Banksy in New Orleans??

Rumors and evidence of possible Banksy work (or closely derived from his work) seen in New Orleans, on the 3rd anniversary of Katrina. Small photoset here.

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Thinks?

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Geauxbama!

Check out the killer Geauxbama shirts & stickers from Dirty Coast!

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Shive on the Scene.

These crazy bastards are too funny. The NSFW Dirty Coast jingle reminds me a little of one of my favorite local NOLA commercial jingles, for Broad Warehouse furniture.

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The Davos Question.

Every year many of the world's top leaders attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how to make the world a better place.

This year, you get to join them.

First, submit a video answering The Davos Question:

"What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?"

Then, starting January 1st, watch and rank others' ideas. The highest-rated videos will be screened in Davos (January 23-27), where world leaders will watch your videos and make responses of their own. Your idea could be the start of something big.

Visit The Davos Question website.

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R.I.P. Evel

Evel Knievel died last week. He was huge when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. The Daredevil Stunt Cycle was a Big Deal. They don't make them like Evel these days. David Blaine and Chriss Angel et al pale in comparison to the impact and awe this strange, probably brain-damaged madman created.

Update: just read that the Stunt Cycle has generated over $300MM in revenue. Wow.

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Email Standards Project.

The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients.

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Facebook's Flaw: Humans

Great article on the nuances of social networking, titled How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook, by Cory Doctorow (co-author of the Boing Boing blog)...

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling -- you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"

full article

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Mmmmmmn, classy.

From Axe. File under 'subtle advertising".

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NOLA Brand Mayhem

Malcolm passed along this cartoon from SF Gate. Sad but true. Or hilarious. I can't decide. After losing a few friends here, probably just sad.

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QBN's Shepard Fairey sessions.

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Faub.org is Alive.

Kudos to Ness & Erik, who went deep and gave us faub.org. We've graduated from temp splash page to this wonderful and fun interim site, which will someday give birth to the full site, which has been an ongoing labor of love since the early days.

What's Faub.org? A growing handful of New Orleans-based creatives and techies, feeling a bit thrown to the winds post-Katrina, bound together in spirit and spirits. We design. We develop. We drink, and more often than not, we talk a lot. Check it out. Play around w. the site. Dragging stuff around encouraged. We're having some sort of launch party this Fall. More to come.

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Diesel Brand Denim.

Props to Diesel for this outstanding site. Check it out.

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Ignition.

We launched a local non-profit's site recently, with a nice custom PHP content management system.

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Clean Is Happy?

This is a kind of funny site promoting what seems to be a bidet. I like all the hygiene euphemisms.

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Billions McMillions

Billions McMillions, a.k.a. Bill McMullen, is a phenomenal pop designer. Love the stuff. Bad Brains, Beasties, Star Wars and Drum Machines. How could you go wrong? Check out the nice site.

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The Secret of Design

Not sure it's this simple, but some neat ideas re: the cyclical nature of consumer ebbs & flows. From Baekdal.

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The Napkin iDea.

Check out this brilliant iPhone parody site from iDea. Thanks to Malcolm for sending it this way!

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Mini-Killer?

The new Fiat 500 has a gorgeous site up.

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How Vitter got Busted

This is a great story on how Larry Flynt's investigators tracked down (married) Louisiana Republican senator David Vitter on phone database records, showing that he frequented a D.C.-area escort service while vilifying adulterers and those not espousing "family values"...

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Future of Web Design

The Future of Web Design is all about getting together leading practitioners and thinkers in the design field to talk about trends, directions and exciting new happenings in the medium. This isn’t just another web event, but one that’s dedicated to the creativity in the profession, bringing back the ‘design’ and drawing together the diverse fields that doing ‘web design’ now represents.

The date for your diaries is the 7th and 8th November 2007.

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Reboot

Reboot is a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us...

2 days a year. 500 people. A journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas.

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10,116-point Logo

The intricate and brilliant new New York Times logo sign in Times Square, courtesy of Pentagram. Read about it on their blog.

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Banned in the U.K.

An ad campaign that promoted a computer game using the slogan "inner peace through outer violence" has been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority.

The posters for the Electronics Arts game Burnout Dominator were created by advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam and appeared throughout the London Underground. [read more]

from MediaGuardian.co.uk

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Too old for MySpace?

Everyone likes to belong, and that is one of the powerful forces of the Internet. Where once your service provider was your identifying online "community," today's equivalents are online social networks like Second Life, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

What's a career-minded grown-up to do amid such Internet playgrounds? [read more]
from International Herald Tribune
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Voyeur Launch

HBO's Voyeur project launched a spectacular site as a part of a larger campaign that included some really cool projections. Read more about the development and launch here.
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Apple's $3000 iPhone.

By Sinead Carew Tue Jun 26, 4:11 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc. said on Tuesday its hotly anticipated iPhone could cost as much as $3,000 with a required two-year service contract, but a handful of eager fans still lined up early to spend their money.

A small clutch of gadget enthusiasts staked out spots in front of Apple's store on New York's Fifth Avenue, days before the iPhone goes on sale on Friday evening 6 p.m. local time.

Plenty of potential iPhone consumers have said they would wait for Apple's next versions of the device to buy it, hoping for a lower price and faster network connection.

But industry analysts expect the first iPhone to sell quickly, at least in its initial months. Jessica Rodriguez, a 24-year-old student from the Bronx, seems to agree with them.

"I love everything Apple, and this is going to be something that goes down in the history books of cell phones," she told Reuters. [more]

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He told me to burn things.

Thanks Bec - good stuff.
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MySpace vs. Facebook

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Danah Boyd
June 24, 2007

Over the last six months, I've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Who goes where gets kinda sticky... probably because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class. [more]
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Dangers of Glare

This Polaroid spot/minisite is suspiciously close to the Milwaukee's Best Beer Cannon. I guess that shooting things from cannons has become its own genre. How viral.
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Music. Dance. Clock.

Incredible Flash-based apparel site. Check out the screen savers.
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Site Entrance Hurdles

It's not unusual for a site to position a long sequence of hurdles just inside their entrance. Someone walking in the door might have to clear some or all of these hurdles before they can even try out the site:

1. Figure out what the service does, and whether it meets their needs. This can be a lot harder than it sounds. The site might describe itself in text, images, or Flash demos. Even assuming the user has Flash installed, sitting through a demo can be tedious. The worst case: the site already assumes visitors know what it does.

2. Find the entry point for signing up. You'd think this would always be obvious, but on some sites it's not.

3. Pick a user ID. Often the first thing the service wants a new customer to do is pick an identifier such as a user name with which to identify themselves to the site later. If the site doesn't use email addresses as IDs, the user generally picks some variation on their own name. If they have a common name, they might have to guess several times before they find a variation of their name that hasn't already been picked as an ID.

4. Enter their email address. If the user ID isn't an email address, the user almost always has to enter their email address separately. Even if the service can be used without an email address, the site is eager to obtain this critical piece of marketing data from the user.

5. Pick a password.

6. Enter the password again to confirm it.

7. Pick the password several more times to comply with arbitrary security requirements.

8. Write down their password somewhere before they forget the new variation of their usual password that finally made it past the arbitrary security requirements.

9. Enter personal data used to configure the service to their needs.

10. Comply with (or carefully turn down) requests for demographic data for marketing purposes. This may include opting out of requests to be added to email newsletters.

11. Agree to terms of use and other legal agreements.

12. Activate their account. The user might need to switch to a completely different application—their email client—and look for a message from the service. They might have to wait for a period of time for this message to arrive. The length of this time period is unknown: it could be a few seconds, or a few days. When the user finally receives the message, they have to find a link somewhere in it that they need to click on in order to verify that they are, in fact, the proper owner of the email address.

13. Download software. If the service entails client software or browser plug-ins, the user has an additional dozen hurdles to jump through: the browser's save dialog, progress dialog, "Are you sure you want to run this?" dialog, an elevate-to-administrator security dialog, and probably a firewall dialog—not to mention the software's own overly long sequence of setup questions.

And finally, after all this, the person gets to try the actual service—and decide whether it's worth using.

With all these hurdles, it's a small miracle some web-based services end up with any users at all. Each hurdle constitutes an opportunity for the user to leave. The site is effectively asking the user, "Are you sure you want to use us? Are you really sure? How about now? Are you sure you're sure? Hmm?" Some users are going to take one of these opportunities and leave. People are growing increasingly leery of starting down the hurdle-strewn path of a new site. They've been down similar paths so many times that they've concluded the experience won't be worth their time unless they're already confident the site will provide substantial value.

From flow|state
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The Rise of Consumer Power

By Marie Jackson
BBC News

The makers of Mars bars have done a swift U-turn over plans to use animal products in their chocolate, to avoid a public backlash.

It appears the parent company Masterfoods did not reckon on the UK's vegetarians and their supporters being quite such a force.

















But as a growing tide of consumers are prepared to use their shopping basket to make a point, companies are increasingly having to watch their step.

A shift in consumerism seems to have taken place as shoppers become increasingly health-conscious and environmentally aware.

From prices and food labelling to sourcing and ingredients, there is little that does not come under the scrutiny of buyers.

And if it is not to their taste, consumers are prepared to reject it.
[read more]
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Brand America

America - Home Free?
America has been, for at least a century, the most powerful brand on the planet. That's not a metaphor: it's the literal truth. The ways that people all over the world think about, talk about and relate to America are exactly the same ways that people think about, talk about, and relate to great brands.

Brand America - Taming Wild Perceptions.
But has America's Western star lost its luster? A recent BBC World Service poll contacted over 26,000 people in 25 countries and found the image of the US deteriorating. Only 29 percent of those surveyed felt the US currently has a positive influence on world affairs. It would seem that the image of the lone cowboy no longer plays well overseas.

Welcome to the Machine

Transparency Triumph

The non-competitive and the downright incompetent have very few stones left to hide under: never before have consumers’ purchase decisions been so strongly influenced by all kinds of transparency. In fact, Transparency Tyranny now rules:

"Old economy fog is clearing: no longer can incompetence, below-par performance, ignored global standards, anti-social & anti-eco behavior, or opaque pricing be obscured. In its place has come a transparent, fully informed marketplace, where producers have no excuse left to underperform. Transparency Tyranny for some, Transparency Triumph for others."

As promised in our Top 5 Trends For 2007 last January, we’ll expand on the Transparency Tyranny trend in this briefing: not only will we focus on what’s next for the by now ubiquitous transparency of recommendations and prices, but also on transparency of intention, of advice, of best of the best.

- Trendwatching.com

Black Spot Unswooshers