Sexy people

Can’t leave you without one of Ronojoy’s new favourite.

SEXY PEOPLE

This is Jack and George. Click on the link for many more. I liiiiiike!

And wanted to say a huge thank you to all for your support! Greatly appreciated.

I’ll be back soon, after I’ve settled down in the Dam.

Get over your blog. I did.

And other web truisms.

I love waiting for your Flash to load. I’ve got fuck all else to do

or

YOUR WEBSITE’S SO COOL THAT I DON’T KNOW HOW TO USE IT.

FUCKING GENIUS

I’m feelin totally depressed today. So anything that can help make Mondays fun should be welcomed. Even if it’s just for about 12 seconds.
http://webwithoutsense.com/

Thanks Ronojoy. You should be the one with a blog. It’d de much cooler.

Make the data dance

From my friend Darius:

Gapminder takes UN data and visualises it graphically over time. You choose all parameters (life expectancy, personal income, CO2 emissions, broadband penetration) and it maps trends by country over time.

Go to http://graphs.gapminder.org/world/

It certainly does make the data dance.

It’s not new, but it’s still pretty sound.

Youtube meme

This is making our design department laugh at the moment.

The Salvia meme. I must admit its quite funny. Here are the known effects of smoking Salvia:

effects may include:

• Uncontrollable laughter
• Past memories, such as revisiting places from childhood memory
• Sensations of motion, or being pulled or twisted by forces
• Visions of membranes, films and various two-dimensional surfaces
• Merging with or becoming objects
• Overlapping realities, such as the perception of being in several locations at once

So basically, it’s quite simple. Smoke salvia and attempt to do a mundane thing. And get a friend to film it.

Let’s try gardening first

Then for the more adventurous type, driving:

Or try to make a sandwich

Ah the simple things. I personally condemn the use of drugs, of course.

So this was turkey of the week

Tough call.

I still think the Seat ad is more of  a stinker.

Is the new batman really the best movie ever made?

I love my movies. I have been sucribing to the DVD movie services like LoveFilm for years. I love it.

Playing and tweaking my list all the time.

But then I realised I started becoming obsessed with checking the ratings of movies on the IMDB.

It’s quite simple, I won’t rent or watch a movie that’s got under 7/10.

I check them all, before putting them on my list. Anything under 7 is normally not worth watching. Everytime I did, I regretted it.

Even if you don’t always agree with the ratings, they are still the best indicator of the quality of a movie that you can find on the Internet. I find it certainly more reliable than Metacritic, which I disagree with pretty much all the time.

So back to Batman, it’s currently topping the list of the 250 best movies ever with a score of 9.4 out of 10. Apparently better than the The Shawshank Redemption or The Godfather. And that, after more than 140,000 people voted for it. Which is pretty amazing.

I’m still to find a similar service for music albums. The ratings on Amazon out of 5 starts are just not good enough. Every album end up having 4 stars.

Anyway, what’s my point? The widsom of crowds? Are #Internet ratings reliable? How the Internet has totally changed our media and entertainment consumption?

Nope.

Just that I’m pretty excited about watching the new batman. Seen it yet?

green team!

Fancy a laugh? It’s Friday after all.

Watch the green team on Funnyordie. It’s a bit old, it’s a bit wrong, but I still find it hilarious.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/fa1420df1f

(Can’t embed it because WordPress is sh*t). I think I really need to upgrade to the paying version (which is a pretty clever trick from wordpress to get some money out of you actually).

I think Will Ferrell is my Internet hero.

sleeveface and hercules and love affair

Ah Fridays. You’ve got to love them.

At BBH, we’ve got something called Summer Fridays. Basically, we can leave the agency at 4. I tried last week, went to the pub at 4, and was completely wasted by 8. Not so good.

Anyway, as said earlier, working on a pitch at the moment and struggling for time.

But, there is always my friend Ronojoy, who, apart from enduring my company and body odor for 8 hours a day, always got a little something to share.

Today’s silly thing is sleeveface:

One or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion

Does what it says on the tin. But does it really well.

Go on and waste some time there. You know you want to.

http://www.sleeveface.com/

On another note (no pun intended) – I’m so not funny – I’m obsessed witht this song (not the video).

Have a good weekend all.

que viva espana

Even at BBH, sometimes, we like to have a laugh. Only on Fridays. And only if it doesn’t last for more than 30 seconds. I was pretty close to getting caught on that one. But that’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while.

Better quality here.

To the importance of pictures

It still surprises to realise how little people have learned over the last 10 years.

Pictures are the Internet most important asset. I decide about most things by looking at the pictures. And this is also what most people do.

Products, hotels, houses, places, experiences, and dare I say people, most of the most important things and choices in our lives are determined by looking at online pictures. And you can’t have too many pictures. It’s so easy to browse and you can rely on people to always find what they want.

I have come so disillusioned with transactional websites that when I want information, I actually look directly in Google pictures. It is most of the time much easier to find what you were looking for.

Or to type what you want in Flickr.

I couldn’t find any pictures of a decent pitcures (a 5*) on their websites so had to rely on tripadvisor and flickr to show me what it was like inside. I wouldn’t have booked it otherwise.

I wish some people could see how many transactions they missed just because they didn’t have enough pictures.

People love pictures. Facebook has become so popular because suddenly you could see everyone’s lives through their pictures. It’s that simple.

You can invest million of pounds in building social experiences, heavy transactional websites, you will miss the sale because of the quality of the pictures you put in (or there non-existence).

And there are million of ways to make browsing pictures really engaging and entertaining. Examples:

Mood stream from the Barbarian Group for Gettyimages

The Tag Galaxy

10 ways to interact with pictures (I think from Sumona for Gettyimages)

You can see more like that here.

Websites could just be pictures as far as I’m concerned. Make them bigger, put more of them, make it amazing to navigate. Everyone’s got a broadband connection, make the most of it.

Whatever you are advertising, invest in pictures.