Companies are now starting to dip their toe into the world of Mashups/user-generated content – but when the user is generating it, the results might not always be what they expect or desire. We’ve seen a few examples of this today.
Uber-car maker Chevrolet – or their agencies – came up with a great wheeze. They’ve put tools on the Web to allow the worlds users remix and mash-up their latest Chevy Tahoe adverts.
It’s not hard to imagine the scene. The agency person, having hear from his ‘Geek’ source that mashups were ‘The Latest Thing’, over-enthusiasticly pitching it to Chevy
Amazingly the thing that they don’t appear to have noticed is that many people see Chevy as Uber in a couple of sense – the sheer size of their company and, importantly for this piece, in the sheer size of the cars on the road and fuel-guzzling nature.
Some witty wags have used the Chevy tools to create adverts mocking the over-sized cars, the nature of their advertising and the company generally.
Selection of spoof ads
Roll-up, roll-up get them while they’re fresh (and before they get taken down by those that be).
Where’s My Helicopter? – This mocks the unreachable locations that car companies put their cars in for adverts, then proceeds to question if a 4×4 car of this size is really needed when they are, on the whole, only used to drive to the shopping mall.
Global Warming – The sights of this spoof are a little more ambitious – asking why the USA reaction to the threat of Global Warming is to make and sell cars like the Chevy Tahoe.
Flowers – This one addresses the over-sized, aggressive nature of the car. Summary – Where have all of the flower gone? Who cares? My truck’s bigger than yours and I’ll crush you.
We love the idea of corporate tools being used against those who are paying for they development, hosting and bandwidth, but suspect that corporate number two who approaches this may take a different approach. This won’t of course stop those who are angered by this type of thing using their own footage to the same affect.
Expect people in the marketing department to get fired over this one. People who run companies like Chevrolet don’t like to be made to looks foolish. Perhaps if they moved to destroy the planet a little less they’d get a better reception from the world.
Thanks to Holy-Moly! for the pointer to the videos on this one.
It is being reported that MySpace-owner, News International, is looking to expand its presence in Europe with its focus being London.
Importantly it also has social/network effects built it. This works both for the creators, as they grow their links to their friends – real and imagined; but importantly for MySpace’s income, the network effect for browsers is huge. As a browser looks at the original site, they split off in a myriad of different directions as they distract themselves, exploring the music taste and hobbies of linked friends.
It’s expanded beyond this now and has now reached the point where record companies feel bands _must_ have their own presence on MySpace, even if they’ve got their own Web presence – witness sons of Ventnor, 
With the media footprint that News International has, it’s highly likely that they’re going to be able to make best value from what appears to be a considerable purchase price. Already there’s been reports their 
When you actually talk to John Bunt, it’s me-groups-legal-pitfalls-with-postingshard to imagine him getting so angry about a Usenet group flame session, as to take the other parties to court. But he did. He also took their ISPs to court for carrying their libels.
That dates back to a Noble Lord of the 19th century, who won a libel action against a book, causing the publisher to be convicted. Some years later, he found a second hand copy of that book in a second hand book shop, and sued them – and won. This meant that people sued WH Smiths – not because they disliked the bookseller, but because Private Eye was poor, and WH Smith had plenty of money.
I spent some time chatting to Bunt after the case, and he says that he’s not a vindictive man – which isn’t much surprise, perhaps. But what’s interesting, is that he says he doesn’t think the people he’s suing are, either.
This sort of case seems to be on the increase. “Anyone with web access and a quick temper can find themselves facing a lawsuit,” commented 
Making blogging too easy seems to be making it hard. It may be coincidence, but one example of “too easy” blogging is the spam blog, or splog – and suddenly, there’s a rash of upset bloggers who have had their blogs blacked.
And a spam blog is something that doesn’t actually have any real content. It’s just links to trackback pointers for everybody else. The trouble is, all the signs of a spam blog are caused by the ease with which they are built. You just have to create the blog (two clicks) and then set up a robot that scours the web for new posts, and links to the trackbacks.
I’m not saying that Qumana is what caused the blog to be blacked. I am saying that if it produces a series of random, unrelated tags to a single site, it’s going to fulfil one of the prime indicators of a splog. And when random, unrelated blog entries all get tagged “Qumana” whatever their subject, you have something so similar, it’s going to be quite hard to see what a blog provider can do to filter it.
Nokia has launched Nokia Lifeblog 2.0, an updated version of their photo-blogging offering.
Well, that’s how we’d describe the process, but Nokia has a more flowery interpretation, insisting that adding the extra information is “rendering them as part of the rich tapestry of items that make up your personal Nokia Lifeblog timeline.”
“With imaging becoming an integral part of mobile devices, the way people approach photography is changing. You are able to capture events and create memories in a spontaneous way as your device is always with you,” gushed Mikko Pilkama, whose job title is surely unpronounceable after five beers: Director, Nokia Nseries See New, Multimedia, Nokia.
You’re thinking of doing your own podcast, I can tell. You were getting all excited about the new generation of digital microphones.
Digital array microphones, however, are as good as the data stream they’re poured into. Imagine my delight to find that the default setting for OneNote audio recording is eight kilobits per second, mono. I found this out AFTER recording an Important Person at a press conference. I have no idea what he said; all I have is a recording of people coughing and creaking their chairs. I’m sure fellow-recorders have found the same.
The English version of Wikipedia has now notched up more than one million articles, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, the fellas who run the free online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia’s reach is truly global, with versions of the encyclopaedia currently available in 125 languages, containing a total of 3.3 million articles.
With the million-article mark passed and the Wikimedia Foundation estimating that new articles are coming in at a rate of 1,700 new articles every day, our back-of-a-beer-mat calculation reckons they’ll be hitting 2 million sometime 2009.
The idea behind buzz-o-phone is simple enough. You call a US freephone (800) number where you’re able to leave a voice message. Your elicitation, wise or otherwise, is the posted to the player section of the buzz-o-phone Web site, where the world can listen.
We’d imagine that two versions of the ‘conversation’ will have to be created; the raw, which would be an unfiltered version; and the clear-feed, dropping off comments that are judged as offensive. This is riddled with difficulties of its own – as with all censorship, you have to make you’re own decision as to if your parameters of acceptability align with the self-appointed censor.
It looks like the world is going blog crazy as the number of blogs online doubles every five and a half months, with a brand new blog being created every second.
According to Technorati, around 2.7 million of those blogs are updated at least weekly, with something like 1.2 million total posts appearing every single day. New blogs are appearing at a rate of over 75,000 every day with an average of fifty thousand blog posts being recorded every hour.
It’s not all good news though, with Sifry revealing that “about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or are attempts to create link farms or click fraud.”