When you have this sort of team on your side.
Only about 20 months late on this.
(And yes – I wish I could shut off that frickin’ tweeting from the Cooking Mama post below. I’ll replace the widget with a link v.soon.
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What I imagine many readers are looking for from an English social media and technology blogger is an overdue Thanksgiving treat. So here you are:
This is a cheeky bit of social media from US animal rights organisation PETA (full size and downloadable versions here). It’s a sort-of protest that plays on and satirises the Cooking Mama games from Majesco Entertainment. You might come across the latest instalment on the Wii over the Christmas period. As you’ll see if you play the game, you prepare a thanksgiving dinner with an emphasis on the unpleasantness of it all — it emphasises the visceral elements of cooking meat and was thus intended to draw attention to the sad plight of turkeys and prompt people to give up meat. Sadly (for the animals, I guess, and also PETA’s marketing gurus) reaction to the game doesn’t suggest that it’s created a lot of hard-core vegetarians with this release: (from the digg comment thread)
(from the thread on Kotaku)
(from the thread on Rampant Coyote)
The web makes ideological interventions tricky for organisations because you can’t be sure who the audience is going to be. If you follow current trends and make your game bloggable and portable through a widget, you increase the reach of what you’ve done, but also increase the chances of a very different reaction to the one you had planned. While Cooking Mama is a kids game, the parody was launched in the adult market, and its widget-ness helps it spread in that demographic. Adult gamers are generally used to pretty good gore, while this offers nothing more gory than Wolfenstein 3D. It would be equally tricky if they produced something photorealistic and considerably more graphic, in which case they’d be accused of attempting to shock, terrify and traumatise children. Food for thought, one way or another.
I have five free tickets for the NMK Behavioural Targeting event, next Tuesday evening. We’ll be looking at the likes of Phorm, Specific Media and so forth and the opportunities they hold for advertisers and publishers, and also the threat to privacy that they may or may not represent. Leave a comment to get one of the free tickets. First come; first served. When: November 25th, 2008 18:00 to 21:00 Location: Bath House, 96 Dean Street, Soho, London W1D 3TA Chair: Guy Phillipson, CEO, IAB. Panel: Nick Barnett, UK Commercial Director, Phorm; Baroness Sue Miller, Liberal Democrat Member, House of Lords; Rupert Staines, VP Europe, Specific Media; Ian Brown, Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute.
1. Send it to everyone you know. 2. Make a Google Maps mash-up out of the data. Much of socialmedialand was rubbing its hands with glee this morning at the news that the British National Party’s membership list had been leaked on the Internet and was freely available for anyone to download. A lot of people were fairly unsympathetic, to say the least. One respected journalist said:
The BNP is a Nationalist party which supports the repatriation of immigrants to the UK, especially ones that don’t have white skin. They are typically poor, ill-educated racists, in other words. Revealing the names of members could have serious implications for their work, relationships and safety. There are apparently a number of police officers on the list, for example, and there are already calls for their dismissal. [I am not saying that is a bad thing]. Before long, one ingenious soul had created a Google Maps mash-up to show the locations of everyone on the list. (It’s now been taken down, since the author realised that though he’d made the locations imprecise, people were reading the map as pinpointing exact locations.) I’ve got no truck with the BNP or any of its policies, but this is quite clearly a terrible idea. Why? Imagine if the boot was on the other foot. Imagine if one of the dozens of CD-ROMs routinely lost by the government was found and posted onto the Internet. Maybe including, say, your wage or any criminal convictions. You would be outraged and very worried (especially if you did have a conviction). One definition of ethical behaviour, a very good one I think, is that when you legislate, you should do so as if you were legislating for everybody. If you say it’s OK to publish the names and addresses of people you disagree with or hate onto the Internet, you should recognise that you’re saying that that it would be OK for someone else to do the same thing to you. If you were behaving ethically. I think most of us agree with the general principle that people have a right to privacy. We become very angry when CD-ROMs are lost or advertising networks are found to be collecting data about our browsing habits without permission. It’s a good principle. So let’s stick to it. Yes, it exists. Here’s a periodic table of the elements, with videos.
It is at http://periodicvideos.com/ and succeeds in making Chemistry really interesting. props @ Nottingham Uni (where I did my PGCE).
Gabe Rivera, the creator of Techmeme, is either a PR genius or so nice that I am flummoxed. After my last post, trashing his service, he tweeted:
And I guess that this is why I owe a not-quite retraction. Techmeme is what it is. It gathers the memes (and in this case, that simply means ‘talking points’) on technology-related blogs. Things it is not:
It’s an algorithm, partially hand-tinkered, I believe, that catches what tech bloggers are talking about. If some nonsense happens to excite that portion of the blogosphere then it will show up. That isn’t the site’s fault. It’s our fault. Techmeme, for tech bloggers, is a mirror. And if we don’t like what we see in the mirror, we shouldn’t blame that piece of silvered glass. When I said that Techmeme was a ‘useless clusterfuck’, what I really should have said was that the bulk of tech blogging, as perceived through Techmeme, is a useless clusterfuck. If I were Gabe, I would despair. But at the same time, I get it. It’s frankly easier for bloggers to get worked up and mouth-off about some not-yet-confirmed yet-possibly-possible feature on Google than it is for them to comment on the implications of SAP’s agreement with P&G, the complexities of which are immense. I can understand that. Don’t expect the original, the useful, the important or the unpopular news to appear on Techmeme. Expect the ‘talking points’. A bit like when you walk into the office wanting to discuss the great documentary that was on last night, but all anyone wants to talk about is the X-Factor. |             | |||
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