Some cool things found via my new Twitter followers

I have just returned home from the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit, where I connected with all sorts of colleagues in the field of Social Media.

Now that I'm home I'm taking the opportunity to review the profiles of some of my new Twitter contacts, and I've found a couple of sites that are really cool and in keeping with this blog's themes, so I wanted to share them with you.

Digitalkoot
http://www.digitalkoot.fi
My first follower from Finland.  I clicked through to the site and found the coolest thing, Digitalkoot is a joint project  by the National Library of Finland and Microtask to digitize and index the library's archives to preserve the country's cultural heritage and make it easier to access.  So, to help them in this project, they have created several interactive text-matching games that, by playing, you can actually use to improve the accuracy of their scanning and indexing.  They're all in Finnish, of course, but even a non-fluent human reader could probably do better than a machine on some of the older and degraded texts.  If you want to check them out, visit the site above and you'll need to log in using Facebook.

Barkley manifesto
http://www.barkleyus.com/
Clicking on another new follower's link I found myself on the homepage of Barkley ad agency in Kansas City, and the introductory video (which doesn't auto-play, so full marks for that).  If you weren't reading it, it might come across as the usual fast, high-impact boldly colored text animation that designers throw together in five minutes and show along with some kind of dance music underneath at the start of their show reel or right before their CEO comes onstage at an awards ceremony.  Same old same old.  But the words are different.  They actually call on the industry to keep to a higher standard, remember the responsibility that comes along with the messages we put out, and to remember that for everyone who reads them they are personal.  Do they mean it?  If they do, this is the kind of message I can get behind.  Communication, even marketing communication, is a conversation between individual human beings.  If they mean it, I'm glad to see this message out there.