PSFK Author:
Alex Morrison

A Treehugger article from earlier today warns against the dangers of supposedly “local” farmers selling very un-local products. The writer, somewhere “on highway 11 just North of Orillia”, stopped at a farm stand with signs promising “Ontario Corn” and “Ontario Blueberries” only to discover a California label on one of the plums at the bottom of the basket he had purchased.

The lesson: pay attention to what you buy. Remember that not everyone is looking out for your best interests.

Is that Farmer Really Selling Local Food?

Because digital cameras can distinguish colors the human eye can’t even see, the company Kameraflage has developed technology which allows them to insert these invisible shades into anything from fabrics to billboards to movies. This will allow anyone to catch a glimpse of hidden shapes like the lightning-strike in the adjacent photo with their digital cameras or cell-phones. The business opportunities are potentially limitless.

Kamerflage

[via Coolhunting]

If the world were a swirling vortex of conflicting emotions, We Feel Fine would be its pictorial representation. An “artwork authored by everyone”, the website is a shifting database of emotional registers built off the blogosphere’s daily lexicon of phrases, ranging anywhere from the ‘I feel fines’ to the heaviest heartbreaks imaginable. Constantly compiled from the diverse corners of the internet, the site is structured around six formal sections – Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds – each of which offers a different visual representation of the general sentiments occurring around the world at any given moment. Their mission statement reads:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s?

The website is beautiful to behold and frequently startling in its power to affect. From the most mundane to the most meaningful, We Feel Fine truly lives up to its mission, presenting a cross-section of the psychic lives of bloggers across the world.

We Feel Fine

For all you ladies out there, has the prospect of taking a cab late-night ever sounded in any way unappealing? Well, certain cities are taking back the streets and making them a little more amenable to the needs of modern women, offering cab services run exclusively by the fair sex. Trendwatching’s recent roundup of cool products for women, gays and boomers have a short piece on these new services, and they do indeed sound pretty useful. In London, Pink Ladies is a new private car franchise that one can join and pay for via a special “pink account”, and offers taxis that are, naturally, “pink inside and out”. In Bombay, the company Forsche have taxis that “include conveniences like wet wipes and perfumed talcum powder to freshen up on the way to a work meeting, nail polish remover and nail clippers and women’s magazines”. This is a relatively new phenomenon, so it remains to be seen where it will go, but certainly many cities could still use it to their advantage in the meantime.

Trendwatching: “Forever Trends”

Fellow trendspotters Coolhunting published an article yesterday about certain social networking sites that have departed from the norm set by their earlier, more ostentatious cousins (i.e. MySpace & Facebook’s well-known worlds of party updates and unabashed time-wasting), and are instead concerned with the more pressing but less tantalizing prospects of social change.

They have compiled several prime examples, including Friction TV, the “YouTube for social activists”, H.E.L.P, a “telemedecine-based online community of physicians and financial donors bringing advanced medical assistance to disaster zones and areas of humanitarian need around the world” and Kiva, “a site that connects the world’s poorer populations looking to develop unique business ideas to people with disposable incomes while providing a transparent lending platform”.

For more, read the full article.

Designed in anticipation of the Discovery Channel’s 20th Anniversary Shark Week, Sharkrunners is a new “big game” of “oceanic exploration and high stakes shark research” developed by area/code. It works as follows:

In the game, players control their ships, but the sharks are controlled by real-world white sharks with GPS units attached to their fins. Real-world telemetry data provides the position and movement of actual great white sharks in the game, so every shark that players encounter corresponds to a real shark in the real world.

Ships in the game move in real-time, so players receive email and/or SMS alerts during the day when their boat is within range of an encounter. Players login, choose crewmembers and an approach technique, and then collect various data from the nearby sharks.

Pretty crazy.

Sharkrunners

Check out Kevin Slavin of area/code talk about big games at the PSFK Conference New York here.

In another bizarre turn of events for the music industry, a new company is offering fans a chance to take band management into their own hands. The folks over at VIP Band Manager have invited 50,000 people to get involved with a new group’s entire musical future, allegedly harnessing the “power of the internet to enable people to become managers”.

NME reports:

Each member will take on the role of manager for the company’s new band and the members then get to vote online to decide on each detail of the band - like who are the members, and what tracks will go on their album.

Band members are being invited to audition for the new ground, with the winning band winning a £1 million deal, and the stewardship of the army of managers.

The band’s three targets are to achieve one million fans, stage a 12-date UK tour and get a Number One record. Progress will be charted via online TV bulletins.

PSFK must admit some skepticism as to the efficacy of this venture. Although it could very well be a huge hit, the process itself seems like it would be rather vulnerable to the potential incompetency of such an interminable bureaucracy. Nevertheless, due to the novelty of such pandering to the public’s whims, it will be very interesting to see where this goes. More to come soon enough.

NME: Fans invited to manage band

VIP Band Manager

Touted as “the best shopping experience in London”, the famous Covent Garden Market will now be open every Thursday evening in August from 5 - 10pm, luring visitors with a spectacular array of gourmet food and the possibility of dining “alfresco style” in “the atmospheric surroundings of hops and hay bails”. Add some great live music and you’ve got a night market that should be enticing to foodies and newbies alike .

Bringing together the best of London’s food markets - traders from Borough to Broadway, Exmouth to Islington will set their stalls out alongside premium food producers never before available in the Capital.

Event Details at The Purple List

Covent Garden Market

In the ever-increasing cross-pollination between real events and their online doppelgängers, music festivals have made leaps and bounds in their attempts to integrate actual shows with the interactive tools of new media.

One such example is Playstation’s 3Rooms, a 9m sq cube that appeared at this month’s Manchester International Festival. The conspicuous metal box contained a veritable laboratory of high-tech, aesthetically pleasing equipment operated by a host of net-savvy students - “the cream of local art and film schools and universities” - all of whom worked towards making the festival more than just a few days of good music.

The purpose of the cube, The Telegraph reports, is, in the words of sponsorship manager Carl Christopher, to:

“use elements of the main festival to help us create a mini-festival within it”. This entailed dispatching teams to each event - Damon Albarn’s Chinese circus show, Monkey, gigs by Lou Reed and Kanye West, Heston Blumenthal’s taste-a-thon and so on - to capture footage to turn into vodcasts, mini-documentaries and animated films.

So what does 3Rooms mean for the future of festivals?

The answer, in part, is that 3Rooms is a response to the changing nature of festivals: as the events become increasingly digitised and interactive, so must the marketers who target them.

Today’s festival doesn’t begin and end standing in a muddy field watching the Arctic Monkeys or, in the case of the Manchester International Festival, sitting in the Palace Theatre rapt at Monkey’s kung-fu routines.

It can begin on festival websites and forums months in advance, as online communities discuss their favourite bands, and make friends and travel arrangements. It peaks during the event itself as people post blogs and upload pictures - while those at home watch live concert streams - then continues afterwards online: hunting clips on YouTube; downloading live snippets from iTunes; regaling Pete Doherty’s latest antics on the forums.

The Telegraph: The festivals that came out of the field and onto the web