McSame
Four more years of the McSame, via Voltron.
07/10/08 by mark in art, politics. No Comments »
Flash Player Update Enables Better Search
A huge (and long overdue) update from Adobe enables search engines to better index content within multi-state swfs.
Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.
“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”
As Michelle Turner, vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe Systems, notes:
The great thing is that this is retrospective - the millions of SWF files out on the web will be indexed by this new player, and content and app developers don’t have to do anything for their Flash-based sites to be picked up. Google is rolling this out on their production servers right now, and while it will likely take a while for the impact of this to propagate into search results, improvement should start to be seen in weeks. Yahoo doesn’t have this live yet, but is committed to using the technology and releasing it at a later date.
I think this is a really exciting technology release. Dynamic content searchability has been an issue for search engines for years. Flash content is so pervasive on the web, the fact that it couldn’t be thoroughly crawled and indexed in the past kept search engines from being able to access an enormous amount of web content. This will be great for increasing search accuracy over time, particularly as Google and Yahoo apply their secret sauce to the SWF results. This also has major implications for SEO companies, and I can imagine the new work springing up around optimization of Flash content. Many creative agencies have been asking for this for a long time, so we’re thrilled to see Google roll this out.
This is terrific news for rich media content publishers. I can’t wait to read more about how it works.
07/01/08 by mark in technology, web. No Comments »
Jerome Austria
Wow. Even though I didn’t work with him directly, I’ve known Jerome Austria was a creative genius from my time at R/GA on the Nike Basketball account a few years ago. But this confirms that his character matches his creative talent. From AgencySpy:
As we hoped, more information on the AKQA situation we reported yesterday has come to light.We told you about a creative director at the agency who walked out when some of his team was let go. Well, the mystery addie is Jerome Austria.
…
The move apparently had something to do with ECD Lars Bastholm, “who reportedly is horrible at managing people and does nothing but send cool web links and take credit for work he had no part of.”
It takes a lot of guts to stand up for the people you work with like this, especially in the commercial design world where it’s a lot easier to keep your head down.
Check out Jerome’s portfolio for some truly brilliant integrated advertising campaigns.
06/25/08 by mark in advertising, design. No Comments »
Vector Portraits
Andrew Bush’s Vector Portraits are an incredible collection of “photographs made while travelling 50 to 70 mph in Los Angeles and other parts of the Southwestern United States” from 1989-1997. [via Neatorama]
06/25/08 by mark in art, photography. No Comments »
Raw for 30 Days
Raw for 30 Days is kind of like a reverse Super Size Me. The film follows several people with “normal American diets” and type-2 diabetes who undergo a drastic lifestyle change as they go on a completely raw diet. Within a few weeks they don’t need their insulin shots, and by the end of one month, they effectively cured their own diabetes. They also became much happier and emotionally balanced as a result. Check out the trailer above.
06/20/08 by mark in health. No Comments »
Advertising: Campaign or Commitment Business
“Are you in the campaign or commitment business?” Joseph Jaffe asks as he rips into Sprint, Sony, T-Mobile, and Starbucks for their “Social Media Mistakes.” Basically Jaffe’s point is marketers and brands should engage every customer genuinely by approaching marketing as a conversation (with two equal sides) rather than a one way street.
Practically what that means is: less lawyers, don’t fake it, follow through, and address customers directly. Jaffe argues for shifting money from the media budget to staff customer service representatives and to be agile as new opportunities to extend a brand appear independently from campaigns. Good stuff.
If Advertising Age let me embed their Brightcove player I would have posted the video. Here’s a link.
06/19/08 by mark in advertising, social media. No Comments »
an update on oil
In case you missed it, here’s what’s been going on with oil:
The oil industry continues to make record profits as prices at the pump skyrocket. Congress summons oil execs to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain their “exorbitant profits.” Oil execs claim it’s actually the restrictive policies of Congress that are causing the high gas prices, specifically to open up more federal lands “and allow us to responsibly produce more American oil and natural gas, which can supply us for decades to come.”
Bush falls in step with Big Oil and pressures Congress to pass “good legislation as soon as possible” to lift federal bans on exploring the Outer Contentinental Shelf and allow states to permit offshore oil drilling, even when his own energy department reports oil production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge “is not project to have a large impact on world oil prices.”
A top McCain economic advisor, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, admits offshore drilling “would have no immediate effect on supplies or prices.” But another McCain advisor, Nancy Pfotenhauer, continues to parrot the false talking-point that China is drilling near Cuba near the coast of Florida:
When you think about the fact that we’ve got China and Cuba drilling closer to the United States — the coastal United States — when American companies aren’t allowed to drill. It’s just insane.
Meanwhile, Western oil companies are about to be awarded no bid oil contracts in Iraq: Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, and BP — are in the final stages of “talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields.”
Does anyone believe the tired rhetoric that offshore drilling is needed to bring down prices at the pump?
06/19/08 by mark in politics. No Comments »
Where’s Firefox 3?
Today was supposed to be a day for the record books: Mozilla hopes to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. Unfortunately the Mozilla site wasn’t ready for the million or so users who pledged to download Firefox 3 today. For several hours after the scheduled 1pm release the site wouldn’t even load.
And then there’s the odd moment when the Firefox 3 page was up, but still linked to Firefox 2. Read that fine print.. By 5pm EST on Tuesday, the Firefox 3 download page was down, and was back to Firefox 2. By 8pm EST they seem to have finally sorted things out.. What happened?
06/17/08 by mark in technology, web. No Comments »
Moving
Another year, and we’re moving apartments again…
06/16/08 by mark in general, photography. No Comments »
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