Bzzzzz

So everyone’s buzzing (sometimes quite angrily) about google’s new attempt to make gmail a bit more social. I noticed that in the list of sites I could connect kimondo.co.uk didn’t appear, yet a few older websites I worked on did show up in the list.

A quick google later and I found this workaround based on editing the page headers:

You can manually associate your site with your account by adding this piece of code to your html code’s header part. Just replace profilename with your Google profile name. Usually takes a few days for Google to pick-up the information.

<link rel=”me” type=”text/html” href=”http://www.google.com/profiles/profilename”/>

However there’s an even quicker way which works almost instantly – just go to the superbly retro-titled google’s webmaster tools and add your site or blog to the list. You can do this with a html file upload or by adding a meta tag to the top of the page to verify the site. Once verified it appears on the list of sites you can add in to buzz.

I’ve also discovered I can create a google profile and sell my soul completely to the company that ‘does no evil’.

57ZQX56N5ZX3

Not sure if it’s working out cities using IP addresses, geotagging or the user’s self declared location (in which instance we’d all be tweeting from Tehran).

Now including Brixton

In the past they’ve come up with creative projects to rank how happy the planet is, get us to talk about our economic feelings in a Fight Club style (without the fist-fighting) and scare the shit out of us with a big doomsday countdown clock.

Their latest project is to have a dig at the idea that perpetual growth is a good thing for the planet by using the illustration of a gigantic godzilla sized hamster:

There’s an accompanying report to go with the video ‘growth isn’t possible’ which can be downloaded as a pdf (sensibly they charge for it in dead tree format).

1. Go running. Been meaning to do this one for a while. My Nike+ avatar is looking decidedly bored.
2. Lose some weight. See point 1. No I’m not going on a diet.
3. Write interesting blog posts more often. I’ll freely admit that I need to hone my blogging skills.
4. Do more art. I’ve haven’t updated flickr in ages. And I have a lovely 40mm pancake lens to take pictures with.
5. Finish more books. And blog about them. See post 3.

I think i’ll stick with four five for the time being – and will get my robot butler to revisit these (after parking my flying car) in 2011.

http://charity.further.co.uk/

By tweeting:

Tweeting this message gets 10p donated to The Children’s Society charity http://bit.ly/4PcaKP #furthercharity

your profile picture then appears on the page and the Christmas tree totalizer counts up the donations. There’s the option to top up your donation as well – although I’d be interested to find out how many tweeps actually do this. It’s always good to see twitter being used for things other than talking about Tiger Woods.

Give a tweet this Christmas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWCvB7_hl6s

Last year a campaigner based in Bangladesh contacted me on facebook in regard to a proposed open cast mine in Phulbari, Bangladesh. A UK based company GCM were attempting to get permission to build a mine that would displace 30,000 people and destroy the water supply of a further million.

I was able to very rapidly put together a video, based on footage of GCM’s offices, stock footage of an open cast coal mine and a video that had been made by the campaigners in Bangladesh. The original Bangladesh video titled ‘the blood soaked banner of Phulbari’ and was too long for the standard youtube format of less than 10 minutes, so by re-cutting highlights from this film with WDM’s material made the video more suitable for our audience.

We ran a series of online actions using the video and were successful in getting Barclays Bank to sell their shares in the project, and Gareth Thomas (minister at BERR and DFID) withdraw UK government support for the project. This was the most popular online action WDM has ever carried out.

I think the video would have been improved with footage of the campaigner doing a piece to camera – by experimenting with different video formats I’ve found that an appeal made directly to the viewer makes for the most effective response rate to an appeal or campaign ask.

2) Question to Gordon Brown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXl_ydgTKrc

This is a very simple video shot on a tiny video camera with a question to Gordon Brown asking what he was doing to fight poverty at an upcoming G20 conference. At the time Downing Street were using YouTube for people to submit questions, with a vote to decide on the videos for Gordon Brown to answer. By emailing our supporters the voting link for our video we were able to ‘game’ the vote in our favour, and you can see in the responses to this video a direct video message from Gordon Brown.

Emailing our supporters with an alternate action to the normal petitions or email actions helped improve the response rate, and being able to reply to our supporters with a direct response from the Prime Minister proved a popular way of promoting WDM as an organisation having an impact on politics in the UK.

If I was to do something like this again I think the video would have sounded better comming from a supporter or local WDM group member as opposed to staff, I think also the sound would have been greatly impoved with a better camera / microphone setup.

Stephen Fry was there in a warm-up capacity presumably because of his oft-voiced love of the iPhone which he uses to disseminate musings that range from being trapped in lifts, to jogging in New York. However, perhaps rather embarrasingly for Apple, Mr Fry decided to use his spot at the iTunes festival to have a go at the practices of the big music companies in aggressively pursuing illegal downloaders and filesharers.

my business – the film business, the television business, the music business – is doing the wrong thing

He spoke out against the ludicrous advert that compares downloading to pinching a handbag or stealing a car. He even fessed up to having bit-torrented a TV show – although covered himself by stating that he had already bought it on iTunes, and for some slightly unusual bandwidth reasons was unable to download it in the normal way.

Now this was all very interesting – and wildly popular with the crowd, however it seemed a little at odds to me. At the bottom of the pdf ticket I’d printed off to turn up at the gig was stated:

*You are not permitted to make audio or audiovisual recordings of the event

So when asked for a bit of feedback I tweeted the following:

listening to @stephenfry slagging off drm at itunes – where i’d get thrown out if caught filming him !

Which got slightly paraphrased when he read it on stage. Stephen Fry’s response was that everyone there was filming and photographing and tweeting – and that his speech would probably turn up on YouTube before the evening was out.

Sadly my fifteen minutes of twitter fame (quoted by the great Mr Fry – crikey!) went unnoticed to everyone but me. It even managed to get a blog on the bbc.

Maybe one day my shameless-self-publicity engine won’t let me down!

For more twitter excitement you can follow me at @kimondo

And yes, Stephen Fry did turn up on YouTube:

Stephen Fry talking at iTunes Live

I’ve now moved my blog to wordpress rather than drupal as a bit of an experiment!

I’ve moved my two most popular posts over from the old site, but hopefully will be blogging a bit more frequently.