AdLab's Inbox: Claymation, Widgets, and NASDAQ

Letters to the editor from the past few weeks. Keep'em coming.



-- An Orange America: an abstract visualization of the aggregate conversation on Twitter showing frequency and context of election-related words. Simon, one of the creators (together with JESS3), writes:

"To make it work, we take a sample from Twitter every 30 seconds and analyze them in 50-result batches for associations and term matches. They accumulate for 5 minutes and then we flush sample aggregates to the database. So the database has samples from when it started through present in 5-minute granularity. As new terms trend, they begin to populate on the X-axis. The system back end will be implemented using a Java-based stack and PostgreSQL RDBMS. The presentation will be implemented using Flash targeted to Player 9, standards-compliant XHTML/CSS targeted to modern browser versions with significant market share (Safari 2+, Firefox 2+, IE 6+)."


-- Scientific American: Does Consumerism Make Us Crazy? (No.) -- from Micah

-- Media Tools for Creative Professionals

-- Reader Lena from Russia has a question. Do you know of any now-common English words that were minted by the ad industry in the past? Or, in her own words, "I'm looking for - words that were created especially for advertising and PR, brand-names, etc. They may be quite common nowadays, but I really need to know what words appeared thanks to advertising."

-- Widget strategies




-- A beautifully illustrated report from Razorfish. Tip: print the report to pdf; will be easier to read. Oh, and this: "Razorfish is strengthening its brand by choosing one of the most memorable and iconic names in the digital world. After extensive brand awareness research, we determined that the name Razorfish already enjoys powerful brand equity and best represents our evolution into the global agency of the future, which taps into the immersive and social nature of digital."

-- CellForce claims to have "the world's largest consumer database of U.S. cell phone users and email addresses", but since there was no URL in the press release, there won't be any here.

-- NASDAQ sells ad space on its website. NYSE apparently doesn't.

-- Here's a company that creates video claymation tutorials - Claytorial.

-- Roberto asks: "I would like to know if you could put a link to our web page." Sure. Here's a link to the site of a company that "offers the Bentley´s of Billboards."