Mantra Day Out

Mantra went on an afternoon away, well a few minutes down the road to the Southbank, on Friday to visit the much-hyped Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

Combining both indoor and outdoor installations, we all had a brilliant time and a few pictures have made it onto our Flickr page.

We <3 Firefox

So Firefox is trying to break the world record for number of downloads in a day. They got off to a shaky start but things are looking up.

At Mantra and Spider we were only to happy to help!

Is it Wii-eally a fake?

I am sure many of you have seen the following video doing the rounds called 'Why you should buy a Wii Fit for your Girlfriend'. It has already had nearly 2 million plays on YouTube alone and no doubt has been a great boost to Nintendo's brand.







But is it actually an amateur video? Looking deeper into the video reveals maybe all is not what it seems...

Have a look at Showmoney's analysis of the clip and make you own mind up :)

Either way I am sure it has sold a few Wii's...

The new breed of viral

So yesterday The Independent on Sunday covered the power of blogging and social media on US politics, particularly Obama's use of social media to publicise popular TV appearances.

Just taking a quick look at today's Viral Video Chart will show the popularity of the elections on social networks like YouTube.

SEO <3's Online PR?

So, I was at the International Search Summit today at the British Library thanks to our friends at Nordic eMarketing.

I got to sit in on the online PR session which included talks on harnessing online PR, blogging and Facebook. Nothing was really new and most of the talks concentrated on international campaigns and running multilingual sites, unfortunately just from a webmaster / blogger point of view.

What was interesting was the intro talks from Microsoft and Xerox. It might have been stating the obvious but again it needed to be done - SEO and Online PR NEED to be aligned. Agencies / colleagues need to work together to optmise press releases distributed online so they can have an impact on SEO.

It is a simple step, but an effective one. When will we learn?

Facebook Chat > IM ?

So Facebook Chat went live today (after a couple of weeks of private beta testing) allowing users to see which of their friends are online and chat in real time the same way one would on MSN Messenger, Skype or GoogleTalk.

ReadWriteWeb has a good summary of the features from the original Facebook blog announcement at the start of the month...

UPDATE - Ok, been playing for 10 minutes and the UI is REALLY good for a V1 release. Initial thoughts are it needs a floating notification widget / desktop client for when your browser is minimised but that's about it. This is going to have a considerable impact on the IM market and it will be interesting to see the competitor and press reaction over the coming weeks.

Twitter becomes front page news!

Everyone knows Downing Street has jumped on the web 2 bandwagon recently but few would have thought it would become front page news.

The Guardian (of course it was The Guardian) has reprinted Gordon Brown's Twitter feed on the cover this morning.

Many 'twitterers' are beginning to get annoyed by Twitter spam, commercial twitter accounts just advertising their clients products. Good to see Downing Street is using it probably and replying to tweets opposed to simply posting corporate 'messages'.

And ironically, how did I find out about it? From my friends on Twitter before I even picked up the paper!