Archive for December, 2009
Merry Christmas Flickr (The War is Over)
On Tuesday Yoko Ono published a Flickr album with various translations of John Lennon’s famous slogan: ‘War Is Over’.
I immediately liked it. I’ve always been interested in the effect of slogans on popular culture and human psychology (think of the power of Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’) and here was one of the most famous of the twentieth century, republished digitally to coincide with the anniversary of John’s assassination and Christmas.
The only problem was that Yoko – or more likely one of her administrators – had issued each of the images without a creative commons license. Her choice, but the strict license seemed contrary to the spirit of the message and in direct contradiction to her invitation to:
“Print & display in your window, school, workplace, car & elsewhere over the holiday season, and send as postcards to your friends.”
All Rights Reserved – the stiffest of the six creative commons licenses, would have prevented bloggers or website owners from reproducing the image digitally. This, in turn, would have reduced the chances of the images going viral, which I imagine was her intention. The creative commons was, I supposed, just another little quirk of the Internet which needed explaining.
And this is the thing that is wonderful about the Internet:
One email to her Flickr account and an hour later they were all altered.
Easy as that.
So here you go. All 47 images are available with the Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license. Quite a mouthful, I know. But it basically means that you can put them up on your blog or site and as long as you attribute them with a link, then that’s quite alright.
It’s sharing and crediting – two key characteristics of Web 2.0.
This will be the last blog post for My Digital Notebook in 2009. I’m off on Sunday on the Africa Rally. The first year for this blog has been a quiet one; I’m planning for much more next year. Merry Christmas everyone – (the War Is Over).
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image credit: Yoko Ono Official
Politics and Social Media
I’ve already written about paid search and politics, but a far more obvious digital tool for politicians over the next few months is social media.
It’s an obvious and efficient way of politicians (and budding politicians) engaging with their constituents or target audiences to get their message across. Some good examples being:
Ed Fordham’s website
Alastair Campbell’s Blog
Iain Dale’s Diary
Tom Watson’s Twitter Feed
Watching each of these grind into motion over the last year has been interesting and this week it has been satisfying to get a bit of social-media-political-attention for myself.
Clowns and Parks
I live in Islington, just off Pentonville Road. Opposite my flat is Joseph Grimaldi Park, named after the man who invented the identity for the modern clown and who, Joe Frankenstein contends in a recent book, was the very first celebrity.
For interest, here is a snippet about Grimaldi:
Grim-all-day
A man goes into the doctor’s. ‘Doctor,’ he says, ‘can you help me? Life doesn’t seem worth living, and I am shrouded in constant gloom.’ ‘My good man,’ says the doctor, taking a look at the melancholy face before him, ‘there is only one cure for you. You must go to see Grimaldi the clown.’ ‘Sir,’ replies the patient, ‘I am Grimaldi the clown.’
Depressed or not, Grimaldi was a sensation and two centuries on his bones lie in the park opposite my flat.
All good and interesting until workmen arrived a month ago and dug it upside down.
After weeks of muddied shoes and sharp clatters from beyond the window, I wrote on Twitter:
“Oh. And congratulations to Islington Council for transforming the lovely Joseph Grimaldi Park into something that resembles a bowl of porridge”
It was about as much as I had time to say on the subject. It wasn’t a concern but it was an irritant. The kind of latent issue that a councillor/politician would never get to hear about in a letter or at a public forum, but which they might just find out about if they took the time to study the Internet.
And well done to Bridget Fox for doing just that. Within the hour I received an @tweet informing me about plans for the park and estimated deadlines and this morning it was followed up by a blog post.
If you glue those two things together it adds up to about as much direct engagement I’ve had with a politician for years. Mostly my fault, I know – but a lesson for politicians nonetheless. If you want to dig beneath the surface (pun intended) and engage with the apathetic masses – then social media is a pretty good way to go.
I suppose it would be glib and rather self-absorbed of me to suggest that I was going to vote for a politician because I’ve appeared in one of their blog posts. But in a world of beeping computers, identity numbers and automated messages it is comforting to communicate with another directly. And when it comes down to it, that might just make the difference.
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Image Credit: Rich Lewis