Building unlikely alliances to save children's lives
Last week the ColaLife animation (below) registered 8,000 views on YouTube. Not bad. But it deserves a much bigger audience – don’t you think?
So last week I wrote to Michael Eavis to see if he’d be willing to show it on the big screens at the Glastonbury Festival. I included the animation on CD. Watch this space!
Views of the ColaLife animation topped 6,000 today and in a search for ‘Project 10 100′ in Google the ColaLife animation is now second only to the Google Project itself! You can view the animation here. If you’ve got a YouTube account please give it 5 stars and make a comment if you have time.
While all this is going on, plans are being drawn up, collaborations built, a giant colalife aidpod commissioned in preparation for a March on London (England) to get people to vote for ColaLife. You can register for a reminder here: colalife.org/vote.
Onwards and upwards.
A small group of us is gathering to plan for the eventually that our entry to Google’s Project 10 to the 100th ColaLife gets through to the final 100. Google will announce the final 100 on 17 March 2009 and then the public will be asked to vote on their favourite idea. Register for a vote reminder here: colalife.org/vote.
The focus of the meeting will be the planning of a voting campaign which will be multi-facetted and swing into action on 17 March if we get through.
At the meeting an exciting new design of the ColaLife AidPod will be unveiled! (Bet you can’t wait!). Shortly afterwards the details will be posted here.
In case you’ve missed it before. Here is our 30 second video that sums up our Project 10 to the 100th entry. The video has had nearly 6,000 views to date. Please go to YouTube to comment on it and give it 5 stars. Thanks.
Google’s trawl for the best ideas in the World (aka Project 10 to the 100th) attracted more than 100,000 entries and ColaLife was one of them. The text of our entry is here and above is the video that Facebook members put together. The video on YouTube has been viewed 4,925 times at the last count which is pretty impressive.
Tomorrow (27/1/09) Google will announce the top 100 ideas and invite people to vote for their favourite. The five winners share $10m to implement their idea. If we get through to the last 100 PLEASE VOTE for ColaLife and help us by ASKING ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO VOTE TOO! Sorry . . . don’t mean to sound desperate 
At the time of writing you can REGISTER TO VOTE HERE.
Of course we might not get through but if we do you’ll hear about it here first.
In this multi-media, web 2.0 world you can’t sit in one place (like your website) and expect everyone to come to you. People are everywhere so you have to be everywhere too if you are going to get noticed. That is why ColaLife has a presence here, on Facebook, on Flickr, on YouTube, on Vimeo, on Twitter, on other people’s blogs and many other places.
Well now we are on eBay too. This will introduce CocaLife to a new group of people and hopefully someone will buy the cards which will mean that we can buy some more and continue to promote the camapign to the (still important) offline world.
Go on! Bid! Click here go to the cards on eBay.
The ColaLife, Four Children A Minute video can’t compete with video clips of Barack Obama but it’s competing pretty effectively with everything else on YouTube. It’s number two in a search for Project 10^100 on YouTube. Second only to the Google video itself. In a Google search for ‘project 10 to the 100th’ it features very highly too.
Thanks to everyone who’s viewed it, embedded it, rated it and favourited it!
To mark the 2,000th viewing of the video we are providing the whole video for download. Right-click here and select ‘Save Link As …’ (6.0MB). It’s in mp4 format and so you should be able to drag it straight into iTunes and onto your iPod.
BUT please go and view the video online as well and if you have a YouTube account please give the video 5 stars, comment and make it a favourite . . . every little helps!
Thanks.
This photo was taken by Teseum – the original is here
Here is an update on the progress of the Coca Cola campaign. The headline is:
HEADLINE: Coca-Cola invites ColaLife to Dar Es Sallaam!
May 1988 – May 2008 – the first 7,305 days – no progress!
May 2008 onwards- the last 180 days – real progress!
Next moves
5,500 children die every day in Africa before the age of 5. This initiative could save thousands and thousands of children’s lives through positive engagement between the private and NGO sector.
Here it is, the 30 sec video to support the ColaLife submission to Goggle’s Project 10^100 (10 to the 100th). Please go and look at it on YouTube. It’s a thing of beauty! Please can I also ask you to comment on it on YouTube and rate it (highly?). It’s worth clicking the ‘watch in high quality’ link to appreciate the detail.
After watching, commenting and rating – that should only take 2 minutes – can I ask you to do one more thing? Please send a link to this page to 10 of your friends and ask them to do the same? Very many thanks.
I want to thank the following people who have dedicated a significant part of their lives over the last 3 days to pull this together: Luke Berry (artist); Sam Berry (Animator); Julian Moore (Sound); Simon Cohen and Howard Lake for creative suggestions.
There’s still time to comment on the text of the application if you can.
Onwards and upwards!
I first found this video heavily embedded in the Save The Children’s Kroo Bay site. But it’s also on YouTube so I’m able to place it right here. This is the sort of despair this campaign is trying to stop.
More videos from Save the Children.
We now have a place to go to monitor all the talk about the ColaLife. The ColaLife Aggregator has been built using Pageflakes and draws items from:
Please leave a comment if you have other sources. Thanks.
