Challenges

Challenges are fun - top gear do them well. I saw this on the Animal blog.
Very cool - the Sao Paolo inter-modal challenge - a cyclist beat a helicopter across the town rated on several different factors of time, cost, environmental handicapping system.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Not sure if this is real or a hoax but it looks quite cool.

Apparently in the US in NYC a couple of days ago strange cloud formations appeared behind a plane I'm not sure but this video is cool.

Musical Mapping Mayhem

I just love this for its sheer lunacy. Somewhere a guy into maps has created a Google maps type mash up whereby he has turned the 88 counties in Ohio in to a map where each county corresponds to a key on a piano so you can play the county and make tunes.


Called Ohio is a piano it is brilliant and mad.

Infuriating yet insightful

Every so often someone in the office sends something round just for fun, and you open it and wish you hadn't. This site is exactly one of those types of sites. They are infuriating because they are addictive and yet totally pointless.



However, the people that develop sites like this demonstrate that they really understand how interaction works. That users are open to exploring, that intrigue is a powerful tool. That you can trust your users and give them more credit than we tend to. That it is human nature to explore and curiosity is a powerful motivation.

Interaction is the mainstay of the interface and its potential for us to use is limitless. At the end of the day something like this whilst stupid is also very insightful. sometimes the simplest things are - but brasnds have to fight their instincts to over complicate or lead the client too much.

Google Cost Savings

Interesting move from Google to demonstrate cost savings to businesses of using their online free services over traditional ms office and IT support staff. They have created a specific cost calculator to show the commercial argument. When you look at the numbers it is a very compelling case.



It is something we have toyed with as a small business but then what happens when Gmail goes down or confidential information in google docs accidentally gets sent to all your gmail contacts as has happened in the past?

I'm sure it will happen and quickly that this becomes the norm. The rise of the browser and the decline of the operating system is a well troden path and its interesting to see how a company like Google tackles this. I'm sure this is the first of many tactics.

T Mobile - Flash mob dancing again

Just saw this on adverblog. Looks quite cool. T-Mobile are sponsoring a series of concerts that have something to do with Oprah in the US.

Here is what happened when they planted a lot of dancers in the crowd

Appealling to your curiosity in a macabre manner

Being a child of the 70's the cold war is something I grew up with and have always found the imagery and psychology pretty fascinating from when the wind blows to mushroom clouds its pretty iconic stuff



...and having been an army brat and lived in Germany amongst other places videos like this have always been quite interesting


But this google maps application passed through my inbox recently and its quite fascinating and rather depressing. Essentially it allows you to see how a nuclear attack would effect your town or area/country and you can dial up the size of device, see pressure, fall out etc. Clearly all based on modeling etc but another fascinating use of Google maps.



Amazing what people can do online now isn't it.