BigShinyThing

As put succintly by the BlipBlip blog (loving that alliteration);

From a quick scan of it, there’s not another ad in the top 100 YouTube videos. By my math, VW has gotten 712,229 non-paid views of their advertising this week. And because the impressions generated online are fully intentional, with consumers seeking out this stuff, the comparison to paid TV impressions has to go through a correction factor to account for DVRs, channel flipping, multi-tasking, and bathroom breaks. Not to mention the additional word-of-mouth and enthusiasm advantage that fully intentional content has over randomly encountered content.

Indeed. Via the MIT adverblog.

Ever confused by youth culture, it seems that The Independent newspaper has gone the responsible route and just made shit up. Poor old George Michael was nicked yesterday passed out in his car and a number of ‘controlled substances’ found. But the paper seems a bit confused as to what this GHB drug is:

‘A type of liquid cannabis’ reports The Independent.

‘GHB — a Class C drug known as Liquid Ecstasy that is popular with clubbers’ says The Sun who seem to have actually done a bit of research.

Pardon us for sounding sanctimonious but GHB has been at the root of numerous clubland horror stories. At the very least you could expect the press to google it before they reported the ‘facts’.

According to analysts at American Technology Research (ATR), Apple has announced a special event next Tuesday promising “fun new products”, which they have interpreted as full length film downloads. ATR has said in a research note to clients that it sees a “greater than 50% chance” that Apple will launch a movie download service on Tuesday, with the increasingly media-centric computer company having just reached 1 billion downloads via iTunes. The three year old service is now on track to reach the 1.5 billion milestone by the end of the year.

Apple is attempting to drive the video on demand market by offering firstly music video content followed by the world’s first legal TV download service last year.

Story via MediaTel.

Student Stephanie, 17, was told by teachers to change out of the offending t-shirt for school photos. She says that she had already worn the shirt several times before to school but that the photocall day had caused concern amongst ‘Year 12 co-ordinators’ at Strathmore Secondary College in Melbourne, Australia. “They said it was because certain parents would complain,” Stephanie told the Sunday Herald.

Stephanie’s mother said that she had had the t-shirt printed for her daughter when she was about 15, “I’m proud of her. I love her and I don’t care what she is.”

What’s particularly great about this story is that the incident triggered a protest of other students who turned up at school wearing other slogan t-shirts: “Nobody knows I’m bulimic”, “Nobody knows I’m pregnant,” and “Nobody knows I’m on steroids.” Brilliant. Who says young people are apolitical?

Via Queerty.

Bids for a ten minute conversation with Penelope Cruz were at $560 at time of writing. It’s reminiscent of the 1997(?) One2One campaign featuring people like Kate Moss talking about who they would like ‘to have a One2One with’ (hers was Elvis). For our money, pretty much the best representation of what mobile communications really mean.

This too is a cute idea but surely eBay needs to hammer home that calls via Skype are … erm … free?

Via IDontLikeYouInThatWay.

Despite all of the scare stories of recent weeks, MySpace really matters. Not least because it currently has over 50 million subscribers and more page views per day than any site on the web except Yahoo!

danah boyd, who has been tracking the site since its inception as a home to indie musics fans in Los Angeles, recently gave a talk which has been transcribed and linked to Boing Boing. It’s worth quoting great big chunks of the transcript here. From it, we learn of the site’s particular appeal to teenage participants (and hence the odd creepy man):

When MySpace was initially introduced, skeptics thought it would be just another fad because previous sites like Friendster had risen and crashed. Unlike the 20-somethings who invaded Friendster, the teens have more reason to participate in profile creation and public commentary. Furthermore, MySpace’s messaging is better suited for youths’ ansynchronous messaging needs. They can send messages directly from friends’ profiles and check whether or not their friends have logged in and received their email. Unlike adults, youth are not invested in email; their primary peer-to-peer communication occurs synchronously over Instant Messaging. Their use of MySpace is complementing that practice.

For most teens, [MySpace] is simply part of everyday life — they are there because their friends are there and they are there to hang out with their friends. Of course, its ubiquitousness does not mean that everyone thinks that it is cool. Many teens complain that the site is lame, noting that they have better things to do. Yet, even those teens have an account which they check regularly because it’s the only way to keep up with the Jones’s.

Boyd terms spaces such as MySpace ‘digital publics’ which unlike physical spaces — the bowling alley, the park bench — introduce a much broader group of peers:

While radio and mass media did this decades ago, MySpace allows youth to interact with this broader peer group rather than simply being fed information about them from the media. This highly beneficial for marginalised youth, but its effect on mainstream youth is unknown.

The biggest challenge is that, online, youth publics mix with adult publics. While youth are influenced by the media’s version of 20somethings, they rarely have an opportunity to engage with them directly. Just as teens are hanging out on MySpace, scenesters, porn divas and creatures of the night [hello UK electroclash scene!] are using MySpace to gather and socialise in the way that 20somethings do. They see the space as theirs and are not imagining that their acts are consumed by teens: they are certainly not targeted at youth. Of course, there *are* adults who want to approach teens and MySpace allows them to access youth communities without being visible, much to the chagrin of parents. Likewise, there are teens who seek the attention of adults, for both positive and problematic reasons.

That said, the majority of adults and teens have no desire to mix and mingle outside of their generation, but digital publics slam both together.

In conclusion, Boyd says,

Youth are not creating digital publics to scare parents – they are doing so because they need youth space, a place to gather and see and be seen by peers. Publics are critical to the coming-of-age narrative because they provide the framework for building cultural knowledge. Restricting youth to controlled spaces typically results in rebellion and the destruction of trust. Of course, for a parent, letting go and allowing youth to navigate risks is terrifying. Unfortunately, it’s necessary for youth to mature.

What we’re seeing right now is a cultural shift due to the introduction of a new medium and the emergence of greater restrictions on youth mobility and access. The long-term implications of this are unclear. Regardless of what will come, youth are doing what they’ve always done — repurposing new mediums in order to learn about social culture.

Technology will have an effect because the underlying architecture and the opportunities afforded are fundamentally different. But youth will continue to work out identity issues, hang out and create spaces that are their own, regardless of what technologies are available.

Boyd has also collaborated with Wired magazine to develop a ‘cheat sheet’ for parents to quell fears over MySpace and teens.

Via Bldgblog. More images elsewhere online.

According to CNet, NBC has politely asked YouTube to pull several classic skits from Saturday Night Live as well as numerous other programmers. Of course, NBC has also waited two months for excitement to build before keeping the content available (albeit freely) soley on its own site. As YouTube reaches its tipping point (it might be already there) into mass culture, it will be interesting to see how many media owners take similiar action. We’re also guessing that more stuff will spring up to replace it as fast as they take it down. In the meantime, loads of advertising agencies are busily ‘accidentally’ dropping their work into the site, in the hope that it will — to use the old fashioned term — ‘go viral’.

Remember the days when passing out in front of the television at night meant waking up to that Videodrome-esque static screen. Whatever happened to that midnight hinterland where the television just Switched Off. Can you buy DVDs of the BBC’s switch off when they used to play the national anthem over the revolving globe and then… nothing but snow…

There is, of course, an exhaustive collection of television test cards online. In celebration of a time when television would Just. Stop.

‘Prada Marfa’ is part of the luxury brand’s ongoing set of commissioned art projects (see also Vanessa Beecroft’s ‘nude logo’ and in-store work for Louis Vuitton). The shop sadly isn’t open for business. Berlin-based artists, Danish-born Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset of Norway, designed the installation as a “snapshot” in time meant to succumb naturally to the elements over the years. “Isn’t it fantastic that there are still a few things left that you can’t buy with your money?” artists Elmgreen and Dragset said in an e-mail from Berlin.

Nevada was the artists’ first choice for the work, but “casino owners and the porn industry… didn’t seem so hooked on contemporary art,” they wrote. After a visit to the Marfa area, the Texas location made sense, they said.

“The Texan nature, of course, also has an iconographic place in most people’s memory… That makes a great contradiction to an urban, consumer-based icon such as Prada.”

Milan-based Prada SpA has supported contemporary art for years. Miuccia Prada, the fashion house’s chief designer and granddaughter of company founder Mario Prada, selected the shoes and handbags displayed at the Marfa project. She says the work illustrates “a deep-seated anxiety, as well as an extricable link, between art and fashion.”

More like a deep-seated frustration of “look but don’t touch”.

We all know that PETA have a long history of stunts against fashion industry fur fanciers. But do they (or we) ever consider how PETA has in fact done a grand job of publicising and popularising their ‘victims’?

Example One. Julien MacDonald’s show at London Fashion Week. Having been Creative Director at Givenchy a few years back, he quit after a few lacklustre collections. He now has his own line at Debenhams department store and Paris Hilton as a muse — oh, and he’s the catty judge on Sky One’s Project Catwalk. So his show was hardly destined to be front page news — and certainly not big news outside the UK fashion fish bowl. That is, until the PETA flour bombing incident. (Note this also got everyone’s favourite publicity whore, Paris, the lion’s share of the coverage too.)

Example Two. Anna Wintour. Although a known and respected fashion editor, she truly entered mainstream consciousness when PETA started dumping dead raccoons on her dinner plate in restaurants. Since then it’s been one long panto season of ‘Nuclear Wintour’ vs. the animal rights loons, garnering plenty of press for both American Vogue and PETA in the process. It’s also a win-win situation on both sides (although we’re sure damned inconvenient for Wintour on occasion) — PETA make Anna their very own Cruella de Ville and Wintour looks like a stoic protector of Vogue’s (crucial) advertisers.

Example Three. The ‘Giselle fur scum’ sign paraded on the Victoria’s Secret catwalk behind an oblivious-looking Giselle a few years back. She did pretty well out of that did she not? In fact, it seems to have become staple image in any press coverage of PETA — namechecking the VS underwear label as well, of course.

It’s just a thought…

First, a graph showing the number of blog posts that contain the words "Pete Doherty" + KLF per day for the last 30 days.

There are LOTS of people out there willing this to be true and we always had our suspicions.

The story goes:

From tomorrow’s Dagenham Evening Chronicle:
FURY AS DOHERTY TRUTH REVEALED

The Samaritans have today recruited 600 extra staff to deal with an expected surge in calls as troubled fans come to terms with today’s revelations about rocker and teen icon Pete Doherty. In a surprise press conference today, the men behind Doherty’s career reveled themselves – and admitted that the Libertines, Babyshambles, the tales of drug use, the armed robberies and the affair with supermodel Kate Moss have all been part of one of the largest hoaxes in British history.

The men behind the scandal – Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, who were themselves infamous popstars under the name The KLF – admitted how they plucked a young Buddy Holly impersonator Doherty from obscurity and made him a media darling. “It was a meant to be a quick stunt to show the frailties of our celbrity-obsessed culture,” said Cauty, adding, “there are too many people who are famous despite their lack of talent, usefulness and basic intelligence. We wanted to do something that held a mirror up to that.” Mr Drummond called Britain’s pop-culture “sick” and said that although he regretted the hurt caused to Doherty’s many fans, he hoped “this incident taught us all some important things”.

In a prepared statement, the two men – famous for many other pop pranks, including the famous burning of GBP1million on a remote Scottish island – detailed how they manipulated the British Press into making Doherty an icon. Doherty – whose real name has now been revealed to be Trevor McDermott – was making a living as a part-time Buddy Holly impersonator in the Cornwall holiday circuit. He began a short-lived affair with the singer of a well known 80’s rock band, and was introduced to Drummond and Cauty at a backstage party in London’s West End. The men described how a drunken McDermott amused them with his slurred singing and frenetic dance movements, and how they then realised that this would be the perfect “dupe” for a plan they had been hatching for some time.

“The plan involved proving three theories we have about current British society,” reads the statement. “The first is that in the so-called “alternative” scene, everybody is too scared of missing The Next Big Thing to worry about anything else.” To prove this, some session musicians were provided to compose the rest of the “band”, The Libertines, and rumours of exposive gigs were leaked to the media. “The gigs in question never actually took place, but we didn’t have to worry about that. Soon the buzz around The Libertines was so frenetic, journalists were falling over themselves to claim to have been at the front of every single fictional gig.” Within weeks, The Libertines were appearing on magazines and receiving record offers. Gigs sold out in minutes, while their first album “Up The Bracket” flew off shelves.

Feeling that their first point had been proved, Drummond and Cauty moved to their second theory: “We feel that our culture has become an enormous soap opera. We don’t care what a person thinks, or creates, or contributes. We just care about what they do in their normal lives. Especially when it’s something they shouldn’t be doing.”

To demonstrate this, the men co-ordinated a number of scandals. First was a robbery staged in the house of one of the band members. When this took place, McDermott (aka Doherty) was unknown outside of the alternative music scene. An incident of this calibre was sufficient, however, to catapult McDermott onto the front page of every major national tabloid. “One day we has just another singer, the next day he was ‘Disgraced Celebrity Rocker’, and he hasn’t been out of the papers since”. Further revelations about drug abuse and violence kept McDermott and The Libertines on the front pages for months.

One thing that took even Drummond and Cauty by surprise was the affair with model Kate Moss. “That was not something that we planned or had any involvement. Whether she knew about the hoax is something we are not party to. We have never had any contact with Miss Moss.” However, this was the boost their project needed – where the drugs and crime had made McDermott a media sensation, the relationship with one of fashion’s most famous women catapulted him into the world of true celebrity. “While we had not planned this, it certainly proved our point. There are many superior artists in the country today, but they never appear in Heat or The Sun, because they don’t have the words ‘boyfriend of Kate Moss’ after their name.”

Despite this boost, the project began running into a major setback for Drummond and Cauty. Just as they were preparing to enter the final phase of their scheme, Doherty decided that he wanted to part company with them, the fake band, and begin seriously recording music. He stopped all contact with the men, and threatened legal actions if any details were leaked to the press. “We were upset at the apparent failure of our grand project, and also at the monster we had created in Pete Doherty. Our third theorem – that ‘If enough people say that a piece of s*** is a bar of gold, we’ll believe it’s a bar of gold’ – seemed to have been beyond salvation. Fortunately, at that point Pete released the first Babyshambles album.”

In the time since then, Drummond and Cauty have been locked in a vicious legal battle, which was eventually settled out of court by the discovery of a videotape showing McDermott singing “Peggy Sue” at a Butlin’s in Devon. Publicly, McDermott still strongly denies all charges. How this affects the future career of Pete Doherty remains to be seen.

Whatever the truth (it seems to have originated here)… it’s a glorious idea. We can hear the Babyshambles/KLF mash ups already…

Via Gawker, Debaser, Heckler Spray etc etc.

Tonight, Prince performed Purple Rain live at the Brit Awards. With Wendy and Lisa. We weren’t there, but came home from the pub smug and sure that someone would have uploaded footage somewhere by now — but what do we find — nothing! Not even a shaky, hand held, filmed-from-my-mobile flicker of His Purpleness.

What?! Nowhere on the internet, 2 hours later? Are the British that far behind?

UPDATE: here it is (finally) — BST’s first video feed!!!

Just one of many Brokeback Mountain related auctions — WOW has been doing a sterling job of tracking all the bad brokeback-related art as well — the shirts (cleaned but ’still stained’) are raising money for a children’s charity.

Albeit with the same layout…

The BBC is proposing levying a tax on anything that can receive video – from PCs to mobile phones.According to a government green paper delivered this week, the UK government plans to retain the BBC’s licence fee for at least the next ten years but are looking ahead to a time when high speed broadband connections deliver television content to homes.

In a statement to parliament, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell said that,

Like its predecessors, this review [of the BBC licence fee] has examined the Corporation’s scale and scope, its funding and governance. But this one has been unique. In the level of public consultation, and in tackling perhaps the greatest challenge the BBC has ever faced -– the changes in TV technology that will soon result in a wholly digital Britain.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s green paper on the BBC’s long term future proposed an end of the traditional licence fee and “either a compulsory levy on all households or even on ownership of PCs as well as TVs.”

They need to move fast: press coverage this week shows that the BBC is already concerned that people watching TV over their mobile phones may be avoiding the licence fee.

Story via The Register.

Says writer Sukhdev Sandhu, who will be exploring the lost London night through a series of journeys over the course of one year. Nighthaunts is a collaboration between Sandhu, audio artist Scanner and website designer Ian Budden and was commissioned by Artangel. Sandhu’s journey is also being serialised in the Daily Telegraph magazine — he happens to be the paper’s chief film critic. As well as visiting sewers, hanging out with night cleaners and flying over the metropolis in police helicoptors, Sandhu is inviting suggestions of places to visit. Not Trade would be ours…

The BBC reports that Michael Winterbottom’s new film, The Road To Guantanamo, will be released simultaneously at cinemas, online and on DVD, becoming the first film to be released via all three channels at the same time.

This news comes only a couple of weeks after Stephen Soderburgh announced simultaneous release of Bubble cinematically and on DVD. More on the impact of these releases on the cinema industry in our earlier report.

Computer scientist and educational technologist Alan Kay is famous for two things: his exhortation that

The best way to predict the future, is to invent it.

and his stunning success in doing just that — during his time with Xerox in the early 1970s, Kay and his team developed not just the computer interface as we know it — with windows, icons, mice and pointers, but also, in 1972, conceived of the Dynabook: a radical portable device somewhere between a laptop and a tablet PC, unbuildable for another 30 years.

We’ve been reading some of those early papers, and were interested to see what he had to say, in 1972, about what people would do with such tools:

The ability to make copies easily and to ‘own’ one’s information will probably not debilitate existing markets, just as xerography has enhanced publishing (rather than hurting it, as some predicted), and as tapes have not damaged the LP record business but have provided a way to organize one’s own music. Most people are not interested in acting as a source or bootlegger; rather, they like to permute and play with what they own. [our emphasis]

and

A combination of this ‘carry anywhere’ device and a global information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the libraries and schools [not to mention stores and billboards] of the world to the home. One can imagine one of the first programs an owner will write is a filter to eliminate advertising. [our emphasis]