turn on, tune in, drop out

Goddess of TXT, OMG, It's Art
Originally uploaded by JR from Brooklyn

When I told them, my 12-year-old, Maxwell, was like, ‘Yes!’

Meredith Sinclair, blogger and mother of Maxwell, recounting her kid's reaction when she told him she was imposing a household Internet ban from 4 to 8 PM daily. As recounted in The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In in today's new York Times.

face time

Illus: ~CrapsY

The site removed "Random Play" and "Whatever I Can Get" from the options of what members were "Looking For"—to be replaced by "Networking."

Charles Petersen, In the World of Facebook, in the 25 Feb 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books, speaking on the evolution of the social networking site Facebook.

Petersen's piece is interesting for its exploration of class (with a shout out to Danah Boyd's seminal piece), exclusivity, and the social network as an architectural space.

plasticated impunity

Video: Sony Vaio's Mannequin's in Grand Central, 30 January 2009
Sony Vaio is running an ad campaign that takes a page from the playbook of the Grand Central Freeze that generated so much energy and excitement online when Improv Everywhere staged it around a year ago.


Video: The Original Improv Everywhere Grand Central Freeze, 31 January 2008

Only Sony's not billing it as an homage to the creative minds who thought up the first stunt: the original inspiration is cited nowhere. The ad that Sony has posted on their own behalf on YouTube is peppered with comments selected from spectators about how "cool" and "wonderful" the campaign is and how "this is really very unique."

Vaio is supporting the campaign with hooks on several major Social Networks -- including streams on Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

The campaign poses the question: Can a major brand run a strikingly derivative campaign -- and call it their own -- in the same social network space that the grassroots clip was first wildly circulated and applauded? Will the collective crowd turn into a lynch mob?

Does the original staged event qualify as intellectual property? Can a happening be plagerized?

At the very least it's an exercise in bad taste in an environment where citing your vias is considered just plain, good manners.

Stay tuned.


Update: Boing Boing blogged 'em and didn't mention the earlier work. Maybe Sony will get away with it.

for the people, by the people

The New York Times is publishing readers' images of the events surrounding Obama's Inauguration. Submissions are being received pix@nyt.com.

NSFF: not safe for facebook

The only food group your baby needs. You've got what it takes to make a healthy baby. And it doesn't cost a thing.

From an INFACT Canada (Infant Feeding Action Coalition) poster, "a national non-governmental organization that works to protect infant and young child health as well as maternal well-being through the promotion and support of breastfeeding and optimal infant feeding practices."

The above image was deleted by Facebook yesterday as obscene, and was posted to a photo page hosted by the Topfree Equal Rights Association (TERA) [1] out of Ontario which hopes to record all the images of women breastfeeding their children that Facebook has removed per their policy regarding obscene imagery. The images were removed from personal profiles where members choose to share photographs with their Facebook Friends.

A Facebook protest group has taken shape, and over the weekend they staged a virtual nurse-in in which twenty women nursed outside Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters, and over 11,000 folks on Facebook replaced their profile picture with an image of breastfeeding.

More about that here in Time Magazine's Facebook's War on Nipples »

Related: The New York Times write up on suburban housewife Edwina Froehlich, who pioneered a return to breastfeeding in America »

[1] TERA's stated mission is: "to help women who encounter difficulty going without tops in public places in Canada and the USA, and inform the public on this issue." I take it that means breastfeeding, or no.


Update: Many of the images on the TERA site are too much information for me, but I'm shy that way -- you may have noticed that I don't post many personal photos of myself or my family online. I don't object to images of breastfeeding: I object to intruding upon peoples' personal lives. I also get a little embarrassed when people vamp in front of bathroom mirrors, but that's just me (who is also guilty of vamping in front of bathroom mirrors).

The TERA photographs are of women I don't know in intimate and vulnerable moments. Some are artfully done and lovely to look at, some are not. But the point of the controversy is that that they were originally posted in a controlled context for known friends to share an important moment in a relationship that matters to them. Facebook's action against these images demonstrates that they assume a very different intent -- the intent to arouse or titillate, the way pornography intends. I believe that's the compelling point in this dispute, along with the right to share images in what many people consider to be (but truthfully is not) a personal, private space online.

on edge

Atari bling ring
by Sakurako Shimizu

It is connectivity, more than money or stature, that determines individual power.

Ann-Maria Slaughter paraphrasing David Rothkopf in America's Edge: Power in the Networked Century in the January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs.

changed landscape

When you think about it, a campaign is a start-up business. Other than his speech in 2004 at the convention and his two books, Mr. Obama had very little in terms of brand to begin with, and he was up against Senator Clinton, who had all the traditional sources of power, and then Senator McCain. But he had the right people and the right idea to take them on. When you think about it, it was like he was going up against Google and Yahoo. And he won.

Blogger Ranjit Mathoda in this morning's New York Times commenting on the Obama Campaign's use of social networking to win the election.

The article also tells of a late night meeting at SFO between Senator Obama and Netscape creator Marc Andreessen who now sits on the board of Facebook.

Related: Barack Obama behaves like a well-defined brand »

word of mouth -- shhhhhhh

We’ve been working on a project called Nokia Productions. This is basically a user generated movie consisting of content recorded only on mobile phones; it has been directed by Spike Lee and has sparked an avalanche of net-wide submissions over the last few months. You can see the trailer here: http://share.ovi.com/media/NokiaProduction.public/NokiaProduction.10402

We’re extending the idea of social media invading mainstream entertainment by running a virtual premiere alongside the real-life Nokia Productions Hollywood premiere. The film itself will be shown along with highlights, videos and commentary uploaded and streamed live from our social media guys on the ground at the Hollywood event. They’ll be creating some exclusive content, such as an interview with Spike [Lee], and we’ll upload other goodies such as the ‘making of’ documentary, live discussion threads on online film communities, and behind the scenes footage.

We’d love you to be one of our social media attendees, and I’ve attached your personal invite to this email. But we’d also like you to take part. Before the film is screened, we’re going to show a brief video collage of the virtual attendees’ opinions on the project and expectations for the film – a chance to see who else is attending, get your name and your site out there, and contribute to what social media really thinks about the scheme. So if you’d like to take part, produce a quick 15-30 second video introducing yourself and your online space or community, and then answer the question: how will social media impact on mainstream entertainment in the future? Email it over to us and you’ll be part of the virtual premiere yourself.

Excerpt from an email received from the Nokia Word of Mouth marketing team -- the same folks who asked me to test drive that phone a little while ago.

Here's the thing: It's a word of mouth marketing event, but the invite that they sent is sort of exclusive and, frankly, hard to tap. They bundled it into an interactive PDF that wouldn't fire right on the Mac, although opening it on my PC presented the showtime and dates that I was looking for -- in a little animation that disappeared almost as soon as it was presented.

I'm not sure I'm *supposed* to share the info regarding the start time of this event, even though it *is* a word of mouth marketing event. All in all a very muddled marketing effort.

But I'm gonna punt and link it here anyway.

Showtime = Tuesday, 14 October 2008 at 7.15 Pacific (that's 9.15 for me, Central Time).

No promises.

situational context, part 1

Photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson

“When everything is blurred you cannot convey the motion of the bicyclist.”
“Why is the staircase so ‘soft’? Camera shake?”
“Gray, blurry, small, odd crop.”

Flickr comments/criticism (made in, I suspect, a DeleteMe thread -- one of the few places on Flickr where criticism is invited) on a Henri Cartier-Bresson photo that a Flickrite posted as one of their own. As cited in Flickr: Sepia No More in Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

The piece does a pretty good job of identifying the qualities that can catapult images into the upper regions of Flickr’s Explore -- serious saturation, aggressive postproduction processing, and images that read well as thumbnails -- and also bemoans Flickr's impact on popular photography.

swarmin'

In a study conducted by researchers at the Stern School of Business at New York University, an examination of 108 albums that hit record shops in early 2007 determined that those that had been the subjects of 40 blog posts before their release date had sales of triple the average.

Cited in this morning's New York Times.

just drop off the key, lee

It’s like the Hotel California. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Nipon Das, director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, commenting on his unsuccessful attempts to leave Facebook in today's New York Times. Mr. Das tried unsuccessfully to delete his Facebook account this fall.

Steven Mansour, who left Facebook and then returned, has documented his own experience trying to leave in: 2504 Steps to closing your Facebook account.

lather. rinse. repeat.

secondary orality. The tendency of electronic media to echo the cadences of earlier oral cultures.

“If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can’t help but see it everywhere: Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.”

From the Sunday New York Times piece Friending, Ancient or Otherwise, citing Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons who is developing a new course to explore the emergence of oral culture online, in reference to the term "secondary orality" as it was coined in 1982 by the Rev. Walter J. Ong, a professor at St. Louis University and student of Marshall McLuhan.

love in the age of social networks

Let's join a social network built just for two: Listen in »

by Ze Frank.

source: Squandrous