Peace Sells, But Who's Prying?

Your Facebook friendships and the [private?] data that flows between those relationships and being used by Facebook to create a set of statistics intended to imply a growing movement towards World Peace. An inferred international harmony of the nations drawn together beneath the benevolent aegis of Mark Zuckerberg's awesome Frienderdome.

But were you asked whether your information could (or should) make up such a metric? Do you feel your connections to people carry such weight, such rich interpretation? When friending a person from another country with a government antagonistic to your own, do you consider that you're reaching out and (as is now being posited), making the world a better place? Or indeed, by rejecting a friend request from that person, you're tacitly edging us all towards war?

 (Ok. Too much coffee, Dan. Take a breath.)

Does it really matter? Is it sufficiently trivial / harmless / well-meaning an enterprise not to care? Or might you be inclined to say 'Not in my name' to this Facebook Peace? 

David Rooke's comment on my previous post about Facebook and the Metrics of Peace and the Peace Dot project suggests we should 'get real' about such things, and I'm not saying it adds up to a hill of beans, hugs or decommissioned weaponry; I'm just wondering how many other bizarre Facebook extrapolations I might be adding data to in the future...

Keep th' faith,

Article Dan

***

Today's title was brought to you courtesy of memories of an old Megadeth tune:

http://blip.fm/profile/Article_Dan/blip/41939472/Megadeth–Peace+Sells

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Facebook and the Metrics of Peace

World Peace is just around the corner.

You don't think so? Did you know that there were 31,787 India-Pakistan connections made on Facebook in the past 24 hours? And 22,476 connections of Albanian people to Serbian people made? Do you realise that, while the world may seem full of discord and emnity when you read the news, 15,917 Israel-Palestine Facebook connections were made in the last 24 hours? 

Yes, peace truly stands a chance if you watch the weekly data tallied on Facebook Peace - Facebook's offer to partner with Stanord's Peace Innovation project. AKA Peace Dot, the Stanford an intriguing idea to glean and present metrics for peace from organisations and websites whose members' activities may be measured and considered through the prism of optimism.

Launched at the end of 2009, Peace Dot is all about sharing the metrics of world peace; accounting for the pervasiveness of peace through online projects which spread good will and benefits across the world. For instance, one partner, the Khan Academy, delivers educational opportunities across under-served areas of the world; their belief that ignorance leads to conflict, education leads to peace, leads them to their peace metric: 4,916,961 minutes of education delivered world-wide in the past week. Ergo 4,916,961 minutes of peace potential in the world that weren't there a week ago.

Likewise CouchSurfing.com uses its community of bunk-mates and crowdsourced travel stops to offer numbers of people using the service (as celebrated by Clay Shirky in Cognative Surplus) as an indicator of the world edging its way towards being a better place to live in.

'Facebook is proud to play a part in promoting peace by building technology that helps people better understand each other. By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term.'

All admirable stuff, and indeed, if one removes the cynic's hat for a minute, the Peace Dot initiative reinforces Tim Berners-Lee's hopes that the web might make people better known to one another, and so less inclined to kill each other:

(From a speech by Bill Thompson, launching the BBC's Virtual (aka Digital) Revolution project, July 2009: 'I remember interviewing Tim [Berners-Lee] for the Guardian, it must have been about 1996, 1997, and he said to me then that one of the reasons that he valued what he'd done, that he thought it was worth building the web in the first place, was it would allow people to find out more about their neighbours, that if, he said, we knew more about the people next door, the people in the next country, we might want to kill them less often.'

If this is the case then, and Facebook Peace and all the other partners in Peace Dot are growing testaments of measurable worldwide bon homie, then being as (at end of 2009) only 26 percent of the world's population is online, it becomes all the more vital that we connect the remaining billions on the planet; it becomes a moral imperative to enhance the open data of an open world open to the notion of peace through connection and communication.

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Old Spice brings new spice to the internet with the perfect social media ad campaign

The Old Spice guy in the Shower has just ramped it up a notch, set controls for the heart of the sun and sprayed the internet with awesome win.

You've all seen the original Old Spice "Hello Ladies. I'm on a horse." ad by now... Right? Ok. Watch it now if you haven't. Hell, watch it again if you have. It doesn't get tired.

Pretty bloody good already, yes? Now hear this:

In what must be the most brilliant and remarkable social media campaign ever unleashed onto the web and YouTube, the already beloved and respected Old Spice 'I'm on a horse' guy has been firing out short, hilarious video reply after short hilarious video reply onto the Old Spice YouTube channel to all those who have commented on the original ads, tweeted about the ads, about the guy (Isaiah Mustafa - simply the perfect man for a perfect commercial). The campaign has even been so lightening reactive and shit-hot wicked as to be issuing hilarious video replies to people commenting on and tweeting about the slew of video replies.

There's too many to watch; certainly there's too many to embed. I recommend watching some of those sent out to celebrities that are listed on The Next Web, and a these videos to general YouTube folks and Reddit or Twitter comments embedded on Paste Magazine's site. If nothing else - watch this one, which goes some way to illustrating the open, enthusiastic and social media-adoring genius of this peerless advertising campaign:

And this one sent to Perez Hilton in praise of his blog is pretty cake-topping too:

http://www.youtube.com/oldspice#p/u/137/ive3vXv-XRk

I may have to start wearing Old Spice just to show my appreciation.

Keep th' faith with a monocle smile!

Article Dan

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Sad Keanu - a man, a moment, a meme

LOL Cats are so last decade, man. These days of austerity need a new photoshop meme that reflects the sorrow of the times, and that meme is Sad Keanu.

Essentially, Keanu Reeves was papped having lunch, looking kinda down about the world, and this image has captured the imaginations of photoshoppers and spoofers the world over. Not to mention even its own URL shortener http://kea.nu

A digest of some of the best images have been put to song:

One of my favourites is a tragi-comic combination of that other meme-meister, The Hoff, and his Sadness Keanu of Reeves:

Huge thanks to Rubber Republic's newsletter for the info.

Keep th' faith,
Article Dan

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Breastfeeding - what the fuck is your problem?

My wife - the mother of our 5 month-old daughter and 4 year-old son - just spent the morning shopping in Sainsbury's with the kids hanging of each arm.

By the end of the agony of the miles of aisles and the trauma of the tills, our baby daughter was going bananas with hunger. Screaming the shop down. And no one likes that, right? That's the kind of thing people hate. So my wife, now burdened with a massive shop of nappies and post-natal paraphernalia, took the chance to sit down at the Sainsbury's cafe and feed our daughter.

With her breast.

Just like this woman.

Foul isn't it? I should mark this post #NSFW or something. My stomach's turning just looking at it. What was my sick bitch of a wife thinking? Fortunately there were people there to set things straight. Fortunately for Broken Britain, at Sainsbury's there were good, decent people there ready to step up and shout at my wife for being so disgusting.

"You're disgusting! You shouldn't be out!" yelled the first voice of righteous opprobrium: an old woman. "Go home! That's disgusting!"

Now, my wife's not only depraved, but also stubborn (barely loveable, I know - I only stay for the sake of the children). So she didn't stop the breastfeeding debacle at this protest. Instead she looked around and probably treated that goodly old woman like an archaic anomaly - a crazy person, if you will.

All the while, my baby daughter continued to suckle like some sick, cannibal porn star.

Luckily, for Sainsbury's cafe; for society; there was another woman there - a younger woman, who looked my wife in the eye and told her clearly that she was indeed "disgusting" and "a disgrace", directing my wife to finish her fucked-up feral affront to civilisation immediately or leave.

By this time, my wife was finally starting to feel some shame. But a young man chipped in to her defense - he suggested that my wife wasn't being so disgusting and that this breastfeeding was a perfectly natural act, and maybe she should be left alone to care for our daughter.

Clearly this guy was a pervert who just wanted to look at my wife's tits. The righteous women gave him short shrift and he fell to silence.

The braying and barracking continued until my wife saw the error of her ways and put her obscene breast back into her clothing - YES CLOTHING - IT'S WHAT SEPARATES US FROM THE BEASTS AFTERALL!

My wife left swiftly; my daughter distressed and still hungry; my young son musing silently upon the lessons he had just learned about the foulness of the human body, the need to suppress and oppress the weakness of vile flesh and its needs, and something more of the shameful nature of his degenerate mother.

Here, in a country whose top tabloid newspaper leads its inside pages with a new topless girl every day, we can safely say that there are still corners, pockets, enclaves of decency remaining.

Fuckers.

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Star Wars and Johnny Cash show when crowdsourcing really works

Somewhere in a galaxy far far away someone had the most singularly awesome / awful idea of cutting up Star Wars (the original, people!) into 15 second long segments and offering those segments up to people to recreate this most beloved of movies as a crowdsourced collage of crazed imaginations and idle hands.

The result of this idea is simply fantastic. Star Wars Uncut is the most joyous piece of individual madness and obsession coming together as a bonkers community to produce a work of cluttered, ridiculous wonder. Doubt me? Doubt me? Get a load of this montage of the efforts to date that make up the Death Star escape scene.

If you didn't find yourself smiling with unabashed joy at this, then I fear you may be a little dead inside.

Meanwhile in a galaxy much much closer a similar crowdsourcing project is underway. The Johnny Cash Project has taken a more artistic, granular approach to a similar ambition: to frame-by-frame recreate the video for Cash's cover of Ain't No Grave as a collage of black and white images.

http://blip.fm/profile/Article_Dan/blip/45971223/Johnny+Cash%E2%80%93Ain%27t+No+Grave

The barriers for entry to this project are lowered by the application providing the illustration software and upload all within the site, so if you've got Flash, you can get busy contributing your own artistic onion skin layer to the video.

Of course this in-house illustration package is also a restriction - you can't go crazy on Photoshop at home and suddenly add a colour version or a LOL Cash - but that's no bad thing. The other barrier being liking Johnny Cash, I guess. But if you've got no love for the Cash, you got no business being on that site, or this blog for that matter, y'hear? G'wan. Scoot!

(This is a little painting I made earlier. If you spot this in the mix, it means I've made my mark.)

Thinking about this now, I suppose there's a temptation to draw a number of frames representing Rick Astley... But life's too short.

So these appear to me to be two example of where crowdsourcing is working to rather wonderful effect. But they cheat a little by using firm foundations of an existing work of art, rather than attempting that holy grail of crowdsourcing a work from the ground up. Star Wars Uncut, while seemingly preposterous in its initial goal, has actually tapped into an international passion and mania that, on hindsight, was only ever going to deliver big time. Johnny Cash is a smaller, more compact undertaking, with all the tools, bargain, promise of the project clear and present - again: it's a WIN sandwich with a side of W00T fries. If you'd tried to create an animated music video - even with those online illustration tools provided - I'll wager you'd be hard pressed to come out with much more than a buggers muddle. Or if the movie had been My Dinner With Andre - or a film written collaboratively on a platform such as Google Wave or Mixed Ink - would there even be 15 minutes of clips online now...? I doubt it.

Anybody want to share an example of it working from the ground up? I'm all for it - I'd love to see it.

Keep th' faith,
Article Dan

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The Million Pound Drop hints at the future for IP TV and iPad

The Million Pound Drop is Channel Four's latest big money quiz game (as well as their continued quest for a return on buying the sub-prime soul of Davina McCall - keep trying, guys).

The idea is simple: take the Who Wants to be a Millionaire formula and reverse it, so that instead of starting with nothing and accruing money by gambling on your general knowledge, in The Million Pound Drop you start with a physical pile of cash - £1Million - and gradually gamble it away by placing it onto trapdoors representing right and wrong answers. And, to be fair, it's quite compelling watching wads of cash disappear down a hole before contestants' eyes.

So far so game show. But the interest comes with Channel Four's embracing of the two screen synergy more and more of us apply to watching TV accompanied by our laptops, netbooks, smart phones and, yes, iPads.

The show is live, so in the style of a Playstation version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? or Deal or No Deal, the audience at home can play along; so instead of yelling at the contestants on the screen "No, you idiot! No! It's B!!!" Or just scratching your chin and saying "I wouldn't. You're not sure. Take the money. Take the money!" You actually play with the same wodge of cash the contestants do, placing portions of your own virtual £1M across the four trapdoors which represent the same answer options as those the TV contestants are facing.

Which is a little slice of genius.

I played along last night. And while the programme itself lacks something of the atmosphere and professionalism of Millionaire (I mentioned Davina McCall was the host, right?), being able to put yourself in that same situation as the contestants and actually feel the tension of the choice of blowing all your cash on an answer you're only half-sure about, then taking the option of splitting your options, knowing that you will be losing cash - guaranteed - is a compelling offer. And according to the online developer Monterosa's blog it shows a growing audience for multi-screen participation (or dual-screen conversion), from the Apprentice Predictor to where we are now with Million Pound Drop.

And this can only be good news for Steve. Were it not for the fact that The Million Pound Drop online experience is a Flash application - and iPads don't play Flash, this game screams iPad. It shines a bright light onto the future of dual-screen audience participation that the iPad and others can offer seamlessly.

With my netbook on my lap I was struggling around the screen and the silly touchpad mouse to move the sliders that you use to allocate portions of your virtual million. But I could instantly imagine the perfectly presented app version that required no such scrolling or UI discomfort. The experience could be made perfect with an app (or, to be fair, even a well-designed web page).

And the experience WILL be made perfect with an app and a touch pad/tablet.

Basically, the iPad (or any similar apps-environment touchscreen interface) IS game-changing in this regard. The tablet screen can become ANYTHING. It's the T-1000 of consumer devices, and hooked up with your IP TV, it's going to be like Prometheus and Proteus built themselves an apps store. Because the touch screen can become anything before your eyes and beneath your fingertips; it can deliver you almost any interactive complement to the TV experience: it can be your TV remote; it can be your game controller; it can be your gaming interface (as in Million Pound Drop's case); it can be your second screen (goodbye red button); it can be the skype, the IM chat, the Twitter client, the instant user pics delivery system; it can be the wiki beneath your wings...

This is where it all takes off. This is where the pad will PWN.

For the record, I'm holding out for a second gen iPad (I say that, now...). But I will be getting a tablet of some description. My one thought in closing is whether Project Canvas should be considering producing hardware in this regard. Or at the very least thinking about the apps it wants to get into the iTunes Store asap. But that sounds like another blog...

Keep th' faith,
Article Dan

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