This is too funny. A girl is stripping in front of a webcam with headphones on when her mother comes in…

via break.com

I must be getting the hang of this ‘viral video’ thingy…

Deep inside every hard-hitting article about corporate wrongdoing lies the soul of an insipid human interest piece trying to break free.

- Valleywag in New York Times turns corporate privacy violation into story about puppies

Heh.

On Wednesday I had an unusual and amazing day in London… It all started here:

It’s a picture story.

It’s a war… ! The old world of media faces an invasion from another planet. The horror. The horror.

By Michael Markman, Peter Hirshberg, Bob Kalsey; Produced for The Computer History Museum. [For some reason the YouTube embed code wouldn't work. To play click on the graphic or here.]

As one of the filmmakers, I think the video is about the power technology gives the audience: formerly just consumers, they are now participants and have more choice and influence. They buy direct, talk back, skip commercials. The consequences of innovation are often unanticipated and traditional business has difficulty adjusting. Today Reuters has busted a Lebanese photographer for altering photos. It was brought to their attention by … a blogger. Kudos to the blogger, and to Reuters.

I came across this gem earlier today and a classic example of what Jackie and I call ‘re-inventing the bandwagon’…

Eight O’Clock Coffee Co. is energizing coffee drinkers and its brand with a new blog that invites customers to share their gripes and thoughts about life, work and coffee.

The blog, called The Grind, follows the storyline of a working mother of two who writes about her daily life, and invites visitors to share their own experiences. The first blog entry begins with a quick recap of the weekend and talks about the blogger’s boss, nicknamed "Snobicus," and asks advice on how the blogger can break the ice with the chilly boss.

The goal is to connect consumers to the brand in an interactive format, said Jeff Maloy, Eight O’Clock senior brand manager. The blog will run for six to eight weeks.

This is so bad. How shall I count the ways?

• Working mother of two – what’s her name or is this just a target demographic that came highest? Doubt it so please, enlighten us… Hang on, I got it. Her name is Eight O’Clock Coffee, it sayz on the blog – posted by Eight O’clock Coffee.
• Interactive format – comments are good, but no need to asnwer every crank in the comments section, especially it is the first comment on the first post and the answer is the second post on the blog. Or is it someone from the agency who set up the blog trying to ‘crank up’ (sorry) the new interactive engine of the Eight O’Clock Coffee Co? Oh way, I can download a coupon and watch two TV spots. I take it all back…
• What’s with the blogger.com used as blogging platform? It sucks. Really. The worst comments facility ever, even some more benighted blogger.com users use Haloscan to get away from indigenous comments (dis)functionality. But I digress.
• The blog will run 6-8 weeks? That’s marketing-campaign mindset talking. Sigh.

Perhaps time to be constructive? A coffee blog I want to see tells me about coffee, its history, flavours, pictures, coffee-making tips (OK, there are some on the Grind blog buried at the bottom in small print), baristas, growers, geeky facts about espresso machines etc etc  – themes and topics abound.

And then there is the Ristretto Roasters weblog, set up by Jackie Danicki and run by Nancy Rommelmann, the founder of Ristretto Roasters, an artisanal coffee roasting company with its own café in Portland, OR. I know which blog I’d rather read.

Update: Just noticed that the article in PROMO magazine says that Eight O’ Clock handles the Web site and blog in-house. I take a shot at the imaginary agency back. It still leaves plenty to gripe about…

Wikipedia is not losing its momentum. First some vital statistics:

Wikipedia, which was launched in 2001, is now the seventeenth-most-popular site on the Internet, generating more traffic daily than MSNBC.com and the online versions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal combined. The number of visitors has been doubling every four months; the site receives as many as fourteen thousand hits per second.

Given how I feel about metrics, I consider something else a sign of Wikipedia’s continuing journey to the mainstream. The comedy show, Colbert report, uses the online collaborative encyclopedia to coin the word Wikiality. And at the same time it highlights how fallacious TV programmes and shows can be with their own interpretation of reality.

On Monday night’s Colbert Report, the defender of truth himself praised Wikipedia for "wikiality", "the reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you". He urged viewers to "find the Wikipedia entry on elephants and create an entry that stated their population had tripled in the last six months, a fact he freely stated to not know if it was "actually true," with his sidebar stating "it isn’t."

But Wikipedia is not a democracy of content at all. Millions of people being able input their version of ‘reality’ may be democratic in the sense of open access. A handful (in internet terms) of editors determining what sticks, with Jimmy Wales as the ultimate arbiter is monarchy. There are two hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of whom about thirty-three hundred—fewer than two per cent—are responsible for seventy per cent of the work. So half the story about Wikiality is missing, Mr Colbert, and you could have found this out without your show stunt.

Scores of internet users took Colbert’s bait, repeatedly vandalizing approximately 20 articles on elephants before all being placed under a lock. The move also subsequently caused Wikipedia administrator Tawker to block Stephen Colbert from the website, reportedly to verify his identity.

This is the kind of smarmy entertainment that we came to expect from TV – make it sound and look good, but don’t scratch the surface and, God forbid, make an informed argument. This is MSM for heaven’s sake! If you want unfiltered facts, credibility and a more complex picture, that’s what the web is for!

Alright, I’ll calm down, it’s a comedy show.

New York Post has a thorough article on Wikipedia asking if it can conquer expertise. An odd question as it pre-supposes that expertise doesn’t reside in the wild where Wikipedia can harness it better than let’s say the Britannica. (I refer the honorable reader to the post on self-determination I blogged earlier). I found the social dimension surrounding Wikipedia astounding.

There are Aspergian Wikipedians (seventy-two), bipolar Wikipedians, vegetarian Wikipedians, antivegetarian Wikipedians, existential Wikipedians, pro-Luxembourg Wikipedians, and Wikipedians who don’t like to be categorized. According to a page on the site, an avid interest in Wikipedia has been known to afflict “computer programmers, academics, graduate students, game-show contestants, news junkies, the unemployed, the soon-to-be unemployed and, in general, people with multiple interests and good memories.”

It is openess that gives rise to a greater variety, which encourages emergence of new alternative ways of…. doing things. In the off-line environment, we are governed by various sets of rules, often locked into place and conflicting, with little choice but a radical breaking down before we see a real change. The online underworld has given us an opportunity to watch real alternatives evolve emergently. Because of its unexpectedness and vastness, the internet has been accepted as chaotic and without structures. This is not strictly speaking true – just because you cannot see a structure, it does not mean there isn’t one. It may be one you are not used to and for many that seems hard to imagine.

Curiously, though, mob rule has not led to chaos. Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures.

…

Five robots troll the site for obvious vandalism, searching for obscenities and evidence of mass deletions, reverting text as they go. More egregious violations require human intervention. Essjay recently caught a user who, under one screen name, was replacing sentences with nonsense and deleting whole entries and, under another, correcting the abuses—all in order to boost his edit count. He was banned permanently from the site. Some users who have been caught tampering threaten revenge against the admins who apprehend them. Essjay says that he routinely receives death threats.

So some people take Wikipedia too seriously it seems. Jimmy Wales is ambivalent about the rules and procedures but believes that they are necessary.

Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting.

There are varied opinions about Wikipedia mentioned in the article and even Eric Raymond, the author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar (that opened my eyes to open-source back in 1990s and apparently inspired Jimmy Wales) says that Wikipedia is full of moonbats. This completes the circle – the Wikipedia’s entry for moonbat records my contribution to its definition. Gotta love the Web.

via Gothamist

Update: CBSNews.com’s Melissa P. McNamara writes about Colbert report show and Wikiality in her column on August 9th.

Kevin Nalty of Will Video For Food puts it better than any report, survey and trend analysis:

Six months ago I’d be falling asleep on my couch right now watching TV. But here’s a classic example of how I’m “leaning forward” instead of “leaning back.” Unless your grandson is reading this post to you, you’re probably making a similar transition. “Here’s my travel log, and keep in mind that for online video viewing, the journey is as important as the destination.”

….

So there are 3 important take-aways from this post:

1. I don’t believe the studies that suggest online video isn’t cannibalizing tube time. It is, and will continue to until the lines blur between television and online video.
2. Check out MunkyButter. I just introduced you to it and saved you 12 clicks.
3. My wife just fell asleep to Young & The Restless. Irony?

Well, Web 2.0 meme has made it, as it’s sufficiently defined for people to send it up. There was Power of Web 2.0 by Nalts and now famous corporate logos rebranded Web 2.0 style.

You get the idea!

via John Battelle