A great new viral for a new film: “Shifty”
Just today one of my colleagues received an email from the “Community Drugs Team”. She read it, re-read it. Then said “I’ve only just moved to Shepherds Bush. This isn’t right! I’ve not been involved in any of this.” She was referring to this:
Looking at the links, the code behind them, you’d never think it was a fake. Clicking on them, however, told a different story:
Well. It was definitely an interesting way to get the point across. The mark of a good advertising campaign is one that gets people talking about it, in my mind, and this one uses some of the most basic elements of digital technology to deliver that. A great example of KISS
Everyone in the office is talking about it. Oh, and stitching their mates up… Kudos to the team that did that.
New blog design launched
This is the first part of our transformation. We’ve got a few little tricks up our sleeve we’re going to be adding here in the next few days and weeks. Keep your eyes peeled for them.
We love our new blog design. Please tell us what you think of it too!
Your site is playing host to a competition. You’re giving away a nice hefty prize. A TV, a mobile phone, a holiday perhaps for the winner and his or her mates. And the competition revolves around a pure computational figures – how many times someone votes for whatever you’ve uploaded – a picture maybe. A video, or some prose.
The big problem here is that there are some quite savvy users out there who will go almost to the ends of the Earth to win these competitions. And then what if you run another competition and you find the same set of users is trying to manipulate the system again? How do you control this and make sure the people who aren’t cheating get a fair shot at the prize?
That really is the question. How do you stop people cheating? Simply, you can’t. The longer version involves some methods that will certainly help to reduce the amount of cheating that takes place.
One of the first methods is to force people to enter valid email addresses to register – you send them an email and they can’t log in until they’ve activated using a link in the email. The link is usually encrypted and can’t just be guessed. This falls down though when you realise there are sites out there specifically designed to give you temporary email addresses for registering for sites. And the whole process can be scripted by someone with a bit of nouse.
So you make sure that users on your site can police the content for you – they flag it, and you delete it if you feel it’s contravening your terms and conditions – oh yes, and make sure the terms are bullet-proof. Make sure winners aren’t automatically decided by a computer – decide with “judges”.
Good stuff – we now have a user policed site where the users have to have access to the email account, and we’ve even put a CAPTCHA on the registration process to stop computers being able to automatically sign up.
These are wily users though. They’ll still try and get the prize. You could do any amount of verification though but at the end of the day, having a mechanism in place to remove offending users from a competition, or just to pick a different winner is probably the best failsafe. OK, so the whole process can’t be automated – most of it can – but you wouldn’t want to give that one user a TV, a holiday, and a few grand one after the other would you?
It’s well known that Flash makes sites look better. Isn’t it? Well only if you are stuck in the early part of 2000.
I would like to draw your attention to a few sites that use no Flash at all to get their desired effect across:
These are all great sites, some better looking than others, but it’s the technology I’m focusing on here.
Flash is good, but not when it’s used to make an entire site, or to replace content areas that don’t need to be Flash. Use it for videos. Use it for the analogue clock on bbc.co.uk, at least until SVG takes off and you don’t need to use Flash for that any more. Just please don’t use it as a replacement for real websites. Flash, as much as Adobe might say otherwise, still isn’t accessible, and most of the sites that I’ve seen built in Flash are a nightmare to maintain, and look horrendous.
Rant over.
Content distribution, now for the masses
We’ve known about Akamai, who’ve been long regarded as the leaders in CDN technology for some time now. As of a few weeks ago, there’s a new kid on the block.
Amazon released CloudFront on the 19th November, and it’s what I think has been lacking in their S3 storage solution that now makes Amazon a key competitor on the CDN front. That of what Amazon have termed “Edge Zones”. Nothing particularly complex in the definition: You upload your content, and you can have Edge Zones in the USA, Europe, Hong Kong and Japan. Amazon will automatically fetch the data from S3, cache it at the Edge Zone location, and from that point forward the transfer time for your users will be blistering!
I fully expect to see some really innovative uses coming out of this and we’ll keep tabs on it here and keep you abreast of the happenings. If you’ve got a project you’re working on that uses CloudFront, feel free to comment here. It would be really good to see the different uses people have for CDN tech.
For now, that is all. Back later with more fresh goss from the Tech world.
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