Serendipity Book

Create your own tag cloud with Wordle

Wordle creates beautiful tag clouds from any text. This is what it did with my delicious tags. If only it was hyperlinked too.

Via: Thomas Hawk who points to a hack for creating a Flickr tag cloud in the same way.

Big Brother at Alton Towers

So, it seems that I'm only 2 years late to the news that the British theme park Alton Towers has introduced RFID technology in wrist bands to physically track and video their customers using CCTV as they move around the park.

The technology is primarily intended to offer a service which creates a custom video of "Your Day at Alton Towers". Guests wear bracelets fitted with RFID tags that trigger surveillance cameras throughout the park. The video footage is then spliced together automatically with stock "B roll" footage from the park to produce a custom DVD for each customer with a run time of up to 30 minutes.

The surveillance cameras are also used for "safety and crime prevention".

Guests opt-in to wear the tags but the privacy implications for other guests who will feature as "extras" in other people's DVDs are worth reflecting upon. The Alton Towers privacy policy states the following:

Please note that personal data in the form of images of visitors to the Park is collected via the operation of closed circuit television ('CCTV'), ride photography and video cameras all of which are located throughout the Park. Your image will be recorded and processed for the purpose of producing photographic images and video recordings.

Data from video cameras is collected by the wearing by visitors to the Park of a radio frequency identification (RFID) wristband. Please note your image may be captured passively through other visitors to the Park who may be wearing an RFID wristband.

I'm torn. Is this an relevant, exciting and clever use of a new technology which offers a genuine benefit to guests or a gross invasion of privacy?

P.S. Did you realise that it now costs nearly £100 a head to get in to Alton Towers?

Via RD's Delicious links.

The Smiths 'Still Ill' Live Video Bootlegs

I bumped into a friend whilst out and about this morning. We got to talking about the internet. He told me authoritatively that "99.9% of the stuff on the internet is rubbish". I told him that I had heard my dad say something similar.

With no further introduction required, this little musical interlude is dedicated to him. This is The Smiths performing 'Still Ill' live on The Tube in 1984.

Other live versions of this gloriously life-affirming piece of miserabilism can be found here, here, here and here. I could play these all day.

"Let's make a sawng" with Weezer

Geek band Weezer have really been putting the internet to good use lately to generate interest in their upcoming album.

First they gave us a video recreating the greatest hits of the net.

Then, while everyone else is asking why they didn't think of doing that, Weezer's lead singer Rivers Cuomo has been off harnessing the power of mass creativity to write a song with his fans on YouTube.

Rivers' version of the resulting song, '80s Radio', can be found here. Alternatively, you can hear the versions done by some of his collaborators.

Aside: I wonder who owns the copyright to this?

Offside: Can the moustache REALLY be making a come back? I thought the rule was that moustaches can only be worn ironically and even then they must only be grown to raise money for charity and must be cut off immediately after the fundraiser?

Give me an "H", "O", "N", "D", "A"

Honda Live Advert Sky Dive Difficult is worth doing
by unitedgoals

Portraits created from bar codes

Scott Blake makes portraits from bar codes. By hand.

Grab and play interactive video

A new way to manipulate video as you watch: you can "grab" on-screen objects and move them backwards and forwards, though actually you are only moving the video backwards and forwards. A "hint path" shows how the object can be moved.

The DimP direct manipulation player has been developed by the University of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project. There's an explanation in the video below.

Interesting to perhaps think of ways of matching this engine to a touch screen to give rise to some interactive outdoor / in-store activation ideas.

BBC Sound Index - buzz-based music chart

The BBC have created an innovative music chart called the Sound Index based on aggregating usage and purchasing data from popular internet music sites:

"The BBC Sound Index analyses what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web.iTunes, MySpace, Bebo, Google Groups, Last.FM and YouTube

The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are. So, the Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public."

The chart is updated every six hours and broadcast on the BBC every Sunday. Yet more good stuff from Ashley Highfield and team:

"Under Ashley's leadership, the number of UK adults visiting bbc.co.uk has more than trebled from 4.6 million to 14 million every month and page impressions have increased tenfold to just over 3 billion a month."

Predicting the future of the internet

Edelman's Steve Rubel shares his predictions for the future of the internet in a presentation he gave last week to Next 08 in Hamburg:

| View | Upload your own

Thanks to Osgur Alaz

The end of futurists (and ugliness)

I love this (only partially) tongue in cheek visualisation of the extinction timeline of a number of things we take for granted.

Whether it is innocence (2001), retirement (2017) or ugliness (c.2060) Richard Watson can see it coming to an end some day. In fact he even predicts the end of futurists in c.2050 (at about the same time he thinks that we might finally wave good bye to Cher).

Full size version here

Found on Furl.com

Understanding what it means to be British

This lovely evocation of a wet British summer by Buxton water nearly brought a tear to my eye.

Lateral thinking

Go on, try to guess the category this ad is for before the reveal. Genius.

Thanks due to Abu Mallick

Crocs do a marmite

Burger burger burger ... burger burger burger

This must have been an easy sell to the client. Have you ever seen a more product-centric food ad?

HT for the title to the chicken chicken and blah story memes

Invasion of the Scuppies

The Times tells of the arrival of the scuppie, a tribe who want to live well (a.k.a. buy lots of stuff) while doing good:

"First there were hippies. Then there were yuppies. And now, swarming around us in their ethical yet impossibly stylish shoes, we have scuppies, a hybrid of the two. Standing for Socially Conscious Upwardly Mobile Persons, scuppies are the most influential consumer group of our time. Just like hippies, they care about society and the environment - but, just like yuppies, they care about their quality of life and bank balance, too."

Meanwhile, in the same paper, it is reported that tests by Auto Express have (once again) exposed the environmental claims made by manufacturers of hybrid cars as bunk. Will this damage the status of the Prius and the Lexus RX400h as scuppie statements?

Three Brian Eno time-lapse mash-ups

Watch the seasons ebb and flow in these fantastic amateur time lapse videos created to accompany the Brian Eno tracks 'Just Another Day', 'How Many Worlds' and 'This' which use images taken in Komoko National Park, Ontario.

Samsung's Illusion of a Soul

In this wacky little 2 minute film, Samsung attempt to show off the pseudo-holographic properties of their new 'Soul' mobile 'phone.

In simple terms it appears that the phone has an OLED display which changes to show different symbols for each mode (camera, phone, music player etc.).

The film consists of a zany (yes, sadly that is the best word for it) demo of 8 (count them) optical illusions.

This is perhaps the right time to mention that I've always been amazed that one part of Samsung can embrace these so-called 'viral' films (e.g. this and this and this and this and this and this) whilst simultaneously strangling the life out of all of their TV ads with endless approval processes and LINK tests. Do I sound bitter? I think I might be. The Viral Factory looked like they were having a lot more fun than we were.

Lower budgets for production and media = lower risks = fewer people to get between the idea and the consumer.

Saving does not feel this good - even in a recession

Sure saving feels good. But it doesn't feel like this. At all. Not a bit of it. It's a totally different type of feeling good. Sorry. You feel smug. Self-satisfied. Safe. Comfortable. Prepared. Not giggly. Not puddle-dancingly joyous. OK? Winning money feels like this. Not saving your hard-earned.

Waitrose uses a feel-good brand ad in response to rising food prices

As UK food prices continue to soar discount supermarkets Lidl and Aldi are reportedly beginning to snare customers from that archetypal supermarket of the British middle classes, Waitrose.

Mintel is reporting that 57% of British consumers have trimmed their spending due to uncertainty over the future and declining disposable income and some are changing their supermarket preferences accordingly.

In response Waitrose have chosen to avoid being drawn into a conversation about price and instead have decided to try to broaden the appeal of the brand with the launch of this lovely feel-good summer epic ...

A documentary about the making of the rug used in the ad will be on Channel 4 soon.

Our changing relationship with media - some recent commentary

A quick roundup of some interesting recent articles from around the web on the subject of the changing nature of our relationship with media.

1) First out, a nice infographic from The Guardian (pictured below but do go here for the interactive version ) showing the surge in Google's ad revenue relative to traditional media:

2) Chris "Long Tail" Anderson explaining why he believes that news aggregators have a limited future:

Every day I get most of my news from blogs. I don't visit "news sites" or use a "news aggregator". I use a generic feedreader (Bloglines) and a totally idiosyncratic RSS subscription list that includes everything from personal posts from friends to parts (but not all) of the WSJ. When it comes to the web, I have no interest in someone else trying to guess what I want to read or "help" me by defining what's news and what isn't. My news is not your news; indeed, you probably wouldn't call most of it news at all.

3)Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everyone, explains how people find the time to engage with participatory media:

[I told a TV producer about Wikipedia and] she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

4) Rachel Donadio explores the rise of the author and decline of the reader in the New York Times:

53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year [but] in 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day  7 percent of U.S adults did some form of creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

5) Last week The Sunday Times reported on a study which estimated that some of us now cram 31 hours of life into 24 thanks to multitasking and our increased connectivity and access to useful gadgets:

Patrick Moriarty, one of the authors of the report said: "On the one hand it’s good – you get more done. On the other hand, when I left university seven years ago, life was much simpler. There was more talking face-to-face and more time spent over dinner. I suspect smarter phones may add another couple of hours but we are probably at the limit of multitasking for this generation."

6) According to AP, Bertelsmann is to start printing an almanac of Wikipedia.  Hmmm. And Bertelsmann likes to think that they really get the web.

7) A great round up by Aqute of the (lack of) innovation being shown on the web by UK publishing houses.

8) Brand Republic reports that a survey of 1000 people by online survey provider Ciao Surveys has revealed that 65% of people in Britain think that social networking sites should be banned at work, even though 56% admitted to being a member of at least one. Furthermore, a quarter of respondents believed that social networking sites are a 'passing fad