“Strawberry Lemonade FOREVER – For a Limited Time”
See how this made its way through an advertising agency. It’s not Mad Men.
Link (via @nevenmrgan)
Month: July 2010
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Ditching Read It Later for Instapaper
This evening I made the switch from Read It Later to Instapaper. The latter is by far the more popular service. On the surface, it might be hard to choose one over the other. Their iPhone apps both cost $4.99 (Read It Later, Instapaper), they both have free-to-use websites, they both suck the text out of a web article you’re too busy to read at the moment of encounter, and store it online for later enjoyment. Well, at least that’s the idea.
It seems grabbing the right text off a page isn’t that easy, and RIL was just letting me down too many times. Quite often I’d have words like Home, About, and Related Articles – clearly bits of the navigational interface missed by the dust filter – appearing before or in the middle of the story I wanted to read. Sometimes they’d be the only words on display: the article itself having been weeded out and tossed aside, 90% of the page’s content or not!The RIL text engine wasn’t very smart about pretending to be a normal browser either. Sometimes the policing mechanisms of a website would prevent it from loading the intended content and direct RIL to the front page instead. In the instances where I might only get around to reading the article months later, there’d be simply no way to remember what I was supposed to have been saving. Salon, Edge Magazine, Wired Mobile, and The New York Times all gave it trouble, among others.There were reasons I stayed this long, though. Read It Later excels at being social. After reading an item I really liked, I could send it to Diigo for full-text archiving, or Evernote, or tweet it, Facebook it, bookmark it in Delicious, share it in Google Reader, or even email the plain text to a friend who might be interested. The Diigo bit was closest to my heart. But for every sweet feature – a full-screen view and a scrollbar for quick skimming are two examples worth mentioning – there’d also be the disadvantages of being second-best.I think the reason Instapaper has such a knack for sniffing out the right words from a page is that dedicated users send Marco Arment emails whenever something doesn’t work right. By his own admission, the system is a pile of hacks, but as far as the end user (me) is concerned, it just works. I wish it didn’t always have to be about Features vs. Excellence, but Instapaper definitely wins the lower-my-blood-pressure challenge. RIL probably doesn’t get enough feedback to develop a comparably intelligent engine, but missing the first paragraph of every article on the New York Times? Come on.Also, most apps install support for Instapaper first, and the wait for RIL integration is always long and uncertain. I don’t know if Nate Weiner, Read It Later’s developer, does anything to help adoption of his service along, but like in the case of the new Twitterrific for iPhone, users like me end up being the ones petitioning other app developers to please please please consider adding RIL support. It sucks.Plus, in the time since I last saw Instapaper, it’s received a bunch of great new features like a paginated viewing method, and an enhanced presentation with inline graphics. I’ll miss RIL’s sharing features, and hope Instapaper adds just a couple more export options to the current choices of Tumblr & Twitter (Diigo, please!), but for the moment it’s enough that I can bookmark stuff and be secure in the knowledge that they’ll be waiting for me, complete, when I get to them.The fact that this blog somehow appears in the screenshot for Instapaper in the App Store has nothing to do with it, I swear!
➟ How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made
ReadWriteWeb:
4Chan, the anonymous nihilist obscene messageboard from whence sprang memes like LOLCats and RickRolling, was the subject of what’s now the 3rd most-watched of the Old Spice videos made yesterday, after the ones made for Perez Hilton and Kevin Rose. 4channers hate everything, especially people who talk about 4chan – which this savvy man in a towel did not do. But 200,000 views later, that absurd video response to “Anonymous” has received more than 4000 thumbs up from viewers and less than 100 thumbs down.
Still going strong, and inferring from a tweet I saw in @IsaiahMustafa’s stream, they’ll be doing this till Thursday in the US. Funny that he’s using Chuck Norris for his Twitter wallpaper – Old Spice Man has eclipsed that legend by now.
The Dokaka Discography
Less than a week after I placed my order for The Dokaka Discography, a limited edition 6-CD set of the Japanese mouth-musician’s work, I hold copy #22 in my hands.
Still available for $30USD at Dokaka.com. The fact that they didn’t immediately sell out upon release greatly disappointments me.
➟ Old Spice man responds to online fans
Earlier today on Twitter, I said:
The guys behind the new Old Spice commercials showed a good understanding of social media before when they spread their ads virally online, but yesterday they pretty much won the game. Getting Isaiah Mustafa to come back into the studio with nothing but his bare chest and a towel, they started producing video responses to fans on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. Over a hundred personalized responses in all. Some were replies to counter-replies, so we can see that these were being written/performed on the fly to some degree. It is a very high standard to be achieving on the fly, both as writing and performance.
Online engagement doesn’t get any better than this – rewarding content that viewers happily seek out and interact with, even celebrities like @aplusk, @guykawasaki, @rosemcgowan, and @alyssa_milano. He wore a tie when responding to @GQ, gave himself a trophy on HollywoodLife.com’s advice, and even helped someone propose to his girlfriend with wheeled-out candles and a ring. She said Yes.
Here’s the latest TV ad for context:
➟ Apple’s new iPhone 4 ads
I posted these four ads on Twitter earlier, calling them a cut above Apple’s recent advertising; each one a force of emotion. It strikes me now that these ads are so natural, so well conceived and performed, that they’re more moving than scenes several times their length in Hollywood film. In any case, they are a refreshing change from disembodied hands and players introducing themselves as metaphors for machines.
What’s remarkable about Apple’s advertising is how they have come to accurately reflect the brand’s approach. It’s a lot rarer than you’d think, and most communications from large companies with offices in multiple countries inevitably veer into “off-brand” territory. Just as the modern Mac and iPhone are familiar tools whittled down to their purest forms – no extraneous buttons or indicator lights, solid blocks of CNC-machined material, and straightforward “naturalistic” user interfaces – the modern Apple ad is simple, uncluttered, and devoid of transitions and flashy effects.
They keep the basics: a story, a product, and a pay-off. These iPhone 4 ads all have the same straightforward presentation, an over-the-shoulder shot of someone having a FaceTime conversation, and yet they look like no other ads on TV. You’d recognize the next one in a heartbeat. They’ve taken out everything that could be a distraction, and there’s nothing you could add to make them better. That’s good work, and the craftsmanship is impeccable. I imagine being on the Apple account at TBWA\Chiat\Day is like being an honorary Apple employee.
Link (Apple.com – four new ads total)
➟ Double Rainbow All The Way
Update: The Gregory Brothers’ Double Rainbow song is now available on iTunes for 99c. Half the money goes to helping Yosemitebear (Paul Vasquez), the original video’s creator, out of poverty. This article at the Merced Sun-Star says he’s been living on $5,000 a year and can’t afford to replace the tires on his car, limiting his ability to go into town.
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If you haven’t seen the original Double Rainbow video yet, it’s essential viewing as a primer for all the remixes and spoofs appearing on YouTube. The meme started with a hippie stoner uploading a video where he sees a double rainbow while on a hike (gives new meaning to “Hiking Trip”), and totally loses his mind trying to absorb the beauty of it. “WHAT DOES IT MEAN?! WHOAAA!!”
And so now we have guys like this impressionist applying the template to KFC’s Double Down sandwiches (DOUBLICIOUS ALL THE WAY!!):
And the guys from Auto-Tune the News made an awesome song out of it:
Link (original video)
sangsara.net 