BigShinyThing

Why do big companies like to stifle little ones? You’d have thought that in the brave new Web 2.0 world, big brands would have a better way to deal with mergers and acquisitions but apparently not. Example: we are currently witnessing a major user-generated riot as long-term Flickr users are informed by Yahoo! that they will soon have to use a Yahoo! id to access and use the photo-sharing site.

We’re with the rioters.

Yahoo! bought Flickr a while back. Since then it’s grown hugely and doubtless benefited from Yahoo!’s grown-upness and corporate clout. As for us users, the folk who actually populate Flickr with our stuff, Yahoo!’s presence has until now been pretty benign. We’ve also been patted on the back for being ‘old skool’ by Flickr when we sign in — i.e. a user from before the buyout. This makes us feel kind of with it and proud in a very ‘get me i’m an early adopter’ type way. We’re also the biggest marketing tool Flickr has. Only yesterday we were earnestly telling colleages that ‘Flickr changed my life’. And it has.

Here’s an email that one of us sent on receiving the mail saying that I would soon need a Yahoo! id to sign in — the petulant tone is particularly important:

I don’t want a sucky Yahoo! account.

I hate Yahoo!

I like being an old skool user.

Pooooh.

I guess that Flickr/Yahoo! are betting they can afford to lose the old-timers for the sake of more joined-upness and the ability to flog Yahoo! products to the Flickr users who are left. We’re just left feeling that something brilliant has now been tainted and that — much like when Google took over YouTube — the party is somewhat over. And — more worrying for Flickr — I don’t know if I’m going to be envangelising about Flickr for much longer — not if it involves becoming a Yahoo! user. Urgh.

“When Love Comes to Town”.

We know a bit about the pitfalls of HD: cute animals and landscapes look stunning but humans can look downright terrifying. Having seen their pores magnified to the size of saucers on extra-wide plasma TVs, celebs are rushing to their plastic surgeons to get their skin HD-ready. But the porn industry is already on the case about how to deal with the advanced technology.

As acne-prone celebrities like Cameron Diaz have discovered, HD is extremely unforgiving. But for pornographers it’s not just just their actors faces which are under constant scrutiny — in fact the actors’ facial features are rarely the focus of the close up. As one actress, writer and director, Stormy Daniels explains:

The biggest problem is razor burn. I’m not 100 percent sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD.

Others counter that HD makes the action more ‘real’: “It puts you in the room”, says director Roddy D.

One major obstacle to HD porn has already been created by Sony who said last week it would not mass-produce porno on its Blu-ray high definition discs. The decision has forced the industry to use the competing HD-DVD format, or in some cases, find companies other than Sony that can manufacture copies of Blu-Ray movies. This seems like the latest in a series of strategic blunders from Sony, given the role of the porn industry in the VHS/Beta format wars of the 1980s and the proliferation of the Internet. [UPDATE: Sony have just denied blocking porn production for the format.]

Also, because of the sex industry’s experience in adopting new media formats and championing them, it is the ideal testing ground for HD. There is already work in progress to deal with the ‘highlighted physical imperfections’ issue. Two distributors, Vivid Entertainment and Digital Playground, have been shooting with high definition cameras for two years and says that their experience using the technology gives them the edge in understanding how to deal with hyperdefinition. Their techniques include using postproduction to digitally soften the actors’ skin tone: “It takes away the blemishes and the pits and harshness and makes it look like they have baby skin.”

Hollywood take note.

Source: New York Times via Nettime.

Activists Niko and Andrea place stickers of the “broken link” icon that appears on a web page when the image is missing. We think there’s something enormously sad about it…

A nice follow on from Mr beautiful blank who we wrote about a while back.

Via Wooster Collective.

No doubt intended to cash in on the upcoming Factory Girl-fever (we’re with Mr Dylan on the film — as regular readers on BST will know), Selfridges have excelled themselves with beeeeooootiful silver sixties style windows. We particularly love how our shitty new camera phone has whited-everything out even more to make it look Even More Shiny.

For the next four months, some of the most interesting sound artists working in the UK are on tour, under the banner of Future of Sound (FoS).

Crossover stars such as Scanner, field recordist Chris Watson (ex Cabaret Voltaire) and the Modified Toy Orchestra are performing alongside less well-known artists deserving of a wider audience. And that’s exactly what FoS hopes to offer. If not exactly music for the masses, FoS is about getting experimental, exploratory sonic art in front of punters, not academics.

BST was fortunate to be invited to the FoS launch [thanks again to Lisa Devaney], where we had a chance to hear more about the project from organiser Martyn Ware. He describes the tour (see the FoS calendar for dates) as an opportunity for the artists involved to refine works in progress, while reaching a UK-wide audience.

The tour focus is on sound in space. 3D surround systems designed by Ware and Vince Clarke (see previous interview) are an integral part of the experience — as is enthusiasm for cross-disciplinary collaboration and experiment. Consider for example the work of conceptualist Brian Duffy:

A new musical instrument that uses six specially adapted telescopes; sensors built into the eye pieces convert the light from stars into sound — this information returns to a central control panel, allowing each sound to be manipulated and played in real time…

As Duffy (pictured above, with one of his circuit-bending toy hacks) sees it, today’s segmentation of creativity and thought into categories of ’science’, ‘art’, or ‘music’ is a modern constraint:

400 years ago you had to make your own instruments and tools, whatever you needed.

Duffy’s spirit of convergent co-creation is at the heart of what promises to make the Future of Sound tour something special.

Tickets are selling fast. Check dates, and book early. Prepare to be awed.

[update 25 Jan: The BBC has some footage...]

OK so it’s for a stinky CAR but hey…

Via Plasticbag.org.

In a recent interview David Attenborough claimed that interruptive advertising is the reason why he would never work for another broadcaster. Attenborough’s hatred of commercially-funded TV is part justified by the fact that his programming actually makes money for the BBC:

Our programmes aren’t cheap, but they do sell around the world. So I think you can argue that they don’t cost the licence payer anything. On the contrary, they make money for the BBC.

He says:

I hate advertisements, virulently and with ferocity. If that [TV] set has any damage it’s likely to be because I have thrown something at it when it came to an important point in the drama and they showed a picture of a chocolate bar. I hate advertisements everywhere. I know all the arguments and I know I’m being quirky and that newspapers would die with advertisements, all that. But none the less, I hate them for what they do to the intellectual life of this country, I hate them for what they do to the English language, I hate them for what they do to the coutryside.

Not a fan, then.

So, Channel 4 has beaten the BBC to the first UK-based ‘full’ Video-On-Demand service, which even uses crafty tech like peer-to-peer file sharing to push the infrastructure costs out to the punters and their poor ISPs. But respect — the legals on content must have been a killer to negotiate. We thought we’d give it a bit of a test-drive.

Visit the website, click the install link, computer says no, as the installer thinks my PC doesn’t meet the requirements:

• Windows XP
• A broadband internet connection (well, d’oh)
• Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher
• Windows Media Player 10
• Macromedia Flash 9
• Microsoft.net Framework 2.0

Well, lucky I wasn’t expecting to watch Big Brother on my Mac…

Anyway, I do have all that software, I just choose to not use Internet Explorer unless coerced. So, quit out of Firefox, start up Internet Explorer 7, click the link to install. Nice pop-up saying ‘Error reading initialization [sic] file’ (what — Channel 4 couldn’t find British programmers to write this thing?), of which nothing in their FAQs. Life’s too short, people.

Looks like others are having problems too. Oops. Nothing here to see, early adopters, move on.

Bored now. In the interim, we suggest spending some quality time with the open-source Democracy player: you can probably find everything you want from 4OD on BitTorrent anyway. Not that that’s legal.

I kid not: a big old animated banner ad, trying to sell me stuff, large as life, cluttering up my monitor. I almost fell off my chair. Turns out someone else had been using my machine, and had left Internet Explorer up on the screen. I didn’t notice it wasn’t my usual browser — Firefox – until I clicked into a site and there it was, The Banner. And it was then that it struck me that it’s been months since I’d seen one — the combination of the Firefox plugins AdBlock and FilterSet.G Updater are really that good at blocking the little buggers out.

You can fill in your own moral ending to this tale — be it that I’m one of the scum free-riding on sites that only exist because of ad revenue (whatever — kill them all and let God sort it out), or that Advertising is Dead (in which case someone had better go over and tell it, because last I saw it was dancing on the table and bragging as how it could still pull teenage blondes down the Coach and Horses).

Anyway. I saw an ad! On the Internet! How peculiar.

We’ve reported on the $100 laptop. We’ve flagged up Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: two innovations poised to set fire to the demographic tinder that’s the youth population of the Developing World. We see truly disruptive times ahead.

The $100 laptop (or its yet-to-be-developed relatives and descendants) will network millions of eager young people. Services like the Turk will give them the opportunity and motivation to take on work that’s too tricky for the best Artificial Intelligences the West can conjour, but too brain-numbingly repetitive and low-paid for most Westerners to bother with. That’s a whole lot of motivation, both supply-side and for the creation of demand. And that means business.

In fact, the one thing missing from the OLPC v1.0 seems to be a workable way to actually get micropayments safely in the hands of those for whom such income could be as life-changing as the educational opportunities which are the prime motivation for the project. If the initial rollout is at all successful, we expect free-enterprise, above-ground or not, to rapidly fill that gap.

The potential is enormous. Exploitation or opportunity? The stakes and possible rewards are too high — and the price of failure too terrible — for us to judge too early. Call it exploitunity, and hope it works out. Watch this space.

So, the theory is that dark energy, through some anti-gravitic effect, is the reason, maybe, that our Universe keeps expanding, rather than collapsing into itself. Maybe.

Anyway: hold that thought. Business zeitgeist in London over the last few months has been all about ‘getting to grips’ with social media as knowledge-management tool. Bright shiny lights going off over management heads across the city — if Wikipedia works so well in the real world, why not do it here: get all that tacit knowledge bedded in using tried-and-tested collaborative co-creation tools. I’m all for it. But I doubt that most management teams are anticipate the impact that skilling up with social media, if it really catches on in their business, might have on that business. Turn people onto these tools or, more particularly, onto the value and reward of participatory co-creation, by all means. But don’t affect surprise when you realise that their attention has turned outward, across your firewalls, into the 99.9999999% of the world where most of the things they care about — and 99.9999999% of the expertise that could assist them in their work — already lies. Social media isn’t about collapsing your business’s knowledge resources into a tight knot of hot intellectual property: it’s about joining the vast swirling galaxies of shared effort, collaborative problem-solving, open innovation.

The hackers have known this for years — but it’s only the Web 2.0-era intersection of hacker culture and second-wave digital entrepreneurship that’s exposed the rest of us to the dark energy-like expansionary effect of Wikis, open content, co-creation. First time around, management could read ClueTrain and pay lip service to its manifestos. This time around, business is opening the door to the tools, without still understanding their effect, if they’re actually embraced. There’s a reason they’re called disruptive technologies, people …

All copy from Cluster.

The makers of Zubbles say that they “have done what scientists claimed was impossible… we’ve combined the simple joy of bubbles with the beauty and magic of color, inventing the world’s first real colored bubbles.” And they’ve even got a video to prove it.

Via Springwise.

But — in a nice twist of sustainable capitalism — customers will have to buy two laptops at once, with the second going to the developing world. A philanthropic organisation would be formed to organise the orders and delivery of the laptops. “It’s much more difficult to do this than making the laptop,” say the organisers of the project. The aim is to connect the buyer of the laptop with the child in the developing world who receives the machine. “They will get the e-mail address of the kid in the developing world that they have, in effect, sponsored.”
Five million of the laptops will be delivered to developing nations this summer, in what the BBC is describing as “one of the most ambitious educational exercises ever undertaken.” Michalis Bletsas, chief connectivity officer (now there’s a new and highly useful job!) for the One Laptop Per Child project, said they were working with eBay to sell the machine. Maybe they should be talking to Amazon as well …

Although the eventual aim is to sell each laptop for $100, the current cost per unit is around $150. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan and Thailand have already signed up to buy units. The machine is officially called the XO and has software which is specifically designed for education. The OLPC project is working with Google (who else?) who will act as “the glue to bind all these kids together”. Google will also help the children publish their work on the internet so that the world can observe the “fruits of their labour”, said Mr Bletsas.

Each laptop has built-in wireless networking and video conferencing so that groups of children can work together both physically and virtually. Bletsas says:

I’d like to make sure that kids all around the world start to communicate. It will be a very interesting experiment to see what will happen when we deploy a million laptops in Brazil and a million laptops in Namibia.

An Apple phone? Whatever. We think that the XO is truly visionary tech.

Source: BBC news.

From today we will be taking a note of the song that we wake up singing in our heads.

Day one.

Elkie Brooks’ No More the Fool.

It’s got to mean something. Right?

More pix here.