I was travelling on the tube in London this morning and happened to notice a large advert plastered on to the wall.  It happened to be for Hotmail, the pioneer of web based email, but what interested me about the advert itself was not the design, nor the copy, but the branding.  In a clean, to the point, sans-serif font with a dash of italics was the word ‘Hotmail’.  “Well?” I hear you cry, “So what?”  My reply – what happened to Windows Live?

Now this is an unusual step for Microsoft, who have up until now pushed the Windows Live branding quite heavily.  The new campaign (which I am lead to believe Microsoft has not officially announced) was created by Creature, a Seattle based marketing agency and is promoted by various outdoor and print advertisements and an online campaign.  The essence of the campaign seems to be geared towards giving Hotmail a trendy, modern, and fresh feel.  Aimed at a young, tech-savy professionals the campaign focuses on people with busy lives who love to be organised.  I won’t go into the ideas of the campaign or the copy which as been described as “gibberish” - you can just go look for yourself here.  So excited with the prospect of a new-look, new feel Hotmail, logged on to my account only to be confronted with the usual Windows Live look.

The Problem with Windows Live

The confusion begins with the fact that the online campaign is hosted on Windows Live.  This seems to be a dollop of indecisiveness from Microsoft, is Hotmail being re-branded without the ‘Windows Live’ label or isn't it?  The problem with the Windows Live branding is it sucks.  Unlike most of the commercial world, web service brands aren't really a hallmark of trust and quality.   Just because a big, well known brand has created a new service doesn’t mean it will be any good, the ill-fated Google Buzz is a perfect example.The key with creating a successful web product is to ignore encompassing branding such as ‘Windows Live’.  Today’s web users like the feeling of individuality and being part of a community.  It’s like being a member of a select club.  If you round up all the clubs into one big club you immediately loose that feeling of being part of an individual and independent community.

Take Flickr for example, the hugely popular online photo site has massive online community of dedicated users – a success then.  Yahoo came along and bought Flickr, typically it wanted to integrate it into the Yahoo brand.  Testing the waters Yahoo added a “from Yahoo” to the Flickr logo and the community went wild, taking to the forums to complain.  Since then Yahoo hasn’t done anything more, hopefully it has seen that integrating Flickr into the Yahoo brand fully would be potentially very damaging.

Microsoft has already worked out that encompassing branding isn’t always a good idea.  The Windows Live brand introduced to coincide with Vista was described as “a way to extend the Windows user experience”.  Which is all very well but as the ‘Windows’ brand got increasing bad press over Vista, people don’t exactly want to be part of the Windows club.  Windows Live Search suffered under the brand and Microsoft released it – creating Bing.

Will Microsoft learn from these lessons and allow Hotmail the individuality it needs? Or will it consign it to the shackles of Windows Live? We will have to wait and see.

The other day my mum came to me asking if she could keep a video from YouTube.  Having not ever needed to do this so far I set off to discover the best tool for downloading a YouTube video and converting it to a decent file format.

After some Googling and a search on LifeHacker I stumbled upon the recommended and widely used YouTube Downloader.  However after installing and downloading my selected YouTube video I was disappointed to discover the latter half of the video had not downloaded correctly.  This was disappointing as otherwise this seamed a tidy little app (note: I have not fully tested this app so it may work for you with no problems).

After trying various websites promising to download and convert my YouTube video choice with no avail I became sceptical that any web based tool would do the job properly.  Happily I found a site which did the job, quickly and with no problems at all, the interestingly named – Bender Converter (after the Futurama character).

In summary - as you can see it successfully completed the download and conversion of the 10 min video to MPG format, without asking for any email addresses!  Bender Converter a success so I thought I would share it with all of you to save you time if you need to do the same.

Photo: Mindful One

Why are prices always a penny less than a whole amount? That's simple, it makes the price look cheaper.

This £1.99 policy always leaves me with a penny change, while this is fine for the price conscious and people who like to save their pennies their should be something more creative to do with your change. The best bit is there is!

During my many visits to McDonalds over the years I have always noticed the charity donation box carefully placed next to the till.  It recently occurred to me how much could be donated to charity if everyone who bought their £1.99 burger at McDonalds put their penny change in the charity box.  The obvious next thought was what if all shops and take-away restaurants adopted this charity box solution for people to put their 1p change in?  How much money would be generated worldwide for charitable causes - simply - a lot!

Now when I shop and I get that penny change I always look for a charity box to put it in.  The moral of this story (yes there is one) is not to plug myself as a large donor to charity, nor is it to make you donate your pennies to charity (you can if you want) but, if you own, or know someone who owns a shop, why not get them to adopt the idea and help your chosen charity?

Don't want to post loads of You Tube videos here but this is just brilliant (or is it just my sense of humour?).  It is a television advert for a Canadian bank. Just watch the kid's expression!

Unsurprisingly, this was taken while I was having a late coffee in a Costa establishment.  Part of my new iPhone photo blog set. More explained soon! - Does anyone know of a good photo-blogging site theme (wordpress, other service, tumblr)?

I have a blogging dilemma.  I love blogging and have been doing so for quite a while under various names and guises.  But now I finally get round to opening a personal blog and I have too many choices!  I am in the process of creating my own Wordpress blog but this won't be ready for quite a while as I have so many other things to be getting on with.  So I arrived at lifestreaming - something I first became aware of thanks to Yongfook with his Sweetcron Lifestream system (right words? maybe not!).  While the term Lifestream has been around for quite a while, Steve Rubel was the first major blogger I saw to stop "blogging" and start "lifestreaming" he discusses here on his now defunct blog.  Getting back to the topic of this post, I have a dilemma: should I blog or should I lifestream, if I lifestream, what platform should I use?  I like Tumblr, but I also like the ease of Posterous.  I suppose I have already found my answer since this post is on Posterous.