BigShinyThing

In just the most recent example, Retail chain River Island has found that its flash-y site is inaccessible to people with sight problems. New Media Age reports that the chain will be unable to launch an accessible version of its etail site for three months. The delay means the 2m people in the UK with sight problems remain isolated by the current Flash etail site, which experts believe may be in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act. Meanwhile in the States, Target has become erm a target for blind activists who are suing the company because they cannot use its website:

What I hope is that Target and other online merchants will realize how important it is to reach 1.3 million people in this nation and the growing baby-boomer population who will also be losing vision

– plaintiff Bruce Sexton Jr., 24, a blind third-year student at UC Berkeley.

It’s not hard people! Think of your website as being like a new building — it needs to be accessible to all.

Washington or Toyko, take your pic(k).

The Economist (subscription required) gives its usual informative and concise take on the MySpace phenomenon but uses a screenshot of a site that is very clearly not that social networking site [pictured]. Instead they’ve run with a shot from an adult dating site featuring young lovelies such as “caroline, seeking males, for 1 on 1 sex, erotic email or cyber sex” – precisely the kind of image that MySpace (it’s the new Internet EVIL!) is acting to dispel. Oops.

It suggests that legendarily boring diarist Andy Warhol may well have been the world’s first blogger. The ‘about’ explains:

This is Andy Warhol’s diary entries posted exactly 29 years to the day after they were first recorded. All text is taken directly from the publication The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett. All notes and comments made by the editor have been removed. The Diary spans just over 10 years, bringing this project to completion in Febuary, 2016.

Our favourite entry from the diaries:

Said hello to lots of people who said hello to me.

Via WOW.

We’re evidently not the only ones tantilised by the blurred out, pixelated non-sponsored brand identities on reality TV. The good people over at Ironic Sans obviously had some time on their hands, and decided to turn the problem into an opportunity. Presto: pre-pixellated clothing for reality TV contestants. Or any other media-whores.

And this being Web 2.0, their mocked-up ideas were made instantly available as the real thing using the on-demand printing services of the truly cool CafePress service. From idea to product probably took all of five minutes, with all the promotion happening word-of-mouth and -mouse online. Case study time, anyone?

And we have to wonder, idly, whether he’s actually trademarked these images…

Nigeria has the world’s third largest film industry — ‘Nollywood’ — after the US and India.

Nigeria has perhaps the most distinguished literary tradition in Africa; Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri and Ken Saro-Wiwa are the best-known writers, but it is clear that Nigeria’s home video industry has no pretensions to high art. What it’s all about is money. Nollywood movies were originally financed by importers of blank video tapes as a way of promoting sales of their product — and commerce remains king.

And according to a recent Guardian Unlimited report, the street markets of London represent one of Nollywood’s most important distribution channels. Evidently Londoners just can’t get enough low-budget VHS schlocky horror and African bling.

But the directors of these amazingly successful genre hits have bigger plans:

“They sell a lot of our films in Peckham and in Dalston market [in London],” says Paul Obazele, the veteran producer on American Dream, who has already turned out four movies this year, and plans a US cinema opening for this latest effort. “But Peckham is becoming too small for us. We have decided to take on the world.”

We reckon they’re in with a chance. All they need is a noughties Tarantino to pick up on their mashup of Hollywood glam and Nigerian pop culture, pump up the violence, and glue on a saleably funktastic afrobeat soundtrack — the proto-house grooves of Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit, maybe. Today Peckham, tomorrow the world.

The wisest words we’ve heard for a while on the subject come from MIT’s Advertsing Lab:

My take: throw in a recommendation engine. If people are to endure ads on their MySpace pages, at least let them and their friends pick the ads to see. If I know that my buddy is on the market for a new car, I’ll think there’s a better chance he’d appreciate a Toyota ad more than a random punch-the-monkey banner. And if a banner is funny or otherwise amusing (yes, there are amusing banners), people would recommend those too (just watch all these commecials uploaded on YouTube), eventually driving the overall quality of advertising up.

Well yes. Content is media. Respect its creators, learn the vernacular, and maybe the community will welcome your advertising content into its world. We’re particularly excited to see that great ads are accepted as simply being great clip media. And no we didn’t plant this on YouTube. It’s there because some punter loved it enough to do that themselves. And that’s worth thinking about.

Turns out that it’s not just sky-high Manolos and hobble skirts that cause fashion accidents. Fashion Watch reports that iconic singer Jane Birkin has ditched her own Hermes Birkin bag claiming that it was responsible for her tendonitis.

Birkin was quoted as saying:

That bloody thing. I told Hermes they were mad to make it. My one was always full and it ended up giving me tendonitis.

Expect to see young starlets’s skinny wrists snapping under the strain all over LA…

Via a Socialite’s Life.

Writing on the BBC News site, Internet law professor Michael Geist notes that:

The telecommunications and broadcast industries’ vision of the future of the internet invariably involves its convergence with television.

However, he argues, these plans may have been thrown into doubt, by the emergent phenomena of what he nicely terms ‘clip culture’:

The emergence of video sharing sites is yet another seemingly instant internet success story that has caught many by surprise.

Last month, two sites, MSN Video and Youtube, attracted nearly 10 million unique US visitors each.

[...] Telecommunications companies and intransigent broadcasters face an even tougher choice, as their vision of an on-demand converged internet, must now compete with the clip culture.

The emergence of clip culture represents a lot of unanticipated demand, for a lot of unanticipated content. And the lack of anticipation is what’s making the media giants twitchy: their fear is that betting the shop on converged IPTV might not be as sure a thing as they have thought. Read more in his article.

And as a nice example of the pull of clip culture, ladies and gentlemen — and because here in London it’s a cold rainy Friday and we could do with some inspiration — for your enjoyment, we present Sister Rosetta Tharpe and her electric guitar:

[Via our new favourite music blog, MoistWorks]

Move over Flickr. New-kid-on-the-blog (beta release, currently offline, better call the VCs in for another cash injection) photo-sharing/search site Riya is stirring up a storm.

Why? Advanced image processing, including in-image face recognition and text search. Want to find every picture of your ex? With Riya those pictures don’t have to be hand-tagged ‘insensitive slob’ to come up in your search results — the software knows who (and what) is in each image. ‘Find more pictures with this person in’ is just a click away. Or will be, when they iron out the bugs. Vapourware? Maybe. Or maybe, just maybe they really have what it takes, and simply decloaked a little early — nothing is riskier for a tech startup than to be in the media spotlight a couple of months before the product is ready for a credible beta release!

Either way they’ve been impressing the tech opinion formers. Check out CNET’s review and slideshow, or Riya’s award-winning presentation at the DEMO 06 techfest.

The dark side of Riya is in the implications that content-based search — particularly face-based search — have for privacy. That’s a wait-and-see. Certainly another interesting tool for the avid cyber-stalker.

We’ll keep you in the picture as the story progresses…

Hot on the heels of Slingmedia’s hardware-based placeshifter comes the release of Orb‘s software-only [and free] solution, which allows you to watch placeshifted TV, movies and digital audio and view your photo collection, from pretty much any device anywhere. And it seems to work — MobileCrunch successfully field-tested the service under pretty extreme conditions:

I even managed to watch part of Underworld Revolution from 36,000 feet using Conexion by Boeing on my way back from Korea. When you think about it, that’s pretty amazing, especially since it’s free.

Indeed.

We know that BigShinyThing is often more concerned with baby pandas and cat circuses than the Real World. However, occasionally emergent media does something that encapsulates the tipping point of old media vs new. And exposes the inability of the old model in getting the really important news out there immediately to the people who need it. This is one of those moments.

An excerpt from Martin Hardie’s original Nettime post that brought this to our attention:

…lunch time today we were greeted here in the basque country by the news of the eta ceasefire. its good news but what follows i am sure will be harder than the ‘struggle’ to this point. anyway the news was broken by Gara, a local basque newspaper closley allied with the ezkerda abertzale (patriotic left), the banned party, batasuna etc etc … on the gara front page http://gara.net/ is/was a link to the video of the eta announcement http://gara.net/bideoa.htm when i tried to follow the share link the video in flash format took me to a web page on youtube dot com [URL] Its nice to see that you tube provide such a frinedly and timely service to those in need of alternate media outlets! thats all it made me smile.

The artist took 10 days to complete his mini-masterpiece using a single rabbit hair as a paint brush. Visitors to a Chinese art gallery can currently view the painting through a microscope at 50,000 times magnification.

Within the world of micro-art, we are particularly fond of Willard Wigan and not just because he’s from our home town. The maker of the world’s smallest sculptures, Willard claims to work between heartbeats to avoid hand tremors. He spent months crafting a miniature figure of Muhammad Ali fighting Sonny Liston on a pin head, whilst the film “An Eye of X” follows his attempts to craft a tiny figure of Malcolm X.

And, in these days of CG and airbrushing, it’s great to see art that is genuinely crafty and downright weird.

Story from the BBC.

Good old Wired is obviously feeling the dotcom sap rising once again, and is limbering up for a long hot summer to be spent vigorously fanning the fires of hype.

We’re not quite at that level of frenzy yet. In the meantime, Wired is — like the rest of the ubergeeks — getting all worked up about ‘Web 2.0′, and has put together a nicely zeitgesity primer on what Web 2.0 means, how it works, and why it matters. Cut and paste some of this — indeed any of this — into your next PowerPoint prez, add in a couple of cutesy screengrabs of Flickr and your clients will just know you’re the right ones to win that account! You know it’s true!

Hell yes. If only Wired would resurrect Suck.Com then we’d know the Spirit of ’97 was truly back and walking amongst us. Give it time. Give it time.

The BBC reports that a so-called ‘nuisance beggar’ who licked CCTV cameras to obscure their view has landed an anti-social behaviour order (ASBO). Keith Farran would pester drivers for money to wash their cars and if they refused he would dance around gesticulating and licking cameras.

Appearing before Teesside magistrates, Farran, 27, of Wellington Street, Middlesbrough, was banned from Stockton town centre for six months. The case was brought by Stockton and Middlesbrough councils.

The court heard how Farran was caught licking cameras in the Wellington Square shopping centre in Stockton. He wanted to smear the glass so police could not see him harassing motorists.

The order bans him from causing harassment, alarm or distress and being verbally abusive.

He is also banned from entering any car park within the Cleveland Police area without a good reason and asking for money to wash vehicles.

Chris Dunwell, anti-social behaviour officer for Stockton Council, said: “This order has been made to prevent further people being deceived and harassed by Farran.

“Numerous warnings were made regarding this man’s behaviour. Our team works with other local authorities to ensure that these problems are dealt with. People should be allowed to visit the town centre without being harassed.”

Does this first silly season story of the season mean that it’s finally spring?

Writing in Wired, Wright’s take on modern, non-linear games echoes that of Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You:

[Gaming is] a rapid cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis. And it’s a fundamentally different take on problem-solving than the linear, read-the-manual-first approach of their parents.

In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers’ mindset — the fact that they are learning in a totally new way — means they’ll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.

In other words, gaming is — at its best — science by another name: learning, hypothesis testing, and application of past observations and deduction to future problems.

Well, maybe. Wright and his co-developers are certainly risking the company on his beliefs: their next game, Spore, involves taking a single-celled creature up the evolutionary ladder, through life on land, tribal- and city-based cultures and on to galactic empire, as demonstrated in a strangely compelling walk-through viewable online. After the best part of an hour spent coaxing his beasties out of the pond and up the chain of existence to life amongst the stars, Wright comments [paraphrased] that ‘this is where the game really starts — up to here we’ve just been getting people to learn the controls.’ Lordy. As noted by GameSpy:

The important thing to take away from this is not “Will Wright is making a cool game,” but the way that he is making the game. He’s sidestepped the whole idea of massive teams of content creators in favor of a system of building games based on player-content and emergence.

You can read Spore as simulated Evolution, a creepy gaming take on Intelligent Design, or The Sims with tentatcles, claws and death rays. But whatever, it looks gorgeous, and the attention to the minutae of creature and object design sets a new high for God-games (as they’re known). We’ll have to wait til it hits the streets to see what effect this take on Creation has on our next generation of real-world creators.

The now-somewhat-older pin up has been out and about promoting the forthcoming Bettie Page biopic and finally get some of those vital royalties.

Page has been missing in action for years since joining the god squad and disavowing her porno past. Now however the promise of genuine cash has brought her out of hiding.

The photographic categories on her official site pretty much tells you all you need to know about her illustrious (and extremely radical for the time — Page was never photographed with men, only other women) career:

• Bikini
• Bondage
• Color
• Jungle
• Leggy
• Lingerie
• Magazine
• Miscellaneous
• Nude
• Whip

She should also tell Dita Von Teese she would like her look back…

Photo from an Opera Gloves fetishist’s site.

We ventured outside of our Zone 3 safety zone this week to see Addictive TV present their cinema project Eye of the Pilot at the Waterman’s Art Centre. Before the main feature they treated us to a compilation of their greatest hits as well as Optronica shorts.

See their stuff for yourself (lo res) at Samurai.fm.

Addictive are next playing in London on April 5th at The Garage with German electro punks Warren Suicide. Go. See.

C/o A Socialite’s Life blog.