Busy... You guys take Friday off? I need to convince my DVD distributor to hire Campfire for the DVD release this fall... I guess I'll have to wait 'til monday...
- Paul Krik
Busy... Hey, Megan, why thank you! Where are you based?
- Steve
Busy... As one of my favorite companies to watch, I can't be any more excited to see the new campaigns and ideas that come out of the agency. Each campaign is unique and innovative in...
I’m heading to Austin, TX this week for SXSW and this time I’m speaking on a panel. Come check out Suxorz ‘09: The Ten Worst Social Media Campaigns on Saturday, March 14th at 5:00 PM. Last year, this panel was one of the most lively and interactive of the whole festival and I’m honored to be sitting on the panel with Zadi Diaz from Epic Fu, Jeff Jarvis from Buzz Machine, and Sarah Smith from Wonkette. Moderator Henry Copeland of BlogAds promises to throw firecrackers into the social media bonfire and keep things lively.
I’m looking forward to meeting people and eating BBQ so if you are going and want to connect, drop me a note mmonello (at) campfirenyc (dot) com or contact me through my Twitter account. Hope to see you there.
The New York Times Magazine has a great story on Internet trolls — people who take pleasure in disrupting online communities — that’s worth your time:
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”
Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.
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.
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.
As many of you may know, a chemical reaction occurs when you drop a mentos into a certain coca cola product. It was quite the craze some months ago and there was an explosion of user generated content surrounding the “experiment“. We touched on it as well.
Well, it’s back. Belgium students, 1500 to be exact, set up a record-breaking event in which the largest number of Mentos geysers ever erupted at the same time in the same place occurred. The above is a picture of the set up, and the result can be seen after the jump.
It kind of reminds me of an idea we once had. I think we should sue…. or at least asked to be participate next time.
Story break and pictures courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk. Explosive pictures after the jump (more…)
Something has happened to PBS favorite “Charlie Rose.” The erudite conversations and sober intellectualism have been replaced by an absurd world where illogic, inane dialogues, and open hostility rule.
This is a fantastic conference. Everywhere you go you meet smart, inspired thinkers from diverse backgrounds. The panels have been generally excellent, but this afternoon’s Social Media Metrics panel took a dive when the moderator didn’t um… join the conversation. About 30 minutes in, the discussion, advertised as intermediate level, was still covering the same old “you need to be engaging social media” ground when someone from the audience stood up and asked the panelists to get onto the metrics portion of the program. The moderator responded “we’ll get to that in a little bit,” and this was after trying to push his question off to the end. How very old-media.
The audience soon turned on the panel, and the energy in the large room turned dark. I had no idea what was going on until just now, reading through the back channel meebo chat log. From here on out, I’m bringing my laptop to everything.
Later this evening, I schooled Jeremiah in foosball before ducking into the World Premiere of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie. The organizers wrongly placed it in their midnight section, but this isn’t a goofy cult oddity. Bigfoot is a touching character study of two best friends who are passionate about Bigfoot research and crave legitimacy for their work. It’s a fantastic documentary and worth seeking out at your local film festival. Check out the trailer below.
Tomorrow I plan on more panels, meetings, and BBQ!
This week Jeremiah and I are reporting live from the SXSW Interactive+Film+Music Festival, and while everyone else is reporting on all the amazing panels, parties, and hoopla, we’re here to report what you REALLY want to know. First up — an in-depth comparison of all THREE (!) SXSW Schwag bags.
Kluster.com just might be onto something big. They’ve created an online social community! Wow… OK, sarcasm aside, there is, of course, a bit more to Kluster than being a simple online community. The site and the community have actual purpose. Put simply, the site brings together talented people to work towards, and actually accomplish, common goals.
Once you sign up for the site, you’ll go through the standard steps that you generally need to deal with once you join any other online community: background, interests, avatar selection, etc. However, for each segment of your profile that you fill in, you’ll also receive a quantity of “watts” that get added onto the 1,000 watts you receive for signing up. I’ll get to what these are for in a bit but think of Watts as your Kluster currency. However, in an effort to avoid getting ahead of myself, let me explain what the site is all about. (more…)
Kluster.com