Webbster

How the Met Office predicts the weather

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:40:00 +0000

Running on empty

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 11:06:00 +0000

What happens when the world runs out of oil?

Running on Empty from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

Idiots of Ants Dad sketch

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 06:14:00 +0000

This is one of my favourite new sketches on BBC Comedy right now - partly because I guess there's a dreadful dad joke in all of us!

Ten tips for making video clips go viral

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:33:00 +0000

The following tips were taken from a session I attended recently that was run by a few folks in commercial UK social media and viral marketing sector. The focus of this post is mostly on how certain creative elements can help a video clip find its audience.

Oliver Newton from Starcomm MediaVest serves up an analogy from history to begin his talk on the history of viral.
Paul Revere was a prominent silversmith and American patriot who played a key role as one of three horseback messengers in The Midnight Ride – part of the battle for American independence with the British in 1775.

Revere was sent out by Dr. Joseph Warren to warn people about the approaching British army. William Dawes was also sent out but on a different route.

Revere was a prosperous and well-connected artisan, while Dawes was much less well-known in the area and connected to far fewer people. Where Dawes knocked on random houses to spread his message of the coming danger, Revere approached his local connectors who, in turn, alerted their local connectors, and so on.

While the message was simple - ‘the British are coming’ - it wasn’t enough for Dawes who lacked the quality of and scope of connections held by Revere. Flash forward 200 or more years to our marketing obsessed world and there’s a lesson to learn.

1) Having a simple, powerful message is very important, but that isn’t enough if you want to get noticed. Getting the message sent to the right communities, and connecting with the right people (influencers) makes every bit of difference.

2) By creating a blur between fact and fiction you give people a reason to talk about you, to seek out clues and information.

"In October 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found."
The Blair Witch Project became the blueprint viral in movie world. Numerous fake sites were set up to support the legend of Blair Witch. A sheriff’s missing person’s report; Hi8 video tapes found by The University of Maryland’s Anthropology Department; stills films and a mix tape from the car that was left abandoned. All of this contributed to the mystery of the film and left clues to try to solve, and share.

3) Cross interest groups. Tapping into the social currency of the moment creates a connection that spans different interest groups.

Facebook, Twitter, You Tube etc. have become social accelerators. Where once your inbox was clogged with jpegs and clips, information is much more easily and rapidly shared with groups of people all over the web. So what makes people share?

• To strengthen bonds – people like to feel liked, and spreading stuff they think their friends will like increases that bond
• Define our identity – are you IN or OUT in terms of the quality of stuff you share?
• Increase status - in product terms, Google juice, audience reach
• Create value:

Emotional - people like to get things, be it physical, emotional, or virtual
Real value - what do I get out of this? Physical or material rewards...etc.
Entertainment value

The Will It Blend series has been enormously successful at all of the above with its simple content theme that appeals to numerous audiences.

As a result its videos have achieved 120m views on YouTube; 700% sales growth while Blendtech became leading US blender company. They also made £50k alone on first video in ad sales alongside the clip alone.

Matt Smith from The Viral Factory on what makes good virals…

4) Start with the audience – think about what they would really like to see, not so much what you want to force upon them. Then work back from there.

This Lynx example demonstrates the art of the escalation gag. The premise? What would it be like if you sprayed on more Lynx deodorant? Here the team took the idea as far as it would possibly go. Then they ended on a high, and got out quick. Result: 45m+ views.

5) Align yourself with niche communities

We all love a bit of packaging porn don’t we? Ummm, err, yeah! The idea here was to tap directly into this community by saying ‘We made this for you’. It targets early adopters and says ‘we understand you’ in the hope that it would directly connect with that audience. Result: 5m+ views.

6) Never underestimate the power of cute, preferably anthropomorphised animals.

Breathing Places festive viral. £12k budget, 3m views in 2 weeks.

BUT...it's not just about clip views!
It's also worth noting here that if it's not just general brand awareness you're trying to achieve, and instead you want people to come back to your site from YouTube or elsewhere, think carefully about how you get them to do so. I'm told by BBC colleagues that this clip did very little to bring traffic to the Breathing Places site. For example some video annotation on the clip linking back to BBC might have helped (though perhaps that wasn't available as a feature at the time). Also, adding a link back to the site from the intro might have helped, rather than simply milking the fluffy animals angle in isolation.

7) Tip: Give people something to solve

The YouTube HD Camera trick challenge below appeals to the puzzle fans, the problem solvers, the folks who are happy to waste their morning figuring out how something was done. It played on the power of the collective mind. It created buzz by getting people talking about how it was done. The more conversation the better.

8) Steal the best ideas!

For Diesel XXX The Viral Factory hooked into a meme that had been around for two years prior to this campaign, though this was just a stills image based one. Importantly, the agency made it obvious they'd nicked the idea from the community who started it off. They offered some seeding budget to the original group of meme creators to get that community on-board because they were an influential bunch. The lesson here is that stealing ideas is only okay if you don't try to pretend that your idea is the original one. The internet answers back. Result: 10m+ views.

Chris Quigley, Managing Partner Rubber Republic

9) Make sure your content is talkable; a catalyst for conversation. Not just another YouTube clip.

For this slo-mo surfer clip the team planned what conversations they wanted to start, and with which communities. For example, the clip obviously appeals to natural history enthusiasts, surfers and wider sports communities, but dig deeper and there's another potential audience - the HD camera/tech enthusiasts. The clip was filmed on a $100,000 camera. This was featured on Gizmodo not simply by chance, but because Rubber Republic told them to "Check this amazing camera, which this awesome clips was filmed with..."

10) Properly plan the theme, the community and the conversation

Remember you're giving to the community, not taking
Plan the right conversations with the right communities
Know your communities well
Be socially awesome

Google upgrades to Metaweb

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:25:00 +0000

So the biggest company on the web just bought the biggest player in the semantic web space?

I'll spare you the details of it here as you can read that here, there, and everywhere.

No, what I found more interesting was Metaweb's great little video explaining not just what they're all about, but also how powerful this new age of machine readable websites will very soon become. And all without a single mention of the S------- word.

So, what might this latest acquisition mean for users of Google?

In short their contextual search results will become yet more powerful - adding to their already mighty armoury of snippets, squared and answers.

To get a flavour of what this might mean in very simple terms, check out the pink box in the grab below from Bing, who've already used Metaweb's open Freebase database in their search results. No wonder they're 'nibbling away at Google's market share'.

Rory Sutherland: Sweat the small stuff

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:04:00 +0000

The perils of truncated URLs

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:23:00 +0000

Now I am generally a big fan of Heston Blumenthal but this takes the, err, biscuit?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/carrotsglazedwithcum_80467

Some Grey Boke on the NHS

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:39:00 +0000

Projection mapping

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 06:52:00 +0000

I've seen a few of these things in the past but this is great. Apparently, they're planning to also integrate the projection into YouTube with a ‘game-take-over’.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Mon, 31 May 2010 19:08:00 +0000

It's a bank holiday. We've just returned from a long weekend camping at Rocks East woodland campsite (more on that another time, perhaps). Weary - if no longer wet after the sun that followed the rain - and collectively stinking like a badger's....never mind...we continued the woodland theme with some low-effort kids entertainment in the form of Wes Anderson's delightful adaption of The Fantastic Mr Fox.

If the trailer above is not enough enticement for you, go watch the Making Of (from a site co-founded by Natalie Portman) which gives an insight to how such a movie is made. In brief:

5,229 shots
621,450 frames
120 Gb a day
18.5 Tb total storage

Actually, that's less interesting than the fact that a friend of mine is the sister of the puppeteer whose remarkable talent is that of Eyebrow Animator (or something?). I'd love to have met his career advisor!

Where's my sun powerered electro-suspension car gadnammit?

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:05:00 +0000

I really like this Magic Highway USA Disneyland video from 1958. The animation style is fantastic and the optimistic, often completely impractical visions of the future are entertaining. Moving sidewalks and cantilevered skyways are all very well, but I suspect Wall-E's vision of the future is a tiny bit closer to reality.

Lego boxes get the augmented reality treatment

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 09:15:00 +0000

LEGO has trialled the use of augmented reality on its boxes. Before making a decision about which kit to buy shoppers can now hold up the box to a scanner/screen and a code enables the AR feature. A 3D model of the Lego kit is then displayed on the screen in front of you. If you move the box around the 3D image changes, giving you a really good sense of what's inside the box - and whether it's worth purchasing.

I can really see this catching on, particularly in the toy department, though there are some possible drawbacks. For example, had this been available when I bought a £100 Playmobil Hospital that is now sat in my daughter's room gathering dust, I probably wouldn't have bothered. I'd have realised that it's just an empty building with very few interesting bits inside - hence the rneed to fork out another another £75 for all the other gubbins that make it more fun to play with. I guess that's good Product Management though eh!

On a similar note, I can't wait to see how the RFID business evolves when they start to appear in iphones. Check out this neat RFID iphone prototype. Again, exciting opportunities here for the children's market.

A first look at Heavy Rain

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:32:00 +0000

I bought a PS3 recently, purely for it's PlayTV features (VoD, music streaming etc). I'm also in no way a committed gamer, but I downloaded the demo of Heavy Rain that Sony was pushing on my menu screen with great interest.

Three minutes into the game, I was completely was blown away. The graphics are beautiful, obviously, but I was even more impressed by the narrative-style gameplay.

It's very much a character-driven, immersive movie-like experience where you guide key characters through particular scenes (ie a detective questioning a prostitute, or studying a rain drenched crime scene for clues). The story is told through the players actions - not cut scenes - and every action has a consequence. The choices you make in a scene affect the storyline.

The film-noir narrative revolves around the hunt for a serial killer called The Origami Killer by four very different people: an FBI profiler, a detective, an architect and a journalist.

I've not yet finished the demo but it really got me thinking that it has the potential to completely redefine console game development, and serves a niche market for those mid-30s gamers.

Inviting established TV/film writers like Neil LaBute to write game narratives makes for an entirely new experience - where you really feel like part the story in a movie, taking care not to blindly go shooting your way around a scene.

The future of gaming/reading/movie watching?
Imagine playing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and being able to switch between Kalle Blomkvist and Elisbeth Salander as they unravel the deepest dirty secrets of the Vanger family. I’d buy it!

I don't imagine this style of narrative-led gameplay will ever truly replace high-octane racing games and FPS games, but it’s the most interesting thing I’ve seen in gaming for years. It might just get me back into the sport!

Of course Sony shoots itself in the foot (again) by blocking me from embedding a nice trailer from YouTube.

More on Heavy Rain:

Eurogamer review
Guardian review
Evening Standard on Neil LeBute (writer)

Using Wordle to visualise search behaviour

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 11:03:00 +0000

Ever wondered what people are searching for on your website but don't enjoy reading excel spreadsheets? No?

Okay, so this post won't set your pants on fire, but if you're interested in visualising search data to gain a little audience insight, read on.

This activity can be performed in under an hour and the end result is a neat little word cloud from Wordle. It's a useful way of communicating very boring data in a user-friendly and accessible way. If you're not familiar with Wordle, it's a toy for generating “word clouds” from any text you provide. The more times a given word appears in the text the greater prominence it is given.

Step 1) Get hold of some keyword search data

This could be a monthly search log from whatever source you can get your hands on. (e.g. your analytics system, Google Webmaster Tools report etc). Depending on what you're tying to achieve, I'd say a month's worth of data is sufficient. If you find the number of searches tails off rapidly then you could just pick, say, the 200 most popular keywords in the list.

Now, copy that data to excel. To begin, you need two columns:
'Keyword' and 'Number of searches'.

Step 2) - Identify themes
This step is optional but makes for a more interesting result. Whatever your website is about, it's very likely you'll want to bucket the keywords into categories. (ie Red widgets and Blue widgets). In this example I was interested in TV programmes vs. Web originals.

Assign a value to each of the categories in the third column of your spreadsheet. See screenshot below. This could be the category name or just a number. I added a key for my own reference but you don't have to.

Step 3) - Insert a new column for adding hex values

Hex values are six digit representations of an RGB color. Pick whatever colour you want to represent category in your eventual word cloud.
http://www.pagetutor.com/common/bgcolors1536.png

Into that column you'll need to add a formula that looks as your category column and assigns it your chosen hex value for each category. So, if you wanted one of your categories to be red your formula would be: =IF(C2=1,"FF0000")

Here's what my formula field looks like using 5 categories:

=IF(C2=1,"66BB44",IF(C2=2,"ff0044",IF(C2=3,"000000",IF(C2=4,"3344BB",IF(C2=5,"66335")))))

The formula above says if the previous cell (C2) is equal to "1" assign it the hex value of "66BB44", and so on. The more categories you have, the longer your formula gets. If you need to add more just make sure the number of closing brackets on the end of the formula matches the number of opening brackets for each category, or it will break the formula.

Your spreadsheet should now look something like this:

Step 4 - Add new columns to make it wordle friendly

Now insert two new columns after the 'keyword' and 'number of searches' columns so that Wordle can make sense of your data structure. (You no longer need the category ID column as the formula column has done all the work Wordle needs. You might want to move your category ID columns to the right of the hex column)

Step 5 - Make your wordle
You're almost done. Your spreadsheet should now look like this:

Go to http://www.wordle.net/advanced

Paste in your content into the second text field on the 'Advanced' page. Make sure you don't past in the header row as we don't need that.

Step 6 - Experiment with different types of Wordle

Use the menu option on the top of the Wordle to change case, colour and horizontal/vertical display features.

Step 7 - Save as pdf or Print Screen

Now if you have a PDF writer installed you can save your Worlde as a high-res pdf and play about with it In Illustrator. This is neat as you can zoom right in on your terms and see those really small ones.

On a practical level I'll be using this as a way of finding out how well our attempts to raise awareness of our web exclusive videos is working over time. So by the end of 2010, we'd hope to see more yellow searches (yellow being web exclusive comedy videos).

Credit for this trick goes to my colleague Duncan Bloor, our resident SEO specialist at BBC Vision Multiplatform.

How much do you trust Google?

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:17:00 +0000

I just discovered this cute video from Google Japan showing how Street View works. There was an interesting debate in the press earlier this year regarding Street View in respect of people's privacy. The Wikipedia entry cites details of cases around the world where Street View has been called into question over invasion of privacy.

It even prompted human rights body Privacy International to complain to the UK's Information Commission Office (ICO), who rightly concluded that the risks of invasion of privacy for the majority of people was very small and that it was not in breach of the Data Protection Act. After all, it's not illegal to take photos or film anyone in public, so long as you're not harassing them.

All that aside, as someone who frequently uses many of Google's wonderful free products, it got me thinking about how much information they hold about us, and at what cost to our privacy?

After all, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Actually there is, but moving on...

When you look at the number of products (see graphic below) that have quickly and seemlessly integrated themselves into many aspects of our lives, you realise just how powerful all that information could be if they were to start mining information across their range of products.

How many of these Google products do you use?

Here's the full list.

Clearly Google is all too aware of users' concerns in the area of data privacy, which is why you can now monitor all of the products you use with the new Google Dashboard. This allows you to tweak all of your settings and delete any data you don't want stored.

And what a lot of data they store.

Still, they wouldn't be smart enough to do anything with it, would they?

Seven easy steps to search engine success

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:26:00 +0000

Natural search engine optimisation (SEO) is about common-sense web production, resulting in a bunch of free marketing. Yet some people still dismiss it for a number of reasons. They're either too sceptical, too busy, don't see it as their responsibility, or feel that it interferes with their copy. The truth is SEO is everyone's responsibility, from design, code, editorial and marketing. Ultimately, what's the point in being 'too busy' producing websites if your users can't even get to them?

Before launching any web product (or even a single page) identify your keywords, define the best possible site structure and seek links from authoritative sources from around the web. There are other aspects of SEO, but if you can knock off the following basic principles you'll be in great shape for performance in search engines.

1. Research your keywords. (This is not about meta keywords. These are used only by Yahoo currently. It's the words you will use throughout the page elements in #4). Don’t just think about the brand name.
Make it your business to know what people are looking for in relation to your planned content. Exploit other popular words and phrases people are using when searching. Always start with Google Adwords Tool.

2. Create a holding page early ensuring there are links to it.
This increases chances of being indexed by search engines and allows people to link back to your page.

3. Build your proposition’s overall structure around your keywords, using those keywords in your local navigation.
This means using keywords in all the right places, making it easier for search engines to take meaning from your page. Overall structure and the contents of individual pages should be informed by things people are looking for, and the phrases/labels they actually use when they search.

4. Use keywords in all the right places.
The more of these you can hit the better (* essential)

Title text - the most important element*
In the H1, H2 tags etc* - also very important that it complements the title text using the same targeted words
In the page content (first 200 words)*
In anchor text (link text) of any internal and external links*
Top level navigation (site structure)*
Meta description (under 140 characters including spaces) - this won't help rankings but increases chances of being clicked on in search results pages (SERPs)
In image filenames and alt text - (to improve chances of being indexed by Google images)
Video titles and associated descriptions
Meta keywords

5. Be a smart copywriter
Write copy that will be loved by both humans and search engines
Reinforce keywords in your body with synonyms and clarification words. E.g. green, eco, environment; green, vegetables, spring, recipe; green, car, fuel, efficient.

6. If you already have a site and you’re restructuring never just delete pages.
Do your research to see where inbound links are concentrated, and carefully create a 301 redirect plan.

7. Obsess about good linking behaviour.
Spend 30% of your editorial effort obsessing about the following types of linking:
i. Seek out external links from trusted sites that are most relevant to the central theme of your page
ii. Encourage related internal and external sites to use link text that matches keywords on your page
iii. Exploit every internal linking opportunity and always use matching keywords in the anchor text, never Click here or Read more.

If you're interested in learning more about SEO the following sites and blogs are leading authorities on the web:

Countryside Massive from BBC Comedy

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:27:00 +0000

More nonsense from BBC Comedy in the form of the Joes, Countryside Massive.

Jerry Jackson is RLY RLY Board!

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:50:00 +0000

I'm very much enjoying these little web originals by David Firth, commissioned for BBC Comedy Extra. You can watch more David Firth here.

It's the people stupid

noreply@blogger.com (James Webb) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:25:00 +0000

Understanding search behaviour is an essential, but often neglected part of delivering on your audience needs.

One of the BBC Values is that 'audiences are at the heart of everything we do'.

So, that means doing solid research and being confident that a product is delivering something the public wants or needs that they can't get elsewhere. As a Producer this means adopting user-centred design principles (yawn), which, briefly are about meeting and researching your audience, and testing a product early and often throughout the lifecycle.

While I still subscribe to this, I've recently come to realise that it only provides part of the solution to delivering 'audience-focused' products. Meanwhile, I've gained surprising insights into user behaviour and needs just by spending a bit of time looking at search-related data.

If you're responsible for conceiving, managing, or maintaining any web product you should know the answers to most of these questions, and it really shouldn't take long to find them using your analytics system.

1) Which keywords do your visitors use to arrive at your site?
Let's say you run a site providing support for parents with their child's studies. A look at the 20 most popular keyword searches shows lots of searches about 'becoming a classroom assistant'. You'd never know this unless you interviewed hundreds of your site visitors or ran a site survey. While you may not have planned any content like this, spending a bit of time creating a simple page about this theme would greatly increase the chances of one of those users landing where they want to land, then clicking on a link to another of your pages. A positive experience on this occasion means they're more likely to return next time too.

2) What are the most popular terms relevant to my site in Hitwise?
This activity complements the above but provides wider insights in that it aggregates data from UK ISPs on how 8 million UK Internet users interact with thousands of UK sites. If you work in a large firm with a big presence online they will have at least one Hitwise account. Ask your Marketing contact if they'll let you spend an afternoon running off some reports. If they're feeling helpful, they may even offer to do it for you. The simplest thing you can do (or request) is to run a keyword report for the last three months for people arriving at a any given url. This takes seconds and provides one of the most valuable (and low effort) insights into visitors' search behaviour.

3) Have you researched Google Adwords?
Study Google Adwords to see what specific words and phrases people use in relation to the content you offer; or plan to offer; or maybe never even thought about offering. (NB: Make sure you change the drop down-value from 'broad' to 'exact match' for a more accurate reflection on popular keywords.

4) Which sites bring you the most traffic? (top referrers)

This is useful to know as it gives an insight into what other sites your target audience use, but are they linking to the most appropriate page with words in their link text that match the keywords you're using on your page? Might they be interested in being updated when you publish a particular new piece of content? This activity is known as link-building and contacting your most popular referrers is a useful place to start.

5) Which are the most popular pages on your site?
Is it the one you need it to be in terms of flowing traffic through the most authoritative, highest ranking pages? (People say search engine rankings are meaningless these days, as it's all about "conversions", but for a non-commercial site, I'm not sure that's true)
Do your most popular pages have any connection to your most popular referrals?
Perhaps your big referrers are directing visitors to the wrong page on your site. You can always ask them to change their link to a more desirable page.
Are there sufficient links in your page navigation to other priority pages in your site?

6) What's your bounce rate?
If you have a good analytics package you can see the bounce rate for your site. This is the percentage of single-page visits. A high bounce rate implies your landing pages (key entrance pages from search) are not relevant to your visitors. According to Google, a typical bounce rate overall is around 40% but it can vary widely depending on the sector in which you operate.

7) How long do visitors spend on your site/page?
Whether this is spent in puzzlement or enjoyment, only user-testing will tell. Track this over time and you can consider it a loose form of success measurement. Is this figure rising, static or falling, and if you work for a large organisation, is it in line with other sections of the domain?

8) How many people are linking to you?
Yahoo Site Explorer is a very useful tool that tells you who is linking back to your pages. It's far more accurate than the Google equivalent and you can filter inlinks from within your own domain, or from another domain. The more inlinks from authoritative sources, the better your site will perform in search.

These are just a handful of tips that help you learn more about your visitors and also help you measure effectiveness of your site.