Trevor Filter studies user experience, mobile commerce and digital marketing at American Express (disclaimer). He lives in NYC. This is his personal tumblelog, which is mostly a conduit for exploring the proper way to use sarcasm on the internet.
This is an amazing ad—not for production value, nor because of the mindblowing fact quoted at the end, but because it shows exactly what Apple’s customers are doing with their iPhones. Even though this ad may star actors, it’s a documentary.
If someone ever thought that someday, humans would be able to drag a camera lens around the earth at any angle; be able to generate on-demand time lapse videos, bound only to roads and a pre-determined point in time; well, they would have been crazy.
But, here we are: Hyperlapse, a beautifully interesting video project by Teehan+Lax Labs.
This is internet produsage at its finest—users unlocking their own “stories” from a vast library of open content originally intended for a far more practical application. Jon Lax has a nice post on how the project came together.
Gen Ip returns for the third year in a row with an edited collection of curated movie goodness—an elegant tribute to the stories told on film over the past twelve months. (For reference: the full list of this year’s movies, and the compilations from 2011 and 2010.)
Although it seems like Cloud Atlas’s Tom Hanks narrates most of the dramatic clips, the end result is uniquely sentimental… I’m starting to look forward to this every year.
What do you do when someone name-drops your brand on the internet? In today’s day and age, you respond in kind, with your tongue firmly in cheek.
This week, both BuzzFeed and Flickr have proven that it’s just as possible for a brand to take back “the conversation” from internet meme artists as it is for that conversation to happen in the first place—turning provocation into self-promotion, and earning them loyal followers in the process.
No less than a day after Jory John posted a column of “Suggested Buzzfeed Articles” to McSweeney’s, poking fun at the often absurd collections of content aggregated by the site, BuzzFeed set out to make the list a reality, including:
Thus, BuzzFeed turned a one-off spoof into an even better joke—and they were grateful for it! Granted, playing along meant embracing the public perception of BuzzFeed as a haven for preposterous internet linkbait, but that’s precisely the point: if part of playing nice on the internet means taking your brand a little less seriously, it’s better to be known for wit than labeled a spoilsport. (Don’t believe me? Just ask Taco Bell.)
The same day, upon hearing that Marissa Mayer was leaving Google become CEO of Yahoo!, many took an opportunity to propose advice, among them venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, ex-Yahoo! employee Sriram Krishnan, and AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. (Fortunately for Yahoo!, Mayer probably knows better than to take most of it.)
But one single serving site* in particular—dearmarissamayer.com—pleaded on behalf of “the internet” that in her new role, she would work to make beloved photo community site Flickr (a.k.a., the original social network) “awesome again.” And rather than respond with consternation, embarrassment, or worse—nothing at all—a few Flickr employees took it upon themselves to repurpose the self-proclaimed “internet’s” empty plea for awesomeness into a recruiting campaign (emphasis mine):
Dear Internet, Thanks! Come help us make Flickr awesomer! flickr.com/jobs
Replete with a new call-to-action and a healthy dose of nods to the original (hint: view source), Flickr jumped on the opportunity to demonstrate precisely why it’s not yet sunk: easy-going employees, a sense of humor, and the upbeat attitude that’s attracted talent from day one**. It wasn’t a cinch for Flickr to build a new website on whim, but judging by Twitter’s reaction to #dearinternet, it was well worth it.
Yes, today it takes considerable effort for a brand to stay relevant, because thanks to stars and likes, word of mouth spreads faster than ever before. “Success” in social media is fast and fleeting, and it mandates levity, guts and timeliness. But taking a part in your brand’s public perception isn’t a lost cause—in fact, it’s an undertaking rewarded many times over.
Just one word of advice: before you set out to conquer anonymous hordes of customers on social media, beware that the tides of tweets, likes and shares are unrelenting and unpredictable. After all—it’s only Friday.
* “Single Serving Site” is a term coined by Jason Kottke to describe one-page sites with a sole purpose that live at a dedicated domain name. Examples include umbrellatoday.com, isitchristmas.com, and more.
** See also: the official Flickr sport of Faceball.
Clothes hangers in a Brazilian outpost of European fashion chain C&A have electronic counters that display the realtime number of Facebook “Likes” for any particular article of clothing. C&A calls it “Fashion Like,” which sounds like a brilliant convergence of consumerism and social proof to me (via Marginal Revolution).
Source: marginalrevolution.com
If Zuckerberg had been one of the Stanford scientists’ subjects, the colleague jokes, Facebook would never have been created: He’d still be sitting in a room somewhere, not eating marshmallows.
— Henry Blodget, relating a Facebook employee’s metaphor for the self control behind Mark Zuckerberg’s success, in terms of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification in children. Discussing Zuckerberg’s missteps, his prescience, and his rise to power as one of the more visionary CEOs in the world, Blodget’s report for New York magazine on the “Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man” is well worth a read.
Just beautiful: “Type City” is a composition of metal letterpress type arranged to imitate skyscrapers, streets and piers (compare to one of Jang’s previous works depicting a larger city with no coasts). Related, an earlier paper by Jeremiah Dittmar of American University, exploring the interplay of the printing press and “extraordinary subsequent economic dynamism at the city level,” making Jang’s piece all the more gratifying (via jsm).
Source: davidbsmithgallery.com
Trevor: What would you do if I wasn't here to answer every question you had?
Lindsay: I would be like a guy in any video game I play, since I am so bad at video games.
Lindsay: My guy is always walking into the wall.
Lindsay: Or into some corner, unable to turn around.
Lindsay: That guy is a metaphor for me.
