Model showed here; Tessa Dirks

24th of august 2007, at the NDSM in Amsterdam, WE Fashion organized a street shoot. People could subscribe for the shoot via the internet and were expected at the NDSM terrain for this event. The shoot was hosted by Annemieke Kuhne and a team of visagists , photograpers and other experts. Since “being a model” and television programs about modelling are booming in Holland there were a lot of people attracted by this WE Fashion event, so from all over the Netherlands they went to Amsterdam. The result was an overloaded ferry (the only way to get at the NDSM from Amsterdam Central Station is to go by ferry) with beautifull people. I must say that the result are very nice. A beautifull website, created by Scott van de Velden, shows the results of the WE Fashion street shoot. Movies and photographs. You will find it here. The model showed here is Tessa Dirks, from Amsterdam.

The King Shiloh Sound System drew another one of their party’s up here at the NDSM in Amsterdam North. I was around “accidentally”. I should have been doin’ some other things, but I changed plans when I saw that they could need a little help. So I helped them out with connecting some equipment and attach it to the juice-plug. While Neil was test driving the Sound System I made this “one long take”. The track you’ll hear is unknown for me. But I’ll ask them which one it was if you like. Just ask…
Enjoy

aatski

Filmed with a Nokia N93i

King Shiloh on MySpace 

Design Gangsta.
Yeah!

What up, Winston?
Yeah.
Press check!
keep those guides locked.
Coming to you from the south with
the mutha-kernin’ skills.
Take a look inside my mouth
I even letterpressed my grill.
Paula Scher on speed dial
Sagmeisters my man.
I got mok on lock
Done time with Paul Rand
Wearing black on black
Designer rims ‘round my eyes
Yo my clients call me ‘Snoop’
cuz my concept is so high…

Veeeery cool video about the Original Design Gangsta

Enjoy

Almost 3 years ago, flickr user birdw0rks cobbled together an ode to flickr, based on his contact list. Response was overwhelming, and the photo in his stream that carried the original link, still comes up from time to time, because it is one of the photos I commented on. If you’re an “old skool” flickr user, chances are you’ll recognize many of the names, because they’re your contacts from “the old days”.

Today swedish m-voip provider and disruptor-of-mobile-operators Rebtel released its Facebook Application. From the press release accompanying this:

The new application, to be named ‘Reb Me’, will allow Facebook users to create local numbers for global friends across their Facebook network direct from the Facebook site. The application allows users to add a ‘Reb me!’ box onto their profile so friends can instantly create a local number for them. What’s more, all new users receive 10 minutes of credit with which to try the service, and another five minutes each time a friend they’ve invited adds the application and makes a call – meaning that the potential for viral growth is huge.

As I was in on the news beforehand, I had the chance to try it out last week, and I must say it is convenient to have access to contacts with their Rebtel numbers from within Facebook. It’s also a breeze to assign Rebtel numbers to contacts and to invite them to use the service. Granted, all financial stuff needs to take place on the Rebtel site, but that’s only wise. Incidentally, Reb Me is one of a handful of voip enabled applications on Facebook. It got me wondering why there aren’t more. It’s nice that they are at the forefront with this, although I admit I am looking forward to subsequent releases: as Rebtel itself gains functionality so will -hopefully – its app on Facebook. An interesting interview with the guy who developed it (Ola Sundqvist, I’ve linked to this earlier) can be found here. I figure, Reb Me is about the only Facebook application that will help me save money.

Last week brought the news that the UK government has stopped advertising on Facebook and seeks assurances from sites where its ads may show up on user generated pages. This follows the news that Vodafone UK has stopped placing ads on Facebook, because its ads turned up on someone’s British National Party user page:

COI’s online media-buying agency, i-level, already stipulates that advertising should not appear on sites that contain socially unacceptable behaviour. COI went a step further after several companies highlighted the dangers of appearing on user-generated pages – which on Facebook include “America is full of blithering idiots” and “Bring the death penalty back and why not make them public executions”.

Which just goes to show that the traditional “placing ads on sites” model of advertising is increasingly less applicable, as we start networking more. An ad in a social space like Facebook is where the “smooth” space of the network collides with the “striated” space of the market. Owners of social spaces seeking to leverage revenue from ad placements would do well to take note. Ads, even contextual ads are completely disregarded in a social media space; if companies are willing to invade what users regard as “their” space, it should come as no surprise to them that some of the user generated content may not be to their liking. If you want to become part of the networked space you need to network yourself. Dominance hierarchies are determined by reciprocity and collective ownership of “goods”. An ad placement in that word is as best ineffective and at worst an annoyance. Now that is something I would not want to be associated with, but I assume governments are used to being an annoyance. As is Vodafone.

Amid the negative comments on how walled a garden really is, facebook secrets dumped Facebook’s homepage’s source code on its blog. The bloggage has mainly been about which risks this exposes: the only thing worse than exposing the source would be a breach of security concerning user data. Although Facebook’s API gives it the aura of openness and connected-ness, it is worthwhile to remember that the Facebook network is a closed shop; the equivalent would be a gated community IRL. And so, while networks like FB but also MMOGs need an open internet to flourish they aren’t paying back in kind. Ola Sundqvist, who recently developed a Rebtel widget for FB makes this point exactly when he says:

Facebook is just another website. It’s popular today and I agree it’s as good as it gets by 2007 standards. With some time and skills, anyone can set up something similar based on Open Source platforms like Joomla and Community Builder.

He’s right of course: looking at the number of social media aggregator services now emerging, which need an aggregator to aggregate them, I’d say we’re reaching a paradigm shift: what we see now is a number of dominant closed standards, where there was open mark-up before…fencing in what should be an open and fluid environment must inevitably lead to a counter swing of the pendulum towards enforced openness.

peopleweavers can be found here. Basically it’s a community organizers’ community. Most valuable and most needed!

David Wilcox looks back on the failed bid for a massive Uk Government’s social innovation contract, after a beauty contest where the Open Innovation Exchange submitted its bid transparently, using a loosely jointed array of blogs, facebook, youtube and wikis. Eventually, the UK government chose to award the contract to “the Innovation Unit, a government-funded body set up by the Department for Education and Skills.”

OIE’s approach was a first and a notable innovation, but it didn’t get them the contract. Simon Berry, who led the bid, comments:

“John Craig [Head of Innovation at the Cabinet Office] has indicated to me that they were looking for a partner that already knew what needed to be done and had specific actions to make it happen. It could be argued that this reflects more traditional thinking ie “we know how innovation works, this is what needs to be done and this is how we are going to do it.”

I also think that they had problems with our approach to the web presence for the Innovation Exchange and would have preferred more complete designs to be presented. This was exactly what Ben Whitnall of Delib thought would happen. In the video after the interview he said: “We weren’t about trying to build a proprietary, monolithic new system to bring everyone to us, we just wanted to leverage what was out there already. Unfortunately, I don’t think that makes for a very sexy pitch . . .”

We prefer to make use of existing web services to build presence, especially because increasingly, “internet presence” is now “social presence”. Engaging people is a matter of personal contact, authentic voice and intensive collaboration. This is true in the public sector, which is the space where OIE operate and it is as true in the world of marketing, where corporate façades are crumbling, and collaboration is becoming the only way in which companies can hope to reach their customers. We’ve received flak for not focussing on “web presences” (i.e. sites) and instead advising clients to use what s there, but -more importantly – to engage with the people they want to sell their products to.

 

Click this to download the Tracklog Files from Spain for Google Earth

Short Holiday in Spain.
Me and Tess went to Spain to visit our friends Huub and Esther who are in Spain looking for a nice house to buy and for their holiday. Before we left Amsterdam I bought a new GPS “mouse”. I allready had a gps mouse, a Royaltek, but after I upgraded my Nokia N93i with the latest firmware it didn’t seem to work anymore for unknown reasons. After the upgrade the little computer (N93i) booted the first time in a unix-like shell and I could see all kinds of commands loading. Interesting stuff. The N93i works faster and more stable. What I also discovered after the upgrade were some new applications. Nokia Navigator, Nokia Sports tracker, Landmarks and Position. I also downloaded the latest and free version of Nokia Maps. The Nokia sports tracker is a very interesting application because it records your positions and all the moves you make in memory in a a tracklog. The tracklog is placed in a calendar and when you finish your tour you’ll be able to save and send this file using bluetooth to your computer and load it in Google earth. Superrr! Check the files and see for yourself were I was. The only thing that I would really like to be able of is when the sportstracker is actvated all the photo’s that I make are geotagged. That wouldn’t be to hard to programme, though? That will make the ultimate travel-kit. Rename the sportstracker to traveltracker and record and uppload your trips with geotagged photos.

Nokia LD-3w gps mouse and a N93i were the devices I used here.