(via The subtitles hijack | Adverblog)
Hey look - a method of screwing with piracy that actually seems inventive.
(That said, this is actually a terrible advertising idea, because, though clever, it’s based entirely on 1) pissing people off, and 2) wasting their time. I can’t imagine anyone who just downloaded intentionally incorrect subtitles, would be interested in paying money to the people screwing with them.)
Data centres, the server farms that handle internet traffic, have emerged as voracious users of electrical power. They already account for 2% of global power demand, according to research by the campaigning group Greenpeace, conducted several years ago
BBC News - Inside Facebook’s green and clean arctic data centre
A nice reminder that the internet is part of real life, and has impact there. Nothing virtual about massive data centres.
I love the idea of repurposing common elements to send a message, and I always wonder why we don’t do more of it online.
The common UX elements of a web interface are more than a decade old, at this point. We have new innovations, sure, but they aren’t so confusing that we need to insist on standardization.
We can embellish to add an extra layer of meaning.
We can create experiential web advertising, is what I’m saying.
And we should start now.
ABBOT MEAD VICKERS (UK) for The Economist
The Economist always has fantastic ads, because they have a great core premise - Smart People read the Economist.
This can be flattering, aspirational, motivational or insulting - but it always says something, because everyone agrees being smart is better than the alternative.
They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.
Advertisers have been complaining for the past year – the $5 billion one — about Facebook’s unwieldy collection of advertising products, Facebook product manager Fidji Simo said in a blog post. As a result, Facebook will pull many ad options it had previously touted, like allowing owners of Facebook pages to embed native coupons, or “Offers” in Facebook parlance. The number of ad units will fall from 37 to less than half of that.
In a Shift, Facebook Says It Will Make All Ads Social | Wired Business | Wired.com
Facebook has needed to do this for a while. A clearer, more concise ad offering makes life easier for everyone, and makes it simpler for Facebook’s sales team to have a playbook to work from.
That, and the amount of time agencies and ad optimization companies have spent learning to game the system, and finding the flaws in performance AND reporting in Facebook paid media, doing less, and doing it right, is probably a good call.
The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.
The fact that this only terrifies me a little, tells me we’ve been living post-privacy for a while now.
“The Curalate team, including a computer vision PhD and a dedicated in-house data scientist, recently did some intensive number crunching on that database, sampling 500,000 images and distilling from them half a dozen or so characteristics that seem to distinguish popular Pinterest images. Then, at our request, they identified one ideal picture that best combines these characteristics. And that image is at right.” (via This Is the Perfect Pinterest Picture, According to Science | Wired Business | Wired.com)
The interesting thing about digital communications is that you can mine data to define what box you should be thinking in.
The downside of digital communications is that some people think good content can be procedural.
Data should be an input, not an output, is what I’m saying. The human factor matters.
Amazing work. Completely transcending what ‘poster’ means to most people, and doing it in a way that’s true to the culture and community that the client focuses on.
It also doesn’t hurt that I’m wearing urbanears headphones right now, and love them.
Just perfect.
(via http://www.adverblog.com/2013/06/03/urban-ears-scratch-poster)
5 reasons I’m glad Yahoo! bought Tumblr.
1. Tumblr needed the runway and support (otherwise they wouldn’t have cashed out, rather than raising another round)
2. Mayer has something to prove. She has to convince the world that she can make Yahoo relevant again. She’s too smart to screw up Tumblr by undermining what it is.
3. Leadership stays the same.
4. The lessons of Flickr and GeoCities are etched on the brain of every Yahoo employee at this point. They won’t fail the same way twice, not at this scale.
5. Tumblr needs some adult supervision. The one step forward, one step back approach to ad / revenue innovations and products, rightly or wrongly, screams ‘no plan’. That’s a perception that needs correcting.
I’m still very convinced that Tumblr is something important in the internet today. I just don’t think anyone knows what this is yet. The Yahoo buy gives us a chance to find out.
