Hashtag Battle

Hashtag Battle pits two hashtags from Twitter against each other to see who's winning based on the amount of times they've been tweeted. It's a very simple idea well executed.

Valentine's Day Twitter

I've been keeping my eye out recently for simple projects that use the internet to effect real world items (what's being described as "The Internet of Things".) This brilliantly simple idea by Lachie made me smile. She built  "a machine that dispenses chocolate according to nice or mean things that people say on twitter. It has two settings: nice mode (triggered by words like "good" and "love" and "kittens") and nasty mode (triggered by words that you are all too young to hear)"

Brilliant.

The Internet And Emotions

It's an absolute fact that social media and the Internet have  fundamentally changed every part of our society. We're closer to each  other now than we've ever been. No longer locked down by the  geographical constraints of old, groups and societies are forming  globally and people are connecting in a way the world has never seen  before.

As an ad creative I spend most of my time thinking about digital and social media in terms of brands: How we can use it to shift product? How we can increase loyalty and bring a consumer closer to the brand? But every now and again I step back and look at what digital media artists are doing to explore the deeper side of social media: the emotional, human side.

Below are two great, inspiring projects by some very talented artists that explore the Internet and emotions.

The first project is by Jonathon Harris entitled We Feel Fine. The site has been up for about 2 years now, but if you haven't explored in a while or ever, it's well worth spending some time with. We Feel Fine takes tweets, posts, updates from social media channels and groups them by emotion. What's particularly interesting about this project is how it taps into the guilty human pleasure of voyeurism. Peeking into someone's life on an emotional level such as this, or on a surface level such as looking through someone's facebook photo's is, as much as we mightn't like to admit it, one of the attractions of social media.  As the artist himself puts it:

"It  is about creating an ever-changing portrait of the emotional landscape  of the human world.  It is about creating a two-way mirror — where  viewers simultaneously experience a God-like voyeurism (spying on the  feelings of others) and a bashful vulnerability (realizing their own  words and pictures are in there, too).  When these two feelings mix  together (voyeurism and vulnerability), the hope is that they produce a  kind of humbling empathy — demonstrating that individual experiences are  actually universal."

The second project by two artists Theo Watson and Kyle McDonaldand captures positive human emotions to the Internet. Happy Things is an opensource program that uses the webcam on your computer to analyze your face when you're browsing  and posts your screenshot every time it detects you smiling, along with  the web page that you found amusing.

This project is more about measuring the personal emotion of happiness rather than the collective emotions of We feel Fine. What it gives you is something akin to personal online happiness analytics: a way of understanding what it is about the Internet that makes you happy.

Both projects show that the new Social Internet can be used for more than advertising and can contribute to human society on a deeper, human level. Very inspiring stuff.

Info and Imagery via: PSFK and Welcome To Optimism

Mercedes Race to Super Bowl Controlled by Tweets

As we all know The Super Bowl is as famous for it's ads as it is it's football. Although not strictly a Super Bowl ad in the traditional played-at-half-time-on-a-large-screen sense, Mercedes' Twitter Race is gathering a lot of online attention and getting a lot of football fans very interested.

The race kicked off Feb 2nd with four teams leaving NY, LA, Chicago and Tampa racing towards Dallas in Mercedes' that are fueled by the power of ordinary peoples tweets and several high profile coaches with large amounts of followers. The amazing thing about this campaign in that this "fueling" isn't metaphorical, Mercedes have build cars with engines that respond to twitter commands. Amazing!



This project is yet another great example of how we can use online tools to affect offline objects to create a sense of magic around a product or campaign.

Quora: A New Player in the World of Social Media?

Quora has been receiving a lot of online and offline media coverage recently. So this weekend I sat down to explore the product, read some articles and find out what the hype is all about.


What is Quora?

Quora is a question and answer service, similar in ways to yahoo answers: you post a question and it is answered by real people through a login or facebook connect.

Okay, this sounds like yahoo answers with an open graph feature, how is it different? I googled my question and found this thread on Quora: How is Quora different to X? A bit of a worrying start in my opinion. Surely the conversation around a new product such as this should revolve around how it can be used, not what it is?

As I continued to read I discovered this article by Saneel Radia over on BBH Labs. Where as I am still on the fence regarding Quora, he most definitely is not:

"To clarify, it’s not that I don’t like Quora. It’s that I hate it and want it wiped off the face of the earth."

He makes a very valid point regarding the "How is Quora different to X?" conversation I mentioned earlier:

"OK, so maybe #Twitter was a trending topic on Twitter the first 6 months. But those conversations were focused primarily on usage and innovation with the platform. The Quora self-referential conversations are literally people scratching their heads looking for value. There’s no better sign that the emperor has no clothes people."

His article has sparked quite a heated debate in the comments section. 

On the other side of the fence The Telegraph claims that Quora will be bigger than Twitter and is full of praise for the product:

"Twitter was fun for the few, but Quora will be useful to the many. It's is the place to go for on-demand answers to specific questions from people who know what they're talking about. That's something no search engine - or existing social network - comes close to. Monetisation strategies present themselves readily, where they did not - and still do not - in the microblogging platform's case."

Quora is still in it's infancy and it will be interesting see when all the hype dies down whether it will stick, or suffer a similar fate to Google Wave. For now I'm going to sit back, watch and reserve a definite personal opinion until later (it's a very comfortable fence).

Physical Email

I meant to post about John Kestner's Tableau: physical email a while back, but unfortunately forgot. When Andy Kinsella posted it on his blog last Friday I was reminded of how brilliantly simple an idea it is.

There is a certain magic around digital becoming physical, the online world affecting the offline world. As we move further into what people are calling the "post-digital" age, and augmented reality enters the main stream it's a trend that will become more and more prominent in everyday life and therefore advertising.

The 7 Big Technologies of 2011

As 2010 ended with lists of what has past, 2011 begins with lists of what is to come. Techcrunch's list goes through the 7 technologies set to shake up the first year of the new decade. All of them will have an impact on shaping the future of advertising, especially, in my opinion, web video on the TV.

The list is below with more details here on techcrunch's site.

1. Web Video On Your TV

2. Quora Will Have Its Twitter Moment

3. Mobile Social Photo Apps

4. Mobile Wallets  

5. Context-Aware Apps

6. Open Places Database

7. The Streaming Cloud 

A Christmas Theme

We start this Monday morning with a Christmas theme. Here are 2 nice ideas using good old social media to spread a bit of Christmas cheer.

First up is Honda's "Naughty or Nice" app. An idea I'm sure a lot of people had, but this one is quite clever and well executed in my opinion. Instead of a test of some sort the app analysis' your status updates for the year recognising positive and negative words and delivering you with a naughty or nice result. The design of the machine is very nice and in reminiscent of famous Grrr campaign.

 Next up is this great idea by Regan Meador using twitter to play secret santa. By filling out a simple form the program picks a suitable recipient from your twitter network. It's an interesting use of social connections that are mostly anonymous. Very simple, very nice.

Both projects via mashable.

Anti-Social: Social Network Blocker

Anti-Social is a handy program for mac that shuts down all of the major social networking sites for an alloted time, giving you the time to focus and actually do some work for a change. You can add sites to your blocks if they're not included. Distraction is annoying, and between email and social media it's harder than ever to focus when the world is a click away. !!SHAMELESS SELF PROMO ALERT!! I wrote about distraction here on The Knot Collective, and this nifty piece of software definitely helps in the fight against anti-focus.

Thanks to Ro for the link.

Don't Start a Debate on Climate Change With This Guy

Tired off debating climate change in 140 letters a software developer, Nigel Leck has developed a chatbot to do it for him. The chatbot, under the memorable twitter name of @AI_AGW scans twitter for words that fit in the "usual denier argument paradigm" and sends them back some science.


People on the receiving end don't realise they're arguing with Hal and their retorts are responded to immediately with yet another dose of science. The downside is that the bot doesn't exactly understand sarcasm and tends to start fights with people who don't deserve it, resulting in Mr. Leck issuing a lot of apologises.

The Social Media Sobriety Test

The Social Media Sobriety Test for Webroot  by TDA Boulder, is a nifty little application for your desktop that makes you pass a side-of-the-road sobriety test before allowing you to post updates to Facebook, Twitter or any other social media websites. The site claims that "Nothing good happens online after 1am", I'd beg to differ, but they're probably correct. I know I could have used this once or twice.

Ted On Twitter

A nice use of Twitter by Ted Baker, London. It continues the trend of using digital platforms to effect the real world. Because it's a Friday, and I'm a tad lazy I've copy and pasted this description from PSFK instead of writing my own:

"Today, Ted Baker London is live broadcasting the ‘world’s first remote-controlled, digitally-powered live styling project’. Key US fashion bloggers will be in charge of a professional styling studio in Ted Baker’s London headquarters, using a live video stream and Twitter – and nothing more. Each of 7 selected US fashion bloggers has 15 minutes to demonstrate their fashion expertise by styling exclusive Ted Baker looks, via Twitter. In London, hair stylists, make-up artists and models will be taking direction from these US bloggers and wearing about 450 items from Ted Baker’s Autumn/Winter 2010 collection.

You can follow the event on Ted Baker’s Twitter stream (@ted_baker), and via the Ted Baker blog. In addition to the bloggers, any interested participants are invited to pitch styling suggestions by Tweeting Ted with the hash tag #takeonted. The best ideas may win a prize."

Thanks to Ro for the link.

Old Spice Man on Social Media

This is a very clever, and funny social media campaign for the already very funny and clever Old Spice ads by W+K. Mr. Old Spice is responding directly to his Twitter, youtube and Facebook comments. I wonder how long he'll (they'll) be able to keep it up.

Tweet him quick before he dies from exhaustion!

The Guardian: World Cup 2010 Twitter Replay

The Guardian have just launched this World Cup Twitter Datavisualisation. Choose a match and see how the audience reactions changed during the match. Some of the replays are more interesting than the games themselves!

via creativity-online

Well said...

"You’re gonna die. You’re gonna die. And nobody’s gonna care which version of the iPhone you used to make something on Twitter, or to go and post about your bowel movement on Facebook. And I’m not even talking about legacy; I’m talking about the fact that I personally feel most alive when I’m making something, and I feel least alive when I’m being led around by some obnoxious use of my attention that I wasn’t aware of. To me, that’s the thing. You can buy the jogging shoes and you can buy the Runner’s World, but until you put them on and walk out the door every day, you’re just a fat man."

This is an extract from the transcript of 'The Marketplace of Ideas' - an interview with Merlin Mann. Full audio podcast available on the site. And I found it here on Andy Kinsellas Posterous.

Makes you stop and think for a minute. And in my case turn off twitter and draw.

@anywhere

Twitter recently announced it's new and upcoming @Anywhere function. The purpose of the function is to allow users to intergrate the Twitter experience into their site without having to direct their users to twitter.com. There's a bit more information over here on the psfk blog.

Some of the sites that have signed up are Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

Ah the world is getting smaller at an alarming rate.