Tag Archives | free

Emotional Search in Web 3.0

By Tom Saunter on April 4, 2009 // design, Web

I urge you to go and check out We Feel Fine, a flash applet that scours the Interwebs  not for keywords you’ve chosen, but from a huge array of predefined emotions.

The result is a staggering visualisation of current states-of-mind across various social media sources, from feeling ‘angsty’ to ‘fine’ (of course) and through to ‘zealous’. Seriously, one cannot underplay the significance I feel this holds, as the way it comes across in its black and #ff005d imagery places monumental power behind the little dots and abstract shapes, each representing a different feeling, and crucially a different person. Allow me to elucidate…

Logging on you’ll start in an ocean of multicoloured shapes and colours. Mousing over will freeze the surrounding area allowing you to pick out a certain point  – a label appears signifying the attached emotion. A click on that point shows the sentence or image that the target emotion is connected to. A further click takes you away to that content’s permalink somewhere on the web. Immediately, at least to me, the significance of web browsing via emotional state is felt for the first time.

Jonathan Harris, digital artist behind WeFeelFine along with information architect Sep Kamvar,  has set upon a series of projects intended to exploit our increasing hyperconnectivity, and present back to us the visual representation of our online ongoings. Check out this video from coolhunting on the etymology of the project below:

As a member of the ad industry, I am excited by the potential to target users by their emotional state via WeFeelFine, or by Adrian Veidt-style trendspotting via Universe.

Conversely, as a member of the Open Web culture I know that this is art and should remain so. Let’s not sully this by exploiting human weakness, rather use it as a reminder of those core abilities the web and our hyperconnectivity to it can show us, and what we can learn from it.

That’s the true definition of good art, in my opinion.

Comments { 0 }

Web Discoveries for March 23rd

By Tom Saunter on March 23, 2009 // del.icio.us

These are my del.icio.us links for March 23rd

  • Blog Marketing and Blog Ads : SocialSpark -
    Very compelling idea – crowdsourced social media advertising where advertisers connect directly with bloggers through a brief. Set wordcounts and offer creative assets, plus a small fee. Will research further.
  • Make Something Cool Every Day 2009 on the Behance Network -
    An artist has made these really great images, posted them on Behance & Flickr. Wonder if there’s scope to work something like this into a long-term campaign? Hmm…
  • SoundCloud > Jazzanova Remix -
    Very cool competition site that visualises both the waveform of a UGC remix, as well as user annotations along its timeline. Worth a good hour of browsing when I have time.
  • Soft Drink Generator -
    Create a new line in soft drinks with this online tool – results look really effective!
  • Twitter ‎(Social Brand Index)‎ -
    The largest directory of Brands that Tweet that I’ve found so far. Let’s hope it gets encyclopaedic, and saves everyone time. Where’s the Wiki?
Comments { 0 }

SoundCloud

By Tom Saunter on March 18, 2009 // music

SoundCloud do clever things with music.

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

I found them by accident when searching for remixes of ‘I Can See’, a great song from Jazzanova’s new album – listen to it with Spotify on this link.

Anyway, over at SoundCloud they’ve hosted a remix competition that lets users easily upload their mixes and have them judged by Jazzanova themselves, who had this to say:

“Since so many astonshingly good remixes had been submitted, it was no easy task for us to come to a final decision,” says Jazzanova’s Jürgen von Knoblauch . “We discussed the matter over and over again and finally agreed on three winners who had very different approaches and represented the stylistic variety of all submitted remixes. However, we had to draw the lucky winner of Ableton’s software package and Soundcloud’s premium membership. Once again, we would like to thank all the remixers/producers who participated in our remix contest and submitted their excellent works.”

What’s cool about the contest is it gets users engaged with SoundCloud for one great reason, but entices users to explore their other options (as in my case) such as their free website widgets: a dropbox for users to submit any track to the site owner; a player that shows the track’s waveform and allows users to annotate it at points along it’s timeline. These raise the profile of the service across the social web and drive traffic back to their homepage.

With this competition, SoundCloud and Jazzanova are in perfect symbiosis – both benefit from being associated with the other. I’m very interested in researching their company further, as there has to be elements that larger advertisers can participate in.

The effect on Jazzanova’s album sales will be hard to measure, but I’d love to hear from anyone involved on side-effects/uplift in consideration or other brand metrics.

Comments { 0 }

Web Discoveries for March 9th

By Tom Saunter on March 9, 2009 // del.icio.us

These are my del.icio.us links for March 9th

Comments { 0 }
Quote

Drunken Monkey Hypothesis

By Tom Saunter on February 12, 2009 // academic

In keeping with the Darwinian zeitgeist, here’s a piece on Human Taxonomy, which postulates that the reason we love alcohol (and who doesn’t?!) is all in the genes, but, like, from WAY back.

The drunken monkey hypothesis proposes that human attraction to ethanol alcohol may have a genetic basis due to the high dependence of the primate ancestor of Homo sapiens to fruit as a food source. Ethanol naturally occurs in ripe and overripe fruit and consequently early primates developed a genetically based attraction to the substance.This hypothesis was originally proposed by Dr. Robert Dudley of the University of California at Berkeley and was the subject of a symposium at the meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Dudley believes that while most addictive substances have a relatively short history of use, ethanol attraction may have a long evolutionarily based history. He believes that fruit ethanol may have been a significant source of calories and that the smell of the ripening fruit would help primates locate it. Primates are known to have a higher olfactory sensitivity to alcohol than other mammals. The once-beneficial attraction to ethanol may underlie human tendencies for alcohol use and alcohol abuse.
Wikipedia
Comments { 0 }