Today saw the release of Flush of Fortune. A game inspired by the human centipede, giving people potentially a chance to win £1000 - the only way to achieve that target is to get more people involved. Feeling Flush? Click on the picture below.
Everything Else.
Work.Yesterday, internet browsing was a first time experience for the vast majority of ourselves. We all woke up to see entire sites to headlines blacked out and black badges on sites in protest of SOPA. I will talk about SOPA in a little bit. First, I want to talk about my experience.
As a relatively new developer, I use the internet a lot for research, reading and checking out coding tips, current affairs as well as other random things - to the point when I get home I really do want to switch off my internet - but there’s always something that bugs me at the back of my mind thinking, how do we do this? is there a better way of doing that? So surely yesterday, cracking on with a project - I found my research extremely limited, thank god for google caching. However, it struck me, that not only how much a lot of my viewing is of american origin but also the solidarity of people uniting to fight a common cause, a cause, that even the most ignorant people shouldn’t ignore. I found Wikipedia first but other sites such as wordpress have followed suit. Google blacked out their logo for viewers in America, and Wired blacked out their headlines across their sites. Michela updated her status to say “Ops! Wikipedia is like air... you don't realize about it... till is gone...”, which I think is the best statement to describe with not just wikipedia, but what SOPA will do if it goes ahead.
So what is SOPA? SOPA , means Stop Online Piracy Act. It’s a bill that is going before the american congress pushed forward by mainly the Hollywood industry and has been voiced loudly by the likes of Rupert Murdoch. It is an act to give powers to the the attorney general to block sites and their payments if they are even remotely suspected of showing anything pirate or conterfeit goods (such a torrent links to movies, selling fake louis vittons etc). If passed, SOPA will also allow the forced removal of listings that show any reference to them. You may think that this is good, as it will reduce the millions lost to piracy. However, little notice will be given to the accused sites, who will then be blacklisted and I can only imagine how easy it would be to appeal not to mention the costs involved. So let’s think about it, if you write a blog talking about a pirate link or anything that falls into the remit of SOPA - you will be contravening that act. The terminology used, is so loose that even if you posted a picture of something fake, it could be deemed as contravening the act. There is another bill called PIPA , and I quote, it is “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act”, which is also being put forward to the congress. PIPA works on a similar way as SOPA, and I shan’t go into too much detail about it, but you can read about it here.
The thing I want go into detail about it is, these Bills represent giving power to corporate people and government entities to control what we view, what we don’t view, what we can post and write about. It effectively means, what everything the west world criticises countries like China and Iran for controlling the internet viewing in their respective countries, would happen to us. I say this very callously, but basically the freedom of speech would be abused by the likes of someone who has the money and doesn’t agree what you say and decides to shut down your content. I am not saying we need to encourage or not restrict pirate content, because at the end of day if it’s your property you’re entitled to protection and yes the industry should have this right to protect their property. What can’t I understand is why can’t they innovate to protect their content. Companies like Spotify and Grooveshark, have dramatically reduced music piracy in the uk. So why can’t we do something for the movie industry or other intellectual property? Why have they settled to just block sites? In my opinion, the two bills are a lazy option and could potentially lead to abuse of this power, and should be stopped.
Before, we knew YouTube in the following format - press play, sit back and watch a video. That was until a few campaigns have decided to take it one step further and give it that extra dimension. One such example is the Skittle's Campaign:
A very simple but yet humourous way of engaging the end user and in my case it made me want to share it with some friends, a success in my book for the campaign. Granted, this is very basic and doesn't really do much to the video, but it involves you in the story and makes you a part of the product. There are other examples where you can use your number pad to go to certain parts of a video, click on hot spots to control the end result of the video by redirecting you to another video. This is all good and I have seen some very good examples out there.
However, claiming the fame to the world's first interactive YouTube driving video does not make this next example anymore exciting as watching water drip from a tap. In this case, you can you use your number pad (1-9) to control the car in whatever way you want...
Judging by the comments made - I suspect this video will go viral (if it's lucky) for all the wrong reasons. So the moral of story? Make it a bit more interesting than the world's first interactive YouTube driving video or don't do it at all.