It’s back for a third year!

EdTwinge is a service that monitors tweets about all the acts at the Fringe, analyses them for sentiment and creates a “karma” score for each one. These karma scores are used to create league tables for each genre of show at the Fringe.

So the audience becomes the critic in 140 characters or less.

It means that you can use the wisdom of the crowd, people like you, to decide what shows to see rather than the more dubious and subjective wisdom of a few “professional” critics.

EdTwinge is a collaborative labour of love between Blonde and this band of reprobate brothers, who’ve managed to hold it together since the Fringe Festival of 2009.

Talking of collaborations…

For 2011 EdTwinge is having its back scratched by, and is scratching the back of, the Live At The Gilded Balloon Podcast.

In its previous guises the podcast has enjoyed between 400,000 and 2,000,000 iTunes downloads, and we’ll be working together to add value to each other’s offering and build each other’s profile. For instance the acts that are booked for the live podcast recordings will be influenced by the EdTwinge league tables.

Hopefully the relationship will help EdTwinge grow again in 2011. The site had 192,029 visits from 131,887 unique visitors during the 2010 Fringe.

Follow EdTwinge on Twitter…

On Friday we said au revoir to Nikki Godley who had spent several weeks with us as “animator in residence”.

Nikki approached us with the idea of a mutually beneficial residency, whereby Blonde could benefit from having in-house animation and illustration skills and Nikki could add some digital design and development strings to her bow in a busy studio environment. We found both the idea and Nikki’s infectious enthusiasm and can-do attitude irresistible.

Nikki brightened up everyone’s days whilst she was here and she is a very talented creative lady. We look forward to welcoming her (and her awesome banana bread) back to Blonde in the not too distant future. In the meantime we wish her well with some very exciting animation projects.

Meanwhile our headcount continues to be boosted by 20-25% on a semi-permanent basis by an eclectic collection of freelancers and interns. To cut a long story short we’re busy. And we’re lucky to have found some very talented external resource to add value to our core team, and to contribute to the real sense of buzz around the place.

As a result we often find ourselves testing the theory that meetings are quicker and more productive without chairs. We’ve had to raid meeting rooms for tables and chairs to accommodate the extra bodies in the office.

And we’re delighted to announce that last week one of our interns became a full time Blonde. We had been so impressed by the attitude and intellect of Megan Lambie that we offered her a job in our planning department. Megan will be working closely with our Head of User Experience, Andy Irvine. UX lives at the intersection of design, technology and human insight and so it’s a brilliant place to learn your trade as a digital planner.

Thanks to everyone who has done good work and made the office more interesting in the last few weeks.

A chance meeting.

Another chance to road test Storify.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with Burness LLP and Leithal Thinking for the last 5 months on the new Burness identity and website which launched yesterday.

The website features video profiles, staff blogs and a brand animation that we created to introduce the brand and reinforce the Burness ethos.

The new brand is borne out of conversations with the firm’s clients, intermediaries and staff to find the values that define the brand.

Philip Rodney, chairman of Burness LLP, said: “We have listened carefully to our clients and intermediaries in positioning our business as we continue through challenging economic times.  We have an ambitious and clear vision of who we are and where we want to be.  We just need to turn up the volume.  Our new brand identity will be important in helping us do this.  Our new brand is much more than a logo; it is the foundation of all our relationships.  It is a belief in how we do business and the effectiveness of the work that we produce.  Our promise is to cut through the noise and clutter and be committed to achieving what success looks like for our clients.”

The launch day of the website saw 1,998 visits (almost 8 times the normal visits) and the average time on the site was almost double.

Congratulations and thanks go to Burness for being a great client with a strong vision and confidence to embrace a new identity and website.

According to Adage our latest recruit has one of the hottest jobs in marketing.

Deana Burke has joined us to provide full time community management for one of our major clients.

As the Adage article states, there is a growing interest in the community management function from clients in diverse industry sectors. This isn’t too surprising given the increased emphasis on all things social. If an active presence on platforms such as Facebook is part of your digital communication strategy then community management skills, if not the recruitment of a community manager, will be a hot topic of conversation.

Wordle tag cloud of Deana's CV

Deana has moved to Scotland from New York and brings with her a strong track record of overseeing social campaigns and programmes of various shapes and sizes. This includes managing a community of influencers for TNT (US cable TV channel), plus community management for animal welfare organisation The Humane Society, the US Forest Service, Pepsi brands including Mountain Dew, and GE Appliances. She also managed a private brand ambassador community for Snapple.

With Deana on board our involvement in things social will extend beyond strategy and content provision to the day to day, sleeves-up management of these spaces.

Exciting times.

We have soft launched You Are What You App. The premise of this simple site is that your choice of iPhone applications probably reveals something about you.

And so it would seem. It’s the iPhone equivalent of having LLoyd Grossman looking through your keyhole.

The site appeals both to the iPhone exhibitionist and to the iPhone voyeur.

At the time of writing it’s early stages in terms of the number of active participants, but the average time on site is 7 minutes 30 seconds, suggesting that people are enjoying having a good nosey at other people’s apps.

I’ve already downloaded a few new gems as a result of seeing and reading about the apps that other people can’t live without.

There’s Byline, a mobile Google Reader app, which is perfect for keeping up with RSS feeds on the train.

Instapaper is an interesting looking application that allows you to save and read web pages offline at your convenience.

Around Me elegantly answers the question “where is the nearest x, y or z?”

And people are clearly sufficiently impressed with productivity applications like Omnifocus and Things to part with decent amounts of cash for them.

If you have an iPhone and a Twitter account please do add your apps to the site.

You Are What You App is our latest “hobby” project, following in the footsteps of WeMet for EdTwestival and EdTwinge.

We had another website launch yesterday – Creative Scotland’s perspectives’ forum.

Creative Scotland (if you didn’t already know) will be a new organisation with creative practitioners at its heart: an organisation designed to listen to the needs of professional practitioners and use that intelligence in its role as advocate, champion, investor and broker.

It’s your chance to share your views on the opportunities as well as the obstacles for the creative community, for the individual, for the public and for Creative Scotland itself.

Over the next three months, they’ll be listening to your perspective on Creative Scotland’s four priorities: creative practitioners, accessibility, participation and international activity.

Creative Scotland has commissioned essays from the international creative community as a starting point to stimulate discussion. The first of these, the creative practitioner, was launched yesterday morning by visual artist Hans Abbing.

You can read his thoughts and submit your response on the site.

perspectives.creativescotland.org.uk

Blonde has been working with The Scottish Chamber Orchestra to redesign their new website launched yesterday.

The function rich website allows music enthusiasts to navigate through the calendar of music and educational events, view images, audio and video content of the orchestra and to find out more about the behind the scenes activity in their Blog and Twitter updates.

The Blonde team has been developing their knowledge of classical music and especially enjoyed seeing the orchestra’s performance of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks at the Bank of Scotland fireworks concert.

We’ve been working with Edinburgh International Festival over the last few months on a new site ‘Following the Diaspora: Chinese Lives in Scotland’. The site gives an intimate insight into the lives of Chinese people who have chosen to make Scotland their home, exploring memory and homecoming, as well as celebrating the lives of the Chinese Scottish Diaspora.

The website is made of work by the Scottish/Chinese artist, Pamela So. The project has taken Pamela from her home in North Ayrshire, Scotland, to her ancestral home in Shunde, Guangzhou, China, and back to the most northerly shores of Scotland in Caithness and Sutherland. The result is an interactive portrait of several individuals of Chinese descent who share their thoughts and experiences through text and multimedia, giving a sense of what it is like to live within two cultures.

Browse the Following Diaspora: Chinese Lives in Scotland website at eif.co.uk/diasporaproject

The reflex reaction to being presented with good content is to share it. Generosity, mutuality and sharing are the engines of social media.

But yesterday an un-named Blonde colleague brought to our attention a good idea.

Our collective initial reaction was to spread the word. Tweet and retweet.

Then it dawned on us that this was actually a very, very good idea. An idea that we can adapt and apply to our own wicked ends. An idea whose potential would probably be spotted by others. And we’d hate to be beaten to it.

Too good to tweet in fact.

(Until later when we’ll obviously give credit where credit’s due).

Meanwhile we feel a bit like this.

Image borrowed from DutchImage.

Ever come across anything that was too good to tweet?