A Wider Net

Writers - put away your thesaurus and play with Visuwords. This visual word-wonder allows you to search for a word, then sort through an organic 3D display of similar words. Double-clicking on a node allows you to surf closer to the perfect word. It needs some usability tweaking, but this tool really brings word relationships to life. Try it the next time you’re searching for a tagline.

Via Information Aesthetics.

You hand these USB memory drives to all your booth visitors. They run home and plug it in to see if they’re one of the lucky ones who get a spoken message “You are a lucky winner”. Everyone else hears “Thanks for visiting . Checks us out at www..com” every time they use the drive.

And if you want to be less annoying you can simply load it up with a pleasantly subdued remix of your company jingle.  I’d want it loaded with the Jetsons doorbell, but that’s just me.

Found via Everything USB

At the recent Asian Games, Element Labs provided a massive video screen built out of their Versa Ray product. Versa Ray is a weather-proof curtain material with bright LED pixels spaced three inches apart. When you use enough of it, you can produce stunning images of an immense scale - and the cost is surprisingly low. Curtains like this are routinely used for background scenery at rock concerts and large corporate meetings.

This example represents one of the largest LED video displays ever at over 120 feet tall and over 500 feet wide!

Sue Pelletier at Meetingsnet picked up the story about Wikia, Inc launching three new magazine-style communities - entertainment.wikia, local.wikia, and politics.wikia. Similar to Wikipedia, the massive open-source encyclopedia launched by Wikia’s principals not too long ago, all the articles will come from users. This type of magazine solution is what’s missing from Digg.com where users merely highlight stories - here the users create content.

At the office, we use a central Wiki to collaborate on meeting agendas. I imagine that larger meetings have started doing the same, although I have not seen a case where a wiki was used to collaborate on a large meeting where the attendees were invited to contribute. I’m sure we will see that become quite common before long. As a speaker at the upcoming Exhibitor show, I would welcome a wiki through which people could review the content, ask questions in advance, and propose alterations. As an attendee, I would also find that valuable - to have access to that content, even in outline form, and be able to ask the speaker to address specific details. Having this edited in public wiki form rather than having to handle individual personal requests would not only make it easier on the speaker, but hopefully provide some valuable public discussion.

According to Hill & Knowlton, the current issue of PR Magazine has a cover story people who pose as consumers to blog for clients.  Apparently this practice will likely be illegal soon in the EU.
Seems like there are loads of similar testimonial fraud territory that the US could tackle, from user reviews to client case studies to radio testimonials.  Blog posers are certainly among the most insidious, since it undermines a media form built on trust.

Here’s a relevant article that asked the question about the legality of Splogs over a year ago. Since then there have been a lot of high profile fraud examples but I found no reference of any real progress on dealing with the issue.

Note: The PR Mag article isn’t on their web site - it’s apparently behind the subscriber login.

This terrific video explains web2.0 pretty well, although you will have to know a bit about it already to fully appreciate the video. I just love the way it’s produced. It offers some insight into the changes we’re facing in the way information is created, proofed, found, viewed, modified, and shared.

I also followed the rabbit hole to Mojiti where the creator of the video has posted the video for public comment. Mojiti allows everyone (who registers for free) to place comments right on the video - a terrific experiment in social content creation.

Found on Information Aesthetics.

Billboardom writes about a billboard designed to trick drivers into slowing down to read their billboard. The trick is the realistic cutout of a police car placed below the billboard at ground level. A few years back, while under the influence of the draconian “Speed Kills” campaign across the country, I read a study that proved that speed variance was the leading cause of highway accidents, as opposed to speed itself. Of course, I’ve always said that running into things is what does it, regardless of the speed factors, but who am I to judge?

The point is - here’s a billboard designed to cause traffic to slow down. What if someone slows down suddenly, and gets rear-ended? (Forget that this billboard is in Turkey for a moment). Wouldn’t the ad company and the bank find themselves on the hook for that accident? In fact, a sudden slow down can cause traffic jams, multiple accidents, and even gridlock. So why is this ok, given that it is clearly intended to cause slowdowns, while the Mooninite project, which was designed to create the effect of people talking about mooninites, is being treated as an act of terrorism by the city of Boston and the conservatives on the radio?

You may have heard of a radio show from 1938 which unintentionally caused mass panic and hysteria. That event also occurred at a very sensitive time in our nation’s history.

I guess our industry has to be extra careful not to worry people. Or we can tell the media to simply stop broadcasting the news. Or we can be more diligent and investigate more thoroughly before we react. Is this radio program a hoax? Is that LED cartoon character a bomb? Do they really have WMD’s?

Hitch Media offers an ingenious solution for exhibitors and event organizers to reach cell phone users. Using their own bluetooth transmitter, which they ship you for use on your event, they can beam advertisements to users with bluetooth phones within a range of 300 feet. Users must allow the download on their handset but it costs them nothing. In fact, the per-message transmit rate is also nothing.

Currently the system supports text, jpg’s, and video, although video is not supported by all phones. Also, due to Verizon’s stubborn restrictions on the supported bluetooth protocols on their phones, this system will not reach Verizon customers. It seems likely that Verizon will cave to consumer pressure to change that in the future. Most new phones already support bluetooth, and in the near future all cell phones will support bluetooth. In the meantime, this looks like a great way to grab attention.

Meeting organizers and event planners need to be aware of the promise of TelePresense. Simply put, TelePresence allows you to conduct face to face meetings without being in the same room, and without feeling like you’re talking on a clunky video phone. Telepresence creates an illusion that people from remote locations are in the room with you. It can also create the illusion that a remote presenter is acually on stage at an event. It may sound a little “holodek” fantastic and, to some extent, it is, but this is very real, and based on well-proven technology. What makes TelePresence so much better than videoconferencing is really how it’s integrated into the meeting. Companies have come up with increasingly clever ways to integrate the technology into a familiar environment like a conference room or a ballroom- so you think about interacting and communicating and not about the technology.

Cisco Systems has an extensive section on their website about their telepresence solutions.

Other links:

Human Productivity Lab - has a great telepresnece blog, a massive downloadable paper on the subject, and lots of telepresence content.

Teleportec - solutions for creating the illusion of a remote speaker actually being on stage.

Digital Video Enterprises - provider of a variety of telepresence solutions, including 3D telepresence kiosks.

Telepresence World - annual conference in San Diego

Since those of us in and around Boston are in a pranky mood after the Mooninite invasion, here’s a way we can all join the fun. Dane Cook has a new promo website promoting the Tourgasm DVD. Through it, you can prank your friends and coworkers with emails that appear to deliver pink slips, paternity tests, and other frightening situations.

Viral pranks - if you’re an IT helpdesk worker, “Viral Pranks” is redundant and not at all funny… but I bet each one of ‘em will try to squeeze one of these babies through their spam filters. That has to be the dorkiest thing I have ever written.