Going Global – Paris Hilton and Beppe Grillo

I have just been so busy lately that it has been hard to find the time to catch up here. At the end of last semester I was too busy catching up with assignments to blog, but now that I have incorporated my online lifestyle into my academic one, I will have no excuse.

New Presidential Candidate
I have a few interesting links that should be relevant to our course in Media. I’ll start with Paris Hilton. We were shown a short 29 second clip at a lecture today; here is a longer version that shows a little introduction, as well as a minute more footage that I think shows Paris in a better light. She can have my vote.

Beppe Grillo
Beppe is a force to be reckoned with. I saw a documentay on the ABC on Tuesday night, George Negus, I think. He featured a story on Beppo Grillo, a comedian and political activist in Italy. He is using social networking to mobilise opposition to the Italian government; and Beppo pulls no punches. He is hard hitting and direct. Have a look at his blog and find out more about this man who is changing people’s perceptions and influencing their opinions – but not their voting habits. Not just yet; but he is using social networking to mobilise a very large following throughout Italy. He has a very large Meet Up network. Have you heard about Meet Up? They have a few Adelaide groups of online people with common interests. Here is a link to Beppe Grillo’s blog:

Beppe Grillo’s blog

and here is a link to an article in The New Yorker by Tom Mueller where you can read about V Day.

Here is a YouTube clip of Beppe, it’s in Italian, but you can easily find other clips and stories about him. I think he should come to Australia and shake up our government.

Beppe Grillo on Italian television.

The Social Network Conversation Prism
Brian Solis has been developing a graphic representation of his social network on the internet. I have found this to be quite fascinating, as well as similar to my own; although very different. I am still digesting some of the information it contains and applying this methodology to my own web presence. The Social Network Conversation Prism -

FriendFeed
The links I found above were discovered through FriendFeed, a service that gathers together information from my web activities and logs them so that I can find them later. I can ‘follow’ people with similar interest to mine, and find interesting web pages that they have published or found. It is a great way to find new resources and sources of information on specialist subjects. You can have a look at my FriendFeed stream here.

Another site that is a good resource for material on social networking is SocialMedian. It specialises in news about Social Networking, Web 2, Social Media Philosophy, Twitter and related topics.

Twitter is a very broad channel of short snippets of information and gossip. Plurk is similar to Twitter, but has layers of conversation and chat within each post. I find it more chatty, not a source of hard news. But it does have a good local Adelaide presence. FriendFeed allows you to filter the type of information that you want to gather and has a wide variety of topics. You can add comments to items you find interesting; which allows you to hold conversations and pass on feedback and commentary. This is similar to the newsfeed in FaceBook, but more effective. Yahoo have a similar service at www.mybloglog.com but I don’t think it is as good as FriendFeed. SocialMedian is much more specific to social media as a source of information.

Brian Solis’ PR.20 blog is a very good resource if you have a look at his links, online friends and the free e-books that you can download.

Digital Story Technology
As part of this course we are going to make a short, digital story. If you need some original music to use as background music, or to inspire you to create your own imagery – I would like to offer some of my own for students of this course to use. Here are a couple of links to pages where you can listen to some of my music, in a variety of genres, techno, hip hop, hippity hop, dancy, trancy stuff; as well as some classical, jazz, reggae and world music. The Button Project at www.chrisloft.com/portfolio/button.htmlis an addition I made to my portfolio earlier in the year. It uses the Yahoo Music Player, hidden in the left hand corner of the page. Click on the little ‘play’ symbol (>) or click on the player, then click on the playlist and you can select from over 300 tunes. Most of them are instrumental, no vocals. Feel free to add your own, or use the music in any way you want for your digital story project.

If you cannot load the Yahoo Music Player (because it might not display in some browsers) – there is a flash player at http://www.chrisloft.com/portfolio/button.html – this might not work properly in Internet Exlorer though; it was written a while ago and uses frames. IE7 doesn’t like frames; so you may need to drag the vertical frame over to the right.

You can also hear some music on my MySpace pages. I’m not going to list them here. You can find them at www.radiocurly.com

Well, I’m sure that must be enough for now. I reached a little milestone last week when this blog registered one thousand visitors – over about four months. Thank you for sharing some of my scattered thoughts and ramblings. I wonder what time it is. I’d better not look; better not have any more coffee, I’ll just finish off this bar of chocolate.
adios
Chris Loft in the BlogLoft