One of the Electric Pulp team just pulled into town with a new car. This isn’t any car, it’s the new (2011) Ford Fiesta — a car you’d normally have to travel to Europe to see.

Ford is bringing the Fiesta to the States next year. And, in preparation for launch, Ford issued a simple challenge: tell us why you’d like to try one out and we’ll select 100 of you to drive one free of charge for 6 months. Four thousand people responded with video submissions, including Tanya.

So, T (er, Tanya Kruiter) got a new car, and we’re all pretty excited for her. To add a little drama to the story, there’s a competing Fiesta in town. Hugh Weber (of Deep Bench) was also able to woo the selection committee with his own brilliant submission.

Which means, of course, we’ll have front row seats to the web nerd races you’ll have to watch on youtube. (We hope.)

More on this later, but Electric Pulp also built the web site for Ford’s Fiesta Movement campaign. Check it out.

Congrats to these awesome pulpsters!

Wendy–will be rockin’ the motorcycle-helmet belly with baby #3–and the baby’s gender is going to remain a good ol’ mystery. Warning: she likes her snacks, so hide your food if you are hungry.

Mitch–apparently has a baby coming in May, but no-one has been able to tell. I call shenanigans..he is totally guilty of baby fraud.

Max–became a dad in November to a cute little manga-baby and we never announced it. oops.
Hey everybody, Max had a baby girl!

Apologies in advance if we startle anyone by posting here after a few months of not, but we wanted to let you know about something we had a hand in. Actually, there are quite a few such things we’ve had hands in lately, but we’ll try to keep it focused in on one at a time. This particular thing is a site called Academic Earth.

Academic Earth brings you full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. For real. Check out Larry Page speaking on taking risks. And here’s Guy Kawasaki giving advice to young entrepreneurs at Stanford.

A short while ago, Slate called the site “Hulu, but for nerds.” Today, TechCrunch said “something or other” as well. We’ll leave the writing to the bloggers but reserve the further analysis to you.

That link, again, is http://academicearth.com. Go get ur knowledge.

Also, congratulations to the AE team. There’s a lot to be proud of.

UPDATE: Lifehacker has something to say as well. (So do others. But Lifehacker is always so cordial.)

What if you could wire the world to let you listen in any time someone mentioned your brand in conversation, for good, for bad, or otherwise? That could be helpful, right? Well, if the conversation is happening on the Internet, you can do such things pretty easily.

I submit proof in the form of a two-item list:

1. Set up Google Alerts to monitor key phrases related to your brand.
   Google will email you or ping your feed reader every time it indexes any reference to the phrase you’ve entered. Make sure you’re using any variation of your name (we monitor “Electric Pulp,” electricpulp, and EPulp) or any other relevant phrase. Just understand this is Google, and Google indexes a lot of pages. If you set up an alert for “awesome,” for instance, the Internet may explode.
2. Set up a Twitter Search and subscribe to the RSS.
   Same theory here as before, except you’re now zooming in on a specific community. This will turn up posts Google will never index, and will do it much more quickly. Once you’ve set up your search, just subscribe to the “Feed for this query” and twitter will do the rest.

The only thing left to do is participate in these conversations as they’re happening. Leave comments on posts. Reply to twitters. Et cetera.

If this seems somehow narcissistic or big brotherly (in the creepy sense), just remember consumers hit the search engines before they buy. And they’re going to find all of these conversations, whether you’re in the mix or not. You want it to be the former.

Guy Kawasaki is weaving the tale of Alltop on his blog today. We’re biased, of course, but it’s a great story. The initial concept (and implementation) was that of a single topic aggregator. Seven months later, we have more than 200 topics with a new process that will allow thousands more.

Before we get too far, we should explain what the site (or more accurately, sites) is. Alltop is a news aggregator. Each topic draws from credible blog sources to display recent headlines / excerpts without dwelling on the fact it’s fed by RSS. News is kept current and relevant by a small team of humans and robots. These topics are organized under the Alltop umbrella but can be accessed directly or found via a simple search at alltop dot com. Tell it you’re looking for politics, and it gives you politics dot alltop dot com. Simple.

The real story is in the marketing, though. Our last project with Guy was quickly dubbed the Worst Site on the Internetâ„¢. And although, it generated a huge amount of mixed buzz, it doesn’t compare to his latest gig. Alltop tapped into something more like technorati authority or twitter leaderboard standings. People like the site(s), and they want in.

Another story is in the scaling efforts the site required. One of the topics actually has more than a thousand stories at any given time - complete with excerpts and microformats (not that anyone notices). We’ve had to tweak to get it to play nice with the increasing traffic.

We’ve also set up a system to allow the Alltop team easy topic creation and management. I mean, we had one all along, but it involved emailing a nerd who’d then do things manually. We got rid of the nerd.

A few days ago we introduced a brand new landing page to help make finding topics easy. It was overdue - the old site was never meant to organize hundreds of topics. We’re excited about version 2.

Any way, Guy tells stories better than we do. Go check out his post and / or visit Alltop.

Making time to jam on internal projects is a bit of an elusive luxury here at Electric Pulp. We could spend weeks just registering domain names for our web schemes, but we rarely get them off the whiteboard and onto the Internetâ„¢.

Last week we rolled out *one such occasion,* though, in partnership with our friends at Undercurrent.

The new site is called Viral or Spiral, and it goes like this: community members and vagrants submit videos to be voted on. Voting comes in the form of popularity predictions, i.e., how many times a video is expected to be viewed in 90 days. Predictions are aggregated and compared against actual video performance.

We’re flattering commandshift3 and digg for sure with the new site, and we definitely took some liberty with the YouTube API. It’s for the kids, though. Especially if those kids are looking for early feedback on media from a subset of contributors with proven accuracy for predicting media popularity.

Those kids need help the most.

People swear there’s more going on at Electric Pulp than our blog would have you believe. They’re largely correct. Here are some examples:

Mediascapes 2.0
Earlier this year we started work with Hewlett-Packard to re-introduce mediascapes, an immersive media experience for mobile devices. The project is incredible, and we were excited to be involved in the web facet.

Virgin
Last year, we hooked up with Undercurrent to collaborate on a few projects for Virgin. The first of these to launch is Virgin Music, a video blog and music news aggregation site.

Virgin’s a big company, and navigating their site can be difficult. Our next gig, Virgin Explore, aims to make it less so.

Alltop
Guy Kawasaki has a new venture, and we’re happy to report it involves Electric Pulp. Alltop is a network of topics displaying recent headlines and excerpts from the most popular authors / publishers in each vertical. While [perhaps] not for the most RSS/Atom/feed savvy among you, Alltop is on a tear both in terms of traffic and PR. Last week, we read about it in The Wall Street Journal.

Sidenote: Guy’s earlier venture, Truemors, was recently sold to NowPublic.

Cazt
If you’re a casting director, your life just got easier. Cazt lets you manage projects including actor auditions and stakeholder notes. If you’re an actor, you can actually watch your auditions, read direct feedback and more. I don’t want to play favorites, but this is an awesome example of a web application. Pulp is pretty proud of our part.

Elsewhere
By no means is this the full list of what we’ve been up to. We’ve re-released ecommerce sites, recruiting sites, and quite a few more.

In other words, we’re busy. But don’t worry, none of this prevents Max and George from discussing favorite yogurt flavors. Stay tuned.

g: I’m going to bite your eye out
m: You can’t bite an eye out
g: Yes I can
m: No you can’t

* Okay, this is not entirely fair to George and Max.  This conversation actually took place between my sons, ages 6 and 11.  All the same, I’m confident you see my point.

m: George, what’s your favorite kind of yogurt?

g: I don’t know, strawberry?

m: Wrong. It’s cherry orchard.

g: Oh, gag. Gag!

churro chips

g: are you gonna eat all of those?
m: heck yeah i am!
g: gimme some
m: nuh uh!
g: you are not eating all of those
m: I am too!
g: gaw!
m: that’s payback for taking two donut holes yesterday

donut holes.

m: “you got two! no way!”
g: “the second one was even better than the first one.”