Archive for March, 2008
Friday, March 14th, 2008
This massive skyscraper Torre Agbar (Agbar Tower) was inaugurated officially in September 2005 in Barcelona by the King of Spain, Juan Carlos. The Agbar Tower was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. According to Nouvel, the shape of the Torre Agbar was inspired by the mountains of Montserrat that surround Barcelona and by the shape of a geyser of water rising into the air. The building is the new headquarter for the Agbar Group in which the company are dedicated to services, distribution and treatment of water. It’s the third tallest building in Barcelona, only after the Arts Hotel and the Mapfre Tower.
The facade of this building is covered by over 4,500 glass windows. The glass windows have an integrated temperature sensors which open and close depending on the temperature, reducing the consumption of energy for air conditioning. Inside the facade the walls are covered with multi-colored facade of aluminum panels in 25 different colors. At night, the Agbar tower give a unique feature with its nocturnal illumination. Over 4,500 led luminous devices allow this fascinating building to form luminous images in the facade.
“This is not a tower. It is not a skyscraper in the American sense of the expression: it is a unique growth in the middle of this rather calm city. But it is not the slender, nervous verticality of the spires and bell towers that often punctuate horizontal cities. Instead, it is a fluid mass that has perforated the ground – a geyser under a permanent calculated pressure.
The surface of this construction evokes the water: smooth and continuous, but also vibrating and transparent because it manifests itself in coloured depths - uncertain, luminous and nuanced. This architecture comes from the earth but does not have the weight of stone. It could even be the faraway echo of old formal Catalan obsessions, carried by a mysterious wind from the coast of Montserrat.
The uncertainties of matter and light make the campanile of Agbar vibrate in the skyline of Barcelona: a faraway mirage day and night; a precise marker to the entry of the new diagonale that starts at Plaça de las Glorias. This singular object becomes a new symbol for an international city.” - Jean Nouvel
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Posted in Architects | 8 Comments »
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
This ad campaign from Olay doesn’t strike to me as effective or interesting. What is the message that they are trying to get across? Are they trying to tell us that this Total Effects 7x anti-aging cream, which is enriched with vitamins and minerals, will combat the seven signs of skin aging and there’s no need for the the ladies to go under the knife! For that fact, the surgeons will have lots of spare time to doodle on faces! Also, what do they mean when they say “surgical makers can do prettier things”?
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Posted in Ads | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
One of the fastest ways to drive up traffic through your blog is to write about the topics that most searched on the Internet. Do you agree with me that just make perfect sense? Just imagine that the most searched is Jessica Alba, Britney Spear or Linsay Lohan. If you have written something about them on your blog, there is a big chance that people will hit your articles. The question now is how and where can you find out what topics are most searched or are ‘hot’ and what keywords have been used for those topics? Well, I would like to share with you the tools that I am using and answer this very question. It’s very easy to use and save me lots of time and effort.
First, I have been using this tool to find inspiration or topic ideas when I am running out of ideas for my articles. I never thought that I will use it frequently. There are good results with this tool. I’m talking of course of Google Trends, a tool from Google Labs which show you the most popular searched terms from the beginning of 2004 to now. The way Google search works is pretty simple. It will analyze a portion of the Google Search Engine to compute how many searches have been done for the selected terms. Then it will show you a graph with the results plotted on a linear scale. It also displays the top cities, regions and languages in which people searched for the selected keywords.
So, most of us bloggers would want to know what people are searching on Google today and what’s hot. Don’t worry, Google Labs have thought about it and they have released in May 2007 their Google Hot Trends tool. It’s the newest addition to Google Trends that will display on a daily basis the top 100 hot searches for the past hours. The Hot Trends list gets updated hourly and you will also find links to news, blogs and web results to help give context about why a search may be appearing on the Hot Trends list today.
Now that you know exactly what to write about, you will need to find related keywords to your topics. I suggest you use this SEO Tools, Keyword Suggestions for Google, that will help you to choose relevant and popular terms related to your selected keywords. I hope you will find these tools useful when your head is running out of ideas or inspiration.
Sample of a Hot Trends list on March 9.
Posted in Blogging | 9 Comments »
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
Today I came a cross a book that has 36 pages with the color spectrum and a black background on each page. When you flip through the pages, you will see a 3D rainbow in the air. How cool is that? Created by Masashi Kawamura, a Japanese art director and copywriter, this book is a great and unique idea as a gift to the old and young.
If you want to know where to buy this book, well you are in luck. I did some digging and know that it is available online at Utrecht.jp. But it’s only available to Japan residents because it seems that there are no delivery or payment methods available outside Japan. For people outside of Japan, you can buy it on Heeza, but sorry the book is temporary out of stock! Maybe they ran out of black paper in Japan…Who knows. In case you are wondering, the popular online book store, Amazon.com, does not carry this book. If you have some luck, please tell us where we can buy this cool and wonderful book. 
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Posted in books | 13 Comments »
Monday, March 10th, 2008
This is the kind of advertising that I will never get bored of. I can watch and read it over and over again. What an odd yet different name for a coffee company “Ugly Mug Coffee”. This Memphis (USA) based company is founded by Mark Ottinger. He started his first coffee house in 1998 in a campus hangout where he learned a lot of spiritually uplifting coffee-fueled philosophizing.
I personally have never tasted their beans before but there are good reviews about it. They say that these are delicious coffee. Each has been fully flavored with a unique and interesting taste along with the very pleasant brewing aroma. Coffee lovers can expect to choose from a variety of flavors or blends like the First Cup, Making Waves, Cinnamon Sugar Cookie, Saving Grace, Hardy Passion, Good Vibes. To promote their variety unique flavors, Ugly Mug Coffee released these ads with the clever names and appealing packaging.
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Posted in Ads | 8 Comments »
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