Dear oh dear. Here’s a lesson in how not to get people involved in taking action on climate change. The embedded video, which is no doubt supposed to be hilarious, depicts some sceptical people including school children being blown up for not wanting to participate.

I’m not sure how or why the makers thought this might help to convince sceptical people to participate. Apart from being in really poor taste, this kind of thing only gives ammunition to those who are vocal in their opposition to action.

The video was written for the 10:10 campaign by Richard Curtis of Love Actually, Blackadder, Four Weddings, Bridget Jones’ Diary and Notting Hill fame. Epic communication fail this time, Richard.

Needless to say, the organisation involved has removed the video from their website and replaced it with an apology. But hey, this is the internet, so it can still be found pretty easily.

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Here’s an interesting TED Talk from 2009 by Nicholas Christakis. It’s about how social networks of many kinds, not just online social networks, can be used to detect epidemics a lot earlier than previously.

We’re not just talking flu epidemics here, although he does discuss a study of the H1N1 virus they conducted within the student population at Harvard. We’re also talking about the spread of ideas and behaviours within networks.

While watching the video, I couldn’t help but think about the book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Amazon Assoc. link) by Malcolm Gladwell, which addresses similar ideas about the spread of ideas and viruses. If you’re interested in human social networks in general, it’s well worth a read too, if you haven’t already.

Needless to say, I find this stuff pretty interesting. Do check out this (20 min) TED Talk if you do too.

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I think this TED Talk by Iqbal Quadir is a poignant and powerful reminder that connectivity equals productivity. For those of us who use the web and smart mobile devices daily, it’s easy to forget just how much these enable greater productivity, even if some of our time is spent on more trivial or entertaining activities.

In this inspiring, embedded video, social entrepreneur Iqbal Quadir tells how his experiences as a kid in Bangladesh, and later as an investment banker in New York, led him to start a mobile phone operator connecting 80 million rural Bangladeshi.

In the process, he became a champion of bottom-up development, rather than giving increasing amounts of aid money to top down development, which seems not to be working very well, if at all. In fact, he maintains that it only empowers authorities to maginalise citizens. Even in countries that have grown rich from oil reserves, autocratic regimes have grown hugely wealthy, while poverty among citizens remains entrenched.

Enter Iqbal Quadir. Not long ago in Bangladesh, only one in 500 people had access to a telephone. Quadir points out that “Vasts amounts of wasted time results. The only way people can depend on each other is to connect to each other, which leads to productivity.”

Watch the video to find out how he overcame the significant hurdles involved in what turned out to be a massive connectivity project and business. How could poor people afford to use mobile phones? Who would invest in such a project in such a poor country? This video is a must see.

via Entrepreneur

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Google has actually had real-time search for a while now, and has been improving it periodically. You may have read my previous post from May comparing 10 different real-time search engines, which included Google’s offering.

To recap, as they say in the embedded “How to” video, Google Realtime allows you to search real-time content from across the web. Sources include news stories, blog posts and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and Friendfeed. The real-time stream constantly and automatically refreshes, feeding in live content as it’s posted to the web.

Google Realtime features now include:

• The ability to look back in time to view updates from the past.
• The ability to refine your search by location – by town, state or country.
• The ability to browse a conversation (on Twitter for instance), to see how it developed over time.
• The ability to set up Google Alerts for real-time updates.

Personally, I really like the addition of being able to refine search by location. As in my previous real-time search engine comparison post, I searched under a favourite topic of mine, cleantech, and then refined the search just to Australia.  It came up with some interesting and useful results for me. I’ve previously said, as it’s not a new feature, that I also like the ability to be able to search historically. This remains true.

What are your thoughts on Google Realtime Search? Have you found yourself using it yet? Is it useful enough for you, or do you use another real-time search engine? Do you use real-time search at all?

Check the embedded video for the full set of new features in more detail and how to use them.

Thanks @warlach via @andrewsayer for the heads up this morning.

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Well by now you’ve probably seen the trailer for the much anticipated, and apparently quite dark, movie about the founding of Facebook, The Social Network. Now comes a new spoof (there are others) of The Social Network trailer, complete with an excellent parody soundtrack.

The Twit Network trailer relentlessly lampoons Twitter’s flood of minutiae from people’s everyday lives. It begins with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey having a conversation with a friend which goes “I need to create a way to blog that is as random and incoherent as writing on a bathroom wall”. “Why”. “Because normal blogging is tedious and dumb and leads to fully formed ideas”.  I’m sure you get the picture. It’s funny :)

The parody trailer also begs the question, if  The Social Network turns out to be a box office success, will we one day see a feature film about Twitter too?

On a side note, as you can see from the tweet below, which is a quote from the video trailer, Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone seems to think it’s funny too.

via Mashable

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Well, the full theatrical trailer is out for the much anticipated film ‘The Social Network’. The film is based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book: The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal (Amazon Associates link). As you can see from the embedded trailer, it stars Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Timberlake as Napster cofounder Sean Parker.

It remains to be seen whether the film will be any good, or whether it will be a hit with critics and the public. No surprises for guessing whether Mark Zuckerberg will like it or not! I’ll certainly reserve any judgment until I actually see it. On paper the film seems to have quite a bit going for it so far. It’s directed by (previously Oscar nominated) David Fincher, who has directed such films as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Panic Room, Fight Club and Se7en. According to IMDB, also in pre-production is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That said, direction is one thing, the writing has to be really good too.

Surprisingly, the film has been chosen by The New York Film Festival to be its opening night film. The New York Film Festival is known for not choosing mainstream American films, so that’s certainly a vote of confidence. The selection committee chair and program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center apparently said that ‘The Social Network’ is the rare film that “powerfully captures the spirit of its time”.

Going by evidence in the trailer, the film doesn’t shy away from dealing with Facebook’s widely discussed (especially in the tech media) privacy issues. And as an aside, I think the choice of soundtrack for the trailer is brilliant. It’s a version of Radiohead’s Creep by Belgium girls choir Scala.

The trailer certainly does its job of making me want to see it (as if I was ever not going to). How about you, are you going to see it? It’ll be interesting to see just how successful this film will be at the box office. No doubt it will do pretty well as a digital download, torrent or otherwise.

UPDATE: I’ve just noticed that the hashtag #SocialNetwork has appeared as a Promoted Trending Topic on Twitter. Well that should grab the attention of quite a few social media users! I wonder if Sony Pictures will want to run Facebook ads too? I’m not sure Facebook would allow that. Would you if you were Mark Zuckerberg?

UPDATE 2: It appears order has been restored in the wider world. The international version of ‘The Social Network’ trailer has been released, and it includes Radiohead’s original lyric “so fucking special”, instead of the more sanitized “so very special” in the U.S. version; otherwise, the trailer is the same. If I may say, the “so very special” version never seemed right, not even in Radiohead’s sanitized version. And another thing, Trent Reznor scored the film and says “it’s really fucking good, And dark!”. If he says it’s dark, well, it must be dark.

Hat tip to TechCrunch for the international version update.

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As you can see from the screenshot of the tweet from the Wikileaks Twitter profile below, recent rumors regarding the demise of Wikileaks appear to be false.

In case you are unaware, Wikileaks is an international organisation that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive files from governments and other organisations. Amongst many other files, the whistleblower organisation was recently responsible for releasing the following shocking classified US military video footage showing the killing of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded. This video has now been seen by millions.

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I’ve only used the very new Y! Live service a few times so far. It has a few odd bugs and eccentricities but on the whole it seems like it’s going to be pretty cool.

Larger image here

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I followed a Twitter link from well known video blogger Steve Garfield to his Y! Live channel. I couldn’t get my audio to work straight away but it was still a nice surprise to find not only Steve with an available webcam, but myself and many others too. I guess I was expecting to have to text chat with him while he was on camera.

The next day I joined (supergeek, heh) Eric Rice at his channel while he was testing it out, along with many others. This time I managed to get my audio working and I stayed for a couple of hours, video chatting to various people moving in and out of the channel. It was a lot of fun – a very lively atmosphere.

Larger image here

Now that I’ve experienced it, I realise I’ve been waiting for this kind of service. It seems like a next step from live video streaming services such as Ustream, Mogulus and Kyte.

As many of you know, I’ve been using Seesmic regularly and really enjoyng that. I’ll certainly continue to use it. Seesmic is quite different from this new service, as it’s not live and only one person can speak at a time. The conversation flows smoothly because everyone gets to have their say without being interrupted by others.

Y! Live seems more like real conversation, with people talking over the top of each other. You can turn down the audio for each person though, and remove them if desired. It does have the more traditional text chat as well, which adds an extra layer and allows people without webcams to participate. You can only (only!) view five other people at a time too, so the text chat is a necessary element.

It’s funny, even with multiple webcams on display, I immediately wanted to see more. If there are more people in the room than places in the camera tray, you have to choose who you watch, and you can’t tell who other people are watching. This aspect is confusing and more than a little frustrating.

This is what the site says about about the new service:

We tip our hats to Justin.tv and Ustream.tv – they were an inspiration to us and have created awesome services and built strong and loyal communities. What you’ll see in the coming months from us is a series of new additions to Y! Live which will make it more useful as a platform for broadcasters and developers. Our vision for Yahoo! Live is to create a platform for live video. Stay tuned.

Let’s hope this is turns out to be the case. Whatever happens, I’m going to try to take full advantage of the service, at least for now. It’s been a lot of fun so far. I hope to see you there soon : )

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