Stop-motion animation …

… the intersection of technology and reality, in reverse to what was talked about in the talk yesterday afternoon (sort of).

Playing For Change | Song Around The World “Stand By Me” from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

This cover of Stand By Me was recorded by completely unknown artists in a street virtual studio all around the world. It all started with a base track—vocals and guitar—recorded on the streets of Santa Monica, California, by a street musician called Roger Ridley. The base track was then taken to New Orleans, Louisiana, where Grandpa Elliott—a blind singer from the French Quarter—added vocals and harmonica while listening to Ridley’s base track on headphones. In the same city, Washboard Chaz’s added some metal percussion to it.

And from there, it just gets rock ‘n’ rolling bananas: The producers took the resulting mix all through Europe, Africa, and South America, adding new tracks with multiple instruments and vocals that were assembled in the final version you are seeing in this video. All done with a simple laptop and some microphones.

Yahoo! pulls the plug on Web 1.0 icon Geocities; The Onion makes a joke about it. (No shortage of material with good ol’ Geocities.)

Laughs aside, it’s worth noting that in amongst all those animated gifs and background MIDI tracks, Geocities circa 1999 featured themed “neighbourhoods” and community groups a long, long time before the term social networking came into being. It was still rubbish, mind.

Follow the swine flu…

On Google Maps

On Twitter

Something for the bank holiday week-end?
Here

A show on ABC in Australia that is meant to be coming to UK soon. About advertising, how it works and how it works on consumers.

Latest SNS on the block is Quub (now in public beta), perhaps the most notable feature of which is its “user-friendly” approach to status updates, with a drag-and-drop interface for piecing together those 140 characters. Good for mobile updaters, apparently — like the “Twunning Man” who tweeted for the duration of his London marathon attempt.

… Flutter — “nano-blogging” on the scale of 26 characters per post, “for those who don’t have time to tweet” — has less and less of the spoof about it with each passing day.

Up to the great concrete dystopia in the sky went author J.G. Ballard last week. For Ballard — whose work featured some of the bleakest portrayals of western culture committed to paper — the effect of technology on society and psyche was a life-long preoccupation, so what better time to ponder the extent to which social networks interpose with the well-being of the folk who sign up to them?

Are we all party to the “heedless restructuring of everyday human relations on inappropriate, clumsy models derived from technical systems” (suggested by information architect Adam Greenfield) or, more likely, sometimes a bit put-out when no one responds to our last tweet? With 800,000+ “strangers” signing up to anonymous social network Omegle, Hunch proving you don’t necessarily need direct interaction to “do” Web 2.0, and people wondering whether Facebook is making them more lonely, perhaps it’s only a matter of time before Misanthropebook takes off.