A Draggable Cipher-Reading HTML5 iPad Ad!

Whatever you may think of White Collar, or USA Network shows in general,* you iz craaaaazy if you don't think this idea rocks well. It's like cereal box cipher readers for a whole new generation of kids that never grow up.

I'll go ahead and label this some "objectively brilliant shit" from Glow Interactive. Because I swear I just hugged myself. I swear. I haven't felt this excited since those Tomb Raider Rich Media ads.**

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Hey, a Mobile-Optimised Agency Site!

I'll warn you in advance by admitting I'm not a developer (a fact that makes me very sad). So if at any point in this article you find I'm talking out of my ass, please correct me, and harshly.

Last month Nick Jones of Narrow Design (@narrowd) and McKinney (@mckinney) published screenshots of how the sites of major ad agencies - you know, the ones that claim to "get" digital - render on an iPhone. Most of them don't at all, or do with limited information, because most of them are heavily reliant on Flash. The list spread like anthrax in the agency social media sphere.

I like Flash and I get that Steve Jobs has a beef with Adobe or whatever. But in an environment where technology evolves faster than you can spin and say "hey presto," your digital front lines should be as lean and agnostic as possible: you don't know where that next client is coming from, or who's going to suddenly want to hit up your site in the middle of a conference from their handy-dandy first-gen iPad.

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HTML5 Developers: Starter on Microdata

Webmonkey provides a nice little explanation of what microdata is, plus a very good example and a link to data-vocabulary.org, a good starting point for ensuring that search spiders don't lose the plot.

SEO: still important, and be glad. The roadmaps that exist today are sufficiently rich that it doesn't have to feel like alchemy.