BigShinyThing

Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid has taken blogging mainstream by running blogs from the Israeli and Lebanese frontlines.

The Sun says,

Sun correspondents will keep you up to date with the latest news and views on the Middle East crisis with blogs from the heart of Israel and Lebanon.

Our Chief Foreign Correspondent Nick Parker will post daily blogs for you from war-torn Beirut.

While our award-winning Chief Feature Writer Oliver Harvey is based in Israel as Islamic militants’ rockets rain down on the Jewish state.

In 1961, a New York City zoning board passed a regulation allowing developers and landlords to build additional rental floor space in exchange for providing public plazas and arcades on privately developed lots. This marked the advent of what has become known as “Privately Owned Public Space” in the city.

Over the last 40 years, “Incentive Zoning” as it is called has been instrumental to the creation of 503 plazas, arcades and other public areas which are concentrated primarily in the midtown area of Manhattan. In return, developers were allowed to build higher and wider structures and they received an estimated 20 million square feet of rental floor area.

When combined, “Privately Owned Public Spaces” have the potential to add an astonishing 824 acres or roughly 50 football fields to the public spaces utilized by New York residents.

This is according to Brendan J. FitzGerald of walkingtoursnyc.com. The site also quotes a three-and-half year study published in 2000 by Harvard Professor Jerold S. Kayden which found that 41% of “Privately Owned Public Spaces” were of “marginal utility” and “inaccessible or devoid of the kinds of amenities that attract public use.”

Taking these stats as a starting point, the Graffiti Research Lab have developed some ‘build your own’ chairs made out of postal boxes in order to reclaim these public spaces. [We note that they passed on using Fedex.]

A video of the chairs in action is viewable on the GRL site and, of course, on their Flickr photopool where you can also fall across lots of other examples of the clever outside-hacking stuff that GRL have done.

Or maybe if we get back.

I think every decade has an iconic blonde — like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana — and right now, I’m that icon.

Paris Hilton in the Sunday Times Style section.

First up — CBS in the States is advertising its new schedule on eggs. Yeah, right, whatever, we hear you say — after all Internet bank Smile advertised on bananas yonks ago and we’ve already written about tattooed fruit. But. But this latest effort to merge food and media appears to be well thought out and even has a copy-worthy back story.

The New York Times reports [registration req'd] that network plans to place laser imprints of its insignia and logos for some shows on 35 million eggs in the autumn. CBS’s copywriters have had a load of fun with their sloganeering: CSI — crack the case on CBS; Shark — hard-boiled drama etc.

As cracked as this scheme sounds, George Schweitzer, president of the CBS marketing group, said:

It’s a great way to reach people in an unexpected form… You can’t avoid it.

Just one of the many claimed benefits of the medium is that ‘91% of egg buyers look through eggs to check for breakage prior to purchase’ — more dedicated eyeballs than the average TV commercial can claim (maybe).

The imprinting tech used to brand eggs has been developed by a company called EggFusion, based in Deerfield, Illinois. The founder Bradley Parker claims he wanted to reassure shoppers that egg producers were not placing old eggs in new cartons, so he developed a laser-etching technique to put the expiration date directly on an egg during the washing and grading process. Mr Parker, whose family runs a chicken farm in North Carolina, knew that the only way to get egg producers to co-operate was to make it worth their while. Hence turning the eggs into an advertising medium.

To ensure that egg producers stick to the rules, EggFusion has technicians assigned to each egg plant whilst it owns the equipment and data. The eggs also carry a code that can be checked on a website, www.myfreshegg.com, to find out where the egg originated, the date it left the plant and the names of the distributor and retailer.

Meanwhile in the UK, food producer Birds Eye have continued their ‘we don’t play with your food’ theme into a blog written by one of their pea-farmers. We think that this is a really nice attempt by a corporation to engage with consumers in an open and honest way — right down to somewhat blurry photos. Plus it has a real ‘how it works’ cuteness about it.

What’s clever and zeitgeisty about both of these schemes is that they encourage both consumer trust and producer transparency. The Birds Eye blog has posts titled ‘The folks from ISO are here for an audit’. There is little doubt that consumers Really Care about where the food on their plate comes from nowadays and whether or not it is safe to eat and these branded initatives are picking up on that. And even if the blog in particular is subject to rigorous cross-checking and PR controls it doesn’t show. Plus it’s about peas…

Pea-blogging via Russell Davies’ blog.

We have posted before on the current moral panic concerning the dangers of social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo. As the PR wars between rival sites reach crescendo we’d thought we’d check out blogsafety.com – the advice and social networking site about… social networking. And it appears that little has been learned from the sex education wars. Just a few observations. One, when you are trying to talk to teens it’s best not to look and sound like a teacher from the 1970s. Two, teenagers (and people in general) don’t tend to respond well to being patronised — kids in particular don’t need the Internet explaining to them — it’s part of their reality. Three is the sole comment in response to the following advice:

“We recommend that you do give them the web address of your blog and it’s a very good idea to talk with them about what you’re doing and reassure them that you understand basic safety and privacy rules.”

Nope, I’m never sharing my blog with my parents — and that’s final.

With the arrival of the 2012 Olympics, large chunks of derelict London will be reborn shiny and new. Books like this are important catalogues of what London used to look like — scruffy and dark.

See also: Stephen Gill and his book of photographs of Hackney Wick.

ArtNotAds do what they say on the tin — replace outdoor advertising with art. They’ve also utilised Pledgebank to get a campaign going to get enough pledges of £10 to start the campaign by placing a piece or art/poem/etc on one of the Underground station advertising slots.

What the big outdoor media placement companies think of their antics, we shall soon find out…

Via Protein Feed.

The charming Designers are Wankers are holding a video-phone portrait contest. How very modern. They say:

We want you to flex those artistic muscles and create a film all about you. The objective here is to sell yourself (and not your soul) to a potential employer/client by illustrating how your services are of benefit to their organisation. The duration of the video is to be no longer than 30 seconds, but the quota of imagination on how you approach it is limitless. The winner will be awarded the prize of £5,000, and in addition, job vacancies in various areas of design will be offered at competitive salaries.

The best footage will then be distributed via DVD. How very anachronistic — why not on YouTube? This project is very much like Showstudio’s recent Amaze Me but hopefully with more interesting results. We’ll see.

The BBC reports that Syd died from complications arising from diabetes. Here’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ — remember him this way.

Survivor Rachel North’s blog.

Survivor Holly Finch’s blog.

The online petition for a public inquiry into the 7th July bombings.

CNN took an easy pot shot at Wikipedia this week for its ahem ‘live editing’ (otherwise known as breaking news) on the death of Enron executive Kenneth Lay. CNN reports smugly how:

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, added news of Lay’s death to his online biography shortly after news outlets began reporting it at around 10 a.m. ET (2.p.m GMT).

At 10:06 a.m. Wikipedia’s entry for Lay said he died “of an apparent suicide.”

At 10:08 it said he died at his Aspen home “of an apparent heart attack or suicide.”

Within the same minute, it said the cause of death was “yet to be determined.”

At 10:09 a.m. it said “no further details have been officially released” about the death.

Two minutes later, it said: “The guilt of ruining so many lives finaly (sic) led him to his suicide.”

At 10:12 a.m. this was replaced by: “According to Lay’s pastor the cause was a ‘massive coronary’ heart attack.”

By 10:39 a.m. Lay’s entry said: “Speculation as to the cause of the heart attack lead many people to believe it was due to the amount of stress put on him by the Enron trial.” This statement was later dropped.

By early Wednesday afternoon, the entry said Lay was pronounced dead at Aspen Valley Hospital, citing the Pitkin, Colorado, sheriff’s department. It said he apparently died of a massive heart attack, citing KHOU-TV in Houston.

CNN goes on to note that staff at Wikipedia ‘did not immediately return calls’. But they’re not the reporters are they?

Back in Malcolm McLaren’s day situationist shopping involved a mass Santa invasion of local toy stores to hand out toys free to kids. Nowadays the Internet and pure old-fashioned weirdness has given situationism as new impetus.

Firstly The Economist reports on how Chinese shoppers are organising themselves into mass-buying teams to get the best deals — they converge on stores at a pre-appointed time and haggle. Tuangou, or team-buying, aims to drive through unprecedented bargains by combing the reach of the Internet with the power of the mob. The practice originated in online chat-rooms but has now developed into specialist websites such as 51tuaugou.com and www.teambuy.com. According to Zhang Wei, who helped to set up teambuy.com less than six months ago, the site now has 10,000 registered members. The company now plans to expand into Beijing and Shanghai.

The practice is believed to have developed out of sheer accident as shoppers chatting online realised that they could drive the best deals if they worked together. Bargaining is the norm in China where getting a discount is often a sort of insurance against ending up with badly made or fake goods.

Unsurprisngly, some retailers aren’t keen on the practice. LVMH for instance say that they always insist on fixed prices in China — after all they have the counterfieters to battle. But others encourage the practice in the hope of recovering lost margins through the extra volume. The Gome store in Guangzhou, for example, closed its doors to ‘normal’ customers when the team buyers showed up a fortnight ago and even gave each of them a goody bag as they left. The Economist sees this phenomena as a sort of ‘capitalism for the people’:

Team buying turns haggling, a tradition in China, into an art-form. That such aggressive consumer behaviour has arisen out of a country without much of a consumer economy and weak individual rights is less surprising than it might seem. In the countryside there are more and more organised protests against government corruption and dictatorial landlords, with even poor people using technology like the internet and mobile phones to help. Now their urban, middle-class brethren are adopting their tactics - if only for shopping. However, if China’s economy ever slumps, urban consumers could use their organisational skills to confront the government directly. Beijing might be watching the spread of team buying with trepidation.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports on a gang of thieves dressed as superheroes who have been liberating products from stores across Germany. In one incident, supermarket shoppers were left aghast as half a dozen costumed superheroes invaded a store and filled trolleys with some $2000 worth of fancy produce such as Kobe beef and Manchego cheese. Before leaving (without paying) the thieves left flowers and a note for the cashiers at Fresh Paradise saying:

“n case you do not know us yet: We are Santa Guevara, Spider Mum, Operaistorix and Multiflex. We are precarious superheroes… Without the power of superheroes, there is no chance for survival in this city of millionaires. Although we produce the wealth of Hamburg, we hardly have anything to show for it. It does not have to stay like this.

The group later posted a statement online claiming that the stolen goods had been given to the needy, including children at kindergarten.

It was not the first time the gang had struck: A year earlier, about 20 masked people barged into the Seven Seas Restaurant, a posh bistro overlooking the Elba River. The intruders dumped the entire buffet spread into trash bags before fleeing.

The self-styled caped crusaders belong to a movement called Hamburg for Free, a loosely organized network with a simple ideology: People shouldn’t have to pay for anything they might want. Instead, they should just walk into a store and help themselves.

The people behind Hamburg for Free say that the root of their ideology is basic: economic frustration. The port city, with 1.7 million residents, is home to more millionaires than any other German town. But the city also has an unemployment rate of 11.3 percent, and the posh lofts and waterfront estates are a stark contrast to the squatters and homeless who wander the streets.

Although the police have failed to apprehend any members of the group The Washington Post put in a call to the student government offices at the University of Hamburg and got an interview:

“Appearing in a park on a recent afternoon are a young woman and man who claim to have participated in the heist at Fresh Paradise.

“It’s not that we hate rich people, but we want this kind of wealth for everybody. That’s the point,” says the man, a thin, dark-haired guy in his twenties who describes himself as a university student nearing graduation. “We wanted to show that there is rebellion, that you can stand up and fight.”

The woman, blond and soft-spoken, says she used to work in a small clothing store but hated the “bad working conditions,” like having to stay until 8 some nights [!].

In addition to food thieving, Hamburg for Free also encourages individual acts of rebellion, they say. Favorite tactics include taking longer-than-allowed coffee breaks at work, daring to ride the subway without a ticket and downloading pirated software and music from the Internet.

However, Carsten Sievers, general manager of the Fresh Paradise grocery, is dubious of their claims to be modern-day Robin Hoods.

“How many poor people will really enjoy a bottle of champagne or a high-value cheese?” he asks. “I think the object was just to get in the newspapers and get publicity for their ideas. To help the poor people, there is a right way and a wrong way. You cannot use the voice of Robin Hood to promote yourself.”

In reality, he says, the caper was much more low-key than the gang’s bravado suggested. A conspirator in street clothes performed a reconnaissance mission to the store ahead of time, Sievers says, and stuffed several hand-held shopping baskets with groceries. The baskets were placed unnoticed on the floor near the store’s front entrance. When the costumed performers arrived on the scene, they ducked in for only an instant to snatch the baskets and flee without a word. More like cowardly crooks than superheroes, Sievers believes.

“That was it. That was all we saw,” he says. “One of our girls tried to follow them, but she lost them and they got away.”

Also lost in the myth/PR stunt surrounding the crime, Sievers adds, is a longtime store policy:
twice a week, employees box up dated organic produce and other perishables that have been passed over and donate them to a local social-services agency to feed the hungry and the poor. Maybe the situationist ’superheroes’ should donate their time to that…

And then, of course, there is the gang of violent transvestites currently plaguing New Orleans.

Google sets works off a few examples ie Jerry McGuire, Top Gun and then generates the rest of the set for you. Has its quirks but then that makes it more fun… We like our set of iconic 80s pop bands. Excellent for those moments when your brain goes blank… which for us is rather often.

Blog overlord Nick Denton of Gawker Media has started to behave like a proper media magnate. An ex Financial Times journalist, Denton made his fortune on First Tuesday (remember them?) a dotcom social networking site that reportedly sold for $50 million and Moreover Technologies, which sold for a reported $39 million. Ever the entrail-reader of digital media, Denton has established a blogging empire in Gawker Media which produces tightly-written blogs on Manhattan media, tech, the LA scene and seemingly anything else which could interest the young professional.

But Denton’s clearly playing a long game. In recent days he’s put two underperforming sites up for sale, reorganised others and even sacked several editorial staff.

The changes come as Denton when apparently on top of his game. Page views at his sites have doubled in the last year; Gawker Media and Nielsen/NetRatings put monthly unique visitors at 4.2 million. The crucial advertisers flock after the sites’ ohsodesirable demographic: Gawker’s media pack boasts “The majority of our readers are 26-35. Around 75% are university graduates, 18% with advanced degrees; over 20% more attended/attending university. Almost 30% have a HHI of over 100K; Over 70% above 50K.” At one point last year the buzz got so loud that even Vanity Fair was forced to take note and gave the key staff of Gawker and Defamer their own double-paged spread.

Denton told the New York Times, “Better to sober up now, before the end of the party. We are becoming a lot more like a traditional media company. You launch a site, you have great hopes for it and it does not grow as much as you wanted. You have to have the discipline to recognise what isn’t working and put your money and efforts into those sites that are.”

Traditional media owners beware - they’re not as fluffy as they look, these bloggers. As Denton notes, “The barrier to entry in Internet Media is low. The barrier to success is high.”