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With the announcement of the finalists comes another surprise, the unveiling of the judges! Although we’ve been keeping mum over this side, chilibean’s Victoire is a judge on the 2007 panel! We’ll keep you posted on the awards developments…
This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.
Posted by Victoire on Feb 26, 2007 in Fun, General
Paul and I announced chilibean media’s launch on the 14th February with a special launch video - what you saw was “chilibean on the rocks”, but behind the scenes it was more like a cloud of dust, as we scrambled with the technicalities of recording and editing in a medium we’ve not had much experience in! However, when all the dust settled the video was miraculously edited, the chilibean flash banner converted into video, and we were ready to rock! All of this is thanks to an awesome team of outsourced talent:
- Office For Design’s Paula and Lize for their outstanding design work and excellent service delivered with a smile,
- Nico from Aquila Online for being our swish cinematographer, and then burning the midnight oil getting the video just right - cuts and all.
After all the editing was done, Nico surprised us with a montage - the chilibean bloopers - revealing the candid and un-edited face of the chilibean team. Keep an eye out for the chili dance, which I referred to in my del.icio.us chililuvin post last week!
chilibean is all about passion, and lots and lots of luvin… Indeed, everytime we hear people talking about us our hearts do a little chili dance (watch this space - I’ll be publishing evidence of this soon)!
Our chilibean passion came to fruition when we launched chilibean media on Valentines day - the international day of luvin - and now we’ve caught wind of a growing chilibean fan base. You must know what that does to us - infact, I’m still trying to locate Paul in the stratosphere!
However, we don’t really know who you, our chili fans, are.
It’s with this in mind that we’ve devised a strategy through which we’d be able to get to know you better, and the best part of all is that it’s really easy to do. Bookmark your site with the tag “chililuvin” on del.icio.us. We’ve already set up the feed so that the moment you add the chililuvin tag to your site we’ll know who you are.
These are the steps to follow:
Set up a del.icio.us account if you don’t already have one - Mike Stopforth has quite a comprehensive blog post about del.icio.us which describes how to do this
Install the tools for saving del.icio.us bookmarks - The links to these are at http://del.icio.us/help/
Click on the “Tag” button on your new browser toolbar and enter chililuvin in the “Tags” field, then click on “Save”
Voila! You are our newest fan, and by association, we are yours. So tag your site with “chililuvin” and join our fan club… you know you wanna!
Oh, and if you haven’t quite had enough of all the chililuvin going around, why not spread the love and add our funky flash banner widget to your site?
Forrester has released a paper researching the “why” and “how” of what they call “external blogging accountability”.
Many large companies stand on the brink of blogging, yet they are unwilling to take the plunge. Others, having dove in early, now face the challenge of managing existing blogs without the ability to show that they effectively support business goals. While blogging’s value can’t be measured precisely, marketers will find that calculating the ROI is easier than it looks. Following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals. This, in turn, enables marketers to answer the key questions, such as whether to blog or not to blog, or to make smart choices about an existing blog.
The paper investigates the need for measuring the return on investment (ROI) of organisational blogs and the limitations to these calculations. In addition to the actual calculation Li et al have identified three factors to determine the return:
Quantify and value the key benefits of blogging
Estimate the costs of blogging
Incorporate the risk calculations in the ROI model
The measurement of ROI of technology within the organisation has always been a key factor in the motivation for its cost of ownership. As blogs, and new media in general, are more intensively marketed to, and adopted by, organisations the measurement of the total cost of ownership and their return on investment will be critical. Whilst the “cost of ownership” of the research paper itself is inhibiting at US $379.00, it will be interesting to observe the various permutations of the blogging ROI model as organisations gain experience with this technology.
Another article of relevance published by Forrester is one which explores a case study on the calculation of the ROI of blogging. The case study takes a look at General Motors‘
implementation of corporate blogs. What I found most interesting though, was the ROI model used by GM. Instead of making use of a traditional monetary-value measure, or the popular “page hits” used by most bloggers, GM measure their value of return by “the number of press mentions” metric.
Forrester used the process outlined in the associated Best Practices document, “The ROI Of Blogging,” to calculate the ROI of General Motors’ FastLane blog; but, this is not merely an exercise to generate a number. Using scenarios, General Motors can understand the risk and impact of increases and decreases of a key metric the number of press mentions on the value of the blog. With this knowledge in hand, General Motors can make critical businesses decisions, such as whether to invest heavily in innovations that will rekindle press attention.
I just received an email from Apple. The message: “Go beyond Vista. It’s time to get a Mac.” Apple is known for it’s innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, so this instance is no real exception, however I still love the way they have taken the opportunity provided by Vista’s launch, as blogged by Paul earlier this week, to promote themselves. [1]
I have just completed a manual installation of drupal 5 on my personal server. I decided to blog about it as I went through the process - as my own personal mission - with the aim of providing some guidelines to anyone else wanting to manually install drupal themselves.
i am a geek on a mission[1]. mission drupal 5 to be exact.
the tactic:
read INSTALL.txt word for word.
try to understand it.
you will do well young one.
the frontline operation:
download, extract, and copy the resultant drupal 5 folder into a directory within your root directory. check - using ftp program.
create the drupal database. umm. where? how? oh… i finally found it on cpanel’s MySQL account maintenance, no need to delve into phpMyAdmin.
create the drupal user. check - easy once you know where to look, similar to creating the db.
link the user to the db. check! now the db configuration looks like the configurations for the other db’s i already have installed.
run the install script. install script? i must run it? but when i point to the folder it doesn’t do anything. it gives me an access denied. *help* go back to the beginning…
“move the contents of the directory”. hmm. maybe i shouldn’t have moved the whole directory, but only it’s contents.
ha! it works! but now to give access to the settings.php file. also helps if you take note of the location of the settings file
voila! see how it runs!
remember to restore the access permissions on the settings.php file
configure drupal. *tears fill my eyes*… it worked! i can see the config screen.
the outcome:
i win!
drupal 5’s so pretty!
[1]actually, the use of the word geek when referring to me is very liberal. considering i haven’t done much *real* programming in yonks… i am an enthusiast…
Before I introduce this blog topic, I have to mention that the 27 Dinner was superb and an amazing networking opportunity. Not only that though, it was an opportunity to meet some of the most amazing people in the New Media space. I certainly feel like I have not only expanded my business network, but I’ve also made a few more friends. I look forward to many more interactions.
In addition to this, I was severely chastised (not least of which by our numero uno fan) for not posting regularly enough on chilibean. This is going to change.
Now, without further ado I present Paul’s speech (with audible encouragement from moi)! It was recorded on my K700i Sony Ericsson phone, so the quality is shocking, I apologise in advance.
Posted by Victoire on Dec 31, 2006 in General, Media
I found this interesting article on Economist.com this morning, as I was researching new media solutions. The article explores the history of media from the discovery of the technology of movable type in 1448 to new media as it is today, and in particular the “reincarnation” of movable type.
These two incarnations of movable type make convenient (and very approximate) historical book-ends. They bracket the era of mass media that is familiar to everybody today. The second Movable Type, however, also marks the beginning of a very gradual transition to a new era, which might be called the age of personal or participatory media. This culture is already familiar to teenagers and twenty-somethings, especially in rich countries. Most older people, if they are aware of the transition at all, find it puzzling.
The article is definately a worthwhile read. What I find exciting is the discussion of how new media is participatory, providing for new business models where the “audience” or “consumer” actually input information and knowledge instead of just sitting pretty at the receiving end.
This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.
All the way from Taiwan and just in time for Xmas, MoCo Loco gets its very own "wallet from the future", the Wallet 2.0. It’s bigger than expected, more for a back pocket than a front one. It’s made of pliable silicone and bends easily. The flip-top container contains organizer/planner-like refill sheets designed for use with the wallet. It comes with five types of refill sheets - bill, coins, ID, credit cards and ‘others’ and there are more sheets on the way.
Kinda fits in with what i was saying about design the other day… personally, i love the wallet 2.0… i might even get me a green one
This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.
