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I have to admit it, I get fant­ast­ic­ally excited by Web 2.0. As much as I love many of the com­pan­ies that have appeared on the back of the tech­no­logy, I love it for more nos­tal­gic reas­ons too.

I got into this busi­ness back in the day when the web was just com­ing on-stream, got my first inter­net account with Com­puserve, read my first issues of Wired and Mondo 2000, and believed this stuff was going to change the world.

Of course it has changed the world (almost uni­ver­sally for the bet­ter in my opin­ion) but it hasn’t been plain sail­ing. The hype behind the dot com boom even­tu­ally ended in a blaze of bank­ruptcies and busi­ness went off a cliff. We entered dark, cau­tious times that, frankly, weren’t much fun for any­one involved.

Which brings me back to nos­tal­gia. Web 2.0 for me rep­res­ents a renewed optim­ism. We have new com­pan­ies being born every day (see Tech­Crunch US or UK for details). We also have some dying too (although gen­er­ally with less VC cash attached this time). And we poten­tially have a redefin­i­tion of the rela­tion­ship between com­pan­ies and their customers.

But is it all just another bubble? Are we kid­ding ourselves into another over-optimistic ver­sion of the internet-as-nirvana argu­ment? And will this really spell the begin­ning of a Cluetrain–inspired mar­ket­ing 2.0?

This is prob­ably the biggest con­ver­sa­tion we’re hav­ing at Ban­ner right now. Opin­ion ranges from the “this will change everything, start­ing now” end of the spec­trum to the “only blog­gers are influ­enced by blog­gers let’s get on with the real job” end. We don’t have all the answers, I’m not sure any­one has, but it’s a really import­ant con­ver­sa­tion for any­one involved in tech­no­logy marketing.

To this end, we hav­ing a bit of a get-together we’re call­ing Inside the bubble on the even­ing of 9^th Octo­ber. We’ve invited some friends, some cli­ents and some smart people who have inter­est­ing per­spect­ives Web 2.0. We’ve also booked out the Ser­pent­ine Gal­lery Pavil­ion (the cos­mic egg as they’re call­ing it) just before it’s going to be closed and taken down. It should be pretty cool. It’s a panel dis­cus­sion style event so no Power­Point or end­less speeches just the chance to ask people from the likes of Tech­Crunch UK, Google and etribes among oth­ers for their take on what Web 2.0 means for tech­no­logy marketing.

Any­way, we’d love to see you there so con­sider your­self invited (click here to find out more and to register).

After all the run up, the end­less pre­par­a­tions, the extra pairs of socks, our Byte Night team came out the other side unscathed and raised over £5,500 in the process.

All eyes were on the weather on Fri­day as it looked like they might be bet­ter off build­ing an ark than zip­ping up a sleep­ing bag. In the end it stayed dry and our team of Rod, Belinda, Nikki and Katie got a lux­uri­ous 4 hours sleep before being woken by the chimes of Big Ben and the joy of dew-sodden clothes.

A huge thank you to every­one who sponsored us, who let us cash in favours and who put in the hours to help make the event a success.

And it’s not too late to help us add to the total. You can donate here.

No I’m not try­ing to fill space with noth­ing to say (even though it’s Fri­day). For any­one work­ing in an agency, the lorem ipsum text is prob­ably the one pas­sage of copy they see most in their pro­fes­sional lives. If they are an art dir­ector or designer they usu­ally wish that all copy could be like lorem ipsum. If it doesn’t fit, simply lose a few let­ters out of a word here or a word there. Copy­writers, how­ever, bemoan the fact that their copy will have to fit a pre-set word limit that’s been cre­ated just to look good in the layout.

The ques­tion that always comes up at some point is: what does it mean? Explan­a­tion of its roots can be found at Lipsum.com. From the site:

Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply ran­dom text. It has roots in a piece of clas­sical Latin lit­er­at­ure from 45 BC, mak­ing it over 2000 years old. Richard McClin­tock, a Latin pro­fessor at Hampden-Sydney Col­lege in Vir­ginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, con­sect­etur, from a Lorem Ipsum pas­sage, and going through the cites of the word in clas­sical lit­er­at­ure, dis­covered the undoubt­able source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sec­tions 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, writ­ten in 45 BC. This book is a treat­ise on the the­ory of eth­ics, very pop­u­lar dur­ing the Renais­sance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in sec­tion 1.10.32.

As to the mean­ing, it comes from a treat­ise about pleas­ure, toil and pain (this feels some­how appro­pri­ate). A full trans­la­tion can be found here – although the lorem ipsum we use today is a bit scrambled from the ori­ginal. The Ipsum.com site has a Lorem gen­er­ator as does Subterrane.com (along with other non-lorem passages).

Of course you don’t have to go the Latin route (ged­dit?). Using the Jab­ber­wocky XTen­sion in QuarkX­Press you can select from a range of texts (includ­ing Esper­anto and Klin­gon). I’ve also seen some agen­cies write their own spoof copy (although the one time I tried this the first per­son to look at the concept got half way through the copy before real­ising which reduced the impact some­what). But my favour­ite text gen­er­ator so far can be found at Malevole.com – if only all copy was so quick to create.

Tech­no­logy mash-ups are all the rage right now. It’s seems to be a byproduct of the web 2.0 / open source mind­set. With so many com­pan­ies releas­ing the source code to sig­ni­fic­ant parts of their soft­ware, it’s become easier than ever to spawn new services.

The daddy on this is Google Maps which has been mashed more times than a sack full of spuds. It’s been mashed with BBC News to give BBC News Maps so you can see where top stor­ies are com­ing from (and run the other way). Com­bine it with a whole bunch of oth­ers and you get Weather Bonk (not sure how well that trans­lates into UK Eng­lish) that shows the weather where you are without you hav­ing to look out the win­dow. It’s even been mashed with Flickr to cre­ate Dog Friendly Hotels. In fact, the Pro­gram­mableWeb site lists over 500 oth­ers using Google Maps and over 1,000 mash-ups in total.

There are, of course, mash-up mar­ket­ing oppor­tun­it­ies for com­pan­ies both in terms of cre­at­ing new ser­vices and in how they com­mu­nic­ate and engage with cus­tom­ers. Rod Ban­ner covered a new ser­vice idea in a recent edi­tion of BiteMe (our reg­u­lar news­let­ter) where social net­work­ers could use their own prestige and con­nec­tions to sell per­son­al­ised products (eg Nik­eID gear) – you can read the art­icle here.

Surely this is just the begin­ning. Increas­ingly, com­mu­nic­a­tions must have intrinsic value in their own right over and above their inform­a­tional con­tent. Enga­ging with the cus­tomer, part­ner­ing with them to cre­ate solu­tions, enter­tain­ing them in inter­act­ive, non-linear ways – these are the char­ac­ter­ist­ics typi­fy­ing more and more suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing ini­ti­at­ives today.

We can do this inter­act­ively through adding mashed func­tion­al­ity into inter­act­ive comms. Or we can take on a mashed mind­set to cre­ate more effect­ive, more integ­rated cam­paigns. The res­ult, I believe, will be deeper, more endur­ing rela­tion­ships with cus­tom­ers (plus, we’ll have more fun in the process).

Source: Pro­gram­mableWeb (via Val­ley­Wag).

Ah the 80s. When men were men. When women were men. And when most chil­dren were men too. When the hair was a big as the expense accounts. And when advert­ising ruled.

Fri­day saw Ban­ner turn back the clock to the 80s with Power Dress­ing Fri­day. Ban­ner­ites from across the com­pany dus­ted off their braces, put on their whitest white socks and their best Face-magazine pouts.

The day was to raise money for Byte Night, the tech industry’s annual sleep out in aid of NCH, the children’s char­ity. The actual event takes place over night on Fri­day (22^nd Septem­ber) and we are still look­ing for more spon­sors for our team. The team includes Katie and Nikki (pic­tured with Graeme above) and you can spon­sor them here. Just 3 days left, alto­gether: “I feel the need, the need for speed.” (Sorry.)

Viral Video Chart is a site that works out how con­ta­gious viral videos are by the num­ber of times they are linked to or embed­ded in other sites.

From the site:

We scan sev­eral mil­lion blogs a day to see which online videos people are talk­ing about the most. We count the num­ber of times each video is linked to and the num­ber of times each video is embed­ded. Every morn­ing, after we’ve had a cup of cof­fee, we pub­lish a list of the 25 videos that gen­er­ated the most buzz over the pre­vi­ous day. We reckon this is a pretty good yard­stick of what’s hot and what’s not.

Is it inter­est­ing? Yes (although dis­cov­er­ing what’s hot is a depress­ing exper­i­ence). Is it per­fect? No. It doesn’t allow you search and there’s no way to find out any stats behind the vids (some mash-up with Google Trends or Alexa’s traffic rank­ings would be ideal here).

Per­son­ally, I prefer YouTube’s most viewed and most linked pages which give more inform­a­tion – albeit only from a single site. It will be inter­est­ing to see how Viral Video Chart evolves over time and whether it can add more depth to its offering.

Source: Xeep’s video on the net

ChangeEverything.ca is a new com­munity site based on the area around Van­couver. It’s essen­tially a large com­munity site focused on ideas about mak­ing the area a bet­ter place (although as a con­firmed Vancouver-phile I find this concept per­plex­ing). In some ways the site is sim­ilar to A year of liv­ing gen­er­ously but it’s not a not-for-profit project.

The reason I’m talk­ing about it here is that, as much as it has a not-for-profit feel to it, the site is in fact fun­ded by local bank Van­city. To quote from their part of the site (sorry, it’s a bit long):

So maybe you’re won­der­ing… why is Van­city cre­at­ing an online com­munity? Why would a bank care about any­thing other than its products and sales?

First of all, and this is import­ant, this site is NOT a place where Van­city will sell you mort­gages, term depos­its and accounts. (To every­one who was just aching to find a place where we’d bom­bard you with annu­it­ies come-ons: sorry if we yanked your chain.)

Second, and more fun­da­ment­ally, Van­city isn’t a bank. We’re a community-based fin­an­cial insti­tu­tion that is as inter­ested in mak­ing our com­munity work as it is in mak­ing money. And these days, com­munity is more and more about what hap­pens online, which is why we’re so inter­ested in the Web’s poten­tial for sup­port­ing com­munity devel­op­ment in the Lower Main­land and Victoria.

We have a triple bot­tom line, which means that we don’t gauge our suc­cess merely on our prof­it­ab­il­ity, but also on how we are help­ing the com­munit­ies and improv­ing the envir­on­ment where we do business.

As an exer­cise in cre­at­ing rela­tion­ships with cus­tom­ers, I really like the site. It has a deft­ness of touch and con­fid­ence you don’t see often. The writ­ing is good too.

It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how well Chan­geEverything works in terms of com­munity par­ti­cip­a­tion. It will live or die on how many people take up the idea and get involved. At the moment it has a rel­at­ively lim­ited num­ber of act­ive par­ti­cipants but to be fair, it is new.

Per­son­ally, I wish it well.

Source: Tech­Crunch

When it’s a walk­ing tour, a music les­son, a serial book.

Over on the Future­lab blog, Karl Long has an inter­est­ing art­icle on uncom­mon uses of pod­cast­ing which cov­ers these applic­a­tions and a num­ber of oth­ers. I par­tic­u­larly like Karl’s semi-throwaway sug­ges­tion of an altern­ate com­ment­ary for movies – although why stop there, why not re-voice entire movies?

I also recently read of pod­casts being used as pseudo-personal train­ing guides. Handy when you need that little extra motiv­a­tion to keep you on track – just…eight…more…push-ups…

I’ve also seen pod­casts are also used as med­it­a­tion aids – over at Zen­cast, one of the first pod­casts they put up was a set of 5÷10÷20 minute silences which ended with a single bell chime. This solved the “I won­der how long I’ve been sit­ting here maybe I’ll just look at my watch – is that all?” problem.

There is noth­ing to say that a pod­cast must fol­low the down­load­able radio show format – this is like say­ing all web­sites should look like magazines. And with the expec­ted growth of video pod­cast­ing (sorry, can’t use the term vod­cast­ing with a straight face) who knows where the tech­no­logy will take us?

It’s an old tenet of the inter­net, inform­a­tion wants to be free. And for the most part it is. Some­times over­whelm­ingly so. The deluge of inform­a­tion that hits our inboxes/feed read­ers every day is vast. Even when you screen out the mes­sages invit­ing you to get pre­scrip­tion meds / buy stocks / grow your penis by two inches, there is still more com­ing in than many of us have time to deal with.

I remem­ber years back first dis­cov­er­ing the BBC news site. ‘Great’ I thought, ‘everything I need in one place.’ But there are times you want a dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive, so you flit around from site to site. Then came Google News which nicely aggreg­ated across sources and News­Now which updated every 5 minutes.

But, of course, this was all con­trolled news with an editor decid­ing what I needed to know. Where’s the fun in that?

Now we have social news, news by the people for the people (well OK for the most part links by some of the people for some of the people). The prin­ciple being that col­lect­ively, people are pretty smart (a Wis­dom of Crowds thing). So we have user-driven sites such as Digg – with it’s cur­rent con­tro­versy around users bury­ing stor­ies they dis­agree with – and News­v­ine (my per­sonal favourite).

And now we have Spot­back which claims to be a new breed of per­son­al­ised news ser­vice. Spot­back is tag-based, you set in what you’re inter­ested in when you first go to the site. Then, with a bit of AJAX wiz­ardry, the site gen­er­ates your per­sonal news page which essen­tially looks like many oth­ers. But, the thing about Spot­back is that it learns what you like. You can rate stor­ies, indic­at­ing your pref­er­ences, what you’d like more of and less of. The the­ory goes that over time Spot­back will deliver just the kind of inform­a­tion you want. It’s a nice inter­face which can be eas­ily cus­tom­ised and can deliver news in an RSS feed.

Of course, when I have a ser­vice that can pre­dict pre­cisely what I want to see, feed­ing me the kind of news that I’m sure to agree with, the fear is I’ll miss out on the unex­pec­ted, the chal­len­ging, the down­right uncom­fort­able even.

Maybe it’s time to go back to the BBC.

Since the intro­duc­tion of Intel-powered Macs, there have been a num­ber of devel­op­ments prom­ising the abil­ity to run Win­dows on a Mac. Typ­ic­ally this has either been through a dual-boot approach such as Apple’s own Boot Camp or the run within OS X vir­tual machine approach of Par­al­lels Desktop.

Now soft­ware com­pany Codeweavers, how­ever, is prom­ising the abil­ity to run Win­dows applic­a­tions within OS X but without requir­ing a copy of the Win­dows OS. The product is Cros­sOver Mac and looks very interesting.

From the website:

Cros­sOver Mac allows you to install your favor­ite Win­dows applic­a­tions and games on Mac OS X. Cros­sOver includes an easy to use, single click inter­face, which makes installing Win­dows soft­ware simple and fast. Once installed, your applic­a­tion integ­rates seam­lessly in OS X. Just click and run your applic­a­tion dir­ectly from the OS X Finder. Click­ing a Win­dows file or doc­u­ment — includ­ing email attach­ments — will launch the appro­pri­ate Win­dows pro­gram, allow­ing you to work on the files. Best of all, you do it all eas­ily and afford­ably, without need­ing a Microsoft oper­at­ing sys­tem license.

The soft­ware is in beta at the moment and you must have an Intel-powered Mac (dam­mit!). Codeweavers are offer­ing a free time-limited ver­sion for users to play with. Ini­tial reports indic­ate that for the most part it works OK (well enough for a beta anyway).

If this approach deliv­ers on prom­ise it will be a boon for those who prefer OS X but need to run Windows-only apps such as Microsoft Pro­ject. It also holds out the vis­ion of a time where applic­a­tions and oper­at­ing sys­tems are largely inde­pend­ent (this is already there in many open source programs).

Of course the real long term ques­tion will not be whether to choose OS X, Win­dows or Linux but whether to go for a hardware-based OS or a web-based one. But that’s for another post.