ouroboros

Jeff Goldblum, Harrison Ford and the web nearly die.

"Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth."

"It could go down as the biggest mobile event in history...people wanted to keep tabs on this story, but if you're an accountant you're supposed to be working on your spreadsheet. So they were using their personal cell phones to do so,"

CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke...Twitter crashed as users saw multiple "fail whales"...Google Trends rated the...story as "volcanic."

Neda?  Iran?  Iraq?  Sanford?  Korea?

MJ.

But in the midst of the MJ tsunami that crippled the web last week, a fake story about the death of actor Jeff Goldblum (and Harrison Ford) starting making the rounds, requiring public debunking.  It was this site that generated the spoof celebrity death stories - the Goldblum and Ford riffs were spread through social nets, twitter, etc, and became "trending topics" - a near-guarantor of exponential meme proliferation.

Generating templated fictional stories that then index well on search engines and proliferate through social media (impacting organic and paid search results) was the strategy behind W+K's 2009 Silver Cyber Lion-winning "Swaggerize Me" effort for P&G's Old Spice.

As Linnie Rawlinson and Nick Hunt reported for CNN in regards to the fast spread of fake news:  "The Web can disseminate news -- but like any form of communication it can also help us create what we expect to see next."  Or - don't believe what they tell you about Mark Hamill.

W+K @ Cannes

W+K has four entries shortlisted for this year's Cannes Cyberlions.  Work on behalf of Nokia ('Music Almighty' and 'Somebody Else's Phone), Laika (Integrated campaign for the feature film 'Coraline') and Old Spice ("Swaggerize Me") has been highlighted.  And some nice props for our Nokia partner agencies FarFar for their E66 and E71 'Unloader' work, and R/GA for their N-series 'Vine' work.

Alice.com - would you buy CPG's from this old woman?

I know - I was hoping for something else, too.  And if you are looking for Mr. Cooper's August 2009 midwest tour dates and locations, click here.  Or listen to him now while you read.


sooo...was hanging on Mashable, when I came across their positive review of newly launched Alice.com - though a Web Van investor posted a "get serious"-type comment.

In the "I-can't-believe-anyone-would-do-this-but-hey-the-offers-aren't-half-bad-and-shipping-is-free" category, Alice.com offers some interesting tools, a decent product selection for launch, and lets you both buy your regular CPG purchase items direct (w/ free shipping via UPS) and/or set preferences and receive (email) reminders on when to restock. 

blah blah blah.

But one feature really stood out for me: the way alice.com uses coupons to create value and urgency using three variables - # of personal uses each coupon afforded, the offer expiration date, and the remaining number of available uses for the offer.  See the sample below on Old Spice:



Amy Jo Kim would be proud.  If you haven't seen her presentation on putting the "Fun in Functional", it's worth a read:

Putting the Fun in Functional

View more OpenOffice presentations from amyjokim.

conspiracy thought #42: when it wakes

<wtf>

I'll go back to advertising in a second, but humor me:

We increasingly use technology to externalize our inner life, and in so doing become an interconnected web of socio-cultural dendrite/axon linkages across social nets and microblog tools, newly capable of collective/connective action.  These micro-thoughts accrete to an outsourced 'collective unconscious' in the cloud - the new "reservoir of the experiences of our species."

Buddhist thought calls the dichotomy between inner and outer, between self and other, 'maya', or illusion. 

So what if we aren't individuals, per se, but in reality, 6 billion neurons, creating linkages and meaning for a mind that's slowly waking up with each new neuron that connects to the whole?  The world coming on line, connecting, a being shrugging off sleep in geologic time?  And when Jormagundr finally releases his tail, we're just an intergalactic Willy Loman with a meeting to make? 

Or that our new/accelerating interconnections aren't creating something new, but unleashing/unveiling something very very old?

And when it wakes, we go back to just being a billion bizarre little neurons in a greater consciousness?

"In the mythology of the Aztecs...the present fifth epoch is called Nahui-Olin (Sun of Earthquake), which began in 3113 BC and will end on December 24, 2011. It will be the last destruction of human existence on Earth. The date coincides closely with that determined by the brothers McKenna in The Invisible Landscape as “the end of history” indicated by their computer analysis of the ancient Chinese oracle-calendar, the I Ching. The Mayan calendar comes to an end on Sunday, December 23, 2012"

Or will someone hit snooze for another millenia or two and give us a shot?

</wtf>

alright, alright, I'll go back to looking for a brand using twitter well.

and reading Perry Bible Fellowship comics.

Qik in Iran

Twisualize this:

So I get pinged by Tim Nudd for an Adweek interview via twitter for #tweetfreak on the subject of 'availability'.

then twitter went down.  poetry.  Hopefully its because of the postponed maintenance to help Iranians tweet their streets, but still funny.

At the same time as these shenanigans, Kara Swisher wrote a great piece on Twitter as the Forrest Gump of International Relations -  some choice bits:

"...Harvard University Professor Jonathan Zittrain said: 'It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.'

Zittrain was being quoted in a New York Times piece today about the use of Twitter by those protesting the election results in Iran, as other means of modern mass communications–such as email, Facebook and texting–got blocked.

In other words, Twitter is so simplistic and silly that it is a perfect digital tool to overthrow a government–which is kind of makes the trendy microblogging service the Forrest Gump of international relations.

While not always reliable, masses of people chattering away has always been the most fluid way in which news has been disseminated and received. Although much of that can be mundane and borderline idiotic, one cannot deny its impact.

What one can deny, though, is the hype that inevitably follows in the wake of every one of these breakthrough technologies like Twitter.

That’s a mistake, because it is how the tools are used by people, more than the tools themselves, that should be the focus."

Nice, Kara!

wei?

wei?
Originally uploaded by theshanghaieye

nice...this one off flickr.