For those who are not familiar with the rock music in the 90’s, Rage Against the Machine is American alternative, rock, punk band, notable for revolutionary and political lyrics. If you grew up in the post-communist under sanctions country such as Serbia (former Yugoslavia), you’d probably heard for their popular song “Killing in the name” released in 1992. This song was explained as “a howling, expletive-driven tirade against the ills of American society”, but also it marked the music, political, social scene in Serbia in that period. Why am I writing about RATM and not  about new and so waited Massive Attack LP?

For those who do not live in UK, or do not watch TV (moi included!), there’s a TV reality competition show called X Factor (equivalent to American Idol or Talent), where one of the most unexpected turn outs and victories of this decade happened: RATM’s “Killing in the Name” beat out X Factor’s winner Joe McElderry’s “The Climb”, and became the U.K.’s Christmas Number One single.

This all happened thanks to social network site Facebook, campaign in the form of a group, launched by Jon Morter, a 35-year-old part-time dj and logistics expert from Essex, and his wife Tracy, as they had become jaded by the inevitable annual rise of Cowell’s judge newest pop star to the top of the charts and were determined to stop it, using the power of social networking and obviously a humor.

Facebook group gathered almost 1 million people and the band’s single sold 500,000 downloads gaining Christmas no.1 charts. Some interesting BBC chart analysis show how in short time (only a week of Internet campagne) this single won the charts. Beside Facebook activism, British comedian Peter Serafinowicz urged his 268,000-plus Twitter followers to join this campaign, as later on RATM’s guitarist Tom Morello twittered on this historic event.

The power of social Web created not only the public sphere in political, economic and global context after all, but is also influencing the music business industry where corruption’s time is coming to an end. I’m looking forward to see these kind of activities and campaigns in governmental sector where some policy and political issues can be changed on better if majority learn network and media literacy. It’s interesting video – interview of RATM’s leader Zack De La Rocha with Noam Chomsky. Here’s the video of BBC’s interview with RATM and their live performance.

Today I’ve tested for the very first time Qik – mobile live streaming and sharing tool that connects mobile and social technologies. I had a thought after this demo video with my colleague at UN about implementation of mobile video streaming into not only broadcasting conferences, events, but also in edu technology. The latest news from Qik blog is participating in edu-tech conference where Qik videos will be mapped on Google Earth in its worldwide demonstration so educators from all over the world can test this tool in their classrooms.

Some concern I’m sharing is that streaming over the phone cannot be possible anytime, everywhere, depending on many factors: providers, mobile telecom companies, fees/charges, mobile devices and their ability to support (or not) wifi, availability of free wifi hot spots, social networked compatibility among users, the type/model of mobile phones (see the list of supported phones), etc.

In this test video you’ll notice that during the time I was showing to Gauri Qik, streaming online my first Qik video, and notifying my followers on Twitter,  there were also parallel broadcast of the conference happening somewhere in the world. Beside alerting your friends on Twitter and on the other social networks, there are options for live chat, comments, and geo-mapping. More thoughts about mobile social technologies to come.

Qik test

In the last three weeks my Twitter account is flooded with followers who are marketing agencies, web sites offering super effective strategy for you and your company, that can teach you make money from nothing and easy-fix tips and tricks. If you go to their profiles and web sites, you can find a single page with entire presentation and tons of blinking Web 1.0 ads, free newsletters, trials, twittenars, promotion talks on the ground, boat and airplane (?!$%^&), while the others just inject the buzz single update “how to earn $500 in few minutes”.  Some people on my surprise get hooked by following those accounts with so called auto- robots.

In the last few days I am carefully following what’s going on in my twitter stream and boy, oh boy – I am thinking to reduce the noise. Give Twitter in a hands of people who perceive it as an outlet in personal, professional life, with offending words, abusive comments – things can get out of control. Even for people in IT business.

This kind of communication performances with pushing nature of information, denotes (oh it is!)  the society in crisis (who mentioned global economy?). I am wondering  in which direction social media in the networked world is really going? Now, I’m starting to believe that you are who you are following. Twitter is digital, modern Greek agora but with democratic misinterpretation.

So, still craving for more followers? Here are three simple tips:

1. Be as massive as you can be: tweet and spam your friends, contacts with chat-alike tweets, blip.fm’s, retweets like: “how to ..”, “guide to…”, “grow your follower numbers to over 10,000 in a week..”, ‘follow me and win a prize…”, etc.

2. Don’t forget to mention Britney Spears in your tweets and some mainstream media buzzwords such as ‘marketing’, strategy’,  ’solution’, ‘guru”, etc.

3. If you are female -upload attractive profile photo, if you are male – wear a moustache or left-eye-wink

Even if you are decent Twitterer with the respect for the people you are following and not that involved in twitterati’s fuzz, don’t be misleaded that Twitter’s curse won’t get you down: “Let the massive marketing twitter accounts that offer strategies follow you till the rest of your (digital) life!

…but I’d really like to receive Twitter updates on my mobile device as it was from year and a half ago when I could get sms directly to my mobile inbox: no browser, no applications, just plain and simple receiving text messages from the people I followed and sending directly from my mobile operator. I really miss Twitter with sms for a long time:

Sending updates to Twitter while you’re away from your computer makes things much more interesting. It’s all done through text messages (aka “SMS”), which you probably use all the time anyway, so there’s not much to learn.Twitter doesn’t charge anything for this, but be sure to know what your text plan looks like with your wireless carrier. If you use your mobile in Canada, The United States, or India you can also receive updates via SMS. You can text “OFF” to stop receiving and “ON” to start again.

Now the only information I have got when I tried to update with new mobile number was:

I am not Twitter addict but I’d really like to receive sms’s on my mobile device: is there a way for some European countries to make this come true? Through other services, e.g. Jaiku? What is your experience?

http://www.gapingvoid.com

Three weeks ago, when I was about to move my blog from old address to this – new one I’ve noticed that people in blogosphere have gone crazy about the post I’ve written two years ago about Michael Palin’s visit to Belgrade.  In the meantime I figured out that peeps across the pond got a bit excited not only by upcoming elections, but because of controversial and hideous appearance of Sarah Palin character. It hard to explain to decent European what’s going on there, especially if one is not into world news services.

Recently, I found out that one of my readers jokingly grabbed Palins photo and gave lol-cat treatment regarding the above political story. To be clear here, I deeply respect and love Michael Palin’s work since I was a kid and watched every episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Then, the title of this photo [The Vagina Vote], got me today into wonderful serendipity and to laugh-out-loud article “Drill, drill, drill” written by Eve Ensler {playwright, feminist and activist, best known for her play The Vagina Monologues}, starting that she is having S.Palin’s nightmares… I wonder how world would be more peaceful and friendly place if Michael Palin was a candidate.

Radiohead just released a new video for its song “House of Cards” from the album “In Rainbows”.

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Watch the making-of video to learn about how the video was made and the various technologies that were used to capture and render 3D data.

For more information on data visualization (and how you can download it),  you can click on Google code page. It is interesting that this video is published under the mixture of copyrights/lefts: the code is open source licenced to Aaron Koblin, and the data (not the music)  used to produce the House of Cards music video is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

I hope that this wonderful Radiohead song and the video will inspire and gather other visual artists and IT people to use various technologies in making something innovative in the future.