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New Web Publication Banks On Quality Content Over More Garbage. CRAZY!

July 30th, 2010 · Culture

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In the impending world of digital first, print never there is a shining beacon of hope called Capital New York–a new weekly online publication declaring “This Is How New York Works”. Categorically it falls somewhere between a magazine, a newspaper and a blog and manages to capture the best of each world. It’s well written, entertaining, hyper local and pretty easy on the eyes.

The concept is smart and simple, create a conversation with an already knowledgable audience about things they don’t already know. Eventually they will be covering important people and institutions in politics, media, culture and business, but for now the focus is all on culture. They’re calling it beta mode, but it hardly feels unfinished.

Their concept is clear and their business model is refreshing: “The premise of Capital is that it is possible for a news website to do well by being good” (aka not just rack up the page views with slapped out stories of the latest Lady Gaga who-ha slip). What a novel concept! Really, it is. So far digital success has been determined by metrics and page views–a system easily manipulated by clogging your text with irrelevant keywords, categories, and tags. It’s slimy business and creates a whole lot of garbage, but unfortunately it gets the job done (if the job is proving that X number of people clicked on your link).

We’re anxious to see if a focus on quality content can attract the same kind of advertising dollars as the tragic Perez Hilton machine. (It’s been working for Current TV, right?) Fingers crossed.

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Social Media Magazine

July 22nd, 2010 · Advertising Agency, Apps, Indianapolis, Techy

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Flipbook is a new iPad app that basically creates a magazine all about you and the things your friends are into. It organizes and updates their suggestions in real time, making it easy to search for that perfect time killer. Kind of really awesome.

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I Just Geeked My Pants A Little

July 21st, 2010 · Advertising Agency, Indianapolis

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Science geeks and the young-at-heart, you might want to sit down for this one. Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (that 14 acre reason field trips to Chicago were the highlight of your grade school life) has announced they’re looking for a roommate. Breathe. The winner of Month at the Museum will eat, sleep, and breathe science for one whole month all while living among the exhibits. How cool is that? The winner must document their experiences via blogs/Twitter/yadda yadda and receives $10,000 at the end of the experiment. Personally, I’ve wanted to live inside a museum ever since I read The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler as a kid, a burning desire which was only further fueled by that scene in The Royal Tenenbaums and was later brought to a tipping point with the launch of the Night at the Museum movies. So, feel free to enter–I like a little healthy competition–but don’t get your hopes up. Come October 20th I’ll be curled up in that cozy little replica of the the human heart and you’ll be reading my Twitter feed. Suckers.

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Communication Breakdown #5: Talk to Strangers

July 14th, 2010 · Uncategorized

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Since childhood, we’ve been strongly advised against, if not completely forbidden from, talking to strangers. They’re scary, have candy, and are invariably a threat to you for reasons beyond your ability to comprehend. So we stay away, or are locked in the minivan away. But as we get older, there’s rebellion. The itch for independence and to be left to your own devices becomes strong, which, for a while at least, means constantly saying no to old instincts and being compulsively irresponsible. So, naturally, we talk to strangers. A lot of them. All the time.

And it works. Nothing bad happens. We’re amazed. Curiosity abounds. There’s a swell of new friends. Doors open. Horizons expand. Other clichés occur, and it stops, well, never. Eventually, we find that’s the way of adulthood: talking to strangers, networking with strangers, appealing to strangers. It goes from a banned and, reputed by our parents to be, horrible activity to a necessary tool for navigating life, like drinking.

And like most awesome things that we grow to love, there comes a point where doing it in the flesh of real everyday life isn’t enough. It must transcend. It must become virtual. It must be on the Internet.

Unless you’re a dog, performance artist, desperate exhibitionist or a 16 year-old girl, chances are you haven’t heard of Chatroulette. If you are any of these things, except for a dog, chances are a large percentage of the population wants nothing to do with you.

The Chatroulette concept is simple: strangers talking with strangers, hearkening back to the days of the Internet’s infancy and the chat room. You go to the website and you’re in. No username. No sign up. You’re instantly connected, aurally and visually, to a complete stranger. It’s kind of like Skype but with all ten thousand Chatroulette users at any given time distributed across a wheel ala The Price is Right and then spun for your amusement. You going get a lot of pennies (blank screens), nickels (still photos) and dimes (amateur pornographers), but every once in a while, you hit ONE DOLLAR!!! and you’re in the showcase showdown.

Let me show you what I mean.

Take this guy:

WHAT? Brilliant.

And this guy:

Nicely done.

And whatever this is:

That looks like the most fun ever.

What’s the moral of story, you ask? Well, I don’t really know. I know that Chatroulette is a lot of fun. So is talking to strangers. I also know that you’re likely to see a lot of really disgusting self-gratification if you decide to try your chatroulette chances anytime later than early afternoon. So beware, but also don’t, because Chatroulette is what life’s about. Not all the self-gratification, but taking chances and weeding out the duds from the gems. There are a lot of them out there. They all communicate differently and some of them are doing really amazing things, on or off of Chatroulette. The next time you meet a stranger, don’t eat his candy. Don’t run either. Put on your Walt Whitman hat, or more literally a spiderman mask…

…and ask them if they know any stupid human tricks. What they show you might speak volumes.

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FootInMouth

July 7th, 2010 · Advertising Agency, Indianapolis

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Recently we spent a fair amount of blog space ripping apart the trailer for the soon-to-be premiered Bravo show, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. So, it’s one month and four episodes later  and we can’t take our eyes off it. Not because it’s a total trainwreck or completely laughable, but because it’s really fascinating and we wish we could play along. It’s easily the most interesting thing we watch all week–not including the cerebral class fest that is TrueBlood and Entourage. That being said, we’d like to make our first official noggBLOG retraction and suggest that you check out this show. It’s on tonight in fact! How timely.

Sadly, you missed the cra-cray Judith mess (above), but there’s still plenty of time to oo and ah at Miles the wunderkind.

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Googleheim

June 28th, 2010 · Advertising Agency, Indianapolis

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Every once in a blue moon this little company called Google does something kinda cool and noteworthy. Sometimes little companies owned by Google, like YouTube, contribute to this coolness. And then there are other times when these little companies pair with adorable little arts dynasties–say, the Guggenheims–to unearth and showcase the newest, most innovative, and exceptional work from a bunch of actually little people (in reputation) working in the ever-expanding medium of online video all over the world. In this particular instance they’re calling it Play: A Biennial of Creative Video. Anyone can enter and 25 of those anyones will have their work displayed simultaneously at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Berlin, Bilbao, Venice, and, of course, on YouTube alongside sneezing pandas and embarrassing Star Wars reenactments.

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Toys, Maybe You’ve Heard Of Them?

June 18th, 2010 · Advertising Agency, Art + Design, Indianapolis

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Who doesn’t love toys? If you’ve ever set foot in the Nogginwerks office then you are likely well aware that we work inside a giant misfit toy chest. Perhaps it has caused you to ponder from time to time what your life would have been like had you been born a strange Japanese plush toy instead of the fabulous Nogginwerks client/freelancer/FedEx man that you are. Perhaps that strange rainbow afro dog with the bee in his bonnet causes you to question everything you thought you knew about yourself and maybe that’s why you don’t visit Linda’s office anymore. Perhaps we’ve gotten off track.

We love toys (obV) and when we’re not busy swimming in our sea of degenerate knick-knacks or thinking up just-so-crazy-they-might-actually-work ideas for business we also dig doing some more conventional good. Helping kids is cool. We like doing that when we can (refer to Smart Ideas sidebar). So, naturally, when we saw the winner of the Design21 Game Changers toy design competition we thought it worth mentioning.

It’s called the be-B and it teaches kids Braille (both blind and sighted). It also looks pretty cool and we imagine it could work for the old and sighted as well. There are a few runners-up and about 20 more entries on the Design21 website, if’n you feel like checking it out.

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Shadow Painting & Space Sandwiches

June 9th, 2010 · Advertising Agency, Art + Design, Eats, Indianapolis

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We love how these shadow tracings turn the sidewalk into a surreal carnival mirror version of the world. Speaking of surreal, have we mentioned the spacey majesty of a scanned sandwich?

When someone is able to put a new perspective on an object as commonplace as a shadow or a sandwich, that’s cool. Turning the everyday into something beautiful and worth noticing is way up our alley. After all, is there anything more ugly and everyday than bad advertising? If every tired old personal injury attorney billboard was replaced with something simple and clever and thoughtful wouldn’t that make all the difference?

Perhaps that’s the secret–the answer to what’s ailing this planet. We could turn the world into a more peaceful beautiful place one campaign at a time. Goodbye war. Goodbye hate. Goodbye terrible Go Daddy commercials. Kumbaya, halleluja, et al.

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Just Because…

June 1st, 2010 · Advertising Agency, Indianapolis

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A little something atrocious/mesmerizing to help you ease back into the swing of things.

In case you’ve managed to escape the death-grip hold that the Real Housewives of New York has over the rest of us poor schmucks, that is Countess LuAnn in her much anticipated “music” video (or at least that is some airbrushed, blurry, producer’s vision of what the Countess would look like singing that song). She’s super classy (obviously) and spent most of the first season of The Housewives touting unsolicited etiquette advice to anyone who crossed her, while simultaneously guaranteeing the colossal flop of her upcoming etiquette book, Class With The Countess. (If you’d like to join the huddled masses basking in the glow of the Housewives or even if you just want some hilarious new creative non-fiction to read we highly suggest catching up on all the hijinks via the snark fest known as Gawker Episode Recaps. It’s easily the most entertaining time-killer on the net and will give you something to talk about next time you run out of stimulating cocktail party anecdotes.) As for the rest of you poor schmucks, yes. It’s here. Isn’t it just as horrific and you’d always dreamed it would be? Ahh, thank you Bravo.

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Guerilla Gardening

May 26th, 2010 · Advertising Agency, Art + Design, Indianapolis

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We dig plants. Who doesn’t? But, we’re crap at keeping them alive which had always been an insurmountable obstacle along the path to our dream status of urban gardener super stardom. Enter Seedbombs.

Drop some coins in the machine, obtain bomb, and toss with wild abandon (ideally wherever you think the urban landscape could use a little greening). No muss, no fuss, and no remembering to water. We’re particularly fond of the idea of wedging them in the cracks of sidewalks and vacant lots. Reclaim the land, man. Together we could turn the city into a “Life After People” situation. Did anyone watch that History Channel special? No, just us? It was kinda cool in a cheesy, sensationalized, film-a-lazy-science-teacher-would-make-you-watch-in-5th-grade kind of way.

Maybe it’s that narrator’s voice, but poorly tended gardens never sounded so bad ass.

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