The below is an email reaction that I had to this blog post by Danah Boyd (a researcher at Microsoft Research New England) which was sent around the office.

This blog’s been sitting in drafts for 3 months and so it’s about time I posted it seeing as I seem to be making the same point at every SM event I attend these days and really, I’ve just got to stop. The point I’ve realised that I was trying to make all these months ago when I first drafted this blog is that the current crop of social media platforms do not adequately reflect the way we socialise offline oh and that information decay is an essential part of the social experience.

It’s an excellent article so give it a read and then, I’d love to hear your thoughts on my take on it all,  if it inspires any.

Alastair

Some teens are using Facebook in a very different way from me – are these habits familiar to you guys?

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The girls’ actions aren’t familiar to me but I think the article and observations make for some pretty compelling reading.

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“Internet Comics” brings you… Batman Vs. Longcat! Sadly not a real series but the 5 comic cover mockups over on College Humor are excellent.You really should click through and have a look.

Despite not normally the biggest fan of College humor (I don’t think Europeans are really their target audience anyway) I have to agree with many of the commenters that this is totally brilliant! If this idea was fleshed out into a real series available in the shops I’m sure it’d be a massive hit amongst fans and collectors alike.

Anyone fancy starting a petition?

Introducing the Hitler-as-a-bear-skin-rug rug…

Creepy, macabre and not entirely original this new piece by equally creepy and macabre artist Richard Stipl is on display in Prague until January as part of the Decadence Now! Visions of Excess art exhibition.

Urgh…

One Hello World – Moving voicemail messages put to music.

Dreamfarm tap device thing – Pretty cool idea.

Newspaper extinction timeline – PDF infographic.

Cowboys and aliens – Excellent trailer for next year’s blockbuster.

Unlogo - Project to remove branding from our lives.

The best blogs of 2010 – not that we’ve read many of them.

Enjoy!

Woah… don’t mess with Basement cat. Srsly.

Despite having name that’s going to immediately put most people to sleep and an incredibly underwhelming poster I think that Source Code is probably going to turn out to be one of the better cinematic moments of 2011, if not an opening weekend blockbuster.

Source Code itself is a mix between the Bourne films and Quantum Leap and sees our hero (played by Jake Gyllenhaal)  leaping into the body of a man who has only 8 minutes left to live and when I say leaping I mean leaping.

The leaper (Jake) is transported into the body of his doomed flesh donor from the future through the use of a strange computerised device. When he arrives he’s disorientated, has partial to total amnesia but usefully manages to retain all of his skills and language abilities from before the leap. There’s no Al and no Ziggy and throughout he only ever leaps into one person’s body but really now… I hope Scott Bakula at least gets an invite to the premier.

The time travel device (let’s call it the accelerator) taps into something called the Source Code and allows users to experience the last 8 minutes of anyone’s life before it vomits the user back out into the present. Our hero Jake therefore finds himself as a passenger on a train that’s destined to explode exactly 8 minutes after he realises what’s going on and he has just those 8 minutes to work out who causes the explosion and why.

Here’s the trailer so see for yourself.

As a huge fan of Quantum Leap, 12 monkeys, the Bourne films and that other film with Tom cruise and the precogs whose name escapes me… I think this is going to be great fun to watch. That is of course as long as the film lasts longer than the 8 minutes it takes Jake to explode.

Everything you see in this advert for Silestone (counter tops) is unreal – it’s entirely CGI and totally mind blowing. We’ve seen a lot of big advances in digital video this past year but honestly this is simply stunning.

Production took Alex and Juan of The Mushroom Company 2 and a half months from concept to end and Alex is responding to people in the Vimeo page comments now if you want to ask him anything. Enjoy!

OK horrible blog title I know but I hope it’s at least functional enough for me to be able to share this interesting find with you all.

We don’t normally share links about Facebook apps but this one really captured our attention. Essentially Swat Labs’ Facebook app is a network visualisation tool that sensibly displays all of your friends and their connections to each other.

While it may not sound groundbreaking or particularly interesting to most at first, once you start looking into it it really does get quite fascinating. While poking around my own network I began to realise just how distinct and separated some areas of my social circle really are. I located 4 separate clusters of colleagues from old jobs, one fringe network of friends who I game with and even a couple of mini closed friend networks right at the centre of my social circle.

Of course I probably knew these networks existed and could have identified them if I had really thought about it to begin with but that doesn’t make it any less fascinating to see that offline connections mirrored so realistically in an online environment.

Anyway, I thoroughly recommend this app. It isn’t loaded with features that’ll bother your friends either.

It all makes so much sense now…

link (via)