Our theme is week is about arranging or presenting content in an engaging or innovative manner.

Enjoy

A

The Lost Ring (http://www.thelostring.com)
I learnt a new acronym last night: ARG (Alternative Reality Game). An ARG is a relatively new genre of game that allows players to interact with a fictitious world using real world elements. The difference between this and other formats is that the players are involved in determining what happens in the game and a real live person (called the Puppet Master or PM) controls how the story goes based on the interactions that happen. You use real life things like real phone numbers, character emails and forums and even real world locations where you may have to go and pick something up in your home town in order to help solve the puzzles of the game. Nokia used this a back in early 2000 to launch their communicator.

Anyhow, this ARG is sponsored by McDonalds as part of their Olympic Sponsorship push. The production (and obvious investment) is pretty impressive and the whole campaign has sparked quite a debate about whether this is a form of subliminal advertising (and therefore whether it should be allowed). I’m not going to get involved in that debate. But I though that as our clients are starting to look at us developing more experiential advertising (the HBOS Personal Financial Adviser campaign is one such example), I thought would be useful to see what is our there.

Yahoo! Everything
Compare this http://everything.yahoo.com/ to this http://everything.yahoo.com/index_basic.php Same content, structured in a different way. The former is a great interface for finding information quickly – browse a single alphabetical index or filter by classification. It’s quick too (all javascript) and is more engaging than its static counterpart. This is why technology and IA should be involved at the start of an ideation process; in the interactive universe, creativity can come just as easily from a line of code, as from the way something looks and feels.

AvantGo (http://www.avantgo.com/frontdoor/index_uk.html)
As mobile starts to become an increasingly accepted channel for surfing the web, we will start to see an increase in companies that provide content for mobile devices (also know as mobile content providers.) AvantGo has been around for ages and enables users to select content from a list of thousands of websites around the world to be downloaded to their smartphone or PDA. Why? Imagine that you are in an area which has no signal. Or imagine that you are trying to surf a site that hasn’t been structured for mobile devices. Highly irritating to say the least. For us, we should envisage it as a potential means of getting our information to a broader suite of devices (we could, for example, create a mobile jobs channel for our clients and submit it to AvantGo). It’s not going to change the world yet, but it is a useful starter for ten.

The Wellcome Collection: Medicine/Life/Art (http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents/onlineexhibits/index.htm)
The Wellcome Trust brings to life Sir Henry Wellcome’s vision of a place where people could learn more about the development of medicine through the ages and across culture. It is a fusion of art and science which allows visitors to consider what it is like to be human. And what’s more, it is just up the road.

Anyhow, I came across this section: aside from enjoying the novel approach to site navigation, the way the site allows users to explore and categorise lots of content is really nice. Some of the content is a bit weird, but then I guess I never was an art aficionado. Ohm, and just to test, I tried the Sleeping Test. Apparently I’m awake. That’s good to know.