TIME Magazine’s 50 Best Websites 2009 is out, and we’re extremely excited to report that a site by Electric Pulp made the list. Coming in at number 9, Academic Earth brings you lectures from MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and more, all in one place. (If you haven’t checked it out, we highly recommend it.)
Other sites on the list include Google, Twitter, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Flickr. So, this is pretty amazing news.
The Metal Mulisha is getting ready for X Games 15 with the launch of a new website. They’re probably getting ready regardless of the new site, but there’s a certain way to start a blog post. And that was it.
Anyway, in addition to the new design, the team can post articles, videos, pictures, tweets, and events as per usual. Fans can also get involved with user submitted photos, comments, ratings, and reviews. But what makes this site far better than the last is the addition of a comprehensive ecommerce shop. Go buy something.
Keep your eye out for some new work coming to the Lost Enterprises site as well. And, if you missed it, we just launched a new Rusty (surfboards) site as well as a corporate site for the La Jolla Group, a blog for AFMXA, and, unfortunately, a site in memory of the late Jeremy Lusk.
One of the Electric Pulp team just pulled into town with a new car. This isn’t any car, it’s the new (2011) Ford Fiesta — a car you’d normally have to travel to Europe to see.
Ford is bringing the Fiesta to the States next year. And, in preparation for launch, Ford issued a simple challenge: tell us why you’d like to try one out and we’ll select 100 of you to drive one free of charge for 6 months. Four thousand people responded with video submissions, including Tanya.
So, T (er, Tanya Kruiter) got a new car, and we’re all pretty excited for her. To add a little drama to the story, there’s a competing Fiesta in town. Hugh Weber (of Deep Bench) was also able to woo the selection committee with his own brilliant submission.
Which means, of course, we’ll have front row seats to the web nerd races you’ll have to watch on youtube. (We hope.)
More on this later, but Electric Pulp also built the web site for Ford’s Fiesta Movement campaign. Check it out.
Making time to jam on internal projects is a bit of an elusive luxury here at Electric Pulp. We could spend weeks just registering domain names for our web schemes, but we rarely get them off the whiteboard and onto the Internetâ„¢.
Last week we rolled out *one such occasion,* though, in partnership with our friends at Undercurrent.
The new site is called Viral or Spiral, and it goes like this: community members and vagrants submit videos to be voted on. Voting comes in the form of popularity predictions, i.e., how many times a video is expected to be viewed in 90 days. Predictions are aggregated and compared against actual video performance.
We’re flattering commandshift3 and digg for sure with the new site, and we definitely took some liberty with the YouTube API. It’s for the kids, though. Especially if those kids are looking for early feedback on media from a subset of contributors with proven accuracy for predicting media popularity.
We’ve been working with the Sundance Institute to produce a new community site aimed at connecting independent documentary and human rights. The subject matter is extremely compelling, and the organization behind the effort is one we’re very proud to be working with.
This past week, we had a chance to experience the energy around the project firsthand at this year’s Sundance Film Festival as we snuck away from the office for a few days to help announce the launch of Docsource.
The new site includes discussion areas, film and artist profiles, video clips, and multi-user blogs authored by filmmakers and representatives from the Documentary Film Program (DFP). And that’s just the start. The site will continue to grow over the coming weeks and beyond.
The festival
Snow has kind of jumped the shark in my book, but the festival was incredible. The films we took in were great, the filmmakers we got to meet to were wildly interesting, and a few of us (them) actually got in to see U2-3D. The whole experience was well worth the planes, trains and automobiles effort it took to get out there (all of us were plagued by United “mechanical difficulties.”)
If you’re at all interested, most of us had cameras with us.
Congratulations to Mitch and Heather Kramer, on the birth of their new baby boy, Ethan. We don’t have a lot of details yet (he’s pretty fresh), but we do have Mitch’s photostream to keep an eye on.
There are four tips here: 1) Make friends [with] vendors before you need them, 2) engage a firm that made a similar product, 3) check references after it’s too late, and 4) work with people from the Midwest [Electric Pulp is in South Dakota; PDG is in Oklahoma].
If the Internet feels slower today, it may be due in part to a new site we just launched called MakeMeAmerica.com.
What started out as a humble effort to sell a few books has turned into something more: a humble effort with big pictures, hero profiles, video excerpts, a petition to Oprah, flickr photo integration, and an interactive world domination map. (And lots of easter eggs.)
The book, I Am America (And So Can You), is written by Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central and namesake of a baby bald eagle in Bonita Springs.
The Colbert team quickly determined that, in addition to being able to read books, the show’s audience also seemed to have ready access to the internets. One idea turned into two, and pretty soon, Electric Pulp was in on the plan. The rest, as they say, is history.
Just got an IM from Greg about an interesting article in FastCompany. The article, written by Robert Scoble, discusses consumer engagement and social experience with Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse and Bradley Horowitz.
“The more you can engage with your consumers and provide tools back to them, the more viral your services will become,” Horowitz says.
Wise words. Wiser still, the example Scoble uses to bring the story to life:
Visit the Web site of iPhone-case manufacturer Incase (goincase.com), and you’ll see embedded Flickr photos along the bottom. The net effect is that Incase showcases its corporate personality and lets you be part of its community. You can put a photo on this page simply by adding the Flickr tag “goincase” to your snapshot.
I wonder who built that site… Oh, that’s right! Electric Pulp did!1!
High 5, Incase. High 5, Hummel. High 5, Scoble. Good game.
ps: Congrats to the Scobles on the new baby. And the new 5D.
The Colbert team quickly determined that, in addition to being able to read books, the show’s audience also seemed to have ready access to the internets. One idea turned into two, and pretty soon,