This is a simple use of social media that I think should be used as an example of how to effectively get people to send out your message. First off, it’s simple. You show up to the page – you probably got there from a friend. You log in to twitter using their simple OATH (I only know that term because they use it at the office all the time). The page then asks you if you’d like to “Deploy a boom”, which basically means it’s going to tweet out their message that reads, “Help raise awareness to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by reading the info and deploying a social #boom at http://theoilspill.org“. Then a an orange thing appears on the web page with your name in it leaving you with the “Look mom, I’m on TV!” effect.

This is a good cause, it’s easy to do, and you can learn about what’s going on with the oil spill. It looks as though I was the 204th person to “deploy” a boom – we’ll see where it goes from here.

Everyone loves numbers done visually. They’re so much better than numbers done by just numbers, or numbers done by sound. That would just be weird. This is a cool video created by an agency called JESS3 which, by the way, has a very cool web page. It shows the current state of the internet by the numbers, which by the way – have already changed. We won’t hold that against JESS3 though.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

There are so many reasons why this ad campaign by American Apparel works so well. Ok, really there are two reasons. Reason number one, lots of butts. Boy butts, girl butts, everyone’s butts. Second reason, voting and ranking. Not only do you get to click through the photos, you get to vote 1 – 5 on the quality of butt. One can only assume (pun intended) that this could become addicting. In addition to the addictiveness of ranking peoples butts – you have the opportunity to share butts on Twitter and Facebook. Twitter offering a link back to the voting page so your Twitter followers can start voting, and Facebook leaves a post on your wall so all your friends can see a butt that you particularly liked. (Insert Butt-Facebook joke here.)

Why would you put a picture of your butt up on the American Apparel site you may ask. For $300 – duh! Plus, you can put that on your resume!

What really blew my mind was how I came to find this campaign. Someone I follow on Tumblr took a screen shot of the campaign, just like I have above. But (no pun intended) nowhere on that photo does it say American Apparel. This means that their ad campaigns are strong enough that just from their imagery and type of underwear, I was able to guess that this was coming from them. I went straight to their site, and there it was. Crazy.

Hurry up and post a photo of your butt – don’t lose this chance to have your butt seen by thousands of people and win $300 in the process!

Please link your photo in the comments section (or don’t – ewwwwww).

It’s amazing how a site like Gmail goes down and my brain has to change the way it remembers things. So many of my answers sit in Gmail. For example, I was using Gchat just now to have a conversation with my friend @chicagoabby. She asked the name of a bar that we’re going to this weekend. Usually that would be something I could respond to in perfectly normal chat time (under a minute – probably under 30 seconds). With Gmail down I find myself reconnecting dusty synapsis. I’m sure the answer lies somewhere else – on paper, in a text, in my brain… Hell, I know the location – I could just Google map it and hope the bar name is visible in street view, or I could call a friend who knows the answer and he’d remind me in about 1 minute.

As I write this I realize how much my life is like “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” and how Google is my ultimate lifeline. Not sad – amazing.

I will now leave you with some great tweets from people I follow about Gmail being down.

@nick “No results for Gmail,” Twitter Search tells me. Yeah, THAT’S THE PROBLEM.
@caniba Gmail is down. #fail
@InterAwesome Gmail is Down. 502 Server Error. [pic] http://ff.im/-7v8ze
@geraldine how many tweets about gmail down ?
@dariusdunlap Gmail is down? Good excuse to focus on creating something…
@jyamasaki cool… gmail’s down #failmail #whatdoIdonow? #gpocalypsenow
@davewiner What do you do when GMail is down? Go to lunch in Berkeley with Doug Kaye!
@evanhamilton What do you do when Gmail is down? Look at your to do list, get organized, clean up. Use this to your advantage, don’t freak out.
@Stacina I think the whole Interweb is down. EXCEPT twitter. #irony

Not related but funny.
@Traphik of course i have to poo 5 minutes before my class starts

Thomas and I won a Ford Fiesta for 6 months! We’re not exactly sure what that means at this point – What we do know is that we’ll be heading down to LA on the 19th in order to pick up the car. Now the question that is in your head is likely to be, what color car are you two getting? Well I’m glad I thought you might ask that. The color options for the “Ford Agents”, as they call us, were Black, Silver, Lime Green and Magenta. Because Thomas and I couldn’t have won the car without the help of so many people, we decided to leave that decision in the hands of said people.

Obviously they choose lime green…
So yes, we’ll be driving a lime green Ford Fiesta for 6 months, being agents, doing missions – Again, that is all I know.

The agent web page is up on the Fiesta Movement web site, and if you’d like to see our bio that was written by the beautiful and talented Giselle Kennedy, you should go here.

If you have no idea what i’m talking about because you’ve been hiding under a rock or have a dial-up connection, watch this (unless you have dial-up, you should just turn off your computer and read a book).

As the missions begin we’ll be posting a lot of content, probably here, on my flickr account, on facebook or friendster (j/k), youtube, and of course tweeting the bajesus out of it all on Twitter using the new Seesmic Desktop Client! <- That post to come soon.

See you on the road!

I’ve spent most of the day today dealing with the computer not the camera. The morning welcomed me with a phone call from Loic saying we were going to be filming Kofi Annan and the launch of a partnership with EURO RSCG Worldwide an ad agency who is going to help with the global campaign for climate justice through the Global Humanitarian Forum.

Loic filmed a bit of the announcement this morning on seesmic only to end up with a huge response from the seesmic and twitter community. He ended up championing the cause with great applause from leaders of the launch – In end it looks like the response was rapid and robust so we were able to secure a personal interview with Mr. Annan that we will be doing in about an hour from now. I’ll have more to report later (hopefully tonight yet unlikely – I have no internet in my flat).

I shot John Cleese—I’m a camera man, that’s what I do.

Recently I was fortunate enough to travel down to Santa Barbara with Vinvin and Dean Whitbread to interview John Cleese. I was immediately excited, after all my mom raised me on Monty Python. Growing up, if I stayed home sick from school, she would rent me Marx Brothers or Monty Python, which eventually led me to love Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

I digress. After a nice road trip down from San Francisco, during which I slept in the backseat most of the way, we ended up in Santa Barbara, and eventually at John Cleese’s cottage. This visit was just to scout what we would be shooting the next day.

Day 2, the day I shot John Cleese, we spent about 4 hours at his house on an interview, a tour of the house, and finally a conversation on Seesmic. By far my favorite part was the interview, in which John spent most of his time bashing Sarah Palin and endorsing Obama.

When I heard Mr. Cleese talking about politics, and found myself both laughing and thinking hard about what he was saying, it immediately dawned on me that this footage of him had to get online as quickly as possible. Not because I think John Cleese is going to make anyone change their mind about who to vote for, but because I think it will help inspire other people to be more active in the campaign. The thing that struck me most about what he said is that the US has made itself look so bad in the last eight years, particularly in re-electing George Bush. He said the international world looks at us completely different than it used to but that in a single day, with a snap of the finger and a single vote, we can change how the world perceives us.

To me this is one of the most important points of the upcoming election: the perception of the outside world. We live in a modern global society, and if you don’t think how we are perceived by the rest of the world matters to nearly everything that has to do with us internally, I think you may need a reality check.

I’ll move on.

So the first thing that we made when we got back to San Francisco was a short clip of John Cleese talking about Sarah Palin. In 24 hours the had received more than 10,000 hits on YouTube—this is when we decided it was time to start editing a longer version of John Cleese on US politics. I knew full well that the longer version would have a harder time taking off—first people would think it was the video they had already seen and second it seemed like the moment had passed. Nonetheless, the video went up and about a week later has a little over 24,000 hits.

Being a part of a video that goes viral online is pretty fun. I saw the Diggs Climb (Digg is a place where you can vote if you like a video, blog post, photo, or just about anything online), I saw it on people’s blogs, and my favorite was seeing it on the Huffington Post and Comedy Central’s blog. I think the reason it’s fun to see it get big is knowing that a ton of eyeballs are watching an interview that I shot, Jeremey edited, and Vinvin hosted.

Here is a quick rundown of some of the web pages on which the video was mentioned, or where you could see it posted.

1. Election 2008 on Twitter: John Cleese at the top of the tag cloud.
2. The Huffington Post: an article about the video.
3. Reddit: eventually made it to the top
4. Comedy Central’s blog featured an article
5. 3rd on Digg, eventually made it to the top of Digg. Last I looked the video had 6813 Diggs.
6. YouTube: most viewed of the day and the week. Last I looked the video had 967,115 hits.
7. Boing Boing: probably gave the video it’s first boost.

As I said just the other day, I got a new iPhone. In fact this is my first post from my iPhone, it may be shorter and take 10 times as long to write.

-So this was what I wrote yesterday in the iPhone wordpress App. Since then I have not been able to get this post up using my iphone. So I am transcribing what I wrote; So ironic. I digress.

An interesting thing I just realized is that I have gained 27 “followers” on twitter since my iPhone purchase. I’m not exactly sure what gets you followers on Twitter, or why anyone chooses to follow me, but I do think that my new phone has been a factor in my twitter spike.

If I had to guess, the increased amount of twitter posts I have had since the iPhone directly correlates to the spike in new friends. In other news I just had my 1000 twitter post, connected is a photo of it.

I went for it, I bought a new iPhone 3G. Claire and I were in Portland for a wedding, and they don’t have sales tax there, so I saved about $50, Hooray!
Moving on…

The iPhone functions perfectly for me. It’s made for the person who wants to be able to connect to the internet and surf easily (like me). I can listen to music through Pandora instead of the radio, use GChat, Twitter, and keep up on RSS/ Blogs I like to read. I can also listen to NPR through their site, as well as check in on when my bus is coming to pick me up (I like to think it’s coming for me personally)

These were all things I could do before, but not on my phone while I was on the bus. This has been the greatest upgrade in my life since the purchase, my commute is awesome.

I find myself taking photos and posting them online just because I can, and why not, I don’t have to store the data; twitter, flickr and all the other sites I use will do that for me.

A couple observations:
-I have noticed that I sit on the toilet for longer, just so I can check messages, and do some blog reading.
-I’ve been listening to “This American Life” via podcast while i’m out on a run once a week, but what I’d really like is an application that will map my run from start to finish and tell me how far i’ve gone. The GPS is already there, someone who knows what they’re doing just needs to build it. Go!

More to come on the iPhone i’m sure.