Jen Corbett’s posterous

I have to admit I have a thing for robots. So when I saw this, it was love. There are so many ways that people have tried to hack Roomba's (robot vacum machines) but this is probably one of my favourites...

To generate buzz for IKEA's target audience, Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors decided to turn to facebook. But they didn't fall into the traps that many who also turn to facebook do when they decide to launch a facebook campaign. As a result, they've created this wonderfully simple campaign for IKEA based around a competition using facebook photo tagging.

They created a page for an Ikea store manager, and uploaded images of the manager's new showrooms. They started drawing users to the profile page and telling them the first to do it would win it. The thing is, by tagging something you instantly share it with all your friends who see the notification on your feed. So inevitably thousands of people were drawn in to get their hands on their very own piece of Ikea.

Unlike many facebook campaigns, which consist of a page, perhaps an app and maybe a few brand ambassadors - this concept is fresh and cool and - shock horror! - it appears to have worked. Friends were happy to have this intrusion because they too were keen to participate in this tagging game and also invest in seeing whether or not their friends would win too.

So it's not difficult to see a) why people would participate in this and b) why people would want to share it with their friends.

Call it product catalogue 2.0 - beats email marketing any day.

As you can tell, I like this, I like it a lot.

Yes, technically it's still a facebook campaign. But it doesn't scream yawnfest. It knows how people use facebook and it draws in, interacts with and engages people effortlessly. In effect: it shows how marketing on facebook doesn't begin and end in a facebook page.

It shows, how with a bit of creative tinkering, you can afford to do something unique wwith your social media campaign. And yes, it shows how it doesn't neeed to be complicated, or expensive, or a massively integrated beast to succeed on a most basic level. Interaction, engagement and answering that golden question "what's in it for me?"...

It just requires a small amount of lateral thinking and a bit of confidence.

When are they bringing Ikea to NZ again?

Take a moment to appreciate seven different ways ideas are broken before they get the chance to bounce.  By Scott Campbell. http://scott-c.blogspot.com/

It's pretty special. War. By Feltrinelli Editore / Richard Overy..

Take a walk through Central Park, NYC. 2038 images were used to make this film. www.mlwphotos.com

I'm fascinated by this installation by experimental media artist Christopher Baker. It's many things. But in short, it's a visualisation, an archive of tweets, status updates, or if you like, the digital small talk of micromessaging technologies like Twitter.

Each roll picks up and prints messages that resemble human utterances such as eww, grr, argh, hmph. They stream endlessly, piling up on the floor, in tangled heaps below.

It's purpose is to represent the way these utterances we make - emotional or otherwise - are accumulated, monitored and stored by corporations.

Murmur Study was created in collaboration with Márton András Juhász and the Kitchen Budapest.
Interesting also is the fact that before training in media arts, Christopher Baker was a scientist working to develop brain-computer interfaces at the University of Minnesota and UCLA. He's now the senior artist-in-residence at the Kitchen Budapest, an experimental media arts lab in Hungary.

In a statement on his website, Baker says

"I am energized by the diversity of human expression that continuously activates our vast communication networks....As technologists make daily promises to improve our lives by uniting these physical and digital worlds, I attempt to make work that examines the practical implications of our increasingly networked lifestyles"

A focus I think is incredibly important for us all .

Let them sing it for you is a web widget that allows you to type in a sentence which is then played back using the same words culled from a library of popular songs.

Pretty damn cool.Try it out here ... http://www.sr.se/P1/src/sing/ :D