You have until the 12th to submit your messages to NY on the world's largest LED sign. DO IT!

The Hello World Project 2/3

You have the impression that the disasters of the world do not touch you anymore? You feel vaguely sorry for other people's misfortunes but you don't feel the inner urge which used to make you help your neighbour ? WiFi-SM is the solution !

WiFi-SM is an Internet connected wireless device that you can fix on any part of your body. It automatically detects the information from approximately 4,500 news sources worldwide updated continuously and analyses them looking for specific keywords such as death, kill, murder, torture, rape, war, virus etc.. Each time the text of the news contains one of these keywords, your WiFi-SM device is activated through the Wi-Fi network and provides you with an electric impulse. This impulse is calibrated so that you can feel a certain amount of pain, but is completely safe.

WiFi-SM: feel the global pain

] In an escalation of White House efforts to circumvent
] what President Bush calls the news media "filter," the
] Pentagon plans to launch a 24-hour satellite channel from
] Baghdad to make it easier for U.S. television stations to
] air government-authorized news about Iraq.
]
] The satellite link, dubbed "C-SPAN Baghdad" within the
] administration, is to go on the air in a week or two. It
] begins at a time when guerrilla violence in Iraq is
] increasing and the White House is revising and
] accelerating plans to transfer governing authority to
] Iraqis.

Pentagon Plans Iraq Channel (washingtonpost.com)

] Throughout the 1990s, the IT sector was fuelled by the
] Internet and the Year 2000 bug. "Big PR" followed the
] money and taught it a process developed to sell
] pharmaceuticals, and the information landscape changed.
]
] Here's a rough outline of the process:
]
] a) Publicise the disease;
]
] b) Agitate for action;
]
] c) Announce the cure.

Blissful Ignorance: Placement Prostituting the Press

Get a quick idea of what is going on in the world by simply looking at pictures pulled from top stories...

News-Images.com

] After 35 years in the business of titillating and
] offending, pornographer Al Goldstein says his magazine
] can't compete anymore. The audience is just as large, he
] says, but the Internet has transformed the product and
] its delivery.

On the other hand, Maxim sure has taken off in the last few years. Porn has become a commodity. Good articles have not. What does this tell you about news?

My Way News: Porno has moved to the net.

] let me just say that, as a slashdot troll, i have a
] firewall which allows me to dynamically modify my o/s
] fingerprint, a highly adaptive cookie manager/poisoner
] that can decode many cookies in realtime (stop using
] urlencode!), a browser plugin that lets me modify my
] entire http header including user agent, a
] database-driven transparent proxy tracker which harvests
] new proxies 24/7, scripts to generate free email accounts
] by the 100's, good web scripting skills, and on a good
] day around 500 moderation points on slashdot from over
] 1,000 monitored accounts.

This is a really great discussion between a troll and a sysop. It really speaks to the fact that governance of an internet community is a very complex problem that shares many of the social dynamics of governance of a IRL community.

Trolls vs. Sysops...

] The numbers have network executives scratching their
] heads. You may have read the news story a few days ago:
] three weeks into the new television season, and viewers
] still haven't shown up.
]
] The fall-off in viewership is unprecedented,
] and among no group is this more the case that young males
] between 18 and 24, a prime target group for advertisers.
] Among this cohort, the drop in viewership has been an
] astounding 20 percent this year compared to last, which
] showed a 12 percent drop in men 18-34.

OK, lets see you try to blame this one on P2P networks.

ABCNEWS.com : Silicon Insider: The Game That's Replacing TV

] No -- future TV will may be unrecognisable from today,
] defined not just by linear TV channels, packaged and
] scheduled by television executives, but instead will
] resemble more of a kaleidoscope, thousands of streams of
] content, some indistinguishable as actual channels. These
] streams will mix together broadcasters' content and
] programmes, and our viewers' contributions. At the
] simplest level -- audiences will want to organize and
] re-order content the way they want it. They'll add
] comments to our programmes,programmes, vote on them and
] generally mess about with them. But at another level,
] audiences will want to create these streams of video
] themselves from scratch, with or without our help. At
] this end of the spectrum, the traditional "monologue
] broadcaster" to "grateful viewer" relationship will break
] down, and traditional advertising and subscription models
] will no longer be viable.

The director of BBC New Media on why MemeStreams is the future of Television. :)

TV's Tipping Point: Why The Digital Revolution Is Only Just Beginning: PaidContent.org

] The more commercial television news you watch, the more
] wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq
] War and its aftermath, according to a major new study
] released in Washington on Thursday.

While thinking people are apt to be little suprised by this, its actually a fairly damning report on just how many of us are lieing to ourselves. There may be questions that can be raised about the objectivity of this group, but the press seems to carry their studyies frequently. This specific report, however, has had almost no coverage.

Asia Times - Study: People who watch TV less likely to understand Iraq