'Powerbands' consumer investigation in Australia

Some of the more astute readers may remember a post I did a while back on those mysterious 'Powerbands' that claim to improve balance and athletic performance.


It seems the lawyers from the ACCC have stepped in, probably after they bought a whole truckload of the bracelets so as not to be humiliated in the Christmas company picnic cricket-match and were still spanked by the guys over at payroll.


Story: Powerband marketing is 'misleading'

There is absolutely no proof of this but I will unashamedly claim that the ACCC were alerted to this scandal through my own remarkably unapologetic and thorough investigation and subsequent treatise on the shady matter of these bracelets.


I expect Ping to be brought to its knees in days.

Amazon Studios

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
Winston Churchill

Starting with a wanky and pretentious quote is a great way to begin a blog post, as it quickly establishes that I, the author, am much smarter than you (it takes a lightning quick wit to type ‘democracy quote’ into Google, I can assure you. Can you imagine how hard people had to work to be pretentious before the internet? They probably had to read books). Pretension aside, I have actually included Winnie’s wise words for a reason; and that is to introduce the theme of democracy into this article, and, more specifically, introduce the follies of democracy, especially when it comes to www.amazon.com’s new project: Amazon Studios.

Amazon Studios is a world first open community film-making project, in which anybody can upload a script to the Studio’s website. Once a script is uploaded people can rate it, discuss it and even revise it, making the changes they would like to see and then re-uploading. These scripts can then be made into ‘test-movies’, a sample video clip (again made by anybody who has the time/commitment to do so) which will give the world-wide community an idea of the finished film product. The idea behind all this is that extensive world-wide collaboration will produce scripts which are good enough to turn into Hollywood blockbusters.

The encouraging aspect of Amazon Studios is that they’re not just pissing in the wind when they say that there is a chance for your movie to be discovered. They have a ‘development deal’ with Warner Bros. Studios, and have some well-known film-makers and writers who judge the monthly contests which are meant to weed out the cream of the crop in collaborative online filmmaking. These contests are serious business: 1.1 Million dollars is up for grabs for the best film script/idea uploaded to Amazon Studios in 2011.

Why it will work

One thing that Amazon Studios has going for it is its funding. This isn’t a small start-up from some Hollywood hovel by a bitter and resentful writer who couldn’t crack it into the big-time. These guys have some serious financial muscle behind them (Amazon.com’s revenue in 2009 was close to US$25 billion), evident in their development deal with WB and huge cash prizes offered in the writing contests. This financial backing adds credibility to the product, and provides incentive for artists to work hard.

In addition to their financial position, Amazon Studios bring a revolutionary idea to the table. The concept of user-made content could potentially revolutionise the way the film industry works. Who knows better what the people want than the people themselves? And the internet, the crux of the whole project, provides the basis for global collaboration. This project is directly born out of the existence of the ‘net; it could not possibly work without it. It is an example of an innovative way to harness the highly developed connectedness of the globe.

Why it won’t work

But within the idea of a revolutionised movie-making industry lies the problem: the movie industry doesn’t need to be revolutionised. The people who work in Hollywood are the best in the business*, and the cut-throat nature and competitiveness of the industry demands the survival of the fittest. You could argue that a similar cut-throat industry could develop via Amazon Studios, but I would contend that Hollywood has just the right amount of competitiveness; and it is competitiveness against professionals. Amazon Studios, on the other hand, has the potential not to produce brilliantly collaborated ideas but actually destroy feasible projects due to amateurism. An analogy may be handy at this point: imagine the original concept of a movie as a tiny seed. In Hollywood, this seed is cultivated carefully; its care is placed (more often than not) in the hands of experienced writers, producers and directors. These people care for the seed and nurture it, so as to give it the best possible chance of becoming a majestic flowering Oscar-tree.

Amazon Studios, on the other hand, begins with the seed, but it is in danger of being over-watered and trampled. Because anybody can edit and change anybody else’s project; a really great idea can turn into a lousy one quickly.  Amazonian apologists will argue that this is counteracted by the democratic nature of AS, that bad ideas will never find favour with the public. My counter-argument is that the people who give the green-light to a project in Hollywood know a lot more about good movies and ideas than people who vote for a project on AS. A really ridiculous and silly idea for a movie (say a huge ship which is declared unsinkable gets sunk on its maiden voyage...yawn) may find favour with Amazon Studios because the prime voting audience might be thirteen year old boys with nothing better to do than vote for stupid movies. Sure, the judges who oversee the monthly and annual contests are qualified, but for the movies to get looked at by those judges they first have to find favour with a potentially idiotic public.

This is where our old mate Winnie’s quote comes back into it: do you really want to trust the average person to decide which movies get made? Or would you rather trust the ponytailed, fast-talking Hollywood exec who reads Variety and whose primary interest is reading scripts and producing movies? It’s a tough one, I know, but for me the exec just wins out. Let me put it this way: would you want your house designed by a committee of Joe Schlubs or by one qualified architect?

I have tried to reach this conclusion in the most even-handed way I could. I don’t want it to seem like I’m poking holes in Amazon Studios’ concept for the sake of it. I think it would be fantastic if an online community-produced feature got made into a blockbuster. But think of it this way: if a supposedly democratic society can vote G.W Bush in twice, can we really trust democracy with our movies?  

Check out: http://studios.amazon.com/

*Small and purposely hard-to-read disclaimer: I am aware I have made the rather ungainly assumption that 'Hollywood' is where all the best people are. Film industries in other countries make fantastic movies too. In the context of Amazon Studios, however, it is the most relevant film industry to relate to. 

Truth is Overrated

Don’t believe everything you’re told on the internet. That is a sentiment that is drilled into you repeatedly in University, and for good reason. The internet is full of fraudsters and phishers and charlatans and people who just like to give misinformation for the hell of it. Here’s an example of how relying on the internet as your source of information can be costly:

Google Map error sparks international conflict

The article above describes how Nicaraguan troops ‘accidentally invaded’ Costa Rica after allegedly using Google Maps as their cartography source. As an Australian on the other side of the world, the article seems almost comical, but I assume that it’s no laughing matter in the disputed territory. It’s scary that Google, a company started by a couple of post-grad students in 1998, can now have an impact on world politics. But maybe it isn’t that scary, after all major misprints such as 'Dewey defeats Truman' have appeared in print media before and have the potential to spark similar incidents.  

However, on a personal level it could be argued that we are taking an increasingly large stake in the internet as our source for irrefutable truths. Perhaps it is due to Facebook’s insistence that people use their real identities online that we are becoming slacker with our online vigilance. Our expectations of the internet are shifting, from the AOL/MSN other online chat days when it was rare for people to use their real name online, to today where not only are our real names used but images of us are tagged to that name. After all, what’s the point of social networking if nobody knows who their ‘friends’ are?

Perhaps our slackening vigilance is also due to - despite still being constantly reminded that the internet is a dangerous place - our increasing tendency to conduct important matters such as major purchases and banking with ease online. I’ve personally never had any trouble with online fraud and I can name countless friends who haven’t either. From my perspective then, the internet seems like a pretty safe place. But perhaps banking and other online transactions are more to do with using the internet as a tool to complete objectives rather than the internet being used as an irrefutable source of truth, as appeared to happen in the Costa Rican situation.

Perhaps we are inclined to believe what we see on the internet because we often actively search for it. As opposed to television or newspaper, in which information is presented to you, the internet invites you to look around and find something yourself. Perhaps by doing this, we - consciously or unconsciously – end up at a webpage or article that matches our previously held assumptions about the topic, and therefore we cease our search. There is an old quote ‘For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes’ which could perhaps sum up people’s attitudes to trawling the internet for information. That article supports your views on abortion? Good. Read it, bookmark it, and don’t search any further for views which might challenge it.  Of course, this quote had nothing to do with the net: it was Francis Bacon who wrote it and that was in 1620.

But old Frank was probably onto something, and maybe what happened in Costa Rica was simply an extension of this theory. Allow me to play devil’s advocate here: Perhaps the Nicuraguan troops knew, in their heart of hearts, that the territory they trespassed onto was Costa Rican. But, with Google’s error in their favour, perhaps they thought they could get away with it anyway. They had found a (usually reputable) source that backed up their claim, and looked no further. This theory of looking only as far as you want to is strengthened by the fact that Microsoft’s Bing map servers displayed the correct border. The right answer was only another two or three clicks away for the Nicuraguans, but they didn’t pursue it. I doubt that the whole affair was as black and white as that, but it’s a good exercise in speculation.

On a slightly different tangent, I don’t think the internet has knocked books off their perch as the most reputable source for any given topic. But, if one cares to think somewhat laterally, think about the authors of those books. How often do you read the ‘bibliography’ of a non-fiction book that you have just read? If you don’t (which I suspect is the majority of people) how do you know that the author didn’t just get all his theories off the wacky and unreliable internet and then write them down and print them? This is a pretty unlikely situation, but it does lead to the question: does the very existence of the internet mean that other sources are now less reliable by default? If the whole world is using the ‘untrusty’ internet as a resource, is the web eventually going to replace all other sources of information?

This proliferation of the internet could lead to tricky situations where fast information is held in higher regard than accurate information. Consider online newspapers. A rather competitive market now exists in the online world to break the story on the website before any competitors. This makes the paper look good. So if you’re the stressed out online-editor and a journalist comes to you with a story, a big world-changing, career-making, holiday-paying story, do you ask her to double check the facts, or do you run it online, knowing full well that facts can be edited online on the fly? 

You do the latter. Your online readership may read the initial breaking story, which misrepresents a few facts. If the reader is like an ever increasing number of people, they will get their dose of news from off the internet and perhaps they do not cross check their information with other sources such as television or radio. They might not visit the website regularly (perhaps once a day, over breakfast) and in the time period between when they read the initial story and when they read the updated, correct version hours or even days later, they might have already accidentally invaded Costa Rica.

How do I love thee, Internet? Let me count the ways...

*Hollow promise warning* 

One of these days I will conduct an internet ‘sit-in’ to prove that someone can now quite comfortably live without ever having to leave their computer desk. Of course by conduct I mean I will make it an official one (notify the police and all that) because of course I’ve been conducting an unofficial internet sit-in for pretty much all of my life. I could quite easily live off of eBay purchases and if I get really desperate for food my wireless modem is edible, which is one of the reasons I signed up to my current IP in the first place. Even if I never get around to an official sit in, I can fairly safely conclude that we have become increasingly dependent on the internet to live our day to day lives. Here are a few of the activities available online that have changed the way we interact with the world.

I somewhat sheepishly admit that I would be hard pressed to successfully transfer money from one of my bank accounts to the other if I physically visited a bank. I would desperately claw at the teller window, mumbling incoherently about a login number and password and trying desperately to locate F5 so I could refresh the page. At this stage I would be asked politely but firmly to please leave so that dear old Mrs Robinson behind me could just bank her weekly pension. Of course, one of the great things about internet banking is that I don’t have to deal with people or queues, and it’s interesting to think that although the internet is a great place for social networking it’s also a great place for friendless hermits to hang out, confident that they don’t have to speak to another soul unless they really want to. Even then, they can do so under the guise of a Japanese schoolgirl, but I digress.

Who uses travel agents anymore? Lots of people, I bet, but those people are idiots. Why would you risk a conversation with an unattractive, overweight and odorous travel agent when you could quite comfortably book your trip with the delightful website models on Virgin Blue? (At this point I will permit you to stop reading for a moment to open a new tab and check out Virgin’s website. P.S. Please be careful searching for ‘virgin flight attendants’; I did so with safe search firmly ‘on’.) In fact I have a theory, and it basically consists of my contention that anything which is detrimental to the internet (spyware, viruses, phishing, Internet Explorer) is actually concocted by the International Association of Travel Agents in an effort to ensure not everybody falls totally in love with the internet and puts them all out of business. Of course this theory makes absolutely no sense if you consider that a lot of travel agents now make squillions in revenue off their websites, but that’s like saying that the theory of relativity makes absolutely no sense if you don’t believe in gravity.

Two beautiful people you will never meet in the real world.

Perhaps less essential but certainly more fun than online banking and travel agents is the Web 2.0 phenomenon of user driven sites. I’ve already devoted one post to Twitter and probably will never get around to one on Facebook (it would be the same as examining your partner of forty years: if you start looking too deep you’d find too many reasons not to love it) but another site dear to my heart that deserves a serious look is YouTube.

YouTube is one of those things where I have no idea how I lived without it. Did I just wait for things I wanted to watch to appear on T.V? What a stupid waste of my time! Now I can spend these unproductive TV watching hours on YouTube, mindfully exploring the plethora of film at my fingertips. In my extensive internet sleuthing I discovered something shocking yet somehow refreshing. Watching Katy Perry’s ‘California Girls’ (for the purposes of educating the masses, of course) I noticed it had around about 40 million hits. Curiosity piqued, I headed over to see how many hits Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech had. Suffice to say YouTube is dominated by teenage girls and dirty old men. (If you really want to know, MLK’s speech had a paltry 9 million hits).

Latest YouTube sensation, MLKaty Perry. "I have a dream...a Teenage Dream."

Wikipedia is one of those websites that doesn’t work in theory. Why would a collaborative encyclopaedia, able to be edited by anyone, ever contain any useful information rather than snide and immature jokes and links to porn sites? But the beauty of Wikipedia is that it does work in practice. It has become so beloved, such a trusted source of information, that people are deeply offended if a page is vandalised and quickly change it back. The most recent example I can think of is when the Melbourne Storm salary cap cheating news story broke. Being a product of my time, I first noticed the information on my news website homepage, and for the next forty-five minutes feverishly refreshed the page, getting all the new information as it came to hand. In between reading the ‘official’ reporting of the event, I headed over to Wikipedia to gauge the reaction.  I wasn’t disappointed. I visited the page perhaps ten minutes after the press conference commenced, and the first line had been altered to ‘The Melbourne Storm is a cheating scum rugby club based in Melbourne and participating in the National Rugby league.” Slightly bemused by this hard hitting criticism, I refreshed the page. The words ‘cheating scum’ were gone. Such is the vigilance of the Wiki-police, who refuse to have Wikipedia’s good name besmirched by insolent surfers. 

**Interactive blog segment!**

This is the part where you prove to yourself that Wikipedia really does work as a font of all knowledge. Go to a Wikipedia page, and edit it. Be as outrageous (‘Nixon was an alien’) or as subtle (‘Jack Nicklaus won the 1968 US Open by four strokes') as you like; the result will be the same. Your edit will not last 24 hours. Of course there are a few guidelines: What you write must not be true, and you should do it on a page that would get a reasonable amount of hits. (Anybody can get away with having their name written in the middle of the biography section of the third son of the Bulgarian foreign affairs minister during the 1960s, nobody thinks you’re clever.) If your edit lasts longer than 24 hours, write to me, and I will go and check it out (I promise not to re-edit it). If I can find it, then you win a prize.

Meanwhile, I put my money where my mouth is, and slightly changed Australian actor John Howard’s entry, citing that he not only shared his name with a certain former Australian PM, but in fact was the same person:

A star-studded career

Needless to say, it didn't last long.

There is a point to all this online vandalism. If you had explained to George Orwell the concept of Wikipedia, I imagine he would have been quite ecstatic. You see, it’s very hard to have a domineering world-wide state governed by an omnipresent being when people have access to Wikipedia. It appears, from our above observation (and your practical experiment), that it would be incredibly difficult to change world history through Wikipedia because whoever vigorously monitors their favourite Wikipedia pages would never let a morsel of misinformation appear. So then Big Brother has to find other channels of controlling the human race, such as discovering every man’s greatest fear and using this as leverage to gain their allegiance, but I really doubt he can be bothered doing that. In short, the power of knowledge now rests with the people, and it seems that knowledge is so valuable to people that they won’t accept any tomfoolery, virtual or otherwise. When else in human history did the ‘everyday’ population have the ability to compile, compose and refine a knowledge source explored by millions every day? 

The above sites are just a small sampling of the wondrous resources the internet has given us. Life without these resources, would, I begrudgingly admit, be possible. But it would not be fun at all. How would we spend our idle hours without the magic of YouTube or add to our already questionable knowledge without Wikipedia? Perhaps we’d have to spend our time reading classic novels or plays, or even (god help us) interacting physically with other human begins. Thank god for Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee.

Lord of the Ping(s)

Apple has thrown their hat into the social networking ring with the release of Ping, a networking service firmly based in music. When I first heard about it, I was intrigued, wondering how the service would work and if it was going to knock other sites like MySpace and Facebook off their well deserved lofty perches. I also wondered why Apple had chosen such a hideous sounding name for their product, but imagined that ‘Ping’ scraped in just ahead of ‘iPing’ and ‘MySpacev2.0’ (what makes me really amused is that some high powered marketing twat got payed ~$20,000 to come up with monosyllabic drivel. ‘Ting! Zing! Bing! Xing!’ There you go Apple; I just named your next four products. That’ll be 80k thanks) However, after exploring Ping, I don’t think Apple is seriously threatening the industry leaders of social networking – yet. 

My primary issue with Ping is that it feels like a big marketing tool. From a PC you can only access Ping through iTunes 10 and so Apple have integrated Ping with their online music store. Consequently it seems that almost all the status updates from the ‘big bands’ (e.g. I’m following Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga, Muse, Nirvana) are simply tools to sell more records. Bob Dylan, for example - and I get the feeling if you asked him Bob would never have heard of Ping - has included all his own songs in the ‘Music I like’ pane (a spot usually reserved for artists to show which other musicians they admire), positively screaming ‘this page was made by a record company exec!’.

Subtle, Bob

 I will keep a close eye on this, but I also have a theory that a lot of artists will have links to other acts on the same record label as them, regardless if they actually ‘like’ the music. Obviously as musicians record sales are one of their primary concerns, but after people have gotten used to the intimacy of Twitter a status update on Ping that’s obviously from a PR intern is not exciting. Twitter is exciting because for a lot of personalities, their tweets have less to do with selling records and more to do with the artist’s everyday life, giving a personal connection to followers that our invasive cyber society craves. In this way Ping is more like an extension of the ‘Store’ page on a bands website rather than a social tool. 

Ping is only a few days old, and at this stage it seems rather heavily populated by the international acts that I mentioned before. Ping has the potential to become significantly better when it is utilised by smaller, local acts, in much the same way that MySpace is used now. Again, there are several barriers that I can see which would prevent smaller acts choosing Ping over MySpace. The primary one is that more people have access to the internet than they do to iTunes Ping. Not everybody uses iTunes, and even less of those people who do use it would actively use Ping. Of course the logical conclusion is for bands to set up both MySpace and Ping profiles, but I bet I know which one most bands will create first. Since Facebook took over the mantle from MySpace as the primary social networking site, MySpace has focused on the music side of social networking, and it does this admirably. It is too early to judge whether Ping will seriously challenge this, but it would have to do a few things differently before it can be considered a serious contender.

Nirvana and The Boss

 What needs to change? For a start, I’d love to see Ping move off the iTunes pane and into an actual website accessible from a normal browser. I’ve never been particularly enamoured with the iTunes store interface, and to have a whole social networking site within this theme gets very annoying. The fact that you have to download and install iTunes 10 to get access to Ping is a turn off as well, I could have started ten Twitter accounts by the time I was ready to launch Ping. Couple with the way Apple mysteriously ‘gathers information’ before starting Ping, I had the eerie feeling I wasn’t social networking but being interrogated by the virtual Gestapo. 

The actual artist pages are very bland, and it seems in the first release there is very little room for this to change. To give an example, Lady Gaga’s page looks very similar to Bruce Springsteen’s: all pages have the same drab, greyish background. I can’t understand in the era of Web 2.0 why Apple would be limiting online creativity to some sort of Orwellian conformance. Of course, one man’s drabness is another’s functionality, so what I see as boring others will see as refreshingly simple. 

Ping's "Simple" User Interface

 Ping will also increase significantly in ‘funness’ when more ordinary people join up. As far as I can tell, none of my friends are using Ping (no sniggering over my lack of friends, please. They’re just not as sophisticated as me, that’s all). Apple were planning to have some sort of built in connectivity with Facebook to facilitate bringing over large quantities of people to the new site, but Facebook pulled out at the last minute. Now I am left with sending the standard ‘You should join me on Ping’ emails provided by the site, but I don’t hold much hope for these (when was the last thing you did something that someone suggested you do via a generic email?). Ping also lacks fun-ness simply because there isn’t much to do. Sure you can look at band pictures, or get a status update from them, but there is nothing that Ping adds to social networking that wasn’t provided before by either MySpace or Twitter, apart from the ability to purchase songs directly from your Ping feed.

Therefore, at this stage, I’m inclined to think of Ping not as a social networking revolution but as the next stage in online shopping evolution. Artists can post songs via their Ping page and followers can buy those songs from Apple in one click. Ping can be seen as extension of the iTunes store, giving artists a chance to talk back to their fans and be their own salespeople instead of relying on Apple to flog their wares for them. 

Unfortunately, Ping lacks the intimacy of Twitter, the functionality and popularity of Facebook and the industry standard-ness of MySpace. In two months I will endeavour to write again about Ping, because it is slightly unfair to judge a social networking site a third of a month after it was launched. In two months time I could be saying what a fool I am, that Ping has changed the way we interact forever, but at this stage unless some massive improvements are made I think Ping will remain a fledgling product.

Check out
www.apple.com/itunes/ping

The Internet: Scamming people since 1990

Con artists the world over must have had a grand party when the internet was invented. No  longer did prospective peddlers have to drive around in a beat up station wagon, selling their wares to whatever small town sucker happened to be bamboozled by the fast talking sales pitch. The simplicity of the internet (when it comes down to it, its point and click) and the extent of its reach mean that more shysters can connect to more suckers twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, all with the wonderfully intimate anonymity that only the World Wide Web could possibly provide.

Now, there are far too many dodgy internet scams going on out there to cover in one blog post, but in my daily perusal of the world’s best resource I came across the wonderfully vague technology of the hologram infused ‘Powerband’ (generic term, the different makers have different product names). I’d love to tell you what these things actually do but I don’t have much of an idea myself. Essentially marketed towards athletes, the bands claim to use a hologram to tune into your body’s natural frequency, thereby assisting with balance, power, fitness and general good looks.

Now you may be thinking, ‘well of course it’s going to sound stupid, simplistic and faux when you boil it down into a sentence. I bet they can explain their product a lot better.’ Well I’m afraid that I have simplified a little bit, but not much. One of the makers of these powerbands, ‘Power Balance’, have summed up their product in two succinct paragraphs:

Ahh, now I get it.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I see that a company can explain something that claims to increase your body’s core strength by 500% in two generously formatted paragraphs, I conclude that they’re either making more money than Nike, Coke, and Microsoft put together and therefore don’t need a long-winded explanation of their product, or bullshitting. Since after a quick perusal of the share market pages I didn’t find Power Balance on the ‘startling improvers’ list, I was forced to conclude that maybe Power Balance were stretching the truth a bit. Of course the amazing thing on the internet is that nobody really minds if you stretch the truth a bit. In fact, it’s expected. If everyone on the internet was honest then why would we visit?

The fast talking sales pitch might not have much of a place on the internet but con artists realized that the internet is such a magnificent place that your virtual headquarters can look as dazzling as the big boys. This just isn’t true in real life, where selling products out of your shed or the back of your car doesn’t compete with a flashy, edgy Apple store. But, thanks to the wonders of the digital age, for a relatively small fee your digital home can look as good as any. Compare the Eken power band website (another powerband marketer) with the Apple:

www.apple.com

www.ekenpowerbands.com.au

Both are pretty slick interfaces. Now, compare the digital headquarters with the real life buildings:

Apple, Inc.

'Poweband' HQ

Ok, so I made that last pic up, but you can see the point I’m trying to make: on the internet, as long as you have a budget of around 200 bucks, nobody knows if you’re based in canary wharf or on a rusty houseboat at the end of a wharf. Gone are the days when you had to outlay millions of dollars for some prime office real estate. Now, with the advent of cheap web-hosting and a lot of quality free web design products, you have absolutely no reason to have an unprofessional online presence.

So why not give selling a make-believe product online a go? You'll be surprised how stupid people are.

Xtranormal

I love the internet. I love movies. It was only a matter of time before these two competing mistresses met, and I have to say I am not disappointed at the outcome. Xtranormal is a neat little website that allows you to make small movies with their animations, all you need to do is fill in the script and choose your actors, which in this case are computer rendered figures.

It’s hard to describe Xtranormal without actually using it, but the most pertinent analogy I can think of is Lego. You have a limited amount of bricks (in Xtranormal’s case, the scenes, actors and animations) but you can combine these elements in limitless possibilities. The fact that the actors look a bit like Legomen only facilitates this comparison.

Of course, this wouldn’t be the internet without shameless capitalism (I always imagine the entrance to the internet having that sign off the Simpsons “Sorry, but there’s profit to be had.”) and so there are ‘premium’ options if you feel like spending a few dollars to get some more actors/voices/camera angles/gaffer boys. I subscribe to the nihilist school of thought and think that the movies you can make with the ‘beige’ set are potentially funnier than multi-dollar blockbusters (the rule of the indie film applies to the net too!)

Before you Spielbergos get too carried away, it should be noted that there a few glitches/bugs in the system, such as the foreign voices not really sounding very authentic and some of the load times getting towards the astronomical range. I noticed that for a pretty tidy 129MB you can download the text-to-movie program and use it offline, definitely a plus, especially if you’re going to have to explain to someone that you spent 2GB of your internet plan getting a small CGI rendered person to swear for your amusement.

Another cool feature is that you can group your movies together, and if you use similar actors and settings before you know it you have a long running series on your hands. Its up to you whether you want to turn it into a US 22 episode marathon or a classy British ‘leave the audience wanting more’ 6 week project. Also, once you’ve downloaded your movie you can share it magically through Facebook, Digg, Twitter and wherever else you hang out online so that the four hours you spent making a one minute movie aren’t in vain.

This is the kind of stuff that the internet is made for. I can understand why people used to say they were bored in the 19^th and 20^th century (did you know Charles Dickens created the word boredom?) but in this day and age there is no excuse why your few idle hours at work can’t be spent making ‘The Greatest Story ever Xtranormaled’ masterpieces.

Check out:

www.xtranormal.com

Twitter: Or, How to stop worrying and love the 140 character message

Twitter provides a simple, direct and quick way to connect with people. It has enormous potential as a marketing tool or something that can quickly spread ideas and important messages. Here are some cool and intriguing things that would not have happened without Twitter, the little website that is changing social interaction one tweet at a time:

• Professional cyclist Lance Armstrong impulsively organised a group ride in Ireland via his Twitter account.

• @abolish cancer announced that for every person who followed their account, a supporter of theirs would donate one US dollar. Over $7,500 was raised.

• Recently, South Korea tried to bar users from reading tweets from an account opened by a branch of the North Korean government, who were using Twitter to spread anti-South and anti-US propaganda.

• A Chinese school used Twitter to help students learn by asking them to tweet and respond to fellow students tweets in English

• Mike Massimino, an astronaut, sent the first tweet from space in 2009 during a mission to the Hubble space telescope.

• In the US, the library of Congress has pledged to document every single tweet made since Twitter’s inception in 2006.

• In Australia, the Australian Football League official Twitter has involved the fans in the game by publishing crowd tweets LIVE on the scoreboard at the game. This turns every spectator into a potential commentator. Look> http://twitpic.com/2jujhx

Twitters effectiveness in connecting people will only grow as more people sign up, with currently 100 million users on Twitter. In the future, Twitter could be used even more prominently in events like elections, national disasters, and other global issues which require the quick dissemination of important information. Twitter is more than just inane status updates, it’s changing the way we interact.

Check out: 

www.twitter.com

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_usage