BigShinyThing

Back in May 2003, almost twice as many votes were cast in the Big Brother evictions as in the UK’s local elections. Cue much handwringing from the press and the Hansard Society. Caught in a reflective mood, Peter Bazalgette opined thus:

‘The Commons and the Big Brother set are both ‘televised houses in which a popularity contest takes place’ [...] But parliament is failing to satisfy the demands of a generation raised on text-messaging and email, instead allowing its electorate to express an opinion on the Westminster housemates only once every few years at the ballot box.’

Indeed.

Fast forward to now: outside the slumber and the fury of party politics and its commentators, a number of quirky-but-effective web sites (many developed by Pledge Site creators MySociety and friends) attempt to make the parliamentary process a little more transparent, and to help voters find and engage with their representatives.

Don’t know who represents you in Parliament? Click over to WriteToThem, which can also identify your MEPs and members of the London Assembly. Click on the representative of your choice, and you can compose a letter to them online, which the system will post off automatically. WriteToThem also maintains a league table of if and how promptly representatives reply to such messages: a nice touch.

Want to keep track of what your backbencher has been saying on your behalf in the Commons? Hook into TheyWorkForYou, via which you can search all Debates, Written Answers, Westminster Hall debates, and Written Ministerial Statements since 2001, and even add comments: Hansard-as-blog. The site also tracks voting patterns on major issues. Most searches can be turned into RSS newsfeeds: it is stupidly simple to be kept informed what ‘They’ are doing for (or to) ‘Us’.

These sites concentrate on the parliamentary process itself — other hackers utilise similarly public-domain data to demonstrate the direct consequences of policy. Check out, for example, an experimental map of recent planning permission applications in Tower Hamlets. Scroll the timeline under the map to see the waves of development across the area for the last few years.

The UK political system remains archaic in form, and opaque in process. Official eGov policy is focussed more on access to public services, and the reduction of red tape, than on direct contact between voters and the elected Few. But for those of us with Internet access, there is no longer any excuse not to be informed of and involved with what’s being said and done by them ‘in our name’.

The BBC reports that clubbers were each lent a pair of headphones and left to get on with it. Given that each of the headphones were playing different tracks, it must have been a fairly isolating experience.

Not nearly as wonderful as the Miniscule of Sound - the world’s smallest disco.

If you love Big Shiny Thing, print off the above, copy, cut along the tag lines and distribute.

70 and counting photos on Flickr following Friday’s deluge… related words ‘festival’, ‘mud’ and ‘tor’. My boyfriend and I were sitting smugly in the pub last night showing everybody photos from the scene sent by friends. This is one event that is being mainly documented by people themselves rather than the media.

White Stripes rocked!

More diy photojournalism - the BBC invites readers to send in their own photographs of Live 8.

The Guerrilla Girls are a feminist collective who have been complaining about the low profile of female artists since 1985. The Bush administration is also a target for their vitriol. Lately, they have been doing a lot of counting at the Venice Biannale.

Sick of impersonal digital photos? Not feeling the joy that is flickr? How about polaroid-ising your digital photos to get that retro feel back.

Do it here.

See also the Rasterbator.

Unlike a lot of people these days, she despatches the mice, cats and rabbits herself. Dismembered mice, chickens and cats form the centrepiece of her photographic art.

The furore that surrounds her art is already threatening to overshadow it. In 2003 a group of four masked members of the Swedish Nazi Party came into a gallery wielding baseball bats and destroyed four artworks. Andrew Butler — a PETA member — stood and slept in front of the same gallery for 122 consecutive hours, holding a sign that read ‘Cruelty is not art’. Colleen O’Brien, manager of communications at PETA headquarters in Norfolk, VA, believes that “the only place her work should bthe only place her work should be on display is in a police evidence room. Calling it art is appalling.” It certainly stirs debate. Edenmontʹs name gets some 7,000 hits on Google, mainly sites discussing the ethics of her work.

Thankfully, this unholy alliance of Nazis and animal rights protestors has not shaken the art world: Edenmont recently made the cover of Beaux Arts magazine. Critic Charlie Finch says, “Yes, these images are powerful, even beautiful, but it strikes me as a fascist beauty.”

Edenmount was recently reported to Swedish authorities by the National Veterinary Association for not having a vet present when she kills the animals. Ironically, she had just received a $12,000 arts grant from the Swedish government.

Pictured: Star, 2002.
See also: Pinar Yolacan, aka the ‘tripe artist’.

‘Guerrilla drive in’ groups post screening times on the internet, but most attendees are just people driving by. Sound is transmitted by the cars tuning their radios to the correct FM frequency.

Lawrence Bridges, screens his comedy 12 in parking lots, and calls it a ‘gift and tribute’ to Los Angeles. Kate McCabe of rad.art projects movies onto the back of movie houses to ‘offer an alternative to surrounding corporate control of media’. Pilot, a collective in Chicago, lights up a warehouse wall with videos of friends debating politics to ‘trespass the corporate control of media’, and possibly bore the pants off everyone watching.

Wes Modes of the Santa Cruz, California, Guerrilla Drive-in has a more simplistic take: “We said, ‘Why aren’t there free movies? There’s all these walls!’”

Courtesy of Black Book.

Photo courtesy of Ektopia.

Punch’s interview demonstrates how far some fast food outlets will go to keep poor people away from their rubbish. It’s also a story of modern day ingenuity as Punch describes the best and worst dumpsters, and how to get hot dumpster food.

Sample text:

It’s pretty much corporate policy at McDonald’s to have a compactor as opposed to a dumpster. So next time you hear one of those great commercials about Ronald McDonald House, and how they care for children, just remember how they’re shafting the poor…

The full text is here.

The BBC appear to be a bit behind with this podcasting lark - they don’t seem to have one yet. ABC does …. see here

This is so weird. Just as they should be worrying a lot more about what’s being said about them online, hard hitters like BP and Morgan Stanley choose to try and censure print media.

Other big corporations are so keen to ‘join the debate’ online that they have started employing their own in-house bloggers - see story ‘Corporations Enter the Blogosphere’ on CNN.

You can buy an electric car on the Internet for £7k, pay no road tax, no conjestion charge and get free parking. And save the planet because it’s emission free.

The one pictured was spotted in Soho.

More information about the G-Wiz is here.

The full story is here.

Grafedia is multimedia graffiti written as an email address (—- @grafedia.net) or in blue underlined text to look like a hyperlink. Spotters can send a message to the address and in return get digital art sent to their phone. The above bastardized McDonald’s sign returns a graphic instructing viewers how to avoid choking (see below).

Grafedia has already been used as a promotional tool, linking to images or text that includes a personal website address or a band name. An art teacher in Australia creates treasure hunts, with one grafedia image pointing to the next. It’s also begging to be used to promote parties and events.

Grafedia was invented by John Geraci, a recent graduate from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications program. He likens it to putting a message in a bottle, “You don’t know who will find it and uncork it, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s an act of anonymous, artistis sharing, done with strangers in your city.”

More than 2,000 images have been uploaded to the Grafedia server since it went live in December 2004.

You can make your own grafedia by taking a picture and send it to “anyword@grafedia.net” then write that address anywhere you like. It’s ridiculously easy - for a picture of my cat, email jepthah@grafedia.net.

There’s a greater teaser ad in this somewhere as well - see below. The full story from Wired is here.

What the article fails to note, is that these almost un-watched channels are another instance of the ‘long tail’. Back in 2002, Wired magazine wrote:

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

The seemingly bottomless pit of distribution enabled by the internet and other new media means that the obscure stuff - like Wine TV - has a justifiable market. Media commentators are now predicting that these little pools of enthusiasts will eventually become the market - the mass market will be no more.

One example that Wired uses is that of Touching the Void. Written in 1988, British mountaineer Joe Simpson’s account of near death in the Andes got good reviews, but was only a modest success and soon forgotten. A decade later, Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again, and was turned into a film in 2003.

How did this happen? Simply, ‘Amazon Recommends’. The online bookseller’s software noted patterns in buying behaviour and suggested to readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People followed up on the suggestions, read the book and wrote rave reviews. More sales were generated, more algorithm fueled recommendations occured and the book suddenly became a bestseller.

As Wired notes:

This is not just a virtue of online booksellers: it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what’s available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they fnd, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

The most successful online businesses are already making most of their money out of this so-called ‘long tail’. Google makes most of its income off small advertisers and eBay is mostly niche products (kewpie dolls anyone?).

The power of the long tail for a mass entertainment company like Sky could be this: suppose I think that Sky is all just Sky Sports and reject it wholeheartedly? Suppose that I, as a cat owner, discover that Sky has a whole channel dedicated to cats? Suddenly I’m interested, Sky has an offer that is relevant to me, and I’m driven to subscribe (remember, Sky is the only provider of the Cat Channel). Lots of advertisers who are keen to advertise to me as a cat owner, drop their big channel budgets and pour them into the finely targeted Cat Channel where they know they can reach the 11,000-24,000 odd enthusiasts that would justify their spend. They can even produce their own content as no one else gives a rat’s arse… and so on.

As media becomes increasingly on demand, mass market entertainment companies are going to find themselves increasing at the whim of the long tail. The Cat Channel (no pun intended) might not be that far away.

Blinkx currently gives searchers access to videos from over 70,000 hours of online videos, with sources ranging from Reuters to Fox News to ESPN. Blinkx’s technology has taken a different approach from Google and AOL in that it matches videos to search queries based on transcripts created of clips using speech-recognition technology. Google’s video search test uses closed-captioning text, and Yahoo and AOL tag videos with description.

Blinkx.tv this week said that it had reached a deal to include access to online videos from Apple’s Ifilm on its video search engine. The search engine returns screenshots of the videos, delivering users to Ifilm’s site to watch the ad-supported content. Blinkx has struck several deals to build its online video library and compete with video search efforts by Yahoo, Google and AOL.

AOL is making its Singingfish video search engine a major part of its broadband-focused portal set for release later this month. Singingfish last week said it had also finalised a deal with Ifilm, along with a dozen other content sites, including CNN, CBS News and dotcom survivor iVillage.

Emarketer predicts that broadband Internet connections will reach 36 percent of U.S. households this year, yet the audience for online video remains small due to perceived difficulties with search. In a poll of US Internet users earlier this year, the Online Publishers Association found that 53 percent of respondents would watch more Internet video if they could locate it easily.

Blinkx may well have resolved this.

The chapel of Sedlec, more often referred to simply as ‘the bone church’, sprung from an act of pragmatism: too many people wanted to be buried there. During the plague of 1318, when 30,000 were buried here. When the cemetery became too full in 1511, bones were stored inside the chapel.

After the attached monastery was dissolved, the chapel passed into the ownership of the Schwarzenburg family. They commissioned a half blind monk by the name of Frantisek Rindt (how gothic is that?) to decorate it with the bones. He set about his task with vigour, even producing a version of the Schwarzenburg coat of arms, a shield topped with a crown: a fan of shoulder blades underscored by ribs, outlined and quartered by vertebrae, the detail in tarsals and carpals. The centrepiece of this baroque riot is a chandelier hanging in the nave. It is said to be made with every single one of the 250 or so bones of the human body.

The Sedlec Ossuary is open from 9am-noon and 1-4pm in winter and until 6pm in summer. Just one of many websites devoted to the subject is here.

Sedlec also forms the inspiration for John Connelly’s new novel, The Black Angel.

Photo from Flickr

The delocator asks users to add to its database of ‘non corporate’ cafes — so far only areas in the US apply but it would be interesting to see if it spreads. Maybe local grocer stores in the UK should think of building a similiar site as part of the growing anti-Tesco movement… see also The Guardian

Now there is a fan who knows exactly what to do at the biggest media circus of the year: perform.

Horror writer Stephen King has been among the first to write eloquently about the Jackson trial. In Entertainment Weekly, he writes:

It’s sickening that it takes a columnist in an entertainment magazine to point out that more than 2,000 newspeople covered the Jackson trial - which is only a few hundred more than the number of American servicemen and women who have died in Iraq. On the same day that crowds gathered in Times Square (and around the world) to learn the fate of the Pale Peculiarity, another four suicide bombings took place in that tortured, bleeding country. And if you tell me that news doesn’t belong in Entertainment Weekly, I respond by saying Michael Jackson under a black umbrella doesn’t belong on the front page of the New York Times.

The full article is here (subscription required).

Meanwhile, a blogger notes that it is obviously okay to buy Thriller again. (Courtesy of Defamer)

Photo courtesy of Flickr.

The Pledge Site. Some sample pledges:

I will create the angel of the south west but only if 12 other people will help me plan design and make it and find somewhere for it to go.

I will stay in the inner most lane of the M25 it is safely possible to. But only if 50 other M25 users will do the same and learn from it.

I will stop buying from corporate stores but only if 50 people will too.

I will Turn all my electrical appliances off stand by (TV, HiFi, etc) but only if 50 other people will too.

See also, the astonishing Apology Line.