antoin@eire.com

This is a great video about why youtube and the whole Internet makes a big difference to the way we live.

A well-thought out set of research on the topic, involving Stanford and Microsoft. Not just idle curiousity, related to a project I’m currently working on.

This is a good article about why video conference does and doesn’t work.

The Battle of Algiers, showing in the Irish Film Institute today, is essential viewing if you want to understand the hows and whys of terror, and how governments deal with it. Most of the film is said to be quite true to what happened - Algerian women dressed themselves like cosmopolitan French girls to get access to the fashionable lunch spots of the city, and left timed bombs behind -. The whole terror organization was organized in groups of only three people in order to preserve secrecy and make the whole movement resistant to torture. Some of the people who were actually involved in the action act in the film.

VoteTube » Daisy Girl

The ‘Peace, Little Girl’ ad, as it is also known marked the beginning of the modern political ad. At the time, no one had ever seen anything like it and the news programs showed it a number of times. It is interesting to think about what gives it its emotional strength  Allow me to quote from my own magnum opus:

The researchers referred to the well-known ‘Peace, little girl’ advertisement shown during the Lyndon B. Johnson?s presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater in 1964 as an example. It consisted of a picture of a young girl innocently counting the leaves of a daisy. When she has counted to nine, a male voiceover begins to count down, and the camera zooms in on the little girl?s face. When the count reaches zero, the little girl is replaced with a nuclear explosion, and the voice of Johnson, saying ?These are the stakes?to make a world in which all of God?s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die?.

The advertisement was supposed to be played only once. Such was the newsworthiness, however, that it was played twice more over that weekend by other networks and without payment. The fuss created and the replaying of the ad created a great deal of coverage for the campaign. In fact nowadays, some political campaigners in congressional elections simply make a controversial advertisement and send it to the local television stations, without paying for a spot at all. They depend on the editorial staff deciding to play it on the strength of its newsworthiness.

See also Wikipedia.

A poster on boards.ie writes about his experience in prison in Ireland. Plain and simple facts recounted from personal experience. Personal publishing at its best.

There is a thread on Edward Tufte’s website about the use of IVR systems. I take an atypical view on this - I think that consumers have a completely unrealistic expectation of telephone customer service. It’s just too expensive to provide. Progressive companies need to come up with other support channels, or better still they need to come up with products and services that don’t need as much handholding.

Adrian Weckler makes some observations about how grans and kids are getting ripped off on pre-paid mobiles.

In fact, the appeal of the prepay phone isn’t the cost. People don’t buy prepay because it’s cheap. They buy it because:

- they are unbanked/have no credit.

- they want to keep control of how much they are spending on their bill. (this is at least part of the reason why average revenue for prepay customers is higher than for billpay).

- they don’t want a printed bill arriving at their home, for whatever reason.

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There’s a talk here at Les Blogs about socializing in the year 2055. One of the terms used was ‘emotional bandwidth’. You just cannot fit as much into an email or a video as you can into a real live meeting.

Tags: lesblogs

Joi Ito has spent three weeks playing animated 3-d online role-playing games. He says he has seen the future, and he says it has depth.

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