Do Thoughts Of Aliens Trouble Us?

GCHQ© and DAVID ICKE©

I've been following Clif High for 9 years.

The early years were like podcasts on crack.

Particularly when his webbots picked up that a famous female politician was about to die.

"Who could that be?", "Who could that be?", "Who could that be?"

I demanded of myself in a surly manner.

Margaret Thatcher died a week later.

The webbots also picked up the Occupy protests, but because they are interpretive, Clif described it as people refusing to pay their mortgages and occupying their houses.

In the above presentation of the series critical thinking, that I've been following, I think he's back to doing some of his best forecasting.

We well see.

Radiohead

There's a reasonable amount of evidence to assume I'm a data junky and full-on information whore. I can often hold a conversation and listen to another one at the same time and I guess this habit arose from not getting enough information from just the one.

It's not the first time of late that I've been rebuked by friends for reading RSS feeds on my mobile in nightclubs while chatting and listening to the music and only last weekend in Mexico I popped out of a nightclub to pick up my Macbook Air and do a little light blogging from a club that wasn't quite distracting me enough. I'm like that when the mood takes me.

It's not really a good thing I guess because I only know my way round Beijing, through my electric bike. If it was just down to taxi passenger experience my geography wouldn't exist as taxi rides were invented for digesting RSS on a mobile phone - It took me months to even find my way home or to the office without assistance. Traffic jams come second to data and once I'm sucked in I rarely look up again.

Google Mobile Reader is possibly the most powerful digital-fix-teat. It's way more data intensive than Twitter although considerably less contextual because I don't know most of the posters. Knowing the people who create content is the highest context for receiving it. It sounds obvious but isn't if you're thinking of taking up blogging.

Anyhow, one of the drawbacks of this is that I often come across stuff on-the-move that I want to come back to and without de.licio.us or Google Shared Items or starred items or whatever reminder 'du jour' I'm playing with, I sometimes fail and that's why I'm a bit late in reposting this amazing video by James Houston who entered the Radiohead Nude track remix invitation. You can read about it all over here but the pudding is below. (He's looking for work now he's graduated, in either London or San Francisco - I'd snap him up if I were a digital agency)

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Then there's Robert's Visualisation for Radiohead's music video competion that is also completely brilliant.

Weird Fishes: Arpeggi from flight404 on Vimeo.

Which all leads nicely on to Iain's post about why Radiohead are way ahead of the pack when it comes to embracing Web 2.0 which is a term that some dislike but I don't because I do think that if you're using or thinking of the internet in much the same way as you did ten years ago it's possible you've missed out on a conceptual leap that is having a profound impact on the way that people can get involved with brands or communities. Here's Iain's video presentation and I've finally just discovered that his blog name comes from a reference to the A Team (Team Awesome?)

My Online Marketing Presentation About Radiohead from iaintait on Vimeo.

Playtime

dreadedgmom

A post on Ian Tait's - Crackunit about the quality of YouTube commenting and community led me to do a bit of exploring. I discovered the 'Community Channel' Vlog by Natalie. She is an Australian born Vietnamese Asian, who at first glance comes across unfairly, as yet another vacuous and self indulgent net teen exploiting her natural good looks with a veneer of digital literacy disguised as drama talent vlogging. You'd be mistaken. Her video clips are wildly popular in the main because she is such a babe, but underneath it all there's a charming tenacity on her part to make engaging YouTube clips that often have a role playing make-believe narrative.

Natalie's videos generate mini waves of video responses from people like Van Awesome below that I particularly like, but what is remarkable for those video responses is that while in the main they are pedestrian (they're not meant to be Hollywood) there are flashes of rather good knowing film nods and techniques not to mention great humour. They're not consistently brilliant nor are they meant to be, but this is the future of community video entertainment and I can see no reason why Tim Tams haven't gone out of their way to offer Natalie a sponsorship collaborative deal, or indeed why a youthful brand isn't fostering the right environment where people like Natalie and Van Awesome can do stuff that keeps us coming back more often. Regrettably, I can just imagine that if they did, a monolithic and data driven marketing department wouldn't know how to handle a personality that is all about experimentation, making mistakes and sometimes mediocre musings on life with occasional flashes of delightful brilliance. MTV is surely missing a trick and so are a bunch of others. Snack brands seem ideal to me for this kind of bite sized entertainment format and shouldn't be an excuse for as Nigel Hollis writes, new media making old mistakes.

I guess the question is not so much 'is it good?', but instead, is it better. It seems that compared to other forms of entertainment and for up to 400 000 people who have watched Natalie's most popular clip, the answer is most definitely yes. Here's a video response to her work which has plenty of links for Natalie's own work. She may not be brilliant yet but I'll put money on it that she will be in the future. This is just the testing ground.