An amusing view from the 4th floor this lunch time – the East Link toll bridge raised for a gaggle of swans*!

*There may or may not have been a boat to the left of this picture. The Dublin Port Authority, in all likelihood, do not do business with swans.

Lyndon Wade
http://www.lyndonwade.com/
A tribute to the aesthetics established in the late 1950′s by the Master of Suspense.

HSE: Break
http://www.bannerblog.com.au/2008/11/hse_break.php
Great effect, if not a little disturbing!

Volkswagan’s Clever Innovations
http://www.vwinnovatie.nl/en/
Excellent video rich microsite to demonstrate VW’s latest technology developments. All wrapped up in a simple yet engaging game.

Instinct Phone
http://www.instinctthephone.com/
Samsung takes on the iPhone, head to head. Demo all the features in an extremely inspired, interactive site. A must see – this is how-to of phone microsites.

Back in January we blogged about 2008 being the year of the Twitter. Without getting into a yearly review just yet, it is safe enough to say that this free mircoblogging service has taken the world of social media by storm.

Today we saw that early news of the attacks in Mumbai were broken via Twitter. Those looking to supplement the coverage of the Mumbai attacks by mainstream media with bitesize eyewitness accounts can follow the latest updates through this micor-blogging tool. Rather than replacing the press, Twitter is becoming an essential tool to complement the press.

In Topaz petrol stations recently, you may have noticed that the little Innocent Smoothies have little knitted hats on them. You see it’s all part of a charity drive for Age Action in Ireland. Topaz and Innocent are hoping to raise €20,000 between them to help look after old people in Ireland this winter. For every hatted Innocent you buy, €1 will be raised for charity.

We think it’s great, and that’s why we’ve blogged about it. Well done guys.

MSN and Generator held a seminar for digital media planners in Dublin recently and one of the speakers was Jeffrey Cole – Research Professor and Director of the Centre for the Digital Future, USC Annenberg school for Communication (Annenberg University).

Jeffrey presented some interesting findings and observations from a worldwide study of how the internet is changing lives. With the study live in 29 countries, here’s a snapshot of some insights from 15-24 year olds:

• Will never read a newspaper but are attracted to some magazines
• Will never own a land-line phone (and maybe not a watch)
• Will not watch television on someone else’s schedule much longer
• Trust unknown peers more than experts
• For first time willing (2005) to pay for digital content
• Little interest in the source of information and most information aggregated
• Community at the center of Internet experience
• Think they’re not interested in advertising or affected by brand, but wrong
• Everything will move to mobile
• Television dominates less than any generation before
• Want to move content freely from platform to platform with no restrictions
• Want to be heard (user generated)
• Use IM. Think e-mail is for their parents!

The full presentation can be downloaded here. And although Ireland does not make it to the list of researched countries, we have to agree that the above is indeed a reality here as well (except perhaps for the watch part!).

In the last couple of weeks we’ve had several posts about Google. We discussed using Google Analytics with Flash, about how in Argentina Google being forced to censor search results and a little further back, about tracking regional search engines in Google Analytics. By far the most interesting function that we’ve discovered Google has, is to track flu trends. Seriously.

On the 21st Novemeber, in a follow up to an early blog post, the Google team published an academic paper in Nature, explaining the science and methodology to track Flu Trends using Google Trends. Initially this seems absolutely absurd; to be able to track something so clearly organic (and offline) as the Flu, using a search engine.

Well, we can. Last year, a team of software engineers began to explore the possibility of using Google Trends to look beyond simple epolitical or technology trends, and accurately model real-world phenomena through the search patterns of individuals. Considering the impact that disease has on people, globally, they decided to focus their efforts on infectious diseases, which are responsible for millions of deaths around the world each year.

The most obvious was of course, influenza, commonly known as the flu.

So in coordination with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the team used aggregated search query data and data provided directly by the CDC to investigate if there is a relationship between the frequency of search queries and the number of people who get the flu each week.

Sure enough the results were staggering. The correlations were there and Google was able to launch Google Flu Trends, providing up-to-date flu activity data for each of the 50 states in the U.S. Unfortunately the tool is limited to the United States but hopefully with future participation from similar organizations in other countries, it can be expanded.

Another small step for digital, another giant leap for…… digital.

Well it just had to be this…

Eagle Eye – Experience
http://experience.eagleeyemovie.com
What if your next phone call is from a total stranger who knows everything about you? Play the experience.

H&M: Red Pebble
http://www.hm.com/gb#/cdg/
Nice simple navigation set in a stunning pseudo-3D environment. Exactly what you want it to be.

Protect 7-7 by WIM Tellier
http://www.protect77.com
One of the biggest art installations of 2008. A story about nature, humanity and art by Belgian artist and photographer, Wim Tellier.

Super Volei Brasil
http://www.supervoleibrasil.com.br/
Good graphics, great gameplay and fantastic stickiness – all in all a superb online game and microsite.

What do LIVE web broadcasts hold for the future of the web? If you’re a sports fan, with streaming broadcasts you can sit at your desk and not miss a second of play. The same applies for current affairs and breaking news. But it doesn’t all end there. On 22nd November, YouTube will be airing its very first LIVE streamed event. According to the folks at YouTube this event will be a part concert, part variety show and part party.

And what does this mean for brands? Are consumers motivated enough to tune into a live web broadcast or does apathy rule? This Tuesday past, RTE.ie streamlined Ireland’s first LIVE TV commercial (by 11850) during the much anticipated Munster vs. All Blacks match. Well, they never said it was going to be perfect.

Does this mean Brands should shy away from the idea of streaming web broadcasts? Not necessarily. In his article on Irishtimes.com, Kevin Courtney presented the argument for the need of brands to capture attention by engaging viewers. As you might have noticed, advertisers are using digital to leverage campaigns on traditional media (Cadbury’s Gorilla is among one of the many campaigns backed up by viral marketing). So how does this relate to web broadcasts? Being a platform for pull marketing, the web offers brands the opportunity to engage consumers. If we can also reap the benefits of traditional media (e.g. LIVE broadcasts), we are afforded a wealth of benefits.

The area of web broadcast is still in the trial stages of course. Take a look at Healthy Choice’s Working Lunch to see how streaming content has been implemented to promote this food manufacturer’s brand.

Google Analytics introduces another top feature this week – “Analytics Tracking for Flash”. Although Google Analytics did already provide some functionality around tracking flash events using the videoTracker object, this new offering will let publishers track metrics for their Flash applications from within Google’s popular stats package. This opens up a host of possibilities in the way advertisers pay for engagement rather than simple clicks and views.

For more info check out http://analytics.blogspot.com.