I saw an interesting article pop up last week about Nissan developing color changing paint… Sounded like something perfect to blog about on my color + design blog, so to confirm the story, I sent an email into Nissan Motors and they were nice enough to call me back. Turns out Nissan has no idea where this current web urban legend originated from and they confirmed that they aren’t developing color changing paint.
As I tried to search for where the story originated, I stumbled into the blogging equivalent of a childhood game of telephone. How exactly did this rumor spread in 3 days from a small energy news site to some of the highest trafficked auto & technology blogs on the web? Could Wired, GizModo, Engadget, Jalopnik, etc. really have been part of such a badly spun web of news?
Follow us post by post in the latest game of Blogophone…
Around November 6th, NextEnergyNews.com put up a story about the color changing paint technology being developed. They explained the basics of how this technology works, but they set this all off when they mention Nissan in passing::
The process starts out with a standard galvanized piece of automotive sheet metal steel. A special polymer is applied to the steel with superparamagnetic iron oxide particles embedded within it. The nanoscale crystalline particles of magnetite (iron oxide) are controlled using a low grade magnetic field which is used to effect the spacing of the colloidal crystals and thereby controlling their ability to reflect light and change color.
The coatings are perfect for an automotive application because a continuous small magnetic charge is needed to keep the desired color active and the driver also has the ability to turn off the system at which time the vehicle turns back to its default color of white.
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This revolutionary new paramagnetic paint is a technical wonder and is viewed by Nissan and other auto companies as an amazing innovation…
What seems to be the first blog to pick this up, luxvelocity doesn’t add much to the story, but a little suggestion of a sexy Nissan spotscar to imagine this feature on…
Fancy the White color on your soon to be ordered Nissan GTR?
This is Where the Blognannegans Really Begin…
Motor Authority picked up the story, and definitely got inspired by luxvelocity… they added fancy image of a red, black and white Nissan GTR and connected the recently released Self-Healing paint by Nissan to this new technology.
So who isn’t using YouTube to launch viral marketing campaigns these days? One of the most popular videos today and over 120,000 views… It took about 2 seconds into this clip to smell the funk of a marketing department. I wasn’t quite sure why a College or University would be using a female streaker as a marketing tool…
Who Else Was at This Game?!!!!!!
Well, none of us were… only the marketing department for a movie to be released next month by Twentieth Century Fox was there.
So there was a video post (Trust Me Im A Professional) that hit the front page of Digg.com today, where in a video supposedly shot in 1994 a motivation speaker talks a woman into doing a trust fall where she smacks her head on the floor. The controversy comes from the intro clip to the video that shows what is supposedly the same man, selling his motivation material today, 13 years later…
So how can this guy who knocked a woman out on stage still be a motivational speaker?
He isn’t. It is called a viral video. Made specifically to fool you into talking about it.
Notice that there is an eerie resemblance between the girl who smacks her head in 1994 and a girl in his current promo video…
Britney Spears’s new fragrance, Britney Spears Believe will be out on counters in October, but is available for Pre-order online. The brand for this new fragrance is a complete rip of mondonation’s brand…
Somewhere there is a design team who should be fired.
Last year I stumbled across a very interesting company coming out of Vancouver, Canada. mondonation had a simple, clever and meaningful idea that allowed people to customize a personal mantra onto a t-shirt. A statement of something they believed in… Some were heartfelt messages “I believe everyday people can make a difference every day” and some that are just fun or silly “I believe the hokey pokey is what it’s all about.”
The kicker about mondonation is that it was set-up to support lots of international charities, by donating part of the profits from each shirt sale. I had a chance to speak to Ward Bingham the founder of the company last year about what they were doing and how my disaster relief agency, www.HODR.org could find support from what he was doing. We since have joined up as a partner charity and I’ve been a huge fan and supporter of the project ever since.
mondonation has reached thousands of people with their “I believeâ€? t-shirts. All you have to do is watch some of the YouTube videos to get an idea of how many people they’ve reached. This one video has been viewed almost 700,000 times.
What is it? Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.
Leave your email in a comment below. I’ll invite you and then you invite the 3 people below you…
EDIT by Travis: I didn’t even see Darius’ post here. I’m losing it. So my post is deleted and I’ll share the remainder of my invites to any commentors in this post.
Business week had an interesting story last week about figuring out who your customers are and finding the best way to reach them. Linked along with that post was a very interesting chart that showed the web usage of different age groups… creators, critics