Edit your own Radiohead video

For fans of switched on b(r)ands, Radiohead are always worth watching.

Certainly they know how to use the web to their advantage. Having inaugurated 2008 with a live New Year's Eve webcast from their Oxford studio, they are seeing it out with a terrific piece of interactive marketing hosted by Japanese TV station Wowow in celebration of the fact that their world tour is about to hit Japan.

The idea is simple, the execution characteristically stylish. Visitors to Wowow can create their own video to '15 Step' in real time, choosing between 12 different rainbow-coloured camera angles. As a way of communicating the excitement of Radiohead in concert, it sure beats goggling at YouTube.

You can view my humble efforts here:

Google Zeitgeist 2008

This year's Google Zeitgeist figures are out here. As the googlers point out it is nice to explore 'the big events, memorable moments and emerging trends that captivated us in 2008' that they gather from the billions of search queries that we type into the Google search box every day. A few highlights;

UK Fastest Rising Searches

1. iplayer
2. facebook
3. iphone
4. youtube
5. yahoo mail
6. large hadron collider
7. obama
8. friv
9. cam4
10. jogos

Top how to's

1. how to draw
2. how to kiss
3. how to write

Top cocktails

1. martini
2. mojito
3. margarita

Going native

You'll probably already know that some months back Google released their own browser called Chrome. Its pretty cool, integrates search well and breaks occasionally. From a comms point of view the book they released to get across the technology and approach they took is a nice touch.

Despite pretty slow growth for the browser they announced at Le Web today that it will be coming out of beta (oddly perhaps as gmail is still in beta and is a lot longer in the tooth!). What they also announced very recently is the launch of a thing called Native Client.

Currently applications running on a machine can leverage all of its power, however browser-based apps have much less to play with. Native Client will mean we can build applications that use all the native power from within the browser.

This is significant for a couple of reasons; first it suggests that Google are of the feeling that the browser as it stands is some way short of what is needed for a fulfilling web experience. Second it means we will be able to build web applications that can do some of the heavy lifting like graphic and video manipulation, full blown gaming, 3d and more. Combine this with the offline power of Gears and you have the potential to do some completely new things with your browser based app.

Smoke without fire? Branding without logos?

An interesting article here about a study conducted with smokers to establish their response to branded and unbranded imagery.

http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=132845

It seems the little grey cells (at least those with the addiction) are even more stimulated without the logo, when there is the association but without the explicit mark. That whirring at the back of your head when you recognise a single identity element sounds familiar though, doesn't it?

Splice of life

You've probably seen word clouds like these scattered across the web representing tag clouds on blogs or other sites. If you just want to create your own you can use wordle to generate clouds from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. This is one based on what we do (at least what we say we do here)

Designer launches collection - in lego animation...

JCDC Versus LEGO from Four H.

Have a play with Now!

Take a look at this site from sprint - basically a collection of little flash widgets that collect data from across the internet on things that are happening now.. Watch the number of eggs produced grow, alongside the webcam from the boston aquarium. See how many houses are being built - with the top google searches of the day and the number of seconds to go until national Donut day... (if that's what interests you!)

You'll be ectatic to hear that the top word being used online now is 'the' but that number 107 is 'er'. There's some nicely designed little animations in here and an interesting look at how data drawn from the web needn't look like its just been generated in excel.


http://now.sprint.com/widget/

look no hands! have you tried google's voice activated search (on the iphone)?