January 23rd, 2010

Spec-Savers Climate Eyes – Spekboom global warming campaign

specsavers

Spec-Savers’ new Climate Eyes campaign is currently showing on TV. The concept is simple:  Spec-Savers will plant a Spekboom plant for every purchase of Climate Eyes prescription spectacles.

The Spekboom plant is remarkable in that it stores carbon in enormous quantities.

The idea of soaking up excess carbon by planting more spekboom plants is great in principle. Should this become a national effort? Why is the government not backing this in a visible, urgent manner?

Cynicism might state that Spec-Savers are only riding the enviro-wagon like many other “green” companies – but the upside is that they are creating more awareness of the spekboom’s carbon-scrubbing properties and climate change in general.

Let’s see more of this.

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August 7th, 2009

The (d)evolution of Evony ads

It started off as a fairly standard set of ads for a very unremarkable browser-based clone of games like Civilization.

The ads depicted knights engaged in noble quests, moved on to buxom wenches and finally settled on a set of boobs pointing you to the Evony registration page.

Here are the ads in roughly chronological order: read more »

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August 7th, 2009

Twitter DDoS: A date which will live in infamy

twitterddos

Yesterday, Thursday August 6, 2009 -  a date which will live in infamy – the United States of Tweets was suddenly and deliberately attacked by distributed denial of service attacks of the Empire of Who The Hell Knows.

The Fairyland of Tweetdom was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Forces Unknown, was still tweeting with the Empire and its emperor looking towards the maintenance of endless blabbering about navel fluff in the Twittersphere.

Indeed, one hour after the Evil Empire had uploaded the DDoS in NTT America Advanced Hosting, the load balancer farms were still stable and celebrities were able to describe what they ate for breakfast without interruption.

Yesterday, Twitter was bombed.

Yesterday, Facebook was bombed.

Yesterday, LiveJournal was bombed.

The Empire has, therefore, taken a surprise offensive extending throughout the social communities. The facts of yesterday speak for themselves.

As commander in chief of the Legions of Twitterers, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.

Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us.

No matter how long it may take to overcome this premeditated invasion, the Tweetledoos in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

With confidence in our routers – with the unbounded determination of our load balancers – we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

I ask that the Registrar declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by He Who Cannot Be Mentioned on August 6, 2009, a state of War has existed between the United States of Tweets and the Unknown Empire.

Frank Dee
TweetMasterFunk

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July 6th, 2009

Healthy Food Healthy You – Unhealthy SEO

A great, content rich website - invisible to search engines

Why, when we have the technology, do South African sites still have terrible search engine optimization? SEO is nothing new – it’s been around since the Internet, for goodness sake.

Here’s an example by Discovery Health: http://www.healthyfoodhealthyyou.co.za/

This is a great site with tons of excellent goodies: videos, recipes, great articles and celebrities.

The site even has Facebook advertising to support it.

Unfortunately someone decided that the ENTIRE site should be developed using FLASH, so none of the content will ever get indexed or rank in a search engine.

It’s a real shame that so many South African companies still don’t bother reading about search engine optimization and implementing it.

Click on the thumbnails below:

The thumbnail on the left shows the content rich, awesome, well-designed site. The thumbnail on the right shows what Google thinks the site is about:

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June 24th, 2009

Brands and Branding: hot new hotness

brandsandbranding

Brands and branding is a really visual topic, right? Core to any brand is its visual appeal. When it comes to branding, you really can judge a book by its cover.

Take a look at the hot new Brands and Branding website that recently received a makeover thanks to Digital Bone Design.

Personally, I think it’s a fantastic improvement on the previous website with 100% Web 2.0 goodness added. The articles are easy to find and making comments on each article is now really easy.

You’ve heard of The Encyclopaedia of Brands & Branding, right? This is their online community portal from Affinity Publishing. Headed up by Ken Preston, Affinity Publishing have, for many years now,  brought you the annual who’s who of branding in a content-rich, glossy book.

Well done to the team for a great new community website!

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