Body Language - OK or Not OK?

I saw this little heading and photo on Huffington Post, and I couldn't resist. I don't want to make any comment on the rights and wrongs of the situation - the couple Jon and Kate have enough to worry about. The question that springs to mind looking at the body language in the photo - is this what a reunited couple looks like, or just a couple willing to sit in the same room?

The Best Crutchwork you'll see

I came across this doing work - yes truly! I was checking out the web sites built with the wonderful new component for Joomla - K2 developed by Joomlaworks (K2 is free by the way, so I get no commission for saying this). K2 is now supported in new Joomla themes developed by RocketTheme (and several other theme producers). K2 adds the best of Wordpress and Drupal to Joomla. Anyway, I went to one of the example sites, Weber State University Cultural Affairs and there this clip was, playing automatically. The WSU site is a great example of elegant design, and the clip is a brilliant piece of performing art. Two wins in one! So... here's the clip for you - enjoy!




More info has come in: Bill Shannon is a self-taught conceptual dancer who uses his crutches to perform his incredible choreography around the world. He was born with a double Hip degenerative disease. Bill Shannon is for real, he isn't gliding along on wheelie shoes and he isn't a stunt man.

Performance Art with Sand - Wonderful

It's wonderfully reaffirming to see people that develop new and creative ways to express themselves. Kseniya Simonova is a Ukrainian artist who just won Ukraine's version of "America's Got Talent." She uses a giant light box, dramatic music, imagination and "sand painting" skills to interpret Germany's invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII. Without the web, this ephemeral art would disappear or be limited to a local audience. Instead it is preserved and shared. A thankyou to Huffington Post for finding the video link.

Twitter Usage Strategy and Guidelines Shared

Social media is an important tool. It also carries risks, with little forgiveness of mistakes. On the IGBAPR blog I have posted an entry to share a Twitter Guidelines Template from a UK Government entity. Every corporate entity or Government agency should have a policy that they communicate to staff. Thi example provides an excellent basis to start.

Kevin rose on Twitter Usage

Techcrunch scored a famous guest blogger - Kevin Rose on how to use Twitter. Some of these ideas are reasonable common sense. The underlying assumption though is that there is a strategic reason for your Twitter usage and online persona.

Kevin Rose: 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers

Kevin Rose: 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers
537 Comments
by Guest Author on January 25, 2009

This guest post is written by Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama), also “bloggs” at kevinrose.com. He is an investor in Twitter.

Sometimes Less is More

One of the best, simple articles on website designs. Focus on the core principles. Pin these to the wall (electronic or physical).

4 Principles of Good Design for Websites

4 Principles of Good Design for Websites
written by: Andrew Houle / stashed in: Articles / 03.21.09

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One of my absolute favorite design books is, Robin Williams Design Workshop. It looks into practical design theories and showcases awesome examples. One of the areas of focus that I’ve taken into all my designs are the four major design principles. They include: contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity.

This post will discuss those four principles as they relate to web design. By keeping these design theories fresh in your mind, you will be sure to design cleaner, more aesthetically pleasing sites.

Challenges for the ICT Industry

Here's the closing address I gave the Digital Technology Summit 2009 on the challenges and opportunities for the ICT Industry. If you are a Gov2.0 person you will find this very 'Cathedral' versus 'Bazaar', but you must bear in mind the audience I was addressing. It also started a little more abruptly than I intended because the conference was way over time, and people were worried about catching planes. There was no audio or video recording available apart from my little camera, so the sound needs volume up to catch.

DTS2009 Close, Quicktime Streaming format, (75Mb)

8 of the Best SOCMED Flash Mob moments

The tools of connectivity - the mobile phone, email and twitter enable a new phenomenon - the flash mob event. Like all forces, it can be used for good or evil. Here I've collected some of the best examples. This is part of our Keeping up with the Internet Memes series - web behaviours and the best startups - web nostalgia in the inspirational Understanding the Dance.

Sound of Music - Antwerp Central Station

More than 200 dancers perform "Do Re Mi", in the Central Station of Antwerp. Dance and music routines take rehearsal - just 2 rehearsals created this spectacular! These 4 fantastic minutes start on the 23 of march 2009, 08:00 AM. It is a promotion stunt for a Belgian television program, where they are looking for someone to play the leading role in the musical of "The Sound of Music".

High Five Escalator

My favourite of the improv everywhere projects - it creates smiles on a bleak morning. I like the way it shows how easy it is to make someone's day happier. The full story with background pictures and interviews is on the iproveverywhere site.

Unexpected Performance - Stansted Airport, London

Stansted Airport, London. 7 hidden cameras. 14 undercover actors. 1 unexpected performance. Some people love it, some just let it all wash over them unmoved. The passengers are as fun to watch as the performance.

No Pants

The Improvanywhere no pants day got a spectacular boost in 2006 when a Cop arrested participants. A month later a judge dismissed all of the charges. It is not illegal to wear your underwear in public in New York City. The publicity (reported by news agencies around the world while David Letterman made two monologue jokes about it and staged a No Pants Cab Ride as a parody) led to continued spectacular growth. Now this is no longer the "secret" event with a few participants in the know - it's become almost a parade. Fun to watch though!

No Shirts (111 Shirtless Men in Abercombie and Fitch)

In the interests of equity - if we present no pants, then we'd better present no shirts. It's fascinating to see how corporates that promote topless models cope with a situation like this. The best bit is that 2 guys were thrown out while they were actually buying $45 shirts! Isn't this performance art at it's best?

...

The Freeze Mob

NYC - Frozen Grand Central Station

The inspirational classic freeze mob. Replicated across the World it's a great concept. The video was put together professionally too - top production values. Arguably one of Improveverywhere's greatest projects.

Paris, France - The largest Freeze Mob

This video is the compilation of 20 videopodcasters, who covered the event. Around 3,000 people froze on the Champs Elysee.

Trafalgar Square Freeze

At 3:30pm on a secret cue, almost everyone in the square froze. For 5 minutes the participants held their positions, and then magically everyone unfroze. The participants in Britain take the performance art aspect of the frozen positions in innovative directions.

Free Commercial Bonus Video!

Liverpool St Station, London, UK - The T-Mobile Dance
This doesn't really count as performance art because it was organised as an Ad. But it's still fun! Watch the moment Liverpool Street Station danced to create this special T-Mobile Advert.

Pirates, Blurred Responsibility and Filters

While we are trying to use the Internet effectively, there are many groups that see it as a problem to be managed or eliminated. I've come across a group of people trying to get Facebook classified for Pornography, nudity and sexuality. What happened to personal responsibility here? Choose your friends on Facebook, and you won't get any surprises. The 'censor everything' movement didn't start with Facebook, but now the censorship model has so much steam up it can take almost anything out.

At first I was pleased when France and New Zealand had highly restrictive laws. UK - three strikes law? Fantastic - they've always had good software skills so we need to stop their development in its tracks. Less competition for us - that's good. Then Australia and now Belgium got into the act. Australia censors some religious, health and anti-abortion sites. Belgium now censors anti-paedophile sites.

This is now getting totally out of control - every Person and business dependent on the Internet needs to step up and save the Internet from serious closure. I'd like to show you what finally sent me 'over the edge'. OpenDNS is a great tool - I use it on my SOHO network as an additional layer of protection, plus it allows me to stop categories like "Instant Messaging" if homework isn't done (Yes, that affects me and my business but not for long because it is a great motivator). I went to check how the community rated Facebook. It has two tags voted up, and I think they are reasonable - Instant messaging, Social networking. However, just look at the other classification tags that someone has thought should be applied to Facebook.

Let's talk about "Religious" and "Politics" for example. Any regime (Australia, China, Belgium, UK, NZ or France) that now wants to turn off "Religious" content - and that is always a popular one for any Country with global censorship - would also deny access to Facebook - just because someone, somewhere creates content of this type. It is not created by Facebook, and it is not pervasive either. There needs to be a more clear understanding of the separation between platform and content.

Fig 1 - The Classifications that have been requested and voted on for Facebook as at 25 April 2009. Note that each of these needed a Sponsor!

This issue becomes important for Bittorrent. One of my companies uses Bittorrent to get (licensed, paid for - and I shouldn't even have to say that folks) software that we can't easily download any other way. The PirateBay sideshow does not help. The PirateBay case wasn't about technology. I have heard the technical arguments about how and where content versus metadata is stored. Technical arguments are valid for a site like Mininova that sticks to DMCA rules. PirateBay lost based on a Business argument "Intent" - seriously paraphrasing - if you didn't intend to support Piracy, why are you called "PirateBay" and why didn't you take anything down? It is that fundamental intent issue that means Google can perform a technically analagous task with much less business risk.

Diversion: I personally believe that the cheeky email responses on the site are what did them in. A word to the wise - don't taunt people. I had given a talk about a year before the case where I said this would upset some seriously 'alpha' people who would be perfectly happy to spend as much of other people's money as it took to get even.

The message that gets into the public though is "Downloading is wrong". Some might be, some is very right. The distinction between the content and where the service that transports or indexes it is crucial to the effectiveness of the Internet. I will also concede that there are 'naughty pictures' on the web - I've seen some. Is this adequate justification to bring it all to a halt? Back to Facebook for a minute - I've found friends - many of us have- through Facebook. What are we losing if it can get a silly set of censorship tags? Let's not forget the Amazon disaster where they tried to keep the extremists happy at the expense of their users.

We all have to step up now, individuals and businesses, or we will lose it all, and much faster than I thought.

Steps to Gov2.0 - BBQ discussion

The inaugural Gov2.0 Barbecue was held in Canberra on 17 April 2009. I'll add more Gov2.0 voices over time, but I'll start with two. Nathanael Boehm - a practitioner in the Department of Education Employment and Workplace Reform has been using blogs, twitter and discussion areas to connect with a geographically and jurisdictionally diverse group of stakeholders for over 6 months.



Kerry Webb is working at a preparation stage - helping define guidelines and policy for Gov2.0. This work is essential for widespread deployment of Gov2.0 and for use of web2.0 techniques in large organisations. Senior management needs the assurance that 'it's OK' to use the tools and that there are mechanisms to minimise harm or recover from problem situations. His talk covers some of the issues that affect, enhance or impede the adoption of Gov2.0.

Twitter struck Again

The "let's bash Twitter" meme is alive, well, and fortunately still keeping it fun:

Keep Your Online Profile

Keeping up a consistent image across the web and keeping your content fresh is vital to good business and strong relationships. We've talked about some Web 2.0 aspects already, but your online profile is a key part of your personal and business web 2.0 brand. Profiles must be kept fresh. With a little upfront effort, the task of maintaining multiple profiles can be less tedious, freeing up time to better connect with other people. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube are just the start of it - for people active on social websites, you could have several dozen social media profiles.

Keep an Inventory

The first step is to exactly know where you have a social media profile and where you do not. Start by checking with Check User Names, which will search dozens of popular social media websites to see if your username is active. Check any you normally use. If any don’t ring any bells, see if it’s yours or if somebody already owns it.

Preserve (Reserve) Your Identity

Mashable Tip: Always keep note of other people using your most common username. Making sure people don’t confuse you for somebody else is important for friends, potential employers and particularly if your business is on the web.

Therefore it's important to sign up for the most popular social networks regardless of whether you are going to use them all. This prevents someone else taking your online presence, being mistaken for you and it protects an account that you may want to use later.

This doesn’t mean you should be active on all of these services. Take a long, hard look at all of the services available and your time constraints and choose the ones that pique your interest the most. Keep some focus when choosing platforms. For the rest, place a note on your profile with contact information and links to your favorite social profiles.

Organise, Centralise and Synchronise

Keep track of your email accounts and other feeds. The best tool for me has been netvibes.

One tab has all my email accounts on one page, plus twitter feed and facebook feed. Another tab has various modules plus direct links to all my sites, my client sites and any admin areas. Netvibes starts every time firefox does.

Do not become a Robot, but keep similar tasks together. For example a common action on social media is sending an update that you have updated your blog. Normally, you would have to copy and paste this type of message into Twitter, Facebook, and so on. With services such as Ping.fm and Twitterfeed, this can be done without any work on your end. Find tools that can help you spread you reach without eating up your time.

Atomkeep is a cool tool for updating all of your social media profiles at once - it connects to your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other accounts and allows you to change bios and profile pictures with one action.

I also use PeopleBrowsr to create a more dynamic dashboard for special events and handling the group concept. It combines multiple sources of information in one place. PeopleBrowsr is an online visual dashboard that combines your Web profiles and connections. For an event like SXSW it has created a centralized dashboard for SXSW and all conversations, parties, and events related to the big festival.

If you’re unfamiliar with PeopleBrowsr, the site functions similar to TweetDeck providing users with a column view of status updates and custom created groups, but it also combines your friends and updates across a myriad of other social sites like Flickr, Facebook, FriendFeed and LinkedIn for an all-in-one Web-based view of your social world.