The twists, turns and tips you need for staying up-to-date by the water cooler.
“Crowds are smartest when the people in them are encouraged to act as individuals as much as possible,” says James Surowiecki, author of the best-selling business book The Wisdom of Crowds and the opening keynote presenter at the MarkLogic User Conference yesterday, in San Francisco.
In his keynote address James explained why the power of the crowd trumps individual contributions 90% of the time. Let’s have a look.
More here:
MLUC09: Crowdsourcing Guru Says Crowd Trumps Individual 90% of the Time
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Why the ocean matters…to Google
The Super Bowl is Sunday, and undoubtedly many of you are gearing up for a big weekend filled with fun, excitement, and a Cardinals victory (yeah, I said it). Some of you might have a checklist filled with snacks and drinks you want to pick up before Sunday, but I’m here to tell you that that’s not all you should have on that checklist. Snacks are great and drinks are better, but once your fridge is stocked, you’ll want something to help you pass the time.
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Be nice with Give Real
Want to be the nice person this weekend? Then sign up for Give Real and send your friends a Pittsburgh Pint or an Arizona Ale.
You log on to Give Real’s site, give it your credit card information, and send a gift of beer to your friends. You can suggest a particular beer for your friends to try out and add a personal message. But it’s not like the beer goes through the mail: Once the recipient gets the gift notification, they accept it by registering for Gift Real and inputting their own credit card information. When that’s complete, they can buy a beer at any restaurant or bar and once that transaction posts to their account, Give Real will refund their money and take the cost of the beer out of your account.
Credit card monitoring may not sound too appealing and I wouldn’t be too happy sending my credit card information to a startup that I’ve never heard of, but when it comes to the Super Bowl and to beer, all bets are off.
See the past with Hulu
Hulu, the professional video content site that’s backed by NBC and Fox, may have a Super Bowl ad this year, but that’s not all its doing for the big game. Friday, the company announced that you can view all the commercials from Super Bowl XLII on its site.
The page features all the best commercials from the past year — 55 in all — and to be quite honest, I didn’t realize how entertaining many of them are. I enjoyed my thirty minutes watching all the commercials. I think you will too.
Once you find some you like, you can also use Hulu’s widget, which it unveiled Friday, that allows you to post your favorite commercials to your blog. It’s a neat tool that works well.
But there’s more. This year’s Super Bowl will have, of course, its own commercials. And instead of just telling your friends about them Monday morning, you can actually show them which were your favorite, since Hulu will be adding each commercial to its Super Bowl page as soon as they air Sunday.
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Watch even more commercials on SuperBowl-Ads.com
SuperBowl-Ads.com provides past commercials, much like Hulu does, but it goes one better: you can view commercials from Super Bowls dating back to 1998. It even has a few ads that aired earlier than that.
What’s better on a Saturday afternoon when you’re waiting for Sunday’s game than to sit back and watch old commercials that you probably forgot about? Remember the old Budweiser commercials? They’re on SuperBowl-Ads.com. So are all the GoDaddy commercials and just in case you’re wondering, so is Apple’s famous 1984 ad.
That said, there isn’t an exhaustive collection of commercials and a bunch that I loved in the past are missing. Regardless, the site is still worth trying out.
Get your debate on with Twitter
I love all the ways Twitter is being used, and for those at Boston ad agencies or Boston University, they can use it another way: to debate which Super Bowl ads are best.
According to a report from the Boston Globe, a real-time Twitter debate will start before the opening kickoff to allow everyone in the community to pick their favorite commercials and support their opinions against others who might disagree.
Granted, the debate is being used as a marketing ploy by ad agencies that want to promote their brand, and it’s only being pitched to people in and around Boston, but who cares? That doesn’t mean you can’t start your own debate, or crash the Boston party.
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How to pass the time until the Super Bowl kickoff
If you’ve been using MS Paint to brainstorm it’s time to upgrade. A whiteboard solution called Dabbleboard is one of the better efforts I’ve seen. It lets you put together a map of ideas very quickly, and supports both free-hand drawing, along with a system that will automatically convert basic doodles into sold shapes like circles, triangles, and squares.
Dabbleboard’s killer feature is that it lets you save bits and pieces of these doodles into your library for later use. Once you’ve added anything to your library you can simply drag and drop it into whatever you’re working on, and the pieces will follow you between projects. This is helpful for any complex design elements or images you’ve uploaded and plan to use in a later session.
In addition to its library tool, Dabbleboard boasts online collaboration that lets you work with several others at the same time. The one caveat here is that only one person can be actively making changes for it to save, otherwise anything you’re working on can be overwritten by someone who jumps in and draws something. The system is smart enough to alert you when the other person is using it, however, I found it to do a poor job at respecting the precedence of an edit that had begun before someone else’s.
Any work you’ve done can be shared in a central library with items that can be copied back to your personal collection for editing and redistribution. You can also embed any of these works on a blog or site with code, which means when someone makes a change it will go live wherever it’s been embedded.
Besides the standalone site, Dabbleboard offers an API for developers. Anyone can use it to build Dabbleboard into their sites and services, letting users log in and save their work using a pre-existing user account.
The service reminds me quite a bit of Scriblink and Skrbl, two collaborative whiteboard tools I’ve looked at before. Also worth mentioning is the now-extinct software-based FreeHand, which Adobe Systems killed off back in early 2007. The big difference here remains the clips library, which is just plain smart. In any project where you want to save some time by reusing something you’ve already modeled, this is going to be a immensely helpful.
I’ve embedded the service’s demo video below.
[via Basement.org]
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Dabbleboard saves your sketches, time
