Face #84

Good luck Poke

It’s the D&AD awards tonight and Poke have a few nominations.

It’s also the highlight of SImon Waterfall’s year as D&AD president.

Whatever the outcome, I expect lots of sore heads in the morning.

Good luck Pokers!

Iron Man for real

If you think the current Iron Man film with Robert Downey Jr is just sci-fi crap, have a look at this. The US military have been working on robotic exoskeleton suits for some time now. I may be a pacifist but these are still pretty cool. My apologies. I seem to be in geek mode today.

I know my girlfriend would hate this

But I have to sheepishly admit that it gives me a little bit of a geek thrill. Sorry.

Thanks to Buzz

Face #83

New animation from BLU

I’ve just found this new animation. It is more than 7 minutes of epic animated street art surrealism. Wonderful.

Google Earth look out

Microsoft have just released a virtual telescope to explore space with. It’s imaginatively called WorldWide Telescope and it’s only available on PCs (unsurprisingly). It actually looks pretty slick from what I can see. But, like all Microsoft products, it feels a bit like your dad dancing at a party. They’ve tried to add some kind of social/share-able element to it by letting people create their own tours of space along with their own voiceover, then share them with their friends. However, I imagine the kind of people who would actually do that don’t actually have many friends. Would be nice to actually see it in action though. Time to get a PC emulator on my spanking new work-Mac, I think.

Face #82

Start brushing up on that CV

The European Space Agency are recruiting astronauts. I’m probably a bit old now - and far too unfit - but this is the job I always wanted to have. If you want to go for it in my place, drop me a line and I’ll write you a good reference.

Find out more here.

And put in your application here

Good luck!

The best yet from The Decapitator?

I love The Decapitator’s stuff. So I was pretty happy to come across one of his latest pieces under a bridge on Old Street. He’s beautifully defaced a couple of UNIQLO posters. And in a much more sophisticated way than this. Lovely.

Hey fat boy! Buy a Wii.

Face #81

Turning something mundane into an experience

I spotted this at Paddington Basin last week. They’ve had to drain part of the canal for construction which is normally a pretty inconvenient and dull thing. But they’ve turned it into something that makes people smile by adding a giant plug and drain. I thought it was a lovely touch. It’s doing what a lot of online work should do:

• It’s turning something dull into a more rewarding experience
• It’s observational and witty
• There’s no practical reason to go to this extra effort. And I’m sure the finance department of the construction company wouldn’t have wanted to pay for it (and probably didn’t)
• It’s giving people conversation-fodder. I’ve shown this image to several people and now I’m blogging about it.
• I may tell people about it but there’s very little chance of them actually visiting it

Face #80

Happy 30th Birthday spam

OK. SO the internet is 15 and spam is 30. How does that work? Well apparently the first spam message was sent on the ARPANET - a forerunner to the internet. It was an unsolicited message trying to sell DEC minicomputers. It clearly didn’t work because the company is no longer with us. And goodness knows what happened to the nefarious Gary Thuerk who sent it.

Experts now estimate that 100 billion spam messages are sent every day. But if they didn’t work, spammers wouldn’t send them. The FBI estimate that last year, scammers earned £121 million with junk email.
I’m clearly in the wrong industry. Let my tell you about my father who was a Nigerian diplomat…

Happy 15th Birthday Internet

It was 15 years ago today that the code for the world wide web was given free to the world. All thanks to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau who managed to persuade CERN to give the code away so that anyone could use it and improve on it.

If you want to hear more about how it happened, here’s a film that Uncle Tim did to mark the 10th anniversary.

Even in marketing honesty is the best policy

Well marketers, you’ve only got another month or so to lie, cheat and deceive people online. After that you’ll actually be committing an offense you can get done for. Good! In my (occasionally) humble opinion, we have a duty as an industry to be responsible in our communications - and anyone that isn’t deserves everything they’ve got coming to them. So here’s what you can get done for as from May 26th:

• Seeding positive messages about a brand in a blog without making clear that the message comes from, or on behalf of, a brand.
• Lurking around forums and other online social spaces dropping messages without disclosing that you’re actually a brand ambassador.
• Seeding viral ads on the internet in a way that implies you’re just an everyday member of the public.

With any luck, this new legislation will protect the world from online disasters like WalMart’s campervan tour and Sony’s ‘I want a PSP for Christmas’ blog. I’m just wondering what the sentence will be for any transgressors that get caught. Maybe forcing them to use dial-up for six months would be painful enough to make them change their nefarious ways.

Face #79

I never knew you could do THAT on a Mac

I was trying to sort out an internet connection yesterday when I came across this peculiar panel in a Network Utility application. So, if you’re feeling fruity, you just need to give a Mac user your email address.

Show us your arts

I’ve blogged before about how I love the Jackson Pollock site because it gives you an experience of what it’s like to create one of his famous splatter paintings. I discovered another site today that gives you a bit of a Picasso experience. So this is a self-portrait I did in the Pablo-esque stylee. Not quite as good as the Jackson Pollock one - but it’s getting there.