Til death do us part

One of the Best Free Dating Sites for Zombies:

http://www.zombieharmony.com/?speed=0&speed=0&limbs=0&speed=0&groaning=on#

Thanks to Aaron for inspiring my weekend...

Every brand is celebrating an anniversary...

As Melissa pointed out at the beginning of the week, it would seem that every brand in the US is celebrating it's anniversary... Have a look-see at these examples she picked out for us:

Maccas:ttp://profile.myspace.com/index.cfmfuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=386269716
Nike “Courage” article: http://adage.com/article?article_id=129723
Nike Courage website: http://www.nike.com/nikeos/p/nike/en_US/courage
Chupa Chups: http://www.chupachups.com/en/
Breast cancer awareness: http://comunicadores.info/2008/07/20/caixa-de-cd-duplo-para-prevencao-do-cancer-de-mama/
And one from Simon for Converse:http://www.brandrepublic.com/Discipline/Creative/54818/converse-paper-dolls-anomaly-new-york/

Twitter is taking off, but what's the point?

Why bother? What's the motivation? Thanks to FutureLab for this blog on Twittering and it's hope for the future. Could Twitter become the new office intra-net or does it just exist to feed human curiosity?


Twitter and "Every Minute Accounted For"


by: John Caddell


I've been using Twitter for the last several weeks and I find it interesting, though I'm not yet at the point where I see breakthrough applications for it. They may be out there; I'm just not experienced enough to see them.

(For the uninitiated, Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows you to send 140-character notes from your PC or mobile phone, and for others to view them. You are asked a simple question: "What are you doing?" and your answer is broadcast to the community. You can also subscribe to others' Tweets.)

It's such a simple and open tool that the possibilities for using it are almost limitless. It may go without saying that most of the applications will be better at wasting time than improving productivity. Yet, Twitter has real potential to increase connectedness.

For example, I work with a team of people that are spread out across the US, UK and Ireland, and frequently shift from one location to another. It would be helpful to have Tweets updating where they are so that I can know when to call them (given that there is a 6-hour difference between Chicago and England), or when they're in transit.

You can imagine a million such applications. And right now hundreds (thousands?) of people are doing just that.

I find it fascinating that answering the question "What are you doing?" over and over again can create a life narrative--an autobiography of trivia, as it were. Which reminded me of an article I read in Harper's Magazine more than ten years ago about a guy, Robert Shields, who kept a moment-to-moment diary for more than twenty years ("Every Minute Accounted For" by David Isay--access free with magazine subscription). A sample is below:

10:00-10:05 I groomed my hair with a scrub brush
10:05-10:10 I fed the cat with tinned cat food
10:10-10:20 I dressed in black Haband trousers, a pastel-blue Bon Marche shirt, the blue Haband blazer with simulated silver buttons, both hearing aids, eyeglasses, and the 14-degree Masonic ring.
Two thoughts occurred to me. One: Shields could really have benefited from Twitter. And two: is Twitter growing more Robert Shieldses? How many people out there are notating their lives down to the minute and sharing them with the world?

The last paragraph of the Harper's article poignantly explains why anyone might want to leave such a record. (It is from a passage in the diary where Shields describes an interview with Isay, the author.)

I said I did not know why I kept it, especially since it is doubtful if anyone would ever read it. It is a compulsion. [Isay] asked whether I intended to keep it up until I die and I said yes. It is impossible for me to give any motivation for it, except that when I am gone, the words that I have written will be the only thing that survives.
Another article about Robert Shields is available here.

Related post:
Everyday stories hold great insight

Original Post: http://shoptalkmarketing.blogspot.com/2008/05/twitter-and-every-minute-accounted-for.html

http://blog.futurelab.net/2008/05/twitter_and_every_minute_accou.html

What are you doing now?

[With thanks to The Washington Post]

To Wit: Twittering

By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, May 1, 2008; Page D01
Politicians can have their message of the day, but on the Web, anybody can have their message of the hour -- or the minute.

Short updates on social-networking sites have become a new sort of public writing, the equivalent of text-messaging the Web.

As with texting, conciseness matters here; one popular site even limits updates to 140 characters. (See, this paragraph just hit that mark.)

The best-known example of the genre may be Facebook's "status update," in which you can share your latest tidings with friends.

For many Facebook users, it's their favorite part of the site, both reality-show entertainment and creative outlet.

These updates can be mundane, such as recaps of travel (everybody likes to complain about security lines!) and night-life agendas.

They can also be deliberately cryptic, part of the fun of quasi-public speech meant to enlighten close friends and puzzle others.

(What to make of one co-worker's declaration Tuesday that he "doesn't see what the big deal is"?)

Facebook's status updates have plenty of competition at other online social networks, each with its own style and grammar.

MySpace invites you to pick a word to label your mood; the business-networking site LinkedIn lets you describe your current project.

The site to make the most of this concept, however, doesn't offer much but status updates.

Twitter's home page ( http://twitter.com) simply asks people "What are you doing?"

hen this San Francisco start-up challenges them to say their piece in 140 characters or less.

That limit, tighter than even a text message's 160-character cap, forces brevity and encourages frequency.

So do the usual ways to post an update: cellphone texting, IM services, or a box on Twitter's site that counts down as you near that limit.

You can opt to write only for friends, but Twitter co-founder Biz Stone e-mailed that "80-90" percent of users choose publicity.

Follow their example, and others can search for you and click a "follow" button to get your updates, or "tweets."

You can then converse bulletin-board-style, posting new tweets to answer one another. You can also swap private messages.

Your reward for successful solipsism: a public count of how many Twitterers follow your updates.

You can further express yourself by adding a portrait and background image and changing the colors of text on your page.

And you can publish your tweets on other sites -- many Facebook users include Twitter updates on their Facebook profile pages.

Market researchers say relatively few users have taken up this two-year-old service's offer, but their numbers are growing rapidly.

Twitter itself won't reveal user numbers, and conventional Web traffic estimates ignore its phone and IM users.

ut the New York-based research firm Hitwise reported that its "page views" in April were 900 percent higher than they were a year ago.

Twitter's users have interpreted its open-ended invitation as foolishly and as imaginatively as you might imagine.

Some have broadcast utter drivel, such as their latest snacks, and others have dealt with more serious matters.

At least one user has proposed marriage -- and received an affirmative answer back on the site.

Last month, another user used his phone to report his jailing in Egypt, after which friends successfully lobbied for his release.

Some jokers impersonate famous characters. "Darth Vader," for example, has some 7,500 followers reading his riffs on "Star Wars."

In a less mischievous vein, somebody has been posting Metro's service alerts to a Twitter page.

A growing number of businesses and organizations have taken the hint and began setting up their own presences on Twitter.

JetBlue, for example, answers travelers' queries and warns about weather-related delays.

The Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns also post updates on Twitter, though John McCain's has resisted the temptation.

And me? I've begun to use it as a mix of notepad and gossip column, sharing random observations with whoever may read them.

To date, Twitter users have not been troubled by ads or any other evidence of a profit motive.

An about-us page says Twitter "has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue" but wants to build its audience first.

My bet: Expect to see the same Google ads that you spot everywhere else, and soon. 1999's dot-com exuberance vanished long ago.

The real risk, though, is not the failure of this site or others like it. It's that the daily routine of zapping off these short snippets of text will erode your ability to think in complete paragraphs or read anything long enough to require a tap of a page-down key, much less a flip of a page. And as you spend ever-more time recording your exploits -- like a sociologist sentenced to conduct endless field research on himself -- you will abandon all hope of ever living in the moment.

That would be bad.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com. Read more athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/30/AR2008043003358_4.html?nav=rss_technology

Guest Post: How the Chinese Internet Becomes a Platform for Earthquake Grief (A local perspective)

With thanks to Web Strategy by Jeremiah

Posted: 23 May 2008 08:01 AM CDT

Jeremiah: Paul Denlinger of Beijing is an internet expert on China, and I’ve offered him the opportunity to help share from an insiders perspective. Keeping in the theme of internet strategy and how the web impacts business, (and in this case the world) Paul, a resident of China, shares his perspective.

Although a long post, please show him the same respect that you do for me.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chinese Internet Becomes Platform for Earthquake Grief

-A guest post by Paul Denlinger

The Sichuan earthquake of May 12, which first registered as 7.8 on the Richter scale, has now been revised upwards to 8.0. As of Thursday May 22 in Beijing, the number of fatalities has so far reached more than 52,000, missing are 30,000, while injured are 400,000 and the number of homeless has reached 5 million. The final death toll is projected to be around 72,000. The Chinese government has appealed to foreign governments for aid and assistance, and Russia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong have all sent teams to aid in the search for survivors in the rubble, and for body recovery. With the huge number of refugees, there is also a severe shortage of tents to house them, and many foreign governments including the US, UK, Russia, Germany and Italy have all sent cargo aircraft to Chengdu, the nearest major city, to drop off needed supplies.

The Chinese government reacted swiftly to the tragedy, with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao flying to Sichuan the afternoon of the earthquake. He won wide praise for his swift action, and was photographed and taped talking and holding newly-orphaned children, telling them that the government would care for them, and would be committed to helping them rebuild their lives. He was photographed weeping when the bodies of two young children were removed from the rubble of their collapsed school. After several days of non-stop work directing rescue teams, making sure that they got all the help they needed, the exhausted Wen returned to Beijing, and was replaced by Chinese president Hu Jintao, who in one of the more memorable scenes, was seen holding an 8-year old boy, and telling his family that the government was committed to helping them rebuild, and to finding the bodies of their loved ones.

Military rescue teams from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were dispatched from all of China’s 31 provinces to aid in the rescue effort. The first two days after the earthquake there was heavy rain in the area, and in a few instances, paratroopers were dropped into stranded villages to help the local inhabitants. In one instance a dangerous night drop was made into an isolated village, and the mission was so high-risk that the 15 men were required to write their wills before departure. There continue to be mudslides in the area, and the government says that so far more than 200 volunteers have been killed in mudslides, trying to get supplies to the villagers.

The earthquake struck in a mountainous region of Sichuan, at the foothill of the mountains which run to the west and become the Tibetan plateau. A mix of Han Chinese and ethnic Tibetans live in the area, mostly in small villages surrounded by mountains. The main earthquake struck at 2:28PM, and an estimated 7,000 school classrooms collapsed. Schools were particularly hard-hit since many of the primary school students were taking their afternoon naps, or had just started their afternoon classes. There are many stories of children escaping from their classrooms to their sports field, only to be buried alive when the mountain surrounding the school collapsed on them. For many of their families, their bodies will never be recovered. In other instances, parents rushed to their children’s schools to dig out their children, only to find them dead. In some of the more horrifying stories, the quake was so severe that mountains which were separated by valleys with villages in-between moved together, completely obliterating the villages and their inhabitants.

In most of these village households, three generations of families live together, including grandparents, children and grandchildren, as is the usual Chinese custom. In many of the households, the parents of the children are migrant workers in Shanghai, Beijing and the more prosperous cities of China’s east coast. Upon hearing of the tragedy, and being unable to connect with their families on their mobile phones, they took trains back to Sichuan to search for their families. Many returned only to find that their whole household had been wiped out, or to find that their only child had already been buried in a mass grave. In some cases, there was a single survivor, with no surviving relatives. Most of these people were severely injured, and on learning that their families had been wiped out, said that they too wanted to die.

But then something curious started to happen, something which hadn’t happened before in Chinese society. Strangers started going to hospitals in Chongqing and Chengdu, and started caring for people whom they were not related to, effectively adopting them. All during last week, the news started to spread, not only of the need to send supplies, but also to care for the survivors. Stories of this kind spread quickly though China’s officially-controlled newspapers and television, and spread even more quickly on the Internet, especially Chinese BBSes such as Tianya, which are the most popular community tool for unofficial news. Other popular outlets for information are Twitter and a Chinese version of Twitter, Fanfou. The most popular IM client in China is QQ, which has more than 500 million registered users.

The news spread very quickly about the scale of the disaster, and strangers started organizing themselves online to take supplies to the disaster area. Google China and Baidu, China’s leading search engine, soon created specialized searches for relatives. Then on the weekend of May 17 and 18, some Chinese started designing online memorial sites where visitors could sign a book and give a white flower in mourning for the earthquake victims. These sites were designed and set up by volunteers without any payment from the government or corporations. As of May 22, one site had more than 262,000 unique visitors.

Late on the evening of May 18 Beijing time, the Chinese government announced that there would be three official days of mourning, from May 19-21, and recommending that game and entertainment sites shut down during the mourning period. Robert Scoble interpreted this event out of context and turned a human tragedy into a political event, narrowly framing it in terms of politics and human rights, and suggested that this meant that the Chinese government was enforcing a government crackdown during the mourning period, as could be evidenced from his comments, and those of his followers, on his Friendfeed account.

In fact, the Chinese government’s Central Publicity Department, which is in charge of content on the officially controlled media, was playing a catchup game with China’s Internet population, which is now the largest in the world, as well as the general population of China. As people learned more about the scope of the tragedy, they wanted to do more, and even more, the government sensed that they needed a public outlet to channel their grievance. The problem was that, in China’s long history, there never has been a defined way to remember and mourn ordinary citizens who have been killed in an enormous natural disaster. For this reason, the government prescribed that all cars and citizens would stop where they were on May 19 at 2:28PM, exactly one week to the day from the time of the earthquake, and while air raid alarms sounded, they would stand still for three minutes. They did this on Monday, as can be seen in this Youtube video and this interesting account of the event. Many websites have voluntarily changed their colors to black and white during the mourning period, while some have added the Chinese character for "mourning" to their websites, and many Chinese have chosen to wear black and white during the mourning period. All of this has been done without government orders of any kind; it has all been organized on the Internet through BBSes and people who voluntarily spread the message. Many other sites have set up donation badges to facilitate online donations to help organizations, and there have been blood drives as well. There have also been a few sites, including Google and Baidu, which have created people search sites, so that relatives can look for their loved ones. Most newspapers and magazines, all of which are controlled by the government, have moved to publishing in black and white only.

While younger Chinese have turned to the Internet, older Chinese have devoured huge amounts of TV programming and newspapers, all of which are state-owned and are now fully devoted to reporting the aftermath of the disaster. Unlike in the past, all of this reporting about the disaster is what the audience demands from the bottom up, not what the government wants to give to the people in a top-down fashion. In order to show the people that the government is on top of things and doing its job, state-owned news agencies have been working round the clock to provide news about the situation in Sichuan. When not reporting about rescues, stories detailing the amount of goods and supplies being sent to Sichuan from the various cities and provinces of China form a solid wall of disaster reporting. In keeping with the Chinese affinity for numerical data, precise numbers of boxes sent, trucks dispatched, tons of supplies sent, trains sent, etc. are all reported in these stories. In contrast with the past, Chinese government officials have promised a higher degree of transparency and accountability to the people. Many Chinese have also started openly asking questions on the Internet and on television and radio, including why so many schools collapsed, and if dams in the region may have caused soil erosion.

Whether it is television, print or the Internet, there are endless stories of people living just because they ran a different direction from the rest of their family, or because someone left home on a shopping errand, only to find their home flattened and all their family killed by falling debris. Ever since the end of WWII, China and Japan have had a rocky relationship, but the dispatch of Japanese rescuers to aid the rescue process, has won significant praise and goodwill from Chinese citizens.

Maybe most interesting has been a publicly-driven drive for corporate donations of money and supplies to the earthquake victims. Sina, one of China’s three leading portals, has set up a corporate donation page which lists amounts Chinese corporations have given (minimum amount for listing: 10 million yuan or US$1.4 million). As of the afternoon of May 21 Beijing time, total corporate donations listed on the page had come to 5.58 billion yuan or US$797 million. On the Chinese Internet, netizens have been especially loud in driving corporations to donate more, and in some cases, have publicly attacked corporations for being too cheap in their donation amounts. In most cases, the criticized companies have quickly upped their donation amounts in reaction. Corporations have also looked sideways to see how much their market competitors have donated, and have matched or trumped their donations, sometimes setting off donation bid wars to win praise from the public and favorable PR.

For the past ten days, Chinese have spent most of their time glued to their TV sets or on the Internet, collecting every scrap of information about this huge human tragedy. The outpouring of emotion has been enormous. As the mourning period draws to a close, the next phase will begin, that of reconstruction. Without a doubt, the Chinese Internet will continue to play a major role.

Paul Denlinger is an Internet consultant based in Beijing who publishes his own blog at the China Vortex.

Additional Resources:

Danwei
Shanghaiist Earthquake Special Report
EastSouthWestNorth blog
China Web 2.0 Review
The China Vortex - Let’s See How Many Ways We Can Get This Wrong


http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/05/23/guest-post-how-the-chinese-internet-becomes-a-platform-for-earthquake-grief/

Penguin's ARG

Thanks Melissa!

Penguin publishing dips their toe in Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG). Every week a story is published with clues leading to the seventh story location
http://wetellstories.co.uk/

Interactive story telling

Good article from Colleen Jones, via imediaconnection about how to ally storytelling approaches to the digital space.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/18041.asp