Earlier this week I uploaded this short clip of a train pulling in to Farringdon Station, as filmed by the eight platform cameras and piped to the array of monitors near the top of the platform.
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Author: Robert (Page 149 of 327)
I am sure I have made this point somewhere before on this blog, but a quick search through my archives doesn’t reveal it, so…
All this business about bankers and CEO bonuses makes me uneasy. The pattern is now very familiar: it transpires that some despised ‘fat cat’ – a banker or the head of a quango, say – is due to be given a huge bonus on top of their already huge monthy remuneration. Outrage ensues. The aforementioned ‘fat cat’ is chased by the press and slandered by politicians and interest groups. The ‘Fat cat’ eventually issues a statement saying he will give back the money.
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I went to a Blue State Digital event earlier in the week and assembled my tweeted aide memoirs on Storify: Blue State Digital THINKS. We discussed digital trends that are now mainstream.
Its a rather long Storify, so I won’t embed it here, but its worth pasting in the philosophical bit about mobile phone’s as an extension of one’s brain:
A mobile phone is not an implant, but it functions a bit like the bionic enhancements of science fiction lore. Crucially, it should make us more productive, because of the time we save and the time we find (for example, when we sitting down on our commute, or sitting down doing our ablutions).
Photo by Jeen Na
It is hard to overstate the influence of Disney cartoons on our folklore. The stories of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty et al have been around for centuries, but the versions presented by Walt Disney and his studios have become the definitive, almost canonical representations of the characters. Many people have a huge problem with this, because the studio’s versions tend to overlay its particular moral prism over the stories, which can be partriarchial – or just very saccarine – and much of the ambiguity and darkness is lost in the retelling. For example, Disney’s relentlessly upbeat The Little Mermaid has a very different fate to Hans Christian Andersen’s Den Lille Havfrue. The former gives up her entire heritage and identity for the love of a man; the latter tries and fails to stab him, and then finds herself consigned to a purgatory in the spirit world.
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I’m managing a rebrand and website redesign for English PEN. Part of the project is the integration of third party services like Twitter and YouTube that host some of our output.
This has prompted me to wonder whether it would be feasible to run an organisation without a website. One could interact and share on Twitter; upload any AV content to sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube; editorialise on Storify and Facebook; publish all flyers and other documents to Scribd; use MailChimp as a mailing list and CRM solution; take money (donations, fees) via PayPal, and organise events on EventBrite. An online shop could be run through Amazon or eBay. Each of these services offers at least some space for a logo and summarised raison d’etre on a profile page, and many allow you to fully brand the pages you create.
What does this model lack? Well, it reduces websites to the sum of their parts. Each service does something very specific, and hones the functionality of that one feature or function. However, I think sometimes generic webspace is a virtue. It allows unexpected and complicated piece of content to be created. Also, I suppose the ‘bundling’ of several different types of content under the same top-level URL is a courtesy to the user.
Dissidents and anti-capitalists, and those concerned about online rights (which should be all of us, but in reality is very few of us) will have another criticism: this approach surrenders your content to third parties. Should you do something horrendous – like call for an end to theocracy in Iran, or remix some of Disney’s content, or be Julian Assange – then those who wish to censor you, be they government agents or corporate lawyers, can do so easily by petitioning these third party sites. In a crisis, you have a lot more control over our content if it’s all archived on your own web space.
Are there companies or NGOs that already use the websiteless approach?