It's a beautiful summer in Iowa, except if you're under water. I've been enjoying riding my bike to work. I do it mainly for the fresh air and exercise although it feels good not to be paying $3.89/gallon. On my way back for lunch, I saw two other members of our IT department riding their bikes. Hey, get outside and enjoy!

Here's a screenshot of one of our sites at #3 for a Google search on DRTV. Personally I'm rooting for Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage TV to capture the top spot for DRTV.

Josh Gaumer, has been working at Hawthorne on a school to work intern program on an advergame. Please check out the CMO Survival Game and give us some feedback. Great work Josh!

I've been having some interesting conversations with Jolie O'Dell and Mary Fahncke about the role of new media, in particular in traditional DRTV companies. We've been sharing some link love and you can see links to their sites at the blog/vlog rolls at the bottom of the Hawthorne Videoactive Report.

Saturday, 3May08, was Hawthorne Direct's first event in a new program of community service. Employees and family planted trees at the Soccer field near Dexter plant on Grimes. Here are some pictures taken by Adam Pohren of the planting.

Any suggestions?

I had the opportunity on Tuesday to attend a seminar (on company time at company expense, thanks!) with Marc Freemon on Renegotiating with Integrity which I completely enjoyed. Check out Marc's website at http://www.renegotiate.tv. Marc is an excellent and entertaining speaker. As well as learning specific skills and techniques of renegotiation, what I enjoyed most was Marc's insights into renegotiation as a fundamental activity in all relationships.

This is a really weird move for Taco Bell.  The content doesn't really relate but the implementation is cool.  You can pick locations and limited actions for the model and then proceed to take your own takeaway photographs from the the shoot.  The controls are limited to zooming in and cropping, but the play control sells through.  I can't help but notice it looks remarkably close the the Pokemon game that came out for 64 awhile back.  Check it out:
http://www.directdaniella.com/
 
 

We've been trying out ooVoo as a means for conducting interviews online. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darned good. Meanwhile, I just saw this article about ooVoo's plans to bring "high definition picture phones" to our living rooms. Here's the link: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/62257.html. Because this particular use doesn't really have an ad angle, I won't run it on the Videoactive Report site, but it's still an interesting scheme--especially in light of our experiments these past few days.