Cyclone Gene video update

The winds are really howling here in Suva as of 5.20 local time.
I walked across the street to my friend's house on Suva Point and just captured the following video. I went out to the "beach" area and the water was pretty wild and stings quite a bit. This is just the outside edge of this storm, as well. The gusts are pretty intimidating and the power in the house is fluctuating.

You can hear me say in the video that this scene is taken during LOW TIDE. I never see that water move like this.

Will aim to keep the Twitter feed going.

Here's one more. My daughter, Kaia, jumping around in this with her friends Zoe and Josiah.

Cyclone Gene Makes an Entrance

Cyclone Gene makes an entrance today...
I'll be keeping twitter updates at:

http://twitter.com/fijicyclone

Winds are kicking up quite a bit in Suva and the map is looking threatening.

Giant Water Hologram Monster

Check out this advertising/marketing campaign for a new monster movie in Japan. A huge water hologram in Tokyo Bay is formed. According to the YouTube description, "the feat uses a water screen (carefully sprayed water jet) and exact light projections to create a giant pseudo-3-D Loch Ness "Water Horse" monster in the bay."

We'll be doing something similar here in Suva Harbor but due to technical limitations, will be forced to use a hand-puppet and a flashlight.

Digital Talanoa : Tribewanted - Beyond technology

I’ve always tended to be more interested in the impact of technology on people rather than the actual technology itself. In other words, the changes to our culture through inventions like the Internet can be more fascinating than just the Internet itself. Although we can make pretty accurate assumptions about what kinds of technology we’ll have available to us in the future, it’s much harder to determine how that technology will actually alter our future. When the Internet first started grabbing hold, no one could have predicted the impact it would have on so many aspects of our lives. It seems as if it’s only just starting, too.

Tribewanted has been in the news worldwide this past week. For those unaware, it is an eco-tourism and sustainability project happening on the island of Vorovoro, just off of Labasa’s coast. [Disclosure: Oceanic has done marketing communications work for Tribewanted.] The project is notable more for the way it has developed rather than where it has developed. Unlike traditional tourism initiatives, Tribewanted has an online counterpart (www.tribewanted.com) where virtual discussions guide the evolution and development of the project itself. For Fiji, the residual attention Tribewanted is receiving from around the world is immeasurable. That attention focuses entirely upon an unspoilt, beautiful part of the country and with a five hour BBC documentary beginning this week, Fiji will be on the TV screens of millions of British households on a weekly basis.

Tribewanted on BBC

BBC2 airs the story of Tribewanted beginning Monday in the U.K.
I have been lucky enough to be involved both through Oceanic and personally with the project for some time now and this show is an excellent insight into all that Tribewanted is.

Check out the trailer. We'll have it here in Fiji soon enough, I'm sure. Huge congratulations to Ben and the entire tribe for getting things to this point. Just awesome.

Oceanic's blog : Content, traffic and posts

I've been spending a bunch of extra time recently honing skills in traffic and site measurement because it's playing a much bigger role in the websites of our clients. Although Oceanic's website doesn't get a huge amount of traffic, I've been really surprised at the way in which our traffic has grown as well as the way in which people are finding the site.

Here's a snapshot of four months of traffic on blog.oceanic.com.fj:

The specific numbers are less important, I think, then the trends which emerge from the traffic. Dips represent weekends while spikes represent another kind of event. One of the things I find most interesting are the most popular blog posts. That big spike in the middle is the day Fiji was threatened by a massive cyclone in the north and I posted a photograph of the storm as it approached the country. Naming the storm picked up a large amount of traffic from people querying the storm's name using Google. The elevated level on the left of the chart show the week where the site enjoyed a lot of extra traffic from the Freshbooks story (described below).

From a commenting perspective, the "Open Letter to WebMedia Fiji" posting was the busiest one ever but I suppose that's not much of a surprise given the nature of the content. Any topic which smells like controversy seems to do well. More follow up on that topic below.

The most interesting part of watching our traffic is seeing where people are coming from and how they're arriving. Knowing this information makes it much easier to find ways of driving new traffic to the site. At the end of the day, however, we're just an agency in Fiji so the reach of our general conpany content is limited (for good reason). The blog, however, does pull in new readers. I don't write that intending to sound boastful but I do think it's still an important brand touch on our company and even one which is a bit unexpected.

Here are the top 5 most repeatedly read postings on blog.oceanic.com.fj during the past six months (the blog has been running for well over a year now but I didn't track it as carefully from the beginning):

Vodafone.com.fj : Online top-up shop preview

Oceanic has been developing out Vodafone Fiji's ecommerce shop for the past few months. A key element of the new site is an online top-up shop where people can purchase recharge credit securely via credit card. I've created a brief demo movie of that experience and have included it below.

I'm kind of interested in two things...one, do you think this a useful medium for just showing feature-sets like this and two, what do you think of the application? It's just a brief overview and not overly in-depth but shows the effort made into trying to create an environment that is simple and functional.

Feel free to post comments.

Launch the Vodafone Fiji - Top Up Shop demo. Give it a few seconds (or even a minute) to load as it's a full page video flash file.

Digital Talanoa : A Wake Up Call for ICT

In all these Digital Talanoa columns, I’ll go on and on about any number of things as they relate to new business, online strategy, customer experience and on a handful of occasions, even potholes. I’m tempted to take on a bit more of a serious note this week for no other reason that it’s been one of those weeks.

I read a quote this week from Walter Chrysler, an American automobile pioneer from the early 1940s. He said, “Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.”

R.I.P. - Sir Edmund Hillary

Sir Edmund Hillary passed away today.
Over the past year, I've been infatuated with Mount Everest and the stories behind it. Sir Edmund was a true hero of the 20th century and his first summit will forever be remembered.

New York Times obituary

Sponsoring the Fiji Rugby Union

Oceanic is now the official online communications partner to the Fiji Rugby Union.

This has been in the works for a while as we move closer to the launch of the new FRU website. The site itself has been a pretty massive undertaking and while so many web project launches are delayed due to LACK of content, I'd say this one has been delayed due to the AMOUNT of content we've been working with.

Match data going back to the early 20th century and a system to manage all of it has been a key focus of the project. As we get closer to the launch, I'll post some more information about the project. It's a real honor for us to be involved with the FRU like this.

Here's the official press release on the sponsorship.