Outside Line and Cravendale celebrated today as its site MilkMatters.co.uk was billed as the website of the week by the influential digital industry magazine, New Media Age.

Rating it 25/25 top marks for creative content, NMA was suitably impressed with how Cravendale’s brand has been cleverly brought to life digitally with something useful or “damn good fun” for everyone to get involved in.

Milkmatters.co.uk definitely has a lot to offer whether it’s the breakfast recipes inspired by Cravendale, downloadable cut-out masks or ringtones based on heroes Pirate, Cyclist and Cow. Feel like Van Gogh today? Try drawing your own masterpiece fit for framing on the fridge or join in the latest ‘Make the tea’ craze with your work colleagues, with the chance of never having to make the tea again. Not forgetting the options to create your own version of the TV advert or editing together clips of your personal hilarious ‘Milk!’ moments for YouTube.

Thanks for the nod, guys, we like it too!

For the full NMA article, click onto this link…

I’ve been using Twitter personally since October 2006 (which makes me one of the earliest users of the service). And it’s now flavour of the month - Number 10 Downing Street loves it, and it’s been on the front page of newspapers.

The thing that has struck me is how social it’s become - I used to pop along to a London Blogger’s Meetup earlier in the week after seeing buzz about it on Twitter, and every time a live media event happens - for example, an episode of the Apprentice, or a Champions League semi-final, I find myself conversing in real-time with people I may or may not have ever met in person about it.

But Twitter wasn’t social to begin with. It was about “What are you doing?” and was more individual than social. A bit of fun, a bit of egoplay. Then people started adopting it for their own uses, they started talking to each other, using @ to prefix public messages across to each other (something roughly equivalent to a Facebook wall post). Twitter saw people using it in this way and added features, making @username link through to that person’s profile, flagging these as “in reply to”, and creating a Replies tab on people’s homepage, listing the replies just to them. Having just spent a few minutes looking over the public timeline and some counting on my fingers, I reckon between 40 and 50% of Twitter posts are this kind of social interaction.

There’s two important things to take from this:

1. All web apps these days tend towards the social. If you haven’t got a way of making them social, your users will find a way.
2. If your users have found a new way of making it social, then you should be smart enough to tweak and change it to fit their needs.

That’s one of the key reasons why Twitter has got where it is - not just being very good at what it does, but willing to keep track how its used intently and changing accordingly.

The above thoughts were sparked by a comment I left at Wadds’ Tech PR blog on Twitter, a post itself well worth reading.

One of the things that has slowly been rearing its head around the tech & PR blogosphere is the problem of information overload. The blessing of RSS and web services is that they an easy format to automatically transfer information between applications; the curse is that it can become too easy - your post on Twitter updates your Facebook status, and FriendFeed, which in turn updates Facebook newsfeed as well - so now you have the same thing in three places. If Twitter updates your main blog once a day as well that’s a fourth, and if your blog updates Twitter that it has been updates then you can end up in a vicious circle of never-ending updates.

This is an extreme example (and no-one I know is silly enough to do this), but the potential for things to go wrong is there. There are already alarm bells ringing - as Jon Bounds mentioned last month and Duncan Stephen just this week. While Jon proposes a moral code as some sort of solution, I can’t see this working as everyone’s idea of what that code should be will differ; as Duncan says “it just feels right to publicise my blog posts on my Twitter account.” - and who’s to argue with that?

This problem with how people choose to share is touched on in an interesting post at Lewis Webb’s Social PRobiotic:

However, while I’m active across many social sites and networks, there are still boundaries that I want to keep, for example my facebook friends consists only of people I’ve actually met, whereas I have contacts on LinkedIn that I only know through online networking.

The problem is that while Lewis keeps boundaries, others are more liberal about where those boundaries are and what crosses them. Therefore, I can’t help feeling that a technical solution of some sort may be the answer; as more and more people adopt lifestreaming services like Friendfeed or Socialthing. Maybe the answer lies in the rumoured social search tool Mechanical Zoo that Lewis mentions, that’s been the subject of speculation recently. After all, search is only useful if duplicate and meaningless material is stripped out (something Google is considerably better at than its competitors, which makes the fact Mechanical Zoo that is set up by ex-Google employees a tempting hook). Search faces the exact same problem that lifestreaming is trying to deal with, so it would be interesting to see if we can use the same tools to make browsing & feed reading all the easier.

The creative team at Outside Line were invited to get involved with Nike and Showstudio on the YCN’s ‘Nike 1/1‘ project, which involves two teams going head to head on one side of a large canvas in a ‘paint off’ lasting 90 minutes.

The OL creatives went up against Russell Cole over two halves (broken up by a 15 minute break for half time oranges) and visually responded to the statement ‘Art of Football’

Check out how we got on…

We’re proud to announce that Web 2.0 finally has a solution to the greatest problem of all - the age-old issue of Who’s Making The Tea!

The UK’s number one milk brand Cravendale are proud to bring you MakeTheTea.com - the online solution to the age-old dilemma “Whose Turn Is It To Make The Tea?”. Simply register to the site in a matter of seconds, choose your drink preferences and invite your friends and colleagues.

When you fancy a cuppa just hit the ‘Brew Request’ button and let MakeTheTea.com select the drinks maker. You can then rate them or slate them depending on the quality of the cuppa. It’s simple and fun, and will change the way you brew forever!