PKB

Chris just blogged it. Get the Joga.com Companion now, and turn on Firefox’s latent soccer powers!

*Required legal disclaimer: The data displayed in the screen shot, including scores, player names and team names are not actual and are provided only as an example.

This is pretty random.

I was reading A VC tonight and noticed a little animated thingy in the upper right corner of the page. A thingy whose little pixel eyeballs were tracking my mouse pointer. I clicked play and was treated to a lip-synched animation of Fred’s Miami Heat NBA Finals prediction.

The people behind SitePal, which is the official name for the thingy, have 6 good reasons why you ought to fork over the $9.95 for your own avatar. It’s a marketing thingy.

I didn’t bite. But the demo’s fun. I was reminded of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. One of his theories for why comics opt for less verisimilitude in their illustrative style is the higher degree of self-identification a reader has with lower-res visuals.

In other words, the more-Peanuts-like your characters, the more likely readers will identify with and thereby share the emotions the comic book people they’re looking in on are experiencing.

So it makes a little sense to me that a company would try to get their marketing going on with animated, illustrated characters, who are lip-synching to a sales pitch as they follow your mouse pointer. It’s lizard-brain interactive, and probably sort of novel the first time you see this. The 3rd or 10th time probably not so much.

Still.

Photography is aces. But illustration’s got something going for it that I’m interested in exploring, especially for another visual refresh of our web sites coming up this fall.

Postscript: I must, however, swear now that there will be no talking, mouse-pointer following, marketing thingies on our site.