I particularly love how Oki-Ni have been using Mixcloud to entertain their customers, giving them a reason to return to their retail site. Shame you can't download the compilation mix series anymore though. 

Everything Is A Remix: THE MATRIX from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

I like the W&K Christmas installation at 16 Hanbury Street (oh to have
a show window!). Essentially it's a ticker tape type machine that
creates 'snowflakes' every time some tweets a message containing
#snow. It's a lovely blend of digital technology in the analog world,
though their machine must be overheating with snow-related tweets what
with the arctic weather we've having in the UK.

Be careful when you tweet though, because if you accidentally type
#snowball you'll send a volley of snow at someone in the
twittersphere, courtesy of AnalogFolk's very own Christmas project.
Over a thousand players have already joined in the Hashtag Snowball
fight. Go on, throw some snow!

Hashtag Snowball from AnalogFolk on Vimeo.

So the online driving show SEAT Sex Drive finally draws to a close.
Over the 7 episodes, our driving finalists and celebrity captains
provided us with a high-octane dose of pure driving entertainment. And
they only wrecked a couple of cars (oops).

If you missed it you can catch all the episodes on YouTube. For the
time-pressed among you, you'll probably want to fast forward to the
final episode and see which team won.

SPOILER ALERT: The girls came back from 0-2 down to win 3-2...ridiculous!

And if you are a fan of Fifth Gear, you'll enjoy presenters Vicki
Butler-Henderson and Jonny Smith struggling to keep their SEAT Leon
cars on the track whilst answering quick fire questions about the
sexes. It stars AnalogFolk's very own Stuart Pearman as the
quizmaster...who vomited off-camera (sadly) seconds after getting out
of the car.

As part of the Channel 4 programme On Track with SEAT, Metropolis
Studios recorded this amazing cover of 'Walking in the Air' by The
Maccabees. It's stirring stuff and we were lucky to be in the mixing
studio to hear it.

This year, we decided to make the AnalogFolk Christmas project an entirely social affair.

Why send someone a Christmas card, when you can send them a handful of digital snow to show how much they mean to you? I give you Hashtag Snowball!

It's simple to play:

1. Just @mention your target and add #snowball to your festive tweet to start throwing.
2. Bigger snowballs do more damage. The size of your snowballs is derived from a magic formula created by our elves and based on your Twitter presence.
3. This is a good, clean fight, so you can only hit one target per tweet, and re-tweets don't count!
4. Include http://tiny.cc/snowballfight in your tweet to link to the latest fights, leaderboard, and top targets.

Alongside folk from adland, some big names have been caught in the snowball crosssfire, including Jonathon Ross, Russell Brand, Jamie Oliver, Kanye West, Serena Williams and Sarah Palin (well she did ask for it).

Happy Holidays and feel free to join in...just please don't hit me (my @mentions column has been pummeled to oblivion already)!

Key players In the publishing industry have been queueing up to tell us how mobile devices, such as the iPad, will revolutionise (read 'save') magazines. Having downloaded the app editions of T3, Esquire and Wired, I would have said that the jury is still out. However, having just spent the last 45mins immersed in the digital pages of PROJECT, the new online magazine from Richard Branson, I am feeling more optimistic. Though not a true revolution (Flipboard is closer to realising that dream), the team behind this new title has put more thought and care into the reader's user experience on touchscreen than existing magazine titles that have made the jump to iPad app.

More than just a simple implentation of PDF style swipes and zooms, the PROJECT team has thought about making the visuals richer, the content deeper and the editorial more connected. The experience grabs you from the electronic glitching of the Jeff Bridges Tron cover, and makes you want to read, touch and watch everything inside. Yes, there are some bugs where pages get stuck, or ads are difficult to swipe past...but this is the first edition and fixes & updates are already available via the app store. Hopefully other publishers will take a look at PROJECT and up their game over the coming months.

If online magazines for mobile devices earn publishers a sizeable and profitable audience, there will be a question to be asked of advertisers. As the quality of interactivity and depth of content increases within online editions, the advertising that sits in between must keep step. Among early adopters of online magazines, there is currently as much interest in the ads as content, mainly due to the novelty factor of seeing things slide and spin. If the quality of these of ads rely too heavily on novelty interaction for the sake of it, there is a very real danger that in future editions they won't just be skipped by consumers, they will begin to be seen as intrusive. Publishers, advertisers and agencies will have to start working much more closely together than they have had to with offline magazine advertising. Online magazines don't just require strong technical creativity in the first instance, but also be ready to respond to consumer interaction and update themselves accordingly over the life-span of the edition. If advertisers get it right, online magazines on mobile devices represent a fantastic opportunity to engage with consumers, whilst they are relaxing with content they've chosen to download. Get it wrong and online magazine ads will seen as more intrusive than their offline equivalents, which could spell disaster for the publishers who cannot afford to lose new readers in this fledgling new market.

Of course, with online mags, publishers and advertisers do have a new trick up their sleeve...data. In the offline world it is pure guesswork (unless you are one of the very few that run specific research around print advertising) as to whether consumers even notice your print ad, let alone whether they actually spend time with it. On the other hand, the opportunities to collect behavioural data from consumers reading online magazines will be plentiful. From ad placement to dwell time to depth of interaction, publishers will be able to tell which ads/branded content perform best by benchmarking them against every other ad in the edition. Linking that data to consumer behaviour away from app will be a natural next step. The big question is...will consumers and advertisers stump up the cash in the year ahead for online magazines to fund this future.