Keenan insight into Ford business card debacle

Rob Ford defined the standard by which use of expense accounts and sole-sourced contracts should be judged abusive or corrupt. He defined the principle by which $1,200 in spending should be considered an outrage. Then he spent $1,200 in taxpayer money he did not need to spend, and funnelled the money into his own company. Saying “whoops” and cutting a cheque now that the press has pointed it out cannot erase the misdeed. By the rules Ford defined, he ought to resign. And if he won’t judge himself by the standard he set, council ought to do it for him.

-- Edward Keenan calmly explains why Ford should be sent packing in The Grid

Indie bookstore ponders the merits of social media

I subscribe to the newsletter for indie bookstore Of Swallows, their Deeds, and the Winter Below. (The descriptor "indie bookstore" is probably redundant for an establishment with a name like that). The November issue contains one of the better skeptical debates about social media I've seen in awhile:

1. Bust or facebook

Banker: "You suffer from a traffic problem."

Swallow: "Yes."
Banker: "Why not use social media?"
Sw.: "Would a priest visit an analyst?"
B: "The priest has no Landlord."

We now have a facebook. You can recommend our facebook. It might help others know: they could be traffic.

www.facebook.com/283college

tweet2hold is brilliantly simplistic according to Metro

But perhaps the most brilliantly simplistic exhibit is their social media app, which takes the data from tweets sent to the project’s dedicated Twitter account, @tweet2hold, and converts them into physical objects, in this case origami birds.

--  Ian Gormely of Metro provides us with some much appreciated print media coverage

Photo by Dylan Reibling

@tweet2hold seeks 2,525 secrets about the future for Nuit Blanche 2011

TORONTO, ON (September 22, 2011) – On October 1, tweet2hold (tweet2hold.com), will fill the Bata Shoe Museum with 2,525 paper birds containing secrets about the future. In order to share a secret, participants simply send @tweet2hold an @reply.

Created specifically for Nuit Blanche 2011 by Toronto media collective the Brototypes, tweet2hold is a site-specific version of txt2hold, a recent CFC Media Lab interactive art project. Both txt2hold (which debuted at Toronto’s mini-Maker Faire in May 2011) and tweet2hold involve turning a digital experience into a permanent physical object.

“We drew partial inspiration for tweet2hold from Marshall McLuhan, who loved to describe the future using pithy aphorisms,” explains tweet2hold spokesperson Ryan Bigge. “As for gathering 2,525 secrets about the future our inspiration is a little less highbrow,” Bigge admits. “It’s a reference to the one-hit wonder ‘In the Year 2525’ by Zager and Evans.”

Part of this year’s CFC Media Lab’s Nuit Blanche exhibit (entitled Technological Displacement), tweet2hold will flirt with notions of public and private by placing 2,525 secrets in plain sight inside a large tweetcage. Tweet2hold also will leverage the sophisticated analysis engine of Lymbix.com in order to determine the emotional tone of each secret and assign it an appropriate colour palette.

“McLuhan said ‘We march backwards into the future.’ Given his interest in communication technologies I think he would have been fascinated by Twitter,” notes Bigge. “Or at the very least he would have something witty to say about it.”

To learn more visit: http://www.tweet2hold.com

Twitter: @tweet2hold

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/txt2hold

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Contact:

Ryan Bigge, tweet2hold spokesperson, rbigge [@] cfcmedialab [dot] com

An animated gif for tweet2hold, my Nuit Blanche interactive art installation

When not working full-time, I've working on @tweet2hold, a new media project that I helped create as part of the CFC Media Lab's IAEP.

We're now into the marketing phase of the project, trying to get 2,525 secrets about the future before Saturday, October 1. As a bribe to convince you to submit a secret, I've included my very first animated gif:

Smooth jazz cannot rescue bad website design

Tempted though you are, you stay focused and click for the San Francisco restaurant. One bit of advice: If you’ve got a subwoofer attached to your computer, now’s the time to crank it up, because you’re in for some auto-playing, royalty-free, ambient techno smooth jazz!

-- Slate.com on the enigma of bad restaurant websites

Michael Schur from Parks and Recreation explains why taxes are okay

People don’t seem to make the connection between their tax money and the benefits that they get from their tax money, like free education, and the fire department, and police protection, and everything else. It drives me bonkers, because it’s pretty straightforward to me. People think of taxes as money just being robbed from you. They don’t consider the benefits of paying taxes. The benefits that they get and also the benefit of just being a part of a large group of people: a town, or a city, or a country, or a society that allegedly should stand together and all try to help each other. So my cynical, angry side I gave to Ron. And we have him voice the idea that there’s no point, that governments can’t function, that society is unreasonable, that everyone should just leave everybody else alone.

-- From The Onion AV Club

Freelancers Unite! Either Full Price or Free

Being underpaid is worse than not being paid at all. You know what you’re getting yourself into with the latter. You are a volunteer, so you can unvolunteer at will. You can prioritize other jobs above the non-paying “favor” job and expect that the person benefiting from your unpaid labor will, if they have any common sense, understand and you can decide just how much effort and time to expend because you’re the one holding the magnanimous cards. Not so with underpaying gigs. It’s all the work and the demands  of a well-paid opportunity, but with a lot fewer zeros.

 -- J. Maureen Henderson explains why working for less than you're worth is for chumps.

Because, Because, Because, Because, Because, Because, Because, Because, Because

The Future of eBook Advertising in Hilarious Charticle Format

Softcover Hardsell
Hello, (Stoli) Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, the popularity of e-books has resulted in various experiments that place advertising between the covers. And while a Keebler elf suddenly appearing beside Proust’s precious madeleine might sound like bad sci-fi, the same thing was once said about urinal ads. The trick to making e-book sponsorships palatable is finding a seamless partnership between prose and unique selling proposition (while hopefully avoiding a pathetic fallacy). --Ryan Bigge

Book: What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
Synergistic Concordance: Since Gladwell’s best seller journalism involves more product integration than an episode of American Idol (to wit: Heinz Ketchup, Hush Puppies, Pepsi, Ragu spaghetti sauce, the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, the Aeron chair, Blue’s Clues) it’s not much of a stretch to imagine e-book sponsors. Especially since all Dog articles first appeared in the ad-friendly New Yorker.

Book: The Girl Who Played With The Hornet Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Synergistic Concordance: Like Gladwell, the late Larsson was obsessed with verisimilitude, at least as it applied to Apple laptops. So while a Stieg sentence like “best of all, it had the first 17-inch screen in the laptop world with NVIDIA graphics and a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels” ain’t exactly literature, it does scan better than most of the ads in Wired, and provides multiple opportunities for click-through promotions.

Book: The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook by Ben Mezrich
Synergistic Concordance: At this point, reading about Facebook without being interrupted by series of annoying bleats about Farmville or miracle weight loss tricks would feel positively wrong. And given that publishers are undoubtedly collecting information on your e-reading habits anyway, it won’t be long before e-book screens perfectly resemble your Facebook feed.