If possible I would love to put a bypass around the forthcoming winter. Lets be honest here Christmas is overrated. In January you will fail after 3 days to keep to an enforced health kick and only if you’re lucky February or March might involve a skiing holiday, but that’s pretty much it. So lets just shirk our way through it and start planning the warmer months in 2010. There is at least going to be a world cup, which will be brilliant as long as Wayne Rooney doesn’t fall over.

The 2010 festival season is what most summer lovers will be looking forward to and have already planned, Glastonbury 2010 has already sold out in a day. There is talk of ‘The Zep’ playing, or at least ‘Robert Plant minus the rest of the Zep’ but whatever lineup they choose, as it forms over the next few months we will all be hoping that Jay-Z doesn’t top the bill again. It just wasn’t in the spirit in my opinion, you may argue, but I don’t care because that’s actually the whole point of our latest project anyway.

At the beginning of this year we were looking at ways to engage users socially around Sony’s passion for sound quality. As music has never been more instantly available, the way in which it is discovered and shared has completely changed. But this ease of choice has come at a price with people lessening the importance of music quality (an MP3 is essentially a compressed file). We wanted to create a platform on which Sony’s passion for sound could be shared with a common passion of music. As a result we have just launched Sony’s Fantasy Festival, a free points based league game. The aim – to assemble the ultimate, imaginary festival line-up and gain as many points as possible through your acts’ popularity tracked on the internet. Your personal lineup becomes an expression of your personality but is also a way of proving you have your finger on the pulse.

A mixture of Yahoo data and Last.fm plays is turned into a buzz metric that we have guilefully entitled…Buzz! The better your Buzz, the more popular your festival. Last.fm was the perfect platform – the music fan base was already there with the added bonus of a database of more than 60,000 acts to choose from. It allowed us to make the line up visual and therefore a great deal more enticing.

Top tip – Rammstein are doing very well right now but you never know – Timmy Mallet might just have a giant fan base out there somewhere?! Who knows, but as we are running the campaign in over 32 countries you’re bound to find some obscure success somewhere. All I can say is have a go. The creator of the most popular line up will be going to a festival of their choice in a VIP Winnebago and a pocket full of cash courtesy of Sony. Even if it rains it’s better than a set of practice golf balls from your dad this Christmas.

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Remember all that fun bossing around a man in a ridiculous chicken suit. How about Subservient Cameron? Or maybe even better, Subservient Brown? Well if you fancy living out your fantasies of being a political puppet master, your chance to pull at the strings of power may be closer than you think.

Speech Breaker offers you the delicious pleasure of controlling our fearless leaders and putting your words in their mouths…or in this instance, their own words back in their own mouths. No, not shoving them back in so that they can choke on them, more like re-ordering them and having them spat back out in amusing combinations for your own childish pleasure.

For the more cerebral amongst you that may mean tickling your funny bone by getting Cameron to extol the virtues of Labour Party policy and advocating spectacular increases in public spending and taxing the rich. OR, you might fall into the more puerile camp with me and be endlessly amused by hearing Gordon complain that “He’s wasted” or hearing Cameron say “ balls”. Sadly Cleggie has but a few words to rub together. Not a comment on his verbal ineptitude by the way…. you’ll see what I mean.

Endless hours of fun I tell you. Endless hours of fun…..

Nice picture by revstan | No Comments

Whilst coding away today, I came across a little bit of code that I’ve seldom used and rarely seen documented, but is extremely useful for all those of you who try doing image-replacement for text and want it to work nicely in IE6.

My personal technique of choice, and one of the most accessible, is to use background images on spans within the element you are trying to replace. For example, say you wanted to have a custom font in a navigation element, without using a dynamic font replacement technique such as SIFR or PCDTR. Your html code will look something like this:

<ul>

<li><a href=”#”>Nav item 1</a><li>

<li><a href=”#”>Nav item 2</a></li>

…

</ul>

The first thing to do is to insert span tags within your anchors (these will be used to hold the background image that will replace our text) as follows:

<ul>

<li id=”item1″><a href=”#”>Nav item 1<span><!– –></span></a><li>

<li id=”item2″><a href=”#”>Nav item 2<span><!– –></span></a></li>

…

</ul>

Once your html is in place, you should then create your navigation images. In order to get the hover action working smoothly, meaning without flickering or noticable loading periods, we want to create a single image that has both the off and over states within it, as shown below:

Next, you need to create the css to carry out the replacement and rollover actions:

ul li a {

position: relative;

}

ul li a span {

position: absolute;

top: 0;

left: 0;

}

ul li a, ul li a span {

height: 36px;

display: block;

background-position: top left;

background-repeat: no-repeat;

overflow: hidden;

}

ul li a:hover, ul li a:hover span {

background-position: bottom left;

}

ul li#item1 a, ul li#item1 a span {

background-image: url(/img/nav-item1.jpg);

width: 83px;

}

In short what this does is to cover over your base element (the a tag) with an absolutely positioned element (the span tag). The rollover effect is achieved by shifting the background image position using the :hover css event.

I believe that this technique was originally devised by Petr Stanicek and Tom Gilder, and I pass all credit for it to the original developers. This is sufficient to cover all of the major modern browsers, and is fairly well documented throughout the web. However if you wish to get IE6 to respond to this as well (and reliably so) without using javascript, simply add the following modification (something that I haven’t seen documented before, although I’m sure there are blog posts out there covering this):

ul li a, ul li a span {

border: 0px solid red;

}

ul li a:hover, ul li a:hover span {

border: 0px solid blue;

}

Hopefully you should now have a nice, and quick loading rollover-navigation using custom fonts. The advantage of this technique over others is that, if you have images disabled – for example on a mobile browser or for accessibility reasons – the underlying text still appears, which of course you can style to your satisfaction.

To improve performance even further, you can create one large image that has all of your background images and rollover states on them, not just for one single element / nav item. This is a technique used by many of the web’s stalwart websites (as well as the smaller ones too). For further information, see this excellent post on mezzoblue’s website.

Image credit to developmentseed | No Comments

In 2001 Yvon Chouinard and Craig Matthews the founder of Patagonia and Blue Ribbon Flies respectively created One percent for the Planet, an initiative where companies pledge to give 1% of gross revenues to environmental causes. 1% now has over 1,243 businesses in 29 countries and has contributed over $30 Million so far to over 1500 environmental organisations across the globe.

In 2004 international singer song writer, surfer, photographer, film maker and environmentalist Jack Johnson and his Bushfire Record label became the 50^th and 51st members of 1% for the planet. When Jack released “In Between Dreams”, in 2005, he did so with the 1% logo and this gave 1% a truly international reach unlike anything they had experienced before.

As mentioned in my previous post on the fishing industry grass roots organisations are perfectly suited to embraced social media and 1% for the planet is no different. They are utilising the principles of Social Media to promote their message:

• People not consumers
• Social agenda not business agenda
• Continuous conversation not campaigning
• Long term impacts not quick fixes
• Marketing with people not to people
• Being authentic not persuasive
• Perpetual beta
• Technology changes, people don’t
• Change will never be this slow again
• Measurement and evaluate your social media strategy and activities

Here are a few examples of 1% embracing Social Media through Vimeo and YouTube, Twitter, Pitch Engine the Social Media Press Release service, Myspace and Facebook.

1% for the planet’s company’s ethos allows them to create fantastic content of their own whilst allowing followers and fans to get involved too. Because of the founders forward thinking 1% of the planet is in a perfect position to embrace Social Media and because of the passion of their supporters/members they are able to take their involvement beyond that of most organisations.

They are using the passion and the enthusiasm of their members/supporters and activists across the globe to integrate their online and offline communications in order to get the message out to as many people as possible.

This is a an organisation trying to make a difference to the world we live in and according to the Chouinard it wont even cost us a penny (from a companies perspective).

If you care about the world we live in then it seems a no-brainer to get involved by supporting the member companies.

Nice Picture thanks to Ktylerconk on Flickr. | No Comments

Remember that old marketing quote ‘One unhappy Customer will tell 10 people’. Well I think that saying should be updated. How about, ‘one unhappy customer can tell 2,950,217 people’ (at last count).  When United Airlines broke Dave Carol’s guitar and refused to compensate him, they never thought it would turn into an online PR disaster. Dave went on to make a song titled ‘United breaks guitars‘ which generated over 2.5 million views and 15 thousand comments in five days on YouTube alone.

It didn’t stop there, a search for’ united breaks guitars’ on Google News returns 795 results including the timesonline. To top it off, due to Google’s blended results, a query for ‘united airlines’ currently returns two videos about the incident on the first page.

If this was a hurricane it would have to be a category five, if it was an earthquake, it would be magnitude seven, a runaway train that has yet to be slowed. But this post is not about United, or is it about their lackluster response to the viral onslaught.

It’s about the one company that is quietly benefiting from publicity. In case you missed it, it’s Taylor Quality Guitars.   By quickly responding to the ‘united breaks guitar’ video, Bob Taylor of Taylor Guitars was able to re-assert the quality of the brand and quickly separate it from the United Airlines incident. They also included useful advice for flying with guitars and also stated that they even repair other makes as well. The two minute response has already generated over 100,000 views on YouTube, including I’m sure viewers who perhaps never heard of Taylor Guitars before.

The moral of the story.  Not only is it important to monitor your brand online, but you should also be aware of opportunities where quick wins can be achieved.

Picture, thanks to Tim Parkinson | 2 Comments