I’d like to give kudos to Walt for putting together a nice blog about the St. Louis ad scene. In addition to reading several posts, I took time to visit several of the blogs listed in his blogroll. Finally, the St Louis ad community is publishing some online content.

Being tasked to create content for a website can offer a unique set of challenges. One must be able to effectively convey the right message, have time to do the proper research, and have a sharp vocabulary to keep reader’s interest.

But what if you need to find words that rhyme? Maybe you want to create a headline that has a rhythm to it. Or maybe you think you are the next NAS or Public Enemy and are setting up to battle verses at the hip hop club on Saturday night.

Whatever the reason, rhymezone.com has you covered. Simply plug in the word that you need a rhyming word for and it will populate a field full of suggestions.

When most people think of web strategy or building a web presence, they think of developing a sophisticated looking web site that shows off all that their company can do, and showcases their brand identity. For global ad agency Modernista!, whose focus lies decidedly in thinking outside the box, the solution for their web strategy didn’t involve a flashy web site at all. Instead, they harnessed all of the existing tools of the internet and used them to create an information cloud, simultaneously showing their web savvy and their intent on thinking differently.

Instead of having a portfolio page, they link to their Flickr stream for still images and their YouTube library for video content. Instead of an About Us page, they link to their Wikipedia entry, Facebook profile, and Twitter feed. All of their content is managed through existing tools and social media on the internet. As I navigate through their non-site, I can’t help but think that someone either had a really clever idea, or the design/development team found an easy way out of a lot of work.

What do you think? See it for yourself: Modernista!

When I first read about this, I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. What did Freshjive really mean by “Anti-Branding”? Well, it turns out that Rick Klotz, owner of Freshjive, has decided to remove the Freshjive logo / name from the outside of their fashion lines as well as any inside labels. Their new product lines will feature no logo or name as to who their brand is whatsoever.

I can certainly appreciate not wanting to walk around like a human billboard for a company wearing their logo, and admit that it takes some pretty serious guts to go this route and stand firmly on the product alone, but I guess the question is – what would Nike be without the swoosh, what would Chanel be without its reversed letter C’s, and what would BMW be without its badge. The fact of the matter is that your brand and logo do matter to consumers on a variety of complex and subconscious levels.

Remember in the 1980’s when you would be able to buy generic “beer” at the grocery store, typeset in lowercase Helvetica. That was pretty amusing, but there is a reason that you don’t see that any more. Companies can make more money with a brand that is memorable verses one that is not. Brand loyalty pays the bills. Freshjive is by no means like generic beer, and has BRAND credibility and loyalist. Let’s see if the brand loyalty sticks when kids don’t know its Freshjive anymore.

Check out the full story and let us know what you think.

In this age of information, documenting one’s life experience has become part of daily habit. Most popularly this comes in the form of social media, where people can share every detail of their experience, from tweeting about your annoying neighbor or posting a cool link on Facebook, to blogging about government reform or personal philosophies . For those left-brainers who enjoy balancing their checkbooks and comparing spreadsheets more than waxing poetic on Facebook status updates, there are a handful of web sites around now where you can input the numbers of your life and receive back the graphic analysis of your existence.

Mint.com : Okay, so Mint.com isn’t all that new, and personal finance software isn’t all that new, but Mint.com is free and is accessible from anywhere via the web. There’s no need to sit at home with your spreadsheets and checkbooks and input your data into some stodgy banking software, because Mint does it all for you by tracking your expenditures through your online bank accounts. It categorizes the data and outputs it into pretty charts and graphs, and will also email you monthly reports as well as notify you when you’ve blown your budget.

Tweet What You Eat : Tweeting can help you lose weight! TWYE uses the concept of a food diary combined with the accessibility of twitter to let you ‘post’ your food/calorie consumption from your phone throughout the day. Unfortunately, it’s up to the user to estimate the amount of calories in a given item, making the margin of error pretty big. Still, the results can be insightful.

openeco.org : Geared mainly toward small and large organizations, OpenEco lets you input and track your energy use so that you can monitor progress over time, and also compare and share with other similar organizations. You can then use the data to report to the EPA, or get a strategy from companies like Butterfly Energy Works for reducing your carbon footprint and lowering costs!

daytum.com : Daytum is really The One To Rule Them All. You can input any sort of numerical data that you want, to track and graph in a variety of ways. This could be as useful or useless as you want it to be. A useful idea could be a community service organization garnering trust and support by tracking how many flowers planted, funds raised, food donated, etc. A less useful data set seen recently was ‘Star Wars Songs Listened To’.

I was tempted to create a clever title for this blog post, something like, “Hey – Ho – SEO,”  and rip off a verse from the Ramones, but I suppose it would be going against my tip list below, so I have opted for a more search engine friendly title.

Increasing your rank in Google takes time and is a job in and of itself. It requires designers, developers, and content developers to be on the same page.

There are numerous tips floating around about how to improve your ranking in the search engine Google. I have put together a few that you may find interesting and helpful while thinking about your organization’s new website.

1. Inbound links are important. Google ranks your pages according to how many links are pointing at the page. The more links, the better chance you have at increasing your placement. There are several applications that will help find “linking partner sites” that may be helpful.

2. Your page title name is important. Remember to use important keywords in your page title. Many websites have their names in the title, which is fine if you are a well known established brand, but for lesser known organizations, it may not be as helpful as specific keywords to increase your rank. Remember to be specific.

3. Make sure you use keywords in your content. Use research tools like “Wordtracker” to make sure you are targeting the right keywords searched by web surfers.

4. Use keywords in links. For example, using specific link terms like “Purchase Benny Hill, Volume 1, Blue Ray” instead of “click here” may help to rank you higher.

5. Unlike other search engines, dynamically generated pages can be indexed by Google as long as a link exist to those pages somewhere.

6. Use ALT tags in images. Google indexes the text in the ALT tags of images.

7. Don’t count on META keywords to rank you higher, as Google is believed to ignore this tag.

8. Google also searches header tags (H1, H2, H3). Make sure that you use keywords in at least one or two of these tags.

Enjoy and Good Luck!

With ’social networking’ being a keyword in everyone’s vocabulary these days, starting a Facebook Group or MySpace page is often a first step in reaching out through the online community. Of course, the popularity and success of Facebook and MySpace haven’t gone unnoticed by other online ventures trying to meet the increasing demand and needs of social networking, and have led to a number of spin-offs with their own approaches. One site that has recently been in the spotlight is Ning, a social community site that allows users to join and also create their own social networks. In most aspects Ning functions similarly to Facebook groups – free and easy to set up, a quick way to reach out to people online. However, there are a few added elements that make it unique.

Some of the cool features of Ning:

• Each social network created has a simple url, in the form of www.networkname.ning.com – this makes it easy to remember and link to from emails and other sites.
• Visitors can create usernames unique to each social network. Rather than having to join the massive and exposed network of facebook in order to view groups, you can join a small network focusing on your specialized interest (i.e. hobbies, place of employment, charity group, etc).
• Network organizers can customize the appearance of the web pages, using templates, adding graphics, and organizing widgets.
• Organizers can post events, general announcements, and control viewability and membership.
• Registered users can post comments, forum topics, videos, music, photos, and links.

The applications for Ning are endless – great for educators, activity clubs, neighborhood associations, local retail, entertainment venues, fan clubs, and so forth.

Check it out!

Make you smart.

American Express Open has created a site/blog, Open Forum, with content contributed by some of the brightest entrepreneurial thinkers in the game today. With names like Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin writing articles regularly, it’s one of the best sources of business information I’ve found.

Funny story,  at least for me. My wife was talking with someone who kept refering to this hot new thing on the Internet – Twizzle. She immediately recognized this reference was really about Twitter. There was a third person in the conversation that agreed they had heard of Twizzle as well and they all should get involved. My wife did not correct them. It’s a shame to spoil good humor.

I suggested Twizzle is a hot new social-media site founded by Snoop Dogg.

1000 Acres Vodka packaging, posted on lovelypackage.com

Lovely Package® is yet another design loving site to add to your inspiration arsenal. Above is a post from their blog, featuring 1000 Acres Vodka. Wouldn’t you just love to drink this vodka? The packaging suggests to me that it would taste like delicious ice cold spring water and smell like Icelandic alpine tundra. Of course it probably just tastes like vodka and i would still like to mix it with something to mask the taste, but it demonstrates to me the power of good package design.