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With the launch of their new website, Modernista shows they do (disclaimer: judging by a Google blog search I am pretty slow on this). Rather than displaying their content within a typical agency site format, Modernista took the concept of a social media hub to the extreme, allowing (arguably) the best in breed site for each type of content do the heavy lifting for them with just a simple DHTML overlay allowing the user to navigate between them.

Once I realized the conceit of the site, half the fun became guessing which service they would use for each type of content (spoiler: they made all the obvious choices). Their print work is all displayed through Flickr, categorized through the usage of albums and tags to allow users to navigate the work by client and category. Their television spots are brought to you by YouTube with playlists allowing users to view the videos by client. Similarly, all their interactive work is presented through a link to… you guessed it… del.icio.us, again using tags to categorize their links. Finally, their about and news sections are brought to you by Wikipedia and Google News respectively. One of the best things about this site is that as Modernista is taking you through all these sites, you can hit their escape button and be released into the familiar comforts of whichever social media space you happen to be in. In addition to a great conceit, the site creates a fantastic social media ecology, drastically increasing the reach of Modernista’s content (they could have improved the strength of this effect by cross-linking all their channels to one another rather than just back to their own domain and by using some of the third party Facebook applications to bring their other channels into their Page, but that could be nitpicking on my part).

One critcism I do have of the site is Modernista’s use of “web” spelling in the menu, which may indicate a bit of a shortcoming in understanding of the interactive space on Modernista’s behalf. People only intentionally spell things like that if they are a fledgling start-up and the correctly spelled domain will cost a fortune or if they are a really cool 16 year old on MySpace. Other than that, I really have to applaud Modernista for a fantastic concept with a strong execution.

Update: Wikipedia clearly doesn’t like how Modernista has co-opted their service, but instead of taking the entry down, they have posted a large warning on the top of it. I find this surprising given how protective Wikipedia’s admins are over the neutrality of the site. I would guess they haven’t taken it down because the way Modernista has used the page isn’t occurring within Wikipedia and therefore is not covered in their terms of use.

I had been meaning to put this up for a while, but it sort of got lost in the shuffle, so it may not be as hot a topic as it was about a month ago (especially given how things have gone for Ron Paul), but I think it is interesting nonetheless. Anyways, a while back, Duncan Riley at Tech Crunch had posted an article questioning why Ron Paul stories had been buried on Digg. He put forward two scenarios, the first one being that the long rumored Digg super users had buried the Ron Paul stories, the second one being that Digg suppressed the stories to support their own agendas. While I certainly wouldn’t want to question the power of the Digg super users, I did come across something that might lead some credence to Duncan’s second theory.

Last year, a service called Subvert and Profit launched, which pays users to vote for articles and websites on Digg and StumbleUpon and videos on YouTube. Subvert and Profit’s clients pay them $2 for each vote on any of the above services, of which Subvert and Profit passes on $1 to the end user. However, in order to protect the identity of their clients as well as to throw YouTube, Digg and Stumble Upon off the trail, the user is given four random items to vote upon in addition to the item that has been paid for. Unfortunately for Subvert and Profit and its clients, this cloaking mechanism doesn’t work too well until you have reasonable scale and diversity of clients. Last month I noticed that each “mission” I received contained one Ron Paul link among a bunch of links that I would have a hard time imagining anybody paying to have bumped. Clearly Ron Paul or perhaps a fervent Ron Paul supporter had been attempting to promote these articles. I would assume that if Digg is as “committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing” as they say they are, they would likely have several Subvert and Profit accounts to keep an eye on who is buying votes and probably wouldn’t be too hesitant to bury articles that have been given an unfair advantage.