The Business Creative » trends

Facebook is the New AOL

mick — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 19:17:35 +0000

Remember the old AOL? The one that would send you CD after CD with free hour offers? The AOL that people would use instead of the Internet and the Web–to get, er, social? That’s how I see Facebook now–increasing isolated and controlled, and soon to be a fading star.

[Update: Damn it. A Google search of "Facebook AOL" shows me I'm not the first one to think Facebook is the new AOL; Jason Kottke had chimed in on it (back in 2007!). O! well, chalk it up to one of those great-minds moments.]

Creative Business and Management Bits; September 2nd – September 22nd

mick — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:06:48 +0000

Recently uncovered in all their glorious, clickable hypertext … September 2nd through September 22nd:

Google Flash Indexing Update – Google's ability to index Flash sites is ~relatively~ new, and improving. This is the latest–from June!–but something I kept going back to find but had always been sidetracked.
swissmiss | Arial versus Helvetica – I have to boast, I once took a quiz designed to test how well one could distinguish between arial and helvetica. I scored like 98%, or something there abouts. Fun stuff.
Craigslist Re-Imagined – 'nuff said.
Design Bridge to Create 21st Century Pint Glass | Dexigner – "A safer British pint glass is being developed by designers in a bid to crack the problem of glasses being used in violent assaults."
HTML 5: Could it kill Flash and Silverlight? –

Amazon Web Services

mick — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:48:07 +0000

If you’re not taking advantage of Amazon’s Web Services, how do I say … You’re missing something.

Cloud computing is the idea that individuals and businesses can make use of the massive technology infrastructures and resources we’re connected to via the internet for incredibly inexpensive, scalable, powerful computing and storage power.

I’m not extraordinarily technical, and I was able to setup an enterprise-level wiki with a dedicated IP in a few hours. True, I was using the wiki’s makers tool to shortcut some of the process–thanks, Adrian–but I’m willing to bet that whatever you’re looking to do has already been done and there’s very likely code or commands that you can copy-and-paste for your purposes.

What’s all this have to do with creative? Our ability to harness the technology and scale, to make the machines work for us, makes us competitive in the marketplace and allows us to deliver more for less to our clients. And, it allows us to make use of world-class, just-in-time, scalable technology for ourselves and our own infrastructures–stuff that only the big outfits had previously had access to.

Put Your Money Where Your Digital Is

mick — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:04:14 +0000

Listen in to this brief interview with Organic EVP Adam Turinas in which he discusses the joy of spending marketing dollars on digital with Jennifer Jones. But what else would you expect from a chief at one of the largest digital agencies? But then how can one really argue? With key themes like accountability, targeting, and the idea that digital strategy is a branding exercise that transcends clicks, I think Mr. Turinas is on the money.