Archives for 2009

One year time lapse from clean-cut to gypsyPosted on September 1, 2009

BoingBoing just alerted me to an excellent time lapse of a guy who walked across China for a year, aiming to walk to Germany. He took a photo of himself every day and has made a video documenting his beard and hair growth, as well as his amazing journey.

The Longest Way 1.0 - one [...]

Tags: random thoughts

Facial profiler - so much potential but so badly executedPosted on August 31, 2009

I have a theory that there are only about 14 faces in the world, and we’re all just a sub-set of them. I’ve seen a girl in Thailand who looked identical to a friend in Melbourne except she was Asian. I’ve seen black versions of chinese friends. And I think I have quite a common [...]

Tags: customer experience, innovation, social networking

Web Week comes to SydneyPosted on August 23, 2009

Earlier this year I was gutted to miss the New York Web Week by a couple of days. But things are looking up as Web Directions launches Web Week from October 2-9 in Sydney. And even better, loads of the events are free.
The schedule is already packed with awesome events, from an exhibition by [...]

Tags: Conferences, events, innovation

How does the internet see you?Posted on August 19, 2009

The personas project is a brilliant project by the folk at MIT, to show you how the internet sees you.
It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity.
It basically trawls through your data and categorises what it finds into predetermined set [...]

Tags: Analytics, Cool websites

A brilliant campaign from ElementPosted on August 13, 2009

I’ve just seen a campaign for Element Skateboards that has made my afternoon and given me hope that all advertising is not cynical.

Element’s vision is to “bring progress to skateboarding”. Skaters can be an anarchistic bunch at the best of times, and it only takes a whiff of corporate cynicism for them to accuse [...]

Tags: Marketing, social networking, trends

Youtube gives an instant voicePosted on July 22, 2009

Proving once and for all that mobile advertising executives have their heads wedged firmly up their own arses, Israeli mobile phone company Cellcom launched an ad last week that has been universally derided.

To sell more mobile phones, the ad depicts a soccer ball sailing over the Israel/Palestine wall, hitting a jeep full of Israeli [...]

Tags: dishonesty in advertising

Beautiful stop-motion from OlympusPosted on July 10, 2009

Regular readers of this blog know of my obsession with stop-motion films. Olympus have just released a really beautiful stop-motion, using 60,000 pictures, 9,600 developed prints and 1,800 shot pictures - with no digital post-production.
It’s absolutely gorgeous, and a beautiful tale of a life well lived.

I do wonder if he walked out on [...]

Tags: Cool websites, Marketing

Bill Posters gets prettyPosted on July 7, 2009

This just brightened my morning. We’ve all seen the ugly “Bill posters will be prosecuted” signs that go up on every blank surface - they are much uglier than the posters. In fact, I love how posters appear on every temporary wall, it’s the main way I find out about concerts coming to Sydney.
Happy [...]

Tags: Cool websites

Tweet every minute - new campaign from V AustraliaPosted on July 6, 2009

V Australia have just launched an interesting campaign to promote their Sydney - LA flights.
Called 4320 LA, it selects a group of 3 friends to be sent to LA for 3 days. Once there, they need to tweet every minute for 4320 tweets to win a bigger prize of an around the world ticket [...]

Tags: Marketing

Is this the state of the web?Posted on July 3, 2009

Web Design Dev magazine just released a list of who they think are the 30 most influential people in web design and it’s ruined my Saturday morning.
I understand that it’s hard to put together lists of the most talented in a very vast pool of incredibly intelligent people. But it is so disappointing to [...]

Tags: politics, women