Between minute 1 and 2 of the video you can see the concept I created. We decided to promote the artbook with a trailer shown on 3 walls, complete with suited up staff that guided the audience (close to 300!) into the backroom of the Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT) for the projection.

I’m glad to say I’m still collaborating with Steambot here and there when I have the time and love working with them!

Mmm.

This was released practically 3 years ago and only got 110 000 views, which in Youtube standards is pre-tty poor. What happened there Youtube, the Ultimate Viral Maker or Breaker?

In any case it’s the first I hear of this Screening Room, why did they do such a bad job at promoting it? Man, if I had Moby making a statement, I’d kinda want get my bang for a buck on that commercial.

Was the original intention to compete with at-the-time-fresh-out-of-the-box Vimeo? Was it to claim back its original glory as the tube for freedom? Is it purposefully under the radar to attract a select crowd of viewers and video makers? Especially now that Youtube is putting on advertisements – notably from the LDS church, humpff.

So many questions, so little answers…

I’ve been busy though, first of all filling in at the Canadian Centre for Architecture‘s communications department and helping launch their latest show Architecture in Uniform which examines the architect’s participation in the war effort during WWII.It’s an interesting challenge promoting a museum with a very specific and targeted agenda, and I hope to continue working on building the CCA’s reputation and friendliness.

Besides work I’ve decided to hold a flash mob event on June 12, the International Day Against Child Labor. It will take place here in Montreal, and I’m glad to say it has been gathering quite some interest, even from a Washington advocacy organization! The project is called Go Annie, and I’m hopeful it will gather both teens and adults around an important cause. You can check out more about facts, petitions and flash mob instructions on the project’s website. And of course you are more than welcome to participate!

Five years and a Masters in urban planning later, what have I garnered from my BA? A lot of information paired with a corresponding ability to process and analyze it, but a lack of practical application of much of the theory I was taught.

Last month, I ran into a professor I had back in my bachelor’s, and upon telling him about my Libyan adventures and experience of the job market, he asked me to come talk to his first year students about how their choice of studies can impact their lives. And also something about Libya, which leaves me with the difficult situation of commenting on a country in the midst of a liberation process.

So what did I want to tell them? I gave this some thought, and came to the conclusion that I wanted to question the way students chose theory over observation, especially in political science. For me, I know the use and claim of street art  was a real eye opener,  it helped me bridge the gap between the truth in the books and the reality found when intervening in where we live.

I do hope this year’s TEDp prize winner will help them understand that. I didn’t need to include this video, but I think it’s pretty incredible how JR’s project takes an unexpected genre (caricature) to take stabs at political and social clashes by diffusing them into the city or on a community’s daily stage.

When I look back at the time I spent at school, taking in lectures, I realize my brain was too saturated to look for what I thought was truly interesting, or worthy of more than just scholastic attention. I guess that’s one of the reasons TED is so popular: it brings you back to that one brilliant, interesting, relevant teacher who made you want to run the extra mile. I hope this video will be of great help to me when I try to tell a room full of first year poli sci students to be daring and cross over to other subjects to see, and not just get the bigger picture.

I was trying to explain what they were missing out on by not opting for microblogging. My mother is pretty computer-literate, a pioneer  for her generation. She even has a myspace page to keep up with her children abroad. Lately I even suspect she has developed a slight addiction to Google Analytics.

While  explaining the SEO-esque raison d’etre of Twitter and Facebook to my mother, she asked me something quite interesting, something you tend to forget when you are in the quicksands of addictive posting : how do you measure these tools’ efficiency?

There are a bunch of articles out there that are – and rightly so – quite critical about the influence evaluation platforms like Twitalyzer, Peerindex, TweetReach or Klout. I decided to pick a randomly chosen Twitter user and see how each of these platforms assessed his influence – the Twitter user’s identity is hidden for privacy reasons, but this user is real.

first, Twitalyzer:

I’m starting off with the platform I found the most disappointing. First of all, I do not really see the point of adding a google map embed to show a user’s location – maybe it would be more useful to see where this guy’s followers are located in respect to the subject’s location?  When I tried to look a little closer at the figures, I got sent to a subscription page and the free features gave me no particular incentive to subscribe.  Furthermore, when I registered my Twitter account with Twitalyzer, it kept telling me it couldn’t pick up on my Twitter network… So, unless I missed something here, please enlighten me on Twytalizer’s competitive edge. Maybe the algorithms they use?  Next!

2.  TweetReach

This is more of a “keep it short and sweet” platform for Twitters in search of instant gratification. TwitReach seems to be a fairly uncomplicated evaluation platform, but with not much long term memory, as your reach is based on the last 50 tweets you posted – which in “human” time can mean 1 to 7 days for an average Twitter user.  I guess you could probably test this platform out by hashtagging like a maniac for a week to see what happens to your influence levels.  However, I will be using this example to explain in simple terms to my mom how much more visibility she can get through Twitter – a convenient quick fix.

3. PeerIndex

Often cited as a reference by other bloggers and Twitter users, PeerIndex seems to invest a lot of energy in catchy graphics, but my current knowledge of algorithms and the fact that I do not really know the Twitter subject I picked prevent me from giving you a more in-depth perspective on how it works. But I consider that these platforms should be understandable by every kind of audience so company owners looking for figures on these “tweet thingies they don’t understand” can finally make sense. And with PeerIndex, I definitely feel comfortable with explaining the Topic Fingerprint graph but I’m still a little confused as to how one reads the Component one. I registered with PeerIndex yesterday, hoping to get more information. What also caught my attention was PeerIndex’s effort to evaluate the possibility your Twitter account might be a bot. Interesting, but still very much in testing phase apparently.

4. Klout

Now I don’t want to sound biased, but Klout is the platform I know best as I have been using it for the past month. It looks like Klout is definitely in a tie with PeerIndex for the title of best influence evaluation platform. Both sites make an effort to provide easy access to information about their terminology (network, authority, etc), but where I find Klout has a competitive edge is that their graphs are fairly easy to understand (available on “score analysis”) page. Although Klout allows you to integrate your facebook performance to “up your score”, keep in mind PeerIndex even allows you  to also add Linked and your blog to the mix.

Bottom line is, there is not one clear leader for these influence evaluation platforms, and maybe it will stay like this for a little longer. I think evaluating your performance depends on what your goals are, and none of these platforms actually engaged with me to ask that.  But as this interesting post here concludes, the developers of these platforms have quite a lot on their plate, and are willing to admit  that this is still very much work in progress.  In the mean time, if your mom needs to understand how her blog about cooking can reach a lot more people with tweets, you’ve got enough here to impress and possibly enlighten your confused parent.

For me, their new catch phrase “Tunisia, the place to be … now!” on www.ilovetunisia.org exemplifies what a slogan can do best. It shows both integrity and honesty in light of recent events, appeals both to Tunisians -I actually found this slogan on a Tunisian friend’s facebook picture and on activist blogs! – as well as  to  mainstream tourists.

A blog add-on even allows you to declare your flame to Tunisia here. While the blog seems to be receiving mixed reviews for now,  it will be interesting to see how this will evolve as people continue to participate in the ad campaign.

When Poland was in the midst of integrating the European Union back in 2005, people in France were genuinely afraid  that their WCs would overflow with Polish plumbers come to steal local jobs from the French.  The urban myth became so widespread that it attracted the Polish media’s attention.  It didn’t take very long for them to react, with the Polish Tourist Organisation deciding to use it to their advantage.   Not long after, all over France, there were posters of a hunky  plumber posing in front of a Polish church and plaza, inviting the French to come visit, with the plumber proclaiming “(hey frenchies) I’ve got enough pipes to clean here in Poland. Come visit anytime!”

The Tunisian and Polish cases both show that when politics throws you lemons, you can make lemonade out of it, and it will probably taste better than whatever you had been serving before. I guess you can call that resilient branding.

Personally, I don’t think a poster in France of a guy holding an ear of GMO corn to his temple just like somebody playing  Russian roulette is particularly shocking – we’re talking about a country where marketing companies will gladly use naked women to sell car insurance.

But it looks like the region of Brittany strongly disagrees with this campaign, as one of the posters (see above) depicts a child playing with blue-green algae.  While France Nature Environnement’s intentions were very much sincere (protecting regions like Brittany by raising awareness about the environmental risks they face) the Regional Council and its Tourist commission see this poster as a serious prejudice to their efforts to maintain local economy through tourism.

One sees their point: after all, Parisian vacationers compose the region’s primary client base.   Naturally the region doesn’t want to see this poster on Parisian Metro walls.  After all, their 2008-2012 strategic plan for developing tourism emphasizes adding value to the region’s brand, notably by modernizing it, not by blowing a hole in it with an otherwise innocuous vegetable.

Yet the plan also stresses that the region should be walking the talk on sustainability, and isn’t awareness one of the first steps towards that?

If I were they, I wouldn’t have rushed and joined the outcry just because vehement denial seems quite suspicious.   Au contraire, why not use the opportunity to raise awareness of the threats to one of France’s most beautiful regions?  I guess this is another area where people are clearly choosing sides. Maybe it’s time to broaden the sustainable tourism concept to closer-to-home destinations in more creative, cross-over ways.

From coast to coast, America is suffering from its sprawl which has homogenized and diminished the diversity and richness of its land. This has disconnected Americans from the ecosystems that surround them, further engendering climate change and environmental degradation. Orff’s intention is to reconnect these two interdependent entities through physical, tangible, open-public-space type of interventions.

When Kate thinks of design, she looks at a landscape’s history and trends to see how a combination of urbanism and ecology can work together to restore a site’s ecosystem and livability. Her TED presentations focuses on the Gowanus canal, currently suffering from sewage and contamination problems – basically, your typical post-industrial by-the-river-site.

The first time I listened to this video, the Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project came to mind – CABE presents the case study really nicely here for those who don’t know about it.   Seoul’s mayor decided to strip down a major urban highway to restore the original, then underground and heavily polluted river, that used to run through the city – a great project that kind of beats Boston’s Big Dig in my opinion.

Coming back to Kate Orff’s project, here is the premise in a nutshell: the Eastern Oyster has the amazing capacity to agglomerate into wave attenuators and clean up to 50 gallons of water a day (per oyster!).  The Gowanus project uses the Oyster’s life cycle and habits to restore and shape the landscape into a more welcoming space. By encouraging a native species to grow back through a shoe-string type of budget , Kate Orff’s project sets a model both for city and grassroots initiatives for restoring freshwater spaces.

This project also contributes to New York historical heritage, and provides venues for community and commerce – you’ll have to wait 2050 until you can eat them though…

Regardless, thank you TED for having Kate Orff over, her Oystertecture is an inspiring project!

A little bit about who they’re planning to have and talk about:

- Local Social Media Specialist and Guru Mitch Joel ( 6 Pixels of Separation, president of Twist Image)

- the Evolution of our consuming instinct : read more here if you want to know about this Concordia professor

- Nomadic Massive will be talking about the cultural workshops they held in Haiti

Bref, a lot of good things will be happening on February 19 at Concordia, you can check out more here and hope that everything will be recorded and available to us mere mortals soon.

There is a joint university research project called Mobile Media Lab, I stumbled on this site while admiring local graphic design, Studio Feed. They just finished working on it, along with Pixel Circus.  I highly recommend checking out the site itself, as it is a jewel in graphic design and the ergonomics seem equally appealing.

The Mobile Media Lab is a joint effort, run by both communications departments of York and Concordia, honouring the Canadian tradition of critical thinking and research on communications – long live McLuhan!  Research seems to center around the impact of new media on our lives and while I have yet to understand what are the boundaries of the project ,for now I’ll be glad to learn more on projects like Friction, which explore the sounds bikes make. There seems to be another very interesting project on the impact of music commuters listen to while riding public transit and how music makes them engage with their surroundings.

The MML also developped an application designed to turn your Ipod Touch/ Iphone in to a mobile game controler – I will be downloading this onto my Iphone as soon as I’m finished writing this! You can check it out on www.tentacles.ca

Coming back to MML, I find 3 of the research questions the lab focuses on of particular interest:

• How can an awareness of environmental contexts, social histories and local knowledge influence mobile media use?
• What are some of the social practices, communities and activist agendas that might engage with these technologies?
• What are the material and regulatory contexts shaping the production, distribution and use of mobile practices and wireless technologies?

Events in Tunisia and Egypt certainly come to mind right now when looking at these questions, but myriads of other examples are out there, or merely waiting to happen, triggered by a highly motivated agent or community.  Place making and branding certainly rely directly on these questions of awareness and strategies, and the wealth and quality of communication used to feed these strategies certainly does depend on the conditions of production of these technologies.