Category: content strategy

Here is a novel idea — take headlines, and put them on t-shirts, on demand. Clever, ironic, and just the thing for all of your news-following hipster friends.

I noticed this on the CNN website for the first time today — there is a little t-shirt-shaped icon next to some of the stories with intriguing headlines. The only other icon there is the video camera denoting video content. There is a list of all of the shirts they have come up with so far here. Some highlights:

“Robo restaurant a hit with diners”
“Food zips on rails in automated eatery.”
“Look out! Your groceries are shrinking!”

The design is simple: the headline, and in a smaller font below, the phrase “I just saw it on CNN.com” followed by the date and time that the article was posted.

This, combined with their Twitter feeds, will have them in with the cool kids.

[ image courtesy of Joe M500 / Flickr ]

The Internets are bound for the sewer. Literally.

The BBC has a story today about an Ofcom pronouncement that indicates the new home of the mega-fast internets could be in the sewer.

Basically, this is not that big of a deal. France is doing it already. It is more sophisticated than running a fatty LAN cable through the storm drains; it is an extension of ‘conduit sharing’ that is already taking place. Providers are also looking at literally sharing conduits with other utilities as well.

As the next generation of broadband leaves the once-fast cable modems in the dust, we move closer to instant access. The article states:

Connections of up to 100Mbp will allow for a host of new services including on-demand high definition (HD) TV, DVD quality film downloads in minutes, online video messaging, CCTV home surveillance and HD gaming services.

I have high-speed internet, and video-on-demand in my home, and it is abundantly clear that it operates at the fringe of effectiveness much of the time. Compression artifacts in video distract from viewing, audio on some on-demand material is less-than-mp3 quality, and overall navigation time of the system is snail-paced.

Frankly, I am still sometimes amazed that Comcast is able to shove as much stuff through that standard 75-Ohm coaxial as they do. Imagine if it were fiber optic, at 8-10x the capacity. Now we are talking.

[ image courtesy of Jordon / Flickr ]

As I sit listening to a real CD, I am made sad today about where the music industry has tread.

Two announcements passed before my eyes:
1. Def Leppard art debuting their new single in video game “Guitar Hero III” [thanks Shiny Shiny]
2. Hip-hop producer Jermaine “JD” Dupri has partnered with P&G, makers of “Tag Body Spray” to create TAG Records. [via Trendcentral]

While my own loyalties hew to the old model of the business, however outdated they may be, I can see why they are doing this.

Things are different from the days when I was working for Capitol Records, an independent record store, the college radio station and the local public radio station. [At the same time.] Capitol has moved further down the ladder in importance in the industry, becoming yet another barely defined brand in the EMI Music behemoth cache of holdings. That record store closed its doors. The public radio station was absorbed in a statewide consolidation. All that is left is that tiny college station.

The crossover between video games and music is nothing new, but taking it to the point of debuting a single from a diamond-selling band within one is. This is a band that used the old outfit to sell an astounding 12 million copies of a single title. As store after store reduce their inventories of CDs and DVDs to make room for video games, then that seems to be the best place to show up. Fish where the fishes are, yeah?

I think the TAG collaboration is a bit more strange. Aside from the easy jokes [“Our records don’t stink.” Or, “Our records sometimes stink, but we cover it up.” Or…] it seems like less of a natural transition from one to the next. TAG has tread near this before, with an item highlighted one year ago this week by yours truly. That has worked well for TAG — they have had 26 million people see that video, and by extension their logo. And more importantly, there have been 26 million views of the dreamy Pete Wentz using the TAG product.

If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how the TAG brand is expressed in this new record label/deodorant relationship.

My wife is a fabulous cook. She gets her ideas from all over the place — family, friends, cookbooks, and, most recently, the Internets. for years she has been a frequent visitor of popular site epicurious.com.

Epicurious has been one of those places that was ahead of the social media curve in the same sense as Amazon. They were both doing social media-type things before folks were even calling it that. People were posting their recipes, posting comments, and reviewing. I have eaten well as a result, many times.

CondeNet, owner of Epicurious, announced investment in a new venture in October 2007. It was dubbed “Tastebook.” Created by the originators of Ofoto in February 2007, it takes some of the concepts of the Ofoto photo service [now known as Kodak Easy Share Gallery]; taking the digital and making it tangible in the form of prints.

Here is what Tastebook is capable of, from their press release:

Registered Epicurious.com members can now instantly import their My Epi Recipe Boxes to TasteBook. In addition, by logging onto TasteBook, users will have access to more than 25,000 editor-tested recipes from Epicurious and may upload their personal recipes. With TasteBook’s simple drag-and-drop interface, making a personal cookbook is as easy as creating a “playlist” comprised of recipes. Details like cover art and title are also customizable.

Anyone can create a TasteBook today by visiting www.tastebook.com or www.epicurious.com to get started. Using the TasteBook service is free, and a personal cookbook filled with up to 100 recipes costs only $34.95.

Those two paragraphs cover what blogger Kevin Kelly speaks of in a post titled “Better than free.” Whether Tastebook is aware of it or not, they have provided about five of the “Eight Generatives Better Than Free.” In a nutshell, Kelly posits that in the world of free things, creators/aggregators/distributors need to offer value to people.

Epicurious users have access to those 25,000 recipes already, for free. Users have also always had the option of printing a page out of Epicurious as they would print any web page, but those loose pages tend to accumulate in unusable piles on counters, waiting to be painstakingly indexed and filed.

What they haven’t had up to this point is this:

• a copy they can immediately pull off of the shelf
• user-selected content
• easily accessed content [via index & tabs in the book]
• findable content [as opposed to those print-outs]
• a hard copy they can happily dust the flour off of [as opposed to a keyboard]

They may have had a couple of those, but the more you have in one place, the greater that value proposition appears. Tastebook is making this downright irresistible for net-savvy cooks.

The name may or may not have been a clever play on the white-hot Facebook. If you ask me, their idea is hot enough that they didn’t even need to bother. Perhaps the name was an update on the standby name of ‘cookbook;’ that term is still functional if not overly workman-like, for sure, but Tastebook lends an air of, well, taste.

I saw an ad on the TV this morning that ended with an uncommon call-to-action.

Special K, that Kellogg’s diet standby, asked me to go to Yahoo to search for “Special K diet.”

I have seen this before; some years ago Pontiac pointed people to Google to search for ‘Pontiac.’ They did the same thing that Special K did in this most recent ad — instructed folks to go to a specific search engine and enter a term, circumventing the need for a special URL or landing page that might be hard to remember.

Blogger Cabel Sasser noticed this same phenomenon in Japan on a recent trip; this post details what he saw as a major shift away from URLs toward suggested search engines and terms.

Digging further into the Kellogg site, you will notice that the second item on their left-side navigation is an invite to join them at their Yahoo Group. I went there to find a lavishly branded Group, easily navigable even by those unfamiliar with Yahoo Groups. Newsgroups have come a long way, and this is no exception; there are social functions built in, maps, etc. This is an extensive project, not just a social media tag-along. Props for that. [I am just waiting for a Facebook app…]

The hardest part about trying to integrate this sort of partnership into ad campaigns is yet to come. Folks are pretty well set in their ways when it comes to search engine loyalty. There needs to be an appealing value proposition to make a switch from something as ingrained as Google in their browsing habits. Especially in light of the fact that tons of people are typing URLs into search engines instead of their address bars.

Feeling both lazy and insolent, I went to Google rather than Yahoo to do the search thing. I did the search in my Firefox search field, with Google as the default. Their helpful little ‘suggestion’ feature brought up ‘Special K diet’ after I finished the ‘K.’ Since this feature is based on common searches as entered by other people, I discovered that I was not the only lazy/insolent one. So much for following instructions!

[ image courtesy of Robert of Fairfax / Flickr ]

Word on the street is that Yahoo, proud owners of one of the most prominent photo-sharing sites on the Internets, Flickr, will be offering video hosting.

This is interesting to me, in particular, as I downloaded the Flickr Uploadr for photos just this morning. [Soon I will have a great need to share photos, and this looks to be one of the easiest ways.]

There are some truly odd restrictions, though. According to this article, only Pro users [those paying the $24.95 annually] will have access, and even then they will only be able to upload videos with a duration of less than 90 seconds.

The other option is for folks to put their videos on YouTube for free. Videos up to 10 minutes in length. For free.

I don’t know that the value proposition is great enough for folks to pay the $25/year to have their videos next to their photos. As long as those videos are less than 90 seconds. There are more benefits to the Pro membership than this new video hosting, so perhaps those already paying will see it as an added benefit.

I would image that Yahoo’s reasoning behind the project is this:
1. Most videos that people want to share are less than 90 seconds
2. Most people are not interested in your video past the 90-sec mark.
3. Bandwidth cost savings.

Maybe I’ll go pro and report back. Who knows?