Dumping wisdom on design and the web
In the world of online activity, passive-aggressive comments made by anonymous users are commonplace. Fearing public ridicule and repercussion, users create fake accounts with temporary emails and login credentials to spread their toxicity. [Read more…]
Originally posted on July 29, 2021 @ 3:06 pm
Digital marketing and social media go hand in hand. If you want to make a large impact online, you’ve got to know how to capitalize on the various social media platforms available today. [Read more…]
Originally posted on August 18, 2020 @ 8:30 am
If your business is having a little trouble hitting the mark, your web presence may need a little work. Understanding how to reach your target audience online is a pivotal element of a successful marketing campaign. [Read more…]
Originally posted on December 15, 2020 @ 9:40 am
Skittles on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube
Years from now, people will look back to the day Skittles ditched its flashy site and chose to load the top social websites that talk about it instead.
I can’t even begin to fathom how brilliant a campaign this is (despite being pioneered by Modernista exactly a year before). Maybe it’s not. I don’t know whether it’s so open-minded and fun, it doesn’t even look like a gimmick anymore or it’s just plain lazy to put the Skittles-related Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and even Wikipedia pages right on Skittles.com.
Why load tweets, photos, or videos if you can just pull them via the the sites’ ever-useful APIs and create a page that’s sprinkled with 100% more colors and candy? (Come on, don’t deprive web designers and developers of their jobs!)
Is it even legal for a company to load another company’s web page to promote itself? (But asking that is like saying Facebook owns whatever you post on its site, and we all know how that turned out.)
Is seeing yourself on Skittles.com enough incentive to build buzz about the product instead of the marketers who will be handsomely rewarded anyway? (A resounding yes if you’re one of those new media douchebags, but let’s get to that in a bit.)
Do these cynical questions even matter if you’re enjoying the experience anyway?
Skittles took a risk. Some other company would have been worried about the possibility of smack and smut polluting the streams.
It’s bound to happen anyway, if this campaign lasts long enough and the new media douchebags pounce on another pure phenomenon taking place. I think that’s what draws people to this experiment. It’s raw, unfiltered, and free from any sinister intentions. (At least to the naked eye.)
Remember when SEO hadn’t been invented? When Wikipedia was an unbiased reference? When Twitter was all about what you are doing right now? When your friends on Facebook didn’t have their own fan pages?
And what about the other side of that purity—the cold, hard, messy truth? Because it’s only a matter of time when Skittles, which is not just sweet, innocent, colorful candy, but also a huge corporation, rakes up some dirt in its dealings.
If there’s one thing to take away from all this is that if you’re a company and dreaming of pulling off something like this, it’s not about you. (Or maybe it is, but can you at least try to make it look like it isn’t?)
Any publicity is good publicity, order will emerge from chaos, and worry less about projecting a reality distortion field, focus more on making your product great, because it will speak for itself.
Originally posted on January 31, 2011 @ 12:21 pm
Cloud computing is one of the hottest buzzwords that you will hear these days. Whether or not you know exactly what cloud computing is all about, you can certainly understand just how hot this topic is. For the benefit of those you who want to get a concise definition of cloud computing, here’s a nice description from the recently launched Google book 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web.
Modern computing in the age of the Internet is quite a strange, remarkable thing. As you sit hunched over your laptop at home watching a YouTube video or using a search engine, you’re actually plugging into the collective power of thousands of computers that serve all this information to you from far-away rooms distributed around the world. It’s almost like having a massive supercomputer at your beck and call, thanks to the Internet.
So yeah, cloud computing is THE thing today, and even big companies make use of global data center services to expand their operations. Recently, telecommunications giant NTT Communications announced a new venture wherein they would be using a cloud-based mobile service to analyze the eating habits of people, together with their exercise habits. The result of this analysis will be recommendations to help improve the health of the user.
The venture is being taken on in conjunction with NTT Resonant Inc. (an NTT affiliate) and foo.log Inc. Dubbed Health Enhancement Assist Service, it will require people to take photos of their food (using their mobile phones). The program will then analyze the photos to come up with estimated calorie content and nutritional value. The exercise part will come into play via calculation of how much the user walks within a day – not that different from a pedometer.
Whoever said that the Internet is simply for fun, useless applications can think again, right?
Photo via jhritz
Originally posted on November 23, 2010 @ 3:03 am