David Harper’s Different Things

For all of you who dig QR Codes this is for you.
(Scott forgive me.)

Watch the Pet Shop Boys Video in Wide Format: http://www.petshopboys.co.uk/splash.html

The video sets out to amplify the message of the song. The piece was conceived and created by The Rumpus Room as a multi platform project, having versions of the film for small hand held devices as well as large resolution screens. It is both a traditional piece of film and an interactive portal to online information and campaigns.

The video has over 100 QR Codes that are subliminal when watched in real time, but accessible to interact with if you navigate through the film using time controllers. The QR Code links in the video are a catalogue of online content about issues of civil liberties, as well as links that will give you the opportunity to get involved in campaigning against the erosion of our personal freedom.

I think we found our theme song for MobileCamps.

Dear Yahoo!

When will you honor the request for our domain to be placed on the Yahoo! oneSearch service “White List”?

When will Yahoo!’s oneSearch service respect the “Cache-Control” of “no-transform”?

When will Yahoo! provide transparency to the oneSearch implementation of this Novarra transcoding madness so everyone who needs to can OPT OUT?

(Note: We also have rel=”alternate” media=”handheld” implemented as Google suggests.)

If this is news to you…

I refer you to, “The New Walled Garden?”

Sorting out an off-portal publishing system to deliver mobile device-specific 100% W3C mobileOK and .mobi standards-compliant templates was apparently not enough. Now it seems I have to take on everyone in the world who is bastardizing us with their freaking Novarra “web transformation” engines and poor customer service (i.e. whitelisting.)

and…

Yahoo!’s oneSearch service clearly distinguishes mobile and web results. They are returning both PC and desktop links to Winksite. Links in the PC section goes to the transcoder, while links in the Mobile Web section goes direct.

So why do I have a problem with this? Let me explain…

When someone visits Winksite or a mobile site published at Winksite we send that visitor to a version appropriate to their device. We asked to be White Listed because a mobile phone should never end up at a transcoded version of our broadband site. If Yahoo! respected that ALL the links in the results would pass to us directly where we could then do the job that people count on us to do.

Instead our routing is intercepted and adapted content NOT our content or the content of our publishers as it was intended to be distributed is sent. This cripples our site and renders our community features unusable.

I question Yahoo!’s (and anyone else’s) right to do that…

…and without permission to create a derivative work that violates our copyright AND hinders our ability to provide a service that took years of hard work to build.

Cheers,
David Harper
Founder, Winksite

HP asks, “So how important is mobile for social marketing?”

HP then answer’s their own question, “In short, very.”

I have to agree.

HP’s The Digital Mindset Blog::

• John Hadl, whom Brandweek called “the father of mobile marketing” and a top 10 Next Generation Marketer, predicts that in a couple of years mobile phones will be the “premier consumer connection and medium for insights available for marketers.”
• Julie Ask of Jupiter Research makes the case that mobile has already become a natural and increasingly important complement to social marketing campaigns. She provides a list of seven best practices for marketers to keep in mind when creating mobile social marketing campaigns.
• In his keynote at Mplanet 2006, AT&T’s COO Randall Stephenson, said that of the three vehicles AT&T has to reach customers in their new Three Screen Initiative (internet/PC, TV, wireless/mobile phone), wireless is the most important.
• Wireless Week’s Brad Smith suggests mobile advertising may be poised to explode next year.
• Tomi Ahonen calculated that in 2006 mobile social networking was already worth $3.45 billion. In Ahonen’s view, “if you are not on mobile, you won’t be relevant soon.”
• Mmetric recently reported that 12.3 million consumers in the United States and Western Europe accessed a social networking site with their mobile device in June. And this was prior to the launch of the iPhone.

Note: Winksite is mentioned in the post as an example of a mobile web 2.0 mashup, where web content is automatically repurposed for mobile consumption making it “almost trivial to mobilize one’s blog.”