Check out Kinsey’s Myspace:
http://www.myspace.com/kinseysprompage
Thousands of people have been keeping up with young Kinsey over the last couple of weeks through her video blog posts. She’s excited about her prom and blah, blah, blah, but she’s a little concerned about the behaviour of her brother Hank.
What is Hank up to?
Could it be a secret invasion?
Great work by Marvel (or their agency).
April Fools Day is upon us once again…
http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html
“Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now”
Great stuff.
Stepping away from internet marketing for a minute (I’m technically on holiday), I’d like to draw attention to a charity that particularly grabbed my attention when we met at a trade fair a couple of weeks ago.
In Kind Direct take goods which are unwanted by big business and distribute them to charities. You should definitely have a look at their website.
Look out for some other Upstream peeps posting on this blog next week… have a great weekend.
If you want an idea of where Google is going in the coming months and years, Google Labs is generally a good place to start.
We all know that Google is an organisation that likes to put time and effort into development. While Microsoft made a song and dance (of sorts) about the “release” of Internet Explorer 8 while still in a very early Beta, Google’s fantastic Gmail is still in beta after over four years.
What’s great about Labs is that you can watch a new idea grow from seed to fruition.
One great program to come out of Labs is Google Desktop. This is a free, downloadable program that adds a little bit of search magic to your desktop. Click the CTRL button twice and a box pops up from which you can search your computer and the internet for any particular keywords. One or two other features are a little more annoying - feeds with Facebook status updates and images can pull up some embarrassments when they are least welcome. Still, you can always switch these off.
Another great “graduate” from the labs is Google Maps, which is well on its way to squashing the opposition. It’s rather like Multimap but somehow “Googlier”.
Rather like an emperor with hundreds of children by various concubines, not all of the labs’ spawn are fit to rule. Google Video was dwarfed by YouTube. Froogle died in its sleep one night. Google Reader… meh.
Of the current tools in development, my two favourites are:
Trends, which is very useful for SEO companies like Upstream Connections. This allows you to compare the search volume for up to four keywords over a period of months and years. Results are presented as line graphs and are shown alongside related news stories.
Google Mars. Which is rather like Google Earth but with maps of the Red Planet. Sadly, after hours of searching, I have been unable to locate any of the familiar landmarks from Total Recall, but that Cohaagan always was a sneaky one.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Upstream Connections - SEO Brighton
Microsoft has made Internet Explorer 8 available for download here.
At present, the download is in Beta form and is aimed mainly at programmers and developers, although there is nothing stopping regular browsers downloading and having a play.
Initial impressions: IE8 is quite a handsome beast but it won’t be replacing Firefox or Opera in our hearts (or on our desktops) anytime soon. Basically, this offering appears to be Microsoft playing catch up, trying to offer extensions a la Firefox but not quite “getting it”. The lines are clean, usability is improved from IE7
Some of the more interesting features include
One key development in the browser is called Webslices, which allows information from sites (like Ebay, Stumbleupon and Facebook) to be included in the browser. This works a bit like an RSS feed and offers you “highlights” of sites that you are interested in.
Microsoft, being Microsoft, will never release software which can be adapted like Firefox. In reality this means that people with very specific demands for browsers (SEO companies, for example) will continue to use, modify and love Firefox for the foreseeable future.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Upstream Connections - a Brighton SEO
Today (at the fourth time of asking) Vodafone delivered my shiny new Nokia N95 8GB. I am just coming to terms with the universe of features on the phone, more details of which can be found here. Three of us in the office now have N95s and we are well and truly smitten.
Now I can see why my N95 owning flatmate shakes his fist at the television every time one of those insufferably smug iPhone adverts comes on - Nokia’s flagship phone was out before the Apple and has higher spec, more user options and a lovely two way slider. And it’s 3G.
Which leads nicely on to the topic of this post: a great new website called Qik, which allows you to stream direct footage from your 3G mobile phone to the internet.
We have been spending a frankly upsetting amount of time in the Upstream office playing with this site. You register your mobile phone on the site, receive an sms to confirm and later receive a link from which you download the necessary software.
It is still very much in its infancy, but looks to be a revolutionary development (please correct me if this has been done before). At the moment, the majority of videos being streamed are people sitting in their offices checking if the site really works. A number of them have come from Upstream’s Brighton SEO office. One cool thing is that you can comment on people’s videos as they are streaming… these comments appear on their screens as they are filming. This hasn’t been fully integrated yet, but does have tremendous potential (for both honest interaction and juvenile entertainment).
The potential for streaming from mobile phones is great… lets just hope it doesn’t end up the great big fleshfest that sadly seems on the cards!!
Following on nicely from Dave’s post on Digg, the Guardian Unlimited site today offers a great example of the power of Digg to drive traffic.
Here are yesterday’s most read stories:
 |
Nothing fascinating here, you may think.
What is interesting is that the top story “Mysteries of Computer from 65BC are Solved” was posted on the site in November 2006. Why would such an old story suddenly become the most popular story on the UK’s most popular newspaper site?
 |
That’s the power of Digg!
One of the best things about working in a company like Upstream Connections is spending all day on the internet. True, it’s not great for the eyes. To be honest, it’s probably not all that great for the soul either, but opportunities for entertainment are endless.
The obvious places are often the best. YouTube, for example, has brought us some real gems, my personal favourite being a sneezing baby panda. The site is great for marketing as well, if you can catch the zeitgeist.
For example, Tay Zonday became an unintentional internet legend for his impassioned call to power “Chocolate Rain”, which has had over 13 million views at the time of writing. Doctor Pepper saw the potential of young Tay and quickly signed him up for a marketing campaign. The result is “Cherry Chocolate Rain”, a great piece of viral marketing that has clocked up over 2.5 million views in a month. Whether it will make you want to drink Cherry Chocolate Doctor Pepper is another matter.
For those of us with a more cynical disposition, the comments section on YouTube also provides fantastic entertainment. Somehow, this humble and innocent video site has managed to plunge the bar of internet debate to an all time low. I really wanted to post an image here to illustrate my point, but honestly struggled to come up with anything that wasn’t far too offensive/biggoted/plain stupid - though XKCD author Randall Munroe hits the nail on the head rather nicely.
Away from the obvious sites, where you know distraction awaits, our beloved Google hides a wealth of entertainments.
One that particularly entertained us in the office on Friday afternoon was Google’s approach to nationalities.
Image searches for different nationalities bring up very different results. Switch off safesearch and have a go for yourself!
Searching for “German”, for example, brings up German flags, German Shepherds and German sausages. Searching for “English” brings up a sheepdog, some pictures of language classes and a few cartoons. Searching for “Brazilian”, on the other hand…
Entries RSS 
