Wii Pee

This week’s sweeping generality – what is it with the Japanese and their fascination with urinating? Is this where we are going, people? Do we rely on Japan to take a great idea like the Wii and dumb it down to appeal to every fraternity house in American? How about the Wii Money Shot game?

Are the Japanese ahead of the curve or just peeing on it?

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/superpiipii.html

The New Mix Tape

A great way to share music - http://muxtape.com/

Upload, listen, save to favorites, listen some more, then wait until Metallica's drummer Lars Ulrich wants to shut it down for copyrite infringement.

Public Print Lab

Here is a very cool project going on in Baltimore - www.publicprintlab.com

The Public Print Lab is a user-generated interactive art installation, created in collaboration with Beatbots.com's Justin Blemly. A small laser printer installed in Baltimore's Creative Alliance is connected to a public email address, allowing users to email or txt images directly to the printer. After the close of the exhibition, the collected prints will be bound into a book documenting the project.

JPG, GIF, or PNG images emailed or TXTed to print@publicprintlab.com between March 15 and April 26, 2008 will automatically print out in black and white inside the Minstallation Gallery. Digital copies of the images are instantly added to the online gallery at www.publicprintlab.com.

Radiohead Gets "It"

I got an e-mail today from RADIOHEAD asking if I wanted to remix one of their songs. I thought that was nice of them to offer. Now, I’m not a DJ by any stretch of the imagination and I wish I had the talent to mix songs but I love love love remixes. It pleases me greatly when people get the chance to reinterpret someone else’s vision/art and the original artist is open to their interpretations.

Dig this - RADIOHEAD is not only open to the “idea” of remixes but they are actually encouraging the general public to remix one of their songs. Mixers can go to iTunes and purchase the bits, or “stems”, of the song (drums, bass, vocal tracks, etc). You are then given access to remixing software” GarageBand”, if you need a remixing platform, thus allowing the mixer/DJ the opportunity to easily mix their own interpretation of the track. They are then encouraged to post that remix to the RADIOHEAD site - http://www.radioheadremix.com/ for voting - RADIOHEAD also provides a voting widget so that the DJs can upload their track to their own MySpace or FaceBook pages and generate votes from there, which , in turn, are tracked by the RADIOHEAD site. The main site then publishes the Top 10 voted songs, which is a self-governing site that allows users to “report” songs that may be offensive. There are pages and pages of remixes already, some of them good, some of them bad. But the idea is that people from all over the world are connected by just one song. What I do like about this site is that RADIOHEAD did not provide a space for comments – I imagine that they just wanted to let people’s tracks speak for themselves and they didn’t provide a forum for “hating”.

Are you following this… (he says excitingly!) a band allows access to one of their hit song’s basic tracks from a 3rd party – iTunes. They then tell you to go and remix it, oh and here is some software if you don’t have any for remixing the track. And give the song back to them if you want to, or not, it’s up to you. And OK, here is some “technology” you can use to host the song in your space and we, RADIHEAD can track the voting for YOU.

So far my favorite is from DJ HOLYFUCK, it’s a great track and I can now find more of his music at http://www.holyfuckmusic.com/. (I think he needs to work on his branding a bit – that’s a hard one for search engines). Basically, the Top 10 songs are great. Some purists may find this disturbing. ‘Who is Joe Schmoe to think he can remix a RADIOHEAD track???!” Well, I say, take a listen and you decide.

Ashly Dupre – Nobody to Somebody

In three short days, Ashley Dupre, whom had alleged financed sexual encounters with New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, went from being an unknown 22-year-old “aspiring musician” to the fifth most-searched subject on Google. Her music has had over 1.5 million plays. She basically went from being a “nobody” in terms of popularity on the web from being a “somebody” in a matter days, probably hours.

All of this does not surprise me. We live in a culture where having a sex tape helps your career. Where committing an illegal act can gain you pop-cult status. And you can be “famous” for doing absolutely nothing (Google “Don’t Taze Me Bro”)

There are two things that made me scratch my head and go “hmmmm” about this story.

First is that CNN, the station that brought you the first Gulf war (it has been said that The Defense Department was actually getting updates via CNN) broke this story using Ms. Dupre’s MySpace page content as a source. The first CNN profile is almost entirely made up of MySpace quotes - "I just don't want to be thought of as a monster," Dupre told the newspaper. She revealed little else in the interview, but her MySpace page offered some insight into her background.” – and they ran with it from there. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/13/ashley.myspace/index.html.

Social Media pages like MySpace, Face Book, LinkedIn, provides you an insight to people from all walks of life. What they do, what/who they like, what/who they hate, how they feel, etc. These meeting places are also becoming content providers to traditional media outlets. YouTube video subjects are on Letterman. MySpacers are getting their own shows (see VH1 programming), and now social media content is being mined for news stories by reputable news providers. Think about it – if a story breaks about a “nobody” affecting a “somebody” and you had to write a story about the “nobody”, wouldn’t you Google them first? Facebook and MySpace have become one of the go-to background tools for journalists in the past couple of years, allowing the esteemed members of the press to put a face (sometimes a lot more) to the subject of their story and find out more about them i.e. all of that content on all of those pages is up for grabs, brotha!

The second thing that struck me was how this whole thing with Ms. Dupre played out in her established social media spaces. Her pictures from her MYSpace pages and FaceBook were thrown all over the internet (yes, I used one!). CNN stated that, “time stamps and activity on what appears to be her Facebook profile shows she was staying up all night (Wednesday) cleaning up her profile and responding to critics on the Internet.” She was doing damage control. She doesn’t have “people”. By Thursday morning, she had over 1,100 friend requests on her FaceBook page. She then took everything down but it’s all back up, scrubbed and ready for your review Friday morning. See, publicity is publicity. Good or bad. And these social media pages can be used for good AND evil. Generally, folks don’t consider that they will be under the microscope like Ms Dupre. I don’t think she ever imagined that she would be part of a scandal that rocked New York’s government. She just wanted people to look at her pictures and listen to her songs. One must recognize that these public spaces are just that – public. Employers are Googling you if you are an interviewee for a new position. The press is looking for content if you suddenly become “somebody”. And VH1 needs a new show.

So, the next time you want to put up some crazy photos or post your deepest thoughts and feelings to your MySpace or FaceBook page, remember, we’re all watching and one day those photos and those thoughts might be on CNN.