The LinkedIn vs. Facebook discussion has been a hot topic for a while, and one that will continue for months (and probably years) to come. What’s made this even more interesting is that this week saw the launch of the Facebook Social Jobs Partnerships.  A joint venture between Facebook and the US Dept. of Labor, “The partnership will explore and develop systems for delivering job postings virally through Facebook at no charge.” Some speculate that this will eventually lead to “Facebook destroying Linkedin”. Even if true my personal opinion is that we are a long way from that… In the meantime LinkedIn is maintaining its cool, with co-founder Reid Hoffman stating that ‘Facebook isn’t competition’ at the San Francisco Web 2.0 summit.

Involved in presentations? Then chances are you probably already have a list of data sources that you ‘borrow’ from. Mary Meeker is one of Silicon Valley’s foremost Venture Capitalists and championed very early on companies such as Microsoft, Google and eBay. Her presentations have become legendary and a veritable source of data for anybody working in the digital world. Her latest can be found here . Well worth a read and well worth ‘borrowing’ from.

China (and Asia) cannot be ignored any longer. At some point you will probably be involved in a project that will involve working with clients/partners in this region, as I have been in the last few weeks working on ABB. This site  is a great resource for anything related to digital in Asia in general. Ogilvy has also created a handy guide on the equivalent sites of Facebook, Foursquare or even Google in China, which can be found here.

Finally, I thought I would feature Hypem. A site which is creating quite a buzz. It takes music posted on blogs around the world and indexes it in a nice readable format, for everybody to rate and vote for – as well as to listen to. A great way to discover new music…

Pleasure Hunt My Magnum
Since the heady days of Magnum’s shocking introduction to the heavily traditional world of ice cream, their campaigns have continued to push boundaries. Literally.

The world’s biggest PacMan
A Ronseal site. What more can I say?

“I’m sure you’re going to say you have already seen all this years ago and I’m so behind the times but I was so impressed I wanted to share it with you regardless. I’ve been exploring all the digital recruitment stuff from the Swedish armed forces and its amazing. I remember we featured some social stuff they have done in that GSK prezi so I expect your aware of the work. They all make use of amazing SFX too.

Reminds me that recruitment marketing can still be amazing.”

A

Adobe Museum of Digital Media. A cool and interesting idea where a museum dedicated to Digital Media is developed entirely online. You have to play around with it, as it’s a bit odd. If anything though, it will remain etched in my mind for moment of epiphany by an ‘architect’ from Goodby Silverstein & Partners (the ad agency behind the idea) when he and the team find out that “this was the precise moment when we realised that doing something virtual wasn’t that easy…”

Some of you may remember the TED winner JR from a few mails ago. He’s back and with a vengeance for his newest project, Inside Out. In his words, “INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world. These digitally uploaded images will be made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities.” Quite.

Can’t remember if I featured this in previous mails or not, but this is a nice idea from a Japanese band, that has just been voted a finalist in this year’s SXSW: an interactive music video that gets customised every time you view it depending on your personal data and social networking status. You sign up using Facebook, Twitter and a webcam but for those of you who don’t have (or want to) connect via Facebook, you can see the non-connected version here.

As described by Russ, totally pointless but cool site for a Friday.

And lastly, a fun mashup that allows you to search the Creative Commons images on Flickr according to colour.

Creatively, it is always nice to keep an eye on new and engaging formats, so we turn to a couple of sites spotted by Steve Lo Presti: Media Mind (aka Eyeblaster) run a blog which allows users to look at a wide range of differing advertising formats. In the spirit of openness and collaboration, they helpfully provide the code for these, too. Atlas also runs the Atlas Institute and download centre which can be useful sources of information.

Lego announced big profits this week, fuelled by the success of the strategic decision a few years back to develop bespoke Lego sets as part of movie franchises. The fact that Lego has seen a resurgence amongst adults (10% of Lego purchasers sit within a category known as AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego)) has also been a great help. Anyway, Clone Wars is the current hot trend, so this site is quite fun to play with. Watch out for ‘Cars’ which, according to my 6 year old, is the next big thing. Oh, and by the way, I came across this site, which seems to be an interesting set of musings on Gen Y, Kids Culture and Community online. Worth a peek.

Finally, Charlie Sheen has recently broken the Guinness World Record for the fastest person to reach 1 million followers on Twitter, achieving this dubious honour in just over 25 hours (at the last check, he was standing at 1,489,036 followers) Socially irresponsible? Or just an age old human tendency to laugh at someone else’s misery, whilst taking comfort in the fact that it isn’t us? I’ll let you decide.

Just for fun
•    You are Not a Photographer – a vitriolic commentary on ‘professional’ photography shots
•    City Forward – a mashup from IBM that allows users to delve deep into the detail about their city
•    Red Bull Street Art – a collaborative collection of sites using Google Street View that showcase street art from around the world. Mashups, crowdsourcing and Urban Graffiti – so hip, it hurts.
•    Language Development Live – a bright spark at  MIT has charted the development of his child’s language acquisition from birth to the age of 5. It is a fascinating insight into the human brain (especially for anyone who studied psychology). Watch out for the TED talk when it is released.

Thinking Space from the Economist – nice flash site which gives you access to the collective brains of prominent planners within the advertising world.

Chrome Experiments (view in Chrome) –  a selection of sites and games which are used to test what you can do with JavaScript and a Chrome browser.

Markup – allows you to review and comment on web pages by creating a URL which can then be sent to clients to comment back on. Great interactive tool, especially for Usability Reviews.

True Life Costs – the latest (award winning) site from Volkswagen aims to show you that spending (sorry, investing) more in a Volkswagen that, for example, a Peugeot is a good thing. “To see the big picture you need to look beyond the one off purchase price.”  Exactly.

Told you I’d keep it short…

Enjoy!

A

Getinspired
Struggling for design inspiration? Trying to come up with an engaging but slightly differentiated resolution to a sticky problem? Then Pattern Tap is worth a try. It is a resource of design ideas and executions, nicely categorised into quick access categories. Looking for some ideas about how to display lists? Then click the ‘List’ tab and hey presto, 418 different ideas. Struggling with iconography? Then look at the 200 different types of thumbnails. Simple, intuitive and effective.

GetaGravatar
The term ‘gravatar’ is a neologism that stands for a ‘globally recognised avatar’. Apparently. Anyway, the notion behind this is that, given the explosion of social media requiring soundbyte interaction, making sure that everyone can identify the person behind the comment is an important. Being consistent with this representation of who you are is “SUPER important”, so the logic is that you should create a image of yourself that is associated with every comment or insight you post. I think that this is also called branding…

Getajob
This site is a children’s book, designed to answer the question “what are the strangest jobs in the world”, delivered as a flash site. There are a couple of games to keep you entertained – I particularly like the Sewer Cleaner game. Some content can be translated, but much of the content is in Polish. I’ve no idea why I like it, but I do.

Getsupportfromyourcommunity
We have seen an explosion in the number of community-based support sites recently: Feedbackers.biz and StartUpLift offer low cost support for new to market ideas; Veel provides crowdsourced design support and sites like Sparked make it easy for altruistic consumers to support an organization or cause by enlisting both individuals and groups of company employees to contribute their expertise to a non-profit organisation.  It’s a nice idea and I’d love to see this sort of approach used in either internal or recruitment comms. We just need to think about the ‘what’ and the ‘how’…

Shiftperspective
Tilt shifting is where real-photos are manipulated to look like model photographs. Tilt-shift maker allows you to make your own.  It works better with landscapes.

So this week I’ve been thinking about the notion of preconception and challenging the status quo. We tell our clients that the Recruitment landscape is shifting, but are we heeding the very advice we are dishing out? In this week’s merry bunch of examples, we draw inspiration from children, from those who are hard of hearing and from those who are forcing us to rethink the way we work. So as you come to think about New Year and the list of things you’ll be looking to change, you could do worse than drawing inspiration from the example below.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Andy

Can children draw the internet?
In a world where the balance between what can be imagined and what can be achieved is precariously thin, it is often those who can approach the mundane from a different viewpoint who come up with an idea that truly stands out from the crowd. Such people are often derided as being childlike and over-playful, but in this intriguing experiment, we are all encouraged to relish  our childishness, as it is in this mode that we are uninhibited by preconceptions and more likely to come up with a great idea. The test is simple: senior level creatives and children are asked to draw the internet. The output is fascinating and displays a level of insight coupled with imagination that would stand us proud.

Hearing with your hands
I’ve had to live with people who are hard of hearing all my life, adjusting the manner in which I speak to my family to make the conversation easier to understand and be involved in. The problem is that deafness and partial deafness isn’t exactly easy to spot and for some reason, people are often reticent to admit that they can’t hear. Sometimes, just to understand what being deaf is like, I try to live life without sound. Think about it – how much of your perception of the environment is dominated by what you hear? Try watching a TV programme from start to end with mute switched on and see what impact it has on the way you perceive the programme. Anyway, in this link, the cast of Glee listen to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ as sung by a deaf choir. Sounds strange, but is heart-rendingly moving.

Why work doesn’t happen at work
One of the things that really irritates me is the number of times someone interrupts what I’m doing by asking an inane question that they could quite easily had answered for themselves. Or the long meeting involving all and sundry which could have been done and dusted in a much shorter timeframe between a couple of people. In this engaging and entertaining 15 minute presentation, Jason Fried, the brains behind the hugely successful collaborative work tool Basecamp, discusses how our workplace could actually be counter-productive, providing some suggestions as to how to resolve this. My favourite is No Talk Thursday.

The story of the Nativity & The Digital Nativity
I thought I’d finish with something appropriate to Christmas Eve. For those of us who have ever got involved in acting, a huge challenge is how to provide an interpretation of the playwright’s work that is differentiated and entertaining. Over the past few weeks I have been looking at differing representations of the Nativity and it never fails to amaze me how many different ways there are to articulate what is, when you think about it, quite a straightforward sequence of events. These two videos, which both provide a modern view on the Nativity, have been trending recently and it’s easy to see why: one is tongue in cheek, the other slightly more serious. Both are worth watching.

The best modern careers sites go beyond simply promoting jobs: they provide content that help a candidate gain a deep insight into the culture of the firm that they are looking for. They do this with a range of tricks and tools: 3d panoramics, games, blogs, microblogs, tests, challenges, videos. And the better ones, the ones that win awards, make the experience of accessing that content part of the brand journey.

As a result, I’ve been looking for examples of interactivity, where the user gets more out of a site experience the more they explore. These four examples show how interactive media can help create an immersive experience that crosses a range of differing senses: touch, sound and sight. Can’t do taste or smell yet, but I can’t believe that it’s too far off… maybe we could do that for Nandos?

Enjoy

False
A portfolio site for a Japanese developer, what a better way to showcase your wares that by encouraging a user to interact with it. Some of the pages can make you feel slightly nauseous, but what a fun site! (If you get stuck, select the MENU> icon on the LHS…)

Snowboarding – an interactive experience
We’ve talked before about the use of 3D panoramic in video and I love this example. Drag your mouse around inside the video and watch the video pan out from a range of perspectives. Genius!

Mashup Breakdown
One from our very own DJ Dix. It’s a fun visual way of representing music. You can select different tracks by clicking on the dropdown underneath the page title. Just turn the volume down a bit…

Life in a day: One World. 24 Hours. 6 Billion Perspectives.
A while back, the digerati were asked to help create a feature film that would act as an interactive time capsule that provided a portrait of the world on a particular day (July 24). Individuals were asked to create short videos of some aspect of what they were doing on July 24. User-generated content on a scale that has never before been attempted. In particular they were asked to answer 3 questions and show what they had in their pocket. The three questions were: what do you fear most in your life today? What do you love? What makes you laugh?

The film will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 2011. With Kevin MacDonald as director and Ridley Scott as producer, its going to be something unique and special. Have a look at some of the videos and see what you think…