There is an interesting article about the „sites of social butterflies“ at USA Today. It provides a short summary of Twitter, kyte.tv, twittervision and flickrvision. It gets increasingly impossible to imagine how people kept up to date on each others activities just a year ago. How did they know whether or not their peers were having a coffee or not? I am puzzled how society could have functioned without that…
Ok, this one will only be fun for those of you speaking German, but indeed it could actually be a clever viral stunt:
In total, it is a range of 10 videos (sofar) also found on the website Werben&Würgen, which seems to be made specifically for the videos making fun of the work environment of Becker, Brown & Hardy, an agency from New York, also located in Berlin. The website of Becker, Brown & Hardy already has a big notice up, denying any involvement in this, stating that they will take legal action against the creators of Werben&Würgen.
But who really is the creator? Is it Nolte & Lauth? They have PR statements on their website (opens PDF) claiming to support the website of Werben&Würgen. But it doesn’t really say how they support it…
The Website Werben&Würgen.de however is registered for Olaf Bauch, Ibob TGA, Usingen. That doesn’t help much, because whatever Ibob TGA is, their website does not yet show anything. And Olaf Bauch in Usingen seems to be an engineering bureau.
So, who is behind this? It does look like a cleverly made viral recruitment campaign for either (or both) of these agencies. Since the 10 clips have already taken us this far, I suppose (and hope) we’ll soon find out the rest about this…
In the meantime, enjoy the videos, they’re a lot of fun to watch!
And if anyone finds out what the real story of these videos is, let me know!
[Update: here and here are other sites actually stating that it is indeed a stunt by Becker, Brown and Hardy. I just wonder, how they got Nolte&Lauth in to participate? The two sources mentioned above wrote their posts well before N&L were brought into this. Or is N&L a fake agency? Or is it part of the BB&H Network? Anyway, the two sources say that even the main German Ad Newspapers fell for this, so I don’t feel so bad afterall…]
This seems so obvious, yet so helpful:
Why haven’t people thought about this earlier – well, probably, because this is the age of endless gadgets with plugs all looking the same…
(found here)
As I wrote earlier, it was Internet Shutdownday yesterday. And I decided to take part. When I originally wrote that, I assumed I would be on vacation (sitting on a beach, not thinking about the internet anyway.
However, as it turned out, I wasn’t on vacation, as I had to postpone my vacation by a week. So I will be on vacation next week instead. So it could have been a relatively hard day for me, being an internet junkie. But it wasn’t, since I spent a very nice day in Berlin (more on that later) and got back so late, that I decided to wait until after midnight – German time – for continuing to blog…
So what did I do during Internet Shutdown Day? I was sightseeing around Berlin and I spent almost 5 hours on a train back to Germany.
Was it worth it? If I had purposefully done these things in order to not use the internet, it would not have been worthwile. But I had no choice, so it was easy to not use the Internet.
Nice finding, hey? If you have no choice, then not using the internet can be OK…
I love these „Zoomquilt“-Animations, they’re great:
Several artists gathered to produce an endless zoom animation where you zoom into one digital art only to enter another one through the center. All the way, until you reach the first one again. Brilliant. Each artist needs to make sure that their drawing fits with the previous and the next one following. At the end a flash programmer puts it together…
Here is a link to the Interactive Zoomquilt. And here is an automatic Zoomquilt.
There was already a previous project: Zoomquilt 2005. I already blogged about this on my German blog. That one was a little smaller, as there not as many artists involved.
Wo ich sonst so bin...