I love visualizations and this one is really cool. Check this video from Nicolas Loeillot posted to Vimeo. The only thing missing is that Goldfish-looking alien from Star Wars (original) that goes over the plans to destroy the Death Star.
Holographic Google Earth from Nicolas Loeillot on Vimeo.
I have raved about the Times RSS reader for OS X because of it’s beauty and most unique presentation of your feeds, but I can’t seem to ever leave Google Reader. Part of the allure of Google Reader is features that can have nice positive impact on your workflow. I plow through posts and can email, share and star as many as I like. I use stars as a to-do of sorts, where I plan to re-blog it or spend some time checking out the subject of that post. I guess that’s batch processing as Problogger describes it. When I noticed the ‘Share with note” feature was added (or maybe I just noticed it) I was initially excited at the potential of that. Sure you can put your Reader RSS in a widget on your blog sidebar, but spending so much time in Reader on a daily basis I hoped it might be something like automatic posting to your blog site, or maybe posting comments on that blogger’s site. Instead it seemed the only thing it does is put your text in a block quote above the article you’re sharing on your Googler Reader public shared page. Here’s mine.
I suppose it’s a fine feature and not everyone wants to be a blogger so I thought it might be a good way to ease clients into the idea of blogging.
Sure Ms. Client, why don’t you just get comfortable with Google Reader to see how others do it, then go ahead and start sharing articles, then go ahead and make comments on those articles you’re sharing. Hey, guess what? You’re blogging (sort of). Now let’s try a real blog.
The letdown for me was that it didn’t seem like the Reader ‘Share with note’ feature did anything beyond that page. Not even my Google Alerts picked up on my very smart and relevant comments to other people’s posts. I had accepted it was a wasted experiment. Or so I thought.
This week the blogosphere seemed all whipped up over friendfeed. First Rubel posted his love letter, then Jeremiah fires back, and off we go. The debate spurred me to try the service out. I wondered if it will wind up in the corner of my mind like half the other sites and networks I’ve registered for and not touched since I can’t remember (e.g. Plaxo). Then, boom! There it was.
I noticed my ‘Share with note’ comment showing up as a response to my shared Reader item feed I plugged into friendfeed. After getting over the excitement that someone responded to me on friendfeed (well, it was me responding to me) I settled for happiness that my Reader ‘Share with note’ foray was not completely wasted.
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I think it was a presentation referenced on Presentation Zen where I first caught a look at a presentation created in Sliderocket. Perhaps it was the 16×9 looking orientation or the better looking images (over what I’ve seen in Slideshare), but I immediately thought that this is a tool I’d like to have in my bag of tricks. I forgot about it until recently subscribing to Scobleizer.TV and caught the episode interview of Sliderocket’s co-founder and CEO, Mitch Grasso. I’ve seen smoother product demos before but one thing came clear — Sliderocket tackles what I think may be two big problems in presentation creation, and the cause of Powerpoint paralysis. Those are:
I kinda like giving presentations and part of that comes from using presentation tools (powerpoint, keynote, etc.) at the very end of the process, after I’ve gotten my source information and a story arc. Too many times I’ve been on presentation teams where they want “your slides” two days after first hearing about the meeting. In the typical desktop presentation software usage, as it’s widely used in the corporate environment today, the conventional thinking is that the presentation doesn’t exist until it’s within the .ppt or .key file. That’s like a surgeon worrying more about the scar they’ll leave more than the part of the body they’re trying to fix.
Sliderocket makes it easy, if not more fun, to build or obtain your source information from outside the presentation. You can pull from Flickr in real time or data kept in Google Docs, including charts. This is just the beginning as you know someone will take advantage of an API coming down the road to work with other external content. It’s a great core feature of Sliderocket but which can help rid its users of the dreaded Powerpoint paralysis.
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It’s not the first time we’ve seen events geared for bloggers exclusively but this one in Boston for Edelman client Air One, a new Italian airline looks and smells like any other media event. Do you suppose there’s another similar event for “traditional” media? Which one happens first?
In my media buying days I certainly took up the free Mets tickets and invites to a meal (because a first year media planner’s salary was below the poverty level in 1989) and I can’t say it didn’t influence my purchase decisions — not a surprise to anyone in advertising.
Much like the M.O. of large media buying outfits that mostly see the Internet as a big impressions bucket, I think outreach to bloggers as a media tactic can and should go father than putting “blogger” in the event name and developing a media list of only bloggers to invite. Bloggers are probably networked as good or better than traditional media folks, but I think they might like being considered as simply “media” for events like this so why not just include them in a larger event. If you are going to target bloggers then go ahead and offer them new and interesting ways you can support their biggest desire — creating compelling content — hopefully with your client highly relevant.
Or, I’m just bitter I didn’t get an invite because I love those bacon-wrapped coconut-encrusted shrimp on a toothpick they usually have. Actually, anything wrapped in bacon is great.
Very late last night, Biz Stone posted a note to readers of the Twitter blog about turning off commenting a few days after a post. His rationale is that most people will post a comment within that timeframe and it would help him keep up moderating comments as a regular task while keeping the spammers out. Sounds logical enough, but the little lesson here is that he’s almost asking his readers if this is cool.
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I viewed the post in Reader so I didn’t see return comments, but the tone of having a conversation instead of telling people what’s gonna happen whether they like it or not, does a better job and communicates an open dialog between Twitter and its readers/users.
For those that read this blog, would you mind if I close commenting on each update after 2-3 days? I’m using moderation because we were having a problem with spam comments. My thinking is that 2-3 days gives folks time to make their voice heard and then I don’t have to dedicate as much time to moderating the spam that ensues. Let me know what you think. Also, any other suggestions for how to manage comments are welcome.
It doesn’t look like Boeing’s agency bothered to check out the Washingtpost’s method of publishing video ads when they placed this spot in the Washingtonpost.com today. It was one of those typical series of close ups of weathered faces shots that huge companies and industry groups love to make. “Tell congress to vote <insert answer> on H.R. <insert number>” Sometimes that might resonate with folks, depending on what they’re saying. But somewhere in the buying or planning or maybe even the creative production, nobody bothered to check to see how toothless the spot is when it appears on a portal like washingtonpost.com and by default does not play with sound on. An opening title card such “in the words of our veterans” or something like that might’ve alerted me that these people were special and worth listening to. Even worse the client’s name doesn’t appear until the last few frames. The only reason I stayed on the page to watch was because it was such an obvious mismatch of creative for application. Wash Post rep should’ve caught that too.
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