Vers Geperst: Fresh juice for the brains

Last week I attended the Vers Geperst meeting at Club 11 to tell the audience about the Masters of Media weblog project. Based on the Pecha Kucha presentation idea, all the presenters had only 11 slides of 12 seconds each to propagate their views.

Besides the Masters of Media blog, some other interesting ideas were pitched. What about the already famous ‘Whatever’ button? Are you tired of all the times you have to agree to useless legal information? Just install the Whatever button Firefox extension and you don’t have to worry about all the nonsense anymore! Although I had already installed it before the presentation, Michael Stevenson’s talk and imagery still gave me stomach cramps from laughing.

Another idea came from the guys from ToxTox TV. According to the creators ‘ToxTox is the next generation internet television platform. It allows you to watch video content from your couch, on your tv, using only open software.’ An ambitious idea with lots of opportunities and I’m anxious to see how this works on my television.

The Open-Search project, presented by Erik Borra, focusses on the role of privacy and search engines. The Open-Search project steers away from the centralized powers of the corporate search engine and provides ‘an exemplary peer to peer, collaborative event, whereby people mutually form a search engine without the intervention of central servers or a central actor.’ Definitely worth checking out.

The last presenter I want to mention is Anne Helmond, who is responsible for the lovely Fidel Castroian picture of myself in this post. She presented her photography and also a project she did on drapes and windows. More photographs of the meeting are available on Anne’s Flickr account.

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Disrupt Technorati

This next thing is an interesting initiative. Make a blogpost and link as many people to disrupt -or maybe you could call it hack- Technorati’s ranking system. It’s like the Google bomb for blogs, and why shouldn’t we participate in such an initiative to check out what it does, right? It would be interesting to see what happens if this thing grows big. Web statistics would become less reliable.

Although I’m not sure if this idea is original, I got this through Laurence-Hélène’s blog and the initiator Mark Collier’s Viral Garden blog. eMarketeer Seth Godin also made a post about this, and his list looks different already from the list that I have posted below. To read how this works here is a part of the how-to from Mark Collier’s post Revenge of the ‘Z-Lister’:

What YOU can do is simply create a new post on your blog, but CUT AND PASTE the list I have below, and then ADD any blogs you feel aren’t getting their due either. It can be 1 blog, or a hundred(or none if you simply want to repost the same list), but the idea is, find those great blogs that, for whatever reason, you feel aren’t getting their due, link-wise.
Then after you leave your post, the next blogger will do the same thing, cut and paste YOUR list, and add THEIR blogs to the list, then repost it. Add the same instructions in your post that the next blogger should cut and paste YOUR list, and add any blogs they feel should be on it to THEIR list. The list will get increasingly long, and all the blogs will get a sort of reverse ‘pyramid-affect’ of link-love.

This is the infamous list:
Creative Think / Soloride / Movie Marketing Madness / Blog Till You Drop! / Get Shouty! / One Reader at a Time / The New PR / Own Your Brand! / OTOInsights / bizandbuzz / Work, in Plain English / Buzz Canuck / New Millenium PR / Pardon My French / Troy Worman’s Blog / The Instigator Blog / AENDirect / Diva Marketing / Marketing Hipster / The Marketing Minute / Funny Business / The Frager Factor / Mindblob / Open The Dialogue / Word Sell / Note to CMO: / That’s Great Marketing! / Shotgun Marketing Blog / BrandSizzle / bizsolutionsplus / Customers Rock! / Being Peter Kim / Billions With Zero Knowledge / Working at Home on the Internet / MapleLeaf 2.0 / darrenbarefoot.com / Two Hat Marketing / The Emerging Brand / The Branding Blog / CrapHammer / Drew’s Marketing Minute / Golden Practices / Viaspire / Tell Ten Friends / Flooring the Consumer / Kinetic Ideas / Unconventional Thinking / Buzzoodle / NewsPaperGrl / The Copywriting Maven / Hee-Haw Marketing / Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn / Multi-Cult Classics / Logic + Emotion / Branding & Marketing / Popcorn n Roses / On Influence & Automation / Bullshitobserver / Servant of Chaos / converstations / eSoup / Presentation Zen / Dmitry Linkov / aialone / John Wagner / Nick Rice / CKs Blog / Design Sojourn / Frozen Puck / The Sartorialist / Small Surfaces / Africa Unchained / Perspective / gDiapers / Marketing Nirvana / Bob Sutton / ¡Hola! Oi! Hi! / Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid! / Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together / Community Guy / Social Media on the fly / Jeremy Latham’s Blog / SMogger Social Media Blog / Masey.com / New Media Wanderings / Return on Innovation / T’s Melange / Masters of Media

Yahoo! Timecapsule: What would you like to say to the future?

Yahoo! launched a new subpage called Timecapsule at timecapsule.yahoo.com. Although not very popular in the Netherlands, a timecapsule can be put in the ground with some stuff you think are important to you at that time, you dig it up fifty years later and you can look back at all those memories.

Jonathan Harris, the man behind Yahoo! Timecapsule, thought this would be a great idea to try out on the web. And so we now have a digital timecapsule. Accessible to the whole world to put in their messages of Faith, Sorrow, Fun, Anger and lots more. In a personal note on the website, Harris states: “Yahoo! Time Capsule sets out to collect a portrait of the world – a single global image composed of millions of individual contributions. This time capsule is defined not by the few items a curator decides to include, but by the items submitted by every human on earth who wishes to participate.”

A few days after the start though, Michael Krumboltz from Yahoo! Timecapsule writes on the Encapsuled blog that the Anger category seemed to draw the most text submissions. Interesting stuff, because I think this Timecapsule is a reflection of a whole group of people (Yahoo! users). It’s even mass psychology maybe.

So what do we want others to think of us in 2020? Because that is when the Timecapsule will be opened, at Yahoo!’s 25th anniversary: “After 30 days, time capsule content will be saved onto a digital archive and sealed, to be opened at Yahoo! corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. on the company’s 25th anniversary in the year 2020. In addition, copies of this content will be presented to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings archives in Washington, DC to be preserved, studied and shared with future generations.”