We have linked to it from our blog.

Regards,

Mike.

However, I feel that calling the Cadbury Gorilla video “just a remake” of that other TV commercial is taking liberties. The subject is the same, yes - a gorilla with drums. But that’s where the similarities end. The use of perhaps one of the most famous drum riffs of all time, combined with a funny visual, is what made this popular.

I agree, though, that the page ought to be more helpful. Maybe they could parse the address, restate the domain in a search suggestion for “site:www.google.com ____” and tell you to fill in the blank for a more keyword-like term.

Or maybe have a couple pairs of googly-eyes animated with a nicer “oops, try again”.

Peace.

Interesting list of categories and examples.

If you do make a part 2, please don’t put all the videos in one page, as you did here. My poor computer is struggling to juggle 20+ videos at once.

Thank you! Learned a lot!

Hello to all marketing passionated

These patterns are useful when combining them with service design - a viral alone is not enough now - it’s just broadcasting. A series of productions that use these patterns that tightly bind to user-centric data services is the next wave of development for all communication agencies.

Top post Mike. I’ll send Ms Webber over with a Babycham right now.

that said, I was sick to my stomach about the “don’t taze me, bro” incident, this poor guy was so helpless and screaming out in fear and agony. This wasn’t a sketch or an actor or situational comedy. If this was my friend, I’d be crying my eyes out for him because I couldn’t do anything to help. I nearly was anyway… (ok, I’m a baby.)

I think it’s very observant that one of the viral patterns you point out is that lots of people enjoy laughing at others’ misfortune (like the guy sitting nearby in the video laughing through it, or the viewers those embarrassingly awful American Idol auditions are for). In essence, your list is one of what people want in their head- what keeps their attention- what makes them feel good…

I’ll be sticking to snicker kisses and bouncy balls in the street anyway, thank you for those.

Leanne

I create and produce events - bringing these kinds of ideas to life in a room full of people is difficult and needs the faith of your client. However that is what most of the agencys here have acheaved and look at the payoff.

I think viral marketing is stupid.

http://tinyurl.com/6j2cy4

TO’B

…

http://www.sadkermit.com/

None…

http://hotchickswithnoeyebrows.blogspot.com/

Stopped reading the FAIL blog cos some of the images used are tasteless… but hey, it’s better than http://icanhascheezburger.com/

They say that they “look forward to supporting more languages in the future” - I won’t bet on Ruby though. Maybe Erlang.. :P`

The main benefit here is largely that it’s free, but it isn’t particularly flexible (yet?) which makes it mostly useless for most devs. You can’t simply port apps to it, you’ll have to develop specifically for their platform. I guess that’s not going to be too horrible if you’re a python dev but it isn’t even simple in that case.

Good point about Facebook’s pathetic advertising scheme - although in Google’s favour they have such a wide-reaching, all-encompassing grip, that their strength is their ability to disseminate thorough and deep statistics to find optimal solutions. And they aren’t working with small focus studies.

I like eye-tracking as a means of research, but I don’t think the results are always used properly: are you expected to target the “hot” spots on your page with ads, or is the problem that users are avoiding the ads no matter where they’re placed? Is navigation on a large news portal site of any use if users are getting to your website from a search engine? Does your site need to be able to drive users from the homepage, or is it primarily important to make it easier to drive people to content from deep content pages? Is the kitchen-sink approach feasible? How do you avoid the kitchen-sink if you have a very large volume of differentiated information to present? Thankfully we have you to help answer these questions..

- Sue.

So yes, I like the nice VIEWs that come standard with Vista, relaxing sea scapes, beautiful reflections but is that enough? I could still personalise my desktop with nice VIEWS under XP.

My VIEW is that since I’ve started using Vista my productivity has dropped about 60%. It took me an entire morning last week to rustle up 6 graphs that would have taken me about 20 minutes. Arguably the lack of familiarity with the interface was the main cause but MS could sure do with some lessons from APPLE or NOKIA in understanding user journeys. I might now have pretty illustrations and a myriad of drop down boxes to choose from but is this at the expense of a clearly mapped journey of stages. It just feels like gratuitous and overwhelming choice by pictures where nice small neat buttons worked perfectly well before.

Inevitably I’ll get used to it and several months down the line will no longer be scratching my head and puzzling over where they’ve hidden x or y function , and maybe by SP2 I’ll even be able to rearrange my frequently used menu options to whereever I like, just like the more widget based approach of the new BBC home page (beta) but for now the VIEW is mostly grey and overcast.

There’s a number of good and bad points with the OS. I think that in a nutshell the major pro is that under the hood, it has a lot of nice new features for everyone, but the major pro is the interface: I personally don’t find it aesthetically pleasing at all, and the general experience is often worse, not better, than XP.

Look at the basic explorer window: Good: The new address bar is pretty cool - you can click any directory in the path to go directly there, and even better, you can click outside the address space and it automatically transforms into a text path which you can copy if necessary. Bad: You have a lot of clutter and pointless edging. The transparency effect is fine, but the glow on the window title looks really ugly. Good: You have a much larger number of sorting, arranging and grouping options now available to you. Bad: The sorting/grouping isn’t intuitive, I can’t really figure out how to get a balance between the two.

That’s just the explorer window which, granted, is probably the most important one. But configuration is worse. There’s lots of unnecessary splitting of general and advanced configuration views, I can’t figure out how to hibernate my laptop anymore, UAC makes the system unusable, there are far too many confirmations and additional buttons and dialogs and screens to go through in order to achieve things. In general the window manager is quick and responsive, but I don’t know whether this is due to my having a much more powerful processor and video card in there than my old laptop (which ran XP). Wireless network configuration is a confusing mess. Gadgets are nice but there’s no universal keystroke to activate them, plus the gadgets you can download from Microsoft are crap.

There’s probably more… I agree on the fundamental rules thing, but I think there are even more basic problems. Overall I guess most people are asking whether Vista presents good and enough features to warrant an upgrade… I think the majority of people would agree that this is a firm “No”.

Then again, I remember when I switched from C++ to Visual Basic and wondered why anyone would bother to develop Windows (3.1!) applications when they ran approximately 100x slower than C/C++ apps. The only thing was that it *seemed” faster to develop in VB, and you could have lots of pretty things at a relatively small time cost. MS are good at targetting the wider, lazier base at the end-product’s expense, and building on top of that. While VB is all but dead now, these efforts all led to C# which is now quite popular.

I imagine a lot of punchcard and assembly programmers feel another generation older when they read these articles. There was a time when memory capacity and processor power was at a premium - but now that it’s not really an issue (computing power seems to have outstripped our average need of it), it’s easy to be complacent about how well your application does what it does. You don’t need under-the-hood elegance anymore (ho ho, right iTunes?).

You say people only use the web’n'walk homepage because it is almost impossible to change, this isn’t true, it is very simple to change your homepage (on the devices I’ve tried). Its just a settings change that will take less than a minute to do!

However I think people continue to use the home page because it is quick and easy to use. T-Mobile have changed their homepage recently and now I have my ebay account linked directly to my homepage so I can see what I am doing with my bids; its excellent. Plus it has direct links to my hotmail account and you can get news feeds and other stuff there too.

I’m not sure how I will feel about the advertising; as long as its not intrusive I probably wont mind, but it wont stop me from accessing the web via my mobile and via the t-mobile homepage.

Thanks
Helen

I think we’re pretty agreed though on that fact comparing the two defies sense.

Google is a major player in lots more things. They’ve got blogger, jot, picassa and flickr are with ‘em . Gosh. They work with the weather channel for google maps. Hi5, Youtube, Orkut, linked in. Google android mobile phone system is gonna blow away the iphone. Just jumped on board with open social, open ID. I’m an ignorant country bumpkin so nobody blast me if I got some alliances wrong. If they aren’t lined up totally with all those buzzwords I just wrote then they will be soon. It’s fast becoming a great and powerful Google empire. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but all Facebook really has is a cult following with no meat and potato sturdy apps to back ‘em up. Am I right? What I wonder about is… exactly how much “pulse” do I really want the world to have on me? And why? And what will the world be like when that becomes commonplace. Comments?

Tacks, The Boy Disaster. Get the album ‘Oh Beatrice’ on itunes
if you fancy!