@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.

Once Again, Walter Benjamin Was There First

Back in 2009, I wrote about the sex appeal of bicycling for Spacing. This was not exactly groundbreaking journalism, but I thought I was adding something to the debate. Turns out, however, that Benjamin was there first:

The figure of the woman assumes its most seductive aspect as a cyclist. . . . In the clothing of cyclists the sporting expression still wrestles with the inherited pattern of elegance, and the fruit of this struggle is the grim sadistic touch which made this ideal image of elegance so incomparably provocative to the male world.

I discovered this thanks to a quite wonderful N+1 article called Hasids vs. Hipsters, which also includes this little gem:

That each group selected Williamsburg as the terrain for carving out a secessionist utopia can only be blamed on the cunning of history, plus the L train.

And this gem too: 

A group dressed as clowns led a funeral procession along Bedford to protest the decision, but failed to capture the public imagination since they lacked any vernacular of protest other than the language of a grant application.

Text Message Keepsake Generator txt2hold Invited to Toronto Maker Faire

TORONTO, ON (May 5, 2011) – txt2hold (txt2hold.ca), a new free service that transforms any text message into an attractive and permanent paper keepsake, will be participating in Toronto’s first ever Maker Faire (makerfairetoronto.ca) to be held this weekend, May 7 and 8, at the Toronto Brick Works. Developed by Toronto-based media collective the Brototypes (with the assistance of the CFC Media Lab), txt2hold allows anyone with a cell phone to capture and display a precious digital memory forever.

“txt2hold is built around the idea of creating a physical keepsake of a digital experience,” explains Brototypes spokesperson Dylan Reibling. “Our research process showed us that most cell phone users have many text messages with sentimental value, but these texts are hard to preserve and easy to lose. Our txt2hold service solves this problem by making your favourite texts easy to preserve and hard to lose.”

During Maker Faire, users can forward their precious text messages to 647.462.8292. The txt2hold system uses a powerful semantic engine to interpret the emotional content of the text. It then generates a unique and attractive origami shape that seamlessly incorporates the original text message. Utilizing a magical combination of technology, graphic design and paper folding, txt2hold is meant to generate a shoebox of text message mementos for the 21st century.

“The technology-infused, Do-It-Yourself ethos of Maker Faire dovetails perfectly with our project,” explains Reibling. “And we’re honoured to be a part of the event’s debut in Toronto.”

To learn how to let your memories unfold 160 characters at a time, please visit http://www.txt2hold.ca

Twitter: @txt2hold
Facebook: www.facebook.com/txt2hold

Contact Info
Dylan Reibling, Brototypes spokesperson: dylan[dot]reibling [at] gmail.com

How Starbucks Fought for Its Life by Asking Bloggers to Sell Their Soul

I received this email today. Really.

Hi Ryan,

My name is Tony and I help promote industry specific content. Your site is a great resource and I have an infographic that I think your readers would enjoy.

Starbucks is a global business powerhouse.  It has come a long way from a small Seattle coffee shop to 16,000 different locations worldwide, making it the world's largest coffeehouse and blowing competition out of the water. This infographic details their path to global business powerhouse and takes a detailed looked at the numbers:

[URL DELETED]

I hope you enjoy the graphic as much as we do, and we'd love to hear any feedback you might have!

If you have any questions or want more graphics for your site, please free free to contact me!

Thanks,
Tony Shin
[email deleted]
(815) xxx-xxxx
Folllow me on Twitter @ohtinytony