Media & Publishing

BoingBoing recently found itself in a public tiff with one of their former writers, Violet Blue, after the website’s editors decided to delete every one of her posts with no identifiable reason. BoingBoing insisted that they hadn’t censored their ex-blogger, but rather just ‘unpublished’ all of her work.

In response, Gawker has posted a funny if characteristically snarky post clarifying some of that obfuscating language (such as ‘unpublished’) being thrown around by all of us in the blogosphere when we’re trying to cover up what’s really going on (or what we really mean). Some highlights:

- Brand advertising = Bad clickthroughs. “We have a clickthrough rate of one in ten thousand, but we’re more of a brand destination.”

- Update: Fix. On a blog or in a program, an update means something was broken.

- Experimental: Failed. Everyone secretly hopes their projects take off, so they can say “Oh, it was just a fun little project!” More often, the project gets just the attention it deserved: none.

- Platform: Vague idea. Instead of a useful tool, a tool for other people to make useful tools. Possibly a cash cow, but boring. (For a geekier set, a platform is for those too lazy to code; an API is for those too lazy to write a platform.)

- Beta: Broken. For some web services, “beta” is as regular as PMS until Google buys the company.

- Viral: Cheap. Of course, sometimes that’s the kind of ad a brand deserves. Note which brand was faster to jump on viral videos: Not Coke, but Mentos.

- Contextual advertising: Bottom-of-the-barrel ads. What’s left over after “brand advertising” and served with “user-generated” content.

Gawker: The 15 Most Useless Internet Euphemisms

PSKF recently completed some trends and product ideation consultancy for a client around the subject of Baby Boomers. Here are some of the best blogs we monitored for inspiration (in no particular order):

* 20plus30
* Boomer
* Aging Fabulous
* Time Goes By
* Libido & Health
* Changing Aging
* The Boomer Blog
* The Boomer Chronicles
* Older But No Wiser
* Aging Maven
* Always Question
* Auxiliary Memory
* GenPlus
* Aging Hipster

We’re excited to have Andrew Hoppin, co-founder of NASA CoLab, joining us at PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008 on our “Collaboration & Co-Working” panel. Alongside Ezra Cooperstein from Current TV, Andrew will be discussing how collaboration can be utilized to engage communities (even ones as big as NASA!).

First, who are you and what do you do?

Though a planetary geologist and environmental scientist by training, I came back to NASA in 2006 because of my experience as a social entrepreneur, Web strategist and grassroots political organizer. There, I helped create NASA CoLab, which builds collaborative communities for NASA, online and offline, in service of a more transparent and efficient Federal government.

I also recently co-founded Brazil’s first online political technology company, and Mission Ad Network, an online advertising network for Socially Responsible businesses.
My volunteer work includes representing the Space Generation Advisory Council at the UN, and the advisory board of the New Organizing Institute.

You’ll be speaking on our Collaborative Co-Working panel -can you sum up your views on how collaborative work is changing how companies engage with their customers, staff, partners, and the community?

Collaborative co-working puts more people on the creative “edges” of workgroups by fostering informal but vocationally relevant peer-to-peer interaction across boundaries of bureaucracy, organization, and in the case of NASA with Second Life, physical geography. Cultural cross-pollination results, making organizations more contextually aware, nimble, and responsive. Co-working creates more human points of contact within an organization, melting bureaucracy away and generating creative juice from the meltwater. Now, after more than a year of building communities for NASA through online, offline, and virtual reality co-working at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, we’re turning our attention to bringing these practices to other NASA Centers around the country, and collaborating with colleagues at other Agencies to share this learning across the Federal Government. There has been a lot of rhetoric about “change” in this year’s Presidential Election; we like to think we’re helping to build the DNA necessary to implement rapid change into the Federal bureaucracy.

Five sites that provide you with inspiration?

Open NASA
CharityFocus
BarCamp
X PRIZE Foundation
Twitter

Thanks, Andrew!

NASA CoLab

Hear more from Andrew at PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008 - get your tickets now!

Lens Culture brings us a book of photographs by Hans Eijkelboom that explores patterns of fashion and art in three cities across the globe: New York, Shanghai and Paris.

The brilliant design of the book folds out to reveal three connected books with identical sequences of near-identical subject-matter: opened and stretched out on your reading desk you have three books side-by-side. It then becomes natural to turn the pages of all three books simultaneously as you proceed. With delight, we are presented with, for instance, photographs of French, American, and Chinese men all wearing camouflage clothes as fashion statements in all three cities — lots of men, lots of camouflage, in cities!

Eijkelboom’s book sounds like a pleasure to read - or, more accurately, look at. There’s a constant push and pull between regional individualism on the one hand, and mass-market globalization of trends on the other. This book highlights just how similar we’ve all become.

After conquering the worlds of search and advertising, Google has set it’s sights on entertainment. It was announced today that Family Guy creator Seth Mcfarlane is teaming up with the search giant to “reinvent mass media”. The project, titled Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy will be distributed via Google’s Adsense system. It’s an animated series that will consist of 50, 2 minute episodes that will be pushed to websites matching the Family Guy demographic (you’ll see the animated shorts instead of google ads). The show will contain advertising in the form of preroll commercials or banners at the bottom of the video.

[NYT via Read Write Web]

Q: You write that studies show the time children spend in creative play has diminished over the years. Why?
A: Kids are spending about 40 hours a week engaged with electronic media after school. That’s time taken away from creative play. The combination of this screen time and all the toys based on TV shows and movies narrows children’s options for make-believe. So do these best-selling electronic toys where all you have to do is push a button, and the toy talks, walks and does back flips by itself. It’s like the toy is having most of the fun, but it’s not giving children a chance to be creative. When it comes to toys that encourage creative play, less is more. A good toy is 90% child and only 10% toy.

This was the headline on the Metro free newspaper as I left the UK for Germany a couple of weeks back. The story is an alarmist piece about local councils anonymously monitoring the food waste in rubbish bins so that they can plan their waste strategy and also education programs. The councils say that food waste gives a lot of methane and they need to monitor consumption habits. The paper calls the councils snoops and says that it’s none of their business what people consume…

Continuing with the idea of 10,000 nichepapers, HP Labs has a new print on demand service in beta. Called Magcloud, it’s an economical way for niche publishers to print small runs of magazines. The setup could not be any easier. Users upload PDF’s of their magazine to the site and set a desired profit on top of shipping and productions costs. Magcloud then generates a publisher page for your title which provides information, issue previews and an order form. After that the site does all the work, handling the printing, mailing, subscription management, and promotion. Although anyone can buy from the site, publisher accounts are invitation only at the moment.

Magcloud

CutUp are an anonymous collective of artists based in East London known for experimenting with urban environments. The group’s latest project entailed the removal of large billboards and bus stop posters, which were then cut up into small squares, and then reassembled in the original location using the source material to create entirely new images.

Check out some images from the groups studio and of their work here.

[via Scott Burnham]