BigShinyThing

All You Can Eat at Electrowerkz, Friday 19th October. More photos on Flickr, along with our other London club photography. [Image © Darrell Berry]

We’re huge fans of the BibliOdyssey blog: an endlessly fascinating dig into the world of illustrations from books of all ages, rare and peculiar. The site is a labour of love, and we’re excited to see that they’re publishing a book. We leave the description to them:

The book (like the site) covers a very wide spectrum of styles, time periods and subject matter. You can expect everything from astronomy to zoology and from Art Nouveau to the Renaissance, in something reminiscent of what I call a multi-post (except on steroids and growth hormone and with better grooming habits and no noisy computer fan in the background). I like to think that the trajectory of the book aims somewhere roughly between our internet users’ penchant for a concentrated package of beguiling ephemera and as an introductory overview of the cultural wealth accessible from web archives for luddites.

US readers can get it from Amazon. Us Euro/UK types should head over to Fuel’s website and purchase direct. Tell ‘em BigShinyThing sent you.

As with the defence of ‘homosexual panic’ in gay bashings, crimes of passion seem to have an automatic ‘get out of jail’ card. We were angered and dismayed to hear that Bertrand Cantat — who hit actress Marie Trintignant an estimated 19 times in one attack — has been freed from jail half way into his eight year sentence for her murder. Apparently a ‘model prisoner’, Cantat now intends to resume his career as a singer and no doubt benefit from the deeply dubious halo effect of being ‘the left wing popstar who smashed his girlfriend’s head in in a jealous rage’.

Born Jan. 21, 1962, in Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside Paris, Marie Trintignant started her film career at age 5 when she appeared in “Mon Amour, Mon Amour,” which was directed by her mother and starred her father. She went on to act in more than 50 films and nominated 5 times for a César. She was also the mother of four children.

La Meute (The Pack), a feminist organisation, said that Cantat’s release sent the wrong signal to men in France, where one woman is killed every three days by a partner.

We’ve lost the last day of our lives playing on the closed beta of ‘image bookmarking’ site ffffound. And so have our design- and photography-loving friends. So we guess that’s a big thumbs up.

ffffound is — like the best 2.0-ish sites — dead simple. Install a bookmarklet into your browser, then, when you see an image you like on any site, anywhere, mouse over it, click the FFFFOUND button, and the magic ffffound fairies will add that image to your collection on the ffffound site, where other people can find and favourite it. Kind of a stripped-down flickr for stolen (sorry — ‘quoted’) images, meets Digg, with a collaborative filtering recommendation system under the hood. And that’s it. No tagging, no text: just images and a community of image fetishists. It shouldn’t be as addictive as it is. But it is. The closed beta has obviously attracted a community of design obsessives, and the content is generally excellent. Shame the screensaver seems to be buggered on our Macs.

We think ffffound is One to Watch. We’ve already used up our complimentary invites, so you’l need to get your access elsewhere, sorry. But get on the phone to your friends and try to get signed up.

Kerr starred in The King And I and From Here To Eternity but it is for her role as a sexually-deranged nun in Black Narcissus that we think she should be most fondly remembered.

She was nominated for the best actress Oscar six times and was given an honorary award by the Academy in 1994 (as is the way with brilliant actors who continuously miss out on the Academy’s votes). Kerr, who had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for a number of years, died in Suffolk on Tuesday.

Source: BBC.

Activists haven’t been shy in exploiting digital and social media: witness the successes of IndyMedia‘s user-generated street news, and the burgeoning peer-to-peer video distribution community around Miro (formerly the Democracy Player). The message is clear: don’t just have a voice on the street — create content and share it for global benefit. And this message isn’t just for the hardcore: what else is Al Gore’s current.tv, if not a centre-left, normalising riff on Miro’s theme?

Politically aware citizens, armed with video cameras, open source video editing software and BitTorrenting skills, are accessing difficult places and telling important stories, independent of mainstream media agendas. But how to get that activist content out in front of a broader, less engaged audience?

Say hello to InfoGraffiti (positioning: Tell the World What They Need to Know). Coming on like current.tv after a week at the Anarchist Bookshop, InfoGraffiti aims to take activist media to the people, urban guerrilla stylee. The short version of their manifesto reads as follows:

• InfoGraffiti is a new information distribution service intending on eventually rivaling the mainstream press; we need your help.
• We want to distribute internet documentaries and information via a CD format that will play on good DVD players or PC’s.
• Access to a printing press and the large costs involved is what has stopped forward thinking progressive messages from getting out before.
• Social network and Social news site users are forward thinkers (in general) and most of them have CD burners.
• Between us then we have the biggest printing press the world has ever seen and InfoGraffiti wants to organise it.
• You download our ISO torrent (ISO=CD Image, Torrent=FAST method of download) burn it to CD, label it with a logo and then distribute it around our wonderful cities.
• The CD contains all the best documenataries, virals, and information from the web, chosen by InfoGraffiti users. It works on DVD players and PC’s.
• Place it on park benches, in lifts, in coffee shops, on bus seats and in libraries for our wonderful fellow citizens to discover.

We think they might be a bit optimistic with their planned weekly release schedule, but wish them luck. Now is probably a good time for InfoGraffiti’s distribution model: urban punters have been softened up by countless lame ‘experiential marketing’ campaigns on the streets, flogging cable TV and shampoo — when they pick up those CDs they’re going to expect trailers for Shrek IV, not Noam Chomsky’s media critique. Hopefully they’ll keep watching.

Context: the stunning Opera Mini, iGoogle and the GMail mobile client give us pretty much everything we need on the road: Search, WordPress, FaceBook and email. And Opera Mini does a fair job of managing our RSS life as well. So when Refresh Mobile invited us to come and check out their new mobile midware thingie, touted as ‘a window to the mobile internet’, we were interested to see what more we could be convinced we need. Due to London transport, we didn’t make it to the demo, but we’ve spent the evening messin’ with their product instead. Here are our first thoughts.

Mippin (dreadful name, kids, and the default colour scheme sucks: change it, purleeze!) is a WAP 2.0 social RSS aggregator and news reader for mobiles, with aspirations to greater things, from the people who brought us Mobizines (yes indeed).

On the couple of native phone browsers we tried, as well as an online WAP emulator, and Opera Mini, it all worked as expected: type in the URL of an RSS-enabled site, and off you go. No RSS? Too bad: at this point Mippin only works with feeds. Oops. And the press release is relentless is calling potential subscribers consumers. Get with the program, kids: we aren’t consumers, we’re multipliers, damn it — flatter our egos and we’ll give you a bit more slack on the features and functionality!

Anyway. Sign up, and you get a Mippin profile preloaded with a bunch of the usual-suspect blogs, in categories including Men and LifeStyle (LifeStyle, interestingly, seems to be mostly ‘girl stuff’ — don’t Men also have LifeStyles? Not online, it seems). There’s no indication as to whether those categories are static, or dynamically-generated based on Mippin users’ usage patterns and interactions. After experiencing the subtle magic of FaceBook’s filtering systems (‘A friend of a friend who you often email has posted an event in a category of events invitations which you usually accept, so I’ll tell you about it’), we’re kind of hoping that Mippin has some collaborative filtering magic behind the curtain as well. If so, the press release is keeping schtum on that whole area. Mippin does, however, make it easy to text, twitter (do people really use twitter — real people I mean?) or email stories to friends, and encourages readers to vote sites up or down in popularity. All a bit 1.0, but better than nothing, we guess. And Mippin is still in beta.

But, we’re left feeling a bit whatever. Mippin is a decent WAP-based RSS aggregator, with a bit of a social media flavour thrown in for the kids. And it adapts well to the capabilities of the different handsets we tried it on, without the need for any installs. If you’ve got a WAP-only phone and need a news fix, Mippin might be a must-have as-is. For the rest of us, I guess it’s wait-and-see on what emerges as the beta progresses. To us, it all currently feels akin to an open source project a few months prior to it being Slashdot-worthy. Refresh promises to listen to community feedback: we say try it out, and let them know your thoughts. If they’re serious about that, your feedback might be just what Mippin needs to shine.

The BBC and the Terrence Higgins Trust have collaborated on this ad to ‘raise awareness of HIV amongst 16-34 year olds’, although the language used (with references to ‘barebacking’ and ‘fisting’) makes it clear who the target audience is. The series of films also direct viewers to an interactive website, where they can find out more about HIV and AIDS and customise their own GI Jonny virtual action figure. Their own creation can then be forwarded to friends and downloaded to Facebook (this bit didn’t seem to be working when we checked it out).

According to the Terrence Higgins Trust, the number of people in the UK with the virus has risen from 30,000 in 2001 to 70,000 this year. Research by the charity also suggests there is still widespread ignorance about HIV, particularly amongst young people. A recent poll of 1,000 people found more than 20% of people aged 18 to 24 mistakenly thought there was a cure for HIV. Among the same age group almost a quarter believed condoms had holes in them which let HIV through. So the more information, the better then. Weird though that it took the agency — in this case Kontraband — to get the thing up on YouTube.

Our favourite anecdote in the IHT article — which is well worth reading all the way through — is this:

Kristina Grish, author of The Joy of Text: Mating, Dating and Techno-relating, said she grew so accustomed to making the :−P symbol (a tongue hanging out) in instant messages at work that it once accidentally popped up, in three dimensions, on a date.

“When the waiter told us the specials,” she recalled in an e-mail message, “I made that face — not on purpose of course — because they sounded really drab and uninteresting. And the guy I was out with looked at me like I was insane and said: ‘Did you just make an IM face?‘ “

Prediction: the spillover of online behaviours, etiquette and worldviews into offline life is going to be big news over the next couple of years.

Thus far, SL’s excitement eludes us. Which, on reflection, is maybe a bit unfair: SL is a platform (albeit a creaky, laggy, jaggy one). It’s really up to the inworld community to use it to make engaging spaces. Any number of artists are using SL as an environment for their work. But, as very very occasional visitors inworld, we only find out about their stuff when it surfaces on our lists and feeds: we’re simply not engaged enough with SL itself to track what’s going on there.

So props to the Australia’s d/Lux/MediaArts and their SL project, the d/Lux Pony Club:

[...] a new initiative developed by d/Lux/MediaArts to encourage arts practice and critical dialogue in Second Life. Participants are encouraged to climb aboard one of our uniquely designed magic ponies from a meeting point. From there you will be taken on a teleportation trail ride through galleries, installations and interesting new communities in SL.

As we see it, the Pony Club performs an editorial/curatorial role: choosing the best bits of SL-based art and facilitating access to those, like ourselves, who are outsiders to the SL ‘scene’ (much like those art tours of London’s East End galleries, which we’ve always found vaguely amusing in their assumption that ‘it’s all a ghetto out there’). And those ponies are cute. Kinda.

We missed the last tour, and are kicking ourselves for the lapse: word is that there was much fun to be had, and some genuinely interesting SL art to be seen on the way. Keep an eye on the d/Lux blog for future events.

TechCrunch notes that Al Jazeera has signed a commercial agreement with Google last week to share advertising revenue on their YouTube channel:

This comes even as U.S. cable operators continue to shun the 24 hour news service — only Toledo, Ohio based Buckeye CableSystem and the municipal cable suppler in Burlington, Vermont offer the channel to viewers.

Al Jazeera uploads all original programming and unique news to the channel. Interesting to be reminded that the US still has to go to YouTube to see Al Jazeera (whose worldwide audience rivals that of the BBC) while here in the UK the channel is even available via Murdoch’s network.

A recent study conducted at Indiana University, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, shows that the negative opinions expressed by others cause the greatest attitude shifts, not just from good to bad, but also from bad to worse.

As reported on Eurekalert:

Consumers were presented with information about a new product and allowed to independently form their evaluations. As would be normally expected with many products, some of these evaluations were positive and others negative. The researchers then revealed to participants whether their peers evaluated the product negatively or positively. They found that the opinions of others exert especially strong influence on individual attitudes when these opinions are negative. Additionally, consumers that privately held positive attitudes toward the product were more susceptible to influence from group opinion than those who initially held negative opinions.

Furthermore, the researchers also found that those with negative opinions of the product were likely to become even more negative if asked to participate in a group discussion: “When consumers expect to interact with other consumers through these forums, learning the views of these other consumers may reinforce and even polarize their opinions, making them more negative,” the researchers reveal.

“This research has several interesting implications. First, given the strong influence of negative information, marketers may need to expend extra resources to counter-act the effects of negative word of mouth in online chatrooms, blogs and in offline media. Conversely, companies could damage the reputations of competitors by disseminating negative information online,” the researchers explain. “Consumers should be aware that these social influence biases exist and are capable of significantly impacting their perceptions.”

The JCR doesn’t appear to be available freely online. If you want to hunt this article down, the full citation is:

Adam Duhachek, Shuoyang Zhang, and Shanker Krishnan, Anticipated Group Interaction: Coping with Valence Asymmetries in Attitude Shift. Journal of Consumer Research: October 2007.

With its establishment of a members-only website (as we reported last week), London’s Hospital club exemplifies a trend towards invitation-only digital communities.

Whilst information may indeed want to be free, it seems increasingly clear to us that social networks often require boundaries for them to function effectively. Hardly surprising, really: offline, cliques, clubs and communities frequently entail nomination, rites-of-passage and other signs of commitment and shared values. Those gate-keeping processes have evolved for many reasons, and not all of them are about money and snobbery. Many of us, in many social settings, just need to get on with it, and not have to spend half of every meeting explaining the rules of order, dress code or music policy to the newbies.

In fact, at the risk of sounding tweedy in the extreme, we see the trend for online walled communities as a sign of a Very Good Thing: that people are starting to forget that they are interacting digitally, and simply getting on with interacting per se, in the ways that make sense to them — that are fit for their purpose — rather than feeling obliged to do things differently simply because ‘oh it’s on the internet so it has to be open to all comers’.

On reflection, it seems strange that this even feels controversial, and yet it does. We’ve spent ten years experiencing the revolution (and it is a revolution) that digital social media has brought to collaboration and innovation. We are there, people, we are with that worldview. But there’s a lot more to social activity, innovation and creation than access and open facilitation. Some things are still best done by small groups and kept that way until they’re ready for wider engagement or involvement.

It would, however, sadden us if the innovation and creativity engendered in those walled communities became trapped there. We think the outcome for which to push is not universal access to every online community, but openness as to their goals, and for the exploitation of their digital nature to — as and when appropriate — gift their insight, creativity and creations back to the digital commons. Hmm. We’ll see you the other side of the velvet rope.

We LOVE Kristen McMenamy here at BST. Stuff Cindy Crawford, the fabulously alien-looking supermodel is our ideal of female beauty. And her now-grey hair has made her look even more A-M-AAA-ZING (as our dear friend Gerardo would say). However, fashion followers would be wise to avoid the ‘glad to be grey’ trend unless — like Kristen — you have cheekbones that you can stab puppies with.

News from Old Europe, which goes something like this:

1. Organised labour has serious problem with management at bike factory
2. Workers occupy the factory, but rather than sitting on their arses waiting to be kicked out, they hit on the idea of using the resources around them to build their own branded bikes…
3. …and sell them on the internet to fund their struggle.

Fucking brilliant, and an inspiration to those of us in the knowledge precariate as well. Use your internet time at work wisely, fellow workers. You know what I mean.

[OK, this story is pieced together from dodgy Google translations. Not all of it might be 'really' true. However this is such a nice myth/meme that we couldn't resist.]