Old Spice: it’s been around forever and it’s still leading edge

How the Old Spice Videos are Being Made. How the Old Spice ads use social media to create a huge success. In case you don’t read what women are talking about that often, let me assure you that the Old Spice ads are getting talked about by women.

A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Even 4chan loved it. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that’s just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken. Then they woke up this morning and they are still making more videos right now. Here’s how it’s going down.

A lot of people have hung up a shingle saying they are social media experts in the last couple of years. Campaigns like this show you just what a true social media expert can do.

Useful Links: Reason, Border-radius, Cognitive Surplus

Reason is an open source CMS that several colleges have used with success. How Luther College is Using Reason, is a thorough review of its pluses and minuses.

Border-radius. Put a number in one of the corner boxes and there you go.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Beth Kanter reviews Clay Shirky’s new book and then offers to give it away, along with her newest, The Networked Nonprofit.

In the mind of Copyblogger there’s a great HTML blog

You know Copyblogger, right? Copyblogger is Brian Clark, the genius writer with a kajillion followers who gives good advice to bloggers about how to get traffic and keep readers coming back.

I was playing a game in my head with some of the Copyblogger headlines, thinking that if people who wrote about HTML and CSS and stuff like web education used his headline techniques, there would be a lot more traffic to web dev blogs.

Here are some examples of how the game goes. Feel free to suggest more.

Copyblogger said: How to Find Thousands More Prospects for Your Business
I said: How to Find Thousands of Web Standards Tips

Copyblogger said: How to Develop an Endless Source of Ideas that Sell
I said: How to Develop an Endless Source of HTML Tutorials that Deliver

Copyblogger said: Want More Readers: Try Expanding Your Internet Universe
I said: Want More Semantic HTML? Try Developing Your List Elements

Copyblogger said: 7 Essential Steps to Creating Your Content Masterpiece
I said: 7 Essential Steps to Optimizing Your CSS

Copyblogger said: The Grateful Dead 4-Step Guide to the Magical Influence of Content Marketing
I said: The Grateful Dead 4-Step Guide to the Magical Influence of Accessible Forms

Copyblogger said: Improve Your Writing Overnight with the Rule of 24: Guaranteed
I said: Improve Your Code Overnight with the Rule of 24: Guaranteed

I need to start playing this game in real life.

Looking to hire?

Etsy is hiring. Like any web-based company, they are advertising the job openings on the Internet.

Maybe you aren’t familiar with Etsy. You need to know that it is a marketplace for handmade and vintage items–a community of creative people. That’s important to keep in mind. Etsy is advertising for coders and programmers and database gurus who fit in with the company mindset. A creative, handmade, vintage mindset. A code as craft mindset. Here’s the ad that announced they were hiring.

I could watch that video 20 times, I find it is so hilarious. All the sacred cows of web standards, and programming best practices—really, anything Internet related—turned on its head in a creative twist that is just plain funny.

It’s a brilliant bit of job posting because it tells you about the company and the kind of people you’d be working with. It links to this staid listing of all the jobs available at Etsy.

Which one would tempt you to apply? The perfect-for-you job title, say “Interaction/User Interface Designer,” or the video?

A lot of companies need Interaction/User Interface Designers and workers like that these days. And a job is a job, right? Etsy found a way to make their jobs look like more fun than any other job. Brilliant, I say again.

(Posted in a different form at BlogHer.)

Useful links: Hyperlocal news, free websites, HTML5

Patch vs. Media News: One Little Instructive Story is about the AOL hyperlocal news service called Patch. The landscape is shifting under our feet. Pay attention.

I’ve written about a lot of “build a website, free!” sites, especially for eHow. Now there is a company in the field that has found a way to make building a website into a game, with points and rewards. It’s called DevHub. You can get a fast idea of what DevHub is doing in this article by Jason Kincaid. As an educator, I’ve never worried about places that offer free web sites–no serious web developer would be tempted by them, and no instructor would teach students to use them as a best practice. I’m wondering now if making web development into a game like Foursquare or Gowalla may be tempting enough to build some momentum. And if so, what does that mean to web education?

Two posts from Itpastorn about browser “support” and new technology. No browser supports HTML 5 yet. Part 1. The rant. and No browser supports HTML 5 yet. Part 2. Technology. Are demo sites and experiments the same as browser implementation?

Must attend: Web Directions USA

I’ve mentioned Web Directions USA before, but I want to devote an entire post to urging everyone involved in web education to make an effort to get there this year. It’s happening in Atlanta, September 21–25 and events are shaping up to make it a great experience for educators.

There is more involved that what you see on the program. There will be workshops for educators (maybe some you don’t see on the schedule yet) and a hack day for students. These special edu focused activities happen on the days immediately before or after the schedule conference days, so make plans and reservations for more than just the two actual conference days.

John Allsopp, one of the Web Directions organizers, was also a major force in the creation of OWEA. John wants the September conference in Atlanta to include events that both inform educators about OWEA and benefit OWEA as well.

You can follow @webdirections on Twitter.

Useful links: social media, mobile YouTube, Big Web Show

No, You Can’t Automate Social Media from Techipedia is a thoughtful post about people who are trying to build a social media campaign based on automation.

While the Techipedia article needs no help making its point, there’s a similar piece at Web Worker Daily called 10 Ways to Really Connect Through Social Media that is good.

YouTube Mobile Goes HTML5. Noteworthy in my opinion not because Google’s YouTube effort rivals the iPhone app but because it rivals Adobe Flash software. Watching HTML5 infiltrate the market is so interesting.

The Big Web Show production hosted by Dan Benjamin and Jeffrey Zeldman, is available not just on the web but on iTunes. Dan Benjamin has several other web related shows available from iTunes. If you haven’t looked at what Dan and Jeffrey up to, you should check them out. It’s definitely an educator’s goldmine of a resource. A good starting point is Liz Danzico on Web Education.