Joe La Pompe [4], the anonymous French guy who has been publishing twin ads on the web for almost as long as I have been Badlanding ads, has published a book. Alas, it's in French. But even if you don't know French, you can enjoy the ad twins anyway.
Since I can't really read French, not properly anyway, I figured that my review of the book should not be a written one. Here's my chat on Badlanders in general, and how to avoid them.
My neat little automagick link to Amazon widget is not built for french Amazon and I'm forced to link a US-available related book just to make this post work, here is a hardcoded link to the Joe La Pompe book that I'm actually talking about: Nouveau ? (Broché) [5]
When I was in Cannes I had the pleasure of meeting Joe - this is an interview we did in het Palais where we talk abut the book and copy-cat ideas in general. And even other sites that do copy-cat ideas as their main idea - hehe. Before anyone laughs themselves silly at the idea of a ripped-off-idea sites appearing without influence of each other on the web in 1996 and 1998/99, keep in mind that all creatives have been screaming "that was so totally ripped off from X" since at least the creative revolution. Me and Joe just brought it to the web. Either way, we have different styles, I've been badlanding TV commercials a lot as in the case shown here when Resumé put me in the paper 1998 [6] with the headline "hon lägger plagiat på webben" (She puts plagarized ads on the web). There are other sites, like You thought we wouldn't notice [7] that concentrate more high street designs ripping off subculture designs, and websites stealing features and design ideas from one another. There was another one that I can't recall the domain of, which concentrated more on on commercial art copying fine art. Then there are ad sites that plain old copy the above mentioned, right down to the watermarked images from those who posted first. And they thought we wouldn't notice.
I find it rather funny how similarly we've been received, right down to creatives sending us angry emails - and people we know in the real world yelling at our web-alter-ego's. My cover has been blown for quite some time now, I know first hand why Joe wants to keep his face out of the image. After all, we might even have been working in the same office as you. ;)