Twitter Babble

Every year at PopTech, organizers show a selection of short viral videos to mark segment breaks or pull people back into the Camden Opera House auditorium for a new session. Here's one of them, shown today at PopTech2010, that spoofs the official trailer for the film, The Social Network, and skewers Twitter:

What do you think?

Interactive YouTube

Leading the Web's viral video list over Labor Day weekend was this bit of interactive video, below -- part of an ad campaign by a German company that makes Tipp-Ex, a brand of correction fluid that is popular throughout Europe. The ad has generated some serious buzz across the Web as the latest thing in interactive, YouTube marketing. It features a hunter and a bear in the woods. Tell them what you want them to do and, well...let's just say there are a lot of options.

[Hint: Choose "Shoot the Bear" and get directed to the next round]:

http://www.youtube.com/tippexperience

Silly? Undoubtedly, but the technology used to create the video offers many possibilities for cause messaging and marketing for nonprofits and for-profits, alike. What do you think? Let us hear from you.

Animated Debate

If you can type, you can make movies -- or so says the new text-to-video start-up xtra normal, which has created a way for anyone to quickly (and cheaply) create an animated video to promote a particular cause or point-of-view. [Think Wordpress meets South Park.] The video animation templates offered by the start-up are the latest entry into the fast-growing, short-form video space -- and hold promise for nonprofits and other cause groups that are cash-strapped and video-challenged.

Here's one example, referred to us via DoSomething.org. Made on the xtra normal platform, it urges a more peaceful debate around the construction of a proposed mosque and spiritual center in lower Manhattan:

Of course, as soon as this was made, other (longer, bolder and alternative) versions were released, as well. Here's one of them:

How does it work? Upload your script and choose your actor from a range of English-speaking animals, John Doe types and Sarah Palin look-alikes; the templates do the rest.

What to say? The fight for Good v. Evil is getting animated, indeed. (wince)

Let us know what you think.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Mobbin'

Here's a look at Saturday's Seattle flash mob in Pioneer Square's Occidental Mall, dancing to some of the hit music from Glee. Co-organizer Bobby Bonsey, a freelance choreographer and photographer, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's blogger Monica Guzman yesterday : "I want people to be staring at their computer and be watching this and have that really cool smile just creep across their faces, and have those goose-bumps." Besides this one, Bonsey's flash mobs around Glee also occurred at Seattle's Pike Place Market and Kerry Park in Queen Anne.

Memo to social change advocates: an estimated 3,000 people took part across the three locations; unlike most flash mobs to date, these were mildly choreographed and rehearsed in public parks yesterday morning prior to their tri-space debut, which had been kept somewhat of a secret to the general public. Mobile tech played a huge role in organizing, of course -- and the addition now of new geo-location apps are just making it easier to scale the size of the crowd, Bonsey says.

Are Cause Mobs next? Let us hear from you on that.

Woodstocked

Why does the Woodstock music festival, held 40 years ago this weekend, still matter? Perhaps it's because it was "half a million strong"—mega-viral before flashmobs and the Web. "Woodstock had to have been one of the earliest examples of a viral event—long pre-dating blast faxes, mass emails, Web ads, the blogosphere, texting and tweeting," says Robert Goldstein, NPR's music librarian."Somehow, 40 years ago, word spread from person to person about a fabulous outdoor rock festival at a farm a few hours outside of New York City."

Woodstock also was a community of like-minded souls formed at the edges of the cultural mainstream. Today, there is no mainstream, and crowds are more apt to form digitally; in 1969, crowds were only physical—defined less by their collaborative networking potential than by their power to disrupt the status quo. Today, hundreds of thousands of communities are forming and communicating with each other, quickly, over the Web. Back in the summer of 1969, crowd-to-crowd communication did not exist and was beyond the realm of the imaginable. Woodstock was the original flashmob, shocking in both its size and its ability to rapidly self-organize. "This was a spontaneous, pre-Web community of the anti-Establishment, a kind of peaceful protest and celebration all wrapped into one," says Henry Diltz, a photographer who captured most of the festival in a series of iconic images.

Diltz also told the BBC in a recent interview that Woodstock's crowd-power gave the anti-Establishment a platform that signaled a change in the American spirit. One of Diltz's most vivid memories is of Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner:

"It was a Monday morning, there were only about 20,000 to 30,000 people left—most (concert-goers) had gone home already. It was very startling to hear (Hendrix play) the national anthem that morning; there had been such mixed feelings about it, our country, patriotism. The song in a way represented the (Vietnam) war machine, yet most of people who came to Woodstock were peace-and-love hippies who didn't want to kill anybody. But then to have Hendrix play that song? It was amazing. When you heard the sound effects of dive bombs and machine guns in Hendrix' playing, it reminded you that the (Vietnam) War was still going on...

...What was so amazing was that sound, in the still morning air, of the single string, the single instrument playing. The sound was so sharp and vibrant, and it went out and echoed against the mountains and came back again. And when you looked out onto the field—which had been a green alfalfa field five days earlier—now it was just a muddy hillside and looked very much like a battleground. Somebody had stuck a branch in the ground with an American flag flying and there it was, out there in that muddy field.
It was just a transfixing moment."

Here's Hendrix in that moment, below:



(Poster: Woodstock Music & Art Fair, 1969)

Global Wiring

Thanks to social media, says British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, "foreign policy can never be the same again." In remarks delivered at TED Global 2009 this past week in Oxford, Brown said the Web is offering the world an historic chance for grassroots, collaborative problem-solving. Political and governmental institutions, he says, can no longer be run only by elites.

"Take what modern technology is capable of: the power of our moral sense allied to the power of modern communications and our ability to organize internationally. That, in my view, gives us the first opportunity as a [global] community to fundamentally change the world.
Foreign policy can never be the same again. It cannot be run by elites. It's got to be run by listening to the public opinions of people who are blogging, communicating with each other around the world."

Digital Fish

Here's a good use of social media for change. Note how this group, the Iraqi and Afghanistan Veterans of America, is integrating a well-done, viral recruitment video (below) with its launch of two private, online social networks on Ning. The three-pronged strategy creates instant engagement and drives membership into IAVA's month-old communityofveterans.org. Community members help each other work for the cause—in this case, their own reintegration. (IAVA's separate, online Family and Friends network—also private—closes the circle, providing further, back-up support and engagement for returning veterans.) For more on the use of private social networks by nonprofits to drive recruitment, retention, support, and engagement, see Members Only, posted here earlier this week.)

Michael Media

Michael Jackson died today. ["He had a YouTube account, featuring his innovative music videos, but the embedding on those videos has been disabled," says Salon.com's Liz Shannon Miller.] Jackson's videos were among the first to "go viral" on the Web. Here is a reminder of why they did, with thanks to Miller for her post and shared selection, below:

A live performance from 1988 of Man in the Mirror:

A clip from the Michael Jackson 30th Anniversary Celebration, an improbable duet with Britney Spears on The Way You Make Me Feel:

A medley from the 1991 album Dangerous:

Enough said.

SXSW FilmFest

Here's the just-released movie poster by London-based Build for the design documentary, Objectified, which has its world debut at this month's SXSW 2009 film festival in Austin, Texas. The feature-length film looks at industrial design and the creativity at work behind the creation of everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets; director Gary Hustwit gathers the world's top designers to tell the story of the serious intention of everyday objects. Hustwit's 2008 film, Helvetica—about the iconic typeface—premiered at last year's SXSW festival. For more on Objectified [and the objects in the film], check out the Objectified blog and the movie's trailer, below:



Other films to be featured at this year's festival include Winnebago Man, Ben Steinbauer's documentary feature about Internet fame and the cursing man in the 4-minute, 2006 video of the same name that went viral on YouTube. Also in the line-up of world premieres at SXSW: Say My Name, a documentary about women in hip-hop. The poster art for these films—in competition among others for best design at the festival—are below:

Mashtape

Check out this excerpt from the award-winning documentary Playing for Change: Peace Through Music. Producers used social media to invite street musicians from around the globe to collaborate in song:

iWitness

Twitter has broken news—first—yet again, in a potent reminder that microblogging content may not always be so emphemeral [nor widely unimportant], after all. [Social activists, listen up.] Minutes after U.S. Airways flight 1549 crash-landed in the Hudson River earlier today, 23-year-old Janis Krums, a resident of Sarasota, Florida [who was on a river ferry that was among the first to get diverted to the scene], used his iPhone to snap this photo, above, of the downed plane and post it on Twitter. The photo apparently was the first in the overall news coverage of the event today and immediately went hyper-viral: 34 minutes after Janis posted his photo, MSNBC interviewed him live on TV as a witness; by this evening, thousands of people online had seen it and the New York Daily News is reporting that the surge of interest in Krums' photo has caused TwitPic to crash. Citizen journalists, many of them using Twitter, also played a role in the coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks in November and the U.S. presidential election in November.

Look for more ordinary people, as well as social activists, to get more proactive in using their social media this way—to bear witness as things are happening rather than further after the fact. We're all first-responders now; social media and the immediacy they offer to our knowledge of the unfolding events around us are redefining what is meant by "breaking news."

Krums' tweet and photo, posted on TwitPic at 12:36 pm today, read as follows:
http://twitpic.com/135xa - There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy."

Girls, Uninterrupted

If you haven't seen it yet, check out this video, below. It's called The Girl Effect, and it is a video and Web site produced by the Nike Foundation, in partnership with Peter Buffett's NoVo Foundation, to show the positive impact of educating and empowering girls. Shown at The Feast social innovation conference today in Manhattan, the video is one of the more powerful cause "message" campaigns making the rounds of social networks and video-sharing sites: