Art, an octopus and social media

Strange things happen in social media. Last night was stranger than normal.

Yesterday morning I was using Twitter to complain about doing Excel spreadsheets at work. I felt, I said, like #afishoutofwater – or, I then wrote, exercising a Spanish idiom, ‘Como un pulpo en un garaje.’ – which translates into English as ‘Like an octopus in the garage.’

Less than 12 hours later a website called Irkafirka published this:

Oddly, I first saw the illustration moments after getting home from El Camino Spanish bar in King’s Cross. And waking up this morning I imagined that I’d probably had a little too much sangria – but, after checking, it’s quite real.

It all stems from an idea that Irkafirka’s founders have had to illustrate a random selection of tweets then publish them as quickly as possible. On their website, they write:

The Rules:

1. Irkafirka is as fresh as possible. We aim to post illustrations within 24 hours of the tweet that inspired them.

2. We are not aquainted with our chosen tweeters. Tweets are chosen by a random process of dipping in and out of the massive data deluge that Twitter has become.

3. Suggestions are warmly welcomed but almost certainly ignored. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have a price. You want a commission, you’ve got to pony up. Call it becoming a patron of the arts.

4. We aim to post illustrations daily, but we have jobs, family and cinema tickets, all of which have to take priority from time to time.

5. If we stop enjoying it, we’ll stop.

6. We can break any of the rules except 5.

There are more illustrations on their website. I think it’s a wonderful idea that will work brilliantly over time – just so long as they can keep it going.

I’m after a copy of my tweet #3125 to hang on the wall, and when I asked if I could buy the artwork they responded with:

Nothing more for me to say to irkafirka then, but THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND I BLOODY LOVE IT.

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image credit: freekvandenbergh on Flickr

Irkafirka are @chrisbell @Pockless on Twitter

2005: social media?

About five years after its launch, last Sunday evening, You Tube announced that they are now receiving two billion hits per day. On their official blog they wrote:

Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself. [Link to full post]

Not only is the two billion milestone noteworthy, but the fact that the site is five years old is also well worth noting.

There’s a good argument that 2005 was the pivotal year in the shaping of the Internet as we know it. You Tube was founded, Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook up to schools across America, and Yahoo acquired two year-old Del.icio.us and one year-old Flickr.

For the sake of nostalgia, here is what some of these websites looked like back then, five years ago.

• You Tube

Billed rather simply as a digital photo repository back in 2005 – their logo has hardly changed a bit in the last five years. The homepage design obviously owes quite a bit to Google’s, who, in any case, bought the site in November 2006 for $1.65 billion.

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• Google

In 2005 Google was already looking fairly grown up and confident. Very few changes were made to this minimalist homepage design until just a few weeks ago.

You’ll spot here that back then Google were busy promoting Froogle, their price comparison service which was later rebranded as Google Product Search.

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• Blogger

In May 2005, blogger was already six years old. Therefore it predates Web 2.0 and is one of a few notable survivors of the Dot Com Crash in 2000. It had been acquired by Google in 2003 and by the time of this screenshot it was by far the most popular blogging software available.

In May 2005 they launched Blogger Mobile, which allowed people to blog by text message –making them, by my reckoning, just about two years too early.

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• Wordpress

Wordpress would supplant Blogger in popularity over the next few years. It’s interesting to note, however, their reasons for encouraging people to use their software. ‘You can stop sending mass emails to everyone’, ‘You can archive your thoughts’ and ‘Why the heck not?’

Indeed.

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• Facebook

Facebook has retained this familiar feel from the start, but its evolution has been a little more complex than most.

Back in 2005 there were two Facebooks, one for people in college and one for people in high school. All the dots would be joined up over the next year as it began the march that would see it become the most popular site in America.

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• The BBC

Back in 2005 I had never written a blog, had never used Facebook and only seen a handful of You Tube videos, but I was already mildly addicted to the Internet. And from a sunny Madrid and a fitful Internet connection, the BBC’s official site was where I spent most of my time.

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• The Guardian

And 2005 was a time before guardian.co.uk existed. Back then it was known as the Guardian Unlimited – a website that promised such things as ‘All the headlines from today’s first edition.’

From that I suppose you can summise that the website was still being considered as some kind of digital reflection of the newspaper – and not really a strong publication in its own right.

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• Flickr

Flickr now hosts more than four billion images and is the most popular image sharing site on the web. Back in 2005 PC World were offering them some kind words:

‘Cutting edge real-time photo sharing’, they said. They were right.

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• And in 2006 … Twitter

Twitter didn’t exist in 2005 and it wouldn’t appear properly until more than a year or so later. Therefore it’s just tagged on to the end of this post. It’s a good demonstation of  just what can be done in four years with a scruffily designed website, a clever idea and a willingness to stick with your logo through thick and thin.

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Top image credit: TonVC on Flickr

Screen shots pulled out of the Way Back Machine

]]> http://www.digital-notebook.com/2010/05/18/the-internet-five-years-ago/feed/ 2 http://www.digital-notebook.com/2010/05/06/the-general-election-2010-ha-ha-ha/ http://www.digital-notebook.com/2010/05/06/the-general-election-2010-ha-ha-ha/#comments Thu, 06 May 2010 05:36:08 +0000 Peter Moore http://www.digital-notebook.com/?p=912

Image credit: My David Cameron

How to laugh at a politician

On election morning I thought it’d be a good idea to look back at the last few months’ online political satire. I’m not sure that it has been quite the digital election that I was anticipating, with TV being, if anything, the defining medium, but the Internet has certainly added something.

And here is a quick round up of the best digital satire.

1. My David Cameron

A website set up in January this year by by Clifford Singer, creative director at Sparkloop graphic design agency, shortly after David Cameron’s heavily airbrushed face appeared on 759 billboards about the country.

The site received 90,000 unique visitors in two weeks, with anyone able to share their version of the Cameron poster.

2. #itsnicksfault

After a furious press turned on Nick Clegg for daring to become popular without their support, their negative headlines were ridiculed on Twitter as Rory Cellan Jones explains in this blog post. Some of his highlights being:

“Just had a giant chocolate eclair with cream. All #nickcleggsfault”
“We’ve run out of houmous #NickCleggsfault”
“Pompey not being allowed to play in Europe. #nickcleggsfault”
“Got rid of the wasp and a new wasp has arrived. #nickcleggsfault”
“I got my debit card stolen #nickcleggsfault”

3. Charlie Brooker in the Guardian

Charlie Brooker has been on enormously good form in the last few weeks. I think my favourite paragraph of his was this, just after the final leaders’ debate:

According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact. Perhaps that’s just the expression he pulls when he’s concentrating, in which case it’s fair to say he’d be the first prime minister in history who could look inadvertently funny while pushing the nuclear button.

[Charlie Brooker - BBC debate was a cross between Songs of Praise and Over the Rainbow]

4. The Daily Mash

Odd and shocking as ever, the writers at the Daily Mash have obviously enjoyed the fact that there is an election on:

Clegg to clean up politics using his personal bank account – [link]

BNP launches aryan spread – [link]

Brown to be turned into glue – [link]

5. The election debates and social media

As Shane Richmond explains here, watching the leaders’ debates with Twitter added an extra dimension to the whole thing. Facebook was pretty good too.

6. Matt on the General Election

A cross over from the mainstream media here, but it’s well worth checking out Matt’s bank of General Election cartoons at the Telegraph. There’s a particularly good one of David Cameron pestering a sleeping couple.

7. Nope

Currently doing the rounds on Twitter. Published in response to the Sun’s front page.

Image taken from Mattlays’ Twitpic.

UPDATE 8am: It’s only an hour since I posted this, but already Liberal Conspiracy are publishing lots of different variations of the Cameron frontpage. It’s an echo of the airbrush moment, and it’s interesting to wonder what effect it will have – if any – on polling day.

8. The Peter Mandleson Experience

And, lastly of all, this video of Peter Mandleson and Gordon Brown having a jam is quite brilliant.

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Right. Enough silliness – I’ve got to decide who to vote for.

Lost in Morocco

I last saw my digital camera in the Moroccan coastal town of Agadir on Boxing Day last year. I’ve no idea what became of it, but in my imagination it was spirited out of my pocket by a shifty chap with an ambitious moustache and squinty eyes. Anyway, my point is that since then I’ve not had a camera at all – just the iPhone.

Now the iPhone’s camera has a pretty dismal reputation. There’s no flash so you can’t do anything in the dark, it’s a little slow so you can miss spontaneous moments, there’s no zoom and you’ve got no control over the majority of its settings.

Still, the camera’s simplicity gives it a sort of honest charm and over the past five months I’ve not bothered to replace the old camera and, instead, I’ve preferred to rely on the iPhone.

Doing this is a flexible, dynamic way to collect images. As you have your telephone with you almost all of the time you have far greater potential a capture a wide range of everyday shots. With apps like Photoshop for the iPhone, CameraBag and Camera Plus Pro you can edit on the fly, and with the ability to email and subsequently publish them instantly – giving you the sort of inertia with it all that keeps you going.

Here are a few shots from the  last few months.

1. BT Tower – April 2010

2. Mali – January 2010

3. Warren Street – April 2010

4. Pentonville Road – March 2010

5. Nigeria – January 2010

6. The British Library – April 2010

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My disclaimer is that I am not a professional photographer and I know less about photographic theory than I do about advanced weaving. I’m just enjoying having a play.

I’m glad to see that there is a Flickr group for ‘Photos taken with an iPhone‘, and if you’re on Flickr, then I’m here.

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

image credit: zipenfish

Outside Euston Square station this morning stood a model with blue eyes and a big smile. She was selling copies of today’s Sun newspaper, upon the front of which was the headline:

“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”

The editor, probably happy with his splash, had decided to be proactive. They had sent people out to sell their Jordan and Peter Andre story directly. It was later pointed out to me that inside the paper was another headline:

“Sex with Jordan? That’s out of the equestrian.”

Tabloids have long been famous for their inventive headlines and today it was nice to see that the paper was being bold and creative with their front page. Two features of newspaper journalism that are becoming increasingly scarce.

It reminds me of a long list of such headlines, a few of which I’ll add here:

1. “Super Cally Go Ballistic Celtic are Atrocious” (A Scottish newspaper in response to Celtic’s defeat by Inverness Caledonian Thistle in 2000)
2. “Nut Screws Washer and Bolts” (A report of a mental patient who raped a cleaning assistant at an asylum in California and later escaped)
3. “Slumdog has the Pedigree to Winalot” (On a portentous opening weekend for Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire in the UK)
4. “Elton takes David up the aisle” (Elton John marries long term partner David Furnish)

When I look at such headlines I always recall an excellent article that was written by Shane Richmond in the British Journalism Review. He looks at the example of The Sun’s famous ‘Gotcha’, headline during the Falklands conflict and reasons why such a headline would be highly unlikely today due to the importance of SEO and page views for journalists. He wrote:

“The “Gotcha” headline on a Sun front-page splash about the sinking of the General Belgrano is one of the most famous, or infamous depending on your taste, in the history of British journalism. Yet no web producer with any experience would consider a headline like that today. The reason is search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO has been around almost as long as search engines themselves, but journalists were quite late to cotton on. It didn’t really reach newsrooms until a couple of years ago.

The concept is simple. It’s about ensuring that your content is found by the millions of people every day who use search engines as their first filter for news and those who don’t search at all but trust an automated aggregator, such as Google News, to filter stories for them. These people are essentially asking a computer to tell them the news. If you want your story to be read, you’d better make sure the computer knows what you’re writing about.”

Keyword journalism

SEO is important to journalists today and everyone should have a basic understanding of it. If The Sun were concerned solely with drawing the maximum number of searcher into their websites they should used tools such as Hitwise or Google Trends to give keyword information about relevant searches. Most likely the SEO headline that would have resulted would have to be to the order of:

“Jockey speaks following Jordan and Andre’s spit”

Which is obviously very different to:

“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”

I’m glad that The Sun have decided to swap Googleability for creativity. It’s two fingers up to the people that think SEO and page views count for everything – and, if nothing else, it’s earned them a blog post.

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Update:

As Martin Belam points out, it’s not quite the two fingers up to SEO that I was imagining earlier, as the title tag (the bit up in the left hand corner) for the article on The Sun’s website reads: “Jordan’s horseman friend denies fling” - which is far more palatable for the bots.

Different headlines for different mediums – another journalistic lesson.