Digg.com has since become one of the net’s greatest success story, with some sickening amounts of traffic and revenue being generated from within the Digg community.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Digg, it’s essentially a real-time portal that lists the hottest topics on the internet at any given time.  Digg users simply “digg” any URL that they think is digg-worthy, and the more diggs it receives, the more prominent it’s position on the Digg.com homepage will be.  In addition, Digg allows people with niche interests to filter through the Digg results and find specific topics matching their interests.

Digg has just released this great video, which not only celebrates 5 years of Digg, but also sheds a bit more insight into the history of the company and the successes they have had to date. Well worth watching, I say!

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As the years move on, I have slowly began to realize how important these few words are.  To learn, is to keep your mind active, to keep your outlook on life fresh, and to prevent becoming a stale and dry like an old piece of pita bread left in the cupboard for a week (if you’ve ever seen my pantry you’ll understand the relevance of that comment).

Sometimes you get caught up in routines and occupations that are so process-driven or time intensive that opportunities to learn new things are placed out of arm’s reach.   After all, you need at least a few minutes spare each day to learn something new, right?

Wrong! Learn something every day allows you to quickly absorb an interesting and valuable fact every day of the year, through it’s visual and entertaining layout, pictured below.  And if you are absolutely smitten with any of the facts you learn, you can even buy a tshirt adorned with your newly learned fact!

So now you can follow the advice of a wise man, and learn something every day without interrupting your day job. Live long and prosper my friends!

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When I first glanced at this list, I was immediately skeptical that the list was more of a “top 50 sites that the author of this article owes favors to”, as coming at number at #2 was a site I have never heard of before, California Coastline, with hugely popular sites such as Facebook nowhere to be seen within the top 30.

On closer inspection, after investigating sites such as the aforementioned California Coastline, I realised that the author has done a great job of  thoughtfully collating a list that not only contains mainstream high-usage sites, but sites that represent great value to users.

California Coastline, for example, contains thousands of helicopter images of the Cali Coast,  indexed through a searchable interface, as well as integrated with Google mapping technology.   This site is like a private extension of Google Earth, the difference being the entire project is funded out of an individual’s own pocket, which is really great to see  ( … and not only is it great to see that, but now I can spot all the best surf breaks in California thanks to this great aerial photography! ) . There are other sites likes this within the list too, sites that are the hard work of private individuals, rather than just a bunch of links to high profile, high budget corporate-backed websites that are over-hyped and offer little long-term value.

My only criticism, is that the Best 50 Website of 2009 list is quite U.S. centric, which I assume is because Time Magazine is of course a publication hailing from the Unite States.

To give you a bit of a taste, here is the top 10 websites of 2009, as nominated by Time Magazine.

1. 1. Flickr
2. 2. California Coastline
3. 3. Delicious
4. 4. Metafilter
5. 5. popurls
6. 6. Twitter
7. 7. Skype
8. 8. Boing Boing
9. 9. Academic Earth
10. 10. OpenTable

You view the rest of the top 50 here.

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Let’s face it, website statistics are only of interesting to nerdy website owners (<gulp>, I had to swallow a bit of my pride typing that).  Normal people don’t care how that your website visitation increased by 23% in comparison to the same period last month, or that your bounce rate decreased by 7.8% resulting in a significant rise in conversions. Apparently, normal people have better things to do.

Well here’s an interesting concept, called One Million Hit Wonder.  It actually turns the usually dry subject of website statistics into a commodity of public interest and appeal.

The aim of the One Million Hit Wonder  ’experiment’, to eventually attract one million visitors the homepage of One Million Hit Wonder each week.   The experiment aims to bring more awareness to the general public of the basic principles of website traffic, in a light-hearted fashion. One Million Hit Wonder achieves this, because it’s website statistics are completely transparent to website visitors, being published to the site’s home page and updated in real time.  It’s really quite addictive watching the numbers go up (…nerd alert!).

Seriously , click here to see yourself as a website statistic…and don’t tell me it wasn’t strangely satisfying!

Advertising on One Million Hit Wonder

Another interesting aspect which has been incorporated into this site, is the inclusion of a single advertising slot which spans for 7 days.  By having just one advertising slot available on the homepage in a very noticeable. To add further intrigue for advertisers, the advertising slots are only available for purchase via a weekly eBay auction.

And the icing on the cake – whomever is the current advertiser when the site reaches it’s goal, will retain the advertising slot for a 3 month period, probably providing them with more advertising exposure then their wildest dreams!

If you have a few spare moments, take the time to check out One Million Hit Wonder.  The site will be evolving during the next few weeks with some additional ‘hooks’ to keep visitors coming back , so it is sure to be a very interesting experiment as time moves on.

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Be aware, Time is written and published in the USA, so the list reflects US internet usage.

A couple of my favourites from the Time Top 50 Websites of 2008 are :
Wikitravel - an online travel wiki which is becoming an absolute wealth of travel related information, updated by real people rather than the biased information that is found in many other travel websites

iliketotallyloveit.com – a site that measures the popularity of cool new products, via a user rating system

….and who could forget our trusty friend tinyurl.com - the handy online tool that shrinks those nasty, overly-elongated URLs down to something more managable

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Instead of trawling the web to produce every single possible piece of web content, in order of relevance (as does Google), Wolfram Alpha aims to provide just one page of relevant information.

Wolfram is “computational knowledge engine” , based on studies by Stephen Wolfram. It aims to provide contextual data related to your search (in the form of statistics, graphs and data analysis based on your search query), rather than simply spitting out a whole bunch of links to potentially relevant information, like traditional search engines do. It will be very interesting to see how Wolfram Alpha progresses, and how this new concept impacts internet usage in the future.

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Unfortunately, this is not yet a feasible approach for online design, as Google loves words. Words allow Google to do what it does best – index information. So at the moment we are being pulled in two separate directions when creating appealing interactive website designs that also rank well in search engines….perhaps one day this will change (are you reading this Mr Google?).

When it comes to considering the best practices for the design of interactive web applications, the ongoing challenge, is to create something that feels tangible and alive when you interact with it, despite the fact that the end user will be staring at a flat, 2 dimensional monitor. Just to make matters more challenging, the design must also appeal to Google.

This Web Trends Map, below, manages to achieve the balance.

This Map of 2009 Web Trends shows a great ability to create a ‘tangible’, interactive experience despite displaying a completely intangible set of data related to website usage.

* * * *

Here’s a brief explanation of the concept, from the creators of this eloquent interactive design:

The Web Trend Map is a yearly publication by iA Inc. It maps the 333 most influential Web domains and the 111 most influential internet people onto the Tokyo Metro map. Domains are carefully selected by the iA research team through dialogue with map enthusiasts. Each domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, age and the company that owns it. The iA design team assigns these selected domains to individual stations on the Tokyo Metro map in ways that complement the characters of each.

* * * *

For those of you out there who are trying to represent intangible items, such as company finacial data, or internal web usage trends, to an audience who generally cannot conceptualise anything more than a map of their local street, perhaps you could explore this concept further….of mapping intangible data against an existing familiar and tangible interactive application.

You can interact with the Map here:
http://www.zoomorama.com/2477f0e8b447bb6570493cdac464c41f

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With Flash, usually there’s too many things to go wrong, meaning that there is potential to lose valuable visitors to the website. Slow internet connections, Flash browser plugins, old browser compatibility, a lack of search engine optimisation, and general end-user inexperience, are all factors which render Flash not much more than novelty item when it comes to website design for the masses.

Every now and again I come across a site purely built in Flash, that is worth the risking the potential usability issues mentioned above.   Coca Cola’s recent Flash-based campaign mini-site titled Coke Light – World’s Flavours is one of those Flash websites that is an absolute pleasure to interact with.  

Even from the outset, the Flash loading animation is far more captivating that your average Flash-used-for the-sake-of-using-Flash-website.   Once loaded (and unfortunately it can take a little while on slow connections), the vibrant design of this Flash-based user interface manages to balance user intrigue, with website usability.  

Check out it out. Coke Light – World’s Flavours

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What gives BlogPulse a bit more street credibility than the average blog utility site, is that is owned and operated by Nielsen Buzzmetrics, one of the internet’s largest and most reliable sources of internet usage data.

So what  exactly does BlogPulse do?

BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs.   BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs. 

And how can BlogPulse help you?
Essentially, BlogPulse.com is a search engine for blogs.  Not only that, BlogPulse provides an data on daily activity within the blogosphere.

BlogPulse.com provides the following helpful tools at a very helpful price (i.e. Free!):

• A Search Engine for blogs
• A set of Buzz-Tracking tools that are applied to blog content daily to track blog activity on key issues, people, news stories, news sources, bloggers and more
• A fun look at real-world Trends as reflected through blogs
• Daily blog stats that measure activity in the world of blogging (number of blogs identified, new blogs created, number of blog posts analyzed)
• A Trend Search that allows you to create trend charts comparing buzz in the blogosphere on up to three specific topics
• A Conversation Tracker that follows and captures the discussion, or conversation, that emanates and spreads from individual blogs or individual blog posts
• Blogger Profiles that identify top-ranked blogs and analyze their blog presence, activity and relative influence in the blogging world

My favourite feature on Blogpulse:

If you use Blogs as an online marketing tool, particularly to target certain ‘buzz words’ or keywords within your industry, you will find the Trend Search invaluable.  Trend Search allows you to investigate certain keywords, to monitor how many blog posts have been written based on a particular keyword or theme.  

Using BlogPulse’s ‘Trend Search’ you might find that, after a little bit of investigation, there are some keywords relevant to your business or industry that are being totally under-utilised, which you can then target in your future blog posts.

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This is where TweetScan (30-day trial/$15 annual fee) comes in really handy.

Tweetscan is a Twitter-specific search engine that scans all Twitter posts for the keywords you specify and delivers the results to you in a daily email.  In addition, if you visit the Tweetscan website you will find a Google-like search box, allowing you to conduct a live search of the most recent Tweets across the entire Twitter network.

However, Tweetscan’s real value for those who use Twitter as an internet marketing or monitoring tool, is when it is set up to send you the automated daily email. Tweetscan acts as an extra pair of eyes that stay awake while you sleep.

If you are using Twitter as a marketing tool for your business, some suggestions for choosing effective Tweetscan keywords include:

• Your company’s Twitter name,
• Your core products and/or services
• Your brand name
• The names of your top competitors
• And even the keywords that you focus on for SEO and Google Adwords

Tweetscan is a highly valuable tool for anyone using Twitter as a component of their organisation’s online marketing strategy.

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Those of you who were kids in the early 90′s, will remember the storm that IRC (internet relay chat) created on the web. Thousands, potentially millions, of users were jumping into ‘chat rooms’ to gossip with people from far and wide.  Apparently some even met their perfect matches using online chat.

Omegle is an online chat site for the new generation. It relies on the same concepts as the chat rooms of the 90′s, that is, using a simple real-time text-based chat, but with one difference…you are teamed randomly with one other person, and complete anonymity is encouraged.   

And I can guarantee you that the “Stranger” you are paired up with is not the only random aspect of this website.  You will also come across some very random introductions to your online conversations (check out the guy below)!

According to the folks at Omegle: “Omegle is a brand-new service for meeting new friends. When you use Omegle, we pick another user at random and let you have a one-on-one chat with each other. Chats are completely anonymous, although there is nothing to stop you from revealing personal details if you would like.”

I found the site quite addictive, as it really appeals to those with short attention spans. Don’t like the first few words a person says? Just ditch them, and move onto the next, until you find someone who has something interesting to say…like this guy:

Omegle capatilises on a relatively old, tried and tested technology, with a fresh spin to appeal to all audiences. It’s simplicity, fast loading times and intuitive interface are also aspects which allow visitors of all types to dip their toe into the addictive Omegle waters.

If you are searching for a new online marketing campaign for your company, perhaps the Omegle principle might apply well to your brand?  Take an interactive or online concept that was hugely popular in its day however is now  outdated (we’ve seen it done to death with the likes of Pacman and Pong) , add a 2009 flavour and a little of your company’s branding, and you will be well on your way to creating a viral marketing tool that is highly addictive and will keep people coming back for more!

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Those who are familiar with the MTV show Pimp My Ride will understand the reasoning behind the title (Pimp My Ride is a television show based on the ‘surprise-someone-who-is-low-on-cash-by-restoring-their-prized-possession’ premise).

It’s quite an addictive formula, as we all like seeing someone less fortunate than us (as sad as it might sound)….but, to save our humility, we also like seeing people’s lives being changed for the better. It’s human nature.

Pimp this bum takes advantage of this concept, and uses online media as it communications method…. it’s highly viral, and highly adaptable if you are in the services or retail industry. For example – if you are a web design agency – why not trying Pimping a dodgy website for free, and creating a case study out of the project and the positive results each month. Or perhaps you’re in outdoor marketing, and you Pimp a local retailer by giving them free billboard space on an unused billboard for a week or two.  

The results are guaranteed to be succesful (because it’s free marketing for your lucky recipient), it will create a positive brand image for both the pimper and the pimpee, and everyone will be a winner in the long run.

So get pimpin!

Pimp This Bum.

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If only we had been smart enough to document our findings on a blog. We could’ve become bigger than scanwiches.com

From an online marketing perspective, if I were involved in the fast food industry, I would be replicating this tasty online concept and milking it for all it is worth!

I recall a similar concept, a competition run by an Australian surf magazine who teamed up with a corn chip company several years back, encouraging corn chip eaters across the country to submit their photos of their chips that resembled the perfect barrelling wave (yes, I’m talking about a corn chip that resembles a wave in the ocean….only a surfer would understand!)   

So if you’re in the snack food or fast food industry, and are looking for a new viral marketing idea or social marketing experiment, why not build on the idea of  user-generated photography of your food.

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After all, time is money, and as much as we all like to share information on the web, most of us cannot afford the time to do it forever for free.  Thus (and this may be a personal view only, so don’t take my word for it…) it is my view that many of the internet’s information pieces, regardless of their intrinsic value and their ability to enrich the lives of their readers and users, are created to generate revenue somewhere along the line.

For example. Google is awesome. It’s a powerful search tool, and it’s free. And it helps millions upon millions of users find helpful information, some of which can even save lives.  But at it’s core, Google is a business and generates capital from generally unobtrusive advertising. This monetisation of a ‘free service’  is definitely fair, in fact, it is entirely necessary to keep the world spinning – after all we all have mouths to feed a the end of the day and profitting through ethical and unobstrusive means is the best way to go about putting food on the table while still satisfying consumer needs (in the Google example, the consumer need being a robust and evolving search engine allowing us to search the web freely and effortlessly).

I came across this site yesterday - youshouldhaveseenthis.com

The design of this website is minimalist, but highly effective.  And the content – well, it’s just a bunch of hyperlinks.  But each hyperlink, and there are 99 of them, will keep you enthralled for hours….because this after a website detailing 99 THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE EXPERIENCED ON THE INTERNET UNLESS YOU’RE A LOSER OR OLD OR SOMETHING.

I do believe this site would have taken quite a while to compile. Though the design is simple, the content would have taken a while to gather. 

Which brings be back to the basis of my original theory.  I believe that most websites are created to generate revenue, in some form or another.  The question is, what sort of revenue is youshouldhaveseenthis.com generating?

Is it purely to generate traffic and awareness for the author, Greg Rutter?  Will it prove to be a hugely viral site that will eventually feature Google Adwords advertising and make a few quick bucks through inadvertent click throughs to Google contextual text ads.

Or is this one of those rare sites created for ‘the love of the game’.   What do you think?

youshouldhaveseenthis.com

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WAYN is a community based website entirely dedicated to travel, and includes travel reviews, stories, and comments from travellers across the globe. If you’ve not checked it out, it is certainly worth a look.

I’ve been following WAYN for some time, but until now had not seen a solid execution of a travel related ‘campaign’ using the WAYN platform.

Today I received the following email in my WAYN inbox.

Hi Jake,

Have you been to Ireland before? If not, I thought you might be interested to check out the Tourism Ireland interactive profile so you can discover the magic of the Emerald isle.

Imagine wreck diving off the North Antrim coast, hiking the craggy mountains over Teelin Bay in Donegal or mountain biking around the Aran Island… All of this is showcased on the profile, along with an official blog, a feed of cultural and sporting events, videos, images and a range of visitor information and more.

If you’re one of the lucky ones who’s already experienced what Ireland has to offer, why not share some of your Ireland memories by posting a comment on the profile, so others can see what they’re missing!

See you online,

Maartje

Having not visited Ireland before, and not really knowing what it has to offer, I found this email to be quite captivating, despite its relative simplicity. The first link in the email above (http://tourismireland.wayn.com/ ) is the “call-to-action”, and links through to a dedicated WAYN-based Tourism Ireland mini-site.

If you are involved within an organisation that focuses on a travel related destination, service or product, why not investigate the potential of a WAYN-based minisite for your next online marketing initiative.

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So what does this little script (and I mean little, it’s just one line of code) do? Well, you know those tiny little pictures of a website’s homepage, that take heaps of mucking about to create (especially when your graphics editing skills are sub-standard, to say the least!).  An online application called Websnapr inserts a little bubble next to every hyperlink you create, allowing your users to preview websites before actually visiting,  just by hovering over the little speech bubble icon beside each link.

This means you, as the website administrator or blogger no longer have to muck about creating those thumbnails yourself! S-weeet, you know have more time to waste on Facebook! And it also means your visitors are less inclined to click on links and leave your site unless they really really want to, thanks to Websnapr’s nifty ability to allow visitors to preview other websites without actually leaving YOUR site!

Websnapr and its various thumbnail apps have been around for some time, to make your life a whole lot easier. If you want to reap the rewards of the Websnapr suite of apps (and yes, they are FREE), sign up for Websnapr, and you will be able to create thumbnail images of any website or URL in mere seconds.

If only everything on the web was this easy!

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Let’s take a step back and think about this concept. Let’s imagine a game from an era gone by that everyone on the planet knows (yes, a ‘real’ game that didn’t involve CPUs and bashing a keypad), let’s say ……um, Domino’s! …… and turn it into an interactive Flash application. An application with no real purpose, but to elicit a smile and a flashback to playing the real dominos at grandma’s house many moons ago.

Drawminos is simple. It’s a set of virtual dominos built in Flash that you can set up in any formation, with a few clicks of the mouse (a lot easier and a lot less frustrating than the steady handy and stable surface required by a real set of dominos – not to mention the evil older sister who could possibly come in at just the wrong time and knock the entire set over that you had spent the last 45 minutes painstakingly laying out!). Once you’ve created a formation you a happy with, click the “Play” button and watch your formation topple. And magically you can reset the formation and make it topple over and over again (if only you could have done that that with the big sister incident). You can even save and send your proudest creations to your friends.

Here’s a demo I very quickly created, to give you the idea. Why don’t you have a shot at creating a Drawmino chain right now – and post a link to your best effort in the Comments section of Bread Milk Digital. Enjoy!

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Here’s a cool little pic from Twitpic of the Escape key doing just that – escaping.

You may or may not have heard of Twitpic before. Twitpic leverages off the Twitter network, and allows you to share images through your phone, through the Twitpic API, or directly through the website itself. A very handy little application if you’re looking at using Twitter for some Web 2.0 marketing, and wanted to share more than just the stock standard 160 characters of text that Twitter allows as standard.

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All you have to do is copy and paste your list of links into a box on the home page, click ‘Shrink now’, and you will be presented with a short and sweet web address.  Send this ‘shrinked’ address to your intended recipients, and they are presented with a concise single HTML page containing a thumbnail image of each individual web site as well as the full URL to each page.

It’s useful if you want to send someone a list of multiple web addresses but are confined for space, for example, when using instant messenger or sending an SMS.

Here’s an example I just created http://Shrink2One.com/cc4 – the password is ‘shrunken‘

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Super Obama World - how can you resist playing just one level?

Super Obama World seems to have been developed just as a gimmick by a bored Flash programmer who has a few spare hours in between freelance jobs.  But this simple concept instantly brings a smile to your dial.

Why?

Because who doesn’t want an excuse to play a quick level of Super Mario Bros, right? And seeing Obama’s name replace Mario’s in that classic old-school Super Mario Brothers font, is just plain cool….

…so cool it makes me want to buy one of these t-shirts, even though I’ve no interest in US politics whatsoever.

Super Obama World t-shirt. The only political tee I may ever consider wearing.

Anyone out there who is looking for viral marketing ideas and has writers block…take a few notes from the above.  Adapt a retro classic to something of immediate relevance, and (o)BAM(a), you’ll be getting more votes of praise than the latest US president!

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