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if i give you my location at signup,you probly shouldn’t give me events for the default (wrong) location after signup. looking at you songkick

Perhaps not my finest hour. I thought nothing more about it until yesterday, when I received an @reply on Twitter from Get Satisfaction:

@nonimage EmilyS, an employee of Songkick, just replied to your tweet on GetSatisfaction.com: http://gsfn.us/t/ad69

Wondering what was going on, I followed the link, to find that a new topic had been created in Songkick’s Get Satisfaction area with my tweet in it. A Songkick Official Rep, EmilyS, had replied to my rather off-the-cuff tweet with thanks for alerting Songkick to the problem, and asking for more information so they could look into it!

As it turns out, Get Satisfaction allows companies to create ‘Overheard’ sections for their products, as they explain:

Overheard lists out the most recent Twitter posts (“tweets”) related to this company. Anyone, employee or customer, can convert a tweet into a Get Satisfaction conversation. Overheard notifies the original Twitter poster of the discussion started in response to their issue.

It would appear that Songkick monitor their Overheard section, and EmilyS saw my tweet and responded, which creates a topic and sends the user a reply on Twitter to let them know. Songkick didn’t have to respond - my tweet was hardly an official support request - and by doing so they flagged a potential problem with their product in public for all to see. Yet this probably hasn’t caused any negative effects, and in my case has actually caused a positive effect.

By being transparent about the problem and offering to help fix it, Songkick have created goodwill. Get Satisfaction certainly have their detractors, and perhaps partly with good reason, but they are enabling companies to open up about their products and effectively help users fix problems and request features, while creating a huge knowledge base. The addition of helping companies track conversations about their products improves the service further. It also shows that in many ways Twitter has become a much more important communication tool than any other. Nowadays I see questions on Twitter every day from the people I follow, from restaurant recommendations to Javascript help, and I do it myself on a regular basis. And 9 times out of ten, I receive at least one helpful reply within half an hour.

All this has left me in awe of the web again, at the possibilities and applications for the web that we haven’t yet grasped. And in the meantime it is helping companies help their users and themselves in increasingly clever ways.

I first saw Over The Wall earlier this year, and I announced then that they were my new favourite band (something i tend to do every time i see a good new band after a few beers). Thurso was the lead track on the band’s first EP, The Rise and Fall of Over The Wall, and it’s absolutely lovely. Now it seems the EP is getting another release (I think it was released earlier this year or the end of last year originally), and with it comes this lovely, clunky, ramshackle video which suits the tone of the song and the band perfectly.

Watch The Beatles Rock Band Opening Cinematic

A few weeks ago I launched a personal blog, powered by Tumblr. I intend to use it to post photos and music stuff that really doesn’t fit on this blog. Initially I thought about using a standard Tumblr theme instead of fussing over a custom one when I was busy enough as it was. However, I couldn’t bring myself to use someone else’s template and ended up creating my own, minimal theme over the course of (mostly) two nights.

For some reason I decided I should release the theme. I think it was seeing so many bad Tumblr themes that did it. I’ve called it I Could Live In Hope, after the first album by one of the favourite bands, Low. If I create any themes for any platform in the future I intend to name them after subsequent Low albums, in corresponding chronological order.

So if you have a Tumblr account, head over to the I Could Live In Hope page to preview the theme, and install it via the Theme Garden. Unfortunately the Theme garden doesn’t have permalinks for each theme, but it’s near the top of the Recent page, and currently just above half way up the Popular page. To date over 400 people have the theme installed, and that’s rising every day.

Please let me know if you have any feedback on theme, or find any bugs.

Dead By Dawn, a print client of mine, invited me to the festival a couple of weeks ago. I saw some excellent films, but something that really caught my attention was The Pearce Sisters. A short film by Aardman, it is funny, gory and baetifully drawn. You can watch the whole short film right now at Atom, and find out more at the official site.

Press Check is the third iPhone game by FORMation Alliance in their Games For Creatives series. From their website:

PRESS CHECK is a designer ode to the old-school art of print plate alignment re-imagined as a challenge of speed and accuracy on your iPhone/iPod Touch. Show off your non-digital skills with levels ranging from the beginner 2-color set-ups to the expert 5-color jobs. Compete against virtual press operators worldwide with the international leaderboards for which to aim and judge your scores against. You’ll long for the sweet smell of ink and the hum of the press as you test your eye for perfect registration.

These games (Press Check, Kern and Eye vs. Eye) probably won’t appeal to many outside the design community, but with so many designers owning iPhones, I’m sure that’s not problem. The games are good fun in a hugely nerdy way. Press Check is currently £1.19 in the UK App Store [iTunes Store link]

Watch the video

The video was created by Tribal DDB and Stink Digital, to promote a fancy new Philips TV, on a specially created microsite. The microsite annoyed me so much with its series of questions about location and broadband speeds, that I’ve linked to the video on the Stink Digital site instead.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the video was created for, or where it ended up. It’s just jaw-dropping. Enjoy.