Every once in a while, we’ll stumble upon a site that deserves a mention on GT.   Today’s winner… SuppleWine.com.  This site comes complete with a clever tagline, videos, comics, music in the “bubble.lounge” and of course, wine reviews and wine pairings.

If you’ve followed us closely at all in the past, you’ll know that we have a serious issue with how wines are rated by the Wine Enthusiast, and all the snobbery and politics involved in getting a wine rated by a “respected” connoisseur.  SuppleWine has a “value grade” they use to give wine grades, which ranks wine on a similar letter grade scale as is used in school.. E.g. A+ is excellent, F means drink a beer instead. Read the rest of this entry »

The question of what age we are in?, is important for us as marketers because it helps us understand our macro environment and informs our strategy and our decisions about the future.

There can be no doubt that we are seeing a transition at the moment – and I’m not talking about from capitalism to socialism, but rather something less tangible and equally pervasive. This change, I think, is from an age of objects into an age of ideas. Be it an iPod, a Blackberry or an iPhone, we as a society have come to depend on our objects, but the trend toward ‘one box solutions’ and centralising our PDAs, mobile phones, e-mail and music devices shows a longing to free ourselves of the objects, devices, countless power cables and the increasingly cluttered assortment of gadgetry churned out over the years. The inevitable movement towards cloud computing shows the urge of our society to become less dependent on material objects in favour of something more powerful and less immediately tangible. It is in this very transition from physical to ideological that we can see the beginnings of a permanent change.

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What? That’s definitely the question that is being answered most at the moment – particularly through Facebook, Google status and Twitter, as in what are you doing right now?

By and large this is a question that does not usually elicit an interesting response. However in the world of news-reporting – digital media often covers the essential how, who, when and where questions of journalism, because our communication mediums are increasingly location aware, user-specific and time stamped. What is a question that requires actual human input – and in the past 3 years people have been answering it in terms of Facebook status updates, and for the early adopters – by joining the twitterverse.

Yesterday, however, the answer to that burning question reached critical mass and took on historic significance. Whilst some protested and others wondered about what was going on outside their office walls, multi-tasking employees were able to get on with their work whilst receiving a blow by blow account of history unfolding. It has been overstated to the point of cliché that the medium is the message – but yesterday the message made a medium and Twitter found its place in the global setting. Beyond the news-helicopters, simple tweets turned digital enthusiasts into citizen journalists and for once, a multitude of opinions on the same subject were heard. Suddenly all the hype made sense – some of us had tweeted previously to moderate effect, but for most of us not concerned about letting the world into our daily happenings, Twitter just left us scratching our heads.

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QUICK ANSWER:
add  &hl=all   at the end of your google query url.

For those of you out there who are Search Engine marketers, you may have been having some frustrations lately with the google search engine wiki.   Typically, I keep several browsers running at once so I can be logged in to multiple google accounts (personal, business, client, adwords, analytics, etc..etc..).. so having to log out to see natural results has been quite frustrating.

What I have found really frustrating is that every once in a while, a stray mouse click has a detrimental effect on the virgin google results that I am looking at by clicking on one of the google search wiki buttons, and “BAM” a result disappears to the bottom of the page.  This gets especially frustrating when I’m looking through the SERPS and I am not sure if the results I am looking at reflect those of the general population… or our clients.  While I’m excited to see google search wiki, and I expect that at some point it will effect google search rankings, the inability to disable it seems appalling for usability. Read the rest of this entry »

1. We would be keeping the bears happy…  I mean seriously.. look at this fellow.  He’s enjoying a little splash in the water without a care in the world.   If we don’t make an effort to save the environment, this is going to be a grumpy bear without any place to go other than your back yard. Read the rest of this entry »