Basée à Helsinki, Janine Rewell est une illustratrice et designer graphique qui utilise énormément les couleurs vives et les formes géométriques pour ses créations. Entre design et folklore, une sélection de ses illustrations « Colorful Design Illustrations » est disponible sur Fubiz dans la suite d’article.
Focus sur le travail de l’artiste brésilien Heitor Seió Kimura qui illustre les Yokaïs, ces créatures fantastiques japonaises. Véritable challenge visuel et hommage à la culture folklorique japonaise, l’artiste les représente superbement et graphiquement. Un travail magnifique à découvrir dans la suite.
If you have a Second Life account, go buy yourself an entire McDonald’s restaurant for $2. Creative possibilities abound. Live in it. Organize protests in it. Or order a photorealistic avatar of your favorite president and put him to work.
This homage to Pulp Fiction was made with Moviestorm.
Moviestorm is a stand-alone (and free) application for machinima production with an impressive list of features. The company claims this is the first such dedicated tool, but you’ll remember The Movies game from a couple of years ago as well as Chrysler’s machinima contest. And while machinima production might be a fringe activity, it’s a “lunatic” fringe: The Movies Online game community website “has around 29,000 Studios with a total of 138,404 movies and all those received more than 803,000 ratings and comments.” (source).
Some of these videos are fan-made interpretations of real commercials, like this one about AllState Insurance:
Gary Koelling from Best Buy talks about Blue Shirt Nation — a social networking site for the company’s employees — and about how to make a project like this survive the inevitable friction and committees:
“In the description of our seminar, it says that we’re going to help you learn how to build a social network of your own. The truth is, and this might make you mad, we don’t think you can. Not because of who you are, or what you believe, or anything personal like that. You won’t be able to do something like this because of your company culture. Like we said, BlueShirt Nation is a fluke. The Best Buy culture wasn’t set up to take on something like this. That’s why its built outside of the IT network, that’s why a couple ad guys run it. At every minute of every day, we still face the challenges that you’ll face in your organization.
There’ll be pressure to build the community fast – bad idea. And you’ll face pressure to do it – good luck. There’ll be a temptation to throw money at it – doesn’t work. You’ll want to believe it does – call me, I’ll talk you down. There’ll be talk of scale – big is better.
The truth is, you’re at the mercy of the people that you’re trying to influence. If you try to force it, its not real and will feel contrived – it’ll backfire.”
“The New York Times in Russian. Tell Americans and the entire world about Russia.”
The New York Times has started an interesting project on LiveJournal (LJ), one of the first blogging platforms that was recently sold to a Russian company. The newspaper picks an article about Russia, translates it in Russian, posts it on a LJ, solicits comments, than translates the comments back to English and posts it under the original article. The newspaper’s editors moderating the site promised, “You’ll see that we are not afraid of critisism and willl post a large number of negative comments in our address.”
The first and so far the only article about the upcoming elections has attracted 1780 comments from mostly angry Russians. About 140 of the most civil were translated back. Here’s one of them: “I read the first paragraph [of the article] and it was enough. Sort out everything in your democracy first.”
Blogosphere hasn’t had that much fun since Google’s acquisition of YouTube that has enriched the vernacular with numerous linguistic gems ranging from GooTube to YouTooble.
Here’s what we have so far for the Microsoft-Yahoo deal:
AdLab’s favorite: Microhoot by Gizmodo
Seen on Infade (this one is back from May 2007)
Seen on Techcrunch
Seen on Ad-Supported Music
Seen on David Armano’s
Pictureless: YahooSoft (CNN), Yaasoft (FastForward blog), Yahrosoft. A CNet blog considers relative advantages of Yasoft, Mihoo, and Microhoo (Micro-who?), and even has a handy poll .
It is probably against Facebook’s TOS*, but slapping an affiliate banner on your profile page is fairly easy – get an account with a service such as LinkShare, register with a merchant program, grab an ad unit (a linked image), get MyHTML application (I think SuperWall would work, too, but I haven’t tried), copy-paste the code, and you are in business. Similarly, you can embed a simple pixel-based traffic counter from a service like StatCounter.
Or you could drive traffic to your blog by installing the Blog RSS Feed Reader application that posts daily summaries of your headlines to your mini-feed for all the friends to see.
Are we going to see more profile spam that is so ubiquitous on MySpace and in the darker quarters of YouTube? Don’t know; the lack of anonymity on Facebook is kind of a game killer.
On a related note:
NY Times: “More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages — despite the social networking site’s rule against such ads. They are posting them with the help of a Montreal-based company called Weblo, an advertising network that sells ads onto people’s blogs and social networking profile pages.”
In July, Mashable put together a list of 5 ways to make money with Facebook that included Amazon affiliate links and selling services with micropayments.
*From Facebook’s TOS: “In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to […] upload, post, transmit, share or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, solicitations, promotional materials, “junk mail,” “spam,” “chain letters,” “pyramid schemes,” or any other form of solicitation.”
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
