Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”

Fancy a job with the City of Bozeman (pop. 27,509)? Well get ready to divulge your whole social footprint to your future employer. The above line is taken from their application form, with a space to fill in the URLs of all your online profile locations.

Is this something that we’re going to be seeing more of further down the line? We’ve seen people getting sacked for Facebook transgressions, but surely this is a step too far? I’m all for helping employers to see the many facets of your skillset and interests via what you share with them on your CV, but that should be a decision made by the candidate, not the employer. It’s called a personal life for a reason, and the idea that you could be denied a job due to something you wrote in a forum in 1999* is absurd.

However, remember the golden rule of social networks - if you’re not happy with someone, one day, finding something you’ve done or said, then don’t put it out there.

* I’m just glad that my forum posts from that era were all done under an alias …

I find the RSS feed for The New York Times Technology section a daily source of joy. It’s always interesting, the writing is exemplary and the content is always relevent. And none more pertinent than in their recent piece on Tweeting Your Way to a Job, which details the ongoing trend for companies recruiting people into social media positions, and the tribulations that some people will go through to get them.

Outside Line were one of those companies. And when I came in for my first interview here almost 5 months ago I realised I was one of those people. So once a second interview was confirmed, and while waiting for a working brief to be sent through, I set up a secret Twitter stream where I could capture my work in progress for the presentation I was preparing. Thinking back to my Maths GCSE, and how “showing your working” was important as the answers themselves, my thinking was that Twitter was the perfect tool to capture a stream of consciousness.

I came, I saw, tweeted. And bagged a job.

And the learning? Twitter is a tool, not an idea. So if you’re using it to find the dream job, find some way of tailoring it towards to role itself - build a Flickr page of images you’ve found that might inspire the company, record a YouTube video of you using their products, set up a Tumblr of what you think will be relevent articles to your new position.

Be creative. Don’t just use technology for technology’s sake.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you must watch this beautiful animation for The Beatles Rock Band, written and directed by Pete Candeland of Gorillaz music video fame and produced at Passion Pictures here in London.  The styles between the first and second half are clearly distinctive yet manage too blend together beautifully, starting off in traditional 2D animation and flowing into a full three-dimensional tripped out musical extravaganza.

Storyboards and style for 2D was created by Robert Valley, who has an amazing collection of work on his Flickr account. Illustrations for the little musical characters in the second half were done by South African illustrator Ree Treweek, one third of the Blackheart Gang, who shot too fame in 2006 with The Tale of How.

With this much talent flying around, how could they go wrong?

Winning awards for websites isn’t easy. The competition is huge, the stakes are high, and what might be internet heaven for one person is holy hell for another. But we’ve won them in spades for our Milk Matters site, created last year for Cravendale. We recently added 2 FAB awards to our many commendations the site, one for the Best Website and the second for Most Creative Digital Work. And we thought this would be a great chance to discuss some of the design decisions that went on behind the scenes which we feel made the site chime with so many people.

So a bit of background - Arla gave us the task of a re-designing their site we made for them in 2008, and one of the key objectives was to deliver their key 2009 brand messages, such as “Milk is great for strong, healthy teeth”.

So we decided to create a new animated character for the site that would be able to deliver these messages whilst the user browses. This character would have to be easy to draw and animate, giving us flexibility for animations and updates over the course of the year.

The initial interface designs were focused purely on the bottle, and the way our character could interact with the milk bottle while displaying key messages. Looking back you can see how the different initiatives had taken a back seat in our original designs, they weren’t very flexible and didn’t allow room for loads of content and promotions being added to the site throughout the year.

We wanted to move away from typical images in boxes you see so often in web design so we experimented with different ways of navigating around the site. The stage area became larger and scattered more objects around which represented current and future initiatives. These navigational blocks became more individual with each adopting their own unique look. We made our character smaller so that he could interact with the bottle as part of the site. At this point we liked the look of the 3D boxes sitting in the site.

Here we have a slightly more developed version of the homepage, the 2D character is amongst the 3D blocks and large typography in the background denotes the current site section. The navigational blocks are coming to life with more colour and their own distinct look and feel. One problem we came across was we felt the 2D character and 3D objects did not work well together on screen at the same time. The decision had to be made between a 3D or 2D world. The 3D route would allow us to create some really nice objects, but restricted the interactivity our character could have with the site. A 2D world would let us implement a flash physics engine in the site, therefore allowing the user to pick up any block, object or even the character and throw them around the stage.

The decision between 2D and 3D had been made, and 2D won! The navigational blocks were changed to be completely  flat, with the graphics on each more colourful and distinctive.  They are now all on one plane, allowing our character to run around the site with greater freedom.

At the finishing line, we had a problem with the blocks potentially covering the Cravendale bottle so we moved it to the front giving it prominence on every page. Everything has been brought closer together and the site looks cleaner and more minimal than ever.

So there you have it - from an initial “boring” design into an award-winning site with an integrated physics engine. And at this stage we had fun sticking a few Easter Eggs in there too - for instance, our office telephone number (0207 841 3970) is one of the only numbers that will make the mobile phone ring. There are loads of other hidden gems in the site still waiting to be found - why not head over there now and have a play?

The internet is buzzing today with the unveiling of Google Wave, a “new tool for communication and collaboration on the web”, or more immediately understandable as “email on crack”. As is always the way at Google, they’ve re-expressed a problem with communication as we use it today: the fact that the two largest forms of online communication, email and IM, are based around the letter and the telephone, outdated offline architectures.

Google aim to “combine conversation-type communication and collaboration-type communication” in what could be the next step forward in digital interaction, and a step closer to the workplace of the future. For the last 10 years, we’ve had many worshiping at the altar of “the end of the office”, with Signal vs Noise being one of it’s fiercest disciples. But it’s never really seemed possible: for example, we’re recruiting someone at the moment whose job role will take place primarily online, but logistics dictate that they’ll need to be in the office for things like client meetings. But if such meetings begin taking place through Wave (an entirely probable proposition, just look at the uptake of Skype in corporate culture) then we could be recruiting from a much larger field.

And what of that perennial agency problem of a colleague joining onto a campaign that’s already half way through? Wave has a nifty little feature where a user added to a “wave” can quickly watch how it’s grown into a current state, tracking what discussions were had, changes were made, and get an understanding on the gestation of an idea, rather than just dealing with a single execution made near the end of the line.

We’re very excited about how this could change the way we work …