DigitalAgency

Watching cheese mature:

Well it sure beats watching paint dry.

I was listening to the Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning, when they did a feature on a Somerset Cheese maker who'd put a web cam up for a few months looking at a cheese maturing.

What I thought was brilliant was that this centuries old tradition was using present day marketing to great effect. (A 5 minute slot on the Today programme all about the brand? That'll do nicely.)

If they hadn't put a web cam up, if they didn't have a myspace page, (which I hasten to add they do, with hundreds of cheesy friends,) then this would have been a non-story.

The presenters of Today even gave out the url and invited listeners to go and look at the webcam.

As your humble reporter, I diligently did so, it was wonderfully low-fi and ever so slightly Monty Pythonish, but I noticed that 500,000 other visits to the site had already been racked up.

Yep. HALF A MILLION. To a Shepton Mallett cheese producer's web site.

My guess is that the figures will go even more stratospheric after the Today airing. (Not to mention the long tail benefits and indeed Google ranking effect, thanks to the BBC's links.)

But they might want to revisit their allocation of server capacity, in order to meet demand. After giving out the url on air today, the servers crashed.

Marvellous, name making stuff, and only possible methinks via Web 2.0 enthusiasms.

ps. On visiting the cheese site, I couldn't help but notice a striking resemblance to the TV set graphic the company my Missus works for, whitespace. I wonder if they could be related?

(Cheesecam)

(Whitespace home page.)

UPDATE: I'm told by the Whitespacers that the image was sourced from iStockPhoto, which explains the co-incidental useage.

pps. The cheesecam reminded me affectionately of the Cambridge Coffee Cam many years ago.(But you're probably to young to remember that.)

Never looked at it like that before. But now you mention it:

Let me get this right Missus:

Does this mean you won't be applying for a job in the Genius Bar, when the new Apple store opens.

via: WulfWeard the White.

CoffeeMorn230307:

Whoops, don't know what happened in the camera today, but in addition to all the crap shots I took, this one came out rather well I thought. (If unplanned.)

Oh well, as D.Ream said so well, 'Things can only get better.'

The rest of the Coffee Morn set for today can be seen here on Flickr.

Nick, Ian, Fraser, Andy, Me, Johnnie, Olly, Jamie, Phil, Ewan, Tim, James.

Did I miss anyone. Don't think I did, but if so; sorry, and let me know.

Incidentally, Johnnie aka Mr Walker has his take on the chat from his side of the table here:

Topics covered from my bit of the table were mooCards via Flickr, the YouTube vote, Mars Edit for blogging, DS lite as a teaching aid in schools, presentation styles, and how knackering mid-week there and back in a day London presentations can be.

(Although there are compensations, like the tremendous Kylie exhibition I popped into at the V&A, between meetings yesterday. (Oh dear, D.Ream and Kylie references in a DigitalAgency post? What on earth is happening to me?;-)

 

Cool Coolhunting film:

Jonathan Harris is the guy behind the wonderful 'We Feel Fine' site.

This short, makes you think, film, is packed with great thoughts and images and well worth a look.

(Thanks to my young nephew Mark at Mother for bringing this to his dotty old Uncle's attention.)

Strongbow launch new ad on YouTube. (Prior to TV.):

Joost TV:

Like a lot of other people, I downloaded a beta of Joost recently and have been playing with it for a bit.

Their stated goal is 'truly infinite TV choice'.

The Joost blog is a bit off the pace with the last entry in mid-Feb, (at time of writing here.)

Maybe it was my connection, but the programmes I have been watching have been a bit pixelated, a bit stuttery and the voice to picture was occasionally out of sync.

But hey, this is a beta of course, so Ifingers crossed they iron the bugs out and Joost goes on to rock the world. (And Rupert Murdoch.)

Coffee Morn: 160307:

(Out of date, badly cropped, badly comped shot of James, Ian and Nev.)

A small but perfectly formed group of attendees this morning at Centotre.

Nev, James, Ian and myself.

We covered a pretty tight group of topics too:

Google's personalised home page.

sms vs IM vs email.

We tried to demo a free sms service over the wireless connection. (And failed.)

Where mobile phones are/aren't/might be going. Including of course some heated debate about the iPhone.

Jeff Han, (again.)

Plus Bill Gates legendary, but possibly apocryphal 640k of memory quote.

Then suddenly, the big-hand of the clock had creaked around to the upright.

And we were gone.

ps. Jamie, a coffee morn regular, had a pretty good excuse for his no-show today.He was having breakfast with some bloke called Tony Blair. (Though he did find time to stop by afterwards in his whistle to say hello.)

Jamie, not Tony that is.

hcard

Michael Coulter

DigitalAgency.com

mike@digitalagency.com

United Kingdom

This hCard created with the hCard creator.

SMS from the browser:

I'm always amazed at those nimble-thumbed people who can sms from their mobiles as quickly as the less dexterous, and sadly less cognitively gifted of us, can type out an email of similar length.

But now with CallWave, I can send sms from my browser in double quick time, and because I'm using a computer keyboard and screen, rather than a phone keypad, I'm inclined to write slightly more elegantly than: 'CU @ 4ok' from Mkie, (damn delete/backspace... Mkie, double damn... MIke....mike.

What's more CallWave embeds neatly into my personalised Google page, (it's also available as an Apple, Vista and Yahoo widget), and their faq says it's free.

Although that may well be for US users, I'll check my mobile bill when it comes in, but hopefully it will be covered/absorbed by the gazillion free texts/minutes the phone companies are offering nowadays.

If only something like this could be embedded into an email app where I could write an email to someone then decide via a drop down menu if I wanted to send to their email addy or cell phone via sms.

UPDATE:

Oh dear, I tried using CallWave this morning to send out a bunch of sms's.

I'd sent about 5 out when I got blocked. Very poor service in my book.

Think I'll switch to Nev's recommendation:

and see if I fare better.

Virtual Centotre anyone?:

Every Friday we have our coffee morn at Centotre in central Edinburgh.

A ton of things are covered, some cracking stuff, some nonsense, some inspirational, some unintelligible.

I try and log about the issues discussed sometime sharpish afterwards.

(And often forget things, I know, I know, or don't hear stuff going on in other conversations. It's an age thing perhaps ;-)

Earlier this week Jamie suggested we aggregate  all our posts about CMorn in one place.

The Andy and MrW also suggested something similar; with MrW informing us about: http://www.suprglu.com,

Particularly so we, and you dear reader could have easy access to all the links about all the things we think are interesting.

Yahoo Pipes, were discussed, (beyond me right now), ma.gnolia, the venerable del.icio.us and Jamie's  tool du jour, ning.

Here's the recent correspondence:

Begin forwarded message:

From: Jamie Clague
Date: 8 March 2007 11:03:25 GMT
To: Michael Coulter
Subject: Ning & 2 Minutes to London

Hi Mike

Hope you enjoyed barcamp?

I've been toying with this idea for the coffee mornings, what do you think?

http://edcoffee2point0.ning.com/

See you Friday?

Jamie

_________

On 8 Mar 2007, at 11:23, Michael Coulter wrote:

Jamie,

Re ning.com let's talk about that tomorrow.

Do you remember that Groucho Marx quote, "I'd never join a club that would have me as a member!"

Well, the thing I like about Coffee Morn is that it is kind of loose and not formalised.

I think a standalone online home like ning might make people think they are obliged to join?

When we post randomly about the coffee morns on our individual blogs, we in a sense have a social network.

If we embrace ning, won't we have to post twice> Once on our own blogs and once on ning?

So I'm not sure what ning brings to the party other than yet another place for everyone to subscribe to, showing them content that's already been posted elsewhere.

But as I say, we can explore the benefits/drawbacks tomorrow.

cheers,

Mike

___________

Jamie replied:

.....thought everyone's blogs could filtered through Yahoo Pipes when Coffee Morning was mention and outputted to the Ning page.

Mike replies:
Jamie,

I have to admit, as a humble creative, the pipes and filtering blog posts to ning, is beyond me.

Let's chat tomorrow and see if there is anything we can do with this.

If I understand you correctly, it could be used like a 'category' on a blog platform.

Only in this case, unlike a blog, which aggregates all the posts in a tagged category, ning, would aggregate all the coffee morn posts from every attendees blogs?

Automatically??

Anyhow, your right, back to work for me, let's pick it up again tomorrow,

M

___________

So then after yesterday's CM, Andy and MrW brought up a very similar idea and emailed me this morn about it:

On 09/03/07, Andy Hyde wrote:

Having given up trying to achieve anything else today I've been thinking
about the chat around bookmarks and coffee mornings. How can we capture
the great resources that get thrown into Friday morning conversations?

1. ma.gnolia does offer a groups thing as I think Johnnie mentioned.
There's one for social media at http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/SocialMedia
as an example - presumably we could have one for coffee mornings too.
Those with a laptop on the table could post the links mentioned there
and then... plus, if you can't be there you don't miss the links. I
guess we can import links from there into blogs and our own
delicious-type accounts too?

2. could we use something like yahoo pipes to filter out blog posts with
a coffee morning tag and aggregate them into one feed - and shove that
into ma.gnolia too?

3. does this make any sense at all?

Just some Friday thoughts...have a good weekend

Andy

--
Andy Hyde

http://recentchanges.wordpress.com

To which I replied:

superglu-coffee-bookmark-thing?   Inbox

						Reply to all Forward Print Add Mike to Contacts list Report phishing Show original Message text garbled?

Andy, Mr W,

I'll forward this too to Jamie.

He suggested something very similar earlier this week.

See here:

http://edcoffee2point0.ning.com/

(Incidentally, Jamie also came up with the title: Edinburgh 2.0 which I think is terrific.)

Anyway, I wasn't too sure about the idea and thought it might just replicate stuff needlessly.

I think I was mistaken and got the wrong end of what might be a very good stick.

My interpretation was that it just repackeaged stuff we'd done anyways.

On reflection about Jamie's ideas, and yours chaps, it might be a labour saving device and aggregation tool.

So, Nil point Michel!

Let's talk about it next week and decide the coolest/easist? way to do this.

M.