Five by Five

Five by Five have produced a retro viral game show for Cancer Research UK to promote their ‘Make today Count’ campaign for Friday Febuary 29th. 2008 is a leap year, and this time around February 29th is a date to really remember - it’s a free Friday - an extra one - and you won’t get another for 28 years.

That’s right – this February you get five whole Fridays for the low, low price of four! Cancer Research UK are calling on everyone to celebrate this day by doing something that’s remarkable, worthy or just plain special. There are 18 outcomes giving you fantastic ideas on how to make this extra day count and at the same time raise money for the various areas of Cancer Research.

Check out our new Cancer Research UK retro game at http://www.maketodaycount.tv Join your host Clifton Wooley and his glamorous assistant Mandy, spin the wheel and let it decided how you make your extra day count.

Will you choose to accept the challenge…. or will you spin again?

Don’t forget to send over to your friends and family and ask them to Spin the wheel at http://www.maketodaycount.tv  We are calling for people in the UK to make the most out of the leap year, extra day, and to ‘Make today Count’.

It seems that our industry is in ball pit fever, as I reported earlier this year last.fm created a ball pit at work. Well it seems the ball pit fever has spread to XKCD. Yet more evidence that we need a ball pit here…

[Update] Seems I should do more research… last.fm were in fact following XKCD’s lead, regardless the movement is gathering momentum!

I tend to subscribe to quite a few sites on a regular basis and have quite a few RSS feeds in my reader of choice. I have quite a broad range of topics I like to follow, but sometimes I come across a site where there is really only one bit I want to follow, but the site has only one feed url split into categories. This presents me with a problem as I only really want to visit the feed when there is a story from the category I want to follow. My feed reader will tell me when there are new items in the feed but not when there are new items just from my category in the feed. In this situation I have not subscribed to the feed and just visit the site periodically if I remember.

Yesterday I stumbled upon one such site. A colleague sent me a link to a site which has a segment called “Zero Punctuation”. After watching this segement and laughing so much I almost cried I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen this before, it was a regular segment, lets subscribe to this feed. But no, not that easy, the site only had a general feed. Another site to try and remember to visit.

After my exclamation of dismay Ben, who I sit next to, suggested why not use Yahoo Pipes to customise the feed to my liking. What a brilliant suggestion, I had wanted to try out pipes for a while but hadn’t had a good reason. Today I set about the task of creating this feed and it turned out to be incredibly simple. After logging into the site here are the steps I went through to create my feed.

1. Add a Fetch Feed Module and enter the feed url.

2. Add a filter module to site

3. Link up the modules

4. Save the pipe

It was that simple. By choosing to get this pipe as RSS I had an alternative feed URL which I could use in my reader which gave me exactly what I wanted. It was so easy I created another one for another site which I wanted to subscribe to but up until now was unable to. Here are the URLs to my new feeds, the content of which are not very work friendly, so you have been warned! They will also probably be empty because they are so periodical that there is often no content in the feed which matches my criteria, rest assured though if there was your feed reader would tell you…

• Zero Punctuation
• The Register: BOFH

The bods at Goodmail must have a big marketing drive at the moment. I’ve been questioned about their product, CertifiedEmail, a number of times recently.

The answer, “yes, we can send CertifiedEmail,” is kind of by-the-by. I’m more interested in its relevance in the UK market and the potential negative aspects.

CertifiedEmail, in a nutshell, is paid-for authentication of emails. An email sender can enter into a relationship with a number of CertifiedEmail-compatible ESPs whereby it will pay a fixed charge for each email it sends. In return, the ESP will place the email directly in the recipient’s inbox, bypassing spam filters.

Email authentication’s nothing new. Buzz phrases such as ’sender policy framework’,’sender-ID’ and ‘domain key registration’ have been batted around for years. CertifiedEmail is perhaps unique in that it’s paid-for.

The pros? Goodmail argue that it’ll restore trust between commercial and non profit senders and individual email recipients. They assure us that it’s only available to kosher establishments - those who sweat day and night to ensure they’re sticking to email best practises.

The cons? Some groups are taking a different view to Goodmail. There has been uproar claiming that CertifiedEmail serves to legitimise spam. After all, it seems that anyone with enough cash in their back pocket can hand over the readies to guarantee that the email recipient, willing or not, is going to see their message. And what about those who don’t cough up? Aren’t genuine family and friends getting a raw deal as their entirely innocuous dispatch has to run the gauntlet?

But pros and cons mean little if the product isn’t actually relevant. Currently CertifiedEmail boasts affiliation with AOL, Yahoo and a smattering of lesser providers. While the first two may carry some weight over the pond, in a Hotmail-dominated UK market I just can’t see companies trampling over each other to invest in this product.

Of course if the Goodmail marketing gurus are worth their salt, we could see a wave of interest in CertifiedEmail in the future. For now, one to watch.

We heard this afternoon that of the three boys and three girls that we entered in the Revolution Magazine Valentine’s League, Katrina (left) and Kad (right) have been shortlisted.

The magazine confirmed this afternoon that 50 girls were nominated and that 10 have been shortlisted. All 10 will be featured in the magazine and the readership will be asked to decide on the winner.