Notes from Electric Pulp

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.

We’d like to again say congratulations to the Academic Earth team — they’re having a great run so far. Other accolades include mentions in PC Magazine’s Top 100 Web Sites of 2009 and Richard Ludlow’s own inclusion in the BusinessWeek “America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs, 2008″ as well as a host of great stories from NPR (“An online hub for free university classes, lectures”), Slate (“How to Go to Harvard for Free: The joys of Academic Earth’s online video lectures.”), and others.

Link: http://www.academicearth.org

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.

We’d go on, but we aren’t the story. Check out the Metal Mulisha’s new thing for yourselves.

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.

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.

We’ve been working with the Sundance Institute to produce a new community site aimed at connecting independent documentary and human rights. The subject matter is extremely compelling, and the organization behind the effort is one we’re very proud to be working with.

This past week, we had a chance to experience the energy around the project firsthand at this year’s Sundance Film Festival as we snuck away from the office for a few days to help announce the launch of Docsource.

The new site includes discussion areas, film and artist profiles, video clips, and multi-user blogs authored by filmmakers and representatives from the Documentary Film Program (DFP). And that’s just the start. The site will continue to grow over the coming weeks and beyond.

The festival

Snow has kind of jumped the shark in my book, but the festival was incredible. The films we took in were great, the filmmakers we got to meet to were wildly interesting, and a few of us (them) actually got in to see U2-3D. The whole experience was well worth the planes, trains and automobiles effort it took to get out there (all of us were plagued by United “mechanical difficulties.”)

If you’re at all interested, most of us had cameras with us.

• Aaron’s flickr set
• Angela’s flickr set
• Michael’s flickr set
• Stefan’s flickr collection

No pics of the Airbag guys (we’ll catch you at SXSW), but there’s some good stuff in there. A few of Stefan’s shots even hit the flickr blog.

More updates soon – we’re going Gattaca with the site launches.

Congratulations to Mitch and Heather Kramer, on the birth of their new baby boy, Ethan. We don’t have a lot of details yet (he’s pretty fresh), but we do have Mitch’s photostream to keep an eye on.

Cute kid.

Entrepreneur.com has a great interview with Guy K on his motivations behind truemors. No need to retell, but here’s a random excerpt:

There are four tips here: 1) Make friends [with] vendors before you need them, 2) engage a firm that made a similar product, 3) check references after it’s too late, and 4) work with people from the Midwest [Electric Pulp is in South Dakota; PDG is in Oklahoma].

It’s been a little over a week since we launched makemeamerica.com for Stephen Colbert, and by way of an update, here are a few points of interest:

• You can now see Stephen’s delightful visage on several top CSS Galleries. We thank you for that, CSS Galleries. America thanks you.
• There have been over 4300 Oprah book club petition signatures.
• As of this morning, the World Domination map is open for business outside the confines of the United States border. Time to conquer the world!

Speaking of international support, check out Canada — they sure are organized up there:

If the Internet feels slower today, it may be due in part to a new site we just launched called MakeMeAmerica.com.

What started out as a humble effort to sell a few books has turned into something more: a humble effort with big pictures, hero profiles, video excerpts, a petition to Oprah, flickr photo integration, and an interactive world domination map. (And lots of easter eggs.)

The book, I Am America (And So Can You), is written by Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central and namesake of a baby bald eagle in Bonita Springs.

The Colbert team quickly determined that, in addition to being able to read books, the show’s audience also seemed to have ready access to the internets. One idea turned into two, and pretty soon, Electric Pulp was in on the plan. The rest, as they say, is history.

All that’s left is for you to check it out.

(These guys have.)

The Pee-Wee-Pulp-Word-of-the-Day for Thursday, October 4th is: “Excerpt”