DigitalAgency

Dirty Hands by Harry Kim:

A great trailer for a documentary on David Choe, an LA street artist. There's a terrific early shot of him spraying a huge long stretch of wall as he hangs out of a speeding car. A better quality QuickTime version is available here as recommended by the Wooster Collective, who reckon: "it may well be one of the best graffiti related films ever made."

High praise for lo-tech:

Oliver Laric has taken the everyday, and turned it into something really quite compelling. A bunch of old school clip art 'stills' compiled into a mesmeric little animation. He's put some neat thought into this in the way he's sequenced the shots in a way that they flow, and have a kind of logic. Lovely stuff.

Get 'em young:

I don't know if this clip is cute or a little bit scary. (Probably both.)

Alice is interested in how children react and respond to advertising, maybe she should extend it to the effects of parents exposing their kids to too much French Progressive Rock.

I'm told, (because in the interests of honest disclosure, I actually didn't know this), the  kid is singing in some unfathomable language called Kobaian, developed by the band Magma.

Words fail me. (Unlike the kid.)

Tip o' the hat for the Rocking Vicar for this and Dave Roberts for pointing me in the right direction.

BloggerCon IV:

There's some good coverage of BloggerCon IV here. Including MP3's of the sessions and transcripts of everything. For newbies like us the session about Blogging and Podcasting tools, do's and don'ts was interesting, and the attendee list had lots of the Blogosphere's (did I really use the word Blogosphere?), biggest stars. There's also a wiki. (Are there too many links for one short post?)

How wonderful is this?

Photography Source. Quote Source.

 
Many thanks to the always reliable Iain Tait at CrackUnit for posting about this last week.

It's a massive creative combo of great Web 2.0 quotes all hooked up to some terrific Flickr shots.

Compiled by Lynetter, it's a brilliant, creative, stimulating chunk of aggregated intelligence.

And, in the true Web 2.0 style of generosity and accuracy, she has credited all the photographers and the sources of data.

Exemplary stuff all round.

(Sorry if I've gushed too much.)

Mike loves e-luv:

This is e-luv a first time novel from Dave Roberts, a pal of mine in New Zealand.

Before I tell you to go out and buy the book; a bit of background:

20 years ago Dave and I were trainee copywriters in a somewhat grim and grimey Northern Ad Agency. One day, a bullying account handler came in and had a heated discussion about a brief he'd put in. Dave said it was misleading and certainly not honest, legal, decent and truthful. The suit told him to shut the chuff up and just bloody well write the ad based on the brief, and do as he was being told. (The implication to the young boy being; He'd better just do as he was told, if he wanted to stay on at the agency as a writer.) They say revenge is better served cold, so Dave wrote the ad, and, once it appeared in the newspaper, he cut it out and wrote a letter of complaint about it to the Advertising Standards Authority. To my knowledge, the only time a copywriter has complained to the authorities about his own ad. Genius. And from that day on our friendship was set in stone.
Anyway. Dave now lives in New Zealand and writes novels, or more accurately has written 'a' novel. Called e-luv it charts the adventures of a housebound man as he 'romps' his way through the chat rooms of the early Internet. It's funny, sad, a bit naughty and in so many respects true, true, true.

I'll be writing more about the book and how this first time is doing over the next few weeks.

In fact here at DigitalAgency, we thought it might be a good idea to experiment with the tools and opportunities afforded by web 2.0 to help Dave spread the word about his book. So we're going to explore some online marketing opportunies. Maybe on MySpace and SecondLife.

Here's a link to e-luv on Amazon.

(Disclosure: DigitalAgency get a name check in the book for providing the struggling new author with a computer to write the thing in its earliest days. Aren't we sweet.)

Words of Web 2.0 wisdom:

Peter Day on R4 is a national treasure. 'In Business' one of the most thoughtful/insightful radio programmes you can possibly slurp off to your iPod.

Here Peter gives us his take on Web 2.0, and talks to Jeff Jarvis, of BuzzMachine fame, The Guardian, and Peter Thompson, DG of the Beeb himself. Fascinating stuff:

Web 2.0 logo's:

Picture by Mmmonica here on flickr.

I don't know why but somehow, I find these logos for Web 2.0 companies kind of hypnotic.
It also occurs to me how much energy is going into this revolution, not least by the designers and those who have to make up the crazy names.
With all these made-up names flying about, I'm smugly glad that I registered the domain DigitalAgency way back when. It saved so many sleepless name-generation nights.

Something everybody in the marketering dept, the ad agency and the design studio should read, digest and act on:

First, get the background to this post here:

Great Post from Douglass Turner's Blog:

What a great post.

He's talking specifically about Design Companies, but to be honest it's probably even more applicable to ad agencies, marketing departments and even web developers too.

I think part of the reason many marketers don't get Web 2.0, is that they’ve only just come to terms with Web 1.0.

It's been a steep-enough learning curve anyways, for the last 5 years, to get their heads around crm, email marketing, search engine optimisation, virals, online-branding, css, banners, pop-ups, permission marketing etc.

And now, just as they are understanding how the web works a whole new slew of stuff drops into their metaphorical inbox:

“You want me to learn about rss feeds and blogging? About Social networks? Consumer Generated media? Podcast feeds? About '3rd place' marketing (mobile devices to me and you), Avatar Marketing, the Architecture of Participation?, 'Attention models?', In-Game advertising, the Long Tail?

"Enough!, enough!" they cry. ("Let's just stick to what we know, and Web 2.0 might just go away."

“Why can’t I just do a nice, pretty flash site or a funky viral. I only just learned that. I’m comfortable with that. Please don’t ask me to get my head round more new stuff.”)

I do sympathise with their plight.

But Douglass is right, I think what’s happening in rss, blogging, social networks, wiki's, Flickr, YouTube etc, is a big deal, but right now, not enough advertising, marketing, web development and design pros are 'getting with the programme'. (Link to Paul Beelen's brilliant whitepaper on 'Advertising 2.0'.)
 

Worse still still, they're either looking the other way, or insisting on pushing old solutions and technologies on clueless clients.

Solutions that might fit the agencies business model, but in no way the clients in the era of Web 2.0.

Don't forget to tip:

Oh dear.

I’ve just had coffee in Centotre, my favourite of favourite places to eat and drink in Edinburgh.

I stop by there most mornings as I walk to work, for a double shot latte or americano.

I must have done this about 50 times or more, this year alone.

When I’ve had my coffee, and I’m ready to get on with my day, I just leave £3 on the table, not waiting for the bill, and wend my merry, fortified way, through the Georgian splendour that is Edinburgh’s New Town.

For some reason today, (I think because I didn’t have £3 in change on me), I asked for the tab and was embarassingly shocked to see that a double latte is £3.50!

And has been for some time*

So instead of me being Mr Generous as I thought, and leaving a 50 pence tip every time I have my coffee there, I’ve actually been short changing them.

Not only paying below the full amount, but also NOT paying a tip.

Doh!

* I don’t begrudge paying this at all. The caffe is outstandingly good, served by possibly the most wonderful waitresses in Edinburgh, and certainly the most professional.

5 times better than Starbuck’s coffee, and enjoyed in a 10x better environment.

Anyway, I’m worth it.

Centotre is worth it.

My only worry now is that I owe Victor and Carina, the proprietors, a substantial amount of money for all the underpayments I’ve made. (So sweet is everyone there, not once has anybody challenged my stinginess.)

But owing Italians money isn’t a particularly good idea is it?