Business turns facebook pink!

There is a new application on facebook that allows you to turn you display picture pink. This is quite innovative as in actual face it is an advertisement for a Canadian mobile network called 'Telus' which has the slogan 'the future is friendly'.

Every time someone turns their profile pink, they will donate $1 to the purchase of innovative breast cancer in your local community. However, as this company is based in Canada, the money will be going there and not New Zealand. It is still a good cause though and an interesting ad campaign that has got at least 51,870 people's attention already.

They also are "committed to being an environmental leader and strive to continuously improve our approach." This is a good thing. From just browsing their website you can see they are trying to be more environmentally friendly and encouraging others to do so. Incentives for customers to save trees and paper include turning off their mailed paper bill. This enters customers of Telus in the draw to win $1000 if they do so before the 26th of September 2010.
It is nice to see a company that is actually doing its utmost to reduce, reuse and recycle.

Would you pay for the content you consume on the internet?

Paying for what you see, read and do on the internet, good or bad idea? The current model of basically free access to any content on the internet has definitely impacted on companies such as News Corp, where newspaper earnings have declined at astronomical rates, as a business practice it seems that pay per view for the internet is not only necessary but imminent. Whether it works remains to be seen, personally i believe these corporations have an uphill battle ahead of them as getting users to pay for content that was once free will be pretty difficult and it is shown with the drop in visitors to the times website once they made it pay for access as reported in this article: “Murdoch’s Times Web Visits Drop to One Third as Paywall Starts”.

Another issue that would need to be overcome is the sheer volume of content that is available on the internet. So what would you pay for? Is it worth paying for what is available on the internet right now? Most i have talked to (and by that i mean my flatmates and friends) say they would pay for Facebook but not twitter or bebo. They wouldn't pay for content such as YouTube, newspaper articles, but if they had to they would pay if the content was better quality, and could only be found on the internet to start with.

Another issue that would need to be addressed is the sheer volume of content that is available on the internet, somewhere along the way users are going to find what they need for free, with every website that is locked down by pay only access hundreds more will most likely pop up with free access. It seems that until a suitable business model is found that benefits not only the corporations who want to make money but also takes into account internet users, paying for content on the internet is going to be a difficult issue to solve!

The Twittersphere!

The blog seems to revolve around the heavier, negative ideas surrounding new media forms, so I thought I’d spend a blog to talk about Twitter! Personally, I think it’s great. The microblogging service allows users to 140 character long ‘updates’ which show up on the timelines of that user’s followers.

In terms of privacy, there’s only so much information you can share about yourself on you Twitter profile, so unless you post something really ridiculous like “Going to the forest tonight at 1am, by myself”, you’re pretty safe.

Twitter allows for average everyday people (that’s us, guys) to follow celebrities and high profile characters. It has kind of bridged the gap between the somebodies and the nobodies, allowing anyone to communicate with anyone.

Even news networks and journalists have joined in on the fun. 3 News (@3NewsNZ) has their own Twitter feed, through which latest headlines can be posted. This service provides followers with the ability to access news as it happens.

What I especially like about Twitter is that no matter how many people I follow, I can never run through my timeline or Tweet myself for more than ten minutes, if that. There is very little room for addiction. Sure, there are some extreme cases and some people will Tweet their live instead of actually talking. But in reality, Twitter is just a forum for short updates and links to external sources.

The only real debate against Twitter would be that people who have it for personal use are more or less wasting their time throwing these updates into cyberspace,or the Twittersphere, where no one else will really care about them.


I say, don’t hate. Twitter is a wonderful example of a new media form which allows for the expression and performance of self identity (in a 140 character limit medium) (and I blatantly just incorporated one of the essay questions into my blog).

Apparently video games can save the world...

I was listening to an episode of the Guardian's Tech Weekly podcast last night and the final item was an interview with a games designer, Jane McGonigal, who seems to believe genuinely that the key to "saving the planet" lies with video games. I'm personally very averse to her whole perspective: it creeps me out, actually. But she is getting a lot of exposure, including a slot earlier this year on the TED Talk circuit. Whether you watch the video or listen to the last part of the podcast, I'd be really interested to hear your views on all this... especially if you can give me some reasons to tone down my cynicism and distaste for the views expressed by McGonigal!

In new media we trust?

So, its starting to look like news as we know it will soon be a thing of the past. It's evolving, adapting to new technology and giving you hundreds more ways to interact with what used to just be a few newspaper pages dumped on your driveway in the morning. Cool, ay?

Well, it would be, except for tiny things like censorship, discrimination and just a few minor laws that protect your rights and keep news outlets in check. Seems like we have begun to use outlets such as Twitter, Facebook and phone apps to keep up to date with news, but the laws which make traditional news outlets the reasonably trusted sources they are today haven't quite been able to keep up.

Just this week, Twitter experienced a 'security exploit', Facebook saw fit to cripple several high profile protest pages and T-Mobile were sued for blocking a mobile service allowing users to locate the nearest medical marijuana dispensary because they 'did not approve.'

The fact is, if these media outlets are going to act as our new trusted news sources, they should be subject to the same rights, responsibilities and laws that traditional news outlets have to deal with. Admittedly, some old school news agencies have flirted with the boundaries of the law before, but at the end of the day, the laws are there, the enforcement bodies are there, and you can't plant a virus in National Geographic.

When it comes to censorship and new media, Apple take the cake and as Steve Jobs is now the 'New King of Technology' its clear that if we don't get some new media laws up and running soon, notions of media as a watchdog, or the trusted fourth estate may pass us by.

News: it's pretty far-fetched.

Nohing beats ending a day's television watching with Nightline. The presenters are babes, the stories are quirky and the show prepares you for a fully informed sleep.

What could be better, but waking up from that fully informed sleep to empty your mind of all that information which is useless in the morning, and starting the process of filling it up with news all over again?

Not only are there more sources for news than ever before, the term 'news' itself is broader, and less easy to define than it once was.

Do you still think of a newspaper or broadcast when you think about news? Or do you picture your Twitter feed with Diplo's call for comiserations because nobody will look him in the eye with his new Zef haircut?

'News' refers to information exchanges that inform and update others about recent happenings. This definition, then, includes basically anything anyone ever says on the Internet. It's the job of the user to then filter out what 'news' is important to the individual (hello, SouljaBoy/Fabolous coke-fuelled rage, and Kanye discovering the joy of drunken Tweeting) and what is just tedious (Diddy, I'm looking at you) space-filler.

Where did this out of control desire to make news come from? Why did the News Makers not simply translate online and dominate the space as well as newsprint? It all looked so organised back in '81. Now everyone wants everybody to know everything about themselves, and likewise, we seem to want to know a fair amount about each other too.

News is realtime and includes the photos and cartoons 1981's two-hour-ten-dollar version didn't, but I believe that Presenter when she says it's all a bit far-fetched; a bit ridiculous reading it all from a screen. But that might be because she's a total babe, so I'm biased.

iDose; a digital drug

I recently found an article on the New Zealand Herald website which to me symbolised how technology has been taken to new levels and how we are living in a cyborg society. The article was called 'iDose: Teens using Youtube to get high.' The article discusses how teenagers are now using Youtube and other music sites to get an ecstasy like high. This emphasises how technology is everywhere in our lives and could be causing problems for young people.

This particular technology could lead to drug like addictions, and the fact that you have to pay for these trips, it could have the potential to be as harmful as real drugs such as ecstasy and alcohol. I thought that this related to what we discussed in lecture three on cyborgs, where we talked about how technologies are getting closer to our bodies such as earphones are getting smaller. Using technology is the perfect example of this.

iDose users can be linked into what we discussed about Mundane Cyborgs, where people are not meaning to make technology apart of their bodies and their everyday life but all of their everyday rituals are making it hard not to. Including a digital drug into everyday life would be very easy to do without knowing it.