This Ain’t No Disco {it’s where we work} “invites Agencies from across the world to show us their inner sanctum”.
Today the d.igloo was featured on the site (thanks Ian!), with some cool photos taken by Simone Rosenbauer. That’s Fiekes our uber-cool uber-Dutch Studio Co-ordinator in the shot.
The page also lists some of the sustainable features of the studio previously featured on the Future is man made site. If you like what you see, vote for us!
Like many other people I subscribe to iTunes’ weekly email newsletter to keep up-to-date with the latest releases on the iTunes store.
I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to see this in my inbox:
It is a promotion for a release of John Lennon cover songs by famous artists aiming to raise awareness of the genocide taking place in the Sudan. I flagged it as a great use of social media (in a pretty loose definition of the term) for a cause.
Today I came across a second article in Wired on how activists have demonstrated Google Earth’s potential as a live-saving humanitarian tool, and then received corporate backing from Google itself in support of the initiative.
It’s great to see Darfur getting this attention and seeing the role these popular online services are playing in supporting the cause.
(As an aside, the folks at Campaign Monitor did a terrific review of HTML email best practices which includes a graphic illustration of why the iTunes newsletter is pretty bad from an accessibility and technical perspective. Good food for thought when designing your newsletter.)
Update: I neglected to mention that I first heard about Darfur and the genocide through blogs – Jim Moore’s to be precise – around June 2004. Shortly after reports started coming some of Jim’s friends started Passion of the present as a way of sharing information and organising a grass roots effort.
I promise I’ll stop talking about the iPhone soon. Like, really 
In the meantime – test your site out on the iPhoney – a simulator for testing your site or web application on the iPhone.
Or check out what the iPhone will do by downloading Apple’s 20 minute guided tour. I’ve only made it through to the 5 min mark so far – but even that shows some nice features.
The rest of this post is a bit techy – so if you don’t lean towards the geeky side of the spectrum, you might want to skip to the next one…
Make Blog: iPhoneDevCamp-iPhone hackers converge on San Francisco on July 6.
Like I said – not long ’till we start seeing some interesting things happening on the iPhone, perhaps even Voice over IP (VoIP).
There’s also some interesting commentary on Ajaxian about the potential for multi-touch interface support in Safari, and how AJAX (that’s a technology that reduces the number of page updates required on a page by only updating smaller parts of the page) will be a good fit on the iPhone due to high telco data charges.
Priscilla points to Ripple a search engine that donates 100% of its revenue to to four selected Australian-based causes. Worth checking out…
And succeeds, it would appear. Laurel points to Toyota’s Greek blogging experiment.
The money quote in her post:
…bloggers only allegiance is to their passion and their conscience. So if your car (product/service) sucks, a magazine might be ‘even handed’ in their review. After all, you also pay for advertising, and they want to be invited to press events again. Bloggers will simply say it sucks and lists the reasons why. And that is the crux of the matter – why people trust social media and complete strangers to ‘expert testimony’ and ‘trained journalism’.
I had an interesting discussion with a bunch of webbies who work for NGOs last night down the pub and we were chatting about social media. One of the folks mentioned that a friend works for an broadband internet service provider and spent an enormous amount of time responding to a few critical voices in discussion groups and blogs – defending his company essentially.
My first question was “is the criticism he’s defending against valid?” Social media is not a particularly good idea if what you’re actually doing/offering is not very good or unethical.
But, the point was well taken – tracking and engaging in social media can be very time consuming, and it’s important to evaluate where to invest your energy (and when to just protect your brand).
I’d like to actually start to put together some thoughts on when social media is a good idea, when it’s not, and what sort of resources are required. But in the meantime, Priscilla recently posted a great method of evaluating which social media tools might work best for your organisation. (And then takes her own advice to great effect.)
by Amnesty International France i believe .. elegant, gentle, moving and very effective …
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It was a pleasant surprise to see our friends at Dumbo Feather featured in Campaign Monitor’s email gallery. Digital Eskimo worked with Dumbo feather to create an online strategy prefaced around leveraging existing Web 2.0 services and Open Source software to create a ‘web presence’ rather than just a web site.
The first phase of the project included the blog style web site with paypal enabled e-commerce, integrated flick-r galleries and delicious links and the fine newsletter which supplements the blog ( which was designed by Beth at Dumbo feather). Watch this space for the next phase of the Dumbo feather online strategy!
BusinessWeek profiles 10 designers that “push the envelope in ways that expand the realm of design, move beyond well-accepted wisdom, and transplant knowledge from one field to another to solve a problem or create new opportunities.” [via Zeldman]
Sounds like a bunch of folks we’d enjoy chatting with if we were to bump into them at the pub
I couldn’t resist throwing this up on our blog. It’s the cake the crew from Amnesty International Australia sent us to thank us for the Message in a Bottle campaign we created for them late last year. We had just won three AGDA Finalist awards, hence the wee trophies (notice the laptop and fish detail too!). The campaign was a huge success with 28,000 messages of support in just 11 days – definitely some sort of record. The cake survived a few weeks in our fridge before we devoured it, another record i think.
Speaking of Amnesty, we recently completed the Bring David Hicks Home campaign site for Amnesty which is now the Close Guantanamo Bay campaign for obvious reasons. If you live in Melbourne or Adelaide you can visit and leave your video message for the world to see.