First, new work from M.I.A. is eagerly anticipated as she went on hiatus following a tour for her Grammy nominated record, Kaya. I was at the far edges of the crowd with my sister when she told the audience at Bonnaroo in 2008 that it would be her last performance.  Since then, M.I.A. has largely kept away from music creation.

Second, M.I.A. chose to deliver “Space Odyssey” to fans via a twitter update, where she shared the video via TwitVid, a popular 3rd party service for video hosting that competes directly with Vidly.  While M.I.A’s choice of TwitVid as the media player allowed her to use her Twitter feed to deliver new music directly to her fans, it also has forced everyone to listen to this critically important release in terrible quality video and audio.  Check out the embed above.

Most notably, following the surprise release of the song, M.I.A.’s publicist confirmed that “Space Odyssey”  was released specifically in reaction to a recent New York Times story on the Top 31 Places to Go in 2010 written by Lionel Beehner.  In the NYT piece, Beehner acknowledges that the country has been “plagued by misfortune…but the conflict ended last May.” and goes on to suggest that “miles of sugary white sand flanked by bamboo groves that were off-limits until recently are a happy, if unintended byproduct of the war.”

If you are unfamiliar, a brutal civil war was being fought between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).  Leading up to the end of major conflict in May of 2009, many civilians were killed in efforts by the government to put down the rebel group.  The US State Department has issued a report outlining areas of concern (pdf) where International Humanitarian Law is believed to have been violated.

For some time following the end of combat, a quarter million people from the Tamil minority were forced to remain in refugee camps for months.  Between the brutality on both sides during the war and subsequent forced confinement afterwards, Sri Lanka’s international standing is quite low.  M.I.A. is of Tamil ancestry and fled the country as a refugee.  She has specifically decried (see her explanation at 3:25) the violence on both sides of the war.

M.I.A’s made a bold move in connecting her new artistry directly to a major US news publication’s pithy and embarrassing portrayal of Sri Lanka as a top tourist destination.  She did so using her platform of roughly 82,000 Twitter followers, all eager to hear what she would follow Paper Planes with.  M.I.A. has hit upon a near perfect mix of social networking, social action and artistic expression, most certainly setting her apart as an artist to watch in 2010.

You can learn more from the wikipedia entry on the Haiti.

If you are capable of giving money to assist in the rescue and recovery efforts, please consider a donation to one of the following organizations:

Using your cell phone:

• Text “Haiti” 90999 to be billed a $10 donation to the Red Cross.

On the web:

• Donate to Catholic Relief Services.
• Donate to the Red Cross’s Haiti Relief and Development Fund.
• Donate to the Mercy Corps.
• Donate to Doctors without Borders.

Thank you.   Rob

Something I liked about the article was that it gave context to a technical social mashup idea I’ve been exploring, which is the increased use of near field communication (NFC) to increase one’s visibility in a meaningful way.  More specifically, people will use RFID tag readers in a mobile device like the iPhone to alert the world of their participation in entertainment experiences.

In The End of Solitude, Deresiewicz suggests the culture of celebrity is connected to the video camera, which I connect to broadcast television.  Regretfully, in the year when we could least afford it, reality TV gave rise to pointless distractions like the Balloon Boy and the White House Party Crashers.  But the article also describes the culture of connectivity as a product of the evolving use of computers and mobile communications in society.  As something of an evangelist for new media and a critique of old media, it is somewhat humbling for me to read Deresiewicz’s grouping of celebrity with connectivity in the contemporary self:

“Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known.  It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.”

The value of different participatory entertainment activities runs the gamut.  A film at your local movie theater requires you to only buy a ticket before the film is sold out and ensure you show up at the scheduled time.  Getting yourself twenty feet from the stage at The Dead on July 4th at Rothbury Music Festival in Michigan requires a significantly greater level of planning.  But the relative interest in the social grid in any given activity is less important than the simple declaration to the post modern self that you “did it.”  People want to shout from the top of their literal or figurative mountains, “I am about to (or have just)  ____ at _____.”

Given that a lot of people love to share their experiences, many are simply limited by the inconvenience.  I’ve given some detail to my sense that there is a big splash still yet to be made by Apple’s touch platform.  And that the Touch lineup of the iPod Touch, the iPhone and the iSlate we will see a revolution in mobile computing.  They will allow us to enjoy the impulses of the modern self which are to take part in connectivity and some element of celebrity.

A topic that hasn’t been explored enough is the effect of including an RFID reader in a breakthrough device like the iPhone.  There is reason to believe that an RFID reader will be incorporated in the near future.   I believe that the inclusion of such hardware will open up opportunities to more quickly identify and disseminate interesting information about the entertainment spaces we’re inhabiting.

To illustrate a point, when I was writing the above paragraph I searched twitter for “Sherlock Holmes” which premiered this past weekend.  The third tweet from the top was from a student I’ve never heard of or met named Nicholas King.  From his Twitter bio, we know Nicholas is a student at Eastern Michigan and studies business.  Quite simply, Nicholas tweeted:

A quick search reveals that Trillium is a cinemas in Grand Blanc, Michigan and Nick was keeping his followers up to date with a text message from his phone.  While a text message accomplishes the goal of updating his thirty or so followers, it falls down for a few reasons:

1. Part of being fully connected is also having your information quickly sorted and grouped with similar data.  Twitter provides a reverse method for grouping information through its search.twitter.com functionality.  Users are capable of directly grouping their tweets with hashtags.  Both of those methods suffer the potential for data entry error.  I wouldn’t have known about Nick’s experience achievement if he had spelled it “Shelock Holmes.”
2. Manually updating your followers with the activity you’re participating in requires extended effort.  If you’re walking in the door of an RJD2 show you might have a drink in one hand and a gaggle of pals pulling you forward with the other. It isn’t always possible or at least socially acceptable to whip out your phone and type out an update.

The concept is this.  Sherlock Holmes is being distributed to theaters by Warner Bros Pictures.  In addition to sending out reels of film, Warner Bros would also send a small stand up display that is to be placed near the entrance to the theatre showing the movie.  If Nick carried an iPhone with an RFID reader, he would need only to wave his phone at the entrance and it would automatically pick up his preferences for sharing his location and the movie title he’s seeing via Twitter or Facebook.  More interesting things would be to automatically enter you in a contest for people who attended an Sherlock Holmes on opening weekend.

Another illustration to the benefits of adding an RFID reader to the iPhone in the realm of participatory entertainment is in live music or very large public entertainment events.  For instance, scanning the RFID tag in your section at a football game will identify the mobile capability to an application that could cue everyone to hold up their phones at a given time, display a particular set of images on the screen and turn the entire stadium into a megatron.  At a music festival like Rothbury, it might allow people to collect virtual zoo keys which turn an already amazing Sherwood Forest into something that is digitally enchanted.

The total extent to what could be done with connected devices incorporating RFID tags in combination with the impulse to reinforce personal visibility is impossible to see right now.  What is clear is that culture, technology and the increasing value of participatory entertainment rapidly is converging with all-in-one devices like the iPhone and iSlate.

Update 12/30/09:  A few additional things: 1. There is a strong sense that RFID will be most valuable for payment and wireless financial transactions.  The basis of my interest in RFID has been from seeing the NFC-enabled registers at places like McDonalds and Regal Cinemas.   When I first started seeing them, I would ask how often they took payment using the NFC at POS and I’d get blank stares from the employees.  MasterCard’s PayPass and American Express’s ExpressPay have been around for a while but have mostly only survived market tests as far as I can tell.

To look at how NFC/RFID payments and entertainment overlap, I love what it could do to damage the secondary ticket market.  I’ve long felt that secondary ticketing and scalping does more harm than good on the average would-be live entertainment participant.  Locking tickets to phones is a great way to help track and possibly reduce scalping while still allowing some flexibility in transferability.

There are some articles about how an RFID, NFC enabled phone are useful outside of entertainment which are worth linking to.  Here’s one that simply gooses the idea.  Here’s a second article that talks explicitly in terms of marketing opportunities.

I struggled with April’s song of the month, “Gifted,” which appears on the album  Spirit of Apollo by N.A.S.A.  N.A.S.A (North America / South America) is a project of Sam Spiegel aka Squeak E. Clean and  Brazilian DJ Zego spent five years assembling a gang of artists spilling across genres.

Performers on this record include:  George Clinton, David Byrne, Cee-Lo, Seu Jorge, Sean Lennon, RHCP, Tom Waits, Ol’ Dirty, RZA, Method Man, oh and Kanye West.

The struggle with choosing “Gifted” was that Kanye is on the track.  I was into Kanye before he failed his Bonnaroo performance so miserably in 2008.  Since then, I’ve felt the inclination to leave a room where his music is playing at a party.

Then South Park came and swatted Kanye down this past week.  It was a public thrashing that no one else could deliver, because he admitted to bad behavior and said “I need to just get past myself.  Drop the bravado and just make dope product.”

Speaking of the astounding effect of animation, the music video forGifted is an awesome work by Three Legged Legs.  Done in just three weeks, they put together a story of a crashlanded spaceman stuck on a deserted planet.  It has a sort of a Heavy Metal feel only scarier.  A full writeup on the video is available on their website.  They also have a full HD version available for download.

Congrats to everyone who went into creating Gifted and for Kanye for just barely not screwing it up for everyone.

Peering into my Gmail history for the keyword ‘obama,’ I can see the first time I talked about him was in a chat session with my friend Ala on 10/16/06 at 10:35 AM PST:

me: goodmorning
Ala: good morning
me: how are you this morning?
Ala: fine, and you?
me: fine.   obama huh?
Ala: made the cover of Time

And that’s how it started.

In November of 2006, I did phone banking in Portland for the Oregon Democrats, and took to the street like a crazy person, holding up my Vote sign on Burnside. About 11 months later, I was living in Boston, starting work on my MBA at Babson College.  Politics are a little more interesting for Democrats on the East coast and by then I was looking to get a bit closer to the candidate, in an email to my brother on 10/19/07 I wrote:

Hey,

Obama just got endorsed by Deval Patrick, and they’re having a rally with both of them in attendance on Tremont and Boylston on Tuesday the 23rd at 6:30pm.

I got a call requesting me to flyer for the rally and am going to do it this coming Sunday.  The meeting time is 10am at the transportation station on Boylston by the Boston common.  (10 park plaza).

Are you interested in going at all?  Might be fun to grab some food first and see if we can meet an organizer who can put us close to Obama when he shows up.  Maybe get a photo.

rob

My brother ended up having to grade some 30 Harvard undergraduate papers that morning and couldn’t make it out.  I however, took to the streets in my slacks, buttoned up shirt and tie and stood on the corner of Harvard Square and Commonwealth avenue, in front of a liquor store.  I passed out fliers to whoever would listen, spreading the good word of Barack.  At the time, the democrats were locked in a three person primary, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were still both serious opponents.

Eli Forsyth was the coordinator of the Boston office for Barack Obama at the time, he and his staff helped me into a volunteer captain role at Boston Governor Deval Patrick’s endorsement of Obama on the Boston Common.  I took that work very seriously, wrangling a half-dozen volunteers with clipboards to do data gathering on the long line trying to get into the rally.

After the rally, I had to return to work on my MBA.  The people like Eli were giving up everything to work on the campaign, for free.  If I was in a different time and place, I could see myself doing something like that.  I kept up my efforts from my office chair, so that in December of 2007 when the Obama campaign requested letters in support of overworked campaign volunteers in Iowa, I wrote the following:

Hey there,

I want to thank you for your hard work in helping get Obama elected to the most important job in our country.

I was born in Des Moines and my dad still lives in Sioux City.  I make it back occasionally.  Although I live in Boston and Portland, OR now, I have a special connection with Iowa.

I was a volunteer captain at Barack’s recent Boston rally and did street flyering.  I know it can be tough work.  Putting Barack is the right thing to do, and I’m glad you see it that way as well.

Please keep it up and know that I’m out here appreciating your efforts. I believe in Barack and that Iowa can play a critical role in getting him elected.

Thank you.

Regards,

Robert Banagale

Then, in February of 2008, Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe emailed supporters asking for letters to help secure the support of superdelegates. He asked us to share our stories with the superdelegates, so I did:

Dear Superdelegate,

I’m not sure how you, in particular, were chosen as a superdelegate.  Perhaps you served as a former president or vice-president of this great nation.  Or perhaps you took a strong leadership role on behalf of our democratic party.

Either way, I appreciate what you have done for our country and in turn am happy to share a part of my story as to why I support Barack Obama.

I am a 27 year old man, born in Iowa, raised in Portland, OR.  I’ve been a life-long democrat. I made phone calls for the party in November 2006 and have stood on the street corner with a Vote sign on election day.

Today, I am an MBA student at Babson College.  It is my dream to be running a successful, socially responsible company by the time I graduate.
Barack Obama also has a dream.  He is a man who has a dream that we can change the way our country is viewed by others across this planet.  He has a vision for a country that works together to accomplish progress on our domestic agenda by reaching across the aisle.

But what is a dream or a vision worth without integrity?

Barack Obama has shown integrity in his campaign and in his loyalty to the party.  He has refused to take donations from lobbyists, to show where he stands on influence of corporate interests and he refused to put his name on the ballot in Michigan because he saw and complied with the party line on our primary rules.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t care about the democratic party rules.  When the chips are down, she’ll do anything to win.  I’m not suggesting that our leader should not be decisive or make hard decisions.  But this race for president is not a war, this is our celebrated democratic process.

If Hillary Clinton can not be expected to follow the simple rules set by our party for our election, what might we expect from her in our nation’s highest office?
Please, use your power to vote for integrity.  Use it for a dream of a better, more united country.  Make your vote for Barack Obama.

Kind Regards,

Robert Banagale

In concentrating on my many projects and graduate school, I stopped work on behalf of the campaign and instead simply talked to friends and family about the candidate as much as was polite.  I became focused on renewable energy, thanks in part to from Clinton White and Jonah Eidus, two other Babson graduate students I worked with to create the Babson Wind Turbine.

This interest led me to the Cleantech Forum in Washington DC, where I had a chance to meet Jason Grumet, Obama’s energy adviser.  About a month later, I attended a debate between Grumet and James Woolsey (McCain’s energy adviser) at MIT.

A photo of me and Jason Grumet.

As the days counted down towards the election, I still had some friends and family to convince, so I reached out as much as possible to help them understand.  Some minds were changed, some were not. I also was active on Facebook, posting relevant links and videos, including sharing my brother’s Status Updates for Change group occasionally.  My contributions, like the lifetime of the campaign were winding down.

But late last night I authored what would be my final opportunity to reach an audience on behalf of Barack Obama.  My Dave Matthews Band website, Weekly Davespeak recieves between 50k and 100k visitors a month.  The site is meant to appeal to all DMB fans and is thus, non-partisan.  However, fortunatly Dave Matthews and I have been politically aligned, at least on choice of presidential candidates for the past three elections.

During my press coverage of Bonnaroo 2008, I met the photographer from Wire Image who shot Dave Matthews and Barack Obama backstage at Farm Aid.  He offered up his photos, which unfortunatly did not turn out well because of some bad sunlight cast on Barack’s face.  So, I went to work mending the photographs and released them packaged with some new exclusive photos of Dave Matthwes and Tim Reynolds taken by a photographer and ally of Weekly Davespeak.

Touched up photo of Dave Matthews and Barack Obama.

These went up on the front page of the website this morning, and were part of an email newsletter blast to just under 5,000 Dave Matthews Band fans.  To me, voting for a candidate simply because an artist endorses them is lunacy.  However, for those fans out there who know the issues and are considering voting against their own personally held social values in favor of the dynamic leadership, I see nothing wrong with their affiliation with Dave Matthews being a reasonable tipping point for getting their vote.

Yesterday, I printed out a non-partisan sign reminding everyone living in my building to go vote, with the address of our local polling station.  I firmly believe that this is a good country, and that when push comes to shove, we will make the right decision.  For so many reasons, Barack Obama represents the greatest opportunity for the long-term prosperity of this nation, and because of it I heartily endorse him to be the next President of the United States.

Google’s Android OS is not quite Open Source, but will rely heavily on the Open Source contributions from the public. This past weekend an ARS Technica article about updates to Android acknowledged Google’s creation of a public bug tracking system as a “sign that Google is taking the needs of the Android third-party developer community more seriously.”

Clearly, expectation of visibility into today’s major software projects has increased with the growth of the web. But what about older software? Who is looking into the games and tools that we used on a daily basis 15 years ago?

Know Your Mario History

A new Download Squad article discusses the impending release of a historical documents related to Sega video game development between 1993 and 1994. It claims that a “large community of Sonic fans have been searching for prototypes and lost levels in the games for many years now.” Indeed, you can read the granular details.

The new article says that a community member is planning on releasing “an entire year’s backup of data from the Sega of America offices from 1993-1994.” The article calls the eagerness of the community to review the information as part of a post-modern archeology culture, where people examine the assembly-level code of these game ROMs.

Post-modern archeology? …Really?

In 2004 Henry Lowood, the Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections at Stanford University presented an argument for the preservation of videogames to the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works that included the following passage:

Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at M.I.T., has written that video games may be the “art form for the digital age.” Some of you will find this thought difficult to reconcile with Pong, Pac-Man or Pokemon. Jenkins answers by suggesting that such reactions “tell us more about our contemporary notion of art—as arid and stuffy, as the property of an educated and economic elite, as cut off from everyday experience—than they tell us about games.”

Debating the ultimate status of games as an art form strikes me as less important than the potential impact of computer games on artistic expression, more a matter of the interplay between computer games and artistic practice.

It is nice to know that the academic community has been on board to preserve video game history for some time. But it appears that the forefront of research is being taken care of through crowd-sourcing on the web; the release of 15 year old corporate documents draws a buzz a little nerdier and a little less consipracy-laden than the release of new evidence from the JFK assassination.

I suppose it makes sense that if there is a large community that wants insight into the development of today’s work and play software such as the Android OS or next Street Fighter, would also want insight into the games they played when they were young. I wonder how long it will be that the theft of historical source code will make as realistic movie plot as that of Cezanne, Monet, Van Gogh, and Degas.

Update: While exploring a compelling new suite of web applications from Aviary, I came across an interesting related note in their work blog that reads:  “There is so much to learn from the implementations of design concepts in games that can be applied to non-gaming.”  A bit off the topic of historical software development, but a nod nonetheless towards important lessons that can be learned from video games.  Read the full entry: 3 lessons learned from Half-Life.

I didn’t notice any smokers in Ratatouille, and I couldn’t see them in a new traditional film from Disney either. But the FT article goes on to state that Bob Iger’s position is that “the company would also ‘discourage’ depictions of smoking in films made by its other studio labels.”

Disney’s owns Bob Weinstein’s Miramax Films which has released a ton of adult-oriented features including Tarantino’s, Pulp Fiction and Resevoir Dogs. Quentin Tarantino makes including cigarettes in his movies a recurrent presence. Iger goes on to say that argueing with filmmakers working under his roof about excluding cigarette smoking is a “confrontation we are certainly willing to have.”

The timing of the move is certainly not coincidental, as the MPAA recently began making smoking a factor in rating films. This change comes only two years after a suggestion by the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. So while Disney is doing the right thing being the first to take a hard line on tobacco use, it is also protecting a kid-friendly film ratings.

Keeping cigarettes out of the movies is one thing, but Disney aims to make a difference in the nutrition level of its customers as well. In October of 2006 Disney published new guidelines for both food available on theme park menus along with its promotional and licensed foods available in stores. This is most likely a move to help slow down the increase in obesity among children, but you have to question, why is Disney in the food business in the first place?

If Disney is going to get serious about kid’s health they’re going to have to take a hard look at the ethics of marketing to children in the first place.

1. Perform Baptisms
2. Performing Weddings
3. Performing and Speaking at Funerals
4. Visiting the sick
5. Counseling
6. Establishing New Congregations
7. Ordaining others

I have already done items two, three, four and five–which leaves baptisms, creating a congregation and ordaining my own clergymen and women.

So, to my friends and those I do not know, please let me sprinkle water on your child. I will say some nice words too. I haven’t decided what to name my church yet, but I expect all of you to show up on Sunday for the prayer and the basket passing.

Read this article to get a taste of exactly how lame our city commisioner’s office is.  Probably the worst part of the article is the author’s attempt to make it sound like the one arrest from last year justifies canceling the event.

I sent the following letter to the editors of the Portland Tribune, Oregonian and Portland Monthly:

UPDATE 1/ 11/05: The Portland Tribune published my letter in the 1/10/05 edition. 

 <!–adsense–>

Editor:

The Portland city commissioner’s office casual dismissal of support for the annual New Years Eve program in Pioneer Courthouse Square caused great disappointment in the public that filled the area in the last minutes of 2005. 

While the decision to continue to support the First Run & Walk was admirable, both the race and the Pioneer Courthouse Square New Years Celebration have co-existed in years past.  Why wasn’t the budget for the celebration reduced and made to rely further upon sponsors rather than canceling an annual Portland tradition? 

 
The registration tent for “racers and their companions only” was empty and poorly placed because runners were at the starting line blocks away at twelve o’clock.  As our grouped walked away from the most melodramatic entrance to a new year ever, we remarked upon how sad it was that our city wouldn’t trouble itself to support its public in celebrating something as basic as New Years Eve.

About ten minutes ago about two hundred santas descended on 23rd avenue on their way to the Gypsy lounge. They’re part of the 2005 Portland Cacophony Society.

According to their official webpage, anyone can join in the herd, so long as you wear a santa suit. Includes “A coat, a hat, a beard, red pants and accessories. Gifts and candy for the kids, cash for bars and strippers.”

At their last stop before hitting the bar, I snagged a video of them chanting, “Santa needs a drink!” at the top of their lungs.

Check out a few pictures of Portland Santacon 2005 on my flickr page.