I’m copying an article I wrote for Beautiful Crime here because, well I can and because it’s about digital communication. Please Digg it if you feel so inclined as for once it’s a serious and academic piece rather than some pop tech ramblings and mixed metaphors, which I know you all enjoy:

Never have street art and political activism combined to elect a US President.

That they have now with Barack Obama says a lot about the art, the man and how we communicate.

Shepard Fairey, marries respect with commerce as America’s most recognisable street artist. His Obama series of posters, ‘Progress’ and ‘Hope’ were pasted across America’s cities in the run up to Super Tuesday on February 5th. This wasn’t some sub Warhol camp extravagance, this was forthright, counter culture political activism.

But rather than wry commentary Read the rest of this entry »

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AdAge, which is 34, geddit? I’m called Adam… er Adam’s Age, er… AdAge, nope? Well screw you, now for the gloom via AdAge, re-printed in full because it disappears behind a subscription wall soon, which given the article below, means they’ll be ok come Webogeddon:

‘NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Start-ups of the second web boom — so-called Web 2.0 companies — have revolutionized the way we communicate (Twitter), consume media (YouTube) and relate to one another (Facebook). But most have one thing in common: They are built on the notion that if they can build scale, a near-bottomless well of advertising awaits, allowing them to offer tools, software, bandwidth and media to consumers for free.

In the past five years, trends have justified that optimism and helped fuel massive venture-capital Read the rest of this entry »

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Congratulations to Simon and all the team at Dodaq on launch of their demo. They made Techcrunch this morning and the demo we created made top of xplsv.tv… now to raid the wife’s cupboard for diamonds to trade, trade, trade!

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When you know you’re going to be read by more people than have read you before, you feel compelled to be funnier.

You also start referring to yourself in the third person, thus casting yourself as a fictional character in your own semi-demi-fat-fiction or as my history teacher Mr Rumblelow once said, ‘Adam, you’re in danger of becoming a caricature of your own self’.

How he would chortle if he knew the new Fat Man site had made FWA Site of The Day and that I featured prominently on said site as a mad man wrenching out his own teeth with pliers.

I had a caricature done once, at the Epcot Centre - Disney World, when I was 13, by a computer. It was very ‘technically advanced’. Read the rest of this entry »

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Last night my 3 year old daughter informed me that she was ‘dropping Tina off at Barbara Cartland’s house.’

Tina is a cabbage patch doll with it’s face coloured blue and Barbara Cartland is a dead ‘…successful English author, known for her numerous romance novels. She also became one of the United Kingdom’s most popular media personalities, appearing often at public events and on television, dressed in her trademark pink and discoursing on love, health and social issues.’ So says Wikipedia.

If she were alive today I’m sure she’d be presenting a show on sexually transmitted disease on BBC3.

My wife and I were amused and perplexed as to how our daughter had come into contact with Barbara. Perhaps her Flemish speaking pal from Antwerp whose hair length is directly related to her constant running and getting lost in museums (according to my daughter), had told her about the dead pop romantic wordsmith? Unlikely, but then sometimes things just happen for no good reason at all.

Much like the death of my Macbook last week. Like Barbara it often appeared at public events and enjoyed discoursing on love, health and social issues. Like Barbara it is dead.

Given my trade in webology, I should have backed up. I even had the Time Machine hooked up and ready to go until a sharp ‘ping’ sound emanated from the Macbook prompting me to re-boot it and leaving me with nothing but a flashing grey folder with a question mark on it.

Nada. Nothing. Gone. Photos, invoices, pitches, proposals, ideas, business plans, the carefully disguised document with all my passwords carefully disguised within it for all my carefully disguised applications, banking and general logon-ness.

Apple Genius Bar were efficient and replaced the hard drive within 24 hours. Somehow being in their store lusting after an ‘I will break it’ Macbook Air made the news that all was lost easier to take.

Days later and now Time Machined up, the new Macbook feels like a new start, sort of digital slash and burn to promote new growth.

It may even make me a better person. I haven’t lost days sifting through my RSS reader or mourning all my lost feeds. I’ve even avoided looking at Techcrunch for 4 weeks, in part due to my wife supplying a son to accompany the daughter and in part due to my dearly departed Macbook. I’d been meaning to delete my Boing Boing feed and my Digg feed for sometime, there’s only so much total crapola you can sift through. I have vowed to treat the web and my reader with more respect.

You will see a new Adam emerge post-ping. My property porn addiction has gone the way of the financial institutions. No more private browsing. I will read only blogs and view only sites I would be proud to introduce to Dame Barbara Cartland, if she were alive and if she were my Gran or something.

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I’ve been silent for too long, but for good reason, my breeding partner gave birth to a son who we named after a fictional order of intergalactic warriors made famous by George Lucas and the founder of Springfield, the everytown in The Simpsons. Our reasoning certainly stumped the grandparents and to a lesser degree ourselves. But alcohol hand rub, sleeping in hospital chairs and hot plate fry-ups from the canteen can do strange things to the mind.

I’m back so stay tuned, I have 8048 articles to read in my RSS reader, one business plan to write, several lunches to eat and talk webotronics over and world domination to plot.

So what’s on the agenda? Read the rest of this entry »

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Why spend a billion schmillions on an invisible jet tank with nuclear gills when you could just call upon the patriotism of your countries hackers and Spam Lords (for it is they who send me missives about Angelina in a mud bath) and get them to turn on your enemy with ‘denial of service attacks’.

World of Warcraft ain’t got nothing on this (via Slate):

‘As Russian and Georgian troops fight on the ground, there’s a parallel war happening in cyberspace. In recent weeks, Georgia’s government Web sites have been besieged by denial-of-service attacks and acts of vandalism. Just like in traditional warfare, there’s a lot Read the rest of this entry »

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Natasha Vargas-Cooper writes a razor like critique of the rise and fall of the Lad’s Mag, entitled Twilight of the Rods. When the boobs don’t work, blame the internet:

‘For publishers in the halcyon days of the late 1990s—those days before the Internet was blamed for robbing media moguls of their precious ad revenues—there existed a magical recipe that could build you a glossy magazine empire almost overnight. The concoction was simply named The Formula.

The Formula’s ingredients were as follows:

3 scantily clad B-list starlets
1 two-hundred word sex advice feature
1 personal benefit/service feature
1 “gritty read”(legitimately researched, well written Read the rest of this entry »

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Yann is our French intern. Yann is very clever and very organised. Yann isn’t going anywhere! But sometimes people do strange things and I feel the need to share, only so my mental torment is dissipated slightly by the knowledge others share it.

By way of back story, David and I were reaquainting ourselves with the ex-girlfriend stalker hell that is Facebook and I chose to tell him via Facebook IM that my daughter did a big poo this morning just as the midwife arrived to examine my wife and that the house smelt. There is more detail, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

Forward, 20 minutes or so later, much real business has been discussed in this time, notably the wonders of Qik and excitement about our first iPhone App.

Yann, David and I are all conversing via the Skypetron. Simultaneously both send me a link:

www.ratemypoo.com

In my wisdom I click away, twice. My eyes pop, my stomach churns, I’m looking at someone else’s poo in a bowl, thankfully partially obscured by toilet paper.

I respond to Yann and David:

Me: I feel sick

Yann: Me too, I found this when trying to find if the verb is written ‘to poo’ or ‘to poop’.

You got to admire the grammatical dedication.

Picture from the staggering Sprinkle Brigade.

UPDATE: Whilst getting the url for Qik, whose tagline is ’see what happens’, I was confronted by a hand towel in a bathroom and then a man masturbating furiously.

This is turning into a morning that requires some mental erasing.

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