beta testing facebooks hyperlocal augmented reality:
Met up with some interesting intruiging and exciting peeps last night in Cardiff #cdfblogs meetup with @getgood @hrwaldram @carlmorris @stuherbert @GlynTansley Am excited again about the concept of local online. 
Might even do something like a “secret swansea” facebook group.
I read recently that the Tetris website has games on it that are designed to last exactly the time it takes to travel between stops on Japan’s commuter trains. This struck me as an extremely efficient way to waste time. Tetris is a real time waster – addictive and consuming and lots of fun – and I guess there is a demand from Japanese commuters that they get as much of it as they possibly can in their allotted ‘downtime’.
I do it, too. I enjoy an evening in front of the TV when I can but hate adverts and filler. So I look at the listings and meticulously plan my viewing schedule: ‘Is this programme on a channel that has adverts?’, ‘If so, can I use the Watch Again feature on my cable to see it another day?’, ‘Can I fill up this 1/2 hour gap with anything I have left over to watch from yesterday when there was two things on at the same time?’.
I thought about doing a post on advertising since Upside Downturn started. And as the length of time between the last post and this one spiralled out beyond my expectations (and my control) the more the idea of managing to squeeze a post in before the end of the decade played on my mind.
I had fragments of posts written about various ads but they were little more than rants and I like to have something vaguely positive to say in my posts here. What tied it all together in the end was one of those pointless commercial TV countdown shows. The ‘50 Best Racist Sitcoms’ sort of thing. This one billed itself as the 20 greatest ads of the decade. I guessed I could bear to sit through it because of two things.
1. The ability of the ITVplayer to fast forward and
2. The thought of seeing any of the Sony Bravia ads again.
Most of the places I’ve worked for throughout my website building career have been pretty hot on accuracy – in design and in terms of spelling. My time at the BBC especially instilled in me a religious devotion to spelling web-words correctly.
Internet shouldn’t have an uppercase ‘i’ (unless it’s at the beginning of a sentence, as it is here). Neither television, nor radio are capitalised, so why should our medium be?
Website is all one word (and for people looking for someone to do your website it’s a good rule of thumb not to go for anyone who spells it ‘web site’ or, worse, ‘web-site’. That includes most of America).
World wide web is lower case.
Most importantly email neither has a hypen, nor a capital E. Just don’t. It’s wrong and makes you look like an amateur. You wouldn’t capitalise paper or envelope, and it’s no more a foreshortening of electronic mail than radio is of radiogramme.
Useful links: www.oed.com
Firstly, apologies for the lack of posts recently. Things have, ironically, been very busy and any spare time is taken up with other projects. I wanted to point you towards the results of The Freelancer Survey 2009 which shows some interesting patterns within my industry – especially to do with the credit crunch.
Went to get some cash at lunchtime and the cash machine swallowed my card, and started a Windows load sequence, and then hung. Shame it didn’t give me loads of free money, maybe next time!
click on image for more detail.
It’s frustrating enough when small things don’t do what they’re supposed to. Ben Elton called said that there must be a Ministry of Crap somewhere responsible for them. He cited motorway service station teapots (the ones with a spout that makes the tea dribble down the front of them – rather than pouring neatly – and with handles too small to get more than one or two fingers inside). I remember mainly that were made of a heat-conducting metal that made picking them up a like plunging your hand into the sun as an example of soemthing created by the Ministry. Also, Izal toilet paper (the greaseproof stuff you used to get at school with all the absorbency of Teflon). Later examples would be CD jewel cases (Does it hold a CD? Barely. Does it open and shut? Not really. Sometimes, maybe. If you’re lucky) and stove-top kettles (Looks homely sat on your Aga but no good unless you’ve got a spare couple of days to wait for it to boil).
It seems like a new gadget comes up on the web every five minutes. The latest must-do thing to join up to. And as a complete gadgetphobe I initially sneer at them all. That, combined with the fact that I hate the phrase ‘web 2.0′ even more than ‘brand building’ or ‘multi-media’ or even the use of ‘old school’ to describe any hip hop more recent than 1990 and you can see I don’t make a natural Social Networker. However, this post is all about what can be done when you make use of the right tools at the right time to plug your business.
Read more…
Comedy series Flight of the Conchords pretty much passes me by to be honest. Could just be my dislike of comedy in songwriting. Sometimes though, it throws up a gem, and this is certainly one. It provides perhaps the definitive example of Qualifying Statements put to music.
“And when you’re on the street, depending on the street,
I bet you are definitely in the top three,
Good lookin’ girls on the street.
(Depending on the street).”
The joke throughout the whole thing is a play on the exagurated claims of R&B stars on the qualities of the lady they have just met. The girl that the Conchords meet is beautiful, sure, but they make sure that they keep the claims they make about her in perspective.
The past 6 months I’ve been elevating the importance of landing pages in my projects. Typically it’d only be the homepage that I’d paid substantial efforts on. However, with my increased efforts on pay-per-click campaigns, and SEM, I wanted make sure the page that visitors first see continues the experience of where they’ve come from and removes barriers to them actioning either first contact or a sale.
So here, I’ve brought together some of the real world examples of psychological tricks people use in the real world attention locations that translate superduper well to landing pages, and are things that you should definitely consider on your landing page design.
Paolo - glorious leader of South Wales web empire Refresh Creative. Paolo also reviews cheap laptops for his other website.
Andy - runs a web consultancy based in the sunny city of Bath. He has been working in the online industry for 13 years. His mission is to get his clients to "improve their business, achieve the results they want and not get suckered into spending money on things they don't need!".
