Forrester researcher, Jeremiah Owyang, posted a tweet about the recent flurry of rumors of the death of actor, Jeff Goldblum. The star of The Fly, Law & Order, and Jurassic Park was reported on Twitter to have fallen to his death in New Zealand. As you’ll see in this video from the Colbert Report he is alive and well. Since, however, Goldblum has become the poster child for what Owyang calls the “#GoldblumEffect” of the creation of false news or, in this case, celebrity news via Twitter.
With its recent success in moving millions of Iranians to protest a what seems a rigged election, the 140-character blogging application has enjoyed some credit as a journalistic tool. However, as the rumor of Mr. Goldblum’s death points out, it’s a thin line that Twitter walks. There is a power that comes with “word of mouth.” On the one hand it can be a power for justice and on the other a corruption of reality. The crowd-sourcing effect of Goldblum’s “death” shows how easy false information can turn into truth. To my mind, Twitter’s #GlodblumEffect could be a possible entry in an updated version of Charles Makay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Web 2.0 apps like Twitter are extremely vulnerable; that much is clear to me. They depend a great deal on “good will” and, sadly, there’s not an endless supply of that in the world. For the time being, Twitter remains both a friend and foe of truth. So pay attention, people.
If you go to www.booneoakley.com you are in for a surprise. This is the website for a “daring agency for those who dare to do daring work.” Well and good, I say. But I was gobsmacked when the URL brought me to YouTube and the video you see above.
This Charlotte, North Carolina, outfit has created a stellar example of using the web without having to run or own everything. The servers are owned by Google and yet BO has managed to do something I’ve never seen before. Clearly this site is a statement from a company that knows how to use the Internet in the beautiful, disruptive way that makes the Net so much fun.
Be sure to click on the link to their “site”. Then enjoy clicking on the boxes on the left-hand part of the video to get a full website experience — all inside of YouTube. This is ~not~ one page but a fully fleshed out website built on YouTube as a platform. Masterful!
This is such jarring a step outside of normal expectations that I’m forced to confess that they are a daring agency for those who dare to do daring work. Good on ya, folks!
The winner of the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington. The B-L Fiction Contest challenges entrants “to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.”
“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”
Laurent Pacalin has a great piece about “financial systemic risk” on his blog, Ad-Ventures in Marketing. In it he breaks the economic meltdown and its solution into three separate solutions which I will describe as simplicity, clarity and decisions at a mico-level. He even quotes my personal hero, Harvard law professor, Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the Congressional oversight panel on government bailout spending. Good practical ideas: Go read.
I was a lukewarm fan of Toto but this is a fascinating a cappella version of their hit song, Africa. The interpretation is by the Slovenian vocal jazz choir, Perpetuum Jazzile, performed at Vokal Xtravaganzza 2008. They credit the Kearsney College Choir of South Africa for coming up with their innovative rainstorm intro. Perpetuum Jazzile has some wonderful music on their MySpace page as well. [Tip o' de hat to Jane C. for the pointer.]
L. McDuff takes the piss out of “old” media in this celebration (dirge?) about the change social media has wrought. Titled Mad Avenue Blues, McDuffsays the parody of Don McLean’s famous song “is about the media/advertising world and the impact to the traditional models brought about by the accelerating migration to digital.”
A group of friends take a hike on a warm, foggy Sunday in the hills above Tennessee Valley just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in the Marin Headlands.
I saw a reference to this video while reading Lens, a new blog from The New York Times online edition. Lens is a photojournalism blog not unlike The Big Picture blog from Boston.com, the online version of the Boston Globe. It is different, however, in that there is more commentary and the photos are presented in a Flash “reel” format as opposed to a long single page.
It’s Friday. The week is winding down. It’s lunchtime. Your boss is out of the office. So go ahead. Take a look at these intriguing videos, selected by Erik Olsen, a video journalist at The Times, for their quality, novelty, ingenuity and insightfulness. We’ll be offering this guilty pleasure every week.
So I does videos instead of photography on Fridays. I’ll be checking back regularly. This is a marvelous piece that is very reminiscent of Nick Park’s Creature Comforts, one of my all-time favorite clay animation shorts. (Parks animated interviews of people in a retirement home and children with claymation animals in a zoo.)
