If you've met us, you'll already know that we're a part of the 'Clinic' family. Well, we're very excited to announce that Oneshoe is now wholly integrated within our parent brand. As we mature along with the rest of the digital industry, we find that we are working on creativity that crosses all disciplines.
It's complete integration for a completely integrated world. So please make your way to Clinic here.
Everyone wants to be the first to be sporting the new trend – or even better yet to spot the next trend before it’s happened.
Particularly in the world of digital it’s tempting to see something new and label it as the next big thing. But often the next trend is just a name that gets stuck onto something that has been around a while and suddenly becomes popular.
We’ve been working with a lot of innovative web technologies and ideas over the years, and have been surprised a few times to find its suddenly got a new name.
Blogs, podcasts, ajax – this is what we were doing with them before they became popular.
Blogging as ranting
A blog in its simplest form is an ongoing record of views and opinions published online – often with the intent of gaining reaction.
It was in 2000 that music industry expert Jon ‘Webbo’ Webster wanted to express his opinions on the state of the music industry online.
He wanted to rant – as was his wont – to as many people as would listen. And so we created ‘Webbo’s rant’. This was sent out as an email as well as appearing as articles on a small site. It was a blog, but we didn’t know to call it that. (and in the nature of all good blogs it stirred up opinion – and we’ve had to take it down.)
Podcasting the news
Podcasts have become an easy way to consume digital content away from the desktop - just download the audio and listen to it anywhere.
For Sky News we set about publishing audio transcripts of all their interviews online.
We called these ‘audio transcripts’ and set up an RSS feed. If we’d been aiming to get loads of consumers to listen in rather than journalists, we’d have called it podcasting and we’d have filled quite a few more iPods. Admittedly ‘podcast’ is a lot snappier than ‘audio transcripts with RSS’
Ajax – and we’re not talking football
When it comes to snappy names ‘asynchronous javascript and xml’ was never going to cut it. But turned into an acronym, ‘ajax’ has hit the headlines.
So what is it? Very simply it’s a web page that loads pieces into the page without having to refresh the whole page. Why slow down a site by loading the entire gallery of staff biographies and photos into a page if the visitor is only going to look at one at a time? This was what we did on the Clinic site in 2003. It made the user’s experience of the site so much smoother than it would have been.
Back then it was called DHTML and XMLHTTP requests, and AJAX belonged to Dutch football.
So what’s next?
If you were to ask if we know the next trendy name, the answer would be no. But we’re certain that we’d know about the trends and technology behind it.
Guy Hatton