Hello I’m a scammer

This made me chuckle (via poketo):

Dead pixel in Google Earth, 2008

Title: Dead pixel in Google Earth
Year: 2008

82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km.

photo: Jeroen Wandemaker

(via somethingchanged)

THE COOLHUNTER

By Mark Lewman

I prepare trend reports for fortune 1000 companies.
I am paid to play
the disenfranchised against the disrespected
make the F1000 feel connected
to the cognosumers who reject them,
stuck in the cultural crosshairs.

I package the questions and organize the answers,
emailing the butcher, blackmailing the baker,
sharing the bone marrow with clandestine video game maker.

I tell them about funky black barbers in Memphis
using fire to cut hair.
Swedish teens bored to tears
soaking their tampons in vodka
to get juiced in school.
Crispin Glover joins the Wu Tang Clan
and nobody bothers to understand
but everybody says
dude that’s cool.

The revolution
is a bunch of white kids
addicted to database pollution
yelling slogans, brandishing upside down crosses
bearing inverted icons;

Pillsbury wants to update the dough boy and make butter ‘younger’,
stick that fucker with a fork and call your mother,
scrape the lard from the fat of the land
and leave it smoking in the pan.

And some guy in a conference room in Ohio says into his speakerphone:
“Tell me more about the Krautrock movement and the abstract bands.”
I spit out details to counteract,
and wipe my face with my cuff,
generating more fluff,
without concentrating on the end result,
just the next step which is an orchestrated effort to tap into tech step

to sidestep the fact that all packaged goods are the same,
only the name changes.
and the game rearranges and the world Wayne lives in
can be divided into stages, phases, trends, fads, and crazes.

Declare a war on a demographic,
paying top dollar for a guerilla campaign of street posters placed in prime places
where kids congregate and pedophiles masturbate to juvenile faces,
services provided by an eco-terrorist graffiti artist specializing in revitalizing heavy metal.
His brandalism spreads the viruses we peddle:
Kids in custom vans should crave candy and chemicals, rejecting morals and resting on their laurels,
making fun of Pauly Shore
as they get addicted to death and keep whoring for more.

And some guy in a conference room in Ohio will smile. “This is teen cool AND mom cool.”

What’s hot, what’s right, what’s not in the spotlight?
Hold a focus group and retool, train the pilots to tame the planes and get ready for a midair refuel.

Do kids really think black is the new brown?
or is platinum the new black?
Who do we assassinate, and what era is ripe for a comeback?

Do you trust me to keep the world on track?

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable – Clay Shirky’s really intelligent thoughts about the future of newspapers, summed up by this one:

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem

Ooh look – a USB Key

Check this out – A USB drive shaped like a key. I love it.

A really simple idea. Good design wins again.

The iamakey, by Lacie.

(Via Swissmiss)

Forget business models. Focus on ideals.

So the next time you hear an old dude banging the business model drum, or worse, the sounding the “monetization” bullhorn, let him know the 20th century was yesterday. Today’s challenge is building a better economy – not hawking the same old mass-produced, toxic, self-destructive junk slightly differently. Challenge him with this: you’ve got a business model. But do you have any ideals? Because without the latter, the former is worth about as much as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, or Detroit.

Why Ideals are the New Business Models, by Umair Haque. Via my latest favourite Something Changed.

As if you needed any more reasons to hate John Mayer…

Over the weekend, James Duthie posted an excellent piece entitled ‘Twitter whoring goes mainstream” – a brilliant rant about singer John Mayer plugging products via his twitter stream.

First there this:

And then this:

Horrendous!

This sort of behaviour, ladies and gentlemen, is why I worry about the future or Twitter, and any social network that becomes too popular.

The New Pop Culture

“The marketing term for people like me is “slash/slashers.” Like, I’m doing the yearbook plus my blog and making videos and working at a communications firm called Naked. We don’t want one path—we want to get involved in lots of creative projects. It’s like, “Oh, you should holler at Harley to go D.J. your party!” or “Holler at so-and-so to shoot your short! He’s also in a band!” I call us the New Pop Culture, which might sound bold, but I believe it. We’re more influenced by what we’re up to—our own creative outputs—than what Karl Lagerfeld is up to. We are more interested in reading our friends’ blogs than Style.com. My friends and I don’t care about Lindsay Lohan; when we see a picture of a celebrity like Kanye West, we want to know who’s standing behind him. It’s cooler to be a real person. It’s our turn now.”

Heron Preston via Britticisms

Modern Art =

Via :: Something Changed, Via Whatson :: Via professionalwidow

Help me save Twitter!

This week, Twitter became mainstream. At least in my world.

It happened when Rove McManus – a questionable Australian television chat show host – spoke to Lily Allen about Twitter on Sunday night. And that was that.

Already this week I’ve experienced a surge of new followers to my Tweets. And I’m expecting plenty more friends, colleagues and old acquaintances and others to be on board by the end of the month. Like Facebook did in 2007, Twitter is infecting the internet-enabled world like a virus.

I’m wondering if that’s a good thing. Actually, I suspect it’s not.

One of the many delightful things about Twitter has been that no-one has really known about it. The world goes by, but anyone Twittering has a whole other world going on. Connecting with Smart people. Funny people. Interesting people. Ridiculous people. It really is amazing.

But now it’s getting popular. And you know what happens when social networks get popular – Their value starts to diminish. And once they go mainstream, all hell breaks loose. The spammers come in droves. It gets harder to keep up with your network. Before you know, your mother-in-law wants to be your friend*.

At the same time this is happening, the social networks are figuring out how to monetize. How to build their business model. And since we’re all addicted to free these days, that can be tricky. So, with an influx of new users beating your door down, the temptation to adopt an advertising based model will increase.

And then something happens. The magic is lost. People feel as though they’ve been duped. And they leave.

This happened to Myspace. And I’d argue this it has started to happen on Facebook. How many of us really use Facebook as often as we once did?

It hasn’t happened to Twitter yet, but I’m worried it could. And if Twitter is not careful, Twitter will fall in on itself.

So I’m proposing something different. I have an idea that would put the brakes on Twitter’s enormous growth, before it’s too late. An idea that would give the company a proper business model, not one based on advertising. An idea that may even strengthen the network. Something that I believe could save Twitter.

The idea? No More Twitter Accounts.

That’s right, Twitter should stop giving away new Twitter accounts.

The only way anyone can join Twitter from now on, would be if they bought their account from an existing Twitter user willing to give it up. Twitter should create a marketplace for Twitter accounts. 50% of the sale goes the ex-Tweeter, and 50% to Twitter themselves.

Given the popularity of Twitter right now, there’d be plenty of people willing to pay for a Twitter account to get in. And Twitter users who never ‘got’ Twitter would probably be willing to sell a Twitter account.

After a while, supply and demand would push the cost of a Twitter account sky high, and that’s where the revenues would kick in.

What do you think about this idea? I’d love to hear your thoughts, good or bad. And if you like the idea, why not re-post it? Or re-tweet it? My ultimate goal would be spread the idea back to Evan Williams / Biz Stone. I honestly think it’s a good one.

So, what do you say? Help me save Twitter before it’s too late.

* No offence dear mother-in-law, but that was a Facebook-has-jumped-the-shark moment for me.