My friend Maria at AMV is pitching for the opportunity to go to Brazil to help non-profit organisations promote what they do. With only one place up for grabs, the competition is tough. Maria needs to convince our bosses she’s the right girl for the challenge, and I couldn’t agree more.

Rather than just explaining her commitment to the cause, our Maria has taken action getting people behind her - check out (and join!) her Facebook group.

Here’s my contributing pitch…

Maria studied chemistry so is handy with a bunsen burner. I think this will come in handy when she saves Brazil’s natural resources.

I just read it’s normal for Brazilian men to stare at women. I think she would thrive on this opportunity : )

She once attended Notting Hill carnival. Brazil is known for their carnivals.

Scotch eggs are her favourite savoury snack. Did you know some variants are made with brazil nuts? This must be more than just a coincidence!

I think Maria played football once. Brazil are obsessed with footballing. It’s fate!

So support Maria in her career defining moment.

And finally, I think our Maria would really rock this outfit!

Ever nod off and miss your stop? iNap means there’s no longer a need to worry.

iNap taps into your phone’s location sensors and sounds the alarm when you get close to your destination. You can even determine how much warning you need. If you’re a slow riser, you can tell it to wake you up 10 miles early. If you wake up fast, you can give yourself less warning.

Awesome, soon I won’t even have to think for myself.

What better way to cheer up on a Friday, than watch some light branded pornograhpy.

It keeps being flagged as inappropriate on YouTube, so hopefully this version still works. If you can watch it, you’ll know why…

To promote the new Simon Pegg flick ‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People‘, Paramount have launched a rather neat ‘anti-social networking’ Facebook app. Okay…so it goes against the niceties of social networking love, but the devil in me loves this.

The app offers great features such as creating insults for your friends, doodle on a friends profile picture, giving crap gifts (aren’t they all crap?), cheating at Scrabble, and it even suggests friends you don’t really like to remove as a friend. Genius.

Wednesday night I had the pleasure of attending a talk at the ICA on ‘Crowdsourcing’ - presented by Wired’s Jeff Howe who originally coined the term in 2006. It has since been developed by other theorists and has become an increasingly known buzz word in our industry. The debate came strongly from a journalists point of view, rather than a theorist. Some audience members did struggle with the fact there was not always a right / wrong, yes / no, answer to Crowdsourcing, nevertheless, it was a thought-provoking evening.

Jeff has two definitions of Crowdsourcing:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

We debated some interesting themes surrounding crowdsourcing…

Authority vs. Electronic Crowd

Some audience members viewed ‘Crowdsourcing’ as some sort of act of laziness. This raises the question - are the brands that are involving crowds in new innovations either smart in the age of co-creation, or do they merely have a lack of ambition? Some institutions may see ‘Crowdsourcing’ as a cost-cutting labor saving solution, but this is certainly not the way Jeff looks at it (nor I). However, the balance between controlling  crowds vs. complete crowd control, is a complex issue. The best examples of effective ‘Crowdsourcing’, are those where the line between authority and crowd is blurred, and is in fact more of a mutual collaboration.

Democracy

The notion of ‘by the people for the people’ makes crowdsourcing instinctively democratic. Threadless for example is the linchpin of democracy. Threadless is a perpetual, online T-Shirt design competition. Artists submit their designs; users vote on them; the highest-rated designs are printed and sold back to the community. Simple. Brilliant. Perhaps an old example, but one where the crowd not only provides the services, but where the crowd itself is self-evangalising. Not only that, it’s hugely cost effective. Threadless is selling 60,000 T-Shirts a month, has a profit margin of 35 percent - for a company with fewer than 20 employees that’s pretty darn good!

Sturgeon’s Law

All this participation from crowds is all well and good, but isn’t the majority of user-generated content crap? The answer is yes! Sturgeon’s Law is the notion that “ninety percent of everything is crap”. You only have to browse the mindless dribble on YouTube, Digg, Flickr, to know that this is true. That’s not to say crowdsourcing is all crap though - there is a valuable 10%, you just need to find it. We’re begging to see various forms of filtering - this can be as simple as a thumbs up on comments, or Digg’s “Digg it” filterting system.

So while there may be a lot of dribble, we have still seen cases where the collective minds of many can accomplish huge tasks. Jeff spoke about InnoCentive - an instituion that crowdsources research and development for biomedical and pharmaceutical companies. It is one of the largest commercial examples of crowdsourcing.   Anyone, anywhere, with interest and Internet access can become an InnoCentive Solver member.

Monetisation

Monetisation is a grey area - while some see crowdsourcing merely as collective intelligence of the Internet, others see it as collaboration but for commercial purposes. The term came about from Jeff observing the power of bands and fans on MySpace - while there may be money involved, to me this seems more about community and content.

Take iStock for example. iStock started because Bruce Livingstone didn’t have the money to launch a traditional stock company. So he gave his photos away, and found a community of other talented people willing to give their photos away too. The value, as many content companies are still struggling to understand, wasn’t necessarily in the thing itself. iStock was built on passion, not on dollars.

The most pertinent thing I took away from this evening, was the notion that ‘Crowdsourcing’ should not be viewed as a solution to a problem or a theory that can be readily applied. To me, it is little more than an observation of human behaviour in the digital space, which can be hugely effective. I’m sorry to tell you there is no black and white, yes or no, right or wrong, view to ‘Crowdsourcing’ - like many other buzz words in this industry.

If this is a topic you happen to find fascinating, you can check out the book (even the cover is crowdsourced!), or read Jeff’s fantastic blog.

Now I’ve got your attention! You’ve all heard of the six degrees of separation - the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.

According to new research from O2, the six degrees of separation has fallen to three due to the impact of social networking and developments in technology. Email and mobile phones were the technologies that had the most significant impact in facilitating the reduction of degrees from six to three. Whilst social networking sites such as Facebook were highly rated by the youngest age bracket but usage declined drastically the older in age was asked. For more info, read the press release from O2 here.

We really do live in an age of social connectedness.

We need a new diagram!

For three evenings in October (8th - 10th), a new interactive smoky communication will be underway in Trafalgar Square, commissoned by the ICA. It will be an evening to remember - one that combines a very modern medium - mobile, with a 5,000 year old one - smoke signals.

This experiment works as a hybrid system that explores the dynamic and spatial capacities of smoke and light, in relation to modern mobile technology. In Memory Cloud, visitors can text any message they like to the artists’ creation, and that message will be made into huge light-and-air smoke signals, all in real-time.

The project motivates social interaction through visualization of personal expression, and a collective act of writing space. This new exploration of personal expression in public spaces is from Minimaforms, founded in 2002 by brothers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos as an experimental architecture and design practice.

This little film is so cute it deserves a quick post. Now I love the Internet and my blacberry, but sometimes you simply need to unplug and get out there and enjoy the wonders of the real world.

Visit the site here to cure your screen addiction.  Slightly ironic this message is being communicated via electronic means,  but I guess that’s the best way to reach us digital addicts.

Via Paul (thanks).

I just came across this, and I couldn’t help but do a quick post on it. The epic Gorilla ad returns to our screens tonight, but remixed. The new version is cut to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. I just played this in the office and everyone just thought I had really bad taste in music for a second there.

I’m sure bloggers will post the inevitable “their milking it” blog post. Maybe they are. But it made me smile.

Tonight’s Big Brother ad break will also feature Trucks remixed to Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer. This is quite frankly dull, but please judge for yourselves…

Via.

To commemorate a local nightclub to make way for a new IKEA, 200 folks from Milton Keynes (where I lived for a year) turned up to the furniture store recently to hold an impromptu party. Enjoy the IKEA rave.

Via