Prescient Media

• #JusticeatHersheys http://t.co/HaTD62E 13:50:37
• #JusticeatHersheys http://t.co/GRVsMvr 13:51:00
• IMAGES: Student Workers, Union Members Protest At Lebanon Plant – Photos – WGAL The Susquehanna Valley: http://t.co/z9n2JwH 19:04:08
• LMAO “We’re not trying to pass the buck,” Exel spokeswoman said. “It’s a bit of a layered situation.” #JusticeatHersheys goo.gl/dKzPh 20:03:24
• #JusticeatHersheys and @NGAdignity just hit the NYT! http://t.co/GZjdDXm 20:34:57
• Beautiful #JusticeatHersheys TV coverage on Fox43 – Godwin, you’re a star! http://t.co/wA1RItY @hersheys 21:40:09

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• Full of new ideas on #nonprofit #socialmedia after an energizing #sm4np conference this week. 07:14:26
• After #debt debacle, disapproval of #Congress at 82%, highest on record. http://t.co/kDleFnj 07:27:10
• Wow: China scolds US on #debt ( http://t.co/VeHc6Zg ), while Americans want #jobcreation over #spending #cuts 2:1. http://t.co/kDleFnj 07:32:02
• At #jwj11? See 5-min play “J-1 Student Experience” in lobby 5pm @carexgens, @dcjwj @jwjnational @studentlabor @ourwalmart @usstudents 11:45:57
• Please RT #jwj11 See 5-min student play “J-1 Exprnc” lobby 5pm @CaringAcrossGen @DCJwJ @jwjnational @studentlabor @atticascott @USStudents 12:42:12
• @ALIGNny Thanks for follow and RT! 13:14:58
• @MOJwJ Thanks for follow and RT! 13:15:22
• @atticascott Thanks for follow and RT, Attica! 13:26:16

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• Good nonprofit social media tips in #SM4NP recap from @farra of @bigduck bit.ly/pGJu9g 09:47:58
• Love it: If browsers were celebrities – Firefox is Morgan Freeman: http://t.co/mni9rzB 09:50:06
• A few of the reasons I love WordPress: How WordPress beat Joomla: http://t.co/wWcQjjN 09:52:35
• At #jwj11, Sec’y Labor Hilda Solis lifts up #careXgens and National Guestworker Alliance’s Vanderbilt campaign! 06:48:42

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At the Social Media for Nonprofits Conference in NYC, with a great lineup and plenty of useful thoughts and insights.

Here are a few choice ones, in 140 characters or less (of course):

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@davidjboyce1 “People give through, not to. They don’t want to support orgs, but make change.” #sm4np

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“We in the #nonprofit sector tend to be over-led and under-managed.” #sm4np

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@paullyoung from @charitywater: “First, inspire. If you’ve got nothing inspiring to say on social media, say nothing at all.” #sm4np

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Just in time for New Year’s celebrations in New York City, Prescient Media launched the new online home of Emmett O’Lunney’s Irish Pub, a popular family-run pub and restaurant in the heart of Manhattan’s Times Square Theater District.

If you’re in the city and happen to be in Midtown west, drop in: the place is stunning, head and shoulders above the innumerable other Irish pubs in that part of the city, and Emmett, who’s often on site, is one of the friendliest bar owners in the city.

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…buy your FullName.com domain name. If you win a seat, you’ll be better off than more than half your new colleagues.

The New York Times reports today in “Clicking Candidate.com, Landing at Opponent.com” that less than half of U.S. Senators and only 40 percent of U.S. Reps own their FullName.com domain names. The number drops ever lower for FullName.org.

The result? Just what you’d expect. Squatters demanding big payouts to turn over the names, or activists (often from the opposing party) working mischief with redirects attack sites.

At BradEllsworth.org, there are no kind words for Representative Brad Ellsworth, an Indiana Democrat who is running for the Senate. The site forwards visitors to BadforIndiana.com, run by the Indiana Republican Party, which criticizes Mr. Ellsworth as a “reliable rubber stamp for liberal policies.”

A bit hard to believe in an age when Harry Reid is exchanging tweets with Lady Gaga, but when it comes to baffling oversights, Washington will never let you down.

The article is based on a survey by the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse.

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Well, even Google nods from time to time.

From Salon.com’s Scott Rosenberg, a fairly hilarious case that’s bound to encourage all the worst in the phony-content-creation world.

Now, most folks with a conscience—and an understanding of how Google crawls the web—maximize their Google search ranking through good, clean code and substantial, regularly updated content.

Then there’s the so-called “content farms,” of which Associated Content is one of the most notorious: online sweatshops that churn out junk text all but unreadable by any actual human being, but loaded with keywords and search terms designed to capture high spots in Google search returns, i.e., to game the system.

Generally, Google’s very good at catching—and punishing—attempts to game the system. But not always.

Rosenberg described his amazement at Googling to read about the recent n-word-loaded primetime self-destruction of Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

Now, it may have been my choice of search term, or it may have been that the event is already more than a week old, but I was amazed to see, at the top of the Google News results, a story from Associated Content. … Gee, maybe Associated Content is getting better, I thought. Maybe it’s producing some decent stuff.

Naturally, he clicked through and read (errors preserved):

The Dr. Laura n-word backlash made her quit her radio show. It seems the Dr. Laura n-word controversy has made her pay the price, as the consequences of herbrought down her long-running program. But even if it ended her show, it may not end her career. Despite being labeled as a racist, and despite allegedly being tired of radio, the embattled doctor still seems set to fight on after she leaves. In fact, the Dr. Laura n-word scandal has made her more defiant than ever, despite quitting.

Rosenberg jumps to a pretty dire conclusion pretty quickly: that Google’s lost its touch for good:

I still feel lucky to be able to use Google a zillion times a day, and no, Bing is not much use as an alternative (Microsoft’s search engine kindly recommends two Associated Content stories in the first three results!). But when Google tells me that this drivel is the most relevant result, I can’t help thinking, the game’s up. The Wagner tubas are tuning up for Googledammerung: It’s the twilight of the bots.

That’s going far too far, for my money. More likely we’re at a temporary high tide of junk content in the endless ebb and flow of junk and control. There’s plenty of us out here hoping so. And none of us work for Associated Content.

For further reading, a great link Rosenberg passes along: “The Google Sewage Factory” by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand.

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Some months ago, in a great little bookstore in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn—the kind of place that stay open later than some of the local bars—I was stopped in my tracks by a shelf of beautiful little paperbacks that looked like a novelty letterpress imprint from some local basement publisher:

Upon closer inspection, I learned it was about as un-boutique a publisher as you can get: Penguin, in a new “Great Ideas” series—the Russians, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Adam Smith, etc….a sort of brainy undergraduate’s dream team. At least it had been for me. Minus the Adam Smith.

Only this week did I run across the designer of the gorgeous, highly tactile covers: Mr. David Pearson, a London-based designer who specializes in book design and branding.

Aside from his portfolio, very definitely worth a look is his Flickr site, where he shares delicious scans of some of the original old-school sources of his inspiration, including these vintage Russian matchbook covers:

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From designer/illustrator Eric Carl, a great Flickr set of vintage logos from a mid-70s World of Logotypes collection.

Lots to learn from a more innocent, Illustrator-free era, when you could be damn sure that the logo was going to reproduce well in black and white.

Some highlights:

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When I studied typography with the legendary Ed Benguiat — type designer extraordinaire, with some 700+ typefaces to his name (and a second career as a jazz drummer) — he said that there was one project he’d always dreamt of: branding an airline. The scope, the scale, the range…what’s not to get excited over?

And if you like that idea, what about branding a city?

Start researching the competition at Stadtlogo Design, a huge and endlessly fascinating gallery of logos designed for cities. It’s heavy on European examples, since the site is the work of German economist Wilfried Weisenberger (and is in German), but there are plenty of U.S. examples too.

The work ranges from the lovely…

…to the hideous…

…from the somewhat too abstract…

…to the definitely too literal…

…from the Abstract Expressionist-inspired…

…to the 60s-inspired…

…to the Clip Art-inspired…

…to the…well…uninspired…

…to the just plain bizarre:

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Just back from Animation Block Party, a three-day festival of short animated films in Brooklyn — many of them BFA thesis projects, some of them stunning.

The standout for me was Marvelous Keen Loony Bin, the 2005 senior degree animation project by RISD grad Lizzi Akana, now a Brooklyn-based animator and illustrator. Like all great art, it speaks for itself best…I’ll say only that the wild, grim humor in as much in the spirit of the immortal Nikolai Gogol as anything I’ve ever seen onscreen:

“Marvelous, Keen Loony Bin” from Lizzi Akana on Vimeo.

The utterly individual style brought to mind two other artists I love: Mr. Joe Sorren, whose work he graciously allowed me to use in a cover design for the literary magazine Meridian some years ago (the below is a more recent work) —

— and Gail Boykewich, who was featured in a July issue of the New Yorker and has an incredible wall-to-wall show at Mad One Jack’s in Hoboken until September:

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Too good not to pass on: the Grey ad agency’s campaign for Pilot extrafine pens. A taste:

Click through to the full campaign on the DesignBoom blog. In the meantime, we’ll leave you with the equally hilarious and disturbing Lego thong and tramp stamp:

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