Notes from Electric Pulp

Just got an IM from Greg about an interesting article in FastCompany. The article, written by Robert Scoble, discusses consumer engagement and social experience with Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse and Bradley Horowitz.

“The more you can engage with your consumers and provide tools back to them, the more viral your services will become,” Horowitz says.

Wise words. Wiser still, the example Scoble uses to bring the story to life:

Visit the Web site of iPhone-case manufacturer Incase (goincase.com), and you’ll see embedded Flickr photos along the bottom. The net effect is that Incase showcases its corporate personality and lets you be part of its community. You can put a photo on this page simply by adding the Flickr tag “goincase” to your snapshot.

I wonder who built that site… Oh, that’s right! Electric Pulp did!1!

High 5, Incase. High 5, Hummel. High 5, Scoble. Good game.

ps: Congrats to the Scobles on the new baby. And the new 5D.

Metal Mulisha recently engaged us to help kick a redesigned site live in time for the X Games. The new site features a podcast-happy blog, video galleries, photo galleries, full cms, standards-compliant everything, etc. We’ll come back to the case study later (no we won’t), but you can check out the site now.

If you get sucked too far into the videos / pics, just make sure you don’t try any of it at home. Two words: Brian Deegan, Viva La Bam. Ouch. Okay, that was more than two, but these guys are crazy insane. Two words isn’t enough.

Pulp showed up late to the lolcats party, so we thought we’d catch up by posting a few of our own…

thx 4 ur bandwit. kthxbai

If you found yourself secretly loving (or loving to hate) Truemors, Guy Kawasaki’s crowdsourcing, rumor aggregating experiment, you might be interested to find out there’s now more to love (or love to hate.)

In general, the new site is better.

Need specifics? Okay…

First off, we’ve added accounts to the mix. Their full purpose will remain a mystery for the moment. Stay tuned.

Next, Truemors now has spam filtering kung fu. You’re familiar (and amazed) with [blog] comment spam filtering? Same thing. Kind of.

Moving on, the site has been redesigned. The primary change you’ll notice is the dead simple topic navigation. Odd posts, Tech posts, Food posts, even the Greatest posts (as voted by the Truemors community) can be quickly isolated for your viewing pleasure.What else? How about Ajax? If you’re one of the geeks that spotted the v1 site’s meta refresh, you might appreciate the new Ajax.PeriodicalUpdater post refresh voodoo. Oh, the power of voodoo.

Is there more? Sure. But I’d rather take a moment to point out that the site is still going strong. Naysayers, doom & gloomers, and CNet will have to wait to stick a fork in it.

Based out of Los Angeles, Arkitip is a supercool independent magazine promoting art accessibility and freedom of expression. Last night the new version of the Arkitip Intelligence blog was pushed live, and it’s pushing boundaries as well (Electric Pulp provided the design and development behind the project).

Here’s the rundown.

Modern tech meets Lo-Fi look and feel
Arkitip started as a magazine in 1999 with a small run of 50 hand-stapled copies of their first issue. That same simplicity, combined with the existing Arkitip product site, was the inspiration for the new approach to Arkitip Intelligence. The Lo-Fi look and feel hides the modern technologies that make the site oh-so-sweet and easy to explore.

Blog, specialized feed reader, or both?
Because the site is basically a collective of different authors, it was important to let users customize their reading experience and manage the bulk. The new site includes the ability to mark specific authors as favorites, helping readers access their favorite authors easily in a river of news format, while still allowing them to access to other authors when they’re feeling rambunctious. We’ve even gone so far as to allow you to build and subscribe to your own customized RSS feed of just your favorite authors. We’re pretty pumped about it all, actually.

Street spirit, fade out.
It should be pointed out that Arkitip Intelligence holds great promise for a very unique and varied perspective on the world. The collection of authors is amazingly diverse, sourced from many different backgrounds. Post frequency is varied as well, requiring a unique solution to keep readers from clicking around randomly to try to find fresh content: as each author’s content ages, their photo on the front page will fade out, drawing additional attention to the most recent posts and most active authors.

That’s it, I guess.
Thanks for reading. Go check it out and be sure to come back and let us know what you think.

Bob Sutton knows how to spot a jerk. You might even say he wrote the book on the topic (because he did.) And he can help you spot one too, especially if that jerk is you.

You see, Bob also developed a 24 question self-exam to help the world ask themselves the right questions (i.e.: Am I a big jerk?) But the exam needed two things to give it legs. 1) promotion. 2) geekery.

As it turns out, Bob knew a guy. Actually, Bob knew the Guy. And who better to help promote the exam than master evangelist, Guy Kawasaki?

From there, the only thing left was the geekery. Enter Electric Pulp. And soon thereafter, enter the ARSE, an ajax survey built to help the world answer the right questions (i.e.: Am I big jerk?)

And, with 101,209 completions and counting, we’re ready to drop the viral label and announce that this thing has legs.

So, thanks Bob. More than 100k potential jerks are half way through their respective battles.

Deziner Folio has burned through the 8,700 standards-compliant, visually smoking websites featured at CSSMania and posted the top 20 highest rated sites. Turns out Electric Pulp (that’s us!) is on that list.

To help us celebrate, we’re requesting that anyone reading this performs an awesome maneuver of their own choosing at precisely 3pm tomorrow (Thursday.) In addition to showing support for pretty design and standards-happy code, we think it will make the world a better place, if only for a short time.

Congrats to Aaron and Jennifer Mentele on the birth of their bouncing (we assume he’d bounce) baby boy.

Kai Greycen Mentele
May 10, 2007, 2:06pm
7lbs 14oz

Jennifer and Kai are both doing well. For more pictures, I’d assume you should keep your eyes on the Mentele Flickr account.

Electric Pulp has signed up to sponsor the Giant Piano in the Washington Pavilion Imagination Studio, and we just got a few photos from Chris Rossing over at the Pavilion showing that our signage is up. We’re going to have to plan a day trip over there and see if we can all work together to pound out a little Piano Concerto No. 3 by Rachmaninoff.

So, why the sponsorship? It’s for the kids, man, the kids. That, and we’re huge fans of the movie “Big”.

Some days you’re surfing around the internets, and you spot your company logo.