Brightfive blog

An exercise in loneliness

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:19:34 +0100

More Garfield related humour I’m afraid. This time, er, without Garfield in it.

garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com

Quite amusing…

Cat + Theremin

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:05:17 +0100

This is a recipe for hilarity. Check out baffled cat buddy right at the end.

Capturing the zeitgeist...

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:03:52 +0100

‘A collection of ignorance, narcissism, stupidity, hypocrisy and bad grammar.’

This blog that collates comments that have been added to the BBC “Have Your Say” sites. Most are shocking, some are worrying but sadly most are quite predictable contributions from the Daily Mailers.

Some very witty banter between these delightful snippets makes for an entertaining read.

Unless this is the sort of stuff you actually believe…

ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com

Buzz words & brain cells!

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:52:36 +0100

In a world of ever increasing technology we also find new words emerge in an effort to explain them to the masses.

It’s refreshing that I am not the only one who thinks about these words and actually wonders if they are just a bunch of pants!

www.3point7designs.com/

I especially love his gripe about the word ‘google’ but maybe its inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary was after he wrote this blog!

We love Garfield!

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:54:50 +0100

The time and effort that has gone into these gags is admirable.

Enjoy.

www.lasagnacat2.com

The Loudness War

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:50:25 +0100

A strange thing has been happening to recorded music over the last 10 or so years – it has been getting steadily louder. Or more accurately it has been getting less dynamic. In a race to dominate the airwaves, tracks have been increasingly compressed to bring up the perceived overall volume. If your song is louder, people prick their ears up and might take notice.

Today, artists generally feel they have to master their records to be as loud as everybody else’s. This certainly works for many artists. However, there are many other artists who feel their music would be better served by a more dynamic record, but who don’t feel like that option is available to them.

Have a look at this great website that is trying to buck this trend.

Turn Me Up!™ Certified

To preserve the excitement, emotion and dynamics of the original performances this record is intentionally quieter than some. For full enjoyment simply Turn Me Up! (www.TurnMeUp.org)

Welcome to our new website!

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:53:32 +0100

We’ve finally got round to redesigning our website (cobbler’s childrens’ shoes etc…) and hope you’ll find lots of useful information about brightfive and the work we do.

Dotted around the site are many examples of our varied work for a huge number of different clients. These range from small local business start-ups to familiar high street names and national organisations. We’ve tried to use real examples to demonstrate the quality and breadth of our output and when we’ve managed to forcibly extract a testimonial out of a customer, we’ve shown this too.

Backing up the public side of the site is a new client management area that helps us manage resources on larger projects, share schedules, create group task lists and offer previews of multimedia work. We’re confident that it will improve the service we offer and make even complex jobs run more smoothly.

Take a look round and tell us what you think!

If you have a project that you think we’d be able to help you with, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The verb ‘to Google’...

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:28:17 +0100

Have you noticed that people no longer search for things, they ‘Google’ them?

Search Engines have been around since like 1993 & Google went public in 1998… how did people miss the years of it being called ‘searching’?

The way they’re expanding and taking over pretty soon our spoken language will only contain articles, conjunctions and Google:

“Hey, lets google up google this google. I google there is going to be a google and we can totally get googled… google?”

– Googled by Google Google on Google 4th, 2000 Google.

What are we searching for?

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:36:56 +0100

We already know people are searching for the weather and adult-material, these stats aren’t interesting. What is interesting is Google’s fastest rising search terms globally. This year, it looks like we are searching for friends and communication tools.

10. Club Penguin
Club Penguin is a multi-player online world for children, launched in 2005. Players can talk to each other and earn virtual money. Walt Disney recently bought Club Penguin for $700m and will be launching a UK-version mid-2008. You can still go play the US version though.

Penguins have become a popular search term, which seems to have been sparked by the surprise hit documentary March of the Penguins back in 2005, which grossed over $77 million in the US and Canada. Film-makers were quick to jump on peoples penguin preoccupation and released the animated film Happy Feet in 2006 and the ‘mockumentary’ film Surf’s Up in 2007.

9. hi5
Another social networking site, hi5 allows people to make profiles that display information about themselves, and ‘connect’ with other people on the site.

Social networking has exploded in 2005 thanks to sites like MySpace and Facebook.

8. Second Life
Again, another social application. Second Life is a virtual world created by it’s users. Residents can offer their own products and services and sell these for ‘Linden Dollars’. Some people have even been able to make a sizeable income from Second Life. The downloadable viewer client is open source and can be improved and modified by anyone.

7. eBuddy
eBuddy allows you to login to various instant messaging services without downloading any software. Personally, I prefer Meebo.

6. YouTube
YouTube was created back in 2005 by three ex-Paypal employees. It uses Adobe Flash to stream videos and allows users to embed movies into their own websites. Today it is the 4th most popular website.

5. Webkinz
I hadn’t heard anything about Webkinz before looking into this list. They are stuffed animals that come in many cute varieties. Each toy comes with a secret code that allows you to ‘adopt’ a virtual version of the animal on the Webkinz website and look after it. A bit like a Tamagotchi or NeoPets.

I feel strangely compelled to buy one…

4. DailyMotion
DailyMotion is a site very similar to YouTube, but with much better video quality. Definitely worth a look.

3. Facebook
Facebook is the social networking site founded by Mark Zuckerberg back in 2004, but has only been open to all internet users since 2006. It has recently allowed developers to create their own applications which build upon the Facebook Platform.

2. Badoo
Badoo is another social networking site, but unusually has no adverts. Has a very snazzy interface for viewing and rating photos. Launched in 2006 and now has over 12 million registered users. Although they are based in London, they are most popular with users in Italy.

1. iPhone
Apple’s ‘revolutionary’ iPhone has been a hot topic this year. It has received a lot of media attention and hype worldwide. I’d really like one of these but I may hold out until they increase the storage above 8GB.

Wine Tours website launch

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:44:45 +0100

Our latest website has recently gone live at www.winetours.co.uk.

Arblaster & Clarke are a specialist travel company providing a programme of holidays around the world for wine enthusiasts. We were tasked with giving their existing web presence a major overhaul to increase visitors and generate more targeted enquiries.

The previous site was idiosyncratic and sprawling – great content but had a quirky, unpredictable architecture that made it difficult for unfamiliar visitors to find their way around. We built on the fine words by creating a friendly interface that allows site visitors to search for tours, click on recommendations, or browse by destination or holiday type.

We’ve also shored up the booking process, building a secure system that lets customers provide payment details for processing offline.

Online bookings are up and the new site continues to maintain its strong Google ranking for key search queries.

We’re already on with additional improvements and extra features!

Lost for things to do this weekend?

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:25:44 +0100

Here’s a useful page I found on the Telegraph website. It lets you choose types of activities and give a date span which it then uses to show you all relevant events in your part of the world. Nice use of the Google Maps functionality.

Take a look at www.telegraph.co.uk/activityplanner

Welcome to our blog!

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:56:08 +0100

Welcome to the brightfive blog.

This part of our website will be regularly updated – both with news and information about brightfive, and also the thoughts of the individual members of our team on whatever is currently on their minds!

A good blog should inspire its readers to join in and we hope ours will be interesting, informative and fun.

We hope you enjoy reading our blog, please feel free to join in and leave a comment.

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

All the team at brightfive.