Viral trigger happy Krantman

von | Sep. 6, 2005 | Blog, Digital News

Adrants points me to Krantman, which is, as a reader comment at Boing Boing says, an advertisement for a dutch newspaper.

They have done it in the style of „trigger happy tv“ („Comedy Street“ in Germany), only not quite so drastic.
But the principle is the same. Put a guy in the public an let him do silly things. Then film the reactions of the unaware people with hidden cameras.
I don’t know, if they really filmed this with hidden cameras and unaware people, but it does look like it.

Nice idea, and the fact that Boing Boing (and also Adrants) mention it, should give it at least a small viral push.

Listen to any of your RSS Feeds on audio…

von | Aug. 26, 2005 | Blog, Digital News

Jon Aquino has written a software that will probably cause a big uproar in the digital community. I have not read about something like this before, which is surprising because it seems like such an obvious application:
Instead of downloading podcasts using RSS, have a piece of software that downloads your usuall RSS feeds and reads them out to you.

The big advantage here:

  • you don’t have to rely on only those sites, that have podcasts (which aren’t the majority sofar, because )
  • people might not like podcasting themselves, they rather write. And if they do podcast, it might be a terrible listening experience

Like many others, I have been disappointed with the quality of the content of today’s podcasts (to be fair, podcasting is still in its early days), especially with so much good textual content on the web. For example, I wished that there was a podcast of biographies of great lives — after all, there are numerous websites on the subject. Then it struck me: What if I used text-to-speech to convert these textual webpages to podcasts that I could listen to during my daily commute? Thus Audiolicious was born.

This little piece of software converts your usual RSS feeds into an audio file you can listen to on your iPod (but also on anything else, of course).

I have tried a sample from Jon’s website, and admittingly, it sounds terrible. But keep in mind: these kind of things usually improve rapidly (and unfortunately for Jon, they might also be picked up quickly by the big players, like Google or Apple).
Secondly, I got used to it rather quickly. It’s like looking at a monochrome screen in the 80s. Back then we were also happy with it, even though we new from the television, what coloured pictures could be like.
It’s a fantastic application and just a matter of time until this becomes a regular in the blogging/RSS community, I am sure of that.

Darren Barefoot writes some more about the fact, why podcasting, as trendy as it might seem, might also never take off big scale. Same goes with vlogs, but for this, it will be much harder to write a substitute like Jon did. How do you make a video out of a text-blog?

(thanks)

Too much „viral“ stuff out there?

von | Aug. 11, 2005 | Blog, Digital News

Test of character is something done by Renault. A video (yes, only one, but I assume there are more to follow), trying to be funny I guess. With a send to friend button.

Ugly Duck is a site with three clips that aren’t bad. But not send-on function.

Mitchell Brothers is an advergame that is aparently meant to go viral, Chemical Brothers, too. Funnily enough this seems to be a trend for releasing new albums or tours.

I am starting to wonder about the term viral. It’s being used inflationary these days, don’t you think? These 4 examples, plus my last two posts are all meant to be viral. But what makes an ad concept viral? Just by posting movies on the web, like the ugly duck? Or games like the two bands? Just putting something interesting on the web? There is lot’s of interesting ad stuff on the web, clips, audio, games and no one calls it viral.

I don’t think you can initially create something viral, nor should you try to sell to your client a „viral marketing campaign“. Whether or not something becomes (!) viral, you can never know. You can only try to enforce it, by, for example, adding send-to functionalities. Or seeding it in blogs. (But this is dangerous.)

I don’t have a solution. I just recommend not to call it „viral“, until it has somehow proven to be so.

(all examples via)

And again. Something viral. Or wanting to be…

von | Aug. 11, 2005 | Blog, Digital News

There is a microsite for the new AIM Mail. They’re promoting the new mail service with fictional characters that are blogging. And movie clips of/about two of the characters you can find here and there. They obviously want it to go viral.
Just one thing I don’t understand. Clips are still fine these days. If they’re at least a little entertaining, you can be sure that they get send around. And blogs are trendy, yes they’re great and of course, they’re, well, sort of viral.
But what the hell has this got to do with AIM Mail? It says nothing in the clips or blogs about mail. It would be a much better campaign had it been about AIM Journals – which is how they did the blogs. And they don’t even reference mail anywhere. it just sits there, inbetween nice clips and, well, ok-blogs. Or maybe I just don’t get it.

Aparently, they haven’t registered the domains for the other „bloggers“ as Adland writes. How stupid can you be? But then again. The clips are not that great, so I won’t miss the sequels.