Archive for November, 2006
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What matters is what works
Google today announced that it was pulling one its services, Google Answers a paid-for service, where experts answered your queries. It’s an interesting announcement, particularly in light of the growth of Yahoo’s own very different Answers proposition, which we’ve written about previously here.
What really strikes me about this though, is that this is exactly the spirit in which we should all be approaching so-called web 2.0. Some times things won’t work as we expected. The minor feature added at the last minute becomes the runaway success. The sure fire hit isn’t and doesn’t quite make it. Flickr is a fantastic example of this. An online gaming community ends up as the world’s best photo-sharing website. Who knew?
What matters is what works is a common political mantra - and it is applicable here. What is key here is not being afraid to dump what doesn’t work and to focus on what does. It’s only through the experience real world visitors give and share with us that we truly discover the stuff that matters. The technology at our disposal is giving us more freedom than ever to experiment and to play. Let’s use it.
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More Care
After our work during the summer, on the Care International brand strategy, we have also just designed the 2006 uk annual review for them. A nice small format, with lots of great facts and figures. Click on the thumbnail for more images. Once again, a big thankyou to Care for supplying the amazing images.Comments Off
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This week’s signposting
This is our weekly review of what has been catching Precedent’s eye this week:
Wikimapia
An imaginative ‘mashup’ between Wikipedia and Google Maps.Prosumers
Consumer meets producer. Social networking technologies are making this concept a reality.Yahoo’s Frazier Miller Says Local Search Is Like Social Networking
Advertising Age piece on ‘What Flickr Has to Do With Finding Things in Your (Real) Community’Digital Divide: The Three Stages
The economic divide is a non-issue, says Jakob, but the usability and empowerment divides alienate huge population groups who miss out on the Internet’s potential. -
Bio-logical
Precedent have recently completed the Identity for BioPark in hertfordshire. BioPark provides ready to use facilities for bioscience and health technology businesses.
The identity was inspired by the stunning glass atrium in the reception area of the building. We have produced a presentation folder aswell as letter heads, compliments slips and business cards.
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It’s all about opinions
Opinion is the place on the Precedent website where we share our essays and latest articles with you. Recently posted there are two pieces by James Souttar we think you’ll find interesting:
Putting communications at the core
Organizations
must communicate to survive. Continuous, day-to-day interactions with
stakeholders are as essential to the functioning of an organization as
breathing is to a human being. Indeed, one might say that if the
finance function is one of the essential, life-sustaining corporate
systems, communication is the other.Does the public sector need branding?
In
a recent episode of the BBC’s animated comedy series ‘Monkey Dust’, a
brand consultancy called Labia renames the fire brigade ‘Icarus’ -
insisting that they combat their image as an ‘essentially reactive
organization’ by going into the frothy coffee business. Like all the
best satire, it’s the percipience of Monkey Dust that makes it so
wickedly funny. If one of our best loved institutions could be
relaunched as the hated ‘Consignia’, is giving a pretentious,
ill-omened Classical name to the disputatious fire service such a
far-fetched idea? -
Spam can be art
I hate opening my inbox, only to find out that someone called seexxx@bestdeal.com and 123_youwin@pills.com wants to sell or give me something. Who are these people, and why do they think I need this stuff? – I don’t.
So who are they? The spam in your inbox is most likely from one of the 200 small hardcore groups of professional spam gangs that stand for 80 percent of all generated spam. And these guys are probably really rich, since spam cost U.S organisations more than $10 billion per year, and because of the fact that 11 percent of US Internet users actually buy stuff from spam
The Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) keeps track on the top spammers and you can read and see their images on the ROKSO’s website. These people are doing a great job!
I think it’s the fact that you can’t really get back at these guys that makes the whole thing so annoying. Although it is quite satisfying to see their mugshots (I truly hope people recognise them on the street).
If that’s not enough and you’re still feeling depressed over your inbox, then visit spamrecycling.com. It is a data visualisation engine (built with AJAX technology) that creates beautiful pictures from your messed up inbox. You can email your spam to spam@recycling.com and they’ll email you a link which allows you to watch as your spam mail is being recycled. This is definitely a therapeutic process and you’ll also get a beautiful artwork to impress your co-workers with.
Interesting stuff on spam, (also to impress your co-workers).
The term spam is derived from the Monty Python SPAM sketch, set in a cafe where nearly every item on the menu includes spam luncheon meat. The excessive amount of SPAM mentioned in the sketch is a reference to British rationing during World War II. SPAM was one of the few foods that was widely available.
Spammers can spell, but they misspell intentionally to avoid commonly-filtered words e.g. Viagra becomes V1agra
2006 - (June) 55 billion spam per day
The most common items advertised in spam messages are: Pornography site subscriptions, prescription drugs, purported sexual enhancement products and printer ink cartridges
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This week’s signposting
A selection of our recent reading taken from the internet over the last week:
Blogs becoming advertising force (from The Scotsman)
European awareness of blogs and blogging.US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud
A fabulous example showing the power of tag clouds to paint a picture. Take a look at what the big issues were on State of the Union addresses since the 18th century.Map My London
Museum of London meets Google Maps mashupGoogle, Yahoo and Microsoft Agree to Standard Sitemaps Protocol
In
an encouraging act of collaboration, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft
have announced that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps
protocol to index sites around the web.The real story of Web 2.0: Advertising 2.0
The
real story of Web 2.0 has little to do with the bells and whistles says Jason Calcanis and
everything to do with the stunning growth of online advertising‘Beta’ Is Not an Excuse
Released
software that is labeled “beta” is still released software, argues Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, and is fair
game for the same level of criticism as any released software. You
can’t “semi-release” your 1.0 just because you want it out there but
aren’t yet finished.Url.com
Another take on social searching - utilising other search engine results and user input -
Discovery and the power of the peer
We are writing a lot here about the work being done by Google and Yahoo - these two giants are behind a lot of the most innovative work being done on the web (or acquiring it). Both have moved well beyond being just a search engine.
We’ve written here before about the potential for Yahoo! Answers as an interesting approach to participatory search. Over the last couple of weeks, Yahoo! have given us all a peak at how Answers is being built into the heart of their revamped sites - Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Autos Green Center being the latest examples.
Answers, it is becoming clear, isn’t just an supplement to search, but a people-centered approach to finding - a distinctly different proposition. The power of peer suggestion and recommendation is at its core - a highly relevant, more directed form of online discussion that promotes discovery and findability above chat. It’s in these product sites that you can really see the potential for Answers in building communities, leveraging the knowledge of others and so much more.
Lots more to come, I’m sure - it’s fascinating watching Yahoo’s strategy gradually emerge.
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This week’s signposting
This week, we’ve been enjoying:
Microsoft Firefox
Does what it says on the tinOgilvyOne to Marketers: Let’s Get Digital
Interesting insights on Business from the folks behind some of the big web 2.0 namesGmail gets wings, goes mobile
Gmail,
Google’s popular email service is going primetime, by going mobile.Yahoo! Autos Green Center
Very
clever use of different collaborative technologies combined with a
zeitgeisty subjectA New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data
Politics
discovers Google bombing - ‘Fifty or so other Republican candidates
have also been made targets in a sophisticated “Google bombing”
campaign intended to game the search engine’s ranking algorithms’.
