Category Archives: Media & Culture

“Virtual Immortality Made Easy”

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Grannyfinal228x300Regular readers know  smays.com is all about getting those photos and home movies out of the closet and up on flickr and YouTube. I’ve even posted a time or two about digital immortality.

Scott Maentz and his wife are actually doing something about it. From their website: “Our mission at RememberGranny.com is to help technology challenged Baby Boomers create a legacy for future generations using today’s rich digital media and the latest Internet applications.”

RG.com has packages starting at just $99 but my favorite is the Complete Virtual Immortality Package ($499). Need some f2f help? Then you’ll want to consider the Virtual Immortality Mini-Vacation.

PS: I just went looking for some of my earlier posts where I talk about putting your life on line; paying flickr to keep your pix up forever and a day… and I can’t find them. Poor tagging. If anyone remembers some of these posts and happened to bookmark or link, drop me a line.

I’m closing in on 4,000 posts and it’s getting damned hard to find stuff.

More US mobile phone than Americans 13+

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The following stats were featured in a marketing piece I received today. And I’m guessing the numbers are even higher in other developed countries.

  • Tin_can_string85% of Americans have a cell phone (there are actually more US mobile phones than Americans age 13 and older) Source: CTIA Wireless Association
  • 66% of cell phones in America are equipped with a camera Source: comScore
  • 40% of Americans with cell phones send/receive text messages (80% among 13-24 year olds; 63% among 18-27year olds) Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project
  • 24% of Americans with cell phones send/receive photo or video messages (up 60% in the past year) Source: M:Metrics

And it will just get easier and easier to share those photos and videos. I’m not feeling particularly left out because I probably shoot-and-share more video than the average bear. But I can’t deny my mobilness much longer. Holding out for video iPhone.

The photobooth is back

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PhotoboothLast week I pointed to a book called American Photobooth, a new illustrated history of photo booths. Seems like photobooths are making a small comeback as a novel way to take photos of weddings.

You’ve probably been to a wedding where they leave disposable cameras on each table for guests to use and leave.

Barb attended a wedding/reception last weekend that featured a photobooth (a new digital one, I assume). Guests jam inside for group shots. I’m unclear on whether you get the pix on the spot or they mail them to you later. The former, I think.

Not sure why the photobooth sounds like more fun than the cameras on the table but it does.

“Growing new crops”

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Chris Brogan observes “the bigger or older or more successful the company, it seems, the more difficult this experience” of finding the next new hit. An observation he feels applies particularly well to media companies.

Brogan would call his approach to this problem the “escape pod” model:

  • Pick a small core team, half insiders, half raw new outsiders.
  • Stake them a startup seed round.
  • Let them go a few months on that.
  • No corporate oversight, only report backs. It’s spend/try/live-or-die.
  • Assess. Good? Then raise an A round or give them more corporate assets.
  • Revise revenue targets.
  • Observe. Kill, or green light.

He ends is post with the Big Question: CAN media organizations put new crops into the ground without pulling up the roots to check how they are growing? [via David B.]

Cyborg Anthropology

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I doubt there’s any shortage of scholarly papers on the sociological and anthropological effects of the mobile phone. I’ve never had a desire to search out and read any of them.

But my interest was piqued by Amber Case, one of the attendees at Gnomedex 8.0. A recent graduate, Amber describes her area of work and study as “Cyborg Anthropology.” Ooh. She was kind enough to send me a copy of her thesis: “The Cell Phone and Its Technosocial Sites of Engagement.” Here’s a snippet from the introduction:

“Mobile telephony has ushered in social geographies that are no longer entirely public or entirely private. The mobile phone allows place to exist in non-place, and privacy to exist in public. Never before have people been able to disembody their voices and talk across any distance, in almost any place. Cell phone technology has thus changed the dichotomies of place and non-place as well as the private and public dichotomies into a technological-human hybrid.”

I think I’ve had a whiff of this idea from all the time I spend communicating online. And when I break down and graft an iPhone to my hip, it’s only going to get better/worse.