A nice example of what true viral content is about. (See earlier article on brands attempting to do viral). A genuine, home made video that has attracted over 3m views, and has reached the point that the parents have closed off commenting and have asked people to stop emailing offers of work!
Remember "don't talk back to Darth Vadar, he'll getcha". You have been warned by a 3 year old.
I just read a book called Blood River, a true tale of a recent trip by a Telegraph journalist across the Congo. A rare trip these days, particularly for a white man and particularly on foot.
What he highlights with his journey is a sickening situation in a country that had, and continues to have, massive potential.
I felt compelled to write to the author the following note:
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Tim,
What a spectacularly brave, possibly dangerously stupid (!) and fascinating project you undertook. The first journey of hopefully many more if any sort of order is to be restored in the Congo, although I am sure we won't be reading about you personally making it again for a while.
I am British but married to a South African. On a recent trip to see my wife's family, someone made an interesting comment. He said that although I had been to SA many times, Botswana once or twice and a resort in Kenya, that I had never really seen 'Africa'.
I have thought about this a lot since I heard it, and reading Blood River cemented my agreement of the statement.
It is true that SA faces its own set of challenges but none as extreme as countries such as Congo and many others in Africa.
As you are fully aware, true understanding of what 'Africa' means is lacking in the west - just calling it 'Africa' highlights this problem. Referring to an entire continent to describe localised issues is a dangerous generalisation that I see far too often in our press.
Books like Blood River are needed in order to open our eyes to the true situation and help us to develop a better understanding of the solutions required.
Sadly you are right that money is not the answer to 'Africa's' problems, but it is one of the only tools the west understands. This mis-match will continue to feed the pain of countries struggling within the African continent. Recent campaigns have focused on relieving the debt burden that weighs on the shoulders of these nations, but that will only allow more money to flow into the private off-shore bank accounts of the few.
Efforts such as the International Criminal Court should be made more public and supported globally, then perhaps a society where an election means something and individuals are judged for their crimes can develop, which opens the door to progress and repair.
'Africa' is in a mess.
For me, I will no doubt continue to visit South Africa but the real Africa will remain as distant as it always has. And I would question if the real 'Africa' is a place I would want to see now anyway.
A sad thought.
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Response from the author...
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Dax
Thanks for wading down my ruddy river and for putting finger to keyboard.
I own a home in Johannesburg and agree with you totally about the
disconnect between South Africa and the rest of the continent. There was a time when you could take a train from Joburg, through Bulawayo and all the way to the Congolese city of Elisabethville (today’s Lubumbashi).
What a journey that would have made? And what a pity that today it is impossible. I was recently parking my car in Cape Town (Hout Bay to be precise) and the car guard who spoke to me did so with a French accent.
It turned out he had come all the way from Lubumbashi to make his home in a slum on the Cape Flats – and his journey involved illegally jumping four borders.
I hope you continue to enjoy your trips to SA. It is a special place.
But it is the exception, not the rule and, for me, the Congo is really the quintessence of Africa – with all its great potential…and its constitutional disappointment.
If your travels bring you to Jerusalem do look me up on [..].
Best wishes
Tim Butcher
Middle East Correspondent
The Daily Telegraph
Sky News reported on a story today with the headline that the net could be safe for children in 2 years.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,91221-1306904,00.html
The general idea is that although there are many types and brands of 'child protection' software available the parents feel overwhelmed by the choice and perceived technical overhead. And of course some parents don't install such tools at all.
The idea from the Children's Charities Coalition for Internet Safety is to have PC manufacturers pre-install such tools on all computers prior to shipping.
As a parent, a regular net user and someone within the online industry I am pleased to see the initiative, but sadly see it failing completely.
Pre-installing the software will not solve the basic problem that the web is absolutely stuffed full of content that us parents would rather our children weren't exposed to. I would also question who in the family is the most likely power-user - the children or the parent?
I am glad to see someone is thinking about this, but the solution won't be effective until you have a joint initiative between the ISPs, software companies and OS manufacturers, and an advancement in content monitoring tools that include sentiment analysis and contextual image scanning.
And of course parent's teaching their children about the real world and how to behave responsibly within it.
:~Dax~:
Yesterday I took the team on a little road trip as a well-deserved thank you for all the hard work.
(If you are a media planner and looking for a job in new media in either the UK or US then you should come check out the iCrossing site for more information).
We went to the Science Museum in London to go and witness The Listening Post exhibition.
"Devised by sound artist Ben Rubin and statistician and artist Mark Hansen, this electronic, audio-visual installation, purchased with the aid of The Art Fund, takes fragments of live text from thousands of internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums, displaying the words across a suspended lattice of small screens while simultaneously reading – or singing – them out using a voice synthesizer. The result is a kind of symphony of online chatter."
I wasn't quite sure what to expect. When we first arrived it was a dark and quiet room and I thought it was switched off. But motion detectors noted our presence and 1 small screen in the bottom corner of the room lit up and started to share fragments of someone's online conversation.
A computerised voice began to read some of this text out and you have an odd voyeuristic feeling, as though you are watching something you shouldn't have access to.
Another screen flickered to life, and another, until there was a mass of discussion flowing before your eyes. You could quite easily go mad watching this, and I didn't want to leave - that feeling of maybe missing something interesting that would happen just after you are gone!
At one point the system latched onto the phrase 'i like...' and captured fragments of text that included it. An amazing array, anything from 'i like you' to 'i like the theory but the delivery would be difficult to manage'.
It's a great way to get a sense for both the quantity of online discussion and chatter, but also how utterly boring and useless most of it is! Highly recommended.
:~Dax~:
The building I work in has modernised its elevators.
(yawn)
- I hear you, but bear with me!
To me personally, modernisation is about making solving a need by making something better. But what problem needed solving with the humble elevator?
It just works. My 1 year old has even worked this out and points at the call button whenever we stop in front of one.
But under the disguise of 'modernisation' they have broken this universal code.
It is not that the new system is hard to understand, but the point is that it is different, unfamiliar if you will. When someone is in need of an elevator they are not thinking about elevator functionality, they are thinking about their meeting, the working day, their job interview, where they parked their car, what's for supper etc.
One of the key lessons I learned whilst consulting on usability was that familiaraty is usable, and the second would be that if it isn't broken then don't fix it.
I was disgusted to see that they have now started handing out instruction leaflets to all new visitors to the building. In many ways this makes the situation worse - they have acknowledged that the system is confusing for people but instead of changing it back they are giving patronising little cards!
These new elevators are not an example of modernisation in action, they are an example of technology for technology's sake and that someone was an excellent salesman and Land Securities at Portland House bought it all.
---
There is one advantage that I haven't mentioned. It has become the universal ice-breaker for people arriving for meetings in the building. Up and down the 27 floors the first topic of discussion has moved on from the unusual weather we are having to the experience they had riding the elevators.
:~Dax~:
So we have a winner for the new super high definition discs that we will all be buying our movies on for the next decade, and it's Sony's Blu-Ray. Toshiba have thrown in the towel and will stop producing the HD-DVD format.
Despite having both feet firmly in the early adopter camp, TVs and DVD formats etc did not excite me and so thankfully I am committed to neither. I am told that HD-DVD was in fact the higher quality format, but that is never a guarantee of winning in this consumer-demand led market.
Remember the good old war of VHS versus Betamax? Same thing happened, the lesser quality format won out and became visible in households up and down the country.
Why? Well VHS allowed itself to be licenced for distributing adult movies, Betamax didn't. Quite simply porn drives technical development in many areas and people wanted the convenience of adult movies in their own living room! I read a few years back that BT attributed the demand for pornography as one of the leading reasons why people started to shift to broadband in the home. It has also given us many developments online, including payment gateways, security, viruses, micro-payments and the list goes on.
In the Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD battle it wasn't porn that ultimately won over the consumer and forced Toshiba to concede, but it was content of sorts. What Sony acheived over Toshiba was to signup more and larger movie studios than Toshiba. Simple.
The consumer is King.
The other difference was that Blu-Ray has greater capacity, a very solid 25Gb over HD-DVDs not unimpressive 15Gb. On the flipside, HD-DVD made it market first as the presses for producing standard DVDs could be modified easily to produce HD-DVDs, but the manufacturing of Blu-Ray requires entirely new kit.
All this aside, the war is over, the battle is won. The only question remaining is will sales of high definition DVD players actually start to pick up now? 2007 figures show 32m DVD players were sold in the US and only 4% of those were high definition.
:~Dax~:
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