01 Dec 10
The Edit - November Edition
The latest update from our Futures and Implementation team.
Digital relativity
Today, the web will fill up with more information than existed in entirety prior to 2003. This stat was dropped into a speech Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) made earlier this month. Space on the Internet is infinite. In fact, what we can find through all search engines combined makes up only 0.03% of all web pages available. Time and attention, meanwhile, remain finite. What we’re now faced with are consumers who are increasingly time poor and hard to engage with online. The role of editors, recommendations from friends and media concierges will become increasingly key in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Social Media will be silenced!
Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Usher and a host of other celebrities have joined a new campaign called 'Digital Life Sacrifice' to raise money for Alicia Keyes’ charity, 'Keep a Child Alive'. The celebrities all plan to sign off all their social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter on Tuesday 1st December, to drive awareness for World AIDS Day. They will return to tweeting and updating their Facebook status once they raise $1million for Key’s charity. It will be interesting to see how long the silence will last, as with Lady Gaga alone, the silence will be affecting 7.2 million of her followers on Twitter and 24 million of her fans on Facebook. If each of them donate $0.10 they will more than hit their target.
Avatar shot down by Halo
Avatar was THE movie that triggered the mass popularity of practically 3D everything with the global day one box office hitting a massive $27M. At point blank, this success was shot down by the launch of Halo: Reach, an Xbox 360 game, which made a whopping $200M in its first day in just Europe and the US alone!
Anti-Google Street Viewers get egged
The 3% of privacy-minded homeowners in Germany, who had opted out of Google Street View, are currently being terrorised by over-zealous Google fans. The vandals are egging homes that have chosen to blur their houses from Street View and taping notices to their mailbox to ensure their message is delivered: that ‘Google’s cool’.
Wi-Fi, the new tree killer
A Dutch researcher has discovered that radiation from Wi-Fi networks is making trees sick, leading to significant variations in growth, and bleeding and fissures in their bark. These symptoms are non-existent with trees in the woods; however are apparent in over 70% of trees in urban areas of the Netherlands, rising from a mere 10% 5 years ago. Given the choice of one or the other, we’d proffer that the average person would pick the web over trees.