Mediacology

Portals (Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc.) have enabled guided Internet experiences, but Disney now takes it one step further. Its new Netpal notebook computer is entirely a computerized Disney environment. From ZDNet:

Developed with parents and kids in mind, the Disney Netpal has a reinforced mechanical design and, naturally, a Disney user interface. In addition to “more [...]

Well, leave it to Taco Bell to cannibalize flash mobs, but there you have it. The voracious appetite of marketing gobbles up another activist tactic. Why am I not shocked?

Newsflash! Flash Mobs Return! » Adrants:

To promote Taco Bell’s Fruitista Freeze, Philadelphia’s LevLane hired actors costumed in iced-over beachwear with their skin tinted blue who would [...]

Samsung is trying to get on the iPhone bandwagon with its F480 or “Tocco”(“touch” in Italian). Hey, why not just call it the “Taco”? It’s something you eat with your hands… Anyhow, as I argue in my book, one of the greatest distresses of media users is a lack of a sense of place. [...]

YouTube just announced on its blog a new citizen journalist initiative, which is described above by YouTube News & Politics manager Olivia M. I have to admit that the whole style and approach of the press release is interesting because normally it’s traditional media companies who try to hip-ify themselves through remediating (appropriating) the style [...]

Forget peep shows, “un boxing” is one of the strangest consumer fetishes on the Net.

I recently poked around for videos that represent future trends in media. What follows are over a dozen videos (many of which I featured before) representing a range of views, none of which are definitive but are meant to provoke discussion. Click the “more” link to view them.

Megatrends author John Naisbitt updates his thinking. It’s more surprising than you might imagine. Hint: Internet is not technological but social.

Technorati Tags: John Naisbitt

We Tell Stories – ‘Hard Times’ by Matt Mason & Nicholas Felton
As part of Penguin’s We Tell Stories series, this update of Dickens’ Hard Times is a pretty cool little tour of our current state of the stats by Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma. The above is from the page, “Ideas are traveling [...]

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No doubt about it. The media world is changing as we know it. And guess what? It isn’t white.
PS I recommend clicking through to Slideshare in order to view the presentation full screen.

Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.
I just spent 35 minutes watching Bruce Sterling sum up the ideas of his design manifesto, Shaping Things. Thank the Great Whatever, because Shaping Things has been sitting on my bookshelf for two years and I’ve been dying to know what it’s about. I don’t want to spoil a great [...]

If you study the history of media, you see very quickly that they always go to war against each other. Accompanying each new media technology’s adaption curve is a decline for another. So as magazines, newspapers, radio, TV and now the Internet vie for attention, each borrows and steals from each other until, as is [...]

Sticker image from Cafe Press

Firefox is moving beyond “open source” to declared itself “organic software.” Makes sense to me. I’ve always used the analogy that DIY media is like organic gardening when compared to industrial mass media, which is akin to industrial farming. Maybe the main thing that makes open source “organic” is the self-organizing [...]

Graphic via textually.org
I’ve noticed an increasing pop culture awareness that we are addicted to our networked technology gadgets– a no, duh kinda revelation– but I was quite surprised (well, not really, it was inevitable) to see it pathologized with a new term, “Disconnection Anxiety.” I think the term sums up our entire planetary situation, actually, [...]

Photo of dead cellphones by Chris Jordan
(BTW, you must see Chris Jordan’s site for his incredible series of information photo graphics)
In interesting article about the psychology of the cellphone market. Personally, all I want it to do is make phone calls and send text messages, so I settle for the cheapest, dullest clamshell on the [...]

Slaves to our attention span.
Via

As reported previously, Apple seems to have an eating disorder. Others have picked up on Apple’s movement towards “thinnovation.” Is it in dialog with greater social trends, in particular the shrinking waistlines of celebrities and fashion models? Maybe it’s a stretch to equate the MacBookAir with anorexia, but I would certainly link it to [...]

So I believe we can say it’s official: the “Yes, We Can!” Will.i.am-produced celebrity Obama love fest is viral, and since the video link landed in my inbox five different times in one day I figure it requires a response.
With so many good vibes and celebrity endorsements in one impressive eyeful should we let [...]

YouTube – Broadcast Yourself.:
It’s about time to demand some R-E-S-P-E-C-T from your cleaning products so tell that broom “She’s Gone.” We know that you love to belt out those break up songs, especially while you’re cleaning. Put those talents on camera! Choose a song, grab your Swiffer and start filming now! Sing along, dance and [...]

The real reason the Powerbook is shedding pounds. (via WillVideoforFood)

Technorati Tags: Apple, macbook air

Hear Voices? It May Be an Ad – Advertising Age – News:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman’s voice right in her ear asking, “Who’s there? Who’s there?” She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then [...]