Webcurios 15/03/13

Nothing else has been REMOTELY as exciting as the surprise election of an old white man to one of the World’s highest offices – frankly I have no idea WHAT we’re going to do to keep ourselves amused from now on. Maybe stuff like this (although I really do hope not). Anyway, there’s a lot to get through – grab your rosary and pray for divine intervention, for I am taking you deep into the godless world that is THE INTERNET (I may never have been more hyperbolic. Don’t worry, it’s still just links and stuff. Don’t be scared. COME BACK!).

iPope (Image credit: Michael Sohn / AP)

AdvermarketingPRinternetty Stuff:

TEXAS:

• SXSW Overview: I may have mentioned last week that I wasn’t at SWSX and that I was IN NO WAY BITTER. On reflection, I’m really not. Anyway, for all you other proles who, like me, stayed home and forsook barbecues in favour of frostbitten extremities, the WSJ roundup of news is worth a look (Hater is my favourite, fwiw). Regular readers of this thing (I’m talking YEARS, here) may want to send me a congratulatory email and perhaps a present given that this year’s apparently revelatory BIG THEME was all about the confluence of physical and digital, which I may have been banging on about for a while now. You won’t, though, will you? Not even a postcard. You disgust me.

FACEBOOK:

• More Actions: This is going to keep on coming, but the verb invasion on Facebook continues apace, this time with the addition of Open Graph developer actions for ‘Rate’, ‘Run’, ‘Read’, ‘want to read’, etc… I think that the ones expressing desire are particularly interesting if you’re in the business of promoting stuff / things which people could reasonably be expected to look forward to (INSIGHT!!!) but, as I keep repeating and will continue doing until the world basically shows signs of agreeing with me, is unlikely to be of so much use if you have a Facebook Page promoting, oh I don’t know, toilets or something. 
• Hashtags?: So this is nothing more than speculation, and the article rightly calls out all the functional barriers to this working (protected statuses and general FB privacy stuff, basically), but this would potentially be a useful addition to the platform (primarily – you guessed it – as a way to sell more advertising!).

TWITTER:

• More Promoted Tweet Analytics-y Things: After the Ads API thing the other week, this is another sensible move when it comes to showing advertisers quite how much bang Twitter delivers for their paid-media buck. Aside from that, though, the addition of all the information about ‘earned engagements’ (sorry) is actually very useful in terms of determining a campaign’s actual resonance and effectiveness. Depending on how good they get at drawing out detailed demographic info (which is harder for them than for FB as gathering that sort of info’s not part of the sign-up process) this could all be very powerful.
• Twitter Developing Music App(?): Not sure if it needs the question mark, as it looks like a fait accompli, but nonetheless. Details are vague, but it seems to be that it will be some sort of magical taste-determining thingy which will be powered by SoundCloud (and, possibly, by magic. Who knows? I certainly don’t). 
• Now With Added Line-Breaks: This is a brilliantly comical terrible idea. Twitter this week started to allow people to insert linebreaks within Tweets (although it’s only visible when viewing tweets on the Twitter website). What this basically means is that people can now GO HAIKU CRAZY (actually, any community managers reading this with a skill for Japanese verse and a willing client – take that and run with it. Go on. DO IT)! Oh, and really mess with their followers’ timelines by writing tweets at 1-character-per-line. Expect this to be turned off or at least modified fairly significantly in the not-too-distant future.

PINTEREST:

• Look! Analytics!: Not particularly interesting stuff, but worth knowing if you have a Pinterest presence and are trying to work out what it’s doing for you and justify why… An almost certain precursor to the rollout of ads on the platform in the next few months, I reckon. What do you mean you don’t care? Ingrates.

GOOGLE (OR “THE CYBORG MANIFESTO SECTION”)

• Apps for Google Glass: Unsurprising to see apps announced for Google Glass (and if you think I’m being wanky and hyperbolic with that Cyborg Manifesto link, take a second to think about what sort of incredible knowledgegathering / information archiving / memory augmentation a combination of Glass and Evernote can afford one. Go on, THINK. It’s absolutely incredible, and this is just the really crap alpha iteration of all this sort of stuff. MASSIVE DIGRESSION AHEAD: I recently reread Neuromancer, and aside from (as ever) being struck by the sheer density of ideas and the odd not-quite-prescient-but-certainly-pretty-good-guesswork nature of all the techstuff, it got me thinking about the interesting shift in thought about man/machine interfaces …we’ve moved from a position where we imagined plugging chips into our heads to one where we imagine being able to take the augments off at will – but potentially creating a society in which we’ll never want to…). These will be big, anyway, and the possibilities are HUGE. Wonder when the FB one will be announced which partners their nascent facial recognition technology with Google’s to create something which tells you who EVERYONE is when you pass them, what their stated interests are and how many friends you have in common? Dear God, and just imagine what you could do with Bang with Friends…
• Shopping on Glass: A look at grocery shopping in an augmented future. Now think about what I said about Evernote, above, and what an archive of every recipe you’ve ever seen and thought, “ooh, that sounds good, might cook that one day” combined with a comprehensive database of what’s in season, combined with something that tells you what shops sell what, might look like. IT LOOKS HUNGRY.

STUFF THAT MIGHT BE USEFUL:

• No-download Browser Sharing: Erm, exactly what the description says. Really useful alternative to Lync, G+ Hangouts and the like for people who don’t have them. 
• Catch-all Shared Drive Access Thingy: A career in product naming is doubtless but weeks away. This is basically a shell programme that gives you access to all your online files from one place. Draws stuff from Dropbox, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, etc, into one box. I’m describing it appallingly badly, but I’ve had a play around and it’s quite useful. Also, the people behind it were very nice when I emailed them with a suggestion, and that goes a long way.
• OneTab: This Chrome extension could have been made for me, but might also be useful to anyone else who regularly has about 150 tabs open. With OneTab, you can pull all your open tabs into a single one as a linked list – really useful if you need to stop browsing but haven’t finished looking at stuff and don’t want your browser to take about 15 minutes to start up next time. 

CAMPAIGNY STUFF! (as mentioned before, a lot of these are via Roberto Venturini’s blog):

• Renault – Lifted By Likes: This one’s Renault in the Netherlands, who set up a FB competition to win a car. Each ‘Like’ the competition app received translated into a real-life weight being added to a seesaw – at a certain point the likes would outweigh the car, which would lift up – the person whose ‘Like’ was responsible for tipping the car won said vehicle. My favourite thing about this is that, with a bit of basic maths, we can work out exactly what each ‘Like’ cost Renault. Cost of the car at retail? Say £12,000. Cost of the app? Say £7,000. Cost of all the physical stuff (seesaw, weights, people, etc)? No idea, but let’s say £2,000. Cost of the time spent by a bunch of agency people drafting a load of documents, strategies, etc, to make the case for the bloody thing, as well as the endless conference calls and meetings and frenzied calls to the designer when the client said that they didn’t feel the app logo was a red enough shade of red? Hard to say, but I don’t think £20,000 is an outlandish estimate. So that’s £41,000, very roughly, to deliver…12,000 additional likes. That’s £3.41 per like. That seems like rather a lot. AND YES I KNOW IT’S NOT ABOUT LIKES IT’S ABOUT SODDING ENGAGEMENT, BUT STILL THIS IS JUST STUPID ISN’T IT?
• Canberra’s Human Brochure: Nice work from Canberra’s tourist board, who got a load of real people to go and become the HUMAN BROCHURE to promote the area through social media. To the point above, this will also have worked out as expensive, but the outcomes seem to me to be a lot more worthwhile. Maybe I’m an idiot, though. In any case, I like the execution. On a similar note, this slideshare from Tourism Australia is a nice look at how they use digital in their communications – whilst it’s easy to snarkily say “yes, well, try that with Swindon you smartarses”, there are some sensible principles in there. 
• H&M’s Gif-y Shop: & Other Stories is apparently a fashion brand which is an offshoot of H&M. It’s probably meant to appeal to a completely different core userbase; I am sure that there are brand bibles somewhere which explain exactly who their core target consumer is, how she is different from H&M’s core consumer, and how fashion makes her feel. I don’t care about that, as I am (as has been previously mentioned) so poorly dressed as to be practically sartorially handicapped. I’m only including this link as the website has replaced some of the product thumbnails with animated gifs which gives a subtle hipster aesthetic to the whole thing (oh, maybe I do get the userbase thing after all) and is another sign that gifs are mainstream, MAN.
• Old Spice Are Making Fun Of Us:  So following in the footsteps of Isiah Mustafa and Fabio. Old Spice has another FUNNY CHARACTER to front its advertising. This has basically descended to the point where, surely, the people at W+K (or Y&R or whichever advertising behemoth is behind this one) are just sitting there laughing at us all, isn’t it? I mean, the central conceit of this appears to be that Old Spice now have a talking wolf doing their marketing (MANLY!); said wolf has a hilariously simplistic and brutal (and yet ironically sophisticated) approach to campaigning and marketing which we are meant to laugh at, whilst at the same time we consume exactly the same sort of  simplistic and brutal (and yet ironically sophisticated) maketing materials we are supposed to be laughing at OH GOD MY HEAD HURTS. The LinkedIn Page made me laugh, though. 

Young Critic Engaging with John Lavery’s “Portrait of Anna Pavlova” (1911) (Via Christopher Higgs)

BEST THING I FOUND ALL WEEK: When I was 14/15 and growing up in Swindon, Chris Morris’s Radio1 show on (I think) Wednesday nights was the funniest, most subversive thing I had ever heard (on reflection that makes me sound quite sheltered. Oh well). This is an archive of nearly all of them – I listened to a few this week, and was reminded of how much he got away with, and how much of this stuff wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near UK radio, especially the BBC, these days. Funny and silly and clever all at the same time – and, as a bonus, he played some awesome music too. If the idea of a small child telling Richard Littlejohn that he is ‘a Grade-A nonce’ makes you laugh, you’ll like this.

Stuff I Found That I Think Is Good / Interesting, Pt 1:

• CouchSeats: A website which pulls together videos of musicians’ live performances. Nothing you can’t find on YouTube, but if you like watching people live (or, more accurately, recordings of them performing live) then you might like this.
• OurSpot: This is a marketplace for people to buy and sell photography services for various events. A nice idea, and potentially a useful thing if you’re an amateur who wants to build a portfolio or something.
• Paintings-with-food: ‘Red’ Hong Yi self-describes as a painter, but makes her work with food rather than with pigments. The results are very impressive, in any case – see this on the Facebook page of A N Other food-related brand sometime very soon (turns out she’s quite famous already, in fact, so maybe I’m late to her work. Hey ho).
• Product Posters for Stuff That’s In Films: I’m having a fairly hard time describing ANYTHING today. Perhaps I’m getting ill. In any case, this site hosts a collection of rather excellent fictitious adverts for objects from popular culture – so the silly gun from Men In Black, 3 Course Dinner Gum from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that sort of thing. There are some rather good designs on there, check them out.
• World of Classcraft: I thought we were done with gamification, but it turns out it’s still kicking its little legs in defiance of the fact that everyone’s now moved onto another overhyped buzzword trend. I’m also pretty much certain that the number of people with any connection to education who read this is pretty much 0. Anyway, World of Classcraft is an interesting concept for gamifying the classroom – applying the same sort of concept that informs the ‘House’ model popularised by Harry Potter to a fantasy-type game to be played during lessons. No idea whether it would work, but I think it’s an interesting concept and, for certain types of kids of a certain age, might be useful. Tell you what, why not try adapting it for your agency?
• How To Survive a Political Coup: It’s been a bad week for Dave, all told, which makes this blog on how to survive a political coup by former Gordon Brown SPAD Damien McBride particularly interesting. 
• Someone At The Onion Really Doesn’t Like Christopher Walken: No idea whether this will still be up by the time you click on it, but it’s a pretty punch piece of writing about Walken’s somewhat murky past. He’s still a great dancer, mind.
• A Musical Map of Paris: A lovely project, accompanying an exhibition which apparently took place last year, and assigning songs to each of Paris’s Arondissements. On a similar tip (but less digitalinteractive) is this map of which UK cities have spawned which musicians / bands. Who knew Newton Le Willows would give the world so much?
• Logos for CHARITY!: Today is COMIC RELIEF! Your main feeling at that is likely to be one of relief that you will, soon, cease being inundated with crap, unfunny CHARITY initiatives (THERE IS NOTHING INHERENTLY FUNNY ABOUT GOING TO WORK IN PYJAMAS), but it is still a good cause and this is a lovely initiative to raise money. Brand / design agency MultiAdaptor will, for a small donation, design YOU your own personal logo. If you’re one of those insufferable squawking inanities that likes to talk about your ‘personal brand’ this is your lucky day.
• If Superheroes Got Sponsorship: Not sure if I quite agree with some of these. I always thought Batman would be Audi, personally, or maybe BMW. 
• Vinyl Boombox: How Hackney isn’t already overrun by people carrying these I will never know.
• Bureaucratics: Fascinating photoseries of civil servants worldwide. I think there’s a certain similar cast to the eyes, though that might be projection on my part.
• Children and their Possessions: Another globetrotting photoproject, this one looking at children from all over the world and capturing them with their favourite things. Not only rather cute, but also a (unsurprisingly) startling look at a practical demonstration of lifestyle/value/income differentials. 

I find this really upsetting. Photo by Alma Haser

Stuff I Found That I Think Is Good / Interesting, Pt 2:

• The Global Internet Pr0n Search Habits Survey: An ostensibly SFW (no nudity, but I have no idea whether your employers will look askance at you should they see the words ‘MILF’ and ‘facial’ plastered (sorry) all over your screen) look at the top 10 pr0n searches in a variety of countries, regions and US states. My word, Romania, take a long, hard (sorry) look at yourself. 
• Pr0nstars With & Without Makeup (But With Clothes): This did the rounds early this week, but if you’ve not yet seen it it’s both interesting and heartening and sad, and illustrative of exactly how illusory (if anyone needed telling) the image of women that pr0n is peddling is.
• Creepy Sex Aid of the Week: As with many of these things, what really puzzles me is how exactly someone arrives at the point where they think “Yes! Yes, that’s EXACTLY what I need to make my erotic life perfect!”. I mean, I know that this marks me down as incredibly vanilla, but really – A GIANT LATEX EGG LIKE ONE OF THOSE OFF ALIENS???
• The Apogee of Twitter: It’s probably never going to be used for anything this significant ever again. I don’t think, in this person’s position, I would necessarily have shared the experience, but I am sort of grateful that he did.
• Selfless Portraits: A cute little FB-led art project which invites people to draw the profile pictures of complete strangers from Facebook, creating a gallery of portraits inspired by no emotional connections whatsoever. There are some rather nice pics on there, although a little too much use of cheaty photoshop filters imho.
• The Aleph: I’m going to have to take the description from the site itself, as otherwise I will just mangle it: “The Aleph is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which a man is suddenly able to see all things at once. I wanted to present a version of what The Aleph might look like now, designed as an endless stream of descriptive passages pulled from the web. For source texts, I took the complete Project Gutenberg as well as current tweets. I searched for the phrase “I saw.”” . Turn it to ‘tweets’ and lose yourself – I could read stuff like this forever, I must say (‘interesting’ thematic consistency – The Aleph, and Borges, are recurring themes in a later William Gibson cyberpunk novel called ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive‘, EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED).
• Let Your Emotions Choose Your Playlists: This is from SXSW, and maybe should have gone up there, but it’s too odd to bury in the dull bit about social media and stuff that people tend to ignore – this is a prototype for a music system that picks music based on your brainwaves and hence your emotional state. Obviously it’s nowhere near as sophisticated or sensitive as that makes it out to be, but still…mental (B’DUM-TISH).
• Hack Your Life With Reddit: A short, useful guide to which threads on Reddit are worth bothering with in terms of helpful tips. Although I don’t know whether I’d take sex tips from there, to be honest. 
• The Smartphone Breathalyser: Coming soon, so it says. This is either going to save lives or it is going to lead to some absolutely insane competitive drinking games where kids compete to see who can register the highest blood alcohol levels without dying. Possibly both in parallel, which may well fulfil some sort of Darwinian function for which we should all be grateful. 

That is a LONG neck (image by Hanna Antonsson)

The Circus of Tumblrs:

• TrollThread: Not so much a standard Tumblr as a home for an art publishing project, this collates trolling comments from internet threads, arranges them by theme, and publishes them as books. Odd but interesting.
• People Dancing Alone to Pony: So apparently this is a reference to a scene in the film ‘Magic Mike’; who knew? What’s even odder, though, is that there are so many people who have uploaded clips of themselves dancing to this, alone, in a variety of ‘sexy’ ways.
• Rare or Unpublished National Geographic Pictures: Some great photos from the National Geographic archives collected here. I particularly like the one of the Russian lion-tamer.
• Ants: A series of gifs showcasing the crazy, violent, brutal and short world of the ant. More interesting than it sounds, honest, though not great if you are a bit freaked out by mandibles and stuff.

LONG Reads

• Tumblr As Art: A piece commissioned by the Tumblr Art Symposium mentioned here last week (and which you can watch a stream of here). I’m not going to lie – this is VERY long and VERY artwanky, but also interesting as an illustration of how almost universal access to publishing platforms and copy culture is having a transformative effect on art in much the same democratising fashion as the mass-availability of the camera did. This quote which I stumbled across this morning seems relevant, in any case.
• Oh, And On  A Semi-related Note: This is an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, MoMa’s 1st Poet Laureate, again looking at copy culture and appropriation, and containing this awesome, and very true, quote (I don’t imagine my approbation is that surprising): “You see, we are faced with a situation in which the managing of information has become more important than creating new and original information. Take Boing Boing, for instance. They’re one of the most powerful blogs on the web, but they don’t create anything, rather they filter the morass of information and pull up the best stuff. The fact of Boing Boing linking to something far outweighs the thing that they’re linking to. The new creativity is pointing, not making. Likewise, in the future, the best writers will be the best information managers.”
• What Makes Parody Twitter Accounts Work: CLUE: It’s not about being first to an obvious gag. This is a really interesting look at the creative process behind a few of the more successful / lauded parody accounts and what makes them successful. Quite a lot of hard work, unsurprisingly.
• Extreme Urban Exploration: You may recall these pictures from a year or so ago, taken by intrepid urban explorers who broke into the Shard  – this piece in US GQ speaks with them and other pioneers of urban exploration from elsewhere in the world. The whole political side of this stuff is fascinating, I think – the right to take risks, etc etc.
• A Very Strange Tale About Drugs Smuggling and a Potential Nobel Prize: The headline to this NYT piece is pretty much unbeatable – The Professor, The Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble. Very clever people really can be outstandingly thick sometimes. 
• The Man Behind The Meme(s): Who invented the meme? Well, yes, Richard Dawkins. But in a slightly less obvious way, maybe this person did – back in the day when making FUNNY videos from source material involved razorblades and VHS machines and a lot of patience. A look back at how remix culture began and some perspectives on where it’s going – links back rather interestingly to the Tumblr/art debate above.
• Cypherpunk and Surveillance: You know the whole debate about privacy and how much the internet knows about us and stuff? Well it’s probably already too late. Ignore the horrific term ‘Cypherpunk’ – this is morelike social history than it is geekery, and is frankly quite scary if you look at it too closely. 
• Who’s Watching You?: Continuing this week’s (apparent) theme of ‘creepy stuff about the internet and technology’, this is a really unsettling piece on webcam hijackers and the practice of RATTING. Might make you think twice about sitting naked at your laptop (or it might not – I have no idea what you’re into, after all).
• Miss USA in Seedy, Horrible SHOCKER: I don’t imagine that anyone’s going to be all that surprised that a multi-million dollar beauty pageant business owned by Donald ‘Charming’ Trump is anything other than a bastion of moral rectitude, but in case you needed the scales pulling from your eyes then this article should do a pretty good job. Ugh. GRUBBY.
• Big Narstie vs EastEnders: So Big Narstie is a UK Grime musician who’s become moderately well known in part through his music but moreso through his Twitter commentaries on EastEnders, which he approaches with a dedication and emotional commitment that at times borders on zealotry. Even though it’s been about 15 years since I was into show (I always thought that the Mitchell Brothers’ car chase and subsequent watery escape was the series very own ‘jump the shark‘ moment) I still found this very, very funny.

Image by Bernard Plossu

VIDEOS!

1) We kick off this week with a longform documentary on Belle & Sebastian’s awesome second album ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’, for which I offer no apologies. This is long and to be savoured (if you’re a fan – if you’re not, it will probably leave you cold and you should go onto the next one which is weird and has breasts in it). I’ve always thought that Belle & Sebastian had one of the more oddly diverse fanbases in music – from skinny, pallid betwetters like me, to people like a bloke I once knew in Swindon who was a bit psychopathic and used to keep bottles of his own urine in his bedroom (B&S were the only thing we had in common, fyi). Anyway: