middledigit.net | jonathan hopkins

I love ASCII stuff. But I’m not so sure about ACDC. This is interesting nevertheless - a music video created in Excel. Not quite Radiohead’s House of Cards. But still cool.

[via the brand spanking new onlinefire blog, which is super smashing great BTW Mel, Graham and co. - more hippy love coming at you from me!]

Wow. Ben has just spotted this. Jed05 created a level on Little Big Planet in order to propose to his girlfriend. First, mariage proposals on Twitter, now in-game proposals. Just wow. < voiceofanoldperson> What is the world coming to? < /voiceofanoldperson>

I actually think this is a bit cruel. But I appreciate the geekery involved and the website created to showcase the project. And did find it a little bit funny, if I’m being really honest.

[via @juter]

Said Ste on Twitter just now. So I had to take a look. And there is was, a creative agency called lisapmaxwell using its website as a ‘live case study in viral marketing’. Insane it may well be right now, but in the very near future I think it will be the norm to be able to video chat with anyone anywhere. It will be expected.

PS - I didn’t notice the request for a name first on starting a chat window, hence I’m called ‘yo dude’!

Today I saved my 5,000th link on Delicious. That means I’ve invested 13 hours and 45 minutes in Delicious, or thereabouts (I reckon using some fairly crude calculations on 10 seconds per save, allowing for some tag management and re-saves). I actually thought it would be more as this figure doesn’t seem that impressive, but then if I imagine sitting for 13 hours straight saving links it gets a bot bigger in my mind.

So. the big question is why bother? Well from a practical point of view, it helps me remember and find stuff I come across on the web. It’s as simple as that. It’s a big filing system that has traveled around with me from computer to computer and job to job. I actually feel naked without it, when browsing on someone else’s machine or mobile. I feed it relentlessly and I’m adamant that one day I’ll be able to extract even more use out of my bookmarks and everyone else’s bookmarks. For now though, I really do love Delicious and think it’s one of the best, most useful Web 2.0 apps that I use every day pretty much without fail.

Thoughts?

Oh and if you want to get some useful stuff, I’d personally subscribe to the feed for my stats tag. The cat stuff may geek you out a bit.

Green Thing (massive disclaimer, I work with the team and have been doing a spot of digital comms around this) has relaunched it’s website. And, not only that, there’s an amazing new creature (just check it out!) and seven different incarnations of it staring in a brand new film to mark the occasion.

‘Meet Green Thing‘ is a brand new film launched on the new site, explaining the whole new Green Thing and the seven things you can do to lead a greener life.

Meet Green Thing from Green Thing on Vimeo.

1. You get from A to B without any C when you Walk The Walk
2. It’s delicious but it causes more CO2 than cars so go Easy On The Meat
3. Resist the urge to buy the latest and Stick With What You Got
4. Turn down the central heating and turn up the Human Heat
5. The art of wasting nothing and using up everything: All-Consuming
6. Instead of jetting your way around the world, Stay Grounded
7. Don’t leave it on or even put it on, Plug Out

Here’s the semi-official blurb about Green Thing, just so you know.

Green Thing is a public service that inspires people to lead a greener life. With the help of brilliant videos and inspiring stories etc. from creative people and community members around the world, Green Thing focuses on seven things you can do - and enjoy doing. Join people from 171 countries doing their green things and making a difference.

Green Thing is for people who want to live greener lives, but haven’t yet found a way to do it. E.g. whilst most people are aware of climate change, a tiny fraction have actually changed their behaviour. It’s powered by creativity. Green Thing believes that great creativity can inspire people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t consider and is working with a growing community of artists, writers, musicians, film directors to make doing each month’s green thing entertaining.

Green Thing is endorsed by many respected environmental thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic including: Nobel Peace laureate, Professor Wangari Maathai and Cathy Zoi, CEO of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. Green Thing’s goal is to create people-powered sustainability. By helping as many people as possible in as many countries as possible to be greener. Green Thing will use this people power to get governments and businesses to take fast action to do the green thing too – thereby helping prevent climate change.

And here’s the details of the people behind the film and the new Green Thing creature:

- It was designed by Andrew Rae
- Andrew used to do a BBC animation programme called Monkey Dust
- Animation is done by Tom Baker
- The voice of the creature is Aaron Willmer, art director and ex Karmarama
- Background music is an original composition for Green Thing by musician and composer Marc Folan - called ‘Almost Green’ (!)
- Sound effects are with thanks to Freesound
- Story and creative direction type stuff - Naresh Ramchandani (Green Thing co-starter)

So, go and do the Green Thing !

This popped up on my Twitter stream recently - an ‘experiment’ in which $100,000 is put on display in public in the US and the resulting action is captured by a collection of hidden cameras and microphones. In a nutshell, some people just point and stare and others take more extreme action and try and get at the cash with brute force. Overall, it’s rather entertaining and certainly got my attention (and a post/link hey?). It’s like one of those blue sky (euuugh) style ideas that comes up in a brainstorm actually got implemented.

BUT - the film bizarrely doesn’t show you how it ends. And you can’t easily share the film or embed it - other than emailing it to a friend. It appears to be on YouTube (see below too) - but this isn’t linked to on the main site, which I find a bit odd if you want to remove all potential friction that might stand in the way of something going a bit viral. Anyway, enjoy it if you haven’t seen it.

I’m pretty late to this but I’ve just finished watching Nerdcore Rising. Amazingly cool, genuine, funny collection of people and a great insight into the genre’s growth in the US. Hot Chip, Hedluv . . . we have our own hugely popular homegrown stuff too. I can’t wait until all this celebrity stuff finally goes out the window and the true rise of the nerds happens. Technology is driving huge global cultural change and nerds are finding themselves in the spotlight. And I love it (being a bit of a geek myself).

Full stream here, though be sure to check out the official site.

Official trailer below.

Here’s MC Frontalot, star of the movie and the rapper that’s held up as being the Godfather of the scene.

Can you imagine when you go into a club or pub or somewhere and the person sat next to you is actually sat somewhere else in the world but has decided to ‘dial-in’ to be there ? Virtual clubbing? Popping out for a drink via your iPhone app? Hmmm. . .

Updated . . . just noticed a ‘what that brings to the table’ non-intended pun from the guy at Cisco !

[Via a ‘multimedia news release’ with details of the first ‘public’ TelePresence rooms in conjunction with Tata Communications]

Whilst Suw is on ‘blogging sick leave’ I’ve been geeking out with a guest post over at Kits and Mortar. I wanted to write about cats, GPS and stuff and it turned into a rather lengthy post. The first of a few I hope, thanks Suw! It’s really funny though to be blogging away from home after so much one-on-one love with middledigit. I think that might explain the slightly different style and unusually lengthy nature. PS - if you work in PR, it’s worth reading this - what happens when someone like Suw is confronted by reams of spam from PRO’s, even after taking hte time out to write this.

In the meantime, I’ve also been doing HEAPS of Flickr trawling and stumbled across this - some awesomely geeky ink-work. I am awarding the proud owner of these tattoos full middledigit-certified geek status. The first ever award and (I have a feeling) the first of many. More geek tattoos here BTW.