As well as indulging in “Pimp My Hyde” at lunchtime (decking Tom out in ridiculous clothing for the afternoon), we’ve been taking part in typography Friday this afternoon.
This is a nice Flickr group where you post up your typography every Friday. Simple.
This week I went pretty simple with an easy pixel font, but presented in pink post-it notes against a light-up wall we’ve got at the end of one of our benches.
I could post-rationalise it with talk about the medium that’s written on being used to write, but I think that might be a bit self indulgent. Anyways, here it is:
We’ve been discussing what makes a good viral of late. It would seem that (obviously) a key factor is relevancy – make a video of stuff that people are watching right now and you’re more likely to be swept up in a nice little meme.
Consumers are fed up of seeing brands fan sites pop up all over the web, with little or no thought to the value they can offer that community. They’re tired of hanging out in their favourite virtual world only to be interrupted by companies who have nothing to say. Consumers are savvy and are not prepared to be marketed to in the traditional way any longer. Social Media has all the power of an adult but is behaving like a teenager.
Jam are returning to the Social Media World Forum to look at the value that Social Media can offer if only it would grow up.
Come and chat to us on stand 16, or see what Alex and Oli have to say at the conference.
Monday 15th, 2.50: “Social Media is out of control” Alex Miller & Oli Newton
Tuesday 16th, 10.30: “Benchmarking Advertising on Social Networks”
Alex Miller
If you read my previous post from last week you might be aware that I am not a big fan of Google’s new release, Google Buzz. Honestly, I feel that the release of the iPad is equally ridiculous. They have both created products for non-existing markets. The market Google Buzz operates in is already saturated, and Apple is offering a product that sits in-between two product categories (mobile and laptop) without any of the benefits! Both Google Buzz and the iPad are considered to be the two giants’ major releases for Q1 2010, and have therefore generated a lot of discussion. However, they have also receive a lot of critique (not just from me) among all praise.
I want to see which one is considered to be the bigger failure? Or am I wrong? Are they both products that will revolutionise respective industry? Please answer the poll, and if you consider me to be wrong, please tell me why in the comments field!
(This post and poll represents my own opinions and thoughts, and not those of Jam)
It does however, do exactly what it sets out to do: explain social media in plain English.
It also makes me think of ice cream which is never a bad thing.
As all you Gmail users probably are aware, this morning Google launched a new leap into the Social Media space. They call it Google Buzz, and it works very similarly to Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” sharing functionality:
You are able to share thoughts, links, photos, videos, RSS feeds etc. What sets it apart from Facebook, aside from one obvious thing, is that you are able to pull in content from your social networks or utilities such as Picasa, flickr, Google Reader and Twitter. This is a great functionality that facebook is lacking, and will probably do so due to equal lack of collaboration partners. All this is done straight through your Gmail account and is shared to your Gmail contacts. You are able to follow peoples’ Buzz feeds, or bring in random content from all your contacts.
Of course this has taken Twitter by storm (around 3,189 tweets over the last 6 minutes on ‘Google Buzz”) , and is the second highest ranking topic at the moment. However, even though it holds high share of buzz, it is not really received well:
According to me the biggest difference between Buzz and Facebook is also why I don’t think it will revolutionise the Social Media world: Gmail is not the forum where you want to share thoughts, party pictures or funny videos to everyone. My contacts in Gmail differ quite a lot from my friends in Facebook. Even Twitter gets around this problem due to a level of anonymity within the micro blog. As I have used my Gmail account for professional correspondence, I run the risk of sharing my content to unintended recipients.
Even though it could be considered a nice effort by Google to try to break into even another space, I don’t think they will succeed. I use my Gmail account for sending emails, for which it is great, but that’s what I will continue to do, nothing more. I’m not saying that Google hasn’t succeeded before in branching out, but this time they are moving in the wrong direction.
But an even more important question, what happened to Google Wave? I haven’t heard anything about it over the last months. This email system that was going to revolutionise the email world, did it flop?
I’ve been into anlalogue photography for the last year or so, messing around with a Holga, Diana F+ and more recently a Seagull and Lubitel. I think the charm’s in the unpredictability of using the cameras, and also in the way each distorts the image (the latter two cameras do this a bit less than the former two).
An aspect of analogue photography that has pretty much disappeared now is instant film. Polaroid used to produce this, but stopped in 2008 because few people were buying it.
A group of Polaroid photographers have taken it upon themselves to resurrect the production of instant film; The Impossible Project are setting about restarting the manufacture of new types of instant film in a factory in the Netherlands.
However, production seems to have hit a snag, and “an unexpected surprise of impossibility within production occured on the weekend of February 6th”. The Impossible Project haven’t really said much more than that, apart from moving their press conference announcing their product launch back to the tail-end of March.
So, will instant film be available again soon, or will we start to see analogue photography fade away?
I took this. Down the Social with the Diana and a fisheye lense.
Tired of being skint and paying through the nose for dinner, our dear friends stateside have turned to underground ‘supper clubs’. The concept involves inviting people into your home where the host cooks and guests pay for the experience. You get to eat with people you’d probably never had met, nose about in someone’s private abode and the whole experience feels rather.. well.. ‘social’. Increasingly supper clubs are popping up across London and at Jam we’re keen to get involved.
The internet is a magical place. Everyone with access to their local public library is able to create their own space and furnish it with whatever takes their fancy.
Two particular things that seem to take a lot of people’s fancy is cats and style-blogs-featuring-photos-of-real-people-on-the-street-looking-like-they-should-be-in-a-magazine, namely The Sartorialist and it’s many homages.
Some crafty individual has taken the conch and decided that surely the best way to fame and fortune is to combine the two, the result is The Catorialist. Taking it’s design cues (as so many do) from the pared down standard ‘I don’t care much for CSS’ blogger template, the catorialst does for cats what the Sartorialist does for fashion – namely featuring beautiful images with minimal description, and encouraging debate and discussion.
Being Friday and the end of a somewhat busy week I was delighted to come across this video. I feel that such machines should exist in every work place.
Coca Cola invites college students in the U.S to experience the happiness factory via “the happiness machine”. When visiting their vending machine they get a little more than expected.
So far it has racked up 1,223,441 views on YouTube. The only distribution sources for the video were a tweet from the Coke Twitter account and their Facebook fan page. Interactive YouTube feature have been used to great effect as the video finishes with a call to action “Share the Happiness” alongside the question “Where will the happiness strike next?”.
