Crichton, the media guru

Refresshing read, this article by bestselling author Michael Crichton on the future of the American media ... especially the part about the media being part of society's problems or the big ego's of self-indulged media personalities ... which reminds me somewhat of the attitude problems even our tv journalists seem to develop.

The amazing thing however is that this 'Mediasaurus' essay was written in an issue of Wired in the fall of ... 1993.

Entertaining read from a visionary proclaiming the death of traditional media long before we even had a widescale Internet.

we choose the moon (bis)

The more I look @ this site, the more I'm impressed with the concept behind it. Just think about it. When they actually landed on the moon 40 years ago next week(did they?) there was a certain kind of scepticism about it actually having happened. 'they never landed on the moon! It's all fake! It's all part of o giant conspiracy against the USSR! It was filmed in a studio somewhere in a desert in California! ...'

Now we are watching a so-called realtime recreation of an event that happened 40 years ago. Great concept!

But to me, the logical next step would be watching a real time recreation of something happening now that is not taking place or has never happened.

If you can do this, you basically can do anything, right? So why not have a www.thekingsfuneral.org to watch in realtime with realtime meaning ... euh .. nothing while other stuff is going on? I find that fascinating and not just a little bit scary ...

no comment :-)

we choose the moon

I was 9 and our parents woke us up in the middle of the night to watch it but for those who never did, wechoosethemoon.org is an online recreation of the famous Apollo 11 flight to the moon. They have already been launched, the mission is in stage 6 at the moment, somewhere between earth and moon. The really cool thing is that you can follow the live transmissions of the crew on ... twitter (actually there are 3 tweets: from Houston control, from the crew and from the Eagle). This is really cool stuff!

Life made simple ...

... by using a simple idea. How do you visualize 250 million people on Facebook? OK, that's a lot of people, zillions, 23 times the size of the Belgian population, 1/24th of the world population, ...You can also just make a cute little movie. With thanks to jevedebe.

mexican flu, media flu

There is something weird about this Mexican flu thing. Last weekend, Expert Number One Marc Van Ranst, explained in De Standaard that his apocalyptic view of 7 deaths/day this autumn/winter in a worst case scenario is not out of the ordinary. Every year a 1000 people die during a 3 month flu-peak ... that's ten a day. Every day 3 people get infected with HIV in Belgium. And the same number with TBC. Nobody gives a damn. But now that we have 126 cases of confirmed flu we read about emergency scenario's, local communities preparing, hospitals trying out and the army (!!!) distributing vaccins and masks to 15 distribution points. Did some high up offcial read the 'Outbreak' script perhaps? Djeezes!

I should understand journalists but I don't (2)

Then again, when the other side of the country presents its policy plans it is duly noted. Not a couple of paragraphs, no: a full chapter on the digital divide, Web 2.0, opening up public tenders to small(er) companies, use of open source standards, exchange of free software between government institutions, ... and a number of other ideas and initiatives. Granted: the proof of the pudding is in the eating, whether you announce your policies in paragraphs of in chapters .... but why do we find it so hard to admit that this has more beef than what 'we' did ourselves?

I should understand journalists but I don't

Weird. Professional newsletters like Data News or IT Professional write about the major importance the new Flemish government deal is according to the importance of IT. I read the 112 page document and found 2 paragraphs with -let's be honest- very generic blahblah. The article in IT Professional is longer than what you can read in the document itself. If there is a reason for this lack of constructive criticism, I don't see it yet. Maybe I will later.

what started as a gimmick ...

... is conquering the world: the Eternal Moonwalk.
Launched last Friday by StuBru, it has been the most twittered about subject according to twitturly.com and you must admit that some of the uploaded moonwalkmovies are truly amazing! Check it out! And thank you StuBru (this should have been a Humo initiative, alas)