Two years ago, the main portuguese brewery Super Bock created the main blog award event in Portugal, with over 2000 blogs competing to be elected Super Blog. In 2009, we have the 2nd edition with a few improvements, and a chance to see how Portugal’s blogosphere survived the pressure of social networks and microblogging.

Disclaimer: I work for Fullsix, the interactive agency responsible for the online campaign.The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer or Super Bock.

Registrations are still open until the next 23rd February for Portuguese blogs, with the voting taking place afterward until March 24th. Popular vote will elect the top 5 for each category, and the jury will select a category winner and a Super Blog (with a €1500 prize). Special categories include Best Microblog, Blog Angola (for blogs about or written by Angolans), Best Design and Best New Blog.

On the Awards website you can find more about the 14 categories, how to submit your blog and discover hundreds of blogs submitted since the competition started 2 months ago. There’s also the Awards blog, with lots of tips and tricks about blogging, the competition and other useful info.

This year’s edition has Maria João Nogueira, Pedro Rolo Duarte, Fernando Alvim and Alberta Marques Fernandes judging the finalists, elected by popular vote.

You still have a few days left to register your blog, with a few more chances for the following categories: Angola, Science, Corporate, Politics & Economy, Social Causes and Microblogging (there’s lot’s of good tweeple and tumblers out there).

As a sizeable chunk of this blog’s audience is from Portugal, thought this might be of interest. If you’re not keen on registering, any feedback is appreciated to improve one of the few initiatives that recognize bloggers in Portugal. Either that, or we can just have a chilled Super Bock the next time we meet.

Adverblog and Bannerblog have already started collecting Christmas cards, and i’m giving them a help with 2 new Christmas themed websites, were yours truly was involved.

First, the disclaimer: LG and CTT are Fullsix Portugal clients. But i really feel you’ll appreciate these projects.

PedeAoBarbas.com

In most countries, Santa Claus is depicted with a beard, which in Portuguese translates to “barba”. LG Electronics and MediaMarket (an electronics store) took the term literally and gave a chance for everyone to ask the bearded man their gifts for this season. But a humourous twist: the bearded men is actually named “Barbas” and is one of the most popular Benfica supporters, the football club with most fans in our country.

At PedeAoBarbas.com (ask barbas), “Barbas” and his sexy assistant are watching the videos consumers recorded at MediaMarkt stores, asking “Barbas” for their Christmas LG presents. The videos will be published online during the next 3 weekends, and all you have to do is gather your friends to convince the new Santa “Barbas” Claus.

This was one of the most fun projects i’ve worked in a while, with a charismatic football figure known by at least 6 million people. Just shows how brands focus too much on celebrity players and forget about the true fans. I’ll be attending the match tomorrow against Académica and perhaps once again have a chat with “O Barbas”.

Meu Postal De Natal 3D

Yep, it’s Augmented Reality. I know, i know, it’s hype and all that, but forget the gimmicks and just appreciate the lovely illustrations. And if you have the time and want to surprise with a different Christmas card (at least for those not on the AR hype), print it and send it by mail to your dear ones, as long as they have an webcam available.

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No, i won’t post a screenshot of the AR experience. Go try it yourself

What’s so exciting about this? The client is CTT, the national post service in Portugal and one of the oldest public companies in Portugal but that isn’t what stops them to embrace new technologies and experiment.

So, i hope you enjoy these ones early because tradition says that in the next few weeks you will be fed up with Xmas cards.

Just noticed today that ComScore started measuring Internet audience in Portugal, and the numbers do look solid.

The study points to more than 3.8 million people age 15 and older, spending an average 1.9 hours online per person during the month, numbers that will probably be discussed the next 26th November at CAEM i-com National Roundtable (on Twitter @icomglobal).

The last few months i’ve also noticed a renewed interest on giving solid data about Internet behavior, as the market grows bigger with droves of new users consuming more bandwidth (either broadband or mobile).

The data on social networks is finally shedding some public light (disclaimer: Fullsix Portugal has also some panel data on user behavior), with no surprises on the top place for Hi5.com. Facebook numbers show some solid growth, but i’m still a bit far on my prediction that Hi5 would be surpassed by the end of 2009 (even if i seriously suspect that already happened in terms of active users). Twitter is a lot bigger than i expected, and something that most marketeers in my country have been ignoring.

Source: ComScore

It’s been a while since my last Shamess PromoTion, where i highlight projects created by friends, mostly from Portugal. The project i’ll be describing today was developed by SAPO, where some good friends managed to deliver one of the most solid web applications i’ve seen lately, specially considering that Lisbon isn’t exactly Silicon Valley.

So, what’s Pond ?  It’s an aggregator and publishing tool for social media services, that allows anyone to manage their social graph on a single place. You can import your friend list from social web services, merge friend contacts and update your social web status on the web, mobile or desktop.

The wide range of platform support is certainly the highlighted feature:  Besides the web, Android, and Symbian mobile apps are available (iPhone soon) and desktop software (Mac, Windows and Linux) will also be released.

Currently Pond supports Twitter, Flickr, SAPO Fotos, YouTube, SAPO Vídeos, Facebook and SAPO Blogs, as well any RSS or Atom feed. It will surely be a great way to introduce the power of social web to a wider portuguese audience, since the application is sponsored by TMN — the largest mobile carrier in Portugal (disclaimer: TMN is a Fulllsix client) — PT Comunicações and Meo (it will be interesting to see a social app on a IPTV service: social TV).

With smartphones becoming more affordable, growth on the social web will be fueled by mobile web with centralizing services like Pond or Vodafone 360 taking full advantage our digital identities. I only wish i could add more metadata to my friends info, like birthdays, tags or events. Give me that, and i’ll be a happy ? Ponder ?

Great work, SAPO team!

P.S.: the service is on beta — invitation only for the moment — with early registration for TMN clients.

Taking place in Lisbon, the next November 14th, Upload 2.0 intends to discuss current web trends and their impact on Marketing and Communication strategies.

Organized by a team of active participants on Portugal’s social web, the event gathers several practitioners sharing their experiences and ideas on a series of short talks about the role of new media, consumer empowerment and new models of publishing. From marketeers, students, journalists, bloggers or just people with passion for the new social web, you’re all invited to register.

I’ll be giving a short talk on UFOs (Unidentified Flashy Objects). If you find the title unusual, then show up and listen the rest of the content.

Speakers also include Ricardo Teixeira, Rodrigo Moita de Deus, Filipe Carrera, Luís Rasquilha, Fernando Batista, Daniel Caeiro, Vasco Trigo, Paulo Querido, and Sérgio Bastos with panels moderated by Rodrigo Saraiva, João Morais and Domingos Pereira.

There’s no excuse of being at work (it’s on a Saturday) or being expensive (ticket at 28€ / 20€ for students). Find all about it at UploadLisboa.com or get the updates at twitter/@UploadLisboa.

P.S.:
Speaking of events, today it’s Ignite Portugal, where Alt.Prt.Sc will be recording a special videocast and my colleague Tiago is giving the Ignite talk “How to manage impossible projects with agility”. See you later.

After asking last month at Google Portugal when street view would become available, they finally unveiled the map feature for the two major cities in Portugal, Lisbon and Oporto.

Now, time to start peeking and find those awkward situations, like the one below at Parque Eduardo VII (you’ll get the joke if you’re familiar with Lisbon).

Since Cannes doesn’t matter anymore, we’d better start thinking about a new kind of awards, that are somehow different from the usual creative masturbation, more in tune with the future of advertising.

Lisbon Ad School and Torke are announcing the first Guerrilla Advertising Awards, showcasing works in categories as diverse as ambush marketing, urban intervention, PR Stunt, ambient media or viral and interactive. And just to make sure guerrilla is for everyone, there’s an Old Croquette Awards, for senior creatives.

You can submit your work for FREE, as a team or on behalf of your agency, with winners announced the next July, 24th.

Disclaimer: I’ll be one of the online categories jurors

Nurturing the needs of geek advancement, 2 great projects have shown up recently in Portugal where technology and creativity meet, with huge doses of experimentation.

AltLab

Taking the work of AudienciaZero and bringing it to Lisbon, the collective explores alternative media and physical computing every Tuesday, from 19h to 24h, at Geraldine.

Diodo

A new organization promoting the learning, research and experimentation of digital technologies, bringing together a diverse community on a open environment, exploring connections between art, technology and society.

Both projects take a local approach of the community work by MakeMagazine or CreateDigitalMusic, by Peter Kirn. So don’t be shy and join the Portuguese hackers.

I tried. I honestly tried to use AdSense Competitive Filter to block the ads of one of the most annoying display advertisers in my country.

But Movilisto [Buongiorno] ads kept coming back to my blog. With those pesky “Teste da Morte” ads. And now it got even worse with a repugnant “Máquina dos Peidos” (Fart Machine) ad. The company advertises premium mobile services, and if you google them, you’ll see that consumers aren’t that happy with their shady tactics.

They keep wearing out any credibility of display advertising in the country, and since Google doesn’t seem to provide a decent ad rating tool to users or publishers, I’ll take a stance as a blogger: I’m completely removing AdSense from this blog.

My fellow readers: you don’t have to put up with this ad junk. The amount of their interruption/noise/bad taste is one of the causes of banner blindness and also of the decreasing eCPMs for publishers. And until Google fixes this relevance problem, they are no longer welcomed as an ad network here.

What i can do as a blogger is to share this problem with my audience, some of them working at Portuguese online media companies and advertisers, so they could start demanding Google to severely limit the impressions of Movilisto and provide tools to improve the ad experience. Enough pressure will provide better ad quality, a good way to increase the price of their own display inventory while providing a safe haven to creative display advertising that is relevant to consumers.

What i can do as a blogger, is to ask my readers to protest directly in their blogs or Twitter and let their friends know #movilistosucks.