Web marketing is fairly unique to offline marketing in that the technology and trends are changing constantly. Audiences move from site to trend by the time a campaign hits the last one.

April fools day coupled with the random 1-2-1 webcam website chatroulette provided a great opportunity for one soft drinks manufacturer to show that they are indeed looking into these new crazes.

ChatRoulette provides an interesting platform and who knows what the potential is here. This is however a very slow and narrow market especially for someone like Dr Pepper who rely heavily on volume rather than quality sales, would someone be able to use the same platform for quality sales?

This video however is topical, has been well edited, it has elements of the reality ‘hidden camera’ which has always been popular. So may well go viral. I’m assuming this was the goal of the campaign from the get-go.

At this time, the video has been seen only 27,000 times but it has already surfaced on viral sharing websites so keep an eye on it.

No amount of Jargon-free sales pitches will ever truly get across the benefits of working with Zako Media. But for a REALLY dumbed down version. I turn to my old friend XKCD who help keep me sane in times of computer trouble, car trouble, dog trouble… well general problems:

 

Well it’s happened again and inspired me to write a short blog. Digital photographs (including scanned, downloaded, stolen from Google images and digital cameras) are known as bitmaps. ANY TIME a photograph or video (different to some line drawings, see later) reaches the computer screen, it is converted to a bitmap (if it wasn’t one already). A bitmap is a grid with a finite number of pixels (digital cameras are measured in Megapixels (10M, 5M etc.), computer screens are also, 1024×768 etc), each pixel is assigned a colour. When these tiny pixels are zoomed out, shrunk down to individual points, the squares appear invisible and we see a complete photograph of a tree/landscape/dog/your mum.

When we zoom into the bitmap, these squares will become larger and detail in the photograph is lost. There is no way to magically split a pixel out into it’s composite parts, it is a single colour and nothing more, the information isn’t there to enhance! A low quality image or video will ALWAYS BE a low quality image or video.

I can’t blame you for thinking it is possible. I mean Hollywood shows this happening all the time, but it is physically impossible with today’s technology. Even future technology will not be able to improve photographs and videos created with the old technology. It’s IMPOSSIBLE.

Scan back to the start of the film… enhance the image. See the guy in the blue coat on the floor in the reflection of the computer screen. Enhance it, turn him round and lift him up so we can work out how tall he is. Look, can you see what he ate for Breakfast? Check his stomach contents, looks like it came from McDonalds on Regent Street at 11:02-11:04am this morning, lets go speak to Magda who served him to get an ID.

It’s just NOT possible!

The exception comes with some digital line drawings (with or without colour) but not all. The rule of thumb is, unless a graphic designer has issued you with a vector format file (Illustrator, Fireworks, Some PDFs etc.) then it’s probably not high enough quality to enlarge or print in high quality. Most images from your old website will be shrunk to just the right size for the screen, generally these can not be enlarged, printed for publication or improved upon, including logos. These would need to be retaken, redrawn or the original obtained.

Tomorrow’s blog: Time Travel – why a new website and graphics cannot be designed, built and tested before last week.

On the twelfth day of christmas my true love gave to me

• twelve PEOPLE  TYPING
• eleven LUCKY LEADS
• ten BUYERS BUYING
• nine PAYPAL PAYMENTS
• eight EMAIL ERRORS
• seven SURFERS SURFING
• six ADWORD VOUCHERS
  *** [with gusto]
• FIVE THOU-SAND HITS
• four SUPPORT REQUESTS
• three COMPLAINTS
• two NEW CLIENTS
• and a CARTRIDGE IN THE PRINTER

Merry Christmas one and all*

*If you don’t celebrate Christmas, have a nice few free days off work celebrating nothing in particular while enjoying random old films on TV… which I hasten to add tend to be black and white, low quality at a silly frame rate. I hope you enjoy that beautiful HD TV which as it turns out is a complete waste of money! Next time you WILL celebrate Christmas… it takes our mind off the TV and gives us a great opportunity to tell our family members what we really think about their new girlfriend/hairstyle/tattoo/dress sense/sexuality.

Have you ever tried to scan a document into editable format? It never really works because the human brain uses a HUGE variety of processes for reading. The simple home computer simply cannot do this as efficiently. The solution always leads us to manually proofread the entire document word by word correcting mistake after mistake.

As the print quality gets worse, so does the translation. According to one site, this text:

was translated as this:

‘ letz-1- rrk fit: 1′ . on its to Vc ,rt, cann into tlm yc H_ tcr,la, .n. ‘l l; , arc ti:( h of thc 1″,ats that to ltc rc: ,;. , I; ., l: rel!;n. tani., , ./olio, IJuteilu, . 1!’i./_ ;lr”n. Iiam! Jr.r. F’l,nr_.Z.._%i;;, ,, : rt-Irn: am/ tf.rri.:, t?m steamer as a tr nW r. Uu ,tin;t, c ac?1 1″,at firm/ a t;nn, accor.liu; to .t rn. ‘Cl.w r. wu ru lm:nui MistinW /y in u;th, -. ink ;:,k as to “what w ax 1111, :111(I vle:iR a of ;: (,am( into, mnr r-, tm if tlm wo r( uu.i n:’ of t?u : la?:Iv. ‘c : ol in thc , ucr:atic , , Tlau :; will h:aw tu-li.r . ’1′Im yap?tts Il ,,n an,/ I, ,rr:l. r, (,t tf,is r:ity, start witli it, with lu:rtic: ol 1- e:l.k.

A group of geeks at Carnegie Mellon University got together and discovered that in order to translate billions of virtually illegible words, we need humanpower…. and lots of it!

Have you ever seen these? Two words under the brand ‘ReCaptcha’ (single word anti-spam systems don’t do this)

These two words come from the clever people above to prove you are a human by translating the words…. however there’s something they’re not telling you…

Only one of the words is actually known and tested!

One of the words it knows and proves you are human (as we’ve already established, computers are terrible at reading), the other is completely unknown… when you enter that word, assuming the other was correct, it will be assigned to the image helping the recaptcha machine translate an entire book. YOU have become a slave to the system, one part of the mass humanpower needed to run ‘the machine’

I find this amazingly simple concept is just brilliant… pure genius at it’s best. If everyone puts in a tiny amount of effort, the big picture will form much more quickly than our forefathers could have ever imagined. Proof of the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of our parts.

Now I just need to work out how many of these flipping things I’ve filled out so I can write out an invoice…