If you have missed the 2008 hot trends, you can find them on Read/Write Web.
What I have noticed is that Mobile is in the list again, I have seen that a few times in there before but it never lifted off like it should (to me). Let’s see what it brings this year…

Source: Read/Write Web

Art2blog is going on holidays for 1 week to Bodrum. We’ll be back on October 4th. In mean time don’t stop reading our favourite colleagues. If you still have some holidays planned, check out Fasten Seatbelts where you can find the “Do’s and Don’ts” of the country you’re visiting.

We will certainly remember that:

• In Turkey, it is rude to show the sole of your shoe.
• In Turkey, the “OK” sign is very rude.
• In Turkey, in crowded busses (Dolmus), the way to pay for your ticket is to pass the money from passenger to passenger towards the bus driver.
• In various countries, you may be asked to remove your shoes before entering a home.

The last few days it has been quiet…well…now you know why. I moved our blog to my own hosting.http://www.art2blog.be is the place to be now…I’ll make some more changes the coming days on the design but all credits go to Design Disease which created this great 3 column wordpress theme. Furthermore you don’t have to change your rss feed address, that stayed the same (http://feeds.feedburner.com/art2blog)!

Hope you enjoy…

Received several mails from contacts to join their social network on the Quechup site. Ignore these! Don’t know what the final plan is, but once you register the engine behind the site proposes to import online contacts from your webmail account like Hotmail, Gmail, … once imported all these get a mail from you inviting to join Quechup again. Pure spam with hopefully no other harmful intentions (viruses?) behind.

Or at least rumor has it …

Last week air quality in Belgium was so dramatic -too much smog- government decided to lower speed limits on highways from 120 km/h to 90 km/h. This inspired Sloggi Underwear marketeers: cute girls wearing -of course- Sloggi underwear and nothing else warned drivers on bridges across highways about the “smoggi alarm”.

On the site www.smoggi.be you can register for an upcoming contest … and more smoggi babes at work :)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwarxqQUEDc]

Reginald Van De Velde from the Stella Artois Marketing department sent me a friendly e-mail yesterday asking explicitly, but friendly not to visit the Stella Artois web site because a strange phenomenon appeared on their site … Of course I went to take a look and a hacked pop-up page appeared together with the normal site: a group of Viking heirs called Awtra Ällets claims Belgians stole their beer over 600 years ago.

Now they finally succeeded in conquering the Stella site to prove this out of respect to their ancestors:

• In the Stella Artois logo ancient Viking elements are clearly present
• Stella Artois is actually the name of the Beer God Awtra Ällets spelled backwards. They even have an MP3 to prove it …

You can also discover your Viking name and download beer cards to play Sea Battle …

Crazy, but original … I wonder who is behind this? Could it be These Days, Steven? Curious to see what’s next …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgC-dciWs8Y ]

A recent study from ad:tech en MarketingSherpa asked online marketers what marketing tactics worked for them in 2006 and what they expected to concentrate their time and spending on in the months ahead. SEO/SEM and Email marketing (on own lists) are on top in the most successful table. Email marketing rented lists, pop-ups (and pop-unders) en ads in newsletters had bad results.

Also have a look at where budget will be spend in the coming year. Nice to see there is that rich media and web2.0 stuff is showing  up (Blogvertising, social networks, RSS-feeds, video-advertenties,…)

This counts for US market, would be great to have the same study for Europe…

Source: eMarketer

As I am writing this, I still can’t believe it. I was just reading an article on campaign monitor blog. I’m talking about the recent news that Outlook 2007, released next month, will stop using Internet Explorer to render HTML emails and instead use the crippled Microsoft Word rendering engine.

I didn’t test it out yet myself but from what I was reading, following isn’t possible:
(Check out the example on campaign monitor)

1. No background images - Background images in divs and table cells are gone, meaning Mark’s image replacement technique is out the window.
2. Poor background color support - Give a div or table cell a background color, add some text to it and the background color displays fine. Nest another table or div inside though and the background color vanishes.
3. No support for float or position - Completely breaking any CSS based layouts right from the word go. Tables only.
4. Shocking box model support - Very poor support for padding and margin, and you thought IE5 was bad!

I agree that if you design for webmails (gmail, hotmail,…) you already have to take these points into account. But…if you are a B2B company, where 95% of your database is business address (no webmails) and you have been designing for Outlook…you’re screwed. To give you an idea, Outlook has 75-80% share of the corporate email market.

You would think they find a technology to add flash in emails these days but instead they go backwards…are they nuts!? 
Main reason for this limitation seems to be security. But let’s face it, is going back 5 years in technology the solutions???

I wonder if the big businesses (who live on email marketing with images and html) like blockbuster, eBay, amazon, netflix,… will like this?

The stupid thing is MS controls the market here and we have to design in function of the receivers…so…we just have to adapt and live with it, like always…not?
Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of MS technologies and platforms but this is something I don’t get. 

Source: Campaign Monitor

Very nice article from Robin Good (like always) on new media technologies to appear in the coming months.

To give you a quick shot:

• Video
• Online Advertising
• Online Music Listening
• Content Aggregation
• Personal and Independent Publishing
• Web Conferencing and Online Collaboration
• Web and Visual Presentation Tools
• Mobile Group Text Messaging
• P2P-casting
• Visual Search Engines
• Web Metrics
• Mobile Content Delivery and Distribution
• Data analysis - Web 3.0
• Immersive Virtual Worlds

Complete article here 

I can’t wait for these things to come ;-)