Article What Will Happen to Social Media if Marketers Keep Doing Spammy Stuff? by Christopher Butler on January 26, 2009 Phil Johnson at PJA just wrote an interesting post for the Advertising Age Small Agency Diary blog, titled Facebook is Too Crowded and Your Analytics Aren't Up to Snuff. He was encouraged by a previous rant from Peter Madden, who called Facebook a "freak show," and assembled some of his own thoughts on social media and marketing. By the way, I absolutely loved Madden's piece and emailed it to Mark immediately after reading it. We both had a good laugh, yet still eventually sighed in that "this guy's totally right" kind of way. In any case, Phil writes: "The sacred cow is the belief that Facebook and Twitter are the premier platforms for this revolution..." Read Now About
Article The Great Equalizer by Christopher Butler on January 23, 2009 I've been reading a book titled What Are You Optimistic About? Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better, edited by John Brockman. Most of the essays in the collection are pretty short- on the order of 500 words or so - and cover topics ranging from science, religion, technology, biology, ethics, etc. One that I read last night was particularly interesting to me relative to what we do at Newfangled. In his contribution, titled "Altruism on the Web," Dan Sperber writes: "'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' So did Marx define communism..." Read Now About
Article The Extra Benefits of a CMS published on January 22, 2009 Having a full-featured, extensible content management system (CMS) has many benefits. The obvious ones include being able to edit your own content, uploading new images, and keeping a consistent site structure and layout. But this is just the beginning of making your CMS, and website, work for you. I'll lay out just a few extra things that a customizable CMS can provide for your company. Read Now About
Article FFMPEG on Red Hat Enterprise 4 (RHEL4) published on January 21, 2009 FFMPEG is a very powerful and flexible tool for converting one video format to another. Here's a guide on how to install this on your RHEL4 server. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Creative Questionnaire: Liz Dubois by Justin Kerr on January 20, 2009 Liz Goulet Dubois graduated in 1989 from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in illustration. She was instrumental in developing the Club Earth line of nature-themed toys, and still contributes to that line which is now under new ownership. She also helped develop the popular FRED line of housewares, and currently contributes to the line as Senior Designer… Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design In Real Life by Christopher Butler on January 19, 2009 That's me, about five minutes ago, in real life. I was inspired to take this picture (and not care if it looks great) after reading an insightful post from Russell Davies about how screens are getting boring. He elaborates: "It's really hard to impress anyone with stuff on a screen any more. However clever you've been. However much thought you've put in. However good the tech is. No-one's impressed. They've all seen better stuff in ads and movies anyway - when will onscreen stuff be as good as that? Whereas doing stuff in the real world still seems to delight and impress people. Really simple stuff with objects looks like magic. Really hard stuff with screens still just looks like..." Read Now About
Article Our Experience with Online Advertising by Mark O’Brien on January 18, 2009 A short comparison of our results from placing a single ad on facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and an industry site over a one month period. Read Now About
Article Book Review: The Numerati by Christopher Butler on January 16, 2009 I just finished reading The Numerati, by Stephen Baker. Baker, a former Business Week technology columnist, describes a new breed of companies seeking to gather and analyze the massive amount of data we create through work, shopping, voting, communicating, and even seeking love. He breaks the book up into chapters titled Worker, Shopper, Voter, Blogger, Terrorist, Patient, Lover. In some cases, you might be excited and encouraged by what can and will be accomplished by the math wizards that sift through our data. In other cases, it might be a bit frightening. Either way, I would recommend this book to anyone that might fit in to the above categories (that is, everyone), but certainly to anyone in our industry that has or will be involved in building applications that generate and/or process user data. It's fascinating. Here's a short video interview with the author, discussing The Numerati: You can also listen to an interview with Stephen Baker on the CBC podcast, The Spark. There is also a website and blog for the book at TheNumerati.net. Read Now About
Article SEO Friendly Site Images published on January 14, 2009 When it comes to training clients on basics of SEO, it's easy to focus exclusively on textual content. However, proper use of image tags and accompanying descriptions is one easy way to take otherwise empty real estate in Google's eyes and convert it into valuable SEO fodder. This is especially true for agency designed sites that tend to be image and graphic heavy. Here are 4 good tips to follow: Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Resource of the Month: Masterfile’s Endless Media by Justin Kerr on January 14, 2009 I've been playing with Masterfile's new proprietary search tool named Endless Media and it is a significant improvement over its competitors' offerings. Masterfile has rethought image searching from the ground up rather than simply adding new features to an existing engine. Read Now About
