Sunday, January 13, 2008

笑傲江湖

Before I came back to the valley, I was in Hong Kong and bought the third edition of 笑傲江湖. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it's a Chinese martial arts novel. Ask any of your Chinese friends and they can fill you in.

A big fan and admirer of 金庸, I've read all his books many, many times over and over. Lost many hours of sleep in the wee hours of the night doing it. A relative purist when it comes to 金庸 - don't watch the TV and film renditions (aka. gross distortions) of his work.

This third edition of
笑傲江湖 is part of an iniative by the author to revise all his works. I might be slightly biased coming in since I've been so used to the second edition.

My favorite part about the new edition.
When 令狐沖 is learning to play music from盈盈 (then not having revealed who she actually is), there're a couple new paragraphs of addition that analyzes 笑傲江湖之曲. I love this part. It's a little hard to describe in English, but read it and let me know what you think.

Hello.

Okay, guys and girls, this is my first post at blogger. Eventually if I have time, I might move to host this myself on WordPress on my own server, but that is, of course, if I have time. =)

There're lots and lots of topics I'll write about, I think. My main areas of interest are technology, entrepreneurship, Chinese history and literature (I'll be first to admit I'm much less learned in this respect than I hope to be), classical music and other musical styles (Jazz, pop, blah blah blah), the nba, social observations and somewhat philosophical ramblings. If you're interested in none of these, try to stay tuned still. I hope I'll be able to throw in a curve ball once in a whlie.

Now check out this screenshot:



Let me dive into a little context of this screenshot. I was watching a TV episode on abc.com. In general, I think they've done a great job mixing in advertising in a relatively unobtrusive way. The tempo feels right: they serve you ads in a similar timeline as your TV viewing by dividing an 50-minute episode into 5 or 6 chunks, and in between each chunk, they show you ads that you can skip out of after 30 seconds. In this way, they have set up similar expectations for content and ads online and offline.

The interesting part is how they've thrown in an interactive Flash game shown above as one of the ad segments. Kid you not, I spent 5 minutes on this snowball fight game. The hard part was trying to map mouse movements to arm movements on the LHS character. The RHS character is controlled by the game and likes to throw misses to keep you in the game.

Bottomline, we're seeing much more interactive and immersive ads than ever before.

Whether it be games or an immersive branded virtual world, like in Second Life or a custom Flash page that Geico built in an early Facebook ad that I saw a couple months ago. In the Geico example, it shows a party scene of cavemen, where you can look around at stuff inside the room and interact with them.

How about a little bit fun with ads?