It’s with great enthusiasm and an even greater sense of humility that we announce our work on world25.org. The site was created as the official home of the contemporary version of the song, We Are The World.
Led again by executive producers Quincy Jones and Lionel Richie, the new version was recorded February 1st to benefit the Haitian earthquake relief efforts and will premier during NBC’s coverage of the Opening Ceremony of the Vancouver Winter Olympics Friday, February 12th @ 7:30 p.m. EST.
This project means a lot to us. Not only is the song a cultural icon, it’s one of our earliest and clearest memories of charity. The original effort came at a time when many of us knew philanthropy only as a word in a spelling bee; and our world views probably didn’t extend far beyond the schoolyard.
The new version focuses on the profound tragedy in Haiti; something on all our minds. The site will serve as home to the song and video, soon available to watch and purchase through partnerships with YouTube and iTunes. You can also give now by donating at the site. Just remember to visit again tonight (Friday) to see the rest of the site’s features.
It’s hard to write a post like this and not get caught up in how excited we are to be along for the ride. The project has been extremely inspiring for us. We hope to keep that energy around.
TIME Magazine’s 50 Best Websites 2009 is out, and we’re extremely excited to report that a site by Electric Pulp made the list. Coming in at number 9, Academic Earth brings you lectures from MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and more, all in one place. (If you haven’t checked it out, we highly recommend it.)
Other sites on the list include Google, Twitter, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Flickr. So, this is pretty amazing news.
Have we seriously not written about the Fiesta Movement yet? Wow, that’s embarrassing.
Ford is an automaker with a wildly popular car called the Fiesta. (Consult the Top Gear review) Now, if you’re in America, you may not know about the (new) Ford Fiesta because it’s only available in Europe. And if you are in America and you do know about the car, well that’s just spectacular. Because that’s where we’ve been asked to help.
The Fiesta Movement is a coming out party of sorts for the automaker. Maybe you follow Scott Monty on twitter. Well, like we said, we’re a bit late on this post, but when we started, this was all very new and experimental.
The idea began with the web nerds titans at Undercurrent and AMG taking video submissions from would be drivers. From the thousands of entries, 100 people were selected to receive a brand new 2010 Ford Fiesta to drive for six months. These agents would be assigned missions along the way and asked to blog, tweet, video, photograph, and so on about their experience.
By now, you’ve probably guessed we were asked to design / build it. Agent profiles, mission details, events, and a live feed aggregating all mentions of the experience from each of the agents on each of their social media outlets — the site is like one big explosion of Internet love for the little car. We get pretty emotional just talking about it. :/
So check it out. Say hi to our favorite agent. And if you need your own coming out party, let us know. We’re having a lot of fun with this one.
The Metal Mulisha is getting ready for X Games 15 with the launch of a new website. They’re probably getting ready regardless of the new site, but there’s a certain way to start a blog post. And that was it.
Anyway, in addition to the new design, the team can post articles, videos, pictures, tweets, and events as per usual. Fans can also get involved with user submitted photos, comments, ratings, and reviews. But what makes this site far better than the last is the addition of a comprehensive ecommerce shop. Go buy something.
Keep your eye out for some new work coming to the Lost Enterprises site as well. And, if you missed it, we just launched a new Rusty (surfboards) site as well as a corporate site for the La Jolla Group, a blog for AFMXA, and, unfortunately, a site in memory of the late Jeremy Lusk.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
