TMW Ideas

Panorama on the BBC last night made interesting viewing.

They are lamenting the upload of videos depicting criminal activity on site such as Youtube and Liveleak.
Assaults in slapping (I decline to call them happy slapping) videos, gang related activity being highlighted including a lot of gun posturing, various street fights.

A lot of it is hype, one of the many repeated clips was of some youths letting down the tyres of a police car which whilst being somewhat anti-social doesn't make you public enemy number one.
Youtube's response was pretty mealy-mouthed and they put themselves firmly in the “We just carry content, we don't create it. We don't wish to be censors.” Although this doesn't really chime true when you consider parent company Google's relationship with the Chinese state censorship apparatus.
The wider issue for Youtube means that if they start employing people to scan for unpleasant content like this then those people should probably start removing copyrighted content as well and Youtube will go back to being a home video library and a $1.9bn valuation seems a tad high.

Liveleak weren't even remotely apologetic and insist the content uploaded by users is a reflection of society.

Most important to we at TMW is the way that online advertising revenue is supporting these sites and that a lot of very big UK brands (O2, Virgin, Orange among others) were having banner content served up next to online classics as 'Best streetfights' and 'Merseyside police scum'.

However, the brands have all told Panorama that they knew nothing of the adverts - and have since ensured that they have been taken down.

Almost all blamed rogue advertising networks for putting them onto the website. Both Carphone Warehouse and O2 have sacked the advertising networks responsible.

Guy Philpott of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which represents online advertising companies, said that brands were often not aware of where advertising networks were placing their adverts.
He said: “This is pretty lamentable isn't it? They (the brands) don't understand what happened in the chain for them to end up on this site. Online advertising is a fairly new science, you know, and it's grown a lot in the last couple of years. And there is an education process to be done.”

You have been warned.

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This is interesting - a company called tailgate have developed a banner with e-commerce capabilituies. We have always advocated interactive banners - allowing people to register or sign up in a banner rather than having to click through. Generally, people have purpose on the web and don't want to be distracted. Or they do want to be distracted but rarely by banners. This takes the thought a step forward. Very exciting….

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This is a fascinating essay by Danah Boyd on the class divide prevalent in US users of MySpace and Facebook.
I spotted it on Slashdot earlier this week and there are a whole host of similar articles that have been published in the last few days referring to some research by the University of California, Berkeley. Also the Guardian, Big Shiny Thing and the BBC have picked up on the issue.

Most interesting to me is what this divide means for the US military and how the powers that be have blocked access to Myspace for service personnel using military network resources but not Facebook.

The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers' MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I've watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren't quite sure what they are doing in Iraq.

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Here's a helpful map to guide you… (also indicates the rough size of online communities, although I think Facebook might be growing right now).

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(I) realized he was an 11-year-old boy, complete with squeaky, prepubescent vocal chords… …he was a terrific World of Warcraft player… …He seemed equally weirded out by me — a 38-year-old guy who undoubtedly sounds more like his father than anyone he recognizes as a “gamer.”

Now I'm happy playing Nintendo with various nephews and nieces but the make believe element is less crucial(I'm not nor do I pretend to be an Italian-American plumber or his brother) as we are just competing for fun and we don't arrive at the game in our game guises so the social adjustment isn't so strange.

But many players are now discovering that voice tweaks the social environment — and sometimes kills off part of what made their favorite world so much fun.

There are some interesting points about how gender issues become prevalent again when voice is used more and I expect before too long the voice chat services will offer some 'skins' for users to disguise their true gender.
Surely all characters in WoW will end up sounding like this.

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Microsoft seem to be a hive of activity at the moment. Their Digital Advertising Solutions wanted to dramtise the deterioration in the relationship between advertisier and consumer. So they made an ad. Oh, the irony. It's quite good actually.

They also blogged about the process and why they were doing it, even including the agency's pitch. Have a look. After two weeks the ad has had 75,000 views.

“We want to try and tell that digital media is not about technology but about quality of communication, about the interaction between 2 people. There is no better medium than a movie to symbolize the one-to-one communication between people, in this case between an advertiser and a consumer.”

I'm not sure that's entirely true - I think he meant “show” rather than symbolize. It's an interesting appraoch, and judging from the comments and posts about it (including this one, I suppose) they have really engaged their target audience. A good example of demonstrating instead of telling. I'll be interested to see how I can reconnect with my consumer via some XBox 360 in-game advertising. That said, Burger King did great business in the States when it gave away Xbox games.

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Watch this video. It's quite amusing.

Towards the end, there is something written on the white car. On the back window. When you see it, Google that phrase.

Clever, huh?

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It's becoming like a regular thing, this. Maybe I should add a category…

Well, here's two nice examples. Thomson Holidays have relaunched their website, and there are a few interesting things about it. Mainly, they seem to have embraced digital in a way that most traditional holiday providers haven't. First, by recognising that people are moving away from package holidays, and deciding to live with it - they offer individual elements as well as packages, and make it easy.

Second, they have recognised the whole social side, and embedded Google Maps and Flickr into their site. Granted, it doesn't seem to work brilliantly at the moment, but I'm not going to criticise them for trying. I think it's great. (An interesting take on user generated content - they stream slideshows from flickr, so use a site where people are already generating content, rather than starting all over again and attempting to “own” it)

Secondly, here's a nice little thing from BA - we didn't do it but it's still good. As part of their sponsorship of “Taste of London” they have built a wee microsite. There is a “culinary maps” function, which looks very much like a customised Google map. They thing I like about this is that they haven't bothered with the whole user generated thing at all - they got experts to contribute. Which, given that it's a short-term site for a specific event, makes perfect sense. It's a little bit rude to ask someone to submit their thoughts and recommendations as part of a six-week campaign, then deleting them all.

Finally, a Google maps apps - A guide to worldwide flooding if the seas continue to rise.

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You may have seen a story about children on Iran's death row in Metro yesterday. Here is a link to the flickr stream, (not given in the original story, for some reason). It's nice to see social media used for something other than having your house trashed or attempting to sell stuff, but the actual campaign seems a bit incoherent - it says in the article that Amnesty set the sites up, but there is no mention of the campaign on the Amnesty site, that I can see. (Hang on - found it. In the end) There is also no explicit link to the flickr and myspace pages on the stopchildexecutions.com site, apart from some links buried in the profile of one of the founders.

To date, Delara Darabi has 1,572 myspace friends. Lynx's Towelboy managed 1,331. Lily Allen has 250,101.

I suppose the myspace thing is a good way to build awareness, but I can't see it ever having the same impact as the letter writing that Amnesty used so successfully.

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Here's a great link to a site called Bokardo. They look at Social Design, which is essentially designing for Web 2.0, recognising and interacting with social networks. There's a wealth of great information on there.

An interesting post on why you should invest in social features

A link to a Pew report on how teens protect their privacy online

A great diagram demonstrating how Amazon use social features to enhance their business.

(Originally spotted by Fallon)

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Will Brooks, who occasioanlly freelances here, has come up with an cracking idea. For £35 you get to join a fund that will then buy a football club. The “owners” then get to vote on transfers, team selections, and other major club decisions.

It was picked up by the BBC, and Will put it best…

“I remember in the 1980s going to Craven Cottage when the club was broke. I looked around at the 3,000 fans who had turned up and was left thinking that if everyone chipped in we could buy the club - but then there was no way of mobilising that feeling. The internet changes all that.”

Very true - it's a great use of the internet's ability to mobilise crowds, but also to build a community around a shared interest. Join!

www.myfootballclub.co.uk

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I bang on about RSS feeds a lot. They are vitally important, and will become more and more important as RSS readers become standard functions on web browsers. In fact, we'll probably spend as much time understanding how to write well for an RSS feed as we do headlines and email subject lines.

RSS feeds also change the game - given that a consumer has to decide that they will take your RSS feed, you have to work hard to earn your place in the list…

Anyway, here is a fascinating example of how one US dog site has used RSS to deliver up-to-the-minute news on a huge story in the dog world - apparently some dogs in the US have died after eating contaminated pet food.

(Via Fallon)

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Had a very interesting chat with Dvaid Burden of Daden on Friday. While we have dabbled in Second Life, David has been involved in virtual worlds since the mid 90's, so has seen a lot. We had a wander around Second Life with him, and he introduced There, Multiverse, Croquet and a few others. There's a handy overview here.

Key points were -

Virtual worlds will not replace other media, they will work alongside them (he described VW's as “meta” media)
A presence in a virtual world for a brand will predominently be a sales, PR or marketing tool. (The car driving experience, for example, isn't going to convince you to buy a Chrysler)
A key benefit of Second Life is the way some previously disenfranchised people - whether disabled or just plain shy - can fully participate in the community.
The average Second Life user is 33, and approximately 50% Male/Female.
14% of men have female avatars. Only 4% of women have male avatars. (Mind you, some have foxes or dinosaurs, so I'm not sure what that means….)

UPDATE.
Interesting press release from Gartner - 80% of regular internet users will have a second life by 2011……

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If you wanted me to summarise the difference between good, nimble, successful companies that use digital, web 2.0, whatever you want to call it, I'd say it's the developer button.

Some examples. First, and closest to my heart, gambling. The betting world has been taken by storm by Betfair, possibly the most solid business model I've seen in Web 2.0. Betfair allows people to bet against each other, rather than a bookmaker. When the bets are settled, Betfair takes a 5% cut of the winnings. (Currently, £13,400,000 has been wagered on the winner of the Premiership this year. 5% of that is about £670,000)

Obviously, it is in Betfair's interest to have as many people using the site as possible. It makes no difference to them whether people win or lose, they still get their 5%.

So, Betfair have a developer programme. Basically, you join up, they open up their API, and you can build, sell, use applications based on the data that drives Betfair. This obviously leads to more activity, which leads to more profits. Everyone's a winner. Except the losers.

Look also at flickr, which has masses of cool stuff, most of it free and most of it made by amatuers, as has Facebook, Google et al. All of these sites have a small army of helpers beavering away, making them more useful, more fun, more interesting.

It's always worth thinking about how clients could use this type of activity to really add value to someone, as opposed to building a website from scratch…

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CLICK HERE…www.t-mobile.co.uk/music to see the new and improved music site for T-Mobile which encompasses both T-Mobile Street Gigs and now Transmission with T-Mobile too (Channel 4's hottest music show fronted by Steve Jones and Lauren Laverne which starts this Friday night).

The new elements are built onto the existing site which was completed in record time back in January following our digital pitch win. I'm delighted to say we've done it again, and virtually re-built the entire site in next to no time. It looks great, it sounds great, and I'm really proud to have been part of the team to deliver it.

Why not also sign-up to become a friend on our lovely new myspace page too whilst you're here…

www.myspace.com/yourtmobilemusic

Star performers (who deserve many thanks for endless late nights and stress) include…

Michelle Kelly
Ciara Meaney
Peter Mungeam
Gerard Myers
Windahl Finnigan
Millie Graham Campbell
Sam Cottrell
Luke Clark
Steven Haycock
Gareth James
Jon Menzies-Smith
Duncan Scott
Rolff Kruger
Marie Foster
Duncan Butt
Ben Winter
Sarah Guest
Chris Dale
Jamie Huxley
Stuart Mallinson
Miriam Foster

Apologies if I've missed anyone!

Watch this space for future updates about T-Mobile's home for music!

Thanks

posted on behalf of Rob Carter
Group Account Director

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It's nice to know that some of this Web 2.0 stuff is creeping into popular consciousness, particularly following some early predictions on the levelling off of blogging. ( I have to say I agree with the main thrust of this article, but as a journalist he's filtering blogs through his own lens - the delivery of interesting information to people. But most people use their blogs to keep in touch, update people, or just say hello - which is why it can be easily superceeded by Facebook, MySpace et al. Most people's version of interesting information is “I'm having a party!”. )

This wee clip from South Park is, as usual, bang on the money

Thanks to Asi for the spot.

As for this - well…

Thanks to Stuart for finding this, erm, gem…

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So, Google have lauched Google Maps, with a Map function (groovy). And Microsft Live is looking good, particularly their ariel photography of major cities.

Here are two exaples of them in action - first, BMW's new “Lifestyle” (sigh) portal for the 1 Series - 1off They used Google maps as their weapon of choice, and very nice it looks as well. I wrote a review of Bodega's and it made it very easy to put on the map - I just had to enter the postcode.

Second up, Visa's “Love every day” promo (www.loveeveryday.com. sigh..I'll come back to that) uses Microsoft Live to invite people to post up their “Daily Discoveries”. You have to use a push pin to mark the location on the map, but apart from being mind-numbingly slow it's fairly easy.

The thing I can't get my head round is why anyone in their right mind would
a. Post a load of Club/Bar reviews to either of these sites
b. Ever, ever use these as reference, when their are a host of organisations whose job it is to list all bars/clubs in London, and rate them.

(BTW, the loveeveryday.com thing - why not just have it as the main thing on Visa.co.uk? Admittedly, there is a prominent link, but this does lead to the strange case of having Visa say “Discover how we can help you Love Every Day”, followed by “Chip Cards and New Solutions” and “Card Safety and Budgeting”. Love every day through careful budgeting! I do like the old fashioned clock at the top though.)

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One of the exciting things about web 2.0 is seeing it applied in a genuinely useful way. Seeing new technology improve and enhance our lives.

James Pendleton Estate Agents popped a leaflet through Laura's door, with an offer to win a Video iPod. The reason was to publicise their new podcast service. Which is genius.

You can subscribe to the podcast, but this page allows you to sign up to an RSS feed, alerting you to each new podcast. They've got all the bases covered. Although their RSS symbol is not one I've seen before. You can also see the videos on YouTube -

Great stuff.

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Cyber Journalist have formulated a blogger's code of ethics. I quite like it, although you'll see a debate in the comments below the post. I have some sympathy with the anarchist view that bloggers should do what they please and let people vote with their feet (fingers? mice?). In any case, it is a useful guide if you are starting to post.

Cheers to Fallon for the spot (they've got a good blog, they have. (I'm interested by Aki's comment on nicking images from google to illustrate posts. I know Russell advocates the interestingness of always having a picture, but I guess he'd tell you to go out and take one yourself.

Anyhow - this is quite a funny take on Google images.)

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BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight Home | Monday 8 January
There are times when I get thoroughly dis-heartened with all the trappings of this modern society and just want to go and live in one of those experimental communities where the participants live like neolithic humans. I'm sure that I'm not alone in this feeling and this time of year is probably a high water point for it. However, one of the things that I never get pi55ed off with is my mobile phone. I'm firmly of the belief that the phone is my servant and not my master and regularly choose not to answer a call much to the surprise of the people around me. And so to the point of this post. The BBC's Newsnight are running a series of items under the banner 'Geek Week' and last night's instalment (the first) was a fascinating and thoroughly uplifting analysis of the impact of mobile telephony on Kenyan society. Not only has the technology allowed Kenya to skip a costly infrastructure upgrade (have you seen the cost of copper these days?) which would probably never have happened anyway but it enabled a number of services that just don't exist in UK like P2P cash transfers.
Check it out on the BBC media player.
Recommended

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BY JO STEELE - Wednesday, January 3, 2007
Reported in the Metro

A band describing themselves as 'just a bunch of blokes from London' are considering doing battle with one of the world's biggest brands in a row over alleged plagiarism.

Ska band 7 Seconds of Love claim an advert aired by Coca-Cola in Argentina resembles an animated video for their online track, Ninja ? right down to the song itself.

The unsigned band's video, released on websites such as MySpace and YouTube, features a cat bouncing around in a ninja suit.

It was created by lead singer Joel Veitch, 32, the freelance animator behind the extremely popular website rathergood.com.

Follow this link to view the videos and full story on Metro.

There's also this blog by Rob Manuel on the issue in December with numerous responses.

Just shows how careful you need to be that your ideas are truly original!

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It is now time to vote in this year's bloggies. Get busy!

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A discussion about Web 2.0?s effect on society with Andreas Kluth, technology correspondent, The Economist.

When the hype dies down by Andreas Kluth
From The World in 2007 print edition, The Economist

After a bout of silliness, Web 2.0 will in 2007 begin to change mainstream society, says Andreas Kluth

Silicon Valley?s culture is not, generally speaking, big on irony. Almost nobody in the valley thinks it is ironic that Tim O?Reilly, a publisher in the San Francisco Bay Area, chose the term ?Web 2.0? in 2003 primarily as a rallying cry for a valley that was in a deep depression because it had indulged in excess and hype on an epic scale during the late 1990s. So here is that same valley, indulging in much the same excess and hype, only now under the banner ?Web 2.0?. Whatever the term may have meant in 2003 - more dynamic web pages, in essence - there is now little it does not mean. Does it have something to do with ?user-generated content?? It must be Web 2.0. Does it ?harness collective intelligence?? Then it is surely Web 2.0. Is the word ?social? in the business plan? Web 2.0.

• As we head into 2007, there are by some counts more than 400 social-networking sites, all trying to become the next MySpace; more than 200 web-video sites, all trying to become another YouTube; more than 300 ?social-bookmarking? sites, and hundreds of ?meta-sites? that ?aggregate? the other sites by spitting out computer-generated lists of hyperlinks.

Rhetorically, the entrepreneurs behind these sites usually claim that they will make money from ?advertising?. In reality, most hope to sell themselves to Google, Yahoo!, News Corporation or one of the other ?new? or ?old? media giants long before they have to prove any revenue model.

The irony is also philosophical in nature. The ethos of Silicon Valley is libertarian and individualist to a fault. Yet a great many of these same rugged individualists, under the banner of Web 2.0, now profess faith in a new sort of collectivism, the ?hive mind? or collective consciousness that allegedly arises out of all the ?synapses? (ie, hyperlinks) of this newly emerging web. As Jaron Lanier, the valley?s most prominent gadfly, puts it, it is as though technology?s libertarians had unwittingly become ?digital Maoists?. Wikipedia, a phenomenal success of intellectual collectivism in one specific area of human knowledge (ie, encyclopedic, and ideally in scientific topics), is held up as the model for ?liberating? human thought. Books, once they are digitised and hyperlinked, are expected to merge into a world brain.

In 2007 this nonsense will subside, and with much less collateral damage than was caused during the dotcom bust. The previous bubble was blown on Wall Street, and thus on Main Street, as ordinary investors put their savings into dotcoms and lost them. This one is a private-equity bubble that will deflate without pain to small investors. This time, the Utopian and dystopian exaggerations of Silicon Valley will stay largely within the valley, for its own future amusement.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world - people who may be hearing the words ?blog?, ?wiki? and ?podcast? for the first time - will begin to use these new media as they become simple and ubiquitous, just as e-mail became truly simple and ubiquitous only when Hotmail made it so in 1997. Slowly but surely, these technologically unpretentious people will spend less time vegetating in front of the box and instead become their own television and radio programmers, listening to and watching their chosen entertainment on their iPods and other screens as they please. They will gradually lose interest in the mass media and defect to ?personal? media.

They will also begin to participate as creators. Ever more love-struck parents will ?produce? media content - baby photos and videos - and upload it to the web, where ever more besotted grandparents will form micro-audiences to ?consume? this content, which to them will seem the best ever produced. More amateurs will make a name for themselves for their creativity on the web, and will then happily get hired by a big media company in order to make an old-fashioned living as professionals. But most amateurs will discover that producing good content takes time and devotion - far more than a webcam and a broadband connection - and will choose other paths in life. As with the personal computer and other things that have emerged from Silicon Valley, Web 2.0 will change far less, but ironically also far more, than the valley imagines.

Subscribers can also access a Podcast on the site discussing the issue further.

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Sorry for the delay in posting but interesting none the less…

Coca-Cola is online with one of the first YouTube co-marketing efforts. It's called Holiday Wishcast and it's a mini-site based on YouTube service which allows visitors to upload and share their video greetings. Among the users who have submitted content, we find the sweet Geriatric1927 who is already a star among YouTube fans.

Marketers look with interest Coca-Cola's initiative to exploit a new advertising space crowded with young users (read Contagious for example), while YouTube purists hope this is not the beginning of a brand invasion on the popular video sharing service. I don't want to sound pessimistic but, since in the end, someone has to pay the (bandwidth) bills, I'm not sure there's much we can do to stop the brand invasion…

As said Coke is not the first, but among the first brands which are launching campaigns through YouTube. New Media Age reports today that also Levi's has opened a channel for branded video content. It's called Levi's One To Watch Tour 2006 and it features exclusive video footage from upcoming (but already signed) bands like The Fratellis (I love them!), The View and Forward Russia.

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Like the real world, the Net will be increasingly international and decreasingly reliant on English. It will be wrapped in a Chinese kung fu outfit, intoned in an Indian accent, oozing Brazilian sex appeal.

This in Wired 14.12: Posts is Sterling's analysis of a Pew survey of senior opinion formers and futurists on where the net goes from here. Great reading. The best bit about being a futurist is that no one ever comes back ten years later and tells you that you were wrong.

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Anyone even slightly familiar with today's internet will be well aware that there are thousands, if not millions, of spotty kids spending their free time uploading nonsense videos of themselves doing things no-one else is interested in. Sites like You Tube enable them to share their guff with their friends and maybe catch that 15 seconds of fame.

You may also be aware that there are others (known as Elite Amateur Producers apparently) who take this activity very seriously indeed, producing high quality programmes, animations etc. Hobbyists who wish they were in Hollywood, but really just do it because they like it.

I guess it's like anglers who don't take their catch home and eat it

Well for this group, their hobby could soon become their ticket to becoming a “minipreneur”.

Trendwatchers.com latest briefing is forecasting a new stage of web 2.0 whereby the public creators of online content will be getting paid for their efforts.

And it's already happening. Watch the new Diet Coke and Mentos film - that is actually sponsored by Coke (not just because it's sponsored by coke, but because it's also very cool). Visit Revver , and Break.com - sites that share the online ad revenue generated from the viewing of a person's video.

Or try Scoopt - where wannabe paparzzi can upload thier fuzzy camera phone shots of Jordan in China White, then share the proceeds when the tabloids come looking for page filler.

That's just a few, but check out the full report at trendwatching.com: December 2006 trend briefing | GENERATION C(ASH)

The whole idea of online minipreneurship seems to be based on the principle of ebay, but expanding it to everything else that sells in the real world - not just second hand golf clubs - be it movies, music, pictures, in short anything that a keen enthusiast can share online.

It's a scary thought, but in essence, the professionals in all walks of life need to start looking over their shoulders as the ameteurs get their turn to strutt their stuff.

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If you have read more than three of them this year you are super cool.

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Jesus Christ, it's busy, isn't it?

Even so, it is well worth some of your time to nip over to gapingvoid and read the mini-manifestoes therein. Hugh will explain -

“Why take 50,000 words [the length of your average business tome] to say what you have to say, when 500 will do? Brevity. I love brevity. We're both in a hurry.”

Read all you can.If you can only read one, read the sucker revolution by Julian Smith. Part of the aim of this blog is to explore what we think is the impact of digital, web 2.0, whatever you want to call it. I strongly feel it is about truth, and the reason a lot of clients struggle with it is their blithe assumption that it is another channel where you can peddle the same old lies and half-truths, and as long as someone gets hurt in a funny way in the viral you'lll be fine.

I think the sucker revoution sums this up v. neatly.

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A long, long time ago, before the advent of blogs and Web 2.0, the world was pretty much the same. The tools to create a website and update it regularly were available, but just like all early tools, they were a bit of a bugger to use. However, used they were, and some early internet stars started to appear. And I don't mean Danni Ashe.

One in particluar, and one of favourites for, ohh, ever since I can remember really starting to “research” (cheers for the new definition, Charlie) is Maddox, and his great website, The Best Page in the Universe. In fact, it was 2002 when I started reading it, because that's when I read the classic “I am better than your kids”.

The reason I'm sharing is that Maddox is a genuinely influential figure in the online world,and that is interesting, because he breaks all the rules. He doesn't update regularly. Probably once a month, if that. And yet, by looking at the counters on his front page, over 60 people per minute visit his site. He abuses his readers. He is unbelievably offensive. But he is very, very funny.

Now, imagine you are Sony, and you read this post. And dig the animation. I love the way it's been dropped into a PSP as well.

What are you going to do to counter that? Again, look at the bottom of the page - 417, 526 people have read that page at the time of writing. It was 402,000 when I looked yesterday. There will be half a million people reading that in less than two weeks. What are you going to do? A press release? Offer him a tour of headquarters? Set up a rival co-created community with User Generated Content that is more entertaining? Good luck.

Anyhow, I'll conclude by letting Maddox explain why he's better than Pepsi.

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Here we have one of the reasons that young people consume a lot more internet than TV these days.
Pop music moguls home in on the hotel with 66 million guests | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

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Few areas of life have been affected quite so radically by blogging and social media than politics. The effect as so far been fairly negative. (More here.)

However, along with Dave's webcameron, here's Tony's petition creation tool. It seems that politicians are waking up to some possibilities. Part of me thinks that it is great that our leaders are so keen to take advantage of new technology to communicate with us and listen to our views, instead of to sign us all up to ever larger databases tracking our every move (And even though I've “done nothing wrong”, I do have to worry, because I do have things I'd like to hide from the Government and Police, thanks very much. If you don't, take along hard look at yourself).

Part of me thinks they may see it as an alternative to actually meeting and talking to people, with all the risk that they might embarrass them in front of a camera or attack them or something. Part of me thinks they find petitions of such little interest that they are happy for people to sign up to them all day long, because it's not like they will have to actually do anything. Anyway, why not get on and sign up, and we'll see.

Basically, you can go on and submit a petition. Others can go on and sign it. There's a top 10 here. Getting rid of the Fox Hunting law is a clear winner, which is depressing, as I think quite a lot of my tax-payers money has already been spent on that particular non-issue. More interesting (and the one I'd urge you to have a look at) is the “stand on his head and juggle Ice Cream” one. Sign up. We're in a democracy, you have a voice, use it. What would Diddy do?

P.S. It amuses me that there are two sperate petitions calling for the legalisation of cannabis. Was one of them not concentrating? How could they have missed the fact that it's already there? Surely by not uniting under one banner they are diluting their, eh, power in, eh, being united…erm…what was I saying?

Posted by at 6:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An interesting chat with Jonathan Harris, who was behind the brilliant “We feel fine”, a big favourite of ours. I'd recommend the interview, but I'd also strongly recommend looking at his work. Genius.

No Man's Blog: 10 Questions with Jonathan Harris

I can't tell you how excited am I to give you this (email) interview I held with Jonathan Harris, the artist behind such great recent projects as Yahoo! Time Capsule, We Feel Fine, Loveliness and Phylotaxis (to name but a few - you can see them all on his website). As you'll read below, not only is he a briliant artist, he is the nicest pesron as well.

With thanks to Asi.

Posted by at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A bigger bang | Weekend | Guardian Unlimited

This is a good article about the 'second internet goldrush' with lots of stuff about 2.0 for those who are interested.

Posted by at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I can't help liking this Adidas site. It seems they have looked at Nike and learned well. Maybe a bit too well, because in design and technology it's very reminiscent of Joga Bonito, but I quite liked that as well.

Nice touches - the poster designs (God, I love those vintage poster styles. Again, though, I think Nike beat them to it…), the myspace page. I like the video style and they have made the MLS seem a bit glamorous.

And look at the comments from their myspace friends. That's brand engagement, eh?

Unfortunately, the accompanying highlights videos demonstrate that the MLS isn' t really all that good.

I have a vague unease - they're talking the talk with their use of technology and networking sites and so on, but it feels a bit “big ad” and not very intimate or personal, as 2.0 is meant to. Nike had the chain, where people could upload videos of themselves playing keepy-uppy and add it to a never ending chain video, amonst other things. But James raised doubts about their level of commitment. However, I have to say that despite my reservations, I think this is really good - it diverted my attention for 10 mins or so, it uses music and sport, two types of content that will always generate some interest. I'm happy with that, I'm sure they are too - why go further? Would it make the experience that much better?

Posted by at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

if between the funnels, pyramids and 5-slide builds of the usual presentation some cheeky chappy slipped this chart into a presentation;-)

(Thanks Iain)

Posted by at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For the ultimate in search-engine optimisation, try a search for “failure” on Google.

Posted by at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A Guide to the Worst Places on Earth - Newsweek Entertainment - MSNBC.com

I don't know what this type of content should be categorised as. It certainly blurs a lot of boundaries between news classification but it also makes me feel somewhat confused about 'User generated content'. A term that I think is rapidly losing any meaning it may have had when it was first coined.

Posted by at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)