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January 25, 2012 • 2:38 pm 0

#TrafalgarSun

Trafalgar Sun

Trafalgar Sun


I was very honoured to be a (very small) part of the team behind the Trafalgar Sun art installation yesterday. I’d only become involved a couple of weeks ago, months after many of my colleagues, but was involved in planning of and managing the @TropicanaJuices account on the day. We trended for about eight hours in total, four in the morning with #TrafalgarSun and then again in the evening with Trafalgar Square.

Robbie Platt on The PR Blog wrote about the installation, highlighting the Twitter activity

Now here’s where the buzz starts to grow, as well as securing some fantastic coverage across traditional and online media, the team behind the @TropicanaJuices twitter feed were also on hand, offering everyone who tweeted using #trafalgarsun a free voucher for their lovely sunny juice. Not only did this drive up their twitter follower numbers but was also a brilliant data capture exercise, requesting emails in return for free juice.

A video from The Telegraph, where a couple state they came down as they ‘heard about it on Twitter’.

A tweet from @tinyterrapin commending our Twitter activity

 

Metia noted the hashtags on the bottles of Tropicana being given away

While on my way into work yesterday a smiling girl stepped into my path and handed me a bottle of Tropicana orange juice. The gift was delicious, perfectly timed, and came with a hashtag encouraging me to tweet if I enjoyed it

A small selection of coverage

Foreign coverage

Filed under: Freud

January 10, 2012 • 5:04 am 0

Making iBooks better

Apple could take on Audible by letting iBooks read books to you. It would be that horrible computer voice it uses for Siri but I’d make use of it plenty.

Filed under: Uncategorized, ,

December 10, 2011 • 3:43 pm 0

Retro gaming on iOS – Theme Park and Dizzy

20111210-153836.jpgTwo old classic games have been released on iOS this week; Dizzy: Prince of the Yokfolk from Codemasters and Theme Park from Electronic Arts. The Dizzy games were 8-bit platformers, I collected the whole series on cassette to play on my Amstrad CPC. Theme Park was a game I originally played on my Amiga 1200 and loved so much I bought it for Windows when I switched over.

It’s great to see classic games ported over to iOS – and now I have an iPad, I’m pleased both come in iPhone and iPad flavours. Unfortunately they’re not universal, meaning you have to download two versions if you want them on both devices. Sadly only one of the games has made the successful leap to iOS, and the other feels like a massive failure.

D:POTY is a paid-for game, costing £1.49 for the iPhone or £2.49 for the iPad. It feels the most like a straight port, in that the level layout, controls and storyline feel identical to the original (or at least as far as my memory allows me to compare). There are some very minor changes – instead of picking up a radio, there’s an iPod, but as far as I can tell, that’s it. It’s a lot of fun, very playable – still utterly frustrating trying to jump and missing platforms – and you’d have no worries about sitting a kid down with this for hours and letting them work their way through Dizzy’s world.

Theme Park is a different story. They’ve rewritten the whole thing from the very basics up. No longer can you arrange your paths and queues to optimise them – you have pre-defined spaces in either small, medium or large. In these you can put shops or rides. By tapping on them, you can increase their entertainment factor – for example, you can tap on the bouncy castle to give the people on it more enjoyment and then make more money out of them. You can spin a ferris wheel and cash pops out of it more quickly. The more you entertain your guests, the more flags you collect, and once you hit set number you move up a level, gaining access to more rides and shops.

20111210-153827.jpgSadly, the game pretty much demands you spend money on in-game purchases to actually build any of these. You need to trade Super Tickets to build most of them, and you only get these very rarely – however, there’s a big ‘buy more’ button visible at all times on your screen right next to your Super Tickets counter. Santa’s Sleigh Coaster costs 100 Super Tickets, for which you’d need to buy a set of 300 at £13.99. The most expensive in-game purchases are a set of 1,6000 Super Tickets at £69.99 – that’s more than the cost of a day out at a real theme park!

There is nothing engaging about the game as it is, you can’t just pick it up and play and build up a massive park like you could previously, the only options you have are to tap on bins to empty them, tap on shops to restock them, tap on rides to speed them up and increase the enjoyment of your patrons and, for some reason, tapping on rides after a set counter has run out to collect the money they’ve made. I don’t even know why you need to do this – do they stop accepting new guests on them if you’ve not taken the money? There is no explanation during the tutorial at all about the reasons for doing what it tells you to do. How does speeding up a maze or tree house make any sense?

I’m really sad that this is how the game has turned out. Why not charge us a couple of quid to buy a game in which we can do what we want, play it the old fashioned way and have the option of spending a few pound to speed things up a little?

If you’re looking for a retro gaming experience on iOS this weekend, you definitely want to attempt to become Prince of the Yolkfolk.

 

 

Filed under: Personal

September 23, 2011 • 7:26 pm 0

The ROI of social media infographic

Infographic: The ROI of Social Media

Infographic by MDG Advertising

Filed under: New media

August 3, 2011 • 9:39 am 0

Cancun, Ibiza, Southwark

Clever localised poster spotted on the walk to work.

20110803-093546.jpg

Filed under: Uncategorized

July 11, 2011 • 2:10 pm 0

Online tools I use and love, part 1 – Wunderlist & Backtweet

I mentioned each of these apps on Twitter recently, and thought it might be worth writing up a little more about them, how I use them and how others might find them useful. I started this with a ‘short list’ of tools to write about but, after reaching the half way mark I realised I had typed far too much so instead I’m going to publish the first few now and highlight a few more in a couple of days time.

Wunderlist

I write a lot of lists. I have an awful memory and a terrible sense of priority, so I find it useful to start each day rewriting my To Do list, removing the stuff I’ve done and highlighting the stuff that I need to do urgently. I carry two notebooks for personal stuff (one a5, one a4, I flip between them depending on how much I’m planning on writing but both contain lists) plus I have one on the go for my work stuff which usually stays on my desk.

I’ve tried a lot of methods of making my lists electronic, I’ve lost count of the number of iPhone apps I’ve tried. Things was close to becoming my preferred choice but the £30 cost of the desktop app was a little off-putting. I worried I wouldn’t like it as much as i’d hoped and I’d end up resending paying a not-insignificant amount for some software.

Thank heavens for Wunderlist. It is a fairly light list manager, available in flavours for web, iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac and Windows. You can have various folders for your lists (I have my default Inbox, one for my NHSC work and one for SSG) and within it drop in your notes. You can drag these up and down to prioritise them, and mark with a Star the urgent ones. You can set deadlines, meaning you can highlight Today/Tomorrow/This week/Late/No deadline tasks. You can also add detailed notes. I’ve found these have been great for drafting blog posts (I create a note with the subject of the post as the main list item, then start drafting the text as the attached note) or reminders for things to bring up at meetings (my method here is to create a note with ‘Directors meeting’ as the subject, then list all the stuff I want to highlight within the note).

What is great is that everything is stored in the cloud. I keep a Chrome tab open during the day so I can see and update my lists quickly whenever I need to. When I’m on the tube I can add more items or notes to lists on my iPhone and know that as soon as I have signal, they’ll be uploaded and synced. When I’m at home on my Mac, I have the desktop app running, which is practically identical to the web interface.

Most amazingly, the app is free. I’m not sure how, or why, they’re able to make such a powerful and elegant app for free but I assume there are premium options coming.

Backtweets

Generally, it is hard to see who is linking to your site unless they’re savvy enough to @ the organisation they’re tweeting to, and the majority of people have no need to do that. You can find out who is sharing a specific link using a Bitly powered shortener, and Google Realtime was somewhat helpful here too but as far as I’m aware Backtweets is the only service to offer this kind of service.

Backtweets

Backtweets search results

It’s simple, really. Pop in a domain name or full URL and it will list all the tweets which have linked to it, even if they’ve used a URL shortner (including t.co, is.gd, bit.ly, ow.ly – pretty much all of them). It’s really handy for finding Twitter users who are sharing your content – with SSG we tend to drop them a note to say thanks for sharing. With the NHS we wouldn’t do that (for one thing, there are too many of them!) but if someone says something negative about page content we will pass a note to the page editor to ask them to check it out. It is most useful to see how effective a tweet is within a few minutes – some of the topics I weet out of @nhschoices are guaranteed to get retweeted immediately (such as a Behind the Headlines piece mocking a Daily Mail health story claim) whereas others, with more general health messages, are lucky to get a handful of retweets.

They were offering Pro and Enterprise solutions, but these have been discontinued following their purchase by Twitter. They offered email alerts so you would get a daily roundup of everyone tweeting out links to your site. I hope this is the type of tool Twitter offer to publishers in the future.

Filed under: New media, , ,

July 10, 2011 • 4:40 pm 0

Back on the podcast train

The addition of wifi sync between iTunes & iPhones in iOS 5 (currently in beta) has has enabled me to listen to podcasts on a regular basis again. Previously you only got new episodes on your phone after plugging your phone in, going through the hassle of backing up the whole thing and then it put on new music & podcast episodes. Under the latest versions of the software, you put your phone down overnight and, so long as your laptop is powered up and on the same network, you leave in the morning knowing the whole thing has backed up and synced. (I like to imagine within a couple of years we’ll look back and laugh at the fact we ever had to plug in iPhones to get our content on to them.)

NHS Choices Couch to 5K

We launched a Couch to 5K podcast at work a couple of months ago, and I had a little part to play in it (basically, I set up the RSS feed – I did say it was a small part!) which has remained at the top of the iTunes podcast directories health category and is soon to break past a million downloads which I think is pretty amazing. You have to take into account the fact the program is split over 9 weeks and consists of 12 mp3s (most weeks repeat the same run 3 times, but in two you get a bit of variety); but then consider that iTunes only automatically downloads one episode, and the rest have to be manually selected which means people are actively choosing to continue with the program after the first week (or there are a million people who have only done the first week, then given up…). We run a forum for people to discuss their progress, and are looking to put a bit more work into a formal twitter presence too.

A few of the podcasts I’m (once again) listening to…

Guardian Media Talk
Radio 4 media show
I’m not quite a media geek, though I do have a keen interest. I’m a big fan of the Guardian podcasts on general; most have some things I have issues with, but Media Talk is one I listen to as soon as it becomes available. Radio 4 does a similar, though slightly more stuffy, weekly show which is also availble to download. Focusing on the UK media industry, they both tend to cover similar content – this week both had special episodes dedicated to the News of the World scandal.

BBC Health Check
This is a weekly show from the BBC World Service and looks at health development and initiatives around the world. I’m not sure where it’s broadcast or exactly who the audience is, but it is very easy to listen to and understandable – a similar tone to that which is used on NHS Choices’ popular Behind the Headlines section.

Feast of Fun
This is undoubtedly the best gay orientated talk show available. Fausto Fernós and Marc Felion, a couple from Chicago, produce the show daily. They cover all sorts of topics, from interving stars to covering political scandals – recently an investigation and interview they aired led to the resignation of the President of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. One of my worries for the proposed SSG podcast is that it won’t be anything as entertaining as this.

Wired.co.uk podcast
This got off to a shaky start, the first few episodes were really terrible quality, but I stuck with it and, thankfully, so did they; the quality improved a lot and now it sounds as good as you’d expect from such a well presented magazine. They cover the weeks top tech stories  in a friendly and informative manner. Like the Guardian podcasts, it’s a bit like listening in on a conversation between a group of friends rather than a BBC podcast which sounds, of course, like you’re listening to a BBC radio show (which, in most cases, you are).

Off the Wall Post
This is one I started listening to fairly recently after a recommendation on Roo Reynold‘s blog. It’s a group of people (two guys, one girl) talking about… well, a lot, but mostly digital media stuff. I’ve not listened long enough to quite consider it like listening to friends, but it’s quickly starting to feel that way.

The Best of Chris MoylesThe Best of Chris Moyles
There, I’ve admitted it. I’m a fan of Chris Moyles. I don’t listen very often in the morning, as I’ve tended to be getting up and either running or working earlier than I used to. For a while I tried listening to this podcast while jogging but I found myself having to stop so that I could laugh out loud too often, so now I listen on the walk to work – though I still have the issue of bursting out laughing while walking through the City.

Filed under: New media, NHS, , , , , , ,

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