Hip Hop was born in the South Bronx.  BronxRhymes uncovers the history of Hip Hop in the borough by tagging historically important locations with rhymes. These rhymes illuminate the significance of the locations, and issue a rhyming challenge.

Posters appear at each location and invite viewers to respond with their own rhymes via text message. The BronxRhymes website is an evolving archive of the collected rhymes, a reflection of the community, and a way to reinsert the hip hop past into present-day South Bronx.

TextMarks was proud to provide the text-messaging support this mixed media art and public awareness campaign and congratulates Masha Ioveva and Claudia Bernett of interactive marketing agency R/GA for their vision and execution, Turbulence for the grant for the project, and everybody else involved.

For more information:

Bronx Rhymes Flickr Stream

MediaShift Spotlight (PBS)

The Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project is the country’s oldest and largest non-partisan youth voter mobilization campaign. Over the past twenty-five years, they’ve run massive voter registration and get out the vote drives that have turned out millions of young people to vote.

For 2008, the New Voters Project added a set of tech tools to complement its traditional tactics – including a fresh new website, a Facebook application, and a cutting-edge voter registration widget. In addition, they wanted to find ways to utilize text messaging. Their audience – college students – texts each other all the time and it seemed like there should be ways to put this to use to help promote voting.

They chose to use Textmarks as a way to get the word out, because “it was an easy way to quickly take advantage of texting tools.”

When students text STUDENTVOTE to 41411, they get back a reply that says “Register to vote at www.StudentVote.org. Make sure to forward this to 10 of your friends!”

Students on over 100 colleges have been plastering campuses with signs that say “text studentvote to 41411.” In addition, students have been taking a more active approach to promoting the service, by stopping students on campus and asking them to send the text right there. When they get back the automatic reply, they’re then asked to immediately forward the message to at least ten of their friends.

So far, nearly 3000 students have used the service, and they’ve forwarded the studentvote message on to over 20,000 of their friends. It’s proved to be a fun and effective way to promote voter registration and spread the word about the campaign.

For more information about the Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project, visit www.NewVotersProject.org.

Webmonkey just published a great tutorial to help you get started with a simple request/response SMS text messaging app powered by TextMarks. Their example app lets you find out sunrise/sunset times for any location by simply texting e.g. “sunrise portland or” to 41411.

« Click for Webmonkey tutorial

TextMarks user Jesse Andrews saw this tutorial, and in only 14 minutes built his own app to lookup ISBN numbers by SMS! Read about his experience:

Google, Amazon, and TextMark (and web.py) have made building an SMS app trivial and fun. Also the user experience is much nicer than with Twitter. Users of my twitter bots have to: 1) follow the bot, 2) private messages d amazon [ISNB].