News
All the relevant news about social advertising, design and marketing from around the globe. In the right column news coming from our favourite social advertising and marketing blogs
Google groups, porn sites, slide.com, wordpress, YouTube… Blogger.com is the latest addition to this list of banned web sites in Turkey.
After the passing of the new law, web sites in Turkey can be banned without a warning for several reasons:
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NSPCC, the childline from the UK, has won the second annual international Gold Star Award for Excellence in Fundraising DRTV last wednesday. The award was announced at the International Fundraising Congress (IFC) which was held in the Netherlands.
NSPCC’s winning advert for the Childline telephone helpline showed a young girl barricading herself in her room and dialling the Childline number, which rings without being answered. A lack of resources for Childline means that NSPCC is unable to answer one in three calls made to it.
Read all about the award at UK Fundraising.
See also this post at Osocio about the nominees.
The announcement of the Gold Star DRTV Awards at 15 October:
The award winning video from NSPCC:
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The USA counts now 13.6 million health bloggers according to a new report from Envision Solutions. This report provides the most detailed portrait of the health blogosphere to date. It reveals that millions of U.S. adults are actively writing on health-focused blogs. The majority of health bloggers are female and 38% are either African American or Hispanic.
Marketing activity taking place in the health blogosphere has increased. For example, the number of bloggers reporting inquiries from public relations professionals jumped 57% between 2006 and 2007. Also, respondents were more likely to report running advertising on their Weblogs.
Read more at The Health Care Blog
Download the report here for free
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One of the most popular web presentation services has announced their 2008 winners, with 2 of them being focused on climate and refugee issues.
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A new social network designed for pet lovers, ‘All About Pets’, aims to challenge generic sites like MySpace when it officially launches today (1 September 2008). Billed as the ‘Facebook for pet lovers’, www.allaboutpets.org.uk has been developed by Britain’s pet charity The Blue Cross to give pet lovers a new way to communicate and share experiences or advice about their pets.
All About Pets hopes to fill the gap in the market created when sites like Facebook opened their doors to everyone. As one of the UK’s oldest animal charities, The Blue Cross has over 110 years of experience with pets and their owners and has drawn upon this to create a site that appeals to animal lovers around the world.
Built by digital agency DVA, the site has already proved its popularity since its beta launch in March this year with 450,000 unique visits from 142 countries and more than 6,869 members signed up to date. All About Pets is being promoted on- and offline by digital specialists Hot Cherry and with the help of an innovative online viral campaign which allows users to send personalised talking pets to their friends. Since its launch at the end of July, the viral has been viewed over 100,000 times – see www.talkingpets.org.
Laura Dobson, spokesperson for All About Pets said: “With millions of members, sites like Facebook seem set on becoming all things to all people. What sets All About Pets apart is its dedication to pet lovers. The site offers a huge amount of information on all aspects of pet care and every function is easy to access and highly relevant. We know pet owners love talking about their pets so we’ve created a fun place for them to come together online and share their own experiences and advice.”
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Tobacco promotions of smoking in movies cause teenagers to start smoking according to a new study done by the USA National Cancer Institute. The report found the tobacco industry spent more than $13 billion on smoking-related advertising and promotion in 2005. The report found that even brief exposure to advertising influences adolescent attitudes. Three-quarters or more of hit movies depict cigarette smoking, and specific brands can be identified in about one third.
But the report found that mass media campaigns aimed at reducing smoking do work, especially when combined with other tobacco-control strategies.
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Today a new widget is lauched. It recommends to readers of blogs or websites related ways to take action. The widget automatically identifies the keywords on any page and lists social change campaigns related to the content of the page. These campaigns are gathered from social action platforms like Kiva, DonorsChoose, Change.org, GlobalGiving, Care2, Idealist.org, and fourteen others.
Because the new widget pulls actions from 20 social action platforms, it can recommend actions based on a wide variety of content.
Social Actions founder Peter Deitz is also extremely excited about this project. He has described the widget as a “game-changer.”
After cut and paste the widget snippet code into a website, the widget automatically scans the content of each web page on which it appears and identifies the top three keywords for that page. The widget then searches for related campaigns on 20 social action platforms. It then automatically loads the top three campaigns for the keywords, with the option to discover more. As the content of a site changes, the widget checks to see if there are new keywords. As a result, readers are always connected to fresh and relevant calls to action.
This how the widget looks like:
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This week 148 153 (the number is rising) Turkish websites are shut down as a protest against the government ban. The Turkish government blocks YouTube since January this year. And in the last few weeks various other international websites like DailyMotion are also blocked. The 148 website as listed here show this text at their frontpage:
Bu siteye erişim kendi kararıyla engellenmiştir
The protest will go on until Wednesday, August 20th.
Our friend and adblogger Firat from Elmaaltshift is one of the participants. Websites like YouTube and Dailymotion are very important for adbloggers.
A Turkish court issued a similar order in March last year, after a row between Turkish and Greek users escalated and resulted in insults of Atatürk, a serious offense in Turkey. At the moment it is unclear why the Turkish government is banning various websites.
Update 26-10-08: Blogger.com banned in Turkey
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ZAC is the first web browser developed specifically for children with autism, and autism spectrum disorders such as Asperger syndrome, pervasive developmental disorders (PDD), and PDD-NOS. Children touch it, use it, play it, interact with it, and experience independence through ZAC.
ZAC is the zone that will permit a child to interact directly with games and activities that cater specifically to kids who display the characteristics of autism spectrum disorders, like impairments in social interaction, impairments in communication, restricted interests and repetitive behavior. ZAC has been an effective tool for kids with low, medium and high functioning autism.
The ZAC browser is named because of Zackary, the grandson of the developers. At an early age Zackary began displaying classic signs of a pervasive development disorder (PDD) and was diagnosed as severely autistic in 2005.
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The Darfur Olympics is launched today, a week-long protest to keep the spotlight on the people of Darfur during the Beijing Games.
Violence and destruction are raging in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Since February 2003, government-sponsored militias known as the Janjaweed have conducted a calculated campaign of slaughter, rape, starvation and displacement in Darfur. Experts estimate that roughly 200,000 people have died due to violence, starvation and disease. More than 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes and over 200,000 have fled across the border to Chad.
No country has done more to support the regime in Khartoum than the People’s Republic of China: no country has offered more diplomatic support, nor done more to provide money to buy the weaponry that fuels the engine of genocidal destruction. And no country has done more to insulate Khartoum from economic pressure or human rights accountability.
The people behind the Darfur Olympics created an alternative opening ceremony, a one-minute celebration of Darfurian children.
And, every day for the first week of the Games (August 8 to 15) they will show a new webcast report by Mia Farrow from a Darfurian refugee camp.
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ECPAT UK has just launched a new campaign called No Haven for Travelling Sex Offenders. It was triggered by the acquittal in India of two British nationals, Duncan Grant and Allan Waters, on appeal of their 2006 convictions of sexually abusing children in a shelter Grant managed. ECPAT UK is disappointed in this verdict and believe that more cooperation between the UK and Indian authorities is essential to combating child sex tourism.
You’ll find all the information on their brand new Facebook group page.
Or you can directly go to http://voiceyourviews.net/eactivist/vyv.v?v=2121:561:15550 and send an e-mail to the UK Home Secretary who has the power to change the way the UK cooperates with countries where sex tourists go to abuse children. It doesn’t matter which country you are based in, everyone can send an e-mail.
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It seems that some of our RSS subscribers have problems seeing images in our feed.
We have some errors with that in Netvibes and iGoogle.
We are trying to find the problem but haven’t found it yet.
Sorry about that.
Please let us know if you don’t see images in our feed posts.
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Last weeks there was a new kind of viral campaign running on chat channels like MSN Messenger. Many Chinese chatters use the heart symbol to show their support for China and the Olympic games. It was also a protest against the western propaganda about the violation of human rights.
Chinese chatters where ask to put ’
China‘ before there chatname
Amnesty International (together with the Dutch free card agency Boomerang) is now calling chatters to react on this by placing ’ China & Human Rights‘ before their chatname.
This action can be seen as a new and positive approach in the battle about human rights in China.
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The Billboard Liberation Front doesn’t make art. Instead, they co-opt one of the most popular advertising mediums to make ironic, and usually critical statements. They turn the advertiser’s message against itself. The resulting implosion can range from humorous to disturbingly revealing - even sometimes achieving both at once.
James David from The Groundswell Blog did a interview with Milton Rand Kalman, BLF’s Chief Scientist briefly via email for their serie ‘Groundswell Talks’.
Read it here.
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Greenpeace has built a spoof site to take on Kleenex from Kimberly-Clark, the largest tissue maker in the world.
The “Kleer-cut®” site, as Greenpeace USA call it, is a duplicate of Kleenex’s current “Let it Out” campaign.
Kimberly-Clark produces more than 4 million tons of tissue products annually and generates billions of dollars of annual sales from 150 countries around the globe. Kimberly-Clark also produces an extensive line of commercial tissue products that its sells to institutions like universities, schools, governments and businesses.
As the biggest tissue manufacturer on the planet, Kimberly-Clark has the resources to shift towards sustainability. Unfortunately, according to Greenpeace, they have chosen greenwashing over sustainability and business as usual over real change.
Greenpeace’ solution:
- Stop purchasing wood fiber from endangered forests.
- Dramatically increase the recycled content of their products, including Kleenex tissues.
- Only buy virgin fiber that is Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.
At the Kleercut site visitors can involve and take action by:
- Showing Kimberly Clark your creatives in the Photo Action (see examples)
- Create your own Kleercut® tissue box (see examples)
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