Think & Play
Thoughtplay is the creative team behind various popular websites and other projects. At this blog we give away bright ideas regularly, and comment on interesting trends both online and off. The thought channel is for more business-related trends, play looks at entertainment and leisure, and thoughtplay introduces our own creative ideas, as well as news about our projects.
Adapt, plan, info-gather | 191206
News via The Register is that Google has axed its Search API (though an AJAX API remains available, and existing accounts have not been removed).
( What's an API? )
Now, Google's Search API has been criticized, and in any case it imposed a daily limit of 1000 calls - making it pretty useless for anything that might attract a lot of traffic. But what this withdrawal really highlights is the danger of relying on a API unless you have other ways of gathering data. APIs and 'mashups' form a big part of the 'Web 2.0' explosion, but they're always vulnerable to the whim of the data providers. The moral is: trust no one, build your own data, and plan to be adaptable.
Categories: thought
Can the music industry learn from goats? | 161206
Jonathan Rosenberg's webcomic, Goats, recently celebrated its 2000th edition. Rosenberg is to congratulated, not only for the longevity, originality and humour of his comic, but for the fact that he has been able to effectively monetize his creation - since April 2006 he has been able to support himself solely from the proceeds of advertising, book and T-shirt sales generated by the site. Goats is not unique in this respect - John Allison has been making a living from Scarygoround (the best and most popular of the UK webcomics) for several years now.
What is significant about a couple of artists earning a few thousand dollars a year from their websites? ( more on how this relates to the music industry )
Coldplay, the biggest band in the world in 2005 (by sales) consistently trails Scarygoround in online popularity stakes. Of course if you could get all of their tracks for free from the site, this situation would change significantly, but it would be a brave (and legally tortuous) step to take.
At Thoughtplay we think that there might be another alternative, but we'll talk about that in a future blog post.
Categories: thought
Simplify, simplify | 151206
Every day we're faced by what author Barry Schwartz calls The Paradox of Choice - we're inundated with consumer options, often so subtly gradated that we can't decide which is what - check out mortgage or cellphone plans, for example. So maybe new site what.shouldiget.com makes good sense: enter a type of product (inkjet printer, digital camera, that sort of thing) and it will suggest just one recommended brand. A nice idea, maybe even inspired by our What Should I Read Next?, perhaps!
Categories: play
Alex is smart, his advertisers less so | 101206
Last year's internet success story, MillionDollarHomePage spawned a thousand imitators, but none of the truly innovated the original concept. Until now. Pixelotto takes the same essential principle of MDHP - there are 1 million pixels for sale on the site which advertisers can buy in blocks of 10x10 - but adds a significant twist: this time the pixels cost $2 a piece, as opposed to $1. This might not seem like much of an innovation, but the rationale for increasing the charge is. Rather than all of the cash going into the pocket of the site owner, 50% of the revenue generated by the site will be won by one of its visitors, with an additional 5% going to a charity of the user’s choice. In theory therefore some lucky person will walk away with $1m of their own.
The prize is not only a means of driving traffic to the site, it is also generating click-throughs to the advertisers. To be eligible for the prize you have to register on the site (with some well-thought-out steps to prevent multiple applications from the same person) and thereafter you receive an entry into the prize draw every time you click on an ad on the site (with a limit of 10 times a day). Once you have clicked on an ad it is greened out, so you have to click on different advertisers each time.
All very clever, and who came up with the idea? Alex Tew, the creator of the original MDHP. To date he has sold around $260,000 worth of pixels and his Alexa rating has started exceptionally well.
So, a winner for Alex, his users and his advertisers? Well perhaps not the last of three. If you do advertise on Pixelotto there is no doubt that your site will receive tens of thousands of click-throughs. The problem is that these are going to be users visiting the site to quickly click through their ten allotted entries of the day - the odds of them being genuinely interested in the product/service being offered is slim. This is compounded by the fact that many of the advertisers are simply linking through to their regular home page. A visitor who glances at your site for a couple of seconds at best needs to see something other than a detailed homepage like Justsloggi - a bespoke landing page with a clear message would be much more appropriate. Lastminute.com attempts this with a dedicated Pixelotto prize draw, but this is hampered by the fact it is contained within the regular site's frameset.
So is it worth advertising on Pixelotto? Perhaps, but only if you can get your landing page right.
Categories: thought
Free books! Cheap sheep! | 051206
Science fiction author Cory Doctorow has long been an advocate of 'copyleft' and using Creative Commons licences to offer his books as free downloads. There's a new article by him in Forbes magazine explaining why. Of course, he does have the advantage of being one of the contributors to the second most popular blog in the world, BoingBoing...
Meanwhile, here's the other side of the coin: an artist getting people to make his work almost for free. He is Aaron Koblin and he paid 10,000 people a mere 2 cents via Amazon's Mechanical Turk system to create The Sheep Market - and now charges $20 each for sets of stamps based on them. (Thanks to SB&LB for this item.)
Categories: play
Hic transit gloria mundi | 011206
This might turn out to be a marketing experiment that the perpetrators will regret (or one they planned to go like this...): UK-based wine store chain Threshers is offering 40% off all wine and champagne (until 10 December) via a coupon distributed across the internet. If you're in the UK and fancy filling up your rack before Christmas, you'll find the Threshers voucher here. Apparently the firm's website has been experiencing serious access problems already due to the massive surge in interest. The BBC has also picked up on the story - which is hardly going to help Threshers.
You can find loads of other vouchers doing the rounds (many expire on 3 Dec), covering Borders, Selfridges, Gap and more - see a list here.
Categories: play
Join our mailing list | 011206
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Categories: thoughtplay
WSIRN/TON monthly update | 011206
Here's an updated chart of the the 10 most popular books at What Should I Read Next? (figure in brackets is the number of registered users' lists in which the book appears):
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (2215)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6) - J.K. Rowling (1658)
1984 - George Orwell (1594)
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams (1583)
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (1500)
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (1483)
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien (1393)
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald (1266)
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell (1213)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) - J.K. Rowling (1098)
Only one change in the positions from last month: 1984 has overtaken Hitchhiker's to grab the No 3 spot. We'll be keeping you updated every month. The What Should I Read Next? database now contains well over 260,000 individual recommendations!
Categories: thoughtplay
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