Brand Tags is a fascinating little site. In it’s own words: “The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.”

The idea is, of course, fascinating because it is true, even if the word ‘is’ gets in the way. The site then goes on to show you a logo representative of a brand (some of which us UK people might not know as there is a bit of a US bias at the moment) and then you are prompted to enter your first thought. It’s like Mallet’s Mallet but with brands and without the ludicrous spectacles.

After you have entered in a word or phrase you get another brand and so on… You can look at all the words and phrases the brand has been linked to by other people and you can even get presented with the words and try to guess the brand from that. The tags are shown in a nice typographic DNA cloud-like list and some of the results might surprise you.

A great idea, and nicely done. It’s interesting to see just how different your perception of something might be to other people’s, or indeed be validated by your spot on response. Just goes to show how ephemeral brands really are, they’re not logos but psychology after all.

Thanks to Gianni for the link.

We knocked off work a little early yesterday and went over to Regents Park for a ‘picnic’. I say picnic, but it was basically beer and cocktail sausages. Very chilled out and a nice antidote to the studio which is increasingly frantic of late.

Some of the guys had a kick about, which, being a conscientious objector to football, I declined, but it did remind me of this video which I saw the other day…

This one has been in my links for a while, but I was just reminded of it today and then I loved the postcard above so I thought I’d post it.

PostSecret is an ongoing open project where people send in their secret thoughts on the back of a self decorated postcard. Check them all out here, and if you’re feeling brave (you’re safe – it’s anonymous), send in one of your own…

I just saw this over at Wired. It’s a great explanation of the complexities of the web, and how blogs work for the slightly less technical minded such as myself. It shows just how far your words can go and just how extensive the data machine behind the web really is. It’s presented in a nice way too.

I also checked out Matthew Hurst’s own site, where there are some lovely visualisations of the ‘blogosphere’ making the intangible tangible. Well, in an intangible kind of way…

OK, so you can’t actually find out exactly who is furtively flicking through your holiday pictures, but you can now find out a whole lot more about where your Flickr hits are coming from.

The site just added a stats page for pro users, go ahead and activate it here on your account…

I thought I’d post about Ffffound!, a great site which I actually stumbled across a while ago but have really got into recently. It’s basically del.icio.us or Flickr but for graphics, and it’s super simple and easy to use.

The site allows users to grab any image on the web (you can’t get at Flash content or stuff hidden inside framesets mind you) and clip it to their Ffffound! profile to browse later. It’s genius the way it’s done, you simple add a bookmarklet to your browser bar and press it when you’re on the page you want to save an image from. Magically all the images get a thick border and you simply click the one you want.

That’s it, no tagging, no posting, no logging in, it’s that easy. And I think that’s the key, because clipping things like this only becomes second nature, useful and enjoyable if it’s easy to do, with as few extra steps as necessary. I wrote a while ago about Boxedup, which is great, but adding a product to that site does require a bit of tinkering which sometimes is enough to make me think twice abut bothering at all, especially if I don’t have much time.

Ffffound doesn’t use tags (which seems to be a deliberate choice rather than an omission) but it can still track trends and suggests images for you based on your own preference, it also shows you when other users like similar things. There’s even a screensaver which displays either the site’s, or your own picks while your machine is idle…

The only things I guess I would like to see developed would be some way to actually find something specific on the site, as once a favourite of yours is a little older, it simply drifts somewhere within a long list. There’s no way of finding that lovely piece of type you remember saving a couple of months ago. I’d also like to be able to recommend images to other people when I find something I know they’d like or find useful. Other than that, unusually I’m going to resist suggesting bells and whistles, I think that’s part of the site’s charm.

The site is still quite small and it’s a private beta at the moment, only members can invite new ones. This is the reason I had passed it by up to now, but after being reminded about it on Ben Terrett’s blog I emailed the guys who run it and blagged my way in. It looks like a Japanese site (some practise for my Japanese reading skills) and may have something to do with Yugo Nakamura of yugop fame…

Thanks to Keita for inviting me in!