The BBC has launched a new online questionnaire as part of their on-going Child of Our Time experiment.
What’s most interesting about this test is the results; rather than leaving you with paragraphs of dry analysis to read, the BBC site actually explains your results via a sequence of personalised videos.
It’s a really engaging way to relate interesting information that typically ends up relegated to a big stream of boring text.
Highly touted new Folk-Rock super group Them Crooked Vultures are embracing social media to give their fans exactly what they want: the whole of their new album for free before it’s even in the shops.
Them Crooked Vultures, comprising Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters), Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin).
Given how bands like Metallica and U2 have railed time and again (unsuccessfully) against file sharing and “leaked” releases of their forth-coming albums, it’s a smart move on Them Crooked Vultures’ part to beat so-called pirates to the punch themselves.
This on-going embrace of social media and file sharing – to short-cut perceived theft in the music industry – seems to be a continuing trend for a growing number of high profile musicians. What will be telling is how these legitimised pre-releases translate into cash sales, something many traditional, anti-piracy-obsessed media institutions (such as the RIAA) still hotly contest as being viable at all for artists.
Had a look at ‘Huddle’ today – a project management tool – after spotting this headline. The interface is very clean, and I like that files are version controlled and that you can integrate with Microsoft Office (e.g. open files directly from Huddle rather than saving locally first). I couldn’t see anything that suggests you would be able to edit e.g. tasks/calendar items in Outlook and sync with Huddle, but there is an iCal feed. On the face of it (I’ve only had a look through the product tours and a few forums) it looks like a fairly decent stab at integrating with what people are already using rather than coming up with something brand new and expecting people to drop old habits/applications. I’d imagine it’s great for small, relatively new companies that haven’t thought about file systems/versioning/organizational admin/etc to get off to a super-organized start. 
http://www.huddle.net/
I’d like to say the night started off with a bang! Fortunately it was just another night with The Bristol Creative Directors Network. A round table with 10 Bristol creatives enjoying a fabulous meal at Goldbrick House in the company of Chris Arnold.
For those not familiar with Chris, he was Integrated Creative Director of Saatchi & Saatchi before setting up FEEL, which merged with Ron Leagas’ agency to form BLAC. In 2009 Chris started the world’s first independent creative department, a social enterprise and talent incubator all in one – Creative Orchestra
Chris is author of the newly published book, Ethical Marketing
Chris gave us real insight regarding his not for profit agency model and how a democratic voting system gives staff a sense of ownership. From choosing the type of business to go for; all the way through to which creative routes to present.
Interestingly, the business model includes exchanging fee for a percentage of the revenue. There was a lot of discussion around this model, with Matt Golding from Rubberductions introducing a concept of fees based on a promise of specific results. In the event the campaign doesn’t achieve at least these, they offer a refund – now that’s putting your money where your mouth is! (I’m seeing Matt this week and hope to find out more, watch this space).
I think we all found the new model agency insight a real breath of fresh air and Chris’s views on ethical marketing, and in particular Co-Op V’s Tesco a real eye opener.
Much of the evening was also spent talking about how our industry still has a need for ‘big ideas’ but that much of what we do digitally is finding innovative solutions to business problems. This posed the question for some, where does that leave the ‘Craft model’ of the more traditional agencies. At this point Chris introduced his furry backed business card. Everyone oooh’d and ahhh’d, it would seem there’s a real sense of loss, even among the most digitally biased of us!
Many thanks to Chris Arnold, whose easy company and no holes barred industry insight made the evening slip by far too quickly.
One of my more serious posts 
Found this on the great LOVE creative blog, thanks.
I came across this page today. It lets you manually configure the parameters when embedding a Google Map from your My Maps collection and then generates the embed code for you.
I found the parameter for that, and amended it.
This page – http://ongopongo.com/maps/google_my_maps_embedding_tool – allows you to manually configure your Google Map embed. I hope you find it
Dutch company Frontier has developed a very impressive integration with Google maps that plots aircraft movements around Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport in real time. The system is called Casper and is available for any airport that can make the flight and radar data available.
Last Thursday, the Internet turned 40. It all started when a two character message was sent from a computer at UCLA to another computer at Stanford.
The message was “lo”. It was supposed to be a login command, but the system crashed after just two characters. Still, this was the first data message sent between two networked computers.
From that humble beginning to over one billion people online and over one trillion pages…
I’m certainly impressed, as well as wonderfully fortunate to be able to make a living by working on a few of those trillion.
Eichborn the publisher attached some very light banners to 200 flies to promote their exhibition stand at the Franfurt Book Fair.
Pete Fairhurst
Jonathan Waring
Andrew Arnott
Chris Thurling
Iwein Dekoninck
Matt French
Kate Thorpe
Laura Fletcher
Dave North
Bonny Colville-Hyde
Nick Raven
