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Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category

Pullquote styles

by Henry Copeland
Friday, May 3rd, 2013

The most exciting thing about building a new tool is watching how various creative people decide to use it. Inevitably there are lots of unexpected behaviors and unanticipated idioms. That’s the case with tool that some of our team members are building called Pullquote, which makes it easy to link to a paragraph or idea. Below I’ve documented a few of these different use cases. (Shout if you’d like to help test drive the beta version of Pullquote.)

Wanna link to a paragraph?

by Henry Copeland
Thursday, April 18th, 2013

You may have heard that we’re putting some energy into Pullquote, a new tool that makes it easier for you to link to a paragraph. Let’s say you’re reading a long article and find some key nugget in the 17th paragraph. Rather than tweet a link to the whole article and suggest people “look near the bottom of the page,” you can now use Pullquote to direct readers directly to that paragraph. (Or sentence or even word.) This isn’t for everybody — mostly likely best for power-critics and people who like to share a lot on Twitter. Head over and join the beta if you’re interested.

#FTW: Blogads creation wins IAC “Best Advertising Online”

by Kate Studwell
Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

Blogads, Wieden+Kennedy, and ABC have been presented with the Internet Advertising Competition’s “Best Advertising Online Ad” award for 2013.

The award was given for a series of interstitial ads on PerezHilton.com that responded to reader behavior and tied into the theme of ABC’s “GCB,” which features former nemeses who hide their disdain behind the veil of Southern charm. The show starred Kristen Chenoweth and was produced by Darren Star (of “Sex and the City” fame).

If a reader wanted to tweet a PerezHilton.com story, a pop up reminded them “Thou Shalt Not Tweet More Than 140 Characters.” Other behavior on the site prompted similar commandments, such as “Thou shalt not look at sexy photos” or “Thou shalt not covet another man’s wife” when viewing stories about attractive married celebs.

A big congratulations to our sales, programming, design and project management teams for their work. Thank you IAC!

Blogads joins other IAC prize winners in other categories including The Coca-Cola Company, Target, Huge, and CNN.

[Image via reactiongifs.com]

Dave Winer: Twitter is bleeding the blogs

by Henry Copeland
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012

Dave Winer, a trailblazer in blogging software and all around visionary when it comes to the social web, is increasingly pessimistic about the survival of small and niche blogs in the face of Twitter’s “140-character grunts and snorts.” By extension, Winer sees diminishing coverage of important information niches. He sees a possible solution, networking, but thinks its unlikely: “If we could do more networking on a more regular and systematic basis, that would create incentives for more people to do it [blog], and would build flow independent of Twitter. But blogs work like everything else. Installed leaders don’t generally help upstarts.”

Dave was amazingly prescient in foretelling the exponential wave of people-powered publishing that started with blogging and rolled on through Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram et al. This post from early 1995, titled “Billions of websites,” included this passage: “Every writer can participate in the web. Someday, very soon, I believe, every writer will. That’s the next big opportunity in the online world.”

Wedding photo sharing app

by Henry Copeland
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012

As an avid Instagrammer, I’ve been studying various photo sharing apps closely. I think it’s hilarious that Wedpics, a wedding photo sharing app based in Raleigh, NC, features its CEO prominently in the rocking wedding in the company’s promo video.

Android’s brand problem: 25 different phones for every iPhone [INFOGRAPHIC]

by Nick Faber
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012

I was watching TV at my sister’s house when another commercial for another NEW Android phone aired. “Which one do you have?” she asked me.

“Uh… Droid.. um…” I had to take apart my giant case to remember which HOT NEW model I had gotten just a few months back. And then it hit me. “iPhone users don’t have this problem.”

(more…)

John Cleese on creativity… or procrastination?

by Henry Copeland
Friday, April 13th, 2012

John Cleese argues that taking your time and tolerating the anxiety of not having a solution are crucial to exceptional creativity.

I was always intrigued that one of my Monty Python colleagues, who seemed to be more talented than I was, never produced scripts as original as mine. And I watched for some time and then I began to see why. If he was faced with a problem and fairly soon saw a solution, he was inclined to take it. Even though I think he knew the solution was not very original. (more…)

Is your agency making cool shit — or just talking shit?

by Nick Faber
Monday, March 5th, 2012
Deeplocal's LikeBelt in action
Deeplocal’s LikeBelt in action

You’ve probably heard this question a dozen times in the last year: “Should an agency act like a startup?” Essentially, agencies share key ingredients of agile software companies, like designers, programmers and project managers, but do they have the patience to iterate and persist throughout a profitable product’s lifespan? And is coding products in-house just a great exercise, or is a viable new business model emerging? (more…)

[REPORT] Which book publishers are doing social media best?

by Megan Mitzel
Monday, January 30th, 2012

 

Book publishers vary widely in their use of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest, according to research Blogads assembled in advance of its February 15 Social Media Week panel, “Innovative ways to build community around books.”

Many publishers have adopted Twitter and Facebook, with Randomhouse dominating the former and Scholastic big on the latter. Only a small handful of publishers have started using the other growing social platforms of the moment, with three publishers Pinterest, the photo curation service popular with women, and five using Tumblr.


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Advertising with augmented reality: 11 #AR campaigns from 2011

by Nick Faber
Monday, November 14th, 2011

Augmented reality has an advantage over the QR code when it comes to branding. Rather than directing customers to a URL or video, they allow a brand to interact with the customer’s own world as seen through the viewfinders of mobile devices.

While the QR code will always need to rely on incentive to get people to scan (“free gift!” “uncensored video!”), watching cool stuff interact with your coffee cup or magazine is incentive enough for AR interaction. For now.

Here are 11 campaigns that make the customer’s world a little more CG. And a few that actually provide something useful. (more…)


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