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We were more than a little taken aback by Twitter's announcement late last week: they now have the ability to block tweets on a per country basis. Read why we think this will impact users in democracies first.
Youtube released a set of extremely impressive stats this week. Not only does it serve a staggering 4 billion videos per day, 60 hours of new content is uploaded every minute. Let's have a look at where this leaves the MPAA.
RAAK thinks Twitter has opened itself up to governments and corporations of all kinds by introducing country based filtering technology. See a Storify of Tweets on the issue curated by us.
On Wednesday we blacked out in protest against SOPA. For a brilliant summary on how SOPA can destroy the Internet, check out this TED talk by Clay Shirky.
Welcome back to our first newsletter of 2012. And thanks for having us again. This week, a bumper issue of weighty issues as we take stock of the year to come.
All about our remarkable campaign where Miista, a shoe brand discounted their shoes based on the influence weighted Tweets of customers.
Many websites have tried to integrate their Twitter feeds and display them on their site. It's a great way to show what you are currently talking about, and what matters to your business.
Futurology is a quack science, but it is very human to try and make sense of what might happen. Last year we our predictions were remarkably good. These are the one for 2012.
Later this week the Pulitzer Prize Board will announce the details of their new journalism prize categories, which will emphasize real-time reporting (that's live-tweeting to us tweeps). Until then, there's the weekly RAAKonteur.
This week we are trying out a frictionless newsletter, so without further ado...
This week, two notable launches. First: DataSift - Twitter data on tap, sliced and diced the way you want it. And secondly ... Google Music. One of these two are going to struggle. Guess who?
Number 63 of the RAAKonteur looks at how Wordpress is going social, why Twitter does refer more people than Facebook & what Robert Scoble thinks of Google+'s introduction of brand pages.
In history, this year will truly be remembered as a year of revolutions. Have you noticed? Read on ...
If you're using Internet Explorer, you probably didn't get this.
If you're using Internet Explorer, you probably didn't get this.
This week we're mad as hell as our Klout scores are down all round. Not that we check our Klout scores, obviously ;)
It's War! This week we invite y'all to join forces with the DARC side. And you can do that with a pseudonym, as Google+ capitulated on their insistence to use real identities.
Finally this week the Facebook iPad app arrived. We take a look at that, new Facebook engagement metrics and Instagram and foursquare get a look in as well.
This week we take a look at the passing of Steve Jobs. While Facebook is ramping up the functionality of its social ads. Adobe in the meantime is making major strategic moves.
It's official: Jesus is bigger than Bieber in Social Media. But if that story didn't make it in the RAAKonteur, you can only imagine how much else happened this week. Read on!
Don't call this a comeback; we've been here for years. After a few weeks break, it's a pleasure to be back, curating you the most interesting things from the world of Social & Digital.
It's the new trend. Mixing social and location is producing a raft of new applications aiming at... err interaction.
You better enjoy this newsletter. We're taking a little RAAKonteur break, so you'll have to do without our curated list of stories for a few weeks. Don't miss us too much.
Our weekly dose of news, getting the RAAKonteurs' thoughts on the London Riots, the Filter Bubble, Facebook Messenger and much more.
This Monday, as our city was hit by the awful London Riots, we made an unexpected discovery. Twitter limits the amount you can Tweet.
We may not be as genius as the 17-year old kid who invented a better way to search the internet, but we are pretty damn good at curating the relevant Social Media stories. Here's to a full year of RAAKonteur thinkletters!
Claims have been made that the Twitter followers of Newt Ginrich, a Conservative US politician, are fake. RAAK investigated how these claims stack up. Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
Last week's round-up from the best stories, including American Express going all social on us, the real reach of Twitter & much more.
The gateway to most Social Network APIs is OAuth. Often cursed, seldom appreciated, OAuth actually provides a very tough piece of functionality in a very simple and effective way. So, what is OAuth, exactly?
Stories this week: Channel4 does deal with GetGlue, Klout gagging for Google+ API, What exactly is an API & much more
You know what an API is, right? I mean, it's easy - Twitter has one, Facebook has one, Google+ will soon have one. It's this thing - you shake it a bit, and data comes pouring out. Right? Wrong.
Another solid thinkletter this week. But if you're in a hurry and only want to check out 1 wow-thing, have a look at Breath Bird, an app aimed at handicapped people letting you Tweet only using your breath.
Stating that Twitter took its first newspaper scalp is a gross oversimplification. But as the 168 year old NOTW publishes its last issue, it is worth contemplating our brave new social media world.
Big news for the social web these days. We've got a new ambassador. Yes indeed, the pope has sent his first Tweet. Through an iPad no less. Hallelujah!
Earlier this year, the EU announced a new directive which will force websites to get a user's explicit permission if they're going to track the user by means of cookies. Now it's come to light that, on the first site to implement this directive, a drop of 90% in visitor numbers was seen. We explore the technical issues at play.
Working with the HTML5 canvas requires quite a bit of getting used to. It's proper graphics programming - pixel manipulation at the lowest level. Paper.js makes it a lot less daunting.
Another week, another RAAKonteur. This week we cover how Audi created an influence on Facebook with Klout, how Tesco turned the subway into a virtual shop and much more
The RAAKonteur is out! This week we're hunting fake lesbians, dissing Groupon & a bit of f-commerce and mourning Twitter's loss of innocence.
Twitter seems to be in the process of nothing short of a hostile takeover of a small Twitter Development group in London called #devnest. It's weird, and it is tragic.
If you're into Social Media as much as we are: consider followinging the example of this woman. Or just read this week's RAAKonteur.
Welcome to another exciting week in the wonderful world of Social & Digital. Let's hope your week has been better than the Malaysian blogger who was made to tweet 100 apologies in a libel lawsuit.
Have you been wondering how to add the new Google +1 button to your website, but haven't been able to find any formal documentation yet? So have we, and we reverse engineered it, so you don't have to.
Another edition of the RAAKonteur. But be careful with all that computer usage and make sure you balance it with some tree-climbing activity. Because arm strength amongst British teenagers is down 26%.
How big is Twitter really? How does it compare to, say, SMS? We made a comparison, and we were quite surprised. In fact, we were very surprised.
Are we in danger of being ensconced in our own media bubbles? In this brave new distributed social media era, the curators must curate their curators.
In a week where Facebook tried to pull a nasty one on Google, the RAAKonteur is decidedly a haven of good and constructive news.
Near Field Communications have, until recently, mostly lurked beneath the radar since its definition almost a decade ago. This is changing rapidly.
Yes, we know, them again. But the creative collaboration between the director and the creative technologist has spawned another highly ambitious 'music video' project.
On Friday, The Sunday Times jumped onto the social influence bandwagon by launching the Sunday Times Social List. It seems, however, that their influence metric is too easily fooled by bot accounts tweeting a lot.
You know the big stories of the week, don't you? Why Microsoft bought Skype? How on the same day LinkedIn announced its IPO. But there was a lot more interesting stuff around this week.
After taking a break last week, the RAAKonteur team had to work through a pile of posts to curate you the most important stories this week. But as always the pleasure is ours.
WordPress 3 have been with us for almost a year now, yet few realize exactly what the changes that came with it imply. This weeks tech insight will give you the bigger picture on what can be done with Wordpress, as a result of these new features.
With the death of Osama bin Laden, real time news is moving to the internet. Why is Twitter so good at it and what can publicists of all stripes learn?
Last week's RAAKonteur for your perusal. This week is only a 3-day week in the UK (thanks to the royal wedding), so the RAAKonteur will be taking a break.
This week's tech post is a fun experiment we did with Instagram and the jQuery Subway Maps plugin. We plotted some Instagram users' checkins in the Silicon Roundabout area as Subway Lines.
Yeah, we know, it's classical music. But the 'Virtual Choir' ticks a lot of creative boxes.
Thanks to all our readers for pointing their friends and colleagues towards the RAAKonteur. We've almost doubled our readership in the last 4 months. Keep 'em coming!
Location-based social networks have been around for almost as long as Facebook and Twitter, but has yet to make the break into mainstream status. What's keeping them?
There's a few new buzz words doing the rounds. And its partly Color & Instagram's fault that we will all soon be grappling with the elastic network and the post PC world.
People in big corporate companies who aren't allowed to use Twitter, do not despair. Elliott Kember has the answer: a Twitter client that looks just like Excel.
Not a week goes by these days without a big announcement in the social or digital space. This week we have a few biggies.
Ever since Apple's hugely unpopular announcement that they're going to claim 30 percent of all developers' in-app revenue, alternative platform talk has been more rife than ever before. jQuery Mobile might just provide the right means to and end for such a platform.
With Twitter Intents you can now link to Tweets, ready for interaction. This is the RAAK quick and dirty Twitter Intents test.
Last week's edition of the the RAAKonteur newsletter. Sign up on the right-hand side of the page to receive it straight into your inbox.
The use of PHP as server-side language in AJAX communication might eventually come to an end, thanks to a server-side Javascript engine like Node.js
This week our thinkletter covers the subjects of Twitter upsetting the developers, a new navigation app and some nice Social Media case-studies.
In a very inspiring announcement, Foursquare unveiled their brand new client, containing an impressive list of new functionality. As it turns out, a lot more than that was happening in the engine room.
Another RAAK thinkletter. This week we have updates on the brand new Foursquare, Facebook's real-time analytics, an interview with Groupon and much more.
The Groupon HQ, like many other tech companies, is situated on the edge of London's East End. RAAK went to find out more about its hyper successful neighbour.
Ever wondered what your lovingly designed website would have looked like back in 1996, during the Geocities glory days? Mike Lacher's Geocities-izer shows you just that.
This week we are very much about Facebook. It was not by design, mind. They have simply been all over the news, beavering away.
Finding the phantoms, Timo Arnall, tries to make visible our ever increasing but invisible radio wave driven world. In his latest project he visualised wifi signals.
This week we find out about why Facebook Pages don't really work, how HTML5 is invading mobile and how to make better use of Foursquare.
We think location is the next big thing. So we tried a little experiment using foursquare and Peerindex. We thought you'd like it.
Chris O'Shea just created an interactive installation that uses holographic projections to get kids excited about storytelling.
Trying to explain the power of Twitter in the distribution of news isn't always easy. So we visualised it.
This week the RAAKonteur thinkletter talks, amongst other things, about the new Facebook Pages, how Nokia's CEO is trying to change the course of his company and a few examples of baaaaad SEO.
Gemalto, a company that brands themselves as world leaders in Digital Security, has just turned the social media world upside down (or at least on its side), by getting Facebook to run on a SIM chip.
Random? Not at all.
Jordi Parra is an interaction designer who makes the digital tangible in the sleekest possible way. His most recent experiment: the Spotify player.
Last week's thinkletter, covering the best stories from the world of Social & Digital Media.
At the start of the current tumult in Egypt, the Egyptian government attempted to cut off communications in and out of Egypt, including the Internet. While succeeding to a large degree, a small group of people, more specifically, a guy called Jacob Appelbaum, worked day and night to keep a communication lifeline open to Egypt using literally a handful of routable servers.
This post is a snapshot of what happened on the weekend of 27 January to 1 February 2011.
In case you don't subscribe to our newsletter, here's this week's overview of what mattered in social & digital last week.
When code meets creativity. Alexander Chen's Conductor is a piece that turns the NYC subway lines into a musical instrument.
Lots tell you this week. So much that we had to invent another section for our thinkletter. So from now on, you can find a list of other quick stories you may find interesting at the bottom of this email.
Many were launched, but in 2010 there were only a few new tools that really mattered. Kickstarter was one. Quora is another. Here we explain what it has done for us and how you can use it.
Forget Photoshop. Be creative with technology. stAllio! creates art by manipulating the data structure of image files.
It turns out Tunisia was a Facebook revolution. More than any other platform, Facebook was used and used widely by ordinary Tunisians. So does Zuckerberg deserve a pat on the back?
Our weekly overview of what we think are the stories worth reading from the world of Social & Digital.
Alex Valli is a photographer meets inventor. His DeepVue app is turning compulsive snapshot behaviour into an art form of life-logging.
Release an awesome device, and it will get hacked. To bits. Let's call it the law of hackability of awesomeness. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about all the weird and wonderful hacks out there for microsoft's Kinect. Today I'm having a stab at the iPad.
Welcome once again to our weekly curated mix of strategic, technical and creative goodness from the world of Social & Digital Media.
Twitterdawn is a meta-twovel. A writing project by South African author Koos Kombuis on and about Twitter.
In the beginning, when the web was created, Javascript was a language scoffed at by 'real' developers. It was the domain of pop-ups, banner ads and tacky cursor effects. This is not at all the case anymore.
Welcome to our first newsletter of the year. Here's to a social 2011.
So, apart from playing supported Xbox 360 games with your new Kinect, what else can you do with it?
The last RAAKonteur of the year. So the perfect time for a Best Of 2010, an overview of the Social Media highlights, trends and moments that shaped the year. Plus of course a look at what will happen next year.
HTML5 is changing everything on the web as we know it, and most of us don't have a clue how and why. Most of us won't know HTML5 when it jumps out of the browser window and hits us between the eyes with a hammer. We just assume it's Flash.
Someone said the other week that the RAAKonteur isn't a newsletter, it's a 'thinkletter'. Couldn't have said it any better.
This week, as promised, we registered our four little twitterbot soldiers on peerindex.net, and within 24 hours the scores were in.
RAAK tested DataSift. It works. But Twitter's location data is so poor it's almost totally useless.
A few weeks ago, someone on Twitter called him the Andy Warhol of the web and that's exactly what he is. Rafaël Rozendaal does internet art in the strictest sense of the word.
Plus smart words on Telegraph vs Twitter, crowdsourcing the snow, Wordpress A/B testing plug-in and a Paypal button-agency model.
We've managed (on our first try) to build a Twitter bot that, within 80 days, managed to get a Klout score of 50, and 336 Twitter followers. Should this be possible? We think not, unless Klout is broken.
Take note. People share stuff because they love their friends more than they love your brand.
If you missed Take on Ted, the world's first Twitter styling event: this is what it looked like.
This week the RAAKonteur gets thrown upside down. We start with the creative of the week because that's what we'd like YOU to be: creative.
Because Social Media and crowdsourcing have altered the concepts of brands and creativity, we have launched our very own branding project: the crowdsourced ever-changing RAAK logo.
Are those marketeers seeking to pimp soap, crisps and shampoos wasting their time? We explore the options.
Another edition full of useful nuggets of information from the world of Social & Digital Media.
We love animator-artist Han Hoogerbrugge. For his sense of humour, his style and how he's embraced the Internet.
If your not getting seen in the Facebook newsfeed it is because you have low EdgeRank. EgdeRank is Facebook's PageRank - an algorithm that determines what content gets attention.
17 weeks of RAAKonteur activity already. And looking at a few testimonials given by our precious readers, we seem to be doing something right.
A new video from OK Go is always something to look forward to. But since they've left their record company, they're also finding new ways to get their art out there. Cue Samsung.
In a recent survey by The Creative Group, 65% of U.S. marketing executives considered it challenging to keep up with developments in Social Media. Needless to say they're not subscribed to the RAAKonteur.
Live tonight, a world's first. Take On Ted is a project we're doing with Guided Collective, where bloggers will be creating Ted Baker looks, with nothing but a live video feed and Twitter
We shouldn't really just credit the director & technical dude behind The Johnny Cash Project. But also the 250,000 people that contributed to this crowdsourced music video.
A round up of the latest case studies is fashion blogger relations. What has been done by who, and tips to do it yourself.
The RAAKonteur is at it again. A week of thousands of top stories from the fast-paced world of Social & Digital Media, whittled down to a very sizeable read.
Imagine using Twitter as the communications backbone of a new, easy to use, protocol, bringing something similar to SNMP to the consumer appliances and electronics market.
Gap’s marketing department should know that their brand is not just their logo. Just like an ad campaign is not a brand, and if you think it is then you will end up like FCUK.
You know how fashionable we are at RAAK. So we're well aware that making knitwear look cool is like doing something interesting with MySpace. Still, Brooke Roberts does just that.
This week's RAAKonteur stories cover the ROI of a Social Media share, automated tweeting and a strange Skittles campaign
Darren Solomon is a producer/composer who made an amazing 'piece' of music based on YouTube and the power of co-creation.
There are however a number of social media initiatives out there trying to make sense of the cuts. Today the Guardian's Datablog released data on the UK budget deficit.
Lots happening in the social & digital world this week. From the new Facebook Groups to Singing Tweets and the new Twitter Annotations feature.
RAAK saved the world in one brainstorm. We are going to turbo charge Big Society with an API.
In April Twitter announced a feature called Annotations, but it hasn't yet received the attention it deserves. In this week's tech insight we explore the potential disruptive power of Twitter Annotations.
Mobile Roadie is a tool that allows people to build their own mobile apps without having to know any coding. We popped round their office to get a quick demo.
If the government wants to really encourage participation, it should act as an enabler, a platform if you will, as its doing with data.gov.uk and the London Data Store, and provide funding, and stay out of it otherwise.
Before we let you loose on this week's top stories, give our Creative Tech Dude Adriaan a pat on the back. The Lipton Temper Test app he built for our friends at Cow Africa won a Loerie at the South African advertising awards.
While Google has been great for direct response, Facebook Ads has been making brand advertising look easy. But marketeers should learn the value of earned media.
We use URL shorteners more and more. Twitter, Google, Facebook, they all have one. RAAK too. But how do they actually work?
Another edition of our weekly RAAKonteur news update. And it's a first - this must be the first time we don't have a Facebook story. Lazy bastards! But there should be more than enough to keep you interested.
How anonymous can someone like @PigSpotter be, exactly? What does an organization like the South African Police Service have to do to discover some random Twitter user's true identity?
A pat on the back. Number 10 of our weekly news overview of what moved & shaked in the world of social & digital media.
This week, in the wake of the Twifficiency debacle, Twitter fell prey to an embarrassingly simple Javascript injection attack. The attack manifested itself in the form of the first widespread Twitter worm.
Our weekly update on what has been rocking and rolling in the world of social & digital media.
This week saw a flood of Death of RSS posts, tweets, and statuses. Most of these came in the wake of the announcement that Bloglines, the web-based RSS reader, will be shutting down on the 1st of October.
In Dominos Pizza's June earnings report, the company reported it had increased its pre-tax profit by a fantastic 29%, thanks to social media. RAAK spoke to Dominos to find out more about their social media secret sauce.
If you enjoy our weekly selection of social/digital media stories, feel free to forward the subscription link to some people who may be interested in reading this.
Perhaps calling it Twitter's new API is a bit of a misnomer, since Twitter announced User Streams and Site Streams in April already. It is still in beta though, and developers have only been given access to it last month.
Number 7 of our weekly update on what's been going on in the world of Social & Digital Media
...and what about Direct Response? Most marketeers quickly grasp that social media is a tool to create positive brand awareness, even on a massive scale. But who pays for it?
The beauty of Twitter is its simplicity and atomicity. This doesn't, however, imply that there might be limited information in each tweet. To the contrary.
Here's the latest edition of the RAAKonteur, a round-up of the digital and social media stories that mattered this week.
I've always had the idea that a lot can be gained from a service acting as a mediator between browsers and API's like the Facebook API and Twitter API. In steps APIgee.
As you dump your organic waste into the relevant recycling bin, you slip out your iPhone. You check in to recycling.
Woosh, oh cool! You've unlocked the Goodie Green badge.
This week in the RAAKonteur: Facebook Places, GetGlue, Groupons, BBC Dimensions and the is the web really dead?
Wordpress was and is developed by an open community of developers, so this week we wanted to find out, just for the hell of it, how much estimated developer hours went into building Wordpress so far.
As always, some really interesting news caught our eye this week - from the new super Twitter search tool to the iPhone ad platform.
This week one of the hot topics on Twitter was 404 pages. This immediately struck a chord with an issue I encounter way too often: Error messages are almost never designed
"Facebook is for people you know, but don't want to know anymore. Twitter is for people you don't know, but want to know."
This is the third edition of the RAAKonteur. A smartly annotated compendium of what caught our eye this week in the world of social & digital media.
The demise of Google Wave had me thinking on the difference between Facebook and Google as companies, and the companies' ability to understand media and its users.
Today I saw Google Wave was killed. First, I felt a great loss. Then it struck me: I haven't used it in the last two months. Why? Because there was no-one there.
The numbers on Old Spice, the iPad killer app and the beauty of the bar code.
I've written before about the positive aspect of working with Facebook's API's. But the road to security in Facebookland is not paved with yellow bricks all the way.
Facebook might refer more traffic to news websites than Google these days. But any digital marketer ignores Google's search engine at their peril. In this video I explain how PageRank works.
The RAAKonteur number 1. Every week we compile the best bits of news from the ever-changing media world. Which new Social Media tool is worth knowing about? Which campaigns show a great understanding of the media shift?
Facebook has been under scrutiny about their security policies. They've responded by stepping up their approach, as far as extended permissions go. But let's take a step back.
Content is reasserting itself as King, the Search Engine Optimisation industry is moving into the 'content' business, a domain Public Relations - who specialise in 'earned' media - previously saw as theirs.
RAAK is proud to announce our latest project. We helped conceive and then built a creative platform (Guided Collective) that we think might just be a major sign post on the road of change creative agencies are hurtling along.
How can people with good ideas that read this zeitgeist well can use existing social media to create a 'buzz' or even launch a project.
Tweeting for your business? You have a personal Twitter account and you're wondering 'Should I use that?'
Over the weekend the Observer published an article on how to vote tactically. And we thought it would be good if the information was easy to access online.
Twitter is the one social media tool we at RAAK get asked about most by businesses and ordinary people alike. What's the point and is it good for me?
Social media is full of misconceptions, confusion and unexamined clichés. That social media is about conversations is one of these.
In 1892, Tividar Puskas launched a new service that used phones to deliver radio programs. He felt it would make a great way to distribute information and entertainment.
There's a lot of good creative campaign stuff coming out of Sweden these days. Interactivity gallore from Samsung and the Swedish Broadcasting Organisation.
When illustrator Hidden Eloise wrote about how her work was copied by stationery shop Paperchase, the Twitter masses picked up on it. This is what a stream of bad PR looks like.
From all the creative industries, publishing seems to be slow to adapt to the changing media. Camille Scherrer's use of Augmented Reality explores new ways of narrative.
Die Antwoord have come from what is often seen as a cultural backwater to be the music sensation of 2010. But theirs is a marketing storm that money can't buy.
So why are we starting a social media training course? We've been asked about social media, a lot.
