Advertising Turf Wars

Amidst all the increasingly invasive, extreme, (or, on a lighter note, interactive) advertising out there, here’s an intriguing little border war. Textually reports that a teenaged graffiti artist named Skullphone hacked into a bunch of digital billboards in Southern California, replacing the ads with his logo of a, er, skullphone. Probably most arresting less because of the hack and more because of the visual style of the skull holding a cell phone. (via Blogrunner)

Speaking of which, what’s the deal with all the skull imagery these days? Tattoo-style skulls on clothing (like my shoes), Damien Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull. A sign of our Thanatos-driven times, I guess.

Awareness Test

My colleague and pal, Matt Galloway, tipped me off to this fascinating video. If I tell you anything about it, it might spoil it.

Back in Action

Well, that little hiatus turned out to be, um, lengthy, but the show seems to be a bird in flight now, so I’m eager to get back to the crisper! I’d like it to be a scratch pad for some of what I’m working on, particularly issues around how our sense of place and time is shifting.

Blogging MIA

Things have been so busy with Spark, not only the show, but keeping up the Web side of it, that I’ve had to say bye bye to personal blogging for the time being.

It seems to work best for me as a sort of ‘place holder’ for ideas that I haven’t written down more formally yet, and these days, most of my ideas are ending up on Spark. Hope to be back to it soon.

My New Show!

My new show, Spark, is going on the air on CBC radio one in September. Woo Hoo! More deets to follow. Many thanks to Nicola, Tom and Pedro for being amazing producers! There’s a little more about what the show is about at the show blog

The Pros and Cons of Viral

Marc Andreessen has a fascinating look at Facebook Platform. He looks, first, at the difference between applications and platforms, but then, at how the insanely viral quality of Facebook can create huge scalability problems for successful applications. (Think of the bad rap Twitter got when it looked as though they were having problems with this). His point is that successful apps in Facebook Platform are going to need either to be designed by big companies or have lots of VC behind them. (via Guardian Technology Blog).

In addition to the viral quality of Facebook, there’s the fact that it’s so stupidly easy to add these apps. It seems as though focusing on who really is an ‘active user’ and how you define that is going to be important in figuring out real audience and real value. If you define ‘active user’ as someone who has used an application in the last 30 days, well, so what, really?

Reboot!

Here’s one way to deal with info overload. The Guardian has a story about bloggers Fred Wilson and Jeff Nolan who declared email bankruptcy. They were so far behind on emails, they simply announced that they weren’t going to reply to any. “I am starting over,” said one.

MESH

Just participated in a panel on how the Web is changing the way we use media, and in particular, how social media is changing our relationship to media. Part of the MESH ’07 conference. Interesting co-panelists: Mark Federman, who I have interviewed before for my CBC column, and who brought a very refreshing McLuhanite perspective to the table, and Mark Schneider, veteran journalist who now works with Now Public, who made a great analogy off the top about how we’re engaged in a huge engineering project (ie the Internet) and we haven’t done an ‘environmental impact’ study, just by way of, not opposing it obviously, but stepping back and considering its effects.

Back Again

We finished making the pilots for a proposed new show for CBC Radio called Spark. I worked with the producers of And Sometimes Y, which was fabulous. They’re really smart, funny, creative people. It makes such a big difference to any type of creative process.

New Blog

Hi,

I admit it may seem ridiculous that I’m starting a new blog, when I update poor crispermachine so infrequently, but I’ve set up this Vox blog to focus specifically on the link between new social media and MSM, with an eye to experimenting with new ways of doing journalism. Please come visit! Leave your thoughts!