Around the .TV/WEBS

in

The Beauty of Street Photography

Some fantastic street photos from Smashing Magazine.

Street photo
Further limiting the appeal of having children, now we find out that educational DVDs actually make the dumber? Damnit. 

It's all been said.

If IKEA furnished the Oval Office, it'd be unamerican, but they'd probably serve lots of mediocre meatballs.

Russell's newest presentation. Smarty pants.

11brain2axx__1231575167_0544

a flickr set.
Anthroflickr
another flickr set.

Seriously, I kind of felt bad for all those ants. They're just merrily building their sweet ant fort and these asshole scientists dump a bunch of concrete down there. Cool to know and all, but jeez. 

Seems like a big idea for stabilizing local economies. There's too much to wrap my head around here, but it does seem as though global networking could bring hyper-localized urban structures. More to come when I have more than 2 sentences.

Just wait til she starts singing. Doing Dallas proud, as usual.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2918666&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
St Vincent: Marry Me from shoottheplayer.com on Vimeo.

How Far We've Come...
Reject seven dwarfs

Overheard on the Internets

in

Bill Mahr's Religulous. 

Watch the whole thing on Google Video now. Catch it before they take it down.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1839369108234002661&hl=en&fs=true


"In The Play of Man, Groos extended his insights about animal play to humans. He pointed out that human beings, much more so than any other species, must learn different skills depending on the society in which they develop. Therefore, he argued, natural selection led to a strong drive, in human children, to observe the activities of their elders and incorporate those activities into their play. Children in every culture play at the general categories of activities that are essential to people everywhere, but their specific forms of play, within each category, are shaped by the kinds of activities they see around them. When children are free, they play far more, and in a far greater variety of ways, than do the young of any other species because they have far more to learn."


Owyang digs up the Air Force blog response flowchart. 
Airforblog
From Grant McCracken: "I think some people in marketing continue to work with a narrow view.  And I am sure it feels to them like an act of discipline.  "Look how closely we scrutinize the consumer.  Look how microscopic is our view!"  But of course, as Lafley and Charan point out, this eliminates from view the very things that make the life make sense and opportunities come to view. "

The healing begins...

Creating Local Currency, Sleeping On Couches, Investing in Farm Shares, etc..

"Advertising agencies have dabbled in side businesses for decades, but “inventing their own brand, not dependent on clients’ largess, is the big new thing,” said George Parker, an ad agency consultant and writer of AdScam, a blog about the industry. As the economy worsens and ad budgets tighten, “the creation of intellectual property and new products is something you’re going to see a lot more of,” he said."

As Heard in the World Wide Tubes.

in

Russell Davies and the Algorithm

Who knew the big RD was a closet stat guy? I couldn't agree more. While I think we're moving towards creating behavioral shifts through action, not simply communication - the basics of advertising, the stuff still valuable in terms of reach and frequency - will be a much more scientific endeavor.


"The spoils will go to he or she who accumulates the most data from their users and whose mathematicians can devise the most subtle and cunning algorithms for recommendation. It's a battle about maths. And as more marketing and services become about the management and analysis of masses of consumer and media data we're only going to see more of these kinds of contests. It's always seemed inevitable to me that media planning and buying will one day go this way. How long can it be before huge planning and buying departments are replaced by a little PC in the corner, tended by a couple of statisticians, grinding through algorithms?"


A behind the scenes peek at the logos not picked to become the badge of the Obama brand. Good thing they picked the one they did.


via adlab - and this is sort of self-explanatory.


Plenty of juicy graphs to steal for your next presentation from the authors of Groundswell.


Groundswell 
7. Cocaine, 6. Alcohol, 5. Valium, 4. Heroin, 3. Cigarettes, 2. Potato Chips, 1. Love. Who knew? 


The perils of Facebook for the young and accomplished Jon Favreau.
Favreau-facebook
A pretty cool mini-doc of Camp Organic, the somewhat self-indulgent boot camp from the boys and girls at the biggest little digital shop. (The vid below is from a couple years ago, though. Apparently this years wasn't good enough to offer an embed on YouTube. Caution - respect declining quickly...)


Only a few days left til Christmas. If you're still struggling, let Darryland the Plaid Nation lead the way.



CMO: Holy shit,this viral thing is gonna be huge!
Staffer: Yeah, Domino's did one not too long ago.
CMO: What the fuck? You idiot! Where is our viral? Give me viral, damnit!
Staffer: But...
CMO: Now!


And Pizza Hut demeans us all with this horribly unfunny, off-brand, waste of time. (Side note: why not tag this pizza hut, as if no one knew that thiis was paid? Seriously, I tried searching for Pizza Hut and YouTube and couldn't find it.


 

And for the "But they got 200k views!!" crowd. This has more (and is awesome).


Another Trip Around the Internets

in

A Giant Beach Ball.

I'm not sure if there is such a thing as something that isn't cool even if you made it really, really big. Except for monsters. That would not be cool. Apparently this happened in Dallas and I fucking missed it.

Gladwell with a few examples from his new book, Outliers, starting with the creative struggle of Fleetwood Mac, and on to the 10,000 hour rule. The rule essentially states that to be an expert at anything you have to do it for 10,000 hours. The crazy thing is, it's actually applicable to just about everybody. Probably more on this later. (ps - make your video embeddable AIGA. Jeez.)


A website from Jack McKee dedicated to the 90-9-1 principle. As in, in a website ecosystem 90% of the audience is passive, 9% are editors (or critics) and 1% are creating original content.


Kickass new iPhone app. Basically, take a picture of any book, dvd, cd - and get pricing and reviews from competitors. Pretty cool.


...in a way only she could. Fantastic.


Creative Director from Frog Design coins the next annoyingly overused term, this time to describe the act of changing spaces to disrupt perceptions of that space, basically. 

The brilliant Richard Huntington challenges the notion that good ideas come from anywhere. Or basically says that they could, just don't bet on it.