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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!
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Filtered by Category: Internet
How to make a video go “viral.”
A friend who is a director recently asked me about how to get his viral video he’s made “seen” by people. That’s sort of the $6 million question, right? I don’t have the answer unfortunately, but I’ve got some clues, thanks to 6 really good blog posts. Here they are.
Seven Deadly Sins of Advertising Via Viral Video
More Viral Video Lessons: An Interview with the My-Box-In-A-Box Geniuses
The Rules Of Viral Web Success, according to AdWeek.
And the rebuttal, The Rules Of Viral Web Success (My Foot)
6 Things Not To Do With Your Viral Video
I also like the LEGS rule from this post on the Video Insider blog: Viral Videos Ads: No Marketing Panacea
Here’s an excerpt from Viral Videos Ads: No Marketing Panacea:
[Viral] ads need LEGS, a convenient acronym that means viral ads have to have a Laugh out loud quality, Edgy content, must Grip your attention and most often have some Sexual content. Given that few campaigns (viral or otherwise) have LEGS, few will be able to create a successful viral campaign as Dove did with Evolution, and in most cases the reach is low. It comes back to the bottom line — a question of opportunity, cost, and return on investment.
Lastly,The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos has some interesting pointers in it.
There's more to read. Click here for the rest. >>
Advertising • How To • Internet • Marketing • Video • (0) Comments • Permalink
Flash Forward Boston: Day 2
For the second day of Flash Forward, my day had a much stronger focus on creativity rather than coding in Flash. That was my intention though. The conference is structured so that your time here reflects your own interests.There are 4 sessions going on simultaneously so each person, by picking which sessions they attend, gets what they want. If you’re a Flash designer or developer, I would encourage you to attend some time.
My first session was Finding Creative Techniques by Garrett Nantz. He showed a variety of projects he worked on at Big Spaceship—Hungry Suitcase for Royal Caribbean, HBO Voyeur, 30 Days of Night, and Glaceau primarily. What has always impressed me about these projects, beyond their sheer creativity, is the high level of production that goes into them. I’ve wanted to peak into their process and see how they actually accomplish these amazing things and luckily, that was some of what he talked covered. I’m sure I can’t properly distill down the Big Spaceship “secret” to success, but based on what I’ve seen today, it’s clear that a great deal of pre-production helps bring these projects to life. If you’ve visited the Royal Caribbean site, you may recognize the lower image to the right. The image you may not have seen before is the ‘planning’ stage of the site above it. A lot of us use this same technique for outlining a site. The level of preparation they go through sounds like it’s on overdrive though. Garrett’s example of experimenting with filming a variety of ink stains in water to get the transitions right for the Glaceau site is a level of detail was impressive.
Later in the day, Craig Swann from CRASH! MEDIA gave a presentation he called Imagination & Technology. I’ve seen Craig’s presentations at prior Flash Forward conferences and wanted to be sure to see what he’s been up to recently. Craig has a wonderful way of pairing devices with his computer with Flash to create some mind-expanding demonstrations. He explains his projects as simple manipulation of basic data, but the results are really cool. I shot some video of one of his experiments below. In case the audio isn’t clear, what he’s doing is using time as a variable when displaying live video. Instead of displaying a full frame of video every quarter of a second (or so), he’s only displaying one vertical line of the video then moving the next refreshed piece of video to the right by the width of the line. This is just a single example of many interesting projects he showed.
The last session I attended on day two was The Blind Sketchmaker: Exploring Evolutionary and Generative Art with Flash by Mario Klingemann. The Blind Sketchmaker is a project he showed that he’s still working on. It’s goal is to create randomized designs, then, based off of learning it accumulates through asking Mario what images qualify as art and which do not, determine if that generated design scores high enough to qualify as “art.” You can see on of the pieces of “art” here to the right called Sit and Watch. What makes this so interesting is that the definition of what is art is highly subjective. Can a computer program be taught to recognize it? It’s a highly complex process your brain goes through to determine if one image is “art” or just random data. His system is still in development but it’s a really interesting concept. I hope Mario will be posting some of the presentation on his website, http://quasimondo.com.
Advertising • Conferences • flashforward • Development • Flash • Internet • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink
Flash Forward Boston: Day 1
This week I’m happy to be at Flash Forward in Boston. I’ve been to coming to this conference since 1999 or 2000. I forget which year it started. It’s always exciting to see the presentations and find out what the best Flash heads are doing now and what’s coming down the pike.
I attended 4 sessions today, the first day of the conference. The day started with the Adobe Keynote address presented by Kevin Lynch. Mr. Lynch has been the face of Adobe at many of the FFs I’ve attended. For this conference, he gave an summary of all the recent Flash developments Adobe has introduced over the past several months. One of the most interesting to me is Adobe Air which provides a way of making desktop applications from Flash content. As an added bonus, Adobe also gave every attendee a copy of Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0. Thanks, Adobe!
The next 2 sessions I attended were ActionScript 3 for Designers by Rich Shupe of FMA and OOP for the Noob by Peter Elst of Mind Studios. I’ve been playing around with Action Script 3 some and I got quite a lot out of both of them. Peter was good enough to post his session notes on his blog. Check it out here.
My last session for the day was Video Game Opportunities with Flash by John Say of Say Design. His primary topic was casual games. If you check out his company’s site, saydesign.com, you’ll see many cool casual games in the portfolio section. At his company, they prefer to develop games in Flash. There are several advantages to Flash. The development process is easier than traditional programming. There is also a great advantage in distribution since the Flash Player isn’t limited to a single computer platform since Flash games easily play on the computers most people think about when Flash is mentioned--PC, Mac and Linux. In the past year, Flash has moved to our TV screens with the Nintendo Wii and the Playstation 3. Causal games also have a good marketplace on XBox Live, although they are not Flash based in that case.
The highlight of the entire conference was also on the first day, The Flashforward Film Festival. You can check out all of the nominees here. Bitey Castle won the People’s Choice Award for his wonderful 30 days: 30 shorts project. Be sure to check it out here.
Advertising • Conferences • flashforward • Development • Flash • Gadgets • Games • Internet • Technology • Training • Trends • (0) Comments • Permalink
This Is Your iPod Talking
I love music. You’d have a really hard time finding me with my iPod close at hand but you won’t hear much music coming from my iPod. I listen to spoken content almost exclusively. Because I’m a bit of an information junkie, I was really taken with the invention of podcasts. podcasting is simply embedding a file, usually a piece of audio content, into an RSS feed. (What’s an RSS feed? Basically a special kind of link that’s always up to date. Want to know more about RSS? Check out the article at Wikipedia.)
The variety of podcasts being produced is incredible. There are a lot of tech podcasts, probably because that’s the world podcasting started in, but you can find something for nearly ever topic. (Yes, even that thing you’re thinking of right now.) If you’ve never added a podcast feed to your iPod, I encourage you to give it a try. The easiest way to get started listening to podcasts is iTunes. The podcast directory is in the iTunes Store, but don’t worry, you’re not actually buying anything when you subscribe to a podcast. Every podcast there is free. Just enter a search in the upper right hand corner and see what you find.
I’ve got nearly a thousand individual episodes of podcasts on my iPod, so I’m won’t post an exhaustive list of what I listen to, but I’ll give you a few that I like to get you started. My favorite podcasts tend to have a Mac focus, so if you’re a PC fan, you might want to steer away from some of them. (Or you could just get it over with an buy your Mac.)
Never miss an episode:
- The New York Times Audio Digest (This is the only paid podcast I listen to. It’s included with Audible Gold subscription)
- The New York Times Tech Talk
- BBC Documentary Archive
From an advertising perspective, I think they are an incredible way of reaching a dedicated audience with a very targeted message, whether it’s a tech enthusiast or a knitting enthusiast. The problem has been that there haven’t been great tools to measure the audience for an advertiser, which makes it a difficult investment for the people who have to account for their media spending. There finally a little hope on the horizon for the creators of podcasts with the founding of the Association for Downloadable Media. (Read about it in this article from the New York Times.) This means that the variety of podcasts produced will only increase. That’s good news for everyone.
Advertising • Blogging • How To • Internet • Technology • Trends • (0) Comments • Permalink
The SuperGeekery Homepage Smackdown
What’s your homepage? Nearly every site on the internet would love for your entry onto the internet to be their site, but since there are so many decent choices, being simply decent isn’t good enough. It’s time for a home page smackdown.
Based on my experience, there are 3 contenders that stand above the others and deserve consideration: Netvibes, PageFlakes, and iGoogle. I’ve got accounts on all three, but one has become my default. Before I tell you want I use, let me tell you why first.
The primary thing I want out of a homepage is relevant information. The only way I can get the content that is relevant to the unique person I am (no, jokes there please!) is to have a page that is customizable. In modern web-speak, that means my ideal homepage needs to be able to display a variety of RSS feeds, a content aggregator. Netvibes, PageFlakes and iGoogle all do this well. Most sites offer an RSS feed, often represented by an orange icon seen in this paragraph. Depending on how your browser is set up, you can then add that page’s content to your own site.
But I also like content that isn’t necessarily available through an RSS feed. For example, I use Google Maps a lot and I’d like to have service easily accessible where I start my internet journey. Perhaps you’d like a game embedded in your homepage. That should be possible too, right? Luckily the 3 homepages I’ve chosen all offer the ability to embed widgets, basically small Web 2.0 applications, anywhere I want on their pages. Netvibes, PageFlakes and iGoogle are going strong still.
I also happen to be interested in lots of things, so efficient use of the space on my page is important. Looking at the three pages, Netvibes and Pageflakes start to take the lead. iGoogle is just not being as efficient in their design as these smaller upstarts. (Efficient use of the page is where many other homepages failed so miserably that they didn’t make it to the smack down. If you use your internet service provider’s homepage as your personal start page, I bet it’s got a big chunk of the space taken up by unnecessary junk.)
Since I’m going to be looking at my homepage quite a lot, I want to be able to customize it to suit my design sensibility. iGoogle has several nice, but limited, options. iGoogle’s options have a cool feature in that the graphics change over the course of the day to reflect the time you’ve set in your time zone. That’s nice, but their choices need to offer more freedom. PageFlakes, while a very nice looking page, has limited design customization. It just doesn’t have design customization that Netvibes has. Here Netvibes wins my vote. It’s got lots of predesigned themes and allows you to tweak each of them. You can also design them from scratch if you really want. Netvibes wins this part hands down.
One thing I love about both Netvibes, PageFlakes and iGoogle are the tabs you can add to them. I’ve got a “General” tab for my general purpose stuff--email, maps, news headlines-- and tabs that relate to special topics, like Coding, and Flash. Tabs on a homepage are nothing new, even the granddaddy of customizable homepages, My Yahoo, sadly showing it’s age now, had tabs years ago. What sets these Netvibes and Pageflakes sites apart though is the easy ability to share your customized tabs with others.
It’s probably no secret if you’ve gotten this far to know that Netvibes is my winner. I won’t scoff at your choice of PageFlakes or iGoogle though. They’re no slouches. Netvibes is just a really sweet site.
Why not check it out? To get you started down the Netvibes road with a fully geeked out tab, click here to check out my Geekery tab. (That’s right. You can even share your tabs with friends when you get them just right.) If you like it, you can keep my “Geekery” tab as part of your own Netvibes page. Pretty cool, right?