Notes from Electric Pulp

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.