LEMONDE.FR avec AFP et AP | 29.08.07 | 18h31 • Mis à jour le 29.08.07 | 18h35
n guise de réponse à la prochaine arrivée de l'iPhone d'Apple en Europe, le numéro un mondial des téléphones mobiles, Nokia, a dévoilé, une partie de sa nouvelle stratégie, qui privilégiera les téléphones multimédia ainsi que les services sur le Net, dont le téléchargement musical.
Le géant finlandais a par ailleurs annoncé le lancement, pour l'année prochaine, d'un téléphone multimédia similaire à l'iPhone, avec molette et grand écran tactile.
Pour expliquer sa stratégie, le PDG de Nokia, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, a fait valoir que, désormais, les seuls téléphones portables n'étaient "plus suffisants". "L'industrie converge vers l'expérience Internet et [le nouveau portail de Nokia] Ovi est l'expression de la vision de Nokia qui associe Internet et la mobilité", a-t-il poursuivi, précisant que les nouveaux services, dont le lancement en Europe est prévu avant la fin de l'année, permettront à l'utilisateur de transférer facilement le contenu téléchargé d'un ordinateur à un téléphone portable.
1 EURO LE TITRE ET 10 EUROS L'ALBUM
Le fabriquant de téléphones portables va notamment lancer Nokia Music Store, une plateforme de téléchargement musical dans la lignée de l'iTunes d'Apple, qui proposera "des millions de morceaux", protégés par des DRM signés Microsoft, à 1 euro le titre et 10 euros l'album. L'arrivée de Nokia sur ce marché était attendue depuis le rachat, en 2006, de Loudeye, firme américaine spécialisée dans la diffusion de musique digitale.
Autres nouveautés : la plateforme de jeux vidéos N-Gage, disponible en novembre, qui permettra "de découvrir, d'essayer et d'acheter facilement des jeux" sur certains téléphones portables, et Nokia Maps, un service de navigation qui proposera notamment des cartes et des guides touristiques.
Source: lemonde.fr
Nokia veut concurrencer Apple sur le terrain de la musique en ligne
mercredi 29 août 2007
Le système Ikea : l'obsession des économies
LE MONDE | 29.08.07 | 16h27 • Mis à jour le 29.08.07 | 16h27
rès de cinquante ans après l'ouverture par son fondateur, Ingvar Kamprad, du premier magasin à Almhult, petite localité de 8 000 âmes du sud de la Suède, Ikea continue d'étendre sa toile, avec la même obsession : réduire les coûts.
Le groupe a ouvert, mercredi 30 août, son 230e magasin dans le monde (le 20e en France), à Thiais, dans le Val-de-Marne. D'autres ouvertures sont programmées, à Grenoble - fin 2007 - ainsi qu'à Tours et à Brest en 2008. L'objectif est de quadriller la France avec 35 magasins d'ici à 2020.
Depuis 1955, date à laquelle M. Kamprad a dessiné ses premiers meubles, son concept perdure : si le consommateur doit être mis à contribution (prendre ses meubles en magasin, les transporter et les monter lui-même), il faut lui proposer les prix les plus bas possible. Le fondateur, qui collectionne les anecdotes sur son avarice, a eu d'emblée ce souci de l'économie. L'une des premières illustrations de sa stratégie a été l'introduction du "paquet plat" en 1956 : plus pratique pour le client, mais aussi moins onéreux. Aujourd'hui, tout meuble doit pouvoir être transporté dans un paquet plat.
Les 104 000 employés du groupe doivent avoir constamment à l'esprit la chasse au gaspillage. A son embauche, chaque salarié reçoit Le Testament d'un négociant en meubles, rédigé par M. Kamprad. Une sorte de bible mettant en exergue neuf commandements autour du comment faire beaucoup avec de petits moyens.
Les douze designers maison et leurs quatre-vingts collègues indépendants employés par Ikea en font souvent les frais. Enrik Preutz, le plus jeune de ces designers - il a 31 ans -, a vu son siège à bascule, actuellement vendu 7,95 euros, retoqué à plusieurs reprises. "Entre 10 % et 20 % des projets sont rejetés", explique-t-il. Dès la conception d'un produit, la matière première, le pays de production et le fournisseur sont connus du designer.
Pour vendre au plus bas prix, l'une des grandes idées d'Ingvar Kamprad fut de faire appel, dès le début des années 1960, à des fabricants étrangers. La Chine est depuis 2001 le premier fournisseur d'Ikea. "Il n'y a pas de tropisme chinois, mais il y a une nécessité de faire fabriquer à bon prix. La Chine répond parfaitement à cet objectif", confirme-t-on chez Ikea. Et si les produits sont estampillés "Ikea of Sweden" - car ils sont dessinés en Suède - seulement 7 % d'entre eux y sont fabriqués.
Le catalogue maison fait partie intégrante du succès. Et c'est toujours à Almhult qu'il est conçu, par la propre agence de publicité du groupe. M. Kamprad avait réalisé le premier tout seul, sur 4 pages. Le dernier opus en compte 370, et 260 salariés ont contribué à sa réalisation. Distribué à 191 millions d'exemplaires, ce catalogue est l'arme commerciale numéro un du groupe et "la publication gratuite la plus distribuée dans le monde", selon l'une de ses responsables, Lotta Sandström.
PAS DE PINCE À ESCARGOTS FRANÇAISE
Il est réalisé dans une sorte d'immense studio de cinéma. Chaque année, et pour cette occasion, quelque 2 000 décors sont construits. Quant aux figurants, ce ne sont pas des mannequins professionnels, trop chers, mais des collaborateurs du groupe. Dans ces locaux, on repasse les draps et on recycle les éléments de décor pour d'autres prises de vues. Economies toujours.
Chaque année, 30 % des produits du catalogue sont renouvelés. Mais impossible pour un directeur de magasin d'en proposer un dont l'usage serait purement national. "J'avais demandé il y a quelques années des pinces à escargots et des poêles à crêpes. La Suède m'a opposé un refus au prétexte que c'était très français", témoigne Valérie Camara, aujourd'hui responsable du magasin de Thiais.
Pour les détracteurs d'Ikea, ce catalogue est vu comme un outil de propagande censé imposer au plus grand nombre un intérieur standard. Car de Tokyo, à Shanghaï, en passant par Sydney, Madrid ou Varsovie, des centaines de millions de clients achètent les mêmes produits, dont la fameuse étagère Billy, le produit de loin le plus vendu.
La multinationale refuse de payer des études extérieures, jugées trop onéreuses, pour savoir ce que veulent ses clients. Elle emploie des sociologues maison chargés de mener des enquêtes sur les nouveaux modes de vie. Et les 104 000 salariés du groupe, toujours eux, sont un formidable échantillon représentatif.
Ikea a ainsi conçu des meubles respectant les nouvelles tendances sociétales : grands enfants résidant longtemps chez leurs parents, familles recomposées ou monoparentales. "Parce qu'il est interdit de fumer dans les lieux publics d'un nombre croissant de pays, nous en avons déduit que les soirées entre amis se passeraient de plus en plus à domicile, et nous avons développé les articles de bar", explique ainsi Mme Camara.
L'agencement des magasins a été consciencieusement pensé, autour d'un parcours imposé. Chez Ikea, il faut tout voir. Le visiteur commence toujours par le salon et déambule dans les pièces pour finir par les articles de cuisine, les bougies ou les plantes. Chaque magasin propose obligatoirement trois ambiances sur trois surfaces différentes.
Officiellement retiré des affaires, Ingvar Kamprad, aujourd'hui consultant, a également "réussi" à faire de son entreprise un groupe particulièrement opaque. Non coté, il ne publie jamais ses bénéfices. Depuis 1982, la société mère Ikea appartient à une fondation caritative, la Stichting Ingka Foundation, basée aux Pays-Bas.
Une autre société, Ikea Services, détient la propriété intellectuelle du groupe, c'est-à-dire son concept et le design des produits. A qui appartient Ikea Services ? A cette question, impossible d'avoir une réponse claire. En réalité, Inter Ikea Systems serait elle-même détenue par des sociétés dont le siège serait situé dans des paradis fiscaux, aux Caraïbes, selon des journalistes suédois.
La direction se contente de justifier ce montage compliqué, pensé pour protéger l'entreprise d'un démantèlement, lorsque M. Kamprad, aujourd'hui âgé de 81 ans, mourra. Chose certaine, cette délocalisation tropicale permet d'autres économies, d'impôts cette fois.
Nathalie Brafman
Source: lemonde.fr
Le système Ikea : l'obsession des économies
rès de cinquante ans après l'ouverture par son fondateur, Ingvar Kamprad, du premier magasin à Almhult, petite localité de 8 000 âmes du sud de la Suède, Ikea continue d'étendre sa toile, avec la même obsession : réduire les coûts.
Le groupe a ouvert, mercredi 30 août, son 230e magasin dans le monde (le 20e en France), à Thiais, dans le Val-de-Marne. D'autres ouvertures sont programmées, à Grenoble - fin 2007 - ainsi qu'à Tours et à Brest en 2008. L'objectif est de quadriller la France avec 35 magasins d'ici à 2020.
Depuis 1955, date à laquelle M. Kamprad a dessiné ses premiers meubles, son concept perdure : si le consommateur doit être mis à contribution (prendre ses meubles en magasin, les transporter et les monter lui-même), il faut lui proposer les prix les plus bas possible. Le fondateur, qui collectionne les anecdotes sur son avarice, a eu d'emblée ce souci de l'économie. L'une des premières illustrations de sa stratégie a été l'introduction du "paquet plat" en 1956 : plus pratique pour le client, mais aussi moins onéreux. Aujourd'hui, tout meuble doit pouvoir être transporté dans un paquet plat.
Les 104 000 employés du groupe doivent avoir constamment à l'esprit la chasse au gaspillage. A son embauche, chaque salarié reçoit Le Testament d'un négociant en meubles, rédigé par M. Kamprad. Une sorte de bible mettant en exergue neuf commandements autour du comment faire beaucoup avec de petits moyens.
Les douze designers maison et leurs quatre-vingts collègues indépendants employés par Ikea en font souvent les frais. Enrik Preutz, le plus jeune de ces designers - il a 31 ans -, a vu son siège à bascule, actuellement vendu 7,95 euros, retoqué à plusieurs reprises. "Entre 10 % et 20 % des projets sont rejetés", explique-t-il. Dès la conception d'un produit, la matière première, le pays de production et le fournisseur sont connus du designer.
Pour vendre au plus bas prix, l'une des grandes idées d'Ingvar Kamprad fut de faire appel, dès le début des années 1960, à des fabricants étrangers. La Chine est depuis 2001 le premier fournisseur d'Ikea. "Il n'y a pas de tropisme chinois, mais il y a une nécessité de faire fabriquer à bon prix. La Chine répond parfaitement à cet objectif", confirme-t-on chez Ikea. Et si les produits sont estampillés "Ikea of Sweden" - car ils sont dessinés en Suède - seulement 7 % d'entre eux y sont fabriqués.
Le catalogue maison fait partie intégrante du succès. Et c'est toujours à Almhult qu'il est conçu, par la propre agence de publicité du groupe. M. Kamprad avait réalisé le premier tout seul, sur 4 pages. Le dernier opus en compte 370, et 260 salariés ont contribué à sa réalisation. Distribué à 191 millions d'exemplaires, ce catalogue est l'arme commerciale numéro un du groupe et "la publication gratuite la plus distribuée dans le monde", selon l'une de ses responsables, Lotta Sandström.
PAS DE PINCE À ESCARGOTS FRANÇAISE
Il est réalisé dans une sorte d'immense studio de cinéma. Chaque année, et pour cette occasion, quelque 2 000 décors sont construits. Quant aux figurants, ce ne sont pas des mannequins professionnels, trop chers, mais des collaborateurs du groupe. Dans ces locaux, on repasse les draps et on recycle les éléments de décor pour d'autres prises de vues. Economies toujours.
Chaque année, 30 % des produits du catalogue sont renouvelés. Mais impossible pour un directeur de magasin d'en proposer un dont l'usage serait purement national. "J'avais demandé il y a quelques années des pinces à escargots et des poêles à crêpes. La Suède m'a opposé un refus au prétexte que c'était très français", témoigne Valérie Camara, aujourd'hui responsable du magasin de Thiais.
Pour les détracteurs d'Ikea, ce catalogue est vu comme un outil de propagande censé imposer au plus grand nombre un intérieur standard. Car de Tokyo, à Shanghaï, en passant par Sydney, Madrid ou Varsovie, des centaines de millions de clients achètent les mêmes produits, dont la fameuse étagère Billy, le produit de loin le plus vendu.
La multinationale refuse de payer des études extérieures, jugées trop onéreuses, pour savoir ce que veulent ses clients. Elle emploie des sociologues maison chargés de mener des enquêtes sur les nouveaux modes de vie. Et les 104 000 salariés du groupe, toujours eux, sont un formidable échantillon représentatif.
Ikea a ainsi conçu des meubles respectant les nouvelles tendances sociétales : grands enfants résidant longtemps chez leurs parents, familles recomposées ou monoparentales. "Parce qu'il est interdit de fumer dans les lieux publics d'un nombre croissant de pays, nous en avons déduit que les soirées entre amis se passeraient de plus en plus à domicile, et nous avons développé les articles de bar", explique ainsi Mme Camara.
L'agencement des magasins a été consciencieusement pensé, autour d'un parcours imposé. Chez Ikea, il faut tout voir. Le visiteur commence toujours par le salon et déambule dans les pièces pour finir par les articles de cuisine, les bougies ou les plantes. Chaque magasin propose obligatoirement trois ambiances sur trois surfaces différentes.
Officiellement retiré des affaires, Ingvar Kamprad, aujourd'hui consultant, a également "réussi" à faire de son entreprise un groupe particulièrement opaque. Non coté, il ne publie jamais ses bénéfices. Depuis 1982, la société mère Ikea appartient à une fondation caritative, la Stichting Ingka Foundation, basée aux Pays-Bas.
Une autre société, Ikea Services, détient la propriété intellectuelle du groupe, c'est-à-dire son concept et le design des produits. A qui appartient Ikea Services ? A cette question, impossible d'avoir une réponse claire. En réalité, Inter Ikea Systems serait elle-même détenue par des sociétés dont le siège serait situé dans des paradis fiscaux, aux Caraïbes, selon des journalistes suédois.
La direction se contente de justifier ce montage compliqué, pensé pour protéger l'entreprise d'un démantèlement, lorsque M. Kamprad, aujourd'hui âgé de 81 ans, mourra. Chose certaine, cette délocalisation tropicale permet d'autres économies, d'impôts cette fois.
Nathalie Brafman
Source: lemonde.fr
Le système Ikea : l'obsession des économies
mardi 28 août 2007
Marilyn Manson
Brian Hugh Warner (born January 5, 1969), better known by his stage name Marilyn Manson, is an American musician and artist known for his outrageous stage persona and image as the lead singer of the eponymous band. His stage name was formed from the names Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson, showing what he considered the ultimate and most disturbing dualism of American culture.
Smells like Children - Sweet Dreams (are made of this) cover
Antichrist Superstar -
Antichrist Superstar - Mister Superstar
Antichrist Superstar - The Beautiful People
Mechanical Animals - New Model No 15
Mechanical Animals - I Dont Like The Drugs (But The Drugs Like Me)
Holy Wood - Disposable Teens
dimanche 26 août 2007
following freak...
Sorry guys... no Marylin Manson post now...
i ve been looking for Kiss, Alice and Ziggy (and it s not complete) before posting a big one about Marylin Manson..
Just give me a little break lol
Sam
i ve been looking for Kiss, Alice and Ziggy (and it s not complete) before posting a big one about Marylin Manson..
Just give me a little break lol
Sam
Ziggy Stardust - David Bowie
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (often shortened to Ziggy Stardust) is a 1972 concept album by David Bowie, praised as the definitive album of the 1970s by Melody Maker magazine. It peaked at #5 in the United Kingdom and #75 in the United States on the Billboard Music Charts, and inspired a similarly-titled 1973 documentary by D.A. Pennebaker.
The album presents the story, albeit vaguely, of "Ziggy Stardust", a Martian who comes to earth to liberate humanity from banality. Ziggy Stardust is the definitive rock star, sexually promiscuous, wild in drug intake and with a message, ultimately, of peace and love; but he is destroyed by his own excesses of drugs and sex, and torn apart by the fans he inspired. The mythological story cycle of the doomed Messiah endeared itself to fans then and now.
The album was released in the UK on June 6, 1972, and later in the U.S. on September 1, 1972. The single "Starman" was released on April 28, 1972 to promote the album.
The name may come from the singer Iggy Pop or the model Twiggy, both friends of Bowie. Bowie has claimed that it came from a tailor's shop in London called Ziggy's, supposedly because the album was going to be all about clothes.[citation needed] Bowie later told Rolling Stone it was "one of the few Christian names I could find beginning with the letter 'Z'." [citation needed] "Stardust" comes from one of Bowie's labelmates, a country singer named Norman Carl Odom, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. (Bowie covered a Legendary Stardust Cowboy song, "I Took A Trip On A Gemini Spacecraft", 30 years later on his critically acclaimed Heathen album.)
The album cover has become an object of veneration for fans (similar to the Beatles' Abbey Road), who make pilgrimages to see the exact spot on Heddon Street. The phone box depicted on the back cover was removed in 1998.[citation needed]
The album is considered archetypal glam rock, full of hard rock guitar riffs, catchy choruses and confusing, opiate lyrics. It is both gloomy, as in the first song, "Five Years", where it is revealed that the Earth will be destroyed in five years, and joyous, as in the optimism of Ziggy in "Starman". Though Bowie's previous albums had built him a serious fanbase (particularly the hit song "Space Oddity"), his music was largely inaccessible and avant-garde. Ziggy Stardust was still innovative and pioneering, but was also accessible to people who couldn't hear or understand the significance of Bowie's revolutionary techniques and style. Songs like "Starman", "Suffragette City", "Five Years", "Lady Stardust" and "Ziggy Stardust" are strange mixtures of pop rock and art rock. Mick Ronson's guitar work is especially beloved on this album; on previous Bowie compositions, he had displayed talent and occasional spots of brilliance (e.g., Hunky Dory's "Queen Bitch") but he shone on this album, playing the chords that (in the story) awakened the consciousness of humanity.[citation needed]
In July 2003, for the album's 30th anniversary, select songs were broadcast into deep space using a high-tech laser beam. The event was part of a Cosmic Call laser extravaganza that took place in Roswell, New Mexico. Fans took part in an online survey to choose 4 songs to be broadcast, choosing "Five Years", "Starman", "Ziggy Stardust", and "Rock N Roll Suicide". [2]
Source: Ziggy Stardust Wikipedia's webpage
David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust - - 1973 july - london 3/10
Ziggy Stardust - Life on Mars
David Bowie's "Space Oddity"
Kiss
Kiss is an American rock band formed in New York City in 1973. Easily identified by their trademark face paint and stage outfits, the group rose to prominence in the mid-1970s on the basis of their elaborate live performances, which featured firebreathing, blood spitting, smoking guitars, and pyrotechnics. Kiss has been awarded 45 gold albums to date. [1][2] The group's worldwide sales exceed 80 million albums.[3][4]
The original lineup of Gene Simmons (bass and vocals), Paul Stanley (rhythm guitar and vocals), Ace Frehley (lead guitar and vocals) and Peter Criss (drums and vocals) is the most successful and identifiable. With their makeup and costumes, they took on the personas of comic book-style characters—the Demon (Simmons), the Star Child (Stanley), the Space Man (Frehley), and the Cat Man (Criss). Due to substance abuse problems and creative differences, both Criss and Frehley were out of the group by 1982. The band's commercial fortunes had also waned considerably by that point.
In 1983, Kiss abandoned their makeup and enjoyed a commercial resurgence throughout the rest of the decade. Buoyed by a wave of Kiss nostalgia in the 1990s, the band announced a reunion of the original lineup (with makeup) in 1996. The resulting Kiss Alive/Worldwide Tour was the top-grossing act of 1996. Criss and Frehley have since left Kiss again, and have been replaced by Eric Singer and Tommy Thayer, respectively. The band continues to perform, while Stanley and Simmons have remained the only two constant members.
Source: Kiss Wikipedia's page
Kiss online website
Kiss - I was made for loving you
Kiss - Rock and Roll all night
Kiss - Love Gun
Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper (born February 4, 1948) is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans four decades. With a stage show that featured guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood and boa constrictors, Cooper drew equally from heavy metal, garage rock, horror movies and vaudeville to create a theatrical brand of rock music that would come to be known as shock rock.[1]
"Alice Cooper" was originally a band name with frontman Vincent Furnier portraying the lead persona. In 1974 Furnier legally changed his name to Alice Cooper and launched a solo career. Since their first single release in 1966, when the band was known as "The Spiders", the original Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with the 1972 hit "School's Out" and reached their commercial peak with the 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies. Cooper's solo career began with the 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare. Expanding from his Detroit garage rock[2] and glam rock[3] roots, over the years Cooper has experimented with many different musical styles including: conceptual rock, Hard rock, Pop rock, Disco, Experimental rock and Industrial rock. In recent times he has returned more to his garage rock roots.[4]
Alice Cooper is known for his social and witty persona offstage, The Rolling Stone Album Guide going so far as to refer to him as the world's most "beloved" heavy metal entertainer.[5] He helped to shape the sound and look of heavy metal. He is also credited as being one of the first to bring storylined theatrics to the rock/pop concert stage in the late 1960s. Away from music, Cooper is a film actor, a golfing celebrity, a restaurateur and, since 2004, a popular radio DJ with his classic rock shows "Nights With Alice Cooper" and "Breakfast with Alice".
Source: Alice Cooper's Wikipedia page
Alice Cooper's website...www.alicecooper.com
Alice Cooper - I love dead
Alice Cooper - House of fire
Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson Duet
Fedde le Grand
Fedde le Grand was born in Utrecht on the 7th of September 1977 and he always had a real passion for music. As a teenager he started to spin records on the side. After finishing secondary school Fedde le Grand’s DJ adventure began when he started to perform at the Danssalon in Eindhoven, one of The Netherlands’ finest clubs at that time. Since 1998, Fedde le Grand has rocked every high-quality-club in The Netherlands and his tunes are considered to be the most energetic and danceable around.
Fedde le Grand does not only know how to play his records, he sure knows how to organise a thumping party as well. Being one of the innovators of the concept Sneakerz (2004) he created a formula; different venues with three areas throughout the Netherlands, all with their own sound, and a chance given to upcoming talent performing together with famous DJs. Sneakerz started off at ‘De Rechter’ in Eindhoven and it has grown into one of the best clubbing nights all over the Netherlands (‘Panama’ Amsterdam, ‘T Paard van Troje’ The Hague, Sneakerz@the Beach in Scheveningen and Bloomingdale).
Besides DJ’ing and organising club nights, Fedde le Grand has been producing since 2001. In 2004 this multiple talent teamed up with Funkerman and Raf. They started Flamingo Recordings, an independent record label where they have found a way to release their tracks without any compromises. This label has made them able to release tracks as fresh as they can be, with a new & always improving sound, appealing to a large group of people, without losing its underground identity. In a short period of time they have established themselves in the international label scene with releases licensed to partners such as Defected, Ministry of Sound and CR2 Records.
With the release of ‘Put your hands up for Detroit’ Fedde le Grand became known to the world. Eminem’s Detroit based hip-hop crew D12 has created a wicked vocal version over “Put your hands up for Detroit’ released early 2007. Not only well-known artists from the United States but various famous artists all over the world could find this man. Fedde created several remixes for Sharam, Freeform 5, Roog & Greg, Kurd Maverick, Tall Paul, Pete Tong, Camille Jones, Ida Corr, Anita Kelsey and Robbie Williams. Furthermore, Fedde made three compilation albums; The Ministry of Sound album ‘Sessions’ released in the beginning of 2007 and Top of the Clubs volume 33, released on Kontor Records in 2006. His first compilation album ‘Sneakerz’ was mixed and compiled together with Gregor Salto in May 2006.
At the end of the summer 2006 ‘Put your hands up for Detroit’ won the award ‘#1 summer anthem of Ibiza’. He reached the number one position in the official UK singles chart later in November. Other countries followed up quick and Fedde le Grand got more and more requests from all over the world. March 2007, his first international tour through Indonesia, Australia/New Zealand and Miami was a fact. At the Winter Music Conference in Miami – where this tour ended – Fedde took home three International Dance Music Awards; Best Breakthrough Solo Artist, Best Breaks/Electro Sound, and Best Underground House Track. He also won two Danish Deejay Awards and the Australian MTV Award.
‘Put your hands up for Detroit’ is not the only tune which has done great. His follow up ‘The Creeps’ a remix of Camille Jones reached the top 10 of the official UK singles charts. His production ‘Take No Shhh..’ was a major hit within the dance scene together with ‘Just Trippin’ and there is more to come. His F to the F project (with his partner Funkerman) ‘Wheels in Motion’ is currently making its way into Europe. Fedde’s latest remix of Ida Corr ‘Let me think about it’ is a funky impression of the original R&B/Funk/Soul sounding track, while Funkerman treats us with a pure House makeover of the track and they both have turned this beauty in one of the more potential crossover track of this time.
In May 2007 Fedde le Grand does a second tour through the United States and Canada to close his tour in China. Moreover, his first Artist Album will be released this year. During the summer of 2007 you can find him at the finest festivals in the UK and Ibiza. Check his schedule at www.feddelegrand.com. Fedde le Grand is the most requested DJ of the world at this moment…So, if you are a music freak we advise you to keep an eye on this self-made man because he will keep you going and making you coming back for more.
Source: Fedde le Grand's website - http://www.feddelegrand.com/
Fedde Le Grand Wikipedia's page
Fedde le Grand - Put your hands up 4 Detroit
...behind the scene...
Camille Jones Vs Fedde Le Grand - The Creeps
Funkerman & Fedde Le Grand - Wheels In Motion
You wanna know why Fedde chose Detroit ?
check this out...
samedi 25 août 2007
Ugly Betty
Ugly Betty is a Golden Globe[1]- and Peabody Award[2]-winning American television dramedy series starring America Ferrera, Vanessa Williams, and Eric Mabius. It premiered on September 28, 2006, on ABC in the United States. The series follows the life of the unsophisticated but good-natured Betty Suarez (Ferrera), and her incongruous job at the ultra-chic New York City fashion magazine "Mode". Betty's status as a "fish out of water" drives much of the plot.
The series is an adaptation of the Colombian telenovela Yo soy Betty, la fea ("I am Betty, the ugly one"),[3] also simply known as "Betty la fea" ("Ugly Betty") written by Fernando Gaitán (also author of Café, con aroma de mujer). It is adapted into a New York City setting by creator/developer Silvio Horta and co-producers Salma Hayek and Ben Silverman, whose production companies Silent H, Ventanarosa and Reveille respectively partnered with ABC Studios (formerly Touchstone Television) to create the hour-long program for US audience. Hayek appears on the show as Sofia Reyes, in addition to playing a cameo role as an actress on a fictional telenovela watched by the main character's family in early episodes.
The show is filmed like a traditional network drama (with motion picture film), rather than the videotape production of the original series. Ugly Betty has been renewed for a second season. On July 19, 2007, the series received 11 nominations at the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards in the Comedy category (the most of any comedy series)[4], including Outstanding Comedy Series, Best Actress (Ferrera), Best Supporting Actress (Williams), and Best Guest Starring Actress (Hayek for her role as Sofia; Light for her role as Claire).
Source: Ubly Betty Wikipedia s page
Beautiful Agony... la petite mort
Do you know the so called "petite mort/ little death" ?
reference to sexual orgasm
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El Gobierno de Pekín quiere acabar con los abortos selectivos de niñas
PEKÍN.- El Ejecutivo chino planea aprobar este año una serie de castigos legales contra los abortos selectivos de niñas que han llevado a China a convertirse en el país con el mayor desequilibrio de géneros del planeta.
Según informa la agencia de noticias Xinhua, la Oficina de Asuntos Legislativos del Ejecutivo presentará este año varias leyes y regulaciones sobre planificación familiar, entre ellas una nueva que prohibirá los abortos selectivos.
Aunque estos abortos ya están prohibidos mediante la Ley de Planificación Familiar y la Ley de Salud Maternal e Infantil, la legislación china carece de disposiciones legales acerca de los castigos aplicables contra las infracciones de estas leyes.
La aprobación de la nueva regulación servirá para definir la responsabilidad de los diferentes órganos gubernamentales en la aplicación de las actuales leyes sobre aborto selectivo.
En la actualidad China registra 119 nacimientos de niños por cada 100 niñas, muy por encima de la proporción media internacional de hasta 107 niños por cada centenar de féminas.
Esta acusada desproporción se debe a la combinación de la preferencia tradicional china por los hijos varones en una sociedad todavía rural en un 60% y a la prohibición gubernamental desde 1979 de tener más de un hijo por familia para frenar el crecimiento del país más poblado del mundo (1.300 millones).
Debido a esta política de planificación familiar, el aborto es un recurso frecuente y accesible en el país asiático.
La población masculina china supera en la actualidad en 37 millones a la femenina, un desequilibrio que ha disparado los matrimonios ilegales, el tráfico de mujeres, la prostitución y la delincuencia, según el Gobierno chino.
Source: El Mundo
El Gobierno de Pekín quiere acabar con los abortos selectivos de niñas
Según informa la agencia de noticias Xinhua, la Oficina de Asuntos Legislativos del Ejecutivo presentará este año varias leyes y regulaciones sobre planificación familiar, entre ellas una nueva que prohibirá los abortos selectivos.
Aunque estos abortos ya están prohibidos mediante la Ley de Planificación Familiar y la Ley de Salud Maternal e Infantil, la legislación china carece de disposiciones legales acerca de los castigos aplicables contra las infracciones de estas leyes.
La aprobación de la nueva regulación servirá para definir la responsabilidad de los diferentes órganos gubernamentales en la aplicación de las actuales leyes sobre aborto selectivo.
En la actualidad China registra 119 nacimientos de niños por cada 100 niñas, muy por encima de la proporción media internacional de hasta 107 niños por cada centenar de féminas.
Esta acusada desproporción se debe a la combinación de la preferencia tradicional china por los hijos varones en una sociedad todavía rural en un 60% y a la prohibición gubernamental desde 1979 de tener más de un hijo por familia para frenar el crecimiento del país más poblado del mundo (1.300 millones).
Debido a esta política de planificación familiar, el aborto es un recurso frecuente y accesible en el país asiático.
La población masculina china supera en la actualidad en 37 millones a la femenina, un desequilibrio que ha disparado los matrimonios ilegales, el tráfico de mujeres, la prostitución y la delincuencia, según el Gobierno chino.
Source: El Mundo
El Gobierno de Pekín quiere acabar con los abortos selectivos de niñas
Citizens of the New Digital Democracy
I know this article is HUGE... but it is a very very good one.
I believe you ll be as much surprised as I have been.
Sam
By LEV GROSSMAN
Leila
The Real Lonelygirl
Lonelygirl15 is one of the most viewed YouTube users of all time. She's young and pretty, with a complicated and absolutely compelling personal life. She's also a work of fiction—lonelygirl15 was created by two professional screenwriters and an actress from New Zealand, of all places. Well—to paraphrase Woody Allen—you can't have everything.
But that doesn't mean there aren't real lonelygirls out there. Take Leila. She's 20 and lives in Maryland, where she's studying to be a social worker. Her personal life really is complicated. Online she describes her ethnicity as Middle Eastern—she's half Lebanese—and her religion as Muslim. She struggles with depression and her crush on the guy at the 7-Eleven. You know—complicated.
Like lonelygirl15, Leila—she doesn't give out her last name—is a video blogger. Leila has posted 49 videos on YouTube under the user name pppppanic (that's five ps). She speaks directly into her webcam about her life, her opinions, her shifting moods, what she did that day. She says um and ah a lot. She has been known to drink and blog. Sometimes she doesn't speak at all, just runs words across the screen while melancholy singer-songwriter stuff plays in the background.
This isn't what YouTube was designed for—to be the public video diary of a generation of teens and twentysomethings. But sometimes the best inventions are the ones people find their own uses for. "You have people from all walks of life wanting to share a piece of their life with you," Leila says. "The feeling of togetherness is unbeatable. It's a beautiful thing."
There's certainly a narcissistic quality to video blogging—who doesn't love talking about him—or herself?—but the interest that bloggers take in their own lives is matched by their fascination with one another's. Leila no longer even bothers with TV. "I think people are bored with the mainstream media. I've been so caught up in watching other people's videos. I find it more entertaining. Much more real than the run-of-the-mill 'reality' show." Of course, in the post-lonelygirl15 era, there's always that question mark: How authentic are these faces on the computer screen? "I guess that's the only flaw," says Leila. "You can never really know the whole side of the story. You just get bits and pieces. You have to put blind faith in who the person is."
Lane Hudson
Lane Hudson first met former Florida Representative Mark Foley in a Washington bar in 1995. According to Hudson, Foley hit on him, unsuccessfully. He "made everyone, gay and straight, uncomfortable with his sexual advances," Hudson says. "Mark Foley's sleazy behavior was the worst-kept secret in Washington." In a different world, a less wired world, that would have been the end of the story.
Fast-forward a decade. On Sept. 24, 2006, Hudson posted on his blog Stop Sex Predators some amorous e-mails that Foley had sent to a congressional page. Other bloggers linked to them; soon the news networks were covering it, and some incriminating instant messages surfaced. Five days later Hudson was standing in line at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport when his cell phone and his BlackBerry went crazy. Mark Foley had resigned from Congress and dropped out of his re-election campaign. "My heart stopped," Hudson says. "I thought, Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into?"
Now 29, Hudson is no political outsider. A lifelong Democrat from Charleston, S.C., he has worked for quite a few politicians, including John Kerry in his 2004 campaign. His feelings about what happened are complicated. "How can I not be so excited about how this turned the midterm elections?" says Hudson. He says he's surprised by the furor he started, although he has been around long enough to see the judo-like power even a tiny blog can have over a towering public figure—Trent Lott in 2002, for example, or Dan Rather in 2004. "Gotcha" moments like the Foley affair suggest the power of citizen journalists to root out hypocrisy in public life—Hudson isn't slow to point out that Foley chaired the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children Caucus—but also to create a kind of pseudo-Orwellian atmosphere of universal scrutiny. "The magnifying glass over people in public life is getting bigger and bigger," he says. "Politicians have got to start being themselves from the beginning, then they won't screw up so much. Stop pretending."
Hudson has become something of a celebrity in the Washington gay community, but the Foley affair hasn't exactly jump-started his career. He would love to end up as a political consultant or a political commentator. For now, he's started up a new blog called News for the Left. "Everyone told me, 'Oh, you're going to have so many opportunities now,'" he says. "'Everyone is going to offer you a job.' Well, nothing has materialized yet." If he sounds a little bitter, it's understandable. He lost his old job, with the Human Rights Campaign, when it came out that he had used company resources to blog about Foley. "I like to tell people that I'm the only person fired over this whole scandal," he says, "and I'm the person who told the truth."
Ali Khurshid
There aren't that many digital cameras floating around Karachi, Pakistan. Or computers, for that matter. Ali Khurshid started taking pictures with a disposable Kodak his parents gave him when he was 8. Since then he has graduated to fancy digital gear, but he has hung on to his low-tech attitude. "I love how the best pictures are usually taken with Holgas and other toy cameras," he says. "It just confirms my belief that the eye is supreme in taking a brilliant photo. The camera is secondary."
Khurshid, now 22, is an artist in a country that's known mostly, in the West at least, for its politics. He takes pictures "to make sure Pakistan's real beauty was put through," he says. "Not just the Pakistan that is shown in the media, always the center of attention for all the wrong reasons." Fortunately for Khurshid, he lives at a time when a solo shutterbug can have the same reach as a staff photographer at the New York Times.
Last year Khurshid began uploading his pictures to Flickr, a website where anyone can post his photos, view another's and swap comments and critiques. In all, there are more than 320 million photos on Flickr right now, about 200 of which are Khurshid's. He's a shy, polite man, but Khurshid is more than willing to wax romantic about the unifying, globalizing greatness of the Flickr community. "I love the world coming together in one place and just sharing all that's in it," he says. "I feel like I get to see the world like it really, truly is. Not by stereotyping a people or a country."
Even more than blogs or video-sharing sites, Flickr has the power to forge international bonds because it works in an entirely nonverbal medium. In fact, it works almost too well. Lavannya Goradia, a heavy Flickr user in Bangalore, India, finds it to be a bit of a lovefest. "I suppose it's a need to pat each other's backs, but that will always happen on a public forum," she says with a sigh. "I am still waiting for a day when I will get constructive criticism from someone here." As for Khurshid, he judges a picture's quality by its use of light and its spontaneity—"by the fact that one moment later it would have all gone," he says. "If someone can turn the ordinary into a dream, that person to me is a genius."
Megan Gill
When Megan Gill broke up with her boyfriend in November, it wasn't easy, but she gritted her teeth and did the inevitable: she changed her relationship status on her Facebook page. "I knew there would be a flurry of annoying questions about what happened that I didn't want to answer," she says. "But it was the fastest way for it to be over and done with. Besides, if these people are supposed to be your friends, and care about you, then why keep it a secret?"
Gill, 22, a senior at the University of Portland, has a lot of friends—708, according to her Facebook page. Facebook is a social-networking website that has become—for many people, some of whom are even old enough to see R-rated movies—a way of doing what people used to do by gossiping and talking on the phone, but a lot more efficiently and publicly. You can post photos on your Facebook page, personal information, news about yourself, anything at all. If you want to be Megan's friend or have pretty much any social interaction with her, you're going to want to go through Facebook. She's a double major in special education and English, so she's busy, but she checks in with the site at least twice a day, often 10 times that.
She'll post random updates to her profile just to let everyone know how she is: "Megan is so over first semester," "Megan is bummed about the election results," "Megan is tired of letting people down." As she puts it, "Facebook is my generation's way of picking up the telephone." It also does things the phone can't. "If you want to organize something," Megan says, "it's much simpler to send a message through Facebook than leave 20 voice mails." She doesn't know how anything got done on college campuses before Facebook.
Clearly, social-networking sites can create and maintain relationships that wouldn't have existed otherwise. But can they also attenuate relationships? Can Facebook be a way to avoid dealing with people face to face? Gill's answer has a whiff of intergenerational snobbism. "If anything, my friends and I are more in touch than was ever possible before," she says. "Older people had handwritten letters or called each other or whatever. I mean, really, we have a much more convenient way of doing things."
Lee Kelley
Captain Lee Kelley is 35 and hails from New Orleans. He spent 12 years in the Army without once being posted overseas, but that streak ended in June 2005 when he volunteered for service in Iraq and became a signal officer at Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi. He has always been a writer—he has noodled around with a novel, done some freelance journalism. But it turns out he had to go all the way to Iraq to find his voice.
Kelley needed a way to convey to his family—especially his kids—what he was going through. As he puts it, "something I could leave behind if, God forbid, something happened to me." That's why he started taking some nonstandard gear with him on patrol: a notebook. "Work could last either eight hours or 20," he says. "I began to look forward to sitting down to write at the end of it." When he went off duty, he would grab a shower and then bang out a story about what had just happened. "Even though I was writing down what had happened in Ramadi that day," he says, "this was sort of an escape from the violence all around me."
Kelley is a military blogger, or mil-blogger, one of at least 1,200 servicemen and -women who write about their lives online. So far his blog, Wordsmith At War, has logged more than 200,000 hits. Mil-bloggers are a different breed from the domestic blogger who keeps, say, a record of his cat's mood swings. Here's Kelley on driving in Ramadi: "You have to go around big potholes and chunks of concrete blocking part of the lane. It's not a good feeling, because all your training tells you that these are ideal sites for IEDs ... The threat is very real, and you can sense it in the air. You can't think 'it won't happen to us,' you have to assume it will. Yet we discuss it in the same tone we might talk about last night's football game."
If Vietnam was the first war to be televised, Iraq is the first to be blogged—and YouTubed. Kelley says he and other soldiers are disappointed by how the media portray the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. "If you looked at all the coverage, you'd think the whole thing is a huge mess waiting to blow up. I sometimes wonder where these reporters are. I guess it's not exciting enough to write about schools being built." Kelley and his fellow mil-bloggers aren't just writing letters to their families. Unlike generations of soldiers before them, they're writing for history. "If they are archived, blogs will give the best account of this war," Kelley says. "No one knows what's going on better than the soldiers on the front lines."
S.R. Sidarth
His full name is Shekar Ramanuja Sidarth. He usually goes by just his last name, or even just Sid. But most of the country knows him as "Macaca."
Sidarth, 21, is a senior at the University of Virginia, a double major in engineering and government. He spent the past few summers doing campaign grunt work, and 2006 was no different. He worked for James Webb's Senate campaign, tracking Webb's opponent, Virginia Senator George Allen, which means he videotaped Allen's public appearances. On Aug. 11, the tracker became the tracked. Allen singled him out in the crowd with a long, rambling riff. "This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca or whatever his name is, he's with my opponent," Allen said. And later: "So welcome, let's give a welcome to Macaca here! Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!" The clip is on YouTube. One copy has been played more than 320,000 times.
It's ironic that Allen would welcome Sidarth to Virginia, since Sidarth has lived there his whole life and Allen grew up in California. It's also odd because until then, Allen and his staff had been nothing but friendly. "There's no way he didn't know who I was," Sidarth says. "He'd never addressed me before, and then to do so in this context�it was humiliating. That it was in a racial context made it worse." The crowd cheered, but Sidarth believes it was only because they had to. "It was an unfair indictment by Allen of the people there," Sidarth says. "They would have applauded no matter what he said." Later, some audience members went over to Sidarth to apologize.
It was definitely not Sidarth's idea to put the clip on YouTube. "Getting drawn out into the limelight was really surprising," he says, and he means it. He's an intensely private person, and he declined to answer quite a few of the questions put to him by TIME. He's focused on keeping his head down and getting into law school. "Ultimately I'd hope people wouldn't pay as much attention to things like this, instead caring more about who can serve the country or the state better," he says. "Of course," he adds, "character plays into that. And this event reflected on Allen's character."
Waz and Lenny
To watch Warren Murray, 34, and Leanne White, 32, make sponge cake is to hear the silent screams of Julia Child's dear, departed spirit. About 45 seconds in, they add two tablespoons of butter instead of two teaspoons, and it just goes downhill from there. Waz (as Warren is known) and Lenny (that's Leanne—it can be difficult to keep husband and wife straight) aren't professional chefs. They're copy editors at the Guardian newspaper in London. But their ham-fistedness in the kitchen is exactly what makes them great hosts.
Their show isn't a conventional cooking show. It's a video podcast called Crash Test Kitchen, and it's their sheer fallibility, their humanity, that makes the thing work. Waz and Lenny don't have the wizardly air of a Mario Batali or a Martha Stewart. "We have always tried to steer clear of the temptation to make it a Web version of a TV cooking show, with the old here's-one-we-prepared-earlier fakery and everything always turning out right," Waz says. Lenny says, "We try to be honest in our portrayal of cooking, so ordinary people feel brave enough to have a go at it." The sponge-cake episode is "probably the unintentionally funniest episode we've ever done," Waz says. "The thing was like trying to eat a sofa cushion." The episode ends with Waz furtively eating the ruined cake out of the trash. Even culinary daredevil Anthony Bourdain might have been scared to try that.
They don't sugarcoat the stresses of the marital kitchen, either. "The bickering and disputes between Lenny and me seem to be part of the appeal," Waz says, "so we mostly leave that stuff in." The Web is a two-way medium, and their fans offer both culinary advice and unsolicited marriage counseling. One viewer called Lenny a "nagging housewife." ("I took it waaaay too seriously and was really cut up," she says.) Some viewers are even more assertive. "There have been some not-so-subtle come-ons towards Lenny," Waz says, "and we've been asked whether we will be filming future episodes in the nude."
Harriet Klausner
Without the web, Harriet Klausner would be just an ordinary human being with an extraordinary talent. Instead she is one of the world's most prolific and influential book reviewers. At 54, Klausner, a former librarian from Georgia, has posted more book reviews on Amazon.com than any other user—12,896, as of this writing, almost twice as many as her nearest competitor. That's a book a day for 35 years.
Klausner isn't paid to do this. She's just, as she puts it, "a freaky kind of speed-reader." In elementary school, her teacher was shocked when Klausner handed in a 31⁄2-hour reading-comprehension test in less than an hour. Now she goes through four to six books a day. "It's incomprehensible to me that most people read only one book a week," she says. "I don't understand how anyone can read that slow."
Klausner is part of a quiet revolution in the way American taste gets made. The influence of newspaper and magazine critics is on the wane. People don't care to be lectured by professionals on what they should read or listen to or see. They're increasingly likely to pay attention to amateur online reviewers, bloggers and Amazon critics like Klausner. Online critics have a kind of just-plain-folks authenticity that the professionals just can't match. They're not fancy. They don't have an agenda. They just read for fun, the way you do. Publishers treat Klausner as a pro, sending her free books—50 a week—in hopes of getting her attention. Like any other good critic, Klausner has her share of enemies. "Harriet, please get a life," someone begged her on a message board, "and leave us poor Amazon customers alone."
Klausner is a bookworm, but she's no snob. She likes genre fiction: romance, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, horror. One of Klausner's lifetime goals—as yet unfulfilled—is to read every vampire book ever published. "I love vampires and werewolves and demons," she says. "Maybe I like being spooked." Maybe she's a little bit superhuman herself.
Wang Xiaofeng
"Chinese people don't do irony like Israelis and the English," says Wang Xiaofeng. "They don't have that making-fun-of-yourself gene." In China the blogosphere is dominated by the dronings of millions of earnest diarists, and there are still many things that can't be said in the mainstream media. Wang, however, enjoys making fun of art, culture, politics—everything that Chinese people are supposed to hold dear. Serious critiques of social problems or political leaders can still be dangerous in China, but serious isn't Wang's style. He might be the most respected blogger in China, precisely because he respects almost nothing.
Wang's site gets about 12,000 visitors a day. It's plastered with pictures of the Simpsons—Wang is a fan of the show, and he likes to think he looks like Bart—but there's also a bit of Borat in him too. He has posted fabricated interviews and deliberately misleading surveys. Some people call him a cynic or a liberal; some people call him names that are shocking even by online standards of incivility.
But labels don't really fit Wang. He doesn't like isms and movements and refuses to join groups or parties. He doesn't have some big, catchall solution. "There's nothing that can be done about a lot of things in China," he says. "Most of what people do on the Internet is complain. At least we have a place to blow off some steam."
Tila Tequila
Tila Nguyen was 1 year old when she moved to the U.S. from Singapore, but she's Vietnamese by heritage and blond by choice. As for what she does for a living, there isn't really a word for it yet. Nguyen, 25, who goes by Tila Tequila professionally, is some combination of rapper, singer, model, blogger and actress. But what she mostly is is the queen of the massive social-networking website MySpace.
Nguyen—or, oh, fine, Tequila—may be the least lonely girl on the Internet. She has more than 1.5 million MySpace friends. Her MySpace profile has been viewed more than 50 million times. Her self-published single, the profane and attitudinous F___ Ya Man, now playing on her MySpace page, has logged 13 million spins. (To listen to it is to hear the sound track of a million parents' dreams dying.) She gets somewhere from 3,000 to 5,000 new friend requests every day. She is something entirely new, a celebrity created not by a studio or a network but fan by fan, click by click, from the ground up on MySpace.
Before she hit it big, Nguyen had posed for Playboy.com—its first Asian Cyber Girl of the Month—and modeled for car shows and auto mags and formed girl bands. But her big break came three years ago when MySpace founder Tom Anderson invited Nguyen over to his new site. She had spent plenty of time on websites like Friendster, but her outsize, confrontational personality kept getting her kicked off. She says Friendster booted her five times. "I joined MySpace in September 2003," Nguyen recalls. "At that time no one was on there at all. I felt like a loser while all the cool kids were at some other school. So I mass e-mailed between 30,000 and 50,000 people and told them to come over. Everybody joined overnight."
Pre-Tila, your MySpace friends were mostly people you actually knew. Post-Tila, the biggest game on the site became Who Has the Most Friends, period, whoever they might be. "Once they saw how I worked it, everyone did what I did and started promoting themselves," she says. Not everybody would call this a change for the better; there are those who might even prefer a friendly community to a global popularity contest. Not Nguyen. Over the next couple of years she turned her online persona into a full-fledged business. "This is my job," she says. "That's how you maintain your popularity and keep it alive."
Nguyen clearly grasps the logic of Web 2.0 in a way that would make many ceos weep. She sells Tila posters, calendars, a clothing line of hoodies and shirts. She has been on the cover of British Maxim. She has a single due to be released online. She has a cameo in next summer's Adam Sandler movie. She has four managers, a publicist and a part-time assistant. It's hard to know how to read the rise of Tila Tequila. Does she represent the triumph of a new democratic starmaking medium or its crass exploitation for maximum personal gain? It's not clear that even Tila knows. But she knows why it works. "There's a million hot naked chicks on the Internet," she says. "There's a difference between those girls and me. Those chicks don't talk back to you."
Smosh
On Nov. 28, 2005, a video was uploaded to YouTube. It shows two American River College students, Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox, lip-synching to the Pok�mon theme song. Their lip-synching is completely earnest. They're really into it. They're gonna catch 'em all. This video would go on to be viewed more than 17 million times. For six months it was the most watched video on all of YouTube. It's enough to shake your faith in a new medium.
Padilla and Hecox go by the joint nickname Smosh, and they are the Saturday Night Live of YouTube. Their videos are insanely popular. Their genius, if that's the right word for it, is in their unswerving, unwinking commitment to idiocy. It may also be in their shaggy haircuts. (Smosh is some kind of inside joke that has something to do with some friend of theirs talking about mosh pits ... Never mind.) Since Pok�mon, they have done other theme songs, including those for Power Rangers and Mortal Kombat. They have branched out into sketch comedy as well. (Typical setup: a friendly game of Battleship gone horribly, horribly awry.)
So far, Padilla and Hecox haven't been able to monetize their viral notoriety on any significant scale, although they do sell ads on Smosh.com. In fact, for Padilla and Hecox, being Internet celebrities is a lot like being normal people. "Our girlfriends hate that we're so busy," Hecox says. "The videos take up a lot of time, and we're working on several projects simultaneously. Overall, it really hasn't affected our lives." The dream is to end up like Andy (Lazy Sunday) Samberg, who went from online comedy to the real SNL. But not everybody can live the dream, not even in the ultra-democratic YouTube era. "Our future is wide open," Padilla says. "There seems to be a huge potential in what we're doing, so we'll just keep doing what we're doing. And if nothing comes out of it—well, whatever."
Kamini
Kamini grew up in a tiny town deep in the French countryside called Marly-Gomont. He stood out, in part because everybody stands out in Marly-Gomont—pop. 432—but partly because Kamini is black. There aren't a lot of black people in Marly-Gomont.
Kamini (who keeps his last name private) wanted to be a hip-hop artist. It's a long way from Marly-Gomont to South Central L.A., but he recorded a song and shot a video with a friend. Total budget: 100 euros. The name of the song was Marly-Gomont, and in it Kamini raps about what he knows. "I couldn't rap about 'bitches' and 'hos' and do that whole gangsta thing," he says, "because it's not true. It's not my life."
Instead he raps about cows and tractors and soccer. "In Marly-Gomont," the song goes (it's in French), "there's no concrete/ 65 is the average age around here/ One tennis court, one basketball court." The video shows Kamini raisin' the roof with the village elders, who obviously think he's hilarious. But Kamini also raps about racism and being different: "I wanted to revolt, except that there, there's nothing to burn./ There's just one bus for the high school, same for the community center,/ Not worth going and burning a neighbor's car,/ Cuz they don't have them, they've all got mopeds."
On Aug. 30, Kamini and another friend put the video online and cold e-mailed some record companies to tell them about it. The response wasn't exactly a feeding frenzy. But an intern at one of the companies posted a link to the video on a bulletin board. "It's a site that sells custom-print T shirts," Kamini says, shaking his head. "It doesn't even have anything to do with music!" By the end of the day, nobody on the website was talking about T shirts. Everyone was talking about Kamini.
The video spread to YouTube and its French equivalents, WAT.tv and Dailymotion.com. Thousands of people watched it. Kamini started getting requests to appear on radio shows. In mid-October, without having toured or even played a single gig, Kamini signed a record deal with RCA for Marly-Gomont and two albums. He was a rap star by popular proclamation. He had paid his dues virally. "Everything has happened in two months," says Kamini, who hasn't quit his part-time job as a nurse. "Look at me, sitting here at a luxury hotel being interviewed. How did all this happen?"
The answer is that the people can make their own stars no—no auditions, no promotions. It's like American Idol, but everywhere, all the time. Though it's worth noting that the bands that have broken through online—OK Go, the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Gnarls Barkley—are a lot more interesting than the bland standards belters on American Idol.
Some rules haven't changed. People respond to talent and authentic emotion, and Marly-Gomont has them. "I'm not the only one on the Internet with a video," Kamini says. "But Marly-Gomont is different. It shows my real nature, and people respond to that. Materially speaking, it's the Internet that made it popular. But behind that, emotionally speaking, are people."
Simon Pulsifer
There is a list on Wikipedia of who has written or edited the most entries, and for a long time the volunteer at the top of this list was a user known as SimonP. His real name is Simon Pulsifer. He is 25, unemployed and lives in Ottawa.
Pulsifer has authored somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Wikipedia articles and edited roughly 92,000 others. "I've actually fallen to No. 2 in terms of edits," says Pulsifer, who's tall and a little overweight. "But it's a fairly meaningless measure, so I don't feel too bad." He first heard about Wikipedia in 2001, but it wasn't until 2003 that he got serious about contributing. That was the year he got a really, really boring summer job. At that point Pulsifer got "superinvolved" with Wikipedia.
Why would somebody donate so much of his time? "There's a certain addictive element," he says. Pulsifer was still in school, and writing Wikipedia entries turned out to be a handy way of studying for exams. While taking a Russian-history class, he wrote entries about the czars. He has chipped in pieces on African history and biblical studies. Some he wrote "off the top of my head." Others took research. "It's a combination of things," Pulsifer says matter-of-factly. "It's great to see your writing published online—it's not that easy to create things that are read by millions of people." He also liked the prestige that came with being a major player on Wikipedia. Granted, that prestige was mostly among other major Wikipedia players, but still.
Wikipedia isn't a paradise of user-generated content. It has plenty of errors in it, and omissions, although at this point it's considerably larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some people enjoy vandalizing it—erasing or falsifying entries. Earlier this year the entire staff of Congress was barred from Wikipedia for sabotaging one another's profiles. In a way it's as much a litmus test of human nature as it is a reference tool.
As for Pulsifer, he's quietly scaling back his compulsive Wikipediation. He no longer whizzes through 250 edits a day. "To a degree, I'm moving on," he says. He has had a couple of job offers; perhaps a well-paying gig will come along that will allow him to leave his parents' home, where he resides. No doubt a new Wikipedian will arrive to take his place. There are plenty of boring summer jobs out there.
Kim Hye Won
Kim Hye won doesn't look like a journalist, which is to say that she doesn't look like Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday. Kim looks like a 45-year-old Korean housewife, which is what she is. More and more journalists are starting to look like her.
Kim is a citizen reporter for a South Korean website called OhMyNews. There is nothing quite like OhMyNews in the U.S., or not yet. Imagine if the Washington Post were produced entirely by bloggers. OhMyNews is written mostly by a floating staff of 47,000 amateur journalists all over the country. The site gets 1 million to 1.5 million page views a day.
OhMyNews was founded in 2000, after decades of authoritarian rule had left the South Korean media deeply co-opted. The website was a revelation for Kim. "I felt the mainstream media was one-sided," she says. "But after I began to read OhMyNews, I found out there were different views and perspectives available." Kim read the site for about a year before she tried her first piece, about her son, who was studying for exams, and her husband, who was dealing with corporate burnout. The headline: DADDY'S DEPRESSED, SON'S TAKING TESTS, AND I'M WORRIED. She was a natural.
Over the past three years, Kim has written about 60 pieces for OhMyNews. The site awarded her Citizen Reporter of the Year for 2005. "Korean housewives become nameless after marriage," Kim says. "They are often just called someone's wife or someone's mother. I finally found my name through OhMyNews."
Blake Ross
When Blake Ross was 15, he moved from Florida to California to take an internship with Netscape. This was a rather quixotic thing for a 15-year-old to do, because Netscape was on life support at the time—its Web browser was getting the stuffing beat out of it by Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Netscape had one thing going for it: it was open source. Most software is developed exactly the way you think it is: you pay a bunch of geeks in cubicles to write it. Open-source software works differently. You release a rough draft onto the Internet, and anybody can open the hood and go to work on it—streamline it, fix bugs, suggest features, pretty up the interface, whatever. The people who write open-source software "aren't necessarily professionals," Ross says. "It gives you a breadth of experience outside of just computer geeks. It also means the people are truly dedicated because there's no payday." Open source is as much a community, even a subculture, as it is an approach to creating software.
In 2002 Ross and some colleagues decided to start up a new version of Netscape, one that would chuck all the fancy features and go for simplicity, stability and speed. They called the new browser Firefox, and it was a monster hit. When Firefox 2.0 appeared this October, it clocked 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours. Web surfers are switching to Firefox at the rate of 7 million a month.
There's something both very American and very anticapitalist about the open-source approach. It's about including everyone in the process, democratically, but it's also about giving away the product and sharing your trade secrets with the world; the more people who have access to your intellectual property the better. "I'm not in this for the money. I truly love it," Ross says. "I could never see myself sitting in a cubicle." Right now Ross, a world-weary 21, is taking time off from Stanford to work on a new project called Parakey. Parakey is top secret for now, but it will be an open-source project too. So Ross will make sure you hear about it.
Source: The Time
Citizens of the New Digital Democracy
Reported by Jeremy Caplan and Kathleen Kingsbury/New York, Susan Jakes/Beijing, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Grant Rosenberg/Paris and Bryan Walsh/Seoul
I believe you ll be as much surprised as I have been.
Sam
By LEV GROSSMAN
Leila
The Real Lonelygirl
Lonelygirl15 is one of the most viewed YouTube users of all time. She's young and pretty, with a complicated and absolutely compelling personal life. She's also a work of fiction—lonelygirl15 was created by two professional screenwriters and an actress from New Zealand, of all places. Well—to paraphrase Woody Allen—you can't have everything.
But that doesn't mean there aren't real lonelygirls out there. Take Leila. She's 20 and lives in Maryland, where she's studying to be a social worker. Her personal life really is complicated. Online she describes her ethnicity as Middle Eastern—she's half Lebanese—and her religion as Muslim. She struggles with depression and her crush on the guy at the 7-Eleven. You know—complicated.
Like lonelygirl15, Leila—she doesn't give out her last name—is a video blogger. Leila has posted 49 videos on YouTube under the user name pppppanic (that's five ps). She speaks directly into her webcam about her life, her opinions, her shifting moods, what she did that day. She says um and ah a lot. She has been known to drink and blog. Sometimes she doesn't speak at all, just runs words across the screen while melancholy singer-songwriter stuff plays in the background.
This isn't what YouTube was designed for—to be the public video diary of a generation of teens and twentysomethings. But sometimes the best inventions are the ones people find their own uses for. "You have people from all walks of life wanting to share a piece of their life with you," Leila says. "The feeling of togetherness is unbeatable. It's a beautiful thing."
There's certainly a narcissistic quality to video blogging—who doesn't love talking about him—or herself?—but the interest that bloggers take in their own lives is matched by their fascination with one another's. Leila no longer even bothers with TV. "I think people are bored with the mainstream media. I've been so caught up in watching other people's videos. I find it more entertaining. Much more real than the run-of-the-mill 'reality' show." Of course, in the post-lonelygirl15 era, there's always that question mark: How authentic are these faces on the computer screen? "I guess that's the only flaw," says Leila. "You can never really know the whole side of the story. You just get bits and pieces. You have to put blind faith in who the person is."
Lane Hudson
Lane Hudson first met former Florida Representative Mark Foley in a Washington bar in 1995. According to Hudson, Foley hit on him, unsuccessfully. He "made everyone, gay and straight, uncomfortable with his sexual advances," Hudson says. "Mark Foley's sleazy behavior was the worst-kept secret in Washington." In a different world, a less wired world, that would have been the end of the story.
Fast-forward a decade. On Sept. 24, 2006, Hudson posted on his blog Stop Sex Predators some amorous e-mails that Foley had sent to a congressional page. Other bloggers linked to them; soon the news networks were covering it, and some incriminating instant messages surfaced. Five days later Hudson was standing in line at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport when his cell phone and his BlackBerry went crazy. Mark Foley had resigned from Congress and dropped out of his re-election campaign. "My heart stopped," Hudson says. "I thought, Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into?"
Now 29, Hudson is no political outsider. A lifelong Democrat from Charleston, S.C., he has worked for quite a few politicians, including John Kerry in his 2004 campaign. His feelings about what happened are complicated. "How can I not be so excited about how this turned the midterm elections?" says Hudson. He says he's surprised by the furor he started, although he has been around long enough to see the judo-like power even a tiny blog can have over a towering public figure—Trent Lott in 2002, for example, or Dan Rather in 2004. "Gotcha" moments like the Foley affair suggest the power of citizen journalists to root out hypocrisy in public life—Hudson isn't slow to point out that Foley chaired the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children Caucus—but also to create a kind of pseudo-Orwellian atmosphere of universal scrutiny. "The magnifying glass over people in public life is getting bigger and bigger," he says. "Politicians have got to start being themselves from the beginning, then they won't screw up so much. Stop pretending."
Hudson has become something of a celebrity in the Washington gay community, but the Foley affair hasn't exactly jump-started his career. He would love to end up as a political consultant or a political commentator. For now, he's started up a new blog called News for the Left. "Everyone told me, 'Oh, you're going to have so many opportunities now,'" he says. "'Everyone is going to offer you a job.' Well, nothing has materialized yet." If he sounds a little bitter, it's understandable. He lost his old job, with the Human Rights Campaign, when it came out that he had used company resources to blog about Foley. "I like to tell people that I'm the only person fired over this whole scandal," he says, "and I'm the person who told the truth."
Ali Khurshid
There aren't that many digital cameras floating around Karachi, Pakistan. Or computers, for that matter. Ali Khurshid started taking pictures with a disposable Kodak his parents gave him when he was 8. Since then he has graduated to fancy digital gear, but he has hung on to his low-tech attitude. "I love how the best pictures are usually taken with Holgas and other toy cameras," he says. "It just confirms my belief that the eye is supreme in taking a brilliant photo. The camera is secondary."
Khurshid, now 22, is an artist in a country that's known mostly, in the West at least, for its politics. He takes pictures "to make sure Pakistan's real beauty was put through," he says. "Not just the Pakistan that is shown in the media, always the center of attention for all the wrong reasons." Fortunately for Khurshid, he lives at a time when a solo shutterbug can have the same reach as a staff photographer at the New York Times.
Last year Khurshid began uploading his pictures to Flickr, a website where anyone can post his photos, view another's and swap comments and critiques. In all, there are more than 320 million photos on Flickr right now, about 200 of which are Khurshid's. He's a shy, polite man, but Khurshid is more than willing to wax romantic about the unifying, globalizing greatness of the Flickr community. "I love the world coming together in one place and just sharing all that's in it," he says. "I feel like I get to see the world like it really, truly is. Not by stereotyping a people or a country."
Even more than blogs or video-sharing sites, Flickr has the power to forge international bonds because it works in an entirely nonverbal medium. In fact, it works almost too well. Lavannya Goradia, a heavy Flickr user in Bangalore, India, finds it to be a bit of a lovefest. "I suppose it's a need to pat each other's backs, but that will always happen on a public forum," she says with a sigh. "I am still waiting for a day when I will get constructive criticism from someone here." As for Khurshid, he judges a picture's quality by its use of light and its spontaneity—"by the fact that one moment later it would have all gone," he says. "If someone can turn the ordinary into a dream, that person to me is a genius."
Megan Gill
When Megan Gill broke up with her boyfriend in November, it wasn't easy, but she gritted her teeth and did the inevitable: she changed her relationship status on her Facebook page. "I knew there would be a flurry of annoying questions about what happened that I didn't want to answer," she says. "But it was the fastest way for it to be over and done with. Besides, if these people are supposed to be your friends, and care about you, then why keep it a secret?"
Gill, 22, a senior at the University of Portland, has a lot of friends—708, according to her Facebook page. Facebook is a social-networking website that has become—for many people, some of whom are even old enough to see R-rated movies—a way of doing what people used to do by gossiping and talking on the phone, but a lot more efficiently and publicly. You can post photos on your Facebook page, personal information, news about yourself, anything at all. If you want to be Megan's friend or have pretty much any social interaction with her, you're going to want to go through Facebook. She's a double major in special education and English, so she's busy, but she checks in with the site at least twice a day, often 10 times that.
She'll post random updates to her profile just to let everyone know how she is: "Megan is so over first semester," "Megan is bummed about the election results," "Megan is tired of letting people down." As she puts it, "Facebook is my generation's way of picking up the telephone." It also does things the phone can't. "If you want to organize something," Megan says, "it's much simpler to send a message through Facebook than leave 20 voice mails." She doesn't know how anything got done on college campuses before Facebook.
Clearly, social-networking sites can create and maintain relationships that wouldn't have existed otherwise. But can they also attenuate relationships? Can Facebook be a way to avoid dealing with people face to face? Gill's answer has a whiff of intergenerational snobbism. "If anything, my friends and I are more in touch than was ever possible before," she says. "Older people had handwritten letters or called each other or whatever. I mean, really, we have a much more convenient way of doing things."
Lee Kelley
Captain Lee Kelley is 35 and hails from New Orleans. He spent 12 years in the Army without once being posted overseas, but that streak ended in June 2005 when he volunteered for service in Iraq and became a signal officer at Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi. He has always been a writer—he has noodled around with a novel, done some freelance journalism. But it turns out he had to go all the way to Iraq to find his voice.
Kelley needed a way to convey to his family—especially his kids—what he was going through. As he puts it, "something I could leave behind if, God forbid, something happened to me." That's why he started taking some nonstandard gear with him on patrol: a notebook. "Work could last either eight hours or 20," he says. "I began to look forward to sitting down to write at the end of it." When he went off duty, he would grab a shower and then bang out a story about what had just happened. "Even though I was writing down what had happened in Ramadi that day," he says, "this was sort of an escape from the violence all around me."
Kelley is a military blogger, or mil-blogger, one of at least 1,200 servicemen and -women who write about their lives online. So far his blog, Wordsmith At War, has logged more than 200,000 hits. Mil-bloggers are a different breed from the domestic blogger who keeps, say, a record of his cat's mood swings. Here's Kelley on driving in Ramadi: "You have to go around big potholes and chunks of concrete blocking part of the lane. It's not a good feeling, because all your training tells you that these are ideal sites for IEDs ... The threat is very real, and you can sense it in the air. You can't think 'it won't happen to us,' you have to assume it will. Yet we discuss it in the same tone we might talk about last night's football game."
If Vietnam was the first war to be televised, Iraq is the first to be blogged—and YouTubed. Kelley says he and other soldiers are disappointed by how the media portray the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. "If you looked at all the coverage, you'd think the whole thing is a huge mess waiting to blow up. I sometimes wonder where these reporters are. I guess it's not exciting enough to write about schools being built." Kelley and his fellow mil-bloggers aren't just writing letters to their families. Unlike generations of soldiers before them, they're writing for history. "If they are archived, blogs will give the best account of this war," Kelley says. "No one knows what's going on better than the soldiers on the front lines."
S.R. Sidarth
His full name is Shekar Ramanuja Sidarth. He usually goes by just his last name, or even just Sid. But most of the country knows him as "Macaca."
Sidarth, 21, is a senior at the University of Virginia, a double major in engineering and government. He spent the past few summers doing campaign grunt work, and 2006 was no different. He worked for James Webb's Senate campaign, tracking Webb's opponent, Virginia Senator George Allen, which means he videotaped Allen's public appearances. On Aug. 11, the tracker became the tracked. Allen singled him out in the crowd with a long, rambling riff. "This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca or whatever his name is, he's with my opponent," Allen said. And later: "So welcome, let's give a welcome to Macaca here! Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!" The clip is on YouTube. One copy has been played more than 320,000 times.
It's ironic that Allen would welcome Sidarth to Virginia, since Sidarth has lived there his whole life and Allen grew up in California. It's also odd because until then, Allen and his staff had been nothing but friendly. "There's no way he didn't know who I was," Sidarth says. "He'd never addressed me before, and then to do so in this context�it was humiliating. That it was in a racial context made it worse." The crowd cheered, but Sidarth believes it was only because they had to. "It was an unfair indictment by Allen of the people there," Sidarth says. "They would have applauded no matter what he said." Later, some audience members went over to Sidarth to apologize.
It was definitely not Sidarth's idea to put the clip on YouTube. "Getting drawn out into the limelight was really surprising," he says, and he means it. He's an intensely private person, and he declined to answer quite a few of the questions put to him by TIME. He's focused on keeping his head down and getting into law school. "Ultimately I'd hope people wouldn't pay as much attention to things like this, instead caring more about who can serve the country or the state better," he says. "Of course," he adds, "character plays into that. And this event reflected on Allen's character."
Waz and Lenny
To watch Warren Murray, 34, and Leanne White, 32, make sponge cake is to hear the silent screams of Julia Child's dear, departed spirit. About 45 seconds in, they add two tablespoons of butter instead of two teaspoons, and it just goes downhill from there. Waz (as Warren is known) and Lenny (that's Leanne—it can be difficult to keep husband and wife straight) aren't professional chefs. They're copy editors at the Guardian newspaper in London. But their ham-fistedness in the kitchen is exactly what makes them great hosts.
Their show isn't a conventional cooking show. It's a video podcast called Crash Test Kitchen, and it's their sheer fallibility, their humanity, that makes the thing work. Waz and Lenny don't have the wizardly air of a Mario Batali or a Martha Stewart. "We have always tried to steer clear of the temptation to make it a Web version of a TV cooking show, with the old here's-one-we-prepared-earlier fakery and everything always turning out right," Waz says. Lenny says, "We try to be honest in our portrayal of cooking, so ordinary people feel brave enough to have a go at it." The sponge-cake episode is "probably the unintentionally funniest episode we've ever done," Waz says. "The thing was like trying to eat a sofa cushion." The episode ends with Waz furtively eating the ruined cake out of the trash. Even culinary daredevil Anthony Bourdain might have been scared to try that.
They don't sugarcoat the stresses of the marital kitchen, either. "The bickering and disputes between Lenny and me seem to be part of the appeal," Waz says, "so we mostly leave that stuff in." The Web is a two-way medium, and their fans offer both culinary advice and unsolicited marriage counseling. One viewer called Lenny a "nagging housewife." ("I took it waaaay too seriously and was really cut up," she says.) Some viewers are even more assertive. "There have been some not-so-subtle come-ons towards Lenny," Waz says, "and we've been asked whether we will be filming future episodes in the nude."
Harriet Klausner
Without the web, Harriet Klausner would be just an ordinary human being with an extraordinary talent. Instead she is one of the world's most prolific and influential book reviewers. At 54, Klausner, a former librarian from Georgia, has posted more book reviews on Amazon.com than any other user—12,896, as of this writing, almost twice as many as her nearest competitor. That's a book a day for 35 years.
Klausner isn't paid to do this. She's just, as she puts it, "a freaky kind of speed-reader." In elementary school, her teacher was shocked when Klausner handed in a 31⁄2-hour reading-comprehension test in less than an hour. Now she goes through four to six books a day. "It's incomprehensible to me that most people read only one book a week," she says. "I don't understand how anyone can read that slow."
Klausner is part of a quiet revolution in the way American taste gets made. The influence of newspaper and magazine critics is on the wane. People don't care to be lectured by professionals on what they should read or listen to or see. They're increasingly likely to pay attention to amateur online reviewers, bloggers and Amazon critics like Klausner. Online critics have a kind of just-plain-folks authenticity that the professionals just can't match. They're not fancy. They don't have an agenda. They just read for fun, the way you do. Publishers treat Klausner as a pro, sending her free books—50 a week—in hopes of getting her attention. Like any other good critic, Klausner has her share of enemies. "Harriet, please get a life," someone begged her on a message board, "and leave us poor Amazon customers alone."
Klausner is a bookworm, but she's no snob. She likes genre fiction: romance, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, horror. One of Klausner's lifetime goals—as yet unfulfilled—is to read every vampire book ever published. "I love vampires and werewolves and demons," she says. "Maybe I like being spooked." Maybe she's a little bit superhuman herself.
Wang Xiaofeng
"Chinese people don't do irony like Israelis and the English," says Wang Xiaofeng. "They don't have that making-fun-of-yourself gene." In China the blogosphere is dominated by the dronings of millions of earnest diarists, and there are still many things that can't be said in the mainstream media. Wang, however, enjoys making fun of art, culture, politics—everything that Chinese people are supposed to hold dear. Serious critiques of social problems or political leaders can still be dangerous in China, but serious isn't Wang's style. He might be the most respected blogger in China, precisely because he respects almost nothing.
Wang's site gets about 12,000 visitors a day. It's plastered with pictures of the Simpsons—Wang is a fan of the show, and he likes to think he looks like Bart—but there's also a bit of Borat in him too. He has posted fabricated interviews and deliberately misleading surveys. Some people call him a cynic or a liberal; some people call him names that are shocking even by online standards of incivility.
But labels don't really fit Wang. He doesn't like isms and movements and refuses to join groups or parties. He doesn't have some big, catchall solution. "There's nothing that can be done about a lot of things in China," he says. "Most of what people do on the Internet is complain. At least we have a place to blow off some steam."
Tila Tequila
Tila Nguyen was 1 year old when she moved to the U.S. from Singapore, but she's Vietnamese by heritage and blond by choice. As for what she does for a living, there isn't really a word for it yet. Nguyen, 25, who goes by Tila Tequila professionally, is some combination of rapper, singer, model, blogger and actress. But what she mostly is is the queen of the massive social-networking website MySpace.
Nguyen—or, oh, fine, Tequila—may be the least lonely girl on the Internet. She has more than 1.5 million MySpace friends. Her MySpace profile has been viewed more than 50 million times. Her self-published single, the profane and attitudinous F___ Ya Man, now playing on her MySpace page, has logged 13 million spins. (To listen to it is to hear the sound track of a million parents' dreams dying.) She gets somewhere from 3,000 to 5,000 new friend requests every day. She is something entirely new, a celebrity created not by a studio or a network but fan by fan, click by click, from the ground up on MySpace.
Before she hit it big, Nguyen had posed for Playboy.com—its first Asian Cyber Girl of the Month—and modeled for car shows and auto mags and formed girl bands. But her big break came three years ago when MySpace founder Tom Anderson invited Nguyen over to his new site. She had spent plenty of time on websites like Friendster, but her outsize, confrontational personality kept getting her kicked off. She says Friendster booted her five times. "I joined MySpace in September 2003," Nguyen recalls. "At that time no one was on there at all. I felt like a loser while all the cool kids were at some other school. So I mass e-mailed between 30,000 and 50,000 people and told them to come over. Everybody joined overnight."
Pre-Tila, your MySpace friends were mostly people you actually knew. Post-Tila, the biggest game on the site became Who Has the Most Friends, period, whoever they might be. "Once they saw how I worked it, everyone did what I did and started promoting themselves," she says. Not everybody would call this a change for the better; there are those who might even prefer a friendly community to a global popularity contest. Not Nguyen. Over the next couple of years she turned her online persona into a full-fledged business. "This is my job," she says. "That's how you maintain your popularity and keep it alive."
Nguyen clearly grasps the logic of Web 2.0 in a way that would make many ceos weep. She sells Tila posters, calendars, a clothing line of hoodies and shirts. She has been on the cover of British Maxim. She has a single due to be released online. She has a cameo in next summer's Adam Sandler movie. She has four managers, a publicist and a part-time assistant. It's hard to know how to read the rise of Tila Tequila. Does she represent the triumph of a new democratic starmaking medium or its crass exploitation for maximum personal gain? It's not clear that even Tila knows. But she knows why it works. "There's a million hot naked chicks on the Internet," she says. "There's a difference between those girls and me. Those chicks don't talk back to you."
Smosh
On Nov. 28, 2005, a video was uploaded to YouTube. It shows two American River College students, Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox, lip-synching to the Pok�mon theme song. Their lip-synching is completely earnest. They're really into it. They're gonna catch 'em all. This video would go on to be viewed more than 17 million times. For six months it was the most watched video on all of YouTube. It's enough to shake your faith in a new medium.
Padilla and Hecox go by the joint nickname Smosh, and they are the Saturday Night Live of YouTube. Their videos are insanely popular. Their genius, if that's the right word for it, is in their unswerving, unwinking commitment to idiocy. It may also be in their shaggy haircuts. (Smosh is some kind of inside joke that has something to do with some friend of theirs talking about mosh pits ... Never mind.) Since Pok�mon, they have done other theme songs, including those for Power Rangers and Mortal Kombat. They have branched out into sketch comedy as well. (Typical setup: a friendly game of Battleship gone horribly, horribly awry.)
So far, Padilla and Hecox haven't been able to monetize their viral notoriety on any significant scale, although they do sell ads on Smosh.com. In fact, for Padilla and Hecox, being Internet celebrities is a lot like being normal people. "Our girlfriends hate that we're so busy," Hecox says. "The videos take up a lot of time, and we're working on several projects simultaneously. Overall, it really hasn't affected our lives." The dream is to end up like Andy (Lazy Sunday) Samberg, who went from online comedy to the real SNL. But not everybody can live the dream, not even in the ultra-democratic YouTube era. "Our future is wide open," Padilla says. "There seems to be a huge potential in what we're doing, so we'll just keep doing what we're doing. And if nothing comes out of it—well, whatever."
Kamini
Kamini grew up in a tiny town deep in the French countryside called Marly-Gomont. He stood out, in part because everybody stands out in Marly-Gomont—pop. 432—but partly because Kamini is black. There aren't a lot of black people in Marly-Gomont.
Kamini (who keeps his last name private) wanted to be a hip-hop artist. It's a long way from Marly-Gomont to South Central L.A., but he recorded a song and shot a video with a friend. Total budget: 100 euros. The name of the song was Marly-Gomont, and in it Kamini raps about what he knows. "I couldn't rap about 'bitches' and 'hos' and do that whole gangsta thing," he says, "because it's not true. It's not my life."
Instead he raps about cows and tractors and soccer. "In Marly-Gomont," the song goes (it's in French), "there's no concrete/ 65 is the average age around here/ One tennis court, one basketball court." The video shows Kamini raisin' the roof with the village elders, who obviously think he's hilarious. But Kamini also raps about racism and being different: "I wanted to revolt, except that there, there's nothing to burn./ There's just one bus for the high school, same for the community center,/ Not worth going and burning a neighbor's car,/ Cuz they don't have them, they've all got mopeds."
On Aug. 30, Kamini and another friend put the video online and cold e-mailed some record companies to tell them about it. The response wasn't exactly a feeding frenzy. But an intern at one of the companies posted a link to the video on a bulletin board. "It's a site that sells custom-print T shirts," Kamini says, shaking his head. "It doesn't even have anything to do with music!" By the end of the day, nobody on the website was talking about T shirts. Everyone was talking about Kamini.
The video spread to YouTube and its French equivalents, WAT.tv and Dailymotion.com. Thousands of people watched it. Kamini started getting requests to appear on radio shows. In mid-October, without having toured or even played a single gig, Kamini signed a record deal with RCA for Marly-Gomont and two albums. He was a rap star by popular proclamation. He had paid his dues virally. "Everything has happened in two months," says Kamini, who hasn't quit his part-time job as a nurse. "Look at me, sitting here at a luxury hotel being interviewed. How did all this happen?"
The answer is that the people can make their own stars no—no auditions, no promotions. It's like American Idol, but everywhere, all the time. Though it's worth noting that the bands that have broken through online—OK Go, the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Gnarls Barkley—are a lot more interesting than the bland standards belters on American Idol.
Some rules haven't changed. People respond to talent and authentic emotion, and Marly-Gomont has them. "I'm not the only one on the Internet with a video," Kamini says. "But Marly-Gomont is different. It shows my real nature, and people respond to that. Materially speaking, it's the Internet that made it popular. But behind that, emotionally speaking, are people."
Simon Pulsifer
There is a list on Wikipedia of who has written or edited the most entries, and for a long time the volunteer at the top of this list was a user known as SimonP. His real name is Simon Pulsifer. He is 25, unemployed and lives in Ottawa.
Pulsifer has authored somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Wikipedia articles and edited roughly 92,000 others. "I've actually fallen to No. 2 in terms of edits," says Pulsifer, who's tall and a little overweight. "But it's a fairly meaningless measure, so I don't feel too bad." He first heard about Wikipedia in 2001, but it wasn't until 2003 that he got serious about contributing. That was the year he got a really, really boring summer job. At that point Pulsifer got "superinvolved" with Wikipedia.
Why would somebody donate so much of his time? "There's a certain addictive element," he says. Pulsifer was still in school, and writing Wikipedia entries turned out to be a handy way of studying for exams. While taking a Russian-history class, he wrote entries about the czars. He has chipped in pieces on African history and biblical studies. Some he wrote "off the top of my head." Others took research. "It's a combination of things," Pulsifer says matter-of-factly. "It's great to see your writing published online—it's not that easy to create things that are read by millions of people." He also liked the prestige that came with being a major player on Wikipedia. Granted, that prestige was mostly among other major Wikipedia players, but still.
Wikipedia isn't a paradise of user-generated content. It has plenty of errors in it, and omissions, although at this point it's considerably larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some people enjoy vandalizing it—erasing or falsifying entries. Earlier this year the entire staff of Congress was barred from Wikipedia for sabotaging one another's profiles. In a way it's as much a litmus test of human nature as it is a reference tool.
As for Pulsifer, he's quietly scaling back his compulsive Wikipediation. He no longer whizzes through 250 edits a day. "To a degree, I'm moving on," he says. He has had a couple of job offers; perhaps a well-paying gig will come along that will allow him to leave his parents' home, where he resides. No doubt a new Wikipedian will arrive to take his place. There are plenty of boring summer jobs out there.
Kim Hye Won
Kim Hye won doesn't look like a journalist, which is to say that she doesn't look like Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday. Kim looks like a 45-year-old Korean housewife, which is what she is. More and more journalists are starting to look like her.
Kim is a citizen reporter for a South Korean website called OhMyNews. There is nothing quite like OhMyNews in the U.S., or not yet. Imagine if the Washington Post were produced entirely by bloggers. OhMyNews is written mostly by a floating staff of 47,000 amateur journalists all over the country. The site gets 1 million to 1.5 million page views a day.
OhMyNews was founded in 2000, after decades of authoritarian rule had left the South Korean media deeply co-opted. The website was a revelation for Kim. "I felt the mainstream media was one-sided," she says. "But after I began to read OhMyNews, I found out there were different views and perspectives available." Kim read the site for about a year before she tried her first piece, about her son, who was studying for exams, and her husband, who was dealing with corporate burnout. The headline: DADDY'S DEPRESSED, SON'S TAKING TESTS, AND I'M WORRIED. She was a natural.
Over the past three years, Kim has written about 60 pieces for OhMyNews. The site awarded her Citizen Reporter of the Year for 2005. "Korean housewives become nameless after marriage," Kim says. "They are often just called someone's wife or someone's mother. I finally found my name through OhMyNews."
Blake Ross
When Blake Ross was 15, he moved from Florida to California to take an internship with Netscape. This was a rather quixotic thing for a 15-year-old to do, because Netscape was on life support at the time—its Web browser was getting the stuffing beat out of it by Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Netscape had one thing going for it: it was open source. Most software is developed exactly the way you think it is: you pay a bunch of geeks in cubicles to write it. Open-source software works differently. You release a rough draft onto the Internet, and anybody can open the hood and go to work on it—streamline it, fix bugs, suggest features, pretty up the interface, whatever. The people who write open-source software "aren't necessarily professionals," Ross says. "It gives you a breadth of experience outside of just computer geeks. It also means the people are truly dedicated because there's no payday." Open source is as much a community, even a subculture, as it is an approach to creating software.
In 2002 Ross and some colleagues decided to start up a new version of Netscape, one that would chuck all the fancy features and go for simplicity, stability and speed. They called the new browser Firefox, and it was a monster hit. When Firefox 2.0 appeared this October, it clocked 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours. Web surfers are switching to Firefox at the rate of 7 million a month.
There's something both very American and very anticapitalist about the open-source approach. It's about including everyone in the process, democratically, but it's also about giving away the product and sharing your trade secrets with the world; the more people who have access to your intellectual property the better. "I'm not in this for the money. I truly love it," Ross says. "I could never see myself sitting in a cubicle." Right now Ross, a world-weary 21, is taking time off from Stanford to work on a new project called Parakey. Parakey is top secret for now, but it will be an open-source project too. So Ross will make sure you hear about it.
Source: The Time
Citizens of the New Digital Democracy
Reported by Jeremy Caplan and Kathleen Kingsbury/New York, Susan Jakes/Beijing, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Grant Rosenberg/Paris and Bryan Walsh/Seoul
Now It's Your Turn
By RICHARD STENGEL
The other day I listened to a reader named Tom, age 59, make a pitch for the American Voter as TIME's Person of the Year. Tom wasn't sitting in my office but was home in Stamford, Conn., where he recorded his video and uploaded it to YouTube. In fact, Tom was answering my own video, which I'd posted on YouTube a couple of weeks earlier, asking for people to submit nominations for Person of the Year. Within a few days, it had tens of thousands of page views and dozens of video submissions and comments. The people who sent in nominations were from Australia and Paris and Duluth, and their suggestions included Sacha Baron Cohen, Donald Rumsfeld, Al Gore and many, many votes for the YouTube guys.
This response was the living example of the idea of our 2006 Person of the Year: that individuals are changing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user-generated content are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy. From user-generated images of Baghdad strife and the London Underground bombing to the macaca moment that might have altered the midterm elections to the hundreds of thousands of individual outpourings of hope and poetry and self-absorption, this new global nervous system is changing the way we perceive the world. And the consequences of it all are both hard to know and impossible to overestimate.
There are lots of people in my line of work who believe that this phenomenon is dangerous because it undermines the traditional authority of media institutions like TIME. Some have called it an "amateur hour." And it often is. But America was founded by amateurs. The framers were professional lawyers and military men and bankers, but they were amateur politicians, and that's the way they thought it should be. Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger, and Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, Poor Richard's Almanack. The new media age of Web 2.0 is threatening only if you believe that an excess of democracy is the road to anarchy. I don't.
Journalists once had the exclusive province of taking people to places they'd never been. But now a mother in Baghdad with a videophone can let you see a roadside bombing, or a patron in a nightclub can show you a racist rant by a famous comedian. These blogs and videos bring events to the rest of us in ways that are often more immediate and authentic than traditional media. These new techniques, I believe, will only enhance what we do as journalists and challenge us to do it in even more innovative ways.
We chose to put a mirror on the cover because it literally reflects the idea that you, not we, are transforming the information age. The 2006 Person of the Year issue—the largest one Time has ever printed—marks the first time we've put reflective Mylar on the cover. When we found a supplier in Minnesota, we made the company sign a confidentiality agreement before placing an order for 6,965,000 pieces. That's a lot of Mylar. The elegant cover was designed by our peerless art director, Arthur Hochstein, and the incredible logistics of printing and distributing this issue were ably coordinated by our director of operations, Brooke Twyford, and director of editorial operations, Rick Prue. The Person of the Year package, as well as People Who Mattered, was masterfully overseen by deputy managing editor Steve Koepp. Designing a cover with a Mylar window does create one unanticipated challenge: How do you display it online when there's no one standing in front of it? If you go to Time.com, you'll see an animated version of the cover in which the window is stocked with a rotating display of reader-submitted photos. Maybe you'll see yourself.
Source: The Time Magazine
Now It's Your Turn
The other day I listened to a reader named Tom, age 59, make a pitch for the American Voter as TIME's Person of the Year. Tom wasn't sitting in my office but was home in Stamford, Conn., where he recorded his video and uploaded it to YouTube. In fact, Tom was answering my own video, which I'd posted on YouTube a couple of weeks earlier, asking for people to submit nominations for Person of the Year. Within a few days, it had tens of thousands of page views and dozens of video submissions and comments. The people who sent in nominations were from Australia and Paris and Duluth, and their suggestions included Sacha Baron Cohen, Donald Rumsfeld, Al Gore and many, many votes for the YouTube guys.
This response was the living example of the idea of our 2006 Person of the Year: that individuals are changing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user-generated content are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy. From user-generated images of Baghdad strife and the London Underground bombing to the macaca moment that might have altered the midterm elections to the hundreds of thousands of individual outpourings of hope and poetry and self-absorption, this new global nervous system is changing the way we perceive the world. And the consequences of it all are both hard to know and impossible to overestimate.
There are lots of people in my line of work who believe that this phenomenon is dangerous because it undermines the traditional authority of media institutions like TIME. Some have called it an "amateur hour." And it often is. But America was founded by amateurs. The framers were professional lawyers and military men and bankers, but they were amateur politicians, and that's the way they thought it should be. Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger, and Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, Poor Richard's Almanack. The new media age of Web 2.0 is threatening only if you believe that an excess of democracy is the road to anarchy. I don't.
Journalists once had the exclusive province of taking people to places they'd never been. But now a mother in Baghdad with a videophone can let you see a roadside bombing, or a patron in a nightclub can show you a racist rant by a famous comedian. These blogs and videos bring events to the rest of us in ways that are often more immediate and authentic than traditional media. These new techniques, I believe, will only enhance what we do as journalists and challenge us to do it in even more innovative ways.
We chose to put a mirror on the cover because it literally reflects the idea that you, not we, are transforming the information age. The 2006 Person of the Year issue—the largest one Time has ever printed—marks the first time we've put reflective Mylar on the cover. When we found a supplier in Minnesota, we made the company sign a confidentiality agreement before placing an order for 6,965,000 pieces. That's a lot of Mylar. The elegant cover was designed by our peerless art director, Arthur Hochstein, and the incredible logistics of printing and distributing this issue were ably coordinated by our director of operations, Brooke Twyford, and director of editorial operations, Rick Prue. The Person of the Year package, as well as People Who Mattered, was masterfully overseen by deputy managing editor Steve Koepp. Designing a cover with a Mylar window does create one unanticipated challenge: How do you display it online when there's no one standing in front of it? If you go to Time.com, you'll see an animated version of the cover in which the window is stocked with a rotating display of reader-submitted photos. Maybe you'll see yourself.
Source: The Time Magazine
Now It's Your Turn
vendredi 24 août 2007
Gene Kelly
Eugene Curran Kelly (August 23, 1912 – February 2, 1996), better known as Gene Kelly, was an American dancer, actor, singer, director, producer, and choreographer.
Kelly was a major exponent of 20th century filmed dance, known for his energetic and athletic dancing style, his good looks and the likeable characters that he played on screen. Although he is probably best known today for his performance in Singin' in the Rain, he dominated the Hollywood musical film from the mid 1940s until its demise in the late 1950s. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Kelly among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking at No. 15.
Source: Gene Kelly Wikipedia's page
Gene Kelly IMDB info
Singing in the Rain
Gene Kelly perform from 'Les Demoiselles de Rochefort'
Arik Levy
Arik Levy was born in Tel Aviv in 1963.
At the age of 27 he left behind his design studio and surf shop for Europe, and in 1991 graduated with distinction in Industrial Design from the Art Centre Europe in Switzerland. In that same year he won a Seiko Epson Inc. competition and moved to Japan where he took part in various design projects and exhibitions. After his return to Europe he taught at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Creation Industrielle and Les Ateliers Paris from 1992 until 1994. During the same time he gave design workshops at various Design Universities throughout Europe. Arik's acclaimed projects include sets for modern dance at the Grand Theatre de Geneve, the Netherlands Dance Theatre, the Finnish National Ballet and the BatSheva Dance Israel.
He has won numerous awards and is currently Partner and Creative Director of LDesign in Paris, a company active in prospective studies in industrial design, product development, light design, corporate identity, packaging and display, interiors and exhibition design as well as stage design.
Arik designed Black Honey and Minishake, two RAPID MANUFACTURED products, in cooperation with the Belgian company Materialise NV.
Source: http://www.within4walls.co.uk/
Arik Levy
Why Millions Are Living Virtual Lives Online
Second Life is emerging as a powerful new medium for social interactions of all sorts, from romance to making money. It may be the Internet's next big thing.
By Jessica Bennett and Malcolm Beith
Newsweek International
July 30, 2007 issue - It's 1 a.m., and the "Dublin" nightclub is packed. Women in trendy ball gowns and men in miniskirts dance to Bon Jovi. Simon Stevens spins his wheelchair across the room, then leaps up and starts dancing, a move he can execute only here in Second Life, a 3-D virtual world that Stevens roams on his PC screen, using an avatar—a graphic rendering of himself, liberated from his cerebral palsy. "I flourish in Second Life," says the 33-year-old, who heads a disability-consulting firm called Enable Enterprises, out of his home in England. "It's no game—it's a serious tool."
Rhonda Lillie and Paul Hawkins live thousands of miles apart—she in California, he in Wales—and until this week, had never met face to face. But they've been dating for more than two years—in Second Life. The detachment of meeting through their avatars allowed them to open up to one another in a way they might never have done in the real world. "We felt like we could go in and really be ourselves," Lillie says.
Anshe Chung is a virtual land baroness with a real-life fortune. The woman behind the Anshe avatar is Ailin Graef, a former language teacher living near Frankfurt, Germany. Three years ago she started buying and developing virtual land in Second Life to see whether its virtual economy could sustain a real life. Turns out it can: Chung became Second Life's first millionaire in 2006. Her business, Anshe Chung Studios, with a staff of 60, buys virtual property and builds homes or other structures that it rents or sells to other denizens of Second Life.
When San Francisco software developer Philip Rosedale dreamed up the idea for Second Life in 1998, he never imagined that it might have such an impact on the world at large. Just as Google sexed up the way we search, and instant messaging altered the way we interact, Second Life is fast becoming the next red-hot tool on the Internet.
The numbers tell the story. Rosedale launched Second Life in 2001, but it got off to a slow start, reaching only 1.5 million registered users in 2006. In the past year, membership has soared to more than 8 million users—2 million having signed on in the last two months alone. This hypergrowth, driven mainly by word of mouth, is now attracting competitors. South Korea's Cyworld started out as a social-networking site, but has evolved into a two-dimensional equivalent of Second Life, claiming 20 million registered users from Asia to Latin America. Richard Branson's Virgin recently announced plans to create its own 3-D community called A World of My Own. By 2011, four of every five people who use the Internet will actively participate in Second Life or some similar medium, according to Gartner Research, which recently did a study looking at the investment potential of virtual worlds. If Gartner is to be believed (and it is one of the most respected research firms in the field) this means 1.6 billion—out of a total 2 billion Internet users—will have found new lives online.
The power of Second Life lies in its utility for the gamut of human activities. It's a potent medium for socializing—it provides people with a way to express, explore and experiment with identity, vent their frustrations, reveal alter egos. The likes of MySpace and Facebook have already created online communities, but they lack the three-dimensional potential for interaction that Second Life provides. The people who are coming to this online universe aren't just socializing, however. They're also doing business, collaborating on research, teaching courses, dating and even having sex. More than 45 multinational companies, including the likes of American Apparel, IBM, General Motors and Dell are beginning to use the medium for customer service, sales and marketing. Many people are coupling the Second Life chat technology with Skype, the popular audio Internet software, so they can talk out loud while interacting inside the virtual world. Or they use live streaming video to talk and see each other in real life (sitting in front of a computer screen), as well as through their avatars inside Second Life. "The unique thing about Second Life is that it's immersive," says Michael Rowe, head of IBM's digital convergence team. "There's a huge opportunity here, just as in the early days of the Internet."
The medium sucks people in. A recent Dutch study found that 57 percent of Second Lifers spend more than 18 hours a week there, and 33 percent spend more than 30 hours a week. On a typical day, customers spend $1 million buying virtual clothes, cars, houses and other goods for their avatars, and total sales within this virtual economy are now growing at an annual rate of 10 percent. As a result, the money flowing through Second Life has attracted the attention of the U.S. tax authorities, who are currently investigating profits made in online businesses. And as it has evolved, those with ill intentions have apparently discovered Second Life, too. FBI agents are investigating possible gambling operations, and the German TV news program "Report Mainz" recently revealed allegations of child abuse in the virtual world. (Adults were purportedly using their avatars to have sex with the avatars of minors; they were expelled.)
Back in 1998, Rosedale simply hoped to create a vivid three-dimensional landscape in which graphic designers could create likenesses of their real-world ambitions—houses, cars, forests, anything one might find in a virtual game like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Except Rosedale's creation wouldn't be a game: Second Life had no rules, no levels, no dragons to slay. It was open-ended, a digital landscape without regulations (much like the Internet in its early days). It was created on software that operates across multiple servers—a grid system that could easily grow to accommodate a large, far-flung community. A user in Germany could easily partner with a peer in Mexico to form their own mini-community inside Second Life, based on common interests—architectural designs, whatever. "It's basically Tom Friedman's flat world," says Philip Evans, an economist at Boston Consulting Group who studies the industry. "It's the globalization of the virtual world."
At first, it was a world with no rules. Rosedale's company, Linden Lab, oversaw the allotments of server space, which translates into virtual real estate, but imposed no controls over what went on inside the Garden of Eden it had created. A user's representation in Second Life—his avatar—would be bound by no social constraints. And anything could be built, as long as you could write good enough code. The first pioneers—graphic designers, for the most part—simply set up display spaces for their technological projects. Then small communities with common ideas and visions—much like an artistic community, say, in the real world—sprang up. Since then, cities have grown, with urban amenities from stores to clubs. Upon arrival, users are given the PC commands that enable them to move around (walk, run, fly), dress their avatar and communicate with others.
Newcomers agree to a list of several do's and don'ts, but within the communities they form, residents can impose their own codes of conduct. That laissez-faire attitude seems unsustainable—as Second Life expands, eventually Linden Lab will have to figure out a way to deal with the darker elements. In one of the first troublesome incidents, residents reported last year that "gangs" were forcing avatars out of public spaces. Rosedale declined to intervene, saying his hope was that residents would organize to police their own communities. They are currently doing so successfully, with rare exceptions like the recent alleged child-abuse incident.
For the moment, the social freedom is one of Second Life's big draws. One can teleport to a nightclub like Dublin, find a pristine beach on which to relax or start looking for business opportunities right away. Crowded urban streets are lined with clothing stores, car lots, supermarkets and nightclubs. Real estate is the hot moneymaking market, with "islands"— private invitation-only plots of Second Life land—selling for as much as $1,650.
Real-world entrepreneurs and businesses sense the opportunity. With its large, densely settled population, which allows for division of labor, and citizens universally armed with ownership rights and the tools to produce just about anything, Second Life is in some ways the ideal free market. Consider 40-year-old Peter Lokke. Toiling away as a department manager at a Pathmark supermarket, the New York native had dreamed of opening his own design business, but "never pushed myself to get into it professionally." Two and a half years ago, a friend urged him to chase his goals in Second Life. So Lokke paid $230 to Linden Lab to buy a 375-square-meter plot of Second Life land, and opened up his own clothing shop.
Today his avatar—a woman, incidentally—earns nearly $300 a day selling clothing he designs for users to drag and drop onto their avatars—twice what Lokke earned at the supermarket. As for the clothes, he can make "infinite copies of anything." Once he's designed a T shirt, he can make millions of replicas at no additional cost. "My supply is limitless," he says. "There's no bottom line. The costs are only what I pay Linden Lab."
Linden Lab's "no control" policy allows for any income made inside Second Life (the virtual world's currency is the Linden dollar) to be cashed out through the company into U.S. dollars—even deposited directly into your checking account (at an exchange that has remained fairly stable at about 270 Linden dollars per U.S. dollar). A product created in Second Life can also be sold outside it—on eBay, for example, a private island was recently listed for $1,395.
And unlike, say, Sony, which owns the rights to anything created in EverQuest, Linden Lab has relinquished all intellectual-property rights to creations in its world, spurring entrepreneurship. Roughly 90 percent of Second Life's content is created by the users themselves—Linden Lab built the basic architecture, like "Orientation Island," where users first create their avatar and learn about Second Life. Indeed, the barriers to entry and to commerce are so low, it is hard to imagine a more ideal business environment for entrepreneurs, which may prove to be the biggest driver of Second Life's growth. Lokke is so hooked, he says, "I'd rather panhandle on the street than leave Second Life."
A kind of alternate global economy is emerging in Second Life. Linden Lab keeps information on transactions within the virtual world to itself, but economists who study it closely forecast that by the end of the year users will have spent 125 billion Linden dollars in Second Life (about $460 million). About 5 billion Linden dollars were changed (through the official currency exchange, the LindeX) into $19 million in 2006. So far this year, they've converted $37 million, much of it earned in virtual-world transactions.
The multinational companies are using Second Life in a different way: some are holding staff meetings where avatars representing employees can discuss ideas via instant message, e-mail or Skype, in a souped-up virtual office. Others are using it to connect to customers. For instance, IBM is working with clients like Sears and Circuit City to enhance the shopping experience: adviser avatars can walk customers through models of, say, televisions, and actually show them how the product might fit in the living room. The 3-D, real-time experience also allows multiple customers, who might not be together in the real world, to communicate while shopping. A husband and wife on separate business trips can pick out a new couch "together," discussing the dimensions, color and material in real time. "Second Life allows you to strike up a natural conversation that you can't do on a two-dimensional Web site," says IBM's Rowe.
With face-to-face interaction on the decline in offices—where it's easier to e-mail or videoconference than schedule a live meeting—and companies increasingly use the Web for everything from distribution to customer service, a virtual world offers the potential to form relationships that are far more personal than online forms or e-mail. Nissan, for instance, lets customers talk to salespeople and even "test-drive" its new Sentra on a virtual driving track in Second Life. The Dutch bank ABN AMRO has financial advisers available as avatars.
That communication potential also makes Second Life attractive as an educational and research tool. Architecture professor Terry Beaubois began teaching a Montana State University course in Second Life two years ago, remotely from his California home. Now at MSU full time, he meets with classes each week out of "University Island," a mock campus that his students designed and built, with classrooms, workshops and an oceanside gallery where they display their work. Rather than using paper sketches and cardboard models, they build interactive replicas of real buildings and neighborhood-development projects, adhering to proper structure, gravity and physics. The texture of these structures, though certainly animated, is detailed to the point where even a reporter can find herself lost in the arches and hallways of a virtual workshop.
The idea has caught on. Although Beaubois's colleagues questioned his decision to teach through what they called a "computer game," he's now head of MSU's Creative Research Lab and has the backing of the university's president (who has an avatar of his own). And more than 250 universities, including Harvard and MIT, now operate distance-learning programs in Second Life. Students meet in virtual classrooms to discuss history and political science. Teachers give virtual presentations, and lead virtual field trips. Guest lecturers visit from all over the world.
At the University of California, Davis, psychiatrist Peter Yellowlees has set up virtual simulations to show students what happens in a schizophrenic episode. Students can walk through a replica of his psychiatric ward, analyzing terrifying voices and eerie laughs, and can even see simulated schizophrenic hallucinations. Many students find the images disturbing, but Second Life helps them comprehend the "lived experience" of patients who "constantly complain" that doctors don't understand them, says Yellowlees.
True to the unofficial Second Life mantra—by the people, for the people—patients themselves are utilizing that clinical potential, too. "Brigadoon," for instance, is a Second Life island inhabited by a group of adults who suffer from Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism characterized by awkward, eccentric and obsessive behavior. Asperger's patients have trouble interacting socially and don't perceive things that should come naturally—how to introduce themselves or strike up a conversation, for instance. But in Second Life, these patients are learning to interact in ways that would be terrifying for them in real life. One sufferer has re-created a favorite restaurant, where the group regularly meets. Gradually, they are leaving their private island to venture into the rest of Second Life, integrating into the larger community. "The one thing that really amazes me about Second Life is the way it empowers people," says John Lester, the former Harvard Medical School researcher who set up the group (and now works for Linden Lab). "It frees them from the role of the biological device."
Not everyone is convinced that Second Life is a good thing. Some critics are uneasy with the idea of people's getting more and more of their social activity online. "No matter how you beef it up with little icons or fancy colors, [virtual worlds] don't have the nuance of face-to-face interaction," says Oxford University's Susan Greenfield, who heads the U.K.'s Institute for the Future of the Mind. It all depends, of course, on whether you see Second Life's taking the place of ordinary social interaction or supplementing it, or as just another kind of diversion—like "the 21st-century version of the novel," says Greenfield.
For diehard inhabitants, Second Life is a novel they won't put down soon. Elizabeth Ward, who suffers from reflex sympathetic dystrophy—a severe and chronic pain disorder that now keeps her at home—says "the interaction goes one step further than anything that could be achieved online." Ward, who lives with her husband, a software engineer, in Rhode Island, says her disability can make life "frustrating and lonely," but Second Life "has opened up another world." It's allowed her to continue working, to meet people, to visit her son, who lives in Nevada, and her best friend in India. She's gone sky diving, ice-skating—even played an eight-piece violin concerto with a group of mermaids under the sea. "I told my husband when I first started, 'I felt joy as I did when I was little, playing with paper dolls'," Ward explains. "But now the paper dolls are virtual and can interact with real people." Whether you think it's a pale imitation of reality or a vivid world of the mind, it's captivating the globe.
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
Source: Newsweek
Why Millions Are Living Virtual Lives Online
By Jessica Bennett and Malcolm Beith
Newsweek International
July 30, 2007 issue - It's 1 a.m., and the "Dublin" nightclub is packed. Women in trendy ball gowns and men in miniskirts dance to Bon Jovi. Simon Stevens spins his wheelchair across the room, then leaps up and starts dancing, a move he can execute only here in Second Life, a 3-D virtual world that Stevens roams on his PC screen, using an avatar—a graphic rendering of himself, liberated from his cerebral palsy. "I flourish in Second Life," says the 33-year-old, who heads a disability-consulting firm called Enable Enterprises, out of his home in England. "It's no game—it's a serious tool."
Rhonda Lillie and Paul Hawkins live thousands of miles apart—she in California, he in Wales—and until this week, had never met face to face. But they've been dating for more than two years—in Second Life. The detachment of meeting through their avatars allowed them to open up to one another in a way they might never have done in the real world. "We felt like we could go in and really be ourselves," Lillie says.
Anshe Chung is a virtual land baroness with a real-life fortune. The woman behind the Anshe avatar is Ailin Graef, a former language teacher living near Frankfurt, Germany. Three years ago she started buying and developing virtual land in Second Life to see whether its virtual economy could sustain a real life. Turns out it can: Chung became Second Life's first millionaire in 2006. Her business, Anshe Chung Studios, with a staff of 60, buys virtual property and builds homes or other structures that it rents or sells to other denizens of Second Life.
When San Francisco software developer Philip Rosedale dreamed up the idea for Second Life in 1998, he never imagined that it might have such an impact on the world at large. Just as Google sexed up the way we search, and instant messaging altered the way we interact, Second Life is fast becoming the next red-hot tool on the Internet.
The numbers tell the story. Rosedale launched Second Life in 2001, but it got off to a slow start, reaching only 1.5 million registered users in 2006. In the past year, membership has soared to more than 8 million users—2 million having signed on in the last two months alone. This hypergrowth, driven mainly by word of mouth, is now attracting competitors. South Korea's Cyworld started out as a social-networking site, but has evolved into a two-dimensional equivalent of Second Life, claiming 20 million registered users from Asia to Latin America. Richard Branson's Virgin recently announced plans to create its own 3-D community called A World of My Own. By 2011, four of every five people who use the Internet will actively participate in Second Life or some similar medium, according to Gartner Research, which recently did a study looking at the investment potential of virtual worlds. If Gartner is to be believed (and it is one of the most respected research firms in the field) this means 1.6 billion—out of a total 2 billion Internet users—will have found new lives online.
The power of Second Life lies in its utility for the gamut of human activities. It's a potent medium for socializing—it provides people with a way to express, explore and experiment with identity, vent their frustrations, reveal alter egos. The likes of MySpace and Facebook have already created online communities, but they lack the three-dimensional potential for interaction that Second Life provides. The people who are coming to this online universe aren't just socializing, however. They're also doing business, collaborating on research, teaching courses, dating and even having sex. More than 45 multinational companies, including the likes of American Apparel, IBM, General Motors and Dell are beginning to use the medium for customer service, sales and marketing. Many people are coupling the Second Life chat technology with Skype, the popular audio Internet software, so they can talk out loud while interacting inside the virtual world. Or they use live streaming video to talk and see each other in real life (sitting in front of a computer screen), as well as through their avatars inside Second Life. "The unique thing about Second Life is that it's immersive," says Michael Rowe, head of IBM's digital convergence team. "There's a huge opportunity here, just as in the early days of the Internet."
The medium sucks people in. A recent Dutch study found that 57 percent of Second Lifers spend more than 18 hours a week there, and 33 percent spend more than 30 hours a week. On a typical day, customers spend $1 million buying virtual clothes, cars, houses and other goods for their avatars, and total sales within this virtual economy are now growing at an annual rate of 10 percent. As a result, the money flowing through Second Life has attracted the attention of the U.S. tax authorities, who are currently investigating profits made in online businesses. And as it has evolved, those with ill intentions have apparently discovered Second Life, too. FBI agents are investigating possible gambling operations, and the German TV news program "Report Mainz" recently revealed allegations of child abuse in the virtual world. (Adults were purportedly using their avatars to have sex with the avatars of minors; they were expelled.)
Back in 1998, Rosedale simply hoped to create a vivid three-dimensional landscape in which graphic designers could create likenesses of their real-world ambitions—houses, cars, forests, anything one might find in a virtual game like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Except Rosedale's creation wouldn't be a game: Second Life had no rules, no levels, no dragons to slay. It was open-ended, a digital landscape without regulations (much like the Internet in its early days). It was created on software that operates across multiple servers—a grid system that could easily grow to accommodate a large, far-flung community. A user in Germany could easily partner with a peer in Mexico to form their own mini-community inside Second Life, based on common interests—architectural designs, whatever. "It's basically Tom Friedman's flat world," says Philip Evans, an economist at Boston Consulting Group who studies the industry. "It's the globalization of the virtual world."
At first, it was a world with no rules. Rosedale's company, Linden Lab, oversaw the allotments of server space, which translates into virtual real estate, but imposed no controls over what went on inside the Garden of Eden it had created. A user's representation in Second Life—his avatar—would be bound by no social constraints. And anything could be built, as long as you could write good enough code. The first pioneers—graphic designers, for the most part—simply set up display spaces for their technological projects. Then small communities with common ideas and visions—much like an artistic community, say, in the real world—sprang up. Since then, cities have grown, with urban amenities from stores to clubs. Upon arrival, users are given the PC commands that enable them to move around (walk, run, fly), dress their avatar and communicate with others.
Newcomers agree to a list of several do's and don'ts, but within the communities they form, residents can impose their own codes of conduct. That laissez-faire attitude seems unsustainable—as Second Life expands, eventually Linden Lab will have to figure out a way to deal with the darker elements. In one of the first troublesome incidents, residents reported last year that "gangs" were forcing avatars out of public spaces. Rosedale declined to intervene, saying his hope was that residents would organize to police their own communities. They are currently doing so successfully, with rare exceptions like the recent alleged child-abuse incident.
For the moment, the social freedom is one of Second Life's big draws. One can teleport to a nightclub like Dublin, find a pristine beach on which to relax or start looking for business opportunities right away. Crowded urban streets are lined with clothing stores, car lots, supermarkets and nightclubs. Real estate is the hot moneymaking market, with "islands"— private invitation-only plots of Second Life land—selling for as much as $1,650.
Real-world entrepreneurs and businesses sense the opportunity. With its large, densely settled population, which allows for division of labor, and citizens universally armed with ownership rights and the tools to produce just about anything, Second Life is in some ways the ideal free market. Consider 40-year-old Peter Lokke. Toiling away as a department manager at a Pathmark supermarket, the New York native had dreamed of opening his own design business, but "never pushed myself to get into it professionally." Two and a half years ago, a friend urged him to chase his goals in Second Life. So Lokke paid $230 to Linden Lab to buy a 375-square-meter plot of Second Life land, and opened up his own clothing shop.
Today his avatar—a woman, incidentally—earns nearly $300 a day selling clothing he designs for users to drag and drop onto their avatars—twice what Lokke earned at the supermarket. As for the clothes, he can make "infinite copies of anything." Once he's designed a T shirt, he can make millions of replicas at no additional cost. "My supply is limitless," he says. "There's no bottom line. The costs are only what I pay Linden Lab."
Linden Lab's "no control" policy allows for any income made inside Second Life (the virtual world's currency is the Linden dollar) to be cashed out through the company into U.S. dollars—even deposited directly into your checking account (at an exchange that has remained fairly stable at about 270 Linden dollars per U.S. dollar). A product created in Second Life can also be sold outside it—on eBay, for example, a private island was recently listed for $1,395.
And unlike, say, Sony, which owns the rights to anything created in EverQuest, Linden Lab has relinquished all intellectual-property rights to creations in its world, spurring entrepreneurship. Roughly 90 percent of Second Life's content is created by the users themselves—Linden Lab built the basic architecture, like "Orientation Island," where users first create their avatar and learn about Second Life. Indeed, the barriers to entry and to commerce are so low, it is hard to imagine a more ideal business environment for entrepreneurs, which may prove to be the biggest driver of Second Life's growth. Lokke is so hooked, he says, "I'd rather panhandle on the street than leave Second Life."
A kind of alternate global economy is emerging in Second Life. Linden Lab keeps information on transactions within the virtual world to itself, but economists who study it closely forecast that by the end of the year users will have spent 125 billion Linden dollars in Second Life (about $460 million). About 5 billion Linden dollars were changed (through the official currency exchange, the LindeX) into $19 million in 2006. So far this year, they've converted $37 million, much of it earned in virtual-world transactions.
The multinational companies are using Second Life in a different way: some are holding staff meetings where avatars representing employees can discuss ideas via instant message, e-mail or Skype, in a souped-up virtual office. Others are using it to connect to customers. For instance, IBM is working with clients like Sears and Circuit City to enhance the shopping experience: adviser avatars can walk customers through models of, say, televisions, and actually show them how the product might fit in the living room. The 3-D, real-time experience also allows multiple customers, who might not be together in the real world, to communicate while shopping. A husband and wife on separate business trips can pick out a new couch "together," discussing the dimensions, color and material in real time. "Second Life allows you to strike up a natural conversation that you can't do on a two-dimensional Web site," says IBM's Rowe.
With face-to-face interaction on the decline in offices—where it's easier to e-mail or videoconference than schedule a live meeting—and companies increasingly use the Web for everything from distribution to customer service, a virtual world offers the potential to form relationships that are far more personal than online forms or e-mail. Nissan, for instance, lets customers talk to salespeople and even "test-drive" its new Sentra on a virtual driving track in Second Life. The Dutch bank ABN AMRO has financial advisers available as avatars.
That communication potential also makes Second Life attractive as an educational and research tool. Architecture professor Terry Beaubois began teaching a Montana State University course in Second Life two years ago, remotely from his California home. Now at MSU full time, he meets with classes each week out of "University Island," a mock campus that his students designed and built, with classrooms, workshops and an oceanside gallery where they display their work. Rather than using paper sketches and cardboard models, they build interactive replicas of real buildings and neighborhood-development projects, adhering to proper structure, gravity and physics. The texture of these structures, though certainly animated, is detailed to the point where even a reporter can find herself lost in the arches and hallways of a virtual workshop.
The idea has caught on. Although Beaubois's colleagues questioned his decision to teach through what they called a "computer game," he's now head of MSU's Creative Research Lab and has the backing of the university's president (who has an avatar of his own). And more than 250 universities, including Harvard and MIT, now operate distance-learning programs in Second Life. Students meet in virtual classrooms to discuss history and political science. Teachers give virtual presentations, and lead virtual field trips. Guest lecturers visit from all over the world.
At the University of California, Davis, psychiatrist Peter Yellowlees has set up virtual simulations to show students what happens in a schizophrenic episode. Students can walk through a replica of his psychiatric ward, analyzing terrifying voices and eerie laughs, and can even see simulated schizophrenic hallucinations. Many students find the images disturbing, but Second Life helps them comprehend the "lived experience" of patients who "constantly complain" that doctors don't understand them, says Yellowlees.
True to the unofficial Second Life mantra—by the people, for the people—patients themselves are utilizing that clinical potential, too. "Brigadoon," for instance, is a Second Life island inhabited by a group of adults who suffer from Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism characterized by awkward, eccentric and obsessive behavior. Asperger's patients have trouble interacting socially and don't perceive things that should come naturally—how to introduce themselves or strike up a conversation, for instance. But in Second Life, these patients are learning to interact in ways that would be terrifying for them in real life. One sufferer has re-created a favorite restaurant, where the group regularly meets. Gradually, they are leaving their private island to venture into the rest of Second Life, integrating into the larger community. "The one thing that really amazes me about Second Life is the way it empowers people," says John Lester, the former Harvard Medical School researcher who set up the group (and now works for Linden Lab). "It frees them from the role of the biological device."
Not everyone is convinced that Second Life is a good thing. Some critics are uneasy with the idea of people's getting more and more of their social activity online. "No matter how you beef it up with little icons or fancy colors, [virtual worlds] don't have the nuance of face-to-face interaction," says Oxford University's Susan Greenfield, who heads the U.K.'s Institute for the Future of the Mind. It all depends, of course, on whether you see Second Life's taking the place of ordinary social interaction or supplementing it, or as just another kind of diversion—like "the 21st-century version of the novel," says Greenfield.
For diehard inhabitants, Second Life is a novel they won't put down soon. Elizabeth Ward, who suffers from reflex sympathetic dystrophy—a severe and chronic pain disorder that now keeps her at home—says "the interaction goes one step further than anything that could be achieved online." Ward, who lives with her husband, a software engineer, in Rhode Island, says her disability can make life "frustrating and lonely," but Second Life "has opened up another world." It's allowed her to continue working, to meet people, to visit her son, who lives in Nevada, and her best friend in India. She's gone sky diving, ice-skating—even played an eight-piece violin concerto with a group of mermaids under the sea. "I told my husband when I first started, 'I felt joy as I did when I was little, playing with paper dolls'," Ward explains. "But now the paper dolls are virtual and can interact with real people." Whether you think it's a pale imitation of reality or a vivid world of the mind, it's captivating the globe.
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
Source: Newsweek
Why Millions Are Living Virtual Lives Online
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