Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Editor's Note: People, including myself, have done crazy things for the promise of airline miles. So I was intrigued to hear that Yahoo! Canada would be pairing up with Air Miles®. Would the allure of miles be enough to get you to switch your loyalty from Google?

Today in my morning commute, I noticed the free commuter paper "Metro" featured a full back page ad announcing the launch of an Air Miles® Yahoo! toolbar.

Essentially if you download & use the toolbar, you accumulate Air Miles®. Every 50 queries nets you 5 AirMiles up to a maximum of 30 AirMiles/month.

Considering that Google is my default homepage & I'm guessing a good many other people's as well - it's an interesting way to encourage people to use Yahoo's search.

Patrick Dunphy

When YouTube added video annotations back in June 2008, the result was a slew of Pop-Up Video style entries and generally annoying commentary. The most interesting examples that really took advantage of the medium were a few Choose Your Own Adventure storylines and bad card tricks. But in the past month, YouTube video "games" have started appearing on the site. Above is a simple but addictive Oscar Photo Hunt and below is fairly ambitious Street Fighter game (thanks Eric Diem). Enjoy!

Marta Strickland

From time to time, business contacts will reach out for my recommendations on good User Experience designers, engineers, and even IP attorneys. I love networking, but over many years of building my network I've started to forget people's names and lose touch...sometimes even forgetting what folks do for a living. LinkedIn has completely taken over as my primary business relationship rolodex but I've craved the ability to group people into categories for easy reference instead of scrolling through hundreds of names when someone needs a human resource.

Last Tuesday I was invited to a new beta for LinkedIn Connections, which comes with several new features that help me keep my business contacts organized. Joy!

When I went to Wired's Next Fest last October, I had the opportunity to play an upcoming game for PlayStation 3 called Flower created by ThatGameCompany. Instead of killing people, monsters, or zombies like the Top 10 Games of 2008, Flower is about roaming in a dream like environment, and helping flowers to bloom.

Each level takes place in a different flower's dream. The goal of the game is to guide the petal into other vivid color flowers in this never ending field, triggering more flower spreading around in this world. During my 10 minutes with the game, there were no instruction anywhere to teach me how to play, but as a "professional button presser", I quickly learned how to control it by tilting the controller to move around the scene. The sublime movement made me feel like I was just a gust of wind. The more petals you collect, the more sounds samples you will reveal to create a beautiful melody. It's not only visually stimulating, it interacts with sound, making you feel relaxed and calm... which you don't often feel playing a video game.

Jenova Chen described Flower as a video game version of a poem. It sounds a bit abstract, but I'm looking forward to see how the game developers can take this "interactive art form" to the next level.

Euphenia Cheng

image credit: KorayGokhan

As of late, one of the most active posters I follow on Twitter is adagencylayoffs. On the hour (well at least some days, it seems), my Tweetdeck chirps to let me know yet another agency is laying off.

In such a competitive marketplace, it's more important than ever for all of us to define or refine our personal brands. Whether you're a gainfully employed employee, an entrepreneur, or a job seeker - personal branding is the insurance policy we can all invest in to help safeguard our careers.

There are dozens of great books and blogs available that can help walk you through the how-to of developing your personal brand. Dan Schawbel will be releasing a new title this spring: Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success and offers valuable tips at his blog. William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson, have authored Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand and have an accompanying Online ID calculator - which assesses how your personal brand ranks in the digital world. Arruda has also compiled a Personal Brand Quick Quiz to measure your current brand strength.

image credit: Window of The Poor Man's Store by Alfred Eisenstaedt

So you've heard we're in a recession. We're all happy to be working, we're all hoping for the best. But the landscape is transforming, and with vigor.

We're doing a bang-up job in the 24-hr news cycle of measuring financials, but what are the impacts to the emotional, philosophical, and logical norms in our culture? What is emerging in 2009 is an acute marketing awareness, that isn't just reacting to budgets, but crafting a focused strategy and message based on the current culture, day by day. The result is an explosive trend of "self-aware" advertising, or messaging that has pre-written a common state of mind for the consumer.

It's being described as the "Virtuous Recession," and it has literally taken over the tone of advertising at large, with high-profile campaigns from Allstate, Sprint, Hyundai, and a host of others.

Google has just launched its newest app Google Latitude (just launched as still awaiting app for iphone/touch). It looks like a cross between Twitter with status updates and real-time GPS positioning.

Latitude allows you to follow your friends and view their status where ever they are.

Latitude has 4 standard privacy settings:

Detect your location ( your location is updated automatically )
Set your location ( manually set your location )
Hide your location ( just what it sounds like )
Turn off Latitude

Google Latitude is a feature of Google Maps for mobile on these phones:
- Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1
- iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soon)
- most color BlackBerry devices
- most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices
- most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones)
- many Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones, such
   as Sony Ericsson devices (coming soon)

Jason Law

A big key to a successful online community lies in these two words: reward and recognition.

It seems simple, it seems logical, but you'd be amazed how many brands don't want to give in order to get. Online communities have not been the great cocktail parties they should be, instead we have a lot of people standing in the corner wondering who is going to dance first.

But here is a secret everyone starting an online community needs to know... giving doesn't have to cost you a thing. And the rewards you will get in return are well worth the effort. A rewarded community feels appreciated, they feel like they are part of something exclusive and special. And a happy community is a community that keeps coming back, that contributes, and that advocates.

But you say, "We haven't even launched our community yet, why should we worry about this?" Answer... It's never to early to:

1. Identify your internal superstars. There are people inside your organization right now who people want to talk to... find them.
2. Think about your content extras. It might be extra footage from a TV ad, it might be photos of a vehicle a few days before they are released to the press.
3. Find events to access. Events are great for many reasons... they provide an opportunity to document more content and to invite community members to attend.
4. ASK your audience what they consider "reward". Their ideas might surprise you.

And before already launched communities get off the hook, let me remind you that it is never too late to:
- Play matchmaker and bring new people into the conversation
- Give your current advocates recognition
- Simply say "thank you"

I'd love to hear your stories of "reward and recognition". How have you seen it at work?

Marta Strickland

As marketing and sociology continue to collide, we're clearly witnessing the Cluetrain "markets are conversations" come to life.

Social networks have enabled ubiquitous two-way communication between individuals and brands alike. How do we make sense of all the cacophony?

(I've deliberately chosen to focus on brand conversations here but the majority of what I've written applies equally to individuals who are looking to build their own personal brands.)

Brands are grappling with understanding how:

1. to better engage in meaningful and relevant conversations
2. to add value to the multitude of online conversations going on across the globe

What are the metrics and metadata that are emerging to measure, manage and improve these conversations?

Although the ego effect exists and many still seem to be focused on how many followers they have, the true value of social networks goes way beyond the traditional reach measures of the (offline) broadcast model.

How much value you contribute to your social network on Twitter or how much value you contribute to the community on your blog (as an individual or as a brand) is more importantly about listening, reciprocating, networking, learning and giving.

One thing is self-evident - It is HARD work.

A special happy birthday to one of our favorite social networks, Facebook turned five this week.

What's Been Happening This Week?

The Internet Really Gets Me
Do you ever get the sneaking suspicion that when an advertisement is just a little too good or a search was just a little too easy, that the internet knows who you are and knows everything about you? Well that's probably because it's true.

The internet knows how you feel... a new enhancement to Facebook's engagement ads has marketers drooling over how advanced polling could lead down the path to a Facebook sentiment engine. Besides knowing how you feel emotionally, Google's heart rate and health monitor will know how you feel physically too.

The internet knows where you are... Google just launched Latitude this week, a location-based social tool that could have just killed all other mobile social networks.

And the internet knows whether or not to invite you to their party... it turns out that some of us can't help being a social butterfly. A study at Harvard has found that our influence on social networksis due in part to our genetic code.

Other Worldly News... From Outer Space To NYC

First we had a first marriage proposal in Little Big Planet. Next, Google Earth launched maps of the ocean floor and Mars in 3D. Finally, the reach of news here on planet Earth is expanding. The NYTimes launched an API that exposes almost three million of their articles. And at the same time Google started allowing people to embed custom news streams into their websites.

Marta Strickland

Augmented reality (AR) has been around for some time now, yet, commercial implementations have been few and far between. Earlier this week, General Electric launched its "Plug Into the Smart Grid" campaign aimed at promoting its green home technologies. The campaign is unremarkable except for a smart little augmented reality tactic. Truly, if you take the time to print out the glyph and setup your webcam to work with Flash, the end result is a kind of 'wow' moment that brings me back to a time when I was more easily impressed by things I did and found online. The work offers little in the way of utility, so it's the novelty that makes it work as advertising. GE is a brand synonymous with innovation, so It makes sense to seize the opportunity to surprise people with something digital.

Soon it won't be so easy, and as the wow factor wears off, people will begin to want to see some value from the technology. Luckily enough, there's a lot of utility to be had from AR. Lego recently used the technology in retail locations to display 3D models of, well, models, unassembled in the box. Shoppers were encouraged to hold the boxes in front of a kiosk where a camera paired with custom software, by recognizing the packaging, would display a virtual rendering of the fully assembled model on a nearby monitor.

The technology is slowly making its way to mobile devices where it promises to reveal all kinds of virtual content by recognizing physical cues in the 'real world.' The connection of mobile AR software to the physical world has already inspired a slew of startups and partnership demos that do everything from layering Wikipedia and Panoramio content on cityscapes to real-time street sign translation. From where I sit, it seems that many of the more useful implementations of this technology will be delivered through mobile phones, so broad adoption is up to mobile processor power and accessible video APIs.

Dan Neumann

image credit: Duke Research, Ariely conducted an experiment, putting either Cokes or cash into shared dormitory refrigerators. Seventy-two hours later, the Cokes were all gone, the money untouched.

STOP for a minute and ask yourself, "How did I rationalize my last next gen gadget purchase? Did I really need 8 more MB? Why do I feel compelled to take the shampoo from the hotel room when it's not even a brand I would ever use?

Why do we humans continually behave in ways that fly in the face of logic? Even if we can't admit it out-loud, we all do it. In denial? Read on.

I just finished the book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. It's not really a marketing book - I bought it because I'm fascinated with psychology. But, it turns out to be incredibly applicable to what we do...

Blow your cool offline and it's probably forgotten about in 24 hours. Have it out with someone online and there's not only a record you can't erase, but it could spread past the 15 feet your voice would normally carry.

Do online communication tools make it easier to tell someone what's really on your mind? You think you may be hiding behind your twitter alias, but you're really putting yourself out there.

You can't really take back your words when there's a trail of them in cyberspace. I reckon it to having a fight with your spouse in Best Buy. It's just between the two of you, but you have all these onlookers -- customers and workers -- who will only ever know you that way. The big difference is the onlookers. What may have been strangers in the store could become colleagues, potential clients, bosses, friends and even more strangers online.

Such was the case when a national reporter picked a fight with a marketing consultant on twitter. His offline demeanor annoyed her enough to tweet about, though not naming names. He took offense and thus the bashing began.

Strangers retweeted the story. Some looked up the antagonist's twitter page and even read some of his old posts, searching for a trend in his crude behavior.

The up side is when you're in the heat of an argument and the other person says, "listen to yourself," you can truly go back and reread how irrational (they think) you are being. Could be a new behavioral training technique. It just might make you think twice about how, where and who you pick a fight with next.

Have you ever regretted something you "said" online while drunk, angry or fervently upset? Did it spread to people it was not intended for?

Sarah Jo Sautter

MyFonts has released WhatTheFont iPhone app based on their Web service of the same name. The site has been around for a while, allowing users to upload font images for machine or community identification. Now with the arrival of mobile app, design professionals and typography lovers are able to identify fonts anytime, anywhere.

Here's how to use this app:
- Take a new photo or select an existing image on your phone
- Crop the image, leaving only the fonts
- Upload cropped image
- Verify a few individual characters
- Voilà! A list of font matches appears

Fang Yu Lin

As a news junkie, one of the places Twitter has stood out in my mind is how major events (earthquakes, plane landing in the Hudson, etc) where "first reported" on this service...if you only knew how to get that content, verify it and distribute it to interested people.

Because Twitter basically delivers information via text, I've always thought it speaks to the potential power of newspapers online. But most attempts to integrate have been ham-fisted at best, with few readers caring to interact with staff and the whole discussion happening off in some nether world the non-Twittering majority never sees.

Today, in the wake of the Buffalo plane crash, the Los Angeles Times (www.latimes.com) did something interesting by linking to the search term "Buffalo" over at Twitter and featuring this link right next the story on the homepage. Clicking over to Twitter revealed a well-populated stream of thoughts ("I canceled my flight due to winds" "I was going to Buf today") and other comments, links to content, etc. And this conversation was visible to all readers, regardless of their followings. While it could likely have been narrowed to make the stream even better (e.g. no Buffalo Sabres news mixed in), there was plenty to explore related to the crash.

This solves two problems:

1. It develops yet another potential way Twitter could be utilized to add value to a product without a massive investment of time and effort from the end user.

2. It creates a potential way for newspapers to develop much more relevant conversations on their sites.

I sat down several times today to write my digest of the social media space, and I felt a little uninspired by the flow of news items. Sure, we had a few launches, like Facebook's Friendfeed-esque "like" feature and Flickr adding nearby images, but nothing inspired me so much as a single and simple post from Matt Dickman on listening.

Listen has become the new "join the conversation" in the social media world. I find it funny and appropriate that the more subtle and passive direction came after the active one, but maybe 2009 is all about taking a step back. Obviously many thought listening was implied when they recommended brands to "join the conversation", and it wasn't until we got our hands dirty that we realized how hard it really is to listen (and don't even think about joining without listening, we all know how that turns out).

And why is listening so hard? Well, because machines can't do it for us:

"Data alone without human filtering is useless."

Besides what I do for my clients and their communities, I find myself sitting here at the end of every week... a human trying to filter through the social data and look for patterns to digest for my readers. But I want to do a better job of listening to the people that read this blog, whether once or regularly. Tell me:

What makes a blog a community you want to return to? To comment on? What could we be doing better to give you the insight you are looking for?

Marta Strickland
Editor at ThreeMinds

Stop-Motion App-uh-lu-cat-ion from Judson on Vimeo

With unemployment rates at an all-time high, the competition for jobs is fierce. One way to stand out is submitting a video resume. At Organic, we accept any and all forms of resume submissions, including video resumes. The idea of sharing personal content is not new, as many of our creative applicants provide links to non work related art and activities. However, submitting video resumes hasn't taken hold at all levels just yet, although it is increasing in popularity as a new generation of media savvy talent enters the workforce.

We solicit video resumes for interns. We find that it shows us which entry level people are willing to go above and beyond to join us in our ongoing quest to create holistic brand experiences for our clients. We expect our interns and all hires to be media savvy, so this is a proactive tool we use to help us identify the best candidates and cull the hundreds of resumes down to a manageable few.

Some employers are hesitant to encourage or accept video resumes as then potential discrimination liability. This is an example of typical HR paranoia, as anyone you interview you will eventually see in person before you hire them anyway. I say, keep the video's coming, as they are a developing, meaningful method of expressing career interest! However, please keep the following tips in mind...

Nike combines their world-class storytelling with modern in-the-moment citizen journalism with this new Nike 5 Tournament Ad. While filming the ad with Wayne Rooney and Rio Ferdinand in Manchester for the Nike Five 5-a-side Tournament, an onlooker catches the best footage on his mobile phone of a SOT (soccer-obsessed-teen) taking Rooney's pants down. Nike drops it in the ad, with the original mobile phone footage for proof-of-realism on YouTube.

Craig Ritchie

Is it inevitable that all good things must come to an end? That one day you are at the top of your graph, and the next you are on an irreversible downward slope, that it is almost predestined that you will be usurped by the rising up and comer? Maybe that is the cynics way of looking at things, but I still like to believe there is a method to the traffic graph madness. There must be a pretty good reason or two why Mapquest failed at the same time Google Maps succeeded.

In a fabulous article, John McKinley of Silicon Valley Insider asked if Maquest is A Symbol of Everything That's Gone Wrong in user experience design. (Thanks to David Feldt for the link) He clearly lays out a few good reasons for the traffic flip-flop, but the big insight was this:

"At some point along the journey, it has lost its way, in terms of the primary mission it is meant to serve. It is all about simple, informative directions."

Sandy Marsh, one of our resident evangelists of XA done right, suggests following this mantra when designing applications:

"Make each application do it's ONE THING very well - everything else is secondary."

In an age of social noise and application excess, I can think of a few other internet properties that should heed that advice...

Marta Strickland

Ingredients

• 1 cause that can touch the hearts of everyone, for example charity: water
• 180+ well-connected Twitterati located in prominent cities around the world
• 1 cheerful and motivated event coordinator in London
• 1 smokin' tech dude to handle all the development issues
• 20,000+ people who are all trying to change the world
• A melange of content: social media press release, videos, music, iconic imagery, first-person stories, e-newsletter pdfs, blog posts and tweets
• Generous helpings of social media: Twitter; Facebook; Twestival FM; Live Earth; Wordpress; Amiando; Google; YouTube etc.

Directions
Set a single date say February 12th 2009 for a global event date, and incite a laser focus by setting impossible deadline that requires everything for each city's Twestival be organized and completed within a month. Test it in London, refine the model and then roll-out world-wide a few months later.

By now, the novelty of email, IM and texting has worn off and you've realized the value of face-to-face connections over digital contact. Still, digital is allowing us to make and keep connections we wouldn't have been able to otherwise. Think: following a respected colleague located on the other side of the country on Twitter. Or joining a wine forum to talk about your grape passion with other enthusiasts and experts.

I refuse to let my husband buy a Wii because I feel that his time (read: our time) is better spent engaging away from the television. I've heard that after you've been playing the video game for a while, a message comes onto the screen suggesting you stop playing the game and go outside for a few minutes. Does anyone really stop and do this? Or is it one of those annoying hiccups you wish you could disable altogether?

I have shunned Facebook because too many other social networks and blogs already keep me online more hours of my wakeful day than any other activity (outside of my real job). I know that adding another to my feed could wreck havoc on my real world relationships. I mean do I really want to see what that girl in my high school Calculus class is up to these days? If I barely talked to her then, I doubt we'd form any lasting bond years later. Yes, all my friends have a page. But when we have to resort to connecting on line instead of getting together for a girls' night out, I'll find new friends.

Now we see brands tugging on our emotions in a different way. Some have begun capitalizing on that human-digital connection by encouraging us to "take a break."

Yahoo! today announced a new mobile application Yahoo! Mobile at the Mobile World Congress. It consolidates many previously (seemingly) uncoordinated mobile initiatives from the venerable company. This is certainly a welcome development. So far so good. However, it also aspires to be "your starting point to the Internet" on mobile devices, and that's where the tone starts to sound off-key.

As you can see in the image above, the app provides its own user interface to allow access to its included mobile services (apps within an app) such as Maps or Opera Browser. While this may be useful to some less advanced phones, all smartphones already offer their own carefully designed OS GUIs to which their respective user bases have learned and grown accustomed. Why add to the user's learning curve by introducing another OS-like layer? It also obstructs certain information that could have been surfaced on the system level, such as the unread mail counts in the screenshot above (you have to first open the Yahoo! Mobile app in order to see it).

To make matters worse, Yahoo! Mobile incorporates many third party contents and services--such as news sources, social networks, or RSS feeds--all under the same roof. It results in a cluttered interface that creates muddled, weighed-down user experience. The two screenshots above illustrate the point nicely; just imagine adding even more content sources to these small screens.

So what went wrong? The whole "portal" paradigm just might have been expired years ago. It was the toast of the town in the '90s, back when the Internet was a strange and scary place. Many users seems to feel that they needed guidance to navigate this land newly found. As the majority of users becoming experienced and comfortable with the networked space, they have developed complex, dynamic and diverse behavior patterns that no single (clean, planned and orderly) contact point could sufficiently satisfy. Just as Jane Jacobs' urbanist vision has pointed out, it may be time we recognize that cyber world-making is an obsolete ideal.

Fang-Yu Lin

I recently finished reading Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations" where he discusses how the Internet has significantly empowered us to connect, exchange ideas, work together and engage in unprecedented public action well beyond the organizational constraints of old. He includes many great examples where large groups of people have embraced the new social technologies at our disposal to achieve extraordinary things.

A quote from the book really resonated with me:

"We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money ... Now, though, we can do big things for love."

I thought to myself: "Imagine a world where we successfully leverage our social connectivity to contribute significantly to the upliftment of others less fortunate. That's a powerful idea - an idea whose time has come."

I first witnessed this idea in action in November, 2008 with the success of Tweetgiving which helped raise over $10,000 in 48 hours to build a new school in Tanzania. Then, on January 6th, 2009, David Armano bravely reached out via Twitter to his personal community to help a struggling mother and her three kids start a new life. He and his network helped raise over $16,000 for Daniela and her kids in just over a week with the majority of the donations being made within the first 24 hours.

A cosmic light had been ignited in Twitterville. It was time to take these incredible individual efforts to a global scale...

Have you ever watched streaming content on Hulu.com?  It's okay if you haven't but these days you're increasingly likely to be in the minority.

Hulu's great Superbowl ad with Alec Baldwin promises streaming TV and movie content to "your mobile computing devices".  However, one application that truly broke new ground for Hulu's distribution model, Boxee (see http://www.boxee.tv) is now no longer going to feature any Hulu content, at the request of Hulu's content partners (i.e., NBC, Fox, et. al.).

Boxee's blog post about the situation came out today and can be found here:
http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/02/18/the-hulu-situation/

Hulu's own related blog post can be found online here:
http://blog.hulu.com/

I am not a senior strategist/media expert at Organic by any means, but do find the situation fascinating for a few reasons.....

Last week, the New York Times launched an article skimmer, which acts as a very nice tool for browsing daily contents in a way that is similar to skimming the headlines of an actual newspaper. The launch is part of their prototypes series, which allows consumers to test out and give feedback on site features that aren't quite "ready for primetime".

In addition to a simple mouse-based navigation system, the article skimmer also offers a fully featured keyboard based system explained in the small "?" link in the upper right. The launch announcement with the ideas behind it can be found on the New York Times First Look blog. And some hints of future features can be found on the developer's twitter account:@mrandre.

Phil Dokas

The lack of memorable news was certainly not the problem this week. We had social media being used be everyone from old fogies to twittering surgeons. And then of course there was the incredible drama over Facebook's New Terms of Service, which The Consumerist so kindly referred to as "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever." Shortly after the inevitable revolt, Facebook launched the Facebook Bill of Rights and reverted to their previous terms of use.

What's Been Going On This Week

Social Network Soars In #s and $s
As the economy plummets, one thing that is not dying is social networks. LinkedIn's popularity continues to grows. Facebook is successfully overtaking MySpace in traffic. But even though MySpace unique users is flat, their engagement is up. Twitter meanwhile has raised $35 million in new VC funding, and $250k for the cause charity:water (read our summaries of the Twestival in Detroit and Toronto).

Opening Up and Adding On
Also, new features have been launching and platforms have been generally "opening up" in great ways. Facebook has been testing an ad network for their developers, and this week they launched a great portable commenting widget using Facebook Connect (look for it on ThreeMinds very soon). Twitter finally integrated a real-time search engine, and they have been spotted playing around with OAuth. MySpace, without much fanfare, launched a site-wide image search this week, and Flickr has started piecing together the night sky.

Major Mobile Momentum
There was an onslaught of mobile news this week. Skype is going to be integrated into Nokia devices. Google finally released a mobile application for Windows Mobile, and they released details about the second Android phone. Palm released the first chapter of their developer's guide to webOS™, the next gen platform the Pre will run on. Palm also joined the Adobe Open Screen Project, meaning that among other things, they are definitely supporting Flash. And finally disappointing mobile launches came from MySpace and Yahoo!.

Marta Strickland

The Drupal community is buzzing over the confirmation that the Obama Internet team has built the new Recovery.gov web site on the Drupal platform. This open-source CMS has built a reputation of innovation, stability and malleability that is unmatched. Drupal boasts thousands of modules for almost any type of digital presence, with a focus on personalization, community building and social tools.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this implementation by the White House is the choice to use open source code. Security wonks have long been battling over the reliability of open source software, and many have retreated to the "comfort" Microsoft products because they "aren't free." Now, it's hard to argue that there aren't any case studies for Drupal where security is a priority.

Moreover, the Drupal community is driven by collaborative gain, a mirror of the Obama social message, as developers produce ever-advancing functionality and improvements for everyone's benefit.

Oh, and Beyonce is using Drupal, too.

Craig Ritchie

Editor's Note: This following piece is a follow-up to Sandy's review of the book "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions"

I. Love. Dogs. In fact, I love all animals. This should be no surprise to any of you who know me even just a little or anyone in the vicinity when I receive an email with a link to a panda sneezing, when someone mentions a Super Bowl ad featuring chimpanzees, or when I'm forwarding a picture of a baby opossum sitting atop our garbage. I love all animals - just not cats.

My hatred of cats mostly stems from their seemingly intentional relentless assault on my allergies. My affinity for dogs may only be explained by the fact that I'm legally allowed to own one and they don't seem to have it out for me as much as cats do.

My current preference for my dearly departed old dog, Zeb seems to be the direct result of my most recent experience with my current dog, Roxy - who has just attacked the new vacuum cleaner and eaten the upholstery extension.

Do I love Roxy less than I loved Zeb? Of course not. That would be absurd - like proposing you love your son, who is standing in the room with you, more than you love your daughter, who has been in the garage for the past week. I'm just trying to convey what I've learned by reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert - that our minds play tricks, and not just any tricks, but the same tricks. Meaning, collectively, we are a one-trick pony.

In 1969, Paul McCartney made what seemed to be a random decision to call the Beatles album "Abbey Road" and put this picture on the cover.

40 years later, Abbey Road is still a tourist destination.

Above is a recent Youtube time-lapse video of the famous zebra-crossing. (Video is a promotional piece for http://www.blameringo.com).

I'm sure the drivers in St John's Wood curse the day that McCartney made that decision. I know I did when I used to drive through this very exclusive leafy suburb in North West London.

David Feldt @davidfeldt

The Amgen Tour of California is an eight-day race (ending today!!) that covers between 650-700 miles throughout California. The race annually starts in San Francisco Bay Area, then travels through the California redwoods, wine country and the Pacific Coast.

In 2008, Computer Sciences Corporation launched its new global Location Object Field Tracking (LOFT) solution to give fans a unique "bird's eye view" of the race by tracking all of the riders and teams online. This year, they have taken their race tracker to a whole new level: http://tracker.amgentourofcalifornia.com/

Bike enthusiasts can follow the race using multiple video feeds and chat with other fans. The video feeds boost 4 times the resolution of last year. And If you sign up, you can customize your feed to track the GPS of certain riders. But there are still a few features that are lacking.

Conor Brady, avid cyclist, said "one thing I would love to see was if they'd give you a live feed of rider stats (power, speed, HR...)", which is exactly what Polar did at the Tour de France last year.

Karri Ojanen from Organic Toronto also thought that "one exceptional element missing: social tools or graph-portability."

It reminded Patrick Dunphy of the Amgen Tour Experience, a Flex based app using GPS tracked cyclists and lots of video to document the 2007 cycling tour.

Thanks to Evan Cordes for the link.

Marta Strickland

People think NASA, they think "can do" right?

Well, judging by this video shot on a borrowed camera and edited at home by a NASA engineer, the agency that put humankind on the moon faces some of the same problems the rest of the world seems to. Too long, amateurish, cloying and at times downright trite - but bang on. So bang on that upper NASA management has used its very existence to deeply question how they foster some of the best ideas in space that never get developed - the ones that are generated by the person in the next cube.

Craig Ritchie also noted some interesting things about the YouTube video itself: "the comments are much more thought out and obviously experience-based than the stereotypical YouTube flaming; the rating 5 stars with 204 ratings; and 94K+ views in less than a month."

You can read more about the story and NASA's reaction at NPR.org. But a more intimate reaction is on the blog of Wayne Hale, previously Space Shuttle Program Director at NASA, now Deputy Associate Administrator for Strategic Partnerships. He ties it back to how in BOTH space shuttle catastrophes there had been grass roots, internal flags raised and solutions offered to the problems that led to the crashes. Longer, but a really really fascinating read.

Alex Churchill

Christophe Huet is a french artist that specializes in photo retouching. He's created ads for Playstation, Nike, Motorola & Rossignol to name a few. His website showcases a sampling of his work. Other than a slideshow of all creative work as you visit the homepage, by far my favorite part of the site is the "Making of" section. Within it, you can step through each the creative process to see how the final result was achieved.

http://www.christophehuet.com/

On the same topic but not advertizing specific, Erik Johansson, a student from Sweden showcases his personal work. All photographs & retouching work are originals to him.
http://www.alltelleringet.com/

In short, this is amazing & inspiring work.

Patrick Dunphy

There is a growing body of evidence that certain health conditions, including asthma, arthritis, diabetes, heart disease and migraines, can be aggravated by various weather conditions and changes. A new website, MediClim -- the Weather Health Warning System (http://www.mediclim.com/), is helping at-risk people to be more proactive with email and mobile alerts with (and here's the cool part) relevant upcoming forecasts.

Past the health benefit bit (which is still noteworthy), the relevancy bit might be part a new trend. Weather forecast feeds and alerts are nothing new, but this one is pre-filtered, on-demand, and only what users need to know, which is in stark contrast with the overflow of mostly-useless information we can get from just about any other internet source. I mean, probably everything in every news/rss/blog/twitter feed is useful or relevant to *someone*, but which single user ever needs *all* of it? In the case of MediClim's users, it's important to know about upcoming thunderstorms for arthritis sufferers or air quality advisories for asthmatics, but the asthmatics might not care to know about thunderstorms and the arthritics may not care to know about air quality advisories. Or maybe they do, but if they don't then leave them alone.

MediClim is a free service, and so far about 1,000 people in Canada, the U.S., Britain and Ireland have signed up since MediClim launched in December.

David Freedman

Staying in line with the Extra Homepage concept - linking blog and other coverage to stories as they are posted - the NYTimes has raised the bar on coverage of big political speeches with their interactive viewer of last night's address to a joint session of congress by President Obama.

Combining the footage with a timeline and analysis from around the web scrolling in time with the footage - this is how good analysis of this kind of event can be in almost real time. In the age of PVRs, why not wait a few hours and watch when the analysts and fact checkers can watch right along with you? Whether you watched the speech live or not, whether you twittered through it, whether you're a policy wonk or rabid politico or not it makes for some compelling content.

Alex Churchill

This past Friday I attended The New York Times Developer Network's inaugural API seminar. The event was aimed at promoting their roster of existing APIs and launching a new one, for their Times People social network. Organizers had hoped to use the event as a way to reach out to independent developers who would, in turn, presumably use the APIs in innovative ways. In fact, the sprinkling of "hackers" in the audience were overshadowed by a wide range of media-types. Which, despite initial intent, wasn't all bad for the NYT since the media-types did a bang up job of publicizing the event.

I'm a fan of the New York Times' website. It is a consistently high quality experience and, as such, run by one of the few mainstream news companies that understands the digital world. It's clear that the people running the NYT are aware of how important increasing digital consumption habits are to their current and future success. The writing quality is generally high, but more importantly, in recent years, the NYT have released a steady stream of site features, standalone applications, and APIs that together amount to a digital experience that far exceeds that of its competitors.

The recent financial woes of the NYT, and the newspaper business as a whole, have been widely publicized. And while the NYT's new "open" strategy doesn't appear to be a last ditch attempt at staying solvent, it is worth asking: What's in it for them?

As a marketer, I have encouraged several key clients to develop an API. They were all, like the NYT, large national or international brands. Lots of big brands are sitting on huge amounts of data that can, potentially, be shaped into useful services by either the brands themselves, or by developers enthusiastic about what they can do with a new dataset.

There are two reasons why an API makes sense for the NYT, new revenue and free advertising.

Low volume use by a third-party can encourage innovation and often amounts to free advertising in some very interesting places (the risk is having your brand represented in a way you can't control). If a developer hacks together a mashup using your data and it's interesting enough that people use it a little bit, your brand wins some credibility, exposure, and in the case of the NYT, readership in a community where it otherwise might not have any.

If a third-party developed service becomes successful and moves to the realm of high-volume use, your brand could wind up with a new source of revenue. This is why the terms of service for most APIs restrict free use to somewhere in the neighborhood of five thousand queries per day. Anything beyond that costs. So assuming whoever developed a service that gets enough traffic to exceed that number of queries can monetize (easier said than done) the publisher of the API should stand to make some money it wasn't making before.

Dan Neumann

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23timesopen
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/