Reid Beels

Social calendar web app 30 Boxes launched yesterday and has been getting quite a bit of attention. The clean interface, tagging features, and sharing interface make it a joy to use but I have to say that its ‘killer feature’ is definately the ability to add events using a natural language interface (’fly to philly mar 21 6:04am tag travel springbreak’). While this makes entering events quick and easy, I wanted to make it even easier to access without breaking my workflow. I was considering writing a javascript bookmarklet when I realized there was an even easier and more elegant way to do it. I’ve long been a fan of AcidSearch, a Safari plugin that enhances the search field to access multiple search engines, and especially a feature that allowed easy access to these via a prefix to your search terms (for example, I can type ‘kg pine tar’ to go to the Pine Tar entry on the KoL Wiki). Since the process for submitting a search request is the same as submitting any other form, I constructed the proper query string based on 30 Boxes’ code and, I can now add calendar items simiply by typing ‘cal’ followed by my event description into the Safari search box.

Continuing with the critique of television advertising, I just finished watching the playlist of super bowl advertising on Google Video. Overall, I think that I’ve been more impressed in years past, but there were definately a few high points. Some things that I noticed:

1. Jerome Bettis for asthma control test
   (okay, admittedly, this is nit-picky and nerdy, but it stood out and I’m posting it) This ad is sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline and urges people with asthma to talk to their doctor about ways to control it. While I do have problems with this recent trend of drug companies advertising their products to a mainstream audience, that’s not my problem with this advertisement. My problem is that when they show a screenshot of their website it’s being displayed in the IE 5 for Mac. This technology is dead and abandoned folks, get over it. Now, the only excuse I can think of for it is that the scroll bar in the screen shot looks green and the last time that was an option was in Mac OS 9. The window details are a bit blurry in this video capture, but it still shocks me that any self-respecting media-production company would still be using that system and browser.
2. I wasn’t very impressed by the inevitable cornucopia of beer ads, but my favorite was this one (Bud Light - Secret Fridge). Another ad from Budweiser, ‘The Wave‘ seems to me like a pale imitation of Carlton United’s ‘Big Ad’.
3. Burger King’s entry ‘Whopperettes‘ seemed like an interesting way to continue their current over the top advertising strategy, but was fairly poorly executed in my opinion.
4. Degre’s ‘Stunt City‘ is a cool ad, but isn’t new.
5. Emerald Nuts. Their terrible wordplay never fails to amuse me. Greatly. Probably too much.
6. Having driven a car that gets between 25 and 28 MPG for most of my driving life, I’m wasn’t all that impressed by the fact that the Ford Escape hybrid gets 30 MPG. However, I suppose all steps taken to get SUV owners to not be such a bane to existance is a good step. Still, I had hoped Kermit had better standards.
7. GoDaddy.com, your ads annoy me. Sure, you got banned from last year for being overly racy. Sure, you have cheap domain names. Using these two things as the basis for an entire campaign seems uncreative. Also, your logo sucks and your website is ugly. You’d think when advertising a web-based service, you’d put a little bit more money into getting a design that doesn’t scream 1999 quite so much. 305 validation errors on HTML 4.01 Transitional! 606 for XHTML 1.0 Transitional! Grrrrr. Stupid web economics where profit != quality. Grrrr.
8. Hummer’s ‘Monsters‘ ad for the H3 has me a bit confused. It’s well-produced and sends a message that I sort of agree with: “The only way the H3 could be produced is as the ill-conceived lovechild of those bent on destroying the world.” Somehow, I think that might my Ashland upbringing and personal views talking and not the message they wanted to convey…
9. Pepsi’s ‘Hip Hop Can‘ wasn’t all that new of a concept, but stuck with me because we had been discussing the person who brokers a lot of cross promotional deals between products and musicians. It’s interesting to see this process simplified and played out (admittedly with added anthromorphization) on screen.
10. Scott Tissue’s ad, featuring Mike Ditka, bothered me no end. Maybe they’re trying to appeal to a certain redneck aesthetic that I don’t understand, but the production quality of this spot looked like something that we would have shot in the WAMS studio and put together before we started using nonlinear editing. No, strike that, it looked worse.
11. The United Airlines ‘Dragon‘ spot was by far the highlight for me. The animation was amazingly beautiful. It’s one of those styles that I really wish I could acheive myself but haven’t been able to when I’ve tried. Wow. Just wow.
12. GM’s ‘Live Green, Go Yellow‘ kind of seems like it’s an automaker trying to portray themselves as greener than they actually are because it’s the cool thing to do. While E85 is cool, I’d like to see them move beyond that.
13. FedEx’s offering ‘Stick‘ was well done and had an interesting concept behind it. I think I’ve seen them do better, but it still stuck with me.
14. Last, but certainly not least, Dove’s spot promoting The Campaign for Real Beauty , a project that’s working with several global organizations to combat harmful stereotypes for girls, intregued me. While it may be clever marketing on the part of a multinational corporation (Dove->Unilever->boo, animal testing) to improve their image, the campaign seems to be actively doing some good things.
15. Update: Also, there’s this MacGyver MasterCard ad which didn’t make it on to Google Video’s list but is rather amusing.

The rest of the ads made up the middle ground. Not great nor poor enough to get mentioned in detail.

Sometimes I see an advertising campaign that just bugs me. I just watched a television ad from Nestle for their pre-made packaged cookie products. It showed a mother and her children baking cookies together with a voice over beginning “childhood quickly flies away like cookies on a plate”. While the sentiment they’re trying to convey “bake with your children and childhood won’t seem to slip away as quickly” is nice, their product is working for an opposite goal. By removing most of the process (”just place, bake, and decorate” the voiceover continues) they’re removing the pedagogical value of the experience and making it be over even faster. Now, sure, your children will still get to decorate the cookies (using the provided frosting and sprinkles, of course) but their idea of what it means to bake cookies will be seriously distorted. By advertising like this, not only is Nestle pushing to distort valuable childhood memories, they’re chipping away at their future chocolate chip market.

While I had a vague idea of features that I’d wanted to include when working on my current site design, I hadn’t thoguht them through enough when I started. As it happened, the design evolved out of some things that I discovered while implementing a different design in css and just stuck. In this process, it lost the ability to work with some of the functionality that I wanted it to have and it’s just kind of sat here in a half-finished state for some time now. Because I’m tired of it sitting like this and need to get a solid design worked out so I can focus on content and other important things, I’m redesigning the site with a lot more focus. Read on for a list of stuff that I’m planning on doing. Tell me if any of it sounds crazy.
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After sitting in the Old Pharmacy Cafe for far too long this morning (a result of accidentally falling asleep at about nine), I think I’ve finally gotten at least a semblance of a handle on the project of mapping platonic dialogue Euthydemus. I keep thinking that I should be doing something more complex and elegant, but the sheer length and density of the dialogue leads me to the most concise representation possible. At the moment, I’m basically just linking together various series of conclusions that the participants of the dialogue jump to throughout the course of the text. I’d like to do this again with a shorter dialogue in a larger format so that the text and rhetoric could be put in context of the actual encounter. While they would obviously have to be estimated, metrics that correspond to perceived stress and anger would be fun to visualize.