Social Media vs. the law

The AFL ‘dickileaks’ scandal has been unfolding for nearly three days through mainstream news and of course, social media. Where it all began.

Ahh, social media. That sinister, loud-mouthed influencer of the digital playground where content goes to become viral, get blown out of proportion and break all the rules. Or does it?

The controversial story about St Kilda FC player, Nick Riewoldt and his team mate Nick Dal Santo has been flooding the Twitter stream since Monday night when the naughty photos were posted by an unnamed 17 year old teenage girl on her Facebook page. The pics have since been hidden (I feel that ‘removed’ is too strong to use when referring to anything on the Internet), but social media is still buzzing and amping the hype. Since the ‘dickileaks’ hashtag went viral yesterday, it has been mentioned over 1800 times by more than 970 contributors and been repeatedly mentioned in mainstream news reports. It is also still trending in Australia.

Hours after the material was posted, her Facebook profile was closed down and the Police had been contacted. So with the photos, she took to Twitter where her follower count exploded from 200 to 8200. Talk of legal action has been thrown around but in Oz, Social Media and the law meet at a very blurry line. An article on theage.com.au has suggested that she could be charged under the Surveillance Devices Act or the so-called Upskirting Law (prohibits the visual capture and intentional distribution of photos of another person’s genitals) if it is proven that she did take the photos. It also carries a two year jail term.

So, should Social Media be bound by the same legalities that is abided by, by other media types through communications law? Why isn’t it already?

Copyright, Libel and Slander, Liability and Deceptive Acts and Practices have been identified online as areas where social media needs to watch it’s back. In the UK, privacy laws would apply to this situation and in the US, the ‘right to privacy’ could be brought into play. Should we follow suit?

This is the 3^rd nudey Australian celebrity incident to circulate, escalate and Twitter-late this year.

This. Year.

In March, we saw Lara Bingle’s ‘deer-in-the-headlights’ naked shower photo appear on the Internet (but not before Woman’s Day reported it) and in early November, (then) Canberra Raiders player Joel Monaghan was snapped in a compromising position with a Labrador while celebrating Mad Monday festivities with his team mates. (See the censored pics below)…

What can Christmas lights in sequence to music teach us about social objects?

We here at Amnesia Razorfish talk about the value of social objects when looking at how can brands can enter social media. What’s a social object you ask? Anything that people feel compelled to share in a digital landscape. Photos, games, jokes, songs, videos.. and the holy grail, memes.

What binds all of these ‘objects’ together is the simple proposition that the content appealed to someone enough to motivate them to want to share it with their friends. Whether this is because it made that person laugh, cry, revere or repel, it triggered an emotion that caused an effect – they passed it on.

But finding the key to understanding what triggers people to want to pass content on is difficult and takes considered insight. Most brands will fail in their attempts to ‘make something go viral’ and even believe that because they didn’t get 1 million hits on YouTube with that shiny new TVC, that social media isn’t a worthwhile platform for them or for their marketing budgets.

But there are a few basic rules in successful content. And as ’tis the season for all things Christmas (and today being my last day of working in 2010) I wanted to share some fantastic pieces of ‘viral’ content that have garnered the magical seven-figure views.

This magical Christmas lights video is currently sitting on 8,183,000 views. Pretty crazy eh?

Slayer (heavy metal) meets sequenced lights. Rad. And it’s appealed to 1,587,000 people.

It’s pretty slick, but still obviously a ‘home-made job’, but 1,641,000 people watched it.

Because you can’t blog about memes without a LOLcat, this one just makes it in. Sitting at 3,757,000 views, it’s got legs (or is that fur?).

So I’ll leave you with a challenge to find and share your favourite Christmas videos.  And have a very Merry Christmas, and a safe and Happy New Year!

~ Karalee Evans, Social Strategy Manager x

The real Mad Men Christmas party: pretty dull actually

Droga 5’s recent full page ad in The Australian confirmed what we all already knew. Despite telling everyone who’ll listen that ‘the old agency model is broken’, most people in advertising still prefer the idea of a Sterling Cooper-style long lunch to a four-hour workshop on cross-media integration.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Except that according to the BBC’s Adam Curtis, the reality of sixties adland was actually a bit less glamorous than Don Draper and co would lead us to believe.

Spot the difference

On his blog ‘The Medium and The Message’, Adam’s posted a fascinating, if slightly dreary, documentary about the 1969 Christmas party of London ad agency Davidson Pearce Berry and Tuck.

26 year old Media Director Allan Rich is pure gold – he puts an upper limit of ten minutes on festive socialising and shuns alcohol for a cheeky glass of bitter lemon.

Check out the video footage here.

@bdecastella

The Future of Translating

From now on if you are in a (spanish for now) restaurant and you don’t know what it says on the menu or you are in Spain and you can’t read those street signs, all you have to do is take your iPhone out and point Word Lens at it.

It will translate on the fly and looking at the video below it is pretty amazing tech – check it out.

It tries to find out what the letters are and then looks in the dictionary. Then it draws the words back on the screen in translation.

From what I have read it doesn’t work as smooth as it does in the video and it only works on iPhone 3GS, 4 and the latest iPod, but it is still impressive. I’d love to try it, but it isn’t available on Android (hint hint).

It is available on the App store, so check it out. If you do let me know in the comments what you think

maniac13

L.A. Noire: “The Technology Behind Performance”

Check out this fascinating look at how Aussie game-devs Team Bondi (motion) captured the emotion behind the actors’ performance for their upcoming PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game L.A. Noire.

What they’ve done is years ahead of the competition as far as capturing the nuances of an actor’s performance goes.

L.A. Noire is set to be out mid-2011 from Rockstar Games.

Stuck for Christmas gift ideas? How about some Scampi Fries?

Attempting to clear some of my Christmas shopping on Amazon, I noticed a rather curious new section under my personal recommendations – English Cuisine Bestsellers.

Currently sitting at number one is a family size consignment of Scampi Fries. It’s great that an artificially flavoured wheat-based snack has been recognised as a leader in the world of English cuisine. Other top sellers include Cheese Moments, catering packs of PG Tips and Buxton Still Water. Who’s buying this stuff?

@bdecastella

Legally stream (almost) all the music you want in Australia – for free.

We all like music, right? I mean, some of us profess to enjoy it more properly, appropriately or adequately than others – this here Superior Hipster for example:

…but when you get down to it, pretty much everybody likes it.

So, we all want more of it, right? Thus the dawn and success of the iPod, and various other MP3 players. We could carry our thousands of tunes with us everywhere we went, beautiful.

Read on through my rambles to find out what I think the best music streaming service available to Australians is (so far).

IKEA’s self-assembly banner ads

With everyone and their mum banging on about ‘being part of the conversation’ it’s easy to forget about the humble banner ad…and let’s face it, a lot of the time banners sit somewhere between pretty forgettable and downright irritating.

Well, here’s a great example of why banners don’t have to be boring – it’s an IKEA ad by Hamburg’s Grabarz & Partner that made the finals of the LIAs a little while ago.

Briefed with promoting IKEA’s spring sale, the Germs could have banged out some Harvey Norman-style price screamers. Instead they managed to create something that cheekily encapsulates the IKEA philosophy – “assemble it yourself and save money”.

Unbox the banner yourself here – no allen key required.

- @bdecastella

Do you want to know when the next solar eclipse is?

and do you have a few pieces of Lego lying around? then read on

I have always known that the Greek are smart people, but that they build an ancient mechanical computer at around 150 BC has to take the cake.

the device was already discovered in 1901 in a ship wreck, but it wasn’t understood until decades later.

Now we know what it does and the Mechanism has now been recreated by an Apple software engineer by the name of Andrew Carol, who has lovingly pieced 1,500 Lego Technic blocks together, creating 110 gears and four gearboxes in total. Check out the video of it in action.

Simply great

@maniac13

Who said making music with wine glasses is boring?

This is a video by Youtube user Sp0ntanius playing the ‘Song of Healing’ medley from the Zelda classic Majora’s Mask using nothing but wine glasses.

It’s pretty clever

 

@maniac13

Groupon decline Google’s US$6bn takeover bid: wise, or demise?

It has been a great week for the people who own and run online daily-deals business, thanks to Google and Amazon raising their profile via investment and acquisition offers.

Google offered an astounding $US6 billion for the United States-based Groupon, which – as John Chachas, the founder and managing partner of Methuselah Capital Advisors, put it – equalled the gross domestic product of a small country.

Perhaps more astounding, the owners of Groupon rejected the offer. Clearly they have a lot of faith in their product and their business, a two-year-old business in the fickle dot-com world.

Presumably the owners of Groupon have a solid strategy and plan, as Google is unlikely to back away from the daily-deals business. If Google sets up its own website, Groupon – a company with a market capitalisation of $US105 million – will be up against a business with a market capitalisation of $US163 billion and one of the strongest brand names in the world.

Google is not the only company interested in the daily-deals market. Lost in the shadows of its unsuccessful (at this stage) bid for Groupon was Amazon’s $US175 million investment in LivingSocial.com, which is Groupon’s closest competitor.

Why the sudden interest in daily-deals websites and what do these sites offer?

To quickly summarise, these websites typically offer 50 to 70 per cent discounts on the retail prices of specialist consumer goods and services, such as health, beauty and lifestyle products and entertainment services.

To generate a sense of urgency and exclusivity, these offers are available for just 24 hours and only activated when a certain number of people request to purchase the offer (hence the “group coupon” play on words).

The formula is one that clearly appeals to consumers. According to Reuters, Groupon’s global network has more than 33 million subscribers across 35 countries.

While Groupon is not present in Australia, more than a dozen copycat companies have appeared here over the past year, including Jump On It, Cudo, Spreets, Scoopon, OurDeal and Zoupon.

This flurry of daily-deals sites has resulted in the appearance of aggregator sites such as allthedeals.com and buyii.com, which make it easier for consumers to quickly review all the offers available.

Beyond consumer appeal, there is also a significant opportunity for small local businesses in the daily-deals market.

The opportunity lies not so much in the revenue these sites generate for the businesses on the site but in the marketing exposure the sites provide, together with the ongoing revenue potential associated with repeat purchases from new customers, assuming the services provided are up to scratch.

From a cost perspective, the model is low-effort and low-risk as the commercial model is typically commission based. Groupon’s commission is reportedly 50 per cent of the sale price, plus credit card charges where applicable.

From Google’s perspective, the potential of adding timely offers to local businesses in its Place Search product not only provides an improved online user experience and a greater reason for local businesses to extend their Place Search relationship, it would also enhance the company’s product offering on mobile, through the associated localised relevancy, usefulness and thus desirability to consumers.

The extended reach resulting from the mobile extension and the visibility and positioning in Google search would mean a far more compelling proposition to local businesses than any independent company can provide, which begs the question: was Groupon’s rejection of Google’s $US6 billion takeover offer wise, or will it be the start of their demise?

- @jbewes

As published in The Australian Financial Review, 9 Dec 2010

TRON trailer rendered via HTML5

What can a mark-up language do for you? Apparently a lot with this latest “real-time” rendering example of an old school TRON trailer. If not a good display of the flexibility and power of HTML5, it’s simply fun to manipulate the film as it rolls.

See for your self

Most awesome homemade PVC Pipe organ ever

This video has been around for a couple of weeks now, so you might have seen it already, but I just had to share it with you in case you haven’t.

This guy build his own PVC Pipe Organ and plays a medley of different songs on it.

@maniac13

Power Pinata from Vodafone

Here’s a nice idea for a game. Smash the living daylights out of this Piñata using facebook, a robot connected to the internet and baseball bat. When the Piñata bursts it’s a free for all to grab a prize.

Here it is in action. It’s a little like watching cricket … the difference is the English are actually smashing the Aussies.

Anyone discovered any cheats to make the robot smash the Piñata a bit harder?

Lovely idea though. I’m jealous. @handypearce

PETA helps promote Super Meat Boy?

Team Meat, the team behind the brutally unforgiving platform game Super Meat Boy got some unexpected free publicity this week when they became the latest target of animal rights group PETA.

PETA, apparantly objecting to Super Meat Boy’s meat-themes launched it’s own ironically-bland parody game called Super Tofu Boy. Made in Flash, the game attempts to duplicate the gameplay of Super Meat Boy, but instead it’s the Meaty guy that’s the bad guy this time as he exacts bloody, vengeance because his girlfriend has decided that she prefers tofu. Or something.

More after the wall-jump.

Use any bluetooth keyboard on your iphone or ipad.

I’ve had this Nokia SU-8W bluetooth keyboard below for a few years. It’s really pretty cool and folds up into a very compact little box – great as a note taker for meetings. Of course Apple doesn’t like you using anything but their gear (*grr*) but I can finally rejoice because thanks to a nifty little (jailbroken) app I have my old portable keyboard working with my iphone and ipad.

How to:

1. Jailbreak your iphone. I’m using the latest version of ios 4.2 above.
2. Search Cydia for an app called BTstack Keyboard. It costs $5. Install.
3. Open the newly installed keyboard app and connect to your device.

Read more on the official BTstack website here: http://keyboard.ringwald.ch/Welcome.html

 

Sadly the SW-U8 keyboards are no more but you can get them on ebay for between $35 and $70.