New Haven television station WTHN (channel 8) has become the whipping boy of television station weather promotions in this spoof that calls attention to the insanity of Doppler-focused newscasts as if they've actually done something to improve forecasts. In typical, "First, there was this, then there was that, now there's...," a very convincing television promo announcer exclaims "now the most biggest name in weather forecasting just got more bigger. Introducing news channel eight's Supercali Fragilistic Expiali Doppler." You'll love the final statement referring to Mother Nature. Watch it here.
Without any advertising, authors Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg have landed their book, Call To Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results," on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Amazon and saw sales of 17,000 copies within three weeks of the book's May 9 publish date.
To promote their book, the two brothers went the word of mouth route and sent review copies to weblog and newsletter publishers who gave positive reviews.
In early April we wrote about Bob's Cube, a promotional microsite for hosting company Hostway. The microsite presented the virtual world of an office cubicle which allowed visitors to click into the cube and explore. It was engaging enough to grab attention for a few minutes. Well, it seems the idea has been stolen by ailing Netscape to promote its browser. Called "The Cubicle," Netscape's microsite is a near identical copy of the Hostway's concept. Hostway's "Bob's Cube" was launched April 1 (oh no, is the whole thing a joke?). Netscape's "The Cubicle" was launched May 27.
Unfortunately for Netscape and fortunately for Hostway, not many people will see "The Cubicle" because it is delivered as a blockable pop up. They call it a "daughter window" to somehow make it sound less nefarious. Not very smart on Netscape's part when they could have simply launched the rip off in a separate, regular window.
UPDATE: Hugh, in comments, rightly points out this cubicle thing has been going on for quite some time.
Replace Meaningless Words
If you write copy, marketing plans or white papers, you know the power of well chosen words. You also know how excruciatingly difficult it can be to come up with those words. A company called ThinkMap feels that pain and has created a thesaurus on steroids.
ThinkMap's Visual Thesaurus uses a graphic interface to animate the English language in a unique way, revealing the meanings, origins, pronunciations and relationships between words. After entering a word it creates a matrix of type, colored dots and floating lines to display the meanings, parts of speech, synonyms, antonyms, and the relationships between 145,000 English words.
While the standard reaction might be to call this latest move by the Catholic church blasphemous, others might say, hey, what better place to promote priesthood than on beer mats in bars? Or on posters in the London Underground? The bishop's National Office for Vocations in England and Wales has, for the first time, publicized priesthood outside the walls of churches. Not a bad idea, actually. After all, there's probably plenty of people who might consider priesthood as a career who have never set foot in a church.
Vocation Director Father Paul Embry has no problem with the effort saying, "Pope John Paul didn't spend all his time in the Vatican. He went out, and took his message to where people were. We can do something similar to encourage young men to think about the priesthood."
