Last night at DNC, AT&T threw a lavish thank-you party for the dems who let the telecom off the hook for working with the bush administration in helping them spy on people without warants. Salon’s Glen Greenwald tried to infiltrate the party and get some of the names of the dems who had blindly helped the telecoms. Met with evasion, Greenwald was not able to get any names but he did film the party and is hoping the online community can help identify the dems.
According to the Technically Incorrect blog at CNET, Nike, by asking the Chinese gov’t to reveal the name of the person who posted to a yahoo msg board and accused to company of having something to do with Liu Xiang’s, a famed Chinese hurdler, withdrawal from the event is behaving like a
granny who’s just had her handbag stolen by a tiny teenager and asked a big, burly policeman to find the man who took it? The company’s actions serve only to highlight the issue more, when letting a sleeping blog lie might have allowed for this little conspiracy theory to waft its way into the annals of obscurity.
And what does Nike think, the Chinese gov’t will simply waggle its finger at the olympic conspiracy theorist, all the imprisoned Chinese bloggers certainly may beg to differ.
The NYTimes magazine has an interesting article about Blendtec’s viral marketing campaign: Will It Blend? Some dude in a lab coat takes weird things and tries to blend them, hockey pucks, magnets… Recently, due to the increased popularity of the videos, other companies have being getting their products blended, there is a particularly gratuitous blending of nike shoes, and the following blatant iphone blending that has attracted over 5 million viewers:
Everybody knows that the iPhone can make phone calls, play movies & music, surf the web, and a lot more. But, Will It Blend? That is the question
It seems viral ad campaigns have begun to engage in savvy product placement, everybody wins! Or at least both Blendtec and the companies that pay them for blending their products do…
Citizens have been using lo-fi digital technology to call into question police accounts and to government practices:
Sous-veillance” will see video sharing sites such as YouTube used by citizens to shine a spotlight on things such as deadly hygiene lapses in hospital wards and uncollected rubbish, according to the European Information Society Group (Eurim).
Recently during a New York critical mass, a biker, Christopher Long was shoved off his bike. The video of the now famous shove was posted on YouTube has had over 1,000,000 hits. According to the NyTimes:
Officer Pogan composed a story of his encounter with Mr. Long. It bore no resemblance to the events seen on the videotape. Based on the sworn complaint, Mr. Long was held for 26 hours on charges of attempted assault and disorderly conduct.
The availability of cheap digital technology — video cameras, digital cameras, cellphone cameras — has ended a monopoly on the history of public gatherings that was limited to the official narratives, like the sworn documents created by police officers and prosecutors. The digital age has brought in free-range history.
There is a great article in PC magazine about the death of Usenet. Started in 1980, usenet was essential in both introducing young boys to porn and creating vibrant online communities. Usenet has essentially died due to social networking (I mean usenet is so hard to USE right?) and child porn fears. sad so sad.
Kevin Martin is planning to sanction Comcast for traffic shaping. Although good, this isn’t a victory by any means as Martin, anointed by the great W., blames telecoms needs for traffic shaping on their inability to expand due to over-regulation. He believes, as any “small” government lovin’ Republican should, that telecoms should be free to charge users whatever they want in exchange for letting these users do whatever they want, the usual “freedom isn’t free”. Martin does seem to be moderate compared to some his compatriots, he is also pushing cable companies to allow users to pick the channels they want to subscribe to instead of being forced to subscribe to over-priced packages. link
I wonder if anything will happen to Bell here in Canada, who blatant traffic-shapers…
nettime: There is a good description of art appropriation from the Detournement movement in 1950s to intellectual property being the “Oil of the 21st century”:
In a post-industrial society production is no
longer confined to material goods (such as steel
and coal) but increasingly extends to immaterial
goods. However, a significant difference exists
between the two: immaterial goods like knowledge
and information can be reproduced without
impairment, which is not the case with material
goods. But in order to be able to function within
a value chain, the distribution of these
immaterial goods must be restricted - namely with
the aid of patent, copyright and trademark law.
Dan Gilmour, author of We The Media, has an article on the Center for Citizen Media about the future of journalism lying in the helping of what he terms as “almost-journalists” doing actual journalism. He points to organizations such as the ACLU or Human Rights Watch, uncovering gross instances of abuse as examples of very successful “almost-journalism”.
He writes:”They are absolutely in the media field now, because they are using the tools of media creation to learn and tell stories, and to make those stories available to a wide audience. These organizations and countless others like them — small and large, local and international — are part of the media ecosystem. With just a little extra effort, they could be part of the journalistic ecosystem too, in ways that go far beyond their traditional roles.”
Gilmour believes that helping these kinds of organizations remove the almost from their names will lead to a boon in credible news sources for the public.
About a month ago Colbert offered up a challenge to viewers to make McCain exciting by photoshoping green-screened footage of a mind-numbingly dull speech that was uploaded to colbert nation. He has been showing them on The Report ever since and there has been a ton of these videos created, here are some of the most popular and my personal (nerdy favourite)
wired blog: “Bell Canada, the largest telecom provider in Canada, argues that throttling — the practice of slowing down web speeds for “bandwidth hogs” — ultimately improves the user experience and stokes innovation.”
Of course this comes after Bell was lambasted for throttling, do you think Bell would be so forthcoming about all the benefits of throttling if no one knew about it?
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