Top digital stories this week, incl. spies, trams and Twitter

* Featured, Brass digital roundup — By Brass Team on December 2, 2011 2:52 pm

Each Friday we bring you our picks of some of the digital stories that have caught our collective eye and got us thinking. This week we’re talking trams, Twitter, James Bond and more. Let us know your thoughts with the comments box at the bottom.

Move over Bond!

George Hurrell, Digital Designer

I grew up with Sean Connery and Roger Moore on screen as the charismatic Secret Service spy who had it all; the girls, the gadgets and a license to kill.

And now, everyone has the opportunity to try out to be one of the next generation of spies. The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) released a code-breaking game across the internet this week, which quickly went viral over Twitter. It doesn’t quite have the lure of driving an Aston Martin through the French alps, hot on the heels of a criminal mastermind or his henchmen, but GCHQ believes it could be an effective way of recruiting spies for the future with the right skills for espionage.

After following a link to canyoucrackit.co.uk, players are presented with a seemingly meaningless grid of 160 pairs of letters and numbers, and a countdown clock. They are given until midnight on 11th December to unscramble the numbers and correctly identify a secret word.

The game contains no reference to GCHQ, but those players who get the word right are put on a fast-track to a Secret Service career.

Connery or Moore could easily have cracked this code at the same time as skydiving off the Petronas Towers, drinking a Martini and handcuffed to a beautiful double agent. However, I fear they might not have been able to get to grips with Twitter.

Take a look, have a go. Who knows, you could be changing career very soon…

#MyTramExperience

Leah Kayles, Social Media Editor

The super speedy power of social media was highlighted once again this week, when a video of a woman spouting racist abuse on a packed tram from Croydon to Wimbledon was uploaded to YouTube and quickly went viral, with the hashtag #mytramexperience trending on Twitter soon after.

Following all the noise online, Emma West was identified as the woman in question and the British Transport Police (who appear to be embracing social media wholeheartedly) tweeted the following:

Speaking in the Commons this week, Croydon MP Gavin Barwell said: “On a positive note, does this not show the power of social media both in allowing a suspect to be caught and in showing the vast majority of Croydon residents do not share these views?”

Whatever your thoughts on the situation, this story is certainly yet another example of social media opinion affecting change in the real world, especially if recent reports are to be believed: that British Transport Police spoke to Ms West following the incident, but didn’t arrest her until it all kicked off online.

Flavors.me – a new recipe for success?

Mark Kelly, Digital Solutions Director

Claire in our London office (@robbolina) just sent me a link to a Next Web article that details the newly revamped flavors.me platform.

I set up a page months ago and have been using it on my Gmail signature, acting as an ‘About me’ landing page. But now it has a host of additional page and content design options which is bound to mean lots of time lost in getting my signposting site just as I want it.

For those of you who don’t know, flavors.me is a site/service that let’s you aggregate all of your web presences into one landing page. Your blogs, your Twitter account, Flickr, LinkedIn – whatever digital spaces you use. This makes it easy to give people just one (introductory) web location for you, if you want them to see a rounded view of who your are. Great for email signatures, online profiles and business cards.

There is also http://about.me, another a personal signposting platform, which I believe it has had the upper hand in terms of user numbers so far.

But where flavors.me has got really interesting is that it now acts as a social feed aggregator,  not just for your own stuff  but for the content of anyone else you want to follow. And its really granular – you choose which of their specific services to follow. So If I like your photography on Flickr but don’t like how much you tweet (and what about) I can be selective. The one caveat in all this of course is that, for me to do this, you have to be a flavors.me user.

It’s mooted (via Techcrunch.com) that the next iteration of flavors.me will allow for content creation. making it a ‘proper’ social network. And social means traction and also longevity (sometimes…).

#Paid users alone are making the site around $1million per annum (based on 7% of users paying $20 for additional features) and these new features may raise that % share significantly. So subscription revenue could get quite chunky in the future.

I’m wondering if flavors.me will then start to carry advertisements, a la Facebook. It will have a good sized user base, will know what you like (through your profile, your content feeds – subject to legalities – and in the future, via what new content you create on the site itself). Add some algorithms, and ad revenue here we come : good segmentation opportunities and robust enough numbers would make it attractive to advertisers.

That’s just speculation though. In the meantime, even if you don’t want to use the service as a social network, the signposting features alone make it worth checking out.

D&AD Black Pencil showreel

Andrew Brown, Creative Director

D&AD, the Designer and Art Directors Association of London, is 50 years old this year.  D&AD is a charitable organisation established to “inform, educate and inspire those who work in and around the creative industries.” and their icon award, the Yellow Pencil, is one of the most coveted prizes in the world for anyone who works in the creative industries.

The world has changed enormously since D&AD’s inception in 1962, not least due to the advent of the internet and mobile telephony and the development of the whole communications revolution, not to mention transformations in music culture, 3D graphics and VFX.  But D&AD are all about celebrating great ideas well executed.

On their site at the moment there is a showreel, broken down by decade and displaying all the Black Pencil winners; Black Pencil being the ultimate D&AD prize celebrating the very best of the Yellow Pencil winners.  Take a look (click on this story’s title).

What language does Twitter speak?

Claire Robinson, Digital Development Director

One year on from its 2010 study on the language of tweets, where headlines revealed that more than half of tweets weren’t in English, Semiocast (a French social media analytics provider) has updated its report with 2011 stats…

Between October 2010 and October 2011, the volume of English messages increased by 182%, but the share of global voice has now stabilised at just under 40%. The share of Japanese tweets has decreased, while the highest growth language is Arabic.

As Twitter is still banned in Mainland China, less than 0.5% of tweets are in Chinese languages.

Image credits: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8926984/GCHQ-solve-the-online-code-become-a-real-life-spy.html and Semiocast.com copyright 2011.

Tags: black pencil awards, British Transport Police, D&AD, digital design, flavours.me, GCHQ, James Bond, Social Media, twitter, viral, yellow pencil awards