lunarchy

Make my MOG the PMOG

I want my MOG funked up! Got round to signing up to Passively Multiplayer Game. It is fresh. And ingenious. I'm Moonking and need to work out how to get badge widget onto here and then the inevitable grind to get some status. Games of life like life itself.

AfterTV

I heard Andrew Keen promoting his book The Cult of the Amateur: How today's internet is killing our culture on the radio, wherein he decries the celebration of the anonymous, unedited, citizen hacks, high on cheap kit and broadband, who are devaluing the media. He then rather brilliantly disproves his own point in his blog AfterTV, as he manages to bring some interesting and diverse opinions on the media to light, via his own amateur business TV news service.

Sock Puppets Keep It Shill on YouTube -

I recently gave a presentation on viral marketing at a conference called Promax in Berlin. This is a subject I've long been a hobbyist observer of, and it was very interesting to talk with a bunch of people who make promo videos and do marketing and branding for media companies and the like, about the "science" of trying to get people to talk about you. This just in from a Wired correspondent, also in Berlin:  Sock Puppets Keep It Shill on YouTube, highlighting the fact that the EU are planning on banning "posing as a consumer" in advertising. Whatever next! Johnny Brussels telling us that, in future, the only word-of-mouth recommendation you can get are from people who genuinely like what you do and haven't been paid to say it? The Wired piece quotes The Onion's Kyle Pafrath who nails it thusly.

Little Miss Punshine - Kate Modern

Bebo have got the rights to the UK spin off of Lonely Girl 15 as reported in TimesOnline. It's called Kate Modern, which will appeal to the atavistic connection that we all have to UK culture, via a tourist's awareness of London visitor attractions. I looked Kate up on Google and she already exists. Which is either a genius bit of Manchurian Candidate style narrative planting, or is a potentially scrappy discussion as to who will claim pre-eminence in this punscape.

Psycho-geo-audio-visual

I read the news that Radio 4 to co-produce feature film about London, and was reminded of a moment in the Everyman cinema in Hampstead where I saw Patrick Keiller's London, in a double bill with his Robinson in Space. Am thinking I should make my own psycho-geographical map of London sometime which could be filled with recursive times like this.

Russell Brand - Strong language, adult content

Went to see Russell Brand at the theatre and he was very good. A talented raconteur, a definition of charismatic. Urbane, articulate and hatefully sexy, he spiels a mixture of Krishna influenced tolerance and acceptance together with an endlessly inventive advocacy of free, sexual love in all its forms. He also spends a lot of time deconstructing the language of tabloid journalism.

Someone has taken the time to upload the whole of the live DVD.  Notable in this clip, a little riff on Henry the Hoover and his reduction of the  theory of  performance to the memorable: "I'm  not  fucking, I am  fuck" .

Big massive puppet in jeans

Just caught up with the story behind a YouTube viral campaign at Diary of a Marionette Maker: The Giant Puppet in Iceland. Made (I think) by Ed Robinson at The Viral Factory, it set up a multiple sighting of a big puppet in Reykjavik, which was captured by a number of observers who all posted their documents of the incident on YouTube.

Once a viewer came across one of them, the other pieces would be found through their common tags, and the full story would start to emerge. There was the added interest of  the comment about the videos as folk tried to make sense of what they were seeing. Not sure how successful it was, doesn't seem to be that many views and most of the comment is about whether Chinook helicopters have ever flown in Iceland, but it does have an admirable ambition, beautiful execution and is wonderfully native to the medium. Maybe I should consider some Levis instead of my usual Gap-sale strides.

Scooch or Cyndi or whatever

Terry Wogan mistakenly announces the wrong winner of the Eurovision selection show, bravely trying to bring a bit of dirty reality into what otherwise would be an example of Milan Kundera's definition of kitsch.

YouCams is Stickam on Steroids

YouCams is Stickam on Steroids. This from Mashable, which I get a feed of but don't read it enough as the volume and frequency of new social network sites/widgets/deal announcements is absurd. As I only dip in, I find it hard to separate signal from noise but this seemed interesting in that it appears to give you the capability to run the equivalent of a TV studio gallery where you can feed YouTube vids in, live, to a webcam  chat room. Not sure how well it runs or fun it is. Masher like the innovation but decry the execution.

Channel 4 launches mobile blog site on public art | New media | MediaGuardian.co.uk

Channel 4 launches mobile blog site on public art (MediaGuardian.co.uk). looks like a nice plan, reminds me of something similar that mapped graffiti exclusively maybe a bit like this in Minneapolis.