Here’s a few things that have piqued my interest over this festive season. Hope you had a good Christmas and have a splendid New Year.
First up is an art project that I found via PSFK. The artist has made the pier lights in Deal flicker when there are lightning strikes around the globe. Follow the PSFK link for more info.
Next up is a feature on interfaces from ReadWriteWeb. Here’s one of the examples “Scratch Input”:
And finally a beautiful video demonstrating the benefits of Google’s Chrome browser.
Towards the beginning of the year I saw a talk by Clay Shirky about his book “Here Comes Everybody”. He summarised it in five words – group action just got easier. With the advent of the various social media and open publishing platforms, people have all the tools they need to connect and take action. And force change.
There’s an example of this happening right now. It’s one of those fine bits of japery when people unite to take on the behemoths and ruin their carefully laid plans…
A couple of people have created a Facebook group encouraging people to buy “Killing in the name of” by Rage Against the Machine between 13th and 20th Dec to knock X-Factor mediocrity off the top spot.
http://bit.ly/inthename
It’s been well thought through with advice on how many downloads any one person can do without their purchase being disqualified. Also to counter the fact that some proceeds from the X-Factor single go to charity, a JustGiving page has been set up to enable “just because” donations to Shelter, currently running at £4,251.63.
When I first tweeted about this early yesterday afternoon the group had 475,350 members. Approximately 20 hours later they have 535,613. The chatter on the wall page is fast and frantic. People taking on the baton to make things happen such as coordinated phone-ins to radio shows.
There’s a twitter hashtag to follow too. #ratm4xmas. Again this is worth watching for a few minutes to see the scale and gathering momentum as the idea spreads.
