Shel Holtz, Communicator

Watch out MTV, the music video has just got a new gold standard. Indie band Arcade Fire has released a vid for the song “We Used to Wait” off of their new album, The Suburbs, and it’s basically one big ball of HTML5/Google Maps/musical goodness.

The video was announced today on the Official Google Blog, which details exactly what elements went into its creation. Dubbed “The Wilderness Downtown” (an undertaking created by writer/director Chris Milk) the video is a new kind of musical experience, reminiscent of — but much more advanced than — hypertext storytelling of old.

I've been including HTML 5 in presentations about emerging technologies about which communicators should be aware. Video functionality is just one of the aspects of HTML 5 that will have a profound impact. Geolocation is another. Now, with this amazing experimental music video, we're getting a glimpse at what can happen to entertainment when HTML 5 capabilities are mashed together.

As the Mashable article notes, "the experience of watching this highly personalized video is not easily described." True; it must be experienced. The one note I can give you that I didn't see in the article or on the video page is to be sure to minimize your main browser when the video starts in a new window. And, to reiterate what you'll see when you go to the video page, you should use Google's Chrome browser for this. (If you don't already have it, here's the reason you need to go get it.)

One last thought: Wired's "The Web is Dead" article probably didn't consider creations like this that require the web as a platform. In fact, HTML 5 could breathe new life into the web, giving people continued viable reasons to get content there while, concurrently, the use of proprietary mobile tools continues to grow.

Watch the video. Let me know what you think.

Tip of the hat to Andre Wilson.

The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site.

Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

I saw this item tweeted several times today, mostly with the note that it's kinda creepy. I don't know how creepy it is, but I'd be annoyed if the same ad followed me from site to site; I'd be inclined to avoid the site that initiated the process.

How about you? Would this lead you to make a purchase or would the brand suffer in your eyes? Would you employ a tactic like this for your company?

Hat tip to David Jones who tweeted a link to this video, which presents a (fake) massive social media campaign, then ends with a twist -- the statement that perhaps a traditional print campaign would do a better job of reaching the target market. Is this a point well taken, or just a reactionary response to the increased emphasis on social marketing?

On hits Web Ink Now blog, David Meerman Scott writes, "I got to thinking how this style of video is a great form of brand journalism. Creating a documentary about some aspect of your business can serve as interesting content for your buyers. Done right, a video is not a hard sell but rather an entertaining and educational piece that people will enjoy watching and may even share with others."

On a panel on the future of communication in the workplace, Nicky Wakefield, Human Capital Partner at Deloitte Australia, said "We have found a strong correlation between use of Yammer and staff retention." Can we add employee retention to the ways to make the case for microblogging in the enterprise?

Wakefield went on to say:

Deloitte Australia is world's largest user of Yammer, with over half of 4,600 employees using it, having sent over 24,000 messages. Use quickly shifted from social use to business applications. People are looking to communicate with each other and the organization. Workplace communications is a key part of the answer.

This one caught me by surprise, but it makes perfect sense. Read the full article at ReadWrite Enterprise -- especially the comments.

Another example of a company using Augmented Reality, this one as a marketing tool in Times Square. According to Michael Shirely, "The augmented reality billboard uses video of a model dressed in Forever 21 clothes and takess virtual photo of the crowd (occasionally selecting people, picking them up and throwing them into a Forever 21 bag). The software identifies and pulls out a person in real time to composite them into the interactions with the model taking the photo." The billboard has been attracting hundreds of people who stop and watch.

Hat tip to Dell's Bill Bivin.

Google Wave has been dismissed as something of a failure. Leo Laporte on This Week in Tech comments fairly often about the fact that it never gained traction. Most of the problem comes from lack of understanding of what Wave can do. This 9-minute video from a couple members of the Wave team does a nice job of covering its capabilities. I still think there's a big future for Wave.

Hoppala has developed a content management system that allows anybody with a developer account (which, it seems, anybody can get) to create content for the Layar augmented reality browser. As Chris Cameron notes in the ReadWriteWeb article:

As more tools like Augmentation lower the bar of entry for augmented reality, a flood of AR data will begin to fill platforms like Layar, junaio and Wikitude. This progression is not unlike that of the Web with the widespread popularity of blogs. With the Web, however, powerful search engines make finding relevant content much easier and Websites are (for the most part) browser agnostic.

This is not the case with mobile AR, where content is limited to the browser it is built for. Efforts for standardization in AR will help ease this problem, but what is really needed is a new open mobile AR browser that can aggregate content from the other platforms. Looking forward, solutions like these will benefit the overall proliferation of AR, instead of fragmenting and limiting it.

A new survey by AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) finds that implementations of Microsoft SharePoint generally go ahead without a formal business plan, and with confusion about where and how it is to be used.

The online survey of 624 individual members of the AIIM community between May 6th and June 5th, 2010 found that SharePoint deployment is proceeding rapidly, with 22% of respondents reporting it to be in use by 100% of staff. This adoption rate is set to double by this time next year.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that many of these deployments are poorly thought out and implemented. Less than 50% of SharePoint implementations were subject to a formal business case, and only half of those required a financial justification. As a result, most did not have a management plan as to which of SharePoint's many features were to be used, and where.

This is a point Prescient Digital's Toby Ward has made repeatedly (including during a Webinar he conducted on Sharepoint for communicators). I've seen it again and again in organizations. Sharepoint is chosen as the platform for the intranet and is rolled out as an IT project with no regard for governance or management, turning it into a nightmare rather than a solution.

Sharepoint can be terrific for individual teams, but when it's adopted as the foundation for the entire intranet, considerable management effort is required. Deployment needs to be viewed as a knowledge-and-information initiative and managed that way.

Read the full article for even more points that support the need for a plan when you roll out SharePoint as a total intranet solution.