What would you do with 10,000 phone books? [yellow collection] is a site set up to collect ideas on what to do with printed yellow pages books. Some artists have contributed photos of pieces they’ve created involving the color yellow and/or phonebooks.
Yellow Pages Art from Yellow Collection Petter Palander / CC BY 2.0
Obviously they’re taking it for granted that people don’t use yellow pages to look up business information any more!
Making art from old phone books has a lot of appeal for me — I’ve long thought of using old directory covers to make origami stars for Christmas decorations for my friends who still work in the Yellow Pages industry.
It would actually be cool if YP industry were to create a factory to generate recycled furniture out of compressed yellow pages composite — I’ve seen chairs and tables made out of recycled paper before, and I think doing something so visible and useful would likely provide postive publicity to the ailing print directory business.
In a similar vein, the “Hidden Pizza” marketing campaign by Sensis yellow pages company in Australia used recycled material from their yellow pages billboard campaign to cover seats in the restaurant.
If more were done to diffuse the environmental complaints about unwanted phone books from those who no longer use them, it might have reduced hostility towards the industry. For instance, I do not see/hear nearly as much irritation from people about receiving unwanted newspapers in their yards, and this poses much more inconvenience to me in an ongoing basis than phone books do.
Just a few months ago, Google added a content sharing feature for the Google Toobar. The new button surprisingly promotes usage of a few services which are competitive of Google, indicated that Google is aware that they have sufficient numbers of devoted followers to merit inclusion. Content sharing activities are one hallmark of Web 2.0 characteristics, and Google’s addition of this feature which facilitates bookmarking/favoriting, voting, and sharing activities indicates that it’s important enough that marketers need to pay attention to it in their promotion strategies. (more…)
Invasion of the Pod People: Google Zurich
Monday, April 26th, 2010I really don’t know how I missed this UFO sighting, but Google’s offices in Zurich are surrealistic and look almost hallucinogenic. This one looks like a scene out of the SciFi film, “Invasion of the Pod People“:
Google Zurich: Alien Pod Cubicles
I’m well aware of Google’s penchant for whimsical office environments — not only have I seen some of the offices at Google Headquarters a few times, but I also covertly photographed the Google Radio offices here in Dallas-Fort Worth, back when they opened next to my office at Superpages:
Google loves to make their offices playful, giving them a happy, enjoyable atmosphere. They often incorporate bright, primary colors of red, blue, and yellow, which calls to mind their logo colors.
Some have referred to Google’s Headquarters in Mountain View disparagingly as (more…)
Tags: corporate culture, corporate life, Futurism, Google, metropolis, office cubes, office cubicles, office space
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