A few of my favorite links, photos, and videos from the week on my Tumblr blog.

Noah Brier linked to this fascinating article about how the human brain teeters on the edge of order and chaos, in a good way.

They build on the observation that when a single neuron fires, it can trigger its neighbours to fire too, causing a cascade or avalanche of activity that can propagate across small networks of brain cells. This results in alternating periods of quiescence and activity - remarkably like the build-up and collapse of a sand pile.

I finally finished watching The Sopranos, and I completely agree with this interpretation of the ending: "If you look at the final episode really carefully, it’s all there.”* These are David Chase’s words regarding the finale of the Sopranos. He is right, it is “all there”. This is the definitive explanation..." (SPOILER ALERT)


A great satirical piece on McSweeney's by Frank Ferri, "Welcome to our Branding House"

You sure look the part. Short beard, tight-fitting thrift-store shirt, slim-fit jeans and large-framed glasses that scream "I'm hip!" I should hire you on appearance alone. But legally, I can't. Besides, there's a lot more to our shop than how we look and dress.

Wonderful and strange paintings by Scott Listfield.




Trailer for a documentary about how digital technology is changing how we live.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Rob Walker talks about the phenomenon of the surge in sales of Michael Jackson songs and albums.

Yesterday evening, Cult of Mac predicted a surge in sales of Michael Jackson music. Correct. Indeed as I type this 9 of the top 10 albums, and six of the top 10 singles, on the iTunes chart, are Jackson material. Not exactly. It’s not the death but the “high-profile” part of the equation (the attendant media/web coverage and chatter) that matters. This is for the simple reason that it makes such figures highly salient. Salience is certainly not the only element in a consumption decision, but it’s an essential one.

Yesterday, as I was poking around the Game Studies page on Wikipedia, I came across this articulation of a very significant debate within the game studies community:

This disagreement has been called the ludology vs. narratology debates. The narratological view is that games should be understood as novel forms of narrative and can thus be studied using theories of narrative (Murray, 1997; Atkins, 2003). The ludological position is that games should be understood on their own terms. Ludologists have proposed that the study of games should concern the analysis of the abstract and formal systems they describe. In other words, the focus of game studies should be on the rules of a game, not on the representational elements which are only incidental (Aarseth, 2001; Eskelinen, 2001; Eskelinen, 2004).

This made my brain happy. I love a good debate. And this sounds like a great one. It's a healthy debate in which both sides have valid points. On the one hand people love a good story, and many people get sucked into games because they're enthralled by the story. Yet, where would any good game be without rules? And isn't it the structure of the game that ultimately makes us feel like we're actually playing something?

Debates, arguments, discussions, can be an essential part of making our work better. The key is to seek out the most worthy debates, and not argue about inconsequential details.

Sometimes we learn as much from failure as we do from success. Today's lesson comes to us from a UK newspaper called the Weekly Dispatch.

Attempting to stave off extinction, the paper launched what they hoped would be the greatest puzzle hunt of all time. Wrapped in a Sherlock Holmes-type story, each week the paper revealed clues about treasure medallions hidden in cities all over the country. Readers were supposed to buy copies of the paper (increase readership and circulation!), solve the clues, and finally go out and find the treasure medallions. Well, the paper got more than it bargained for, as crazed readers all over the country started digging up roadways, public squares, and neighbors' flower beds in an effort to uncover the medallions. Thousands of people were arrested for destroying public property. And finally, the paper had to quit the treasure hunt early after getting sued by the state for being an accomplice to the rampant destruction.



You may not have heard about this because it didn't happen recently. It happened in January of 1904.

The full story is here in this account by British journalist Paul Slade, Trench Warfare: London's Treasure Hunt Riots. (via Metafilter)

There are many incredible things in this story - and I highly recommend reading the whole thing - but, what stuck out to me was how much this sounded exactly like the kind of "viral" or "guerrilla" campaign we might try to create today.

Embedding a puzzle into a print publication to increase sales? (Wired anyone?) Hiding stories inside of stories to give people a reason to dig deeper? Creating something so remarkable that it captures the curiosity and imagination of an entire country?

Let's not be precious about the format we choose. It's all been done before. Human nature hasn't changed. And the kinds of experiences that people find compelling haven't changed. Our chance to be creative lies in the stories we create and the tools we use to tell them (e.g. any Pixar movie). So, rather than patting ourselves on the back for reinventing the wheel, let's celebrate the moments when we use what's unique about digital media to create an experience for people that they never imagined was possible.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other digital media tools, have claimed a new and powerful role in transforming shared awareness into shared experience.


Click for full size image

As of Monday morning, Michael Jackson is the king of iTunes, claiming 9 of the top 10 albums and 7 of the top 10 songs.

Rob Walker wrote a great post over the weekend about the significance of being salient. When your brand is on everyone's mind, it can have a powerful impact on your sales.

Michael Jackson and his untimely death is the latest example. The same thing happened with Tim Russert's books on Amazon following his sudden death. And before that, the video of Michael Richards' racist tirade during a stand-up performance lead to a huge spike in sales of Seinfeld DVDs.

We can't always know what's going to precipitate a spike in attention. But, what's interesting to me in the Michael Jackson example, is the newly powerful role that tools like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter play.

At the height of the buzz, tweets mentioning Michael Jackson reached 22.61% of all Twitter messages.



If your experience was anything like mine, you were inundated with links to Michael Jackson videos on YouTube, embedded videos on blogs and Tumblr, blip.fm links on Twitter, and just mentions of his name over and over again.

The oversize newspaper headlines and lead stories on every news and entertainment program on TV certainly played a key role in raising awareness. Digital media, though, transformed that awareness into a world-wide shared experience, by sharing reactions, emotions, videos, music, and personal stories.

My favorite links, photos, and videos from the past 2 weeks on my Tumblr blog.

Michael Jackson Billie Jean live




An excellent anonymous first-hand account of the June 15 rally in Tehran, Iran from The New Yorker Magazine.

On June 14th, two days after the election that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is alleged to have stolen from his main challenger, the reformist Mir-Hossein Moussavi, I hurried back to Iran from a trip abroad. The next day, the day of the Azadi Street march, I had lunch with a journalist friend. In view of the election fiasco and the coverage that it had received abroad, my friend told me, the authorities were now trying to curtail the activities of the Western media. “If you want to write for a foreign magazine,” he said, “do it without a byline.” The authorities were refusing to extend the visas of most visiting foreign journalists; several Iranian journalists had been thrown in jail.

Clay Shirky talks about how tools like Facebook and Twitter have changed our world.




Mos Def is releasing his new album as a T-shirt.

Mos Def is releasing his latest album, The Ecstatic, as a T-shirt. How does that work? The T-shirt has The Ecstatic Killer of Sheep-interpolating cover art printed on the front, song titles on the back, and a download code for the album on the hang tag.

Henry Jenkins talks about Transmedia:




PS22 Chorus “JUST DANCE” by Lady Gaga




Photos by Cristin Sloan.




Anti-drug PSA starring a young Helen Hunt + Keyboard Cat + Hall and Oates =