Mint Digital

Click #16

Bloggers solve murders. Law professors make techno. Illustrators draw on rubbish.

There is a shift from professional to DIY happening all over the web.

The creative urge
Clever websites tap in to this.

eBay lets you play at being a shopkeeper (the line between play and reality quickly blurs). Wikipedia invites you to read (like a conventional encyclopaedia) but you can write it too. Boing Boing and CollegeHumour have content submitted by thousands of volunteers, edited by a small core team.

Easy self-expression
It isn’t always obvious how to let your customers stick their heads above the parapet. This site for world environment day does it well.

Mint are making a site which lets you adopt an olive tree. Our favourite idea is an interactive map that lets you check out all the orphan trees. When you adopt a tree you’ll upload a message - ‘Happy birthday, gran’, ‘Freddie Flintoff ate my hamster’ or whatever. This messages will become part of the map - defining neighbourhoods and influencing future adoptive parents.

We are currently reworking Matt Weston’s BusinessBricks. The aim is to create easy - but meaningful - ways for readers to interact. When we get the infrastructure right there’s lots of scope for a community to flourish.

Let 1000 customers bloom
Ten years ago, you sat there while TV bludgeoned you over the head with advertising messages. The internet - especially the way it has developed over the 18 months - lets much more interesting interactions happen. How can you let your customers bloom?