Blogposts stolen include:

5 Reasons to Revamp Your Website
What’s your Why?
Go Mobile, Young Man
The Whys of Social Media: Facebook
Website Packaged Solutions: What You Should Ask
The Whys of Social Media: Twitter
The Augmented Future

So, if you find content that doesn’t link to our site under these titles in a quick Google search, well, there you go. Ours are the originals.

To be clear: the Centric blog is always original content, created by Jason Stoddard, Sue Arellano, or Kevin Cuxil, or the three of us in collaboration. Our competition? Maybe not so much.

Update: 5 minutes after sending an email, the company removed the content. However, this post will remain until the cached Google results disappear, or until they contact us to explain why they thought they could simply steal content.

Jason Stoddard, Centric’s founder and award-winning science fiction author, will be speaking at Digital Media Pipeline about the future of visual entertainment.

How will we enjoy films and video in the future? Will everything live in “the cloud?” What will instantaneous access to virtually every movie and TV series ever created mean to us? How will this affect work, life, and even culture? Jason will take a look at “the day after tomorrow,” or, some of the larger implications of this enormous change.

It’s going to be a fun talk. Please join us for:

DIGITAL MEDIA PIPELINE ’10 – The Business of Digital Entertainment

Skirball Cultural Center
Sepulveda Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
September 15, 2010

http://www.digitalmediapipeline.com

The Garlic Company grows 100 million pounds of garlic every year in California, and has developed unique processes to bring fresh, peeled, whole-clove garlic to consumers who want to make their own tasty meals, but don’t have the time to peel.

Centric will be working with The Garlic Company to define their brand and messages, develop retail packaging, and communicate to their audiences in multifaceted ways.

Fun facts:

1. Most garlic is grown in China, but it does not typically test with the high BRIX ratings of California garlic.

2. If you’re looking for California garlic, look for The Garlic Company’s products. Or at least look for garlic with roots still attached. Chinese garlic typically has its roots shaved off.

Who’s BowTie? Well, if you’ve ever read Dog Fancy, Cat Fancy, or any one of a number of pet-focused magazines (yes, even if you’re a reptile aficionado), you know BowTie.

What you may not know is how extensive their online presence is. Online, Bowtie’s Animal Network spans DogChannel.com, CatChannel.com, BirdChannel.com, HorseChannel.Com, FishChannel.com, ReptileChannel.com, and even SmallAnimalChannel.com. No matter what kind of furry friend–or scaly friend–you’re interested in, BowTie is the definitive source for news, information, and community.

We’re looking forward to working with Bowtie in the months ahead!

Or, like we’ve been saying, in this new world, your website is your brand.

But take another look at that chart: games are also in the +10 hour club for men, right behind internet and television usage.

When will we see a chart with television #3? Soon, very soon.

An interesting question, especially considering that Google itself was only just getting started 10 years ago. We’ve already experienced massive change in the way we get information and entertain ourselves. In fact, we could make the case that the leading edge of entertainment, news, and culture has shifted from traditional media to online in the last five years.

So what’s coming in the next 12? This is the question that Elon University and the Pew Internet asked us.

In their words:

"In this web-based survey, 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators and 618 additional stakeholders (1,196 respondents) were asked to assess thought-provoking proposed scenarios for the year 2020. The point of this non-random survey was to add focused input to the ongoing conversation about the future of the Internet; respondents’ written elaborations—the qualitative results—were the most valuable data gathered by the study."

Centric’s founder and strategic lead, Jason Stoddard, is quoted several times in the report, as is Barry Chudakov, a Centric strategic partner. The entire report makes fascinating reading—a glimpse of what might be coming our way.

Get the report here.

Second Life residents own land, have voluntary exchange, and create a place where they can do pretty much anything they want without government intervention. Residents can also be whatever they want or create whatever they want. In fact, residents in Second Life gamble, have sex, do drugs, and own weapons. Yet, residents in Second Life live a pretty peaceful life and coexist in an environment that fosters community responsibility and growth.

Since the release of “Second Life: A Virtual Frontier,” Reason.tv has clocked in almost 1 million unique views. In fact, our machinima ranks in #3 in an all-time high record for Reason.tv! Check out the Reason.tv episode “Second Life: A Virtual Frontier” and see why Drew loves Second Life for yourself!

Let’s back up a minute. Here’s the backstory: Warner Brothers came to us to help promote their new animated movie: Batman Gotham Knight. This usually means that we create a microsite and a MySpace presence. This time, however, we added a Facebook presence—and a relatively full-featured widget:

The widget allowed people to see the trailer, browse stills, and find out more about the movie, and it had an interesting social feature: When you installed the widget, you became a member of The Concerned Citizens of Gotham City. The more people who installed the widget, the brighter the Bat-signal would glow.

Pretty cool, huh? But what is much, much cooler are the numbers the widget generated:

• Before the launch of the movie, the widget generated nearly 1MM pageviews
• As of this writing, it has generated over 1.4MM pageviews

Now remember: these are pageviews, not impressions. This means that nearly 1MM more interactions were facilitated by the widget before the launch of the movie—and, even after launch, with no additional investment in the campaign, the numbers continue to grow!

Here are a few striking things we noticed:

1. The widget killed the microsite, both in terms of unique users and pageviews. Wait. Let’s repeat that: the widget beat the microsite for unique users and pageviews. These are people who might never have bothered to come to the Batman Gotham Knight microsite—and a real testimonial to the need to "get out where the people are," rather than trying to bring them to your site.

2. The widget performed about as well as a million-dollar paid media buy. To drive 1MM clickthroughs to your site, you’re looking at $500K-2MM for a typical AdWords program. Or, $1.2MM for a network banner buy with $1.20CPM and 0.1% clickthrough. Or $1MM for targeted online ads with $10CPM and 1% clickthrough.

3. The numbers keep growing, even after the campaign has ended. With a media buy, when the spending stops, your media stops. Period. End of story. With a popular widget "in the wild" on social networks, the numbers continue to grow.

"Well, yeah, that’s cool," you might be saying. "But our audience is older/less hip/not on the social networks/won’t use widgets."

Oh really? Let us introduce you to two statistics you might find interesting:

• Widgets have a 67% reach across the worldwide internet audience, according to ComScore Widget Metrix
• Over 40% of moms are on MySpace

Now, sit back, think about your brand and what you might be able to offer in a widget. And think what a long-term, persistently growing, permanent presence in the social spaces and blogosphere might do for your results.

Welcome to the world of today—a world where all the rules are changing.

So, anyone want to buy Centric.com for DNscoop’s valuation? If you do, I’ll throw in the entire company!

Yeah. Weirdness.

It is fitting that paper maps are given a second life of their own, in a virtual world that prides itself in offering its residents a second life. The unique nature of this platform is its ability to be robust, scalable, and most of all fully immersive. Because virtual worlds are so tactile it lends itself well to education – and that is why 30 residents from various parts of the world gathered at David Rumsey’s launch event.

As residents settled in, they were given a chance to view a special presentation appropriately titled “Giving Maps a Second Life with Digital Technologies.” Following the insightful presentation, residents called in to a live Q&A session via conference call. Here residents were given the chance to ask David Rumsey questions regarding his work in Second Life and beyond. Although we’ve known it all along, this is when it truly sunk in for me – the residents of second life really crave meaningful interaction and jump at the opportunity for education. They really do!

The questions asked during the call inspired us to look at the work we have done to date. It challenged us to think of new creative ways to further evolve David Rumsey’s island into a more collaborative and educational space. As a matter in fact, one resident asked “when will we be able to see a collaborative project in second life?” in response to David’s comment on wanting to bring in hundreds of his maps into Second Life. Certainly, the virtual plane is the perfect platform for disseminating hundreds if not thousands of maps. The work however can be a daunting task. This is one of the way that residents can collaborate on a project.

As the event came to an end, residents mingled and explored the various landmarks that helped frame this wonderful event. I have selected the accompanying image because of two important reasons. First, because it captures the awe of Cassini’s globes as residents looked on. The later because these residents really made the event a success. Working as event staff, they were available to guide visitors and educate them on the history, origin, and the technical implications of giving these maps a second life.

On behalf of David Rumsey, and the team at Centric I would like to thank you all for coming to the event, and we look forward to seeing more great things come out of David Rumsey’s island in Second Life.

If you missed the launch event, you may view the video presentation here and as always, there are lots more to be seen at Centric’s Flickr page.