Pre-Owned Lander Now On Mars!

Campfire’s intrepid space correspondent, former creative director Andrew Kessler, is in Tucson AZ covering the Mars Phoenix mission. A key operation of the Mars Lander, which arrived on Mars last weekend, will be the deployment of a robotic arm that will dig below the Mars surface looking for signs of Martian life.

Kessler is actually employed by NASA, working under Peter Smith, who instigated the Phoenix Mission. Andrew is writing a book about the project, and also reporting for Popular Mechanics and consulting on a Discovery special.

One of the unique aspects of the project is the reuse of a lander from a cancelled Mars exploration project in 2001 (the Mars Surveyor), lending a certain post 2008 recession budget consciousness to the entire enterprise. Perhaps the Pentagon could learn a few lessons from NASA when it comes to effective penny pinching.

Images and data will be flowing back for the next 3 months as the lander analyzes the ice under the surface for signs of life. We’ll keep you posted on any exciting news from the Mars front via Andrew.

The Mars Phoenix Project’s Twitter account has 8,894 Followers, with MarsPhoenix following 0.

Technorati Tags: Andrew Kessler, Campfire, Events, Mars, NASA, New Journalism

The Eternal Struggle

In light of recent events in the world of science, it’s time to revisit the age-old conflict: Monkey versus Robot. Here’s the setup:

(basically, monkey hates technology, robot hates the monkey)

The NY Times tells us this week that monkeys can now control robot arms—-with their minds!

Let’s call this match in Monkey’s favor.

Congratulations monkey-brothers, I always knew we primates would prevail!

Campfire Creative Director Lands On Mars!

Although they were hugging happily in Pasadena and Phoenix, there was sadness at Campfire on Friday, as Andrew Kessler, one of our key creative directors and the co-show runner on the long running MyHome2.0 campaign for Verizon, left to write a book about the Mars Phoenix Lander program.

Some may say discovering whether there was life on Mars is more important than the social media and marketing programs at Campfire — but you would not have found much support for this position at Andrew’s many going away parties this past week.

You can find a sweet remembrance of Andrew’s tenure at MyHome2.0 here, and, oh, here’s one of the first images sent back from Mars today:

I dunno, given the choice, I’d take a screening of Mars Attacks in the basement drive-in theater at the Zaharko’s any day of the week. But we’ll miss Andrew a whole lot, he’s an amazingly creative and soulful guy, and one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met. We’re hoping he’ll share some of his experiences here with us from time to time as he explores his own life — as well as on Mars.

Technorati Tags: Campfire, Events, FiOS, marketing, Mars, MyHome2.0, Social Media

Work Tip #32

Geekspeak Onomatopoeia

“…When I interviewed Ben Golub yesterday, he told me that RSSmeme crawls FriendFeed via the API to see what people are sharing on Google Reader. I would guess that Techmeme uses at least some of that same data via either FriendFeed or directly from Google Reader. It’s here where the sharing in Google Reader becomes just like a Digg; one person in your circle shares the item, then others do. Some comment on it. Others additionally submit it to Digg and StumbleUpon. And suddenly, you have the same echo chamber effect in FriendFeed that you see on Techmeme…

– from a “Friendfeed, the New Echo Chamber” post by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

Technorati Tags: Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, Friendfeed, Social Media, Twitter

The Takeaway

Hey, check out John Hockenberry’s new show on NPR, The Takeaway. If you’ve been a fan of uh, listener to, Morning Edition and gotten tired of hearing about the plight of the bubble bee in Mongolia or appeals to ride your bicycle to work in the middle of winter, you’ll find the new show refreshingly-unNPR.

The fact that The Takeaway took Grand Theft Auto 4 seriously, and that they put a post by my son, Gabriel, about the game on the front of their busy site, has nothing to do with my recommendation.

If you like the show, post a positive comment, or vote mine up.

Technorati Tags: Gaming, Innovation, New Journalism, social media, Web 3.0

2015 Media Plan

Rob Norman wrote a fascinating piece on his On Demand blog, taking a stab at how we’ll create, consume, and measure media in the future. From where we sit, his “Work of Fiction” doesn’t seem all that fictional at all.

We know that content is migrating to smaller and smaller screens, that distribution channels are expanding faster than the content creators’ ability to fill them, and that looking at small screens the same way we look at TV and movie screens is a fatal flaw.

As we’re hearing from our friends on the brand side and on the entertainment side, everyone is gearing up to deliver entertainment to mobile phones, computer screens, digital readers, etc. in the ways that people are consuming content today. The real issue–and what makes Rob’s post so prescient–is predicting how we’ll leverage all these platforms to tell brand and entertainment stories tomorrow.

Wayne Gretzky’s cliche’d aphorism applies here: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Yoda couldn’t have said it any better.