently complete a series of obstacle courses. As a televisual experience the programme has limited appeal, other than it allows the family to place ’side bets’ on their favourite ‘Zooks’ and therefore holds the collective interest in the same way as RoboWars might. The really interesting part came when we took up the invitation of the overly enthusiastic presenter to go to the Bamzooki website and create our own ‘Zooks’. Now I don’t normally like cluttering up my computer with spurious applications, but I couldn’t let the kids down, so we downloaded the ‘Zook-Kit’ and within 10 minutes we were taking our first tentative steps towards becoming ‘Zooksters’.
Resisting the offer to download the ‘handy guide’ Our initial attempts to create a working/moving ‘Zook’ were clumsy, but hilarious all the same. In fact the kids were having such a good time that Daddy managed to slope off to the pub to watch the second half of the football, in the sound knowledge that the kids would be entertained for an hour. On return I investigated the ‘Zook-Kit’ and ‘Bamzooki’ site in more detail, and what a powerful and engaging offering it is. The Kit allows the user to create an infinite array of creatures, explore and refine their movement, and render them in a variety of colours and patterns. It is then possible to put them through their paces in private before uploading them to the website where they can enter leagues in order to challenge other ‘Zookster’s’ creations in a variety of competitions. The kids might have to take a back-seat next weekend as Daddy creates the ultimate sprinting ‘Zook’, however if the kids want to take their next steps towards becoming expert 3D special effect animators then Daddy might have to go down the pub again!
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This week’s signposting
This week at Precedent, we have been most reading…
IEBlog
Pacing around like a expectant father awaiting news of the birth of Microsoft’s version 7 of Internet ExplorerWe-Think
The first reader-edited book is launched. Tell Charles Leadbeater what you think and how it can be improved.Patient Opinion
A revolutionary online system which allows anyone to share
their experiences of receiving specialist treatment on the NHS.
utilising a range of social software tool and techniques - ranging from
patient weblogs to feed aggregationTraffic Log Patterns
The
relative popularity of a site’s pages, the number of visitors referred
by other sites, and the traffic from search queries continue to follow
a Zipf distribution.Use Old Words When Writing for Findability
Familiar
words spring to mind when users create their search queries. If your
writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won’t find your
site.Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute
In
most online systems, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9%
of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all
the action. -
The future is here…
No not really, but you can sneak a peak at it. The Pew Internet and American Life research project is the main authority when it comes to internet research in the U.S and they have released a report on the future of internet. It’s quite interesting and it answers the question we all want to know - will internet and man ever become one?
Check out this video clip of Lee Rainie from Pew
Also, we frequently use the buzzword “Web 2.0″ in our posts. It’s often used to describe a wide range of online activities such as RSS, Mashups, blogs, podcasts, wiki and websites such as YouTube, flickr etc and it can be a bit confusing. Fear no more, Andi Gutmans, from ZdNet spells it out in this video clip.
Now that you’ve got the basics, you are ready to view this YouTube video. It features some of the most influential web 2.0 gurus talking about web 2.0, trends and the future…
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Local Life
As I sat at lunch on Friday afternoon talking tucker’ with Paul, I thought to myself, I wonder where those ‘lunchtime favourites’ are to get a good eat at a great price. With our offices only a doorstep away from Bishopsgate Road, a restaurant review of good and cheap eats near work may help!
Monday to Friday.
LUNCH. Has to be the Spitalflield markets! Hosting a delicious array of foods and drinks, you can pick up a great lunch at a bargain! £3 - £5.LUNCH – ALL times
The Easts Best burgers! – have to be down the small lane of Spitalfield markets near the Big Chill Bar. HUGE burger for £3.50 is almost stealing. (map attached)
Dinner – ALL times
As discovered one night, if you are wanting to get some dinner after work, Lanes is quite close and offering a very tempting 50% off all food (see london-eating.co.uk ). After two of us ate and drank well for less than £20, it must go on the list.Any new ideas, please let us all know!
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Hanging out on MySpace
A client of ours has been trying to reach one of the most sought after demographic segments - the unpredictable teen market. Their previous campaign hasn’t been very successful and they are now questioning their traditional approach in favour of new methods.
MySpace, the largest online social networking portal on the web, often pops up (this time being no exception) when the word online marketing is in the same sentence as the words teens and tweens , and with fair reason, it’s where a lot of them hang out. 70 million to be exact (adults included). And it’s not only our client that is taking notice. It is estimated that marketers will spend $280 million on social network advertising in the U.S. this year (imediaconnection).
So why are companies and marketer so eager to throw money at MySpace? I believe the key lays in the ever so popular teen phenomenon - “hanging out”. Teens are basically on MySpace because their friends are their and they want to hang out with those friends. I did a lot of hanging out when I was in my teens (but in a more primitive way), at friends’ houses, the local cafe or even at ‘our’ tube station. We didn’t really do anything, but hanging out was important to us because it (according to Danah Boyed’s interesting research on Identity production in a Networked Culture)allowed us to build relationships and stay connected. We were a quite typical teen group and as with most teens our daily hanging out sessions were quite private (do you remember the “No trespassing” and “Private” sticker on your door?), it was just us, no parents, no teachers and definitely difficult for others to join in.
Things have changed now. The groundbreaking thing about MySpace is that it allows companies and brands (or anyone else for that matter of fact) to join in, hang out, socialise, build relationships and connect to teenagers in a way that just wasn’t possible in the mid nineties (when I was in my teens). I mean, we would have been pretty surprised if Burger King came to one of our local hang out spots and interacted with us as anyone else in the group.
Today’s teenagers are not surprised, at least not the ones that are hanging out on MySpace. Burger King, Gatorade, The U.S. Marines, The Learning Channel, Cingular, Wendy’s, University of Warwick all have profiles or characters on MySpace that are looking for friends, some successful, some not (just like in school!) Wendy’s character ‘Smart’ is one of the successful. He is 28 years old, likes Hip-Hop, Rock and has 78 812 friends. Lvl145.christian and ‘come to darkness!!DWW are two of his friends, and they say ” I love Smart” and “I would soooo eat that”.
You’re not following me? It’s a fictive character (created with the purpose to sell hamburgers) that is hanging out with his/its ‘real’ friends, duuh!
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This week’s signposting from Precedent
At Precedent, we use a tool called del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service for sharing web bookmarks. Del.icio.us is free, easy to use and a simple way for your organisation to capture - and crucially, remember - the material that matters most before it gets lost in the email avalanche.
Here’s a taste of what we’ve been bookmarking recently:
Stanford University Wiki
Stanford
launches a Wiki that allows students to share campus information and
and much more. The project is open to the general public to view, not
just the University community. However, if you want to edit it, then
you need to be a student.Who Is Jonathan Ive?
An in-depth look at the man behind Apple’s design magicThe other Google search site
Google has created a search site - SearchMash - without any Google branding to test new features.Google Does The Mashup Dance
Overview of some of the most recent API offerings that Google has made available.Zoomify ::: Fast high-quality images on the Web!
Great little tool for providing xoomable images on the web - particularly useful for intricate images4AD - Official Website
One of our favourite music labels from the 80s but with a rather nifty flash navigation device -
Client Care
We have recently completed some work for Care International UK, developing their brand strategy and their internal communications. Work completed so far includes a simple brand guidelines, a folder, a pocket sized brand booklet, Word templates for internal stationery and a whizzy new PowerPoint presentation aimed at their corporate partners.
Our job was made a lot easier thanks to the wonderful images supplied to us from Care, for once we were spoiled for choice!
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Am I a (web) knowledge snob?
Interesting article on the BBC news website today about Britons being “bamboozled by tech speak“. I particularly found the bit about knowledge snobbery to be interesting.
As a consultant on web projects, I’m constantly coming into contact with people who know an awful lot about the web. About things like RSS, PHP, Flash and actionscripting, XHTML and CSS, the WAI, W3C, DDA and a bunch of other acronyms that probably don’t mean a great deal to the users of the majority of websites out there today.
Andrew wrote about RSS and Google Newsreader in an earlier post, and I think Google is doing a great job of trying to simplify some of the new bits of technology that we’re seeing, so that the average Joe or Jane can make use of technology just as much as anyone else. Whether they know what RSS stands for or not.
A lot of times people are blinded by technology, without asking “who’s going to use this?” and “what are the benefits?” It’s really important not just to dump technically “wizzy” things (and yes “wizzy” is the technical term) on sites because we can, but really to know how useful these tools will be to our users and just how informed our users are of these tools.
Its almost the opposite of the Field of Dreams approach, its not if you build it they will come, but rather will they use it if you build it? If the answers yes, then build it, if the answer’s no then why are you adding a feature or a function - because you can? Who does this really help? Tough questions I know, but answering them early in the process will save you from a lot of head scratching later on.
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Dangling a carrot
Farhan wrote recently about Yahoo! Answers (Answers trump questions) and the undoubted potential for this community-inspired form of search to really take off.
One of the challenges that often inhibit the adoption of new forms of media like this - you can group blogs in here too - is the tendency for the noise to drown out the signal. Too many low quality, low relevance responses damage confidence in the strength of the overall product.
Yahoo! has a two pronged approach to dealing with this: points and promotion. At the moment, the two are separated out. On their own, they will do much to boost the quality of Yahoo! Answers, but it leads me to wonder how long it will be before we see Yahoo! combine them, following Netscape’s controversial but, perhaps inspired, model and start directly rewarding those whose contributions really make Yahoo! Answers all it can be.
