SpeedPlexer Blog

TechCrunch reports, “In an effort to increase voter turnout for next Tuesday’s Congressional Election, President Barack Obama has put out a call on Twitter for constituents to install a Facebook application called the “Commit to Vote Challenge.” 

Obama harnessed the power of the internet speed and social networking to his advantage in his presidential campaign, and has kept it up. In addition to using it to keep people engaged in politics, he posted a video to YouTube   last week that supports the “It Gets Better” campaign we talked about in an earlier post.  The goal of that campaign is to get teens to quit committing suicide as a solution to bullying, especially about being gay. 

TechCrunch said about the Facebook app, “Like a more noble version of Fast Company’s Influence Project  the Commit to Vote Challenge takes advantage of the ‘network effect’ by using Facebook to spam your friends about voting. Facebook’s population is currently greater than that of the United States.”

Notice the use of the word “spam”, which indicates that the TechCrunch writer isn’t a fan. She also called the Commit to Vote Challenge, “a serious case of social gaming mechanics taken too far,” and said “it’s scary,” I tried it anyway. 

Basically, you share your reason for voting only with the people you choose, and then you see a list of your friends who have done the same.  Maybe it shouldn’t require social networking peer pressure to get people to take part in their country’s political process, but it couldn’t hurt, and there are much less noble things to bug people about.

GE’s Ecomagination is a campaign that’s been running for five years now, to show the world how GE lives up to their one-time and current slogans “We bring good things to life” and “imagination at work.” Their new digital campaign lets you Tag Your Green on YouTube or Flickr. 

The Ecomagination Photo Project on Flickr donates to one of three charities when users upload photos depicting light, wind or water. 

A LIGHT photo send a donation of 175 hours of solar power to d.light which helps make solar lights available to households in East Timor’s Oecusse region, where electricity is unreliable and kerosene is just plain dangerous.

A WIND pic means 4.5 kilowatt hours of wind energy will be donated to Practical Action to help provide wind turbines to isolated communities in the developing world to provide reliable electricity.

A WATER snap means a donation of 480 gallons to charity: water to provide safe, clean drinking water to the over one billion people in developing countries who don’t have access to this basic necessity.

The Ecomagination YouTube Video Challenge involves 15 already popular YouTubers collaborating with their fans to come up with great “green” ideas. The goal is to reach 10 million views and help charity: water bring clean and safe drinking water to developing nations.

Mashable reported last week that the campaign had 7 million views already, meaning they’re well on their way to reaching that goal by campaign end in mid-December.
Join them and Tag Your Green on YouTube or Flickr!  You’ll promote your own work, and help some great causes with internet speed!

On the Yahoo home page today, under Latest Video Picks is “Banana Split Cat Loves Bananas” –a video of a flat-faced, furball of a cat dressed as a banana split, very slowly eating a banana someone’s holding for him. Kinda weird.  But as part of the Purina Animal Allstars website, it at least makes promotional sense. 

An article on Mashable explored the strange popularity of cats online by talking to experts from the online industry.

Here’s some of what they gathered:

Elspeth Rountree, the co-founder of Know Your Meme: “You don’t need any explanation or prior knowledge to understand the slapstick humor that animals provide…. They’re entertainment in easily digestible doses.”

Ben Huh, CEO of The Cheezburger Network: “Cats…are a perfect canvas for human emotion, which makes them awesome for captioning and anthropomorphization.”

Matt Smith, director of strategy at The Viral Factory points to, “an almost infinite number of pictures of cats or great bits of cat footage…meaning an abundance of raw material for meme creation”.

“Most of us who have dealt with cats know that cats are jerks, and while outright abuse is never popular, I think a lot of people just like to see cats get their comeuppance,” says Brad O’Farrell, writer for the Daily Squee, and creator of the Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat video.

Jack Schofield, freelance technology journalist and author of the Ask Jack Guardian blog says, “Cats require relatively little maintenance (no baths, no walks) and are basically nocturnal animals, so they’re a perfect match for the Internet geek/coder/hacker lifestyle.”

So it seems their popularity is based on their availability to the people who spend their time alone with a computer, and like to share with internet speed!

There are some who might find museums boring, especially those accustomed to fast-paced tech-based entertainment like video games and constantly updated social networking.  But museums are getting into tech and social media with internet speed.   Fast Company gave us eight examples in a lovely slideshow you’ll probably want to check out.  Here’s the nuts and bolts of it for you now, though:

Crowdsourcing at the Guggenheim – More than 23,000 submissions from 91 countries vied to be among the 20 finalists to be displayed at Guggenheim museums around the world. HP helped develop the exhibit available on YouTube and the Guggenheim’s website.

Flickr-Streaming at the MoMA - Earlier this year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York live-streamed staring contests lasting hours between performance artist Marina Abramovic and visitors including celebs like James Franco and Björk.. Photos of the exhibit were catalogued into a massive Flickr collection.

Video-Sharing at ArtBabble - Aiming to be the YouTube of the art world, they’ve partnered with more than 20 museums to offer video content ranging from Renoir painting commentary to a behind-the-scenes studio tours.

Next-Gen Storytelling at the 9/11 Memorial Museum - Using crowdsourced photos and stories, and tech from Google Maps, the Make History project offers “a collective telling of the events of 9/11 through the eyes of those who experienced it,” both near the Towers and around the world. It’s online now, and will be part of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, opening next fall on the 10-year anniversary.

Mobile Gaming at the Tate Modern - With the Tate Modern’s multi-player card game smartphone app, users pit assorted masterpieces against each other, and see which one comes out on top in a fight to the death.

Mobile Touring at the Louvre - Works such as the Mona Lisa are displayed with historical information, the date they entered the museum, behind-the-scenes video extras, and more. Bonus: the app is free.

Gone are the days when you could only meet someone nice at church (or temple, synagogue, mosque, kovil, etc…).  Now you can find someone who shares your beliefs and world view with internet speed!  We’ve scoped out a few for those of you who don’t fall into the more traditional categories, and probably don’t attend the above institutions with any regularity. The internet is the right place for non-traditionalists to find each other!

New Age Connections asks, “Are you a yoga single looking for love? Do you value a holistic lifestyle and want to meet green singles? Looking for spiritual singles who understand the “law of attraction”?”  They also offer trips where like-minded people can get to know each other while traveling, and give a portion of their proceeds to charities.

Spiritual Singles.com is the world’s largest dating service exclusively for singles who value a healthy, holistic lifestyle, spiritual growth, yoga, meditation, raising the collective consciousness, world peace and being environmentally conscious. It’s the original site on the Conscious Dating Network, which also includes Spiritual Matchmaking.com and Conscious Match. Together they offer articles and retreats.

Enlightened Dating .com is a community for like minds around the world and find ongoing education & support via powerful ‘webinars’ and multimedia programs with some of the top luminaries of our time. . Enlightened Dating was originally designed to support the News for the Soul community and assist with the sustainability of alternative media around the world.”

There are others, but these seemed the easiest to navigate and the most comprehensive. Being “geographically undesirable” is no longer a barrier to finding people to connect with, thanks to the magic of the internet!  They give the term “connection speed” a whole new meaning!

The Greenopolis Recycling System utilizes technology and internet speed so that people can interact and earn rewards for their good recycling deeds.  Here’s how it works:

• Interactive recycling kiosks nationwide, allow users to scan and deposit cans and bottles for recycling
• Users receive points for everything they deposit
• Points are redeemable on greenopolis.com for a variety of discounts or coupons from restaurants, theaters and retail establishments across the country
• Points can also be earned by participating on the Greenopolis website and playing Oceanopolis on Facebook
• Beyond rewards, the technology allows users to track their behavior and learn about sustainable living through online interaction
• The program’s goal is to use both digital and physical platforms to create awareness and increase recycling

Oceanopolis on Facebook lets you pretend that you’re on a beautiful island that’s unfortunately quite close to the Pacific Garbage Patch, so you have to keep your island beautiful by recycling the junk that washes ashore. Hopefully, players will learn the benefits of recycling while earning real life rewards.

Treehugger.com explains, “The game is a way for Greenopolis to extend its reach into social media, with the hopes of boosting awareness about the real-world interactive recycling kiosks by getting people hooked on building a sustainable island community with their friends. During game play, points are earned that can be added to what players earn through recycling at Greenopolis kiosks.”

Of course, there will still be those who just play and don’t soak up the lessons.  Treehugger’s Jaymi Heimbuch says that would be “like Farmville for people who would rather fake-grow food rather than start a backyard garden, ultimately it is not a path toward a sustainable world.”

Hopefully though, the promotion will work and can encourage more people to recycle consistently.  Fingers crossed!

As if TMZ, E! News and Perez Hilton weren’t enough reasons to be glad you’re not famous, the site JustSpotted is set to launch next week.  It’s so controversial that Twitter terminated their agreement with the new celebrity spotting website. But, tenacious like stalkerazzi, JustSpotted said they’d still use Twitter to update celebrity locations, the L.A. Times reported.

The problem with JustSpotted is that it could put celebrities in danger.  The L.A. Times explains, “JustSpotted plans to use a combination of Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, Foursquare posts and blog updates to plot a celebrity’s location anywhere around the world in near real-time. A celebrity’s position is plotted on a map of the world, with information about the restaurant or other venue where they’d been spotted — but not the actual address.” 

Who needs the actual address when it can be looked up with internet speed?  It may not be dangerous if users aren’t in the same town that the celebrity is in, but for those who are, it would be easy enough to track down the celeb in real-time.  And don’t they already have enough problems with being followed?  Does no one remember what happened to Princess Diana?

“Once a celebrity might have worried about someone with a camera and a flash,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based advocacy group, Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Now they have to worry about someone with a cellphone and a Twitter account.”

So people, let the celebrities have some down time. Enjoy your celebrity gossip, but not in real time.

A lovely graphic from the site Online Colleges and Universities.net gave us the following interesting information, and we thought we’d share with internet speed!  Be sure to check out the complete graphic for all the info.

• 85% of U.S. schools have multimedia computers.

• The average number of students per computer is 24:1.  (Nearly 5 times the Department of Education recommended ratio.) 

• Overall, students attending poor or high minority schools have higher ratios than other students.  (This is known as the Digital Divide).

• 64% of U.S. schools have internet access. But only 14% of the actual classrooms have internet access. Delaware, Hawaii, New Mexico, and South Carolina have 100% school connectivity.

• Just over 50% of U.S. schools have CD-Rom drives.

• Since 1987, the percentage of college-bound seniors reporting no computer or coursework experience decreased from 26% to 9%. 

• Between 2005 and 2007 laptop ownership on college campuses went from 52.8% to 75.8%. 

• More than two-thirds of colleges and universities have wireless access.

• One professor found students who use laptops excessively did 11% worse than the other students in her class.

• 64% of teenage students used emoticons in their school work. : (

• Two-thirds of U.S. teenagers use internet writing shortcuts, (such as LOL and OMG), in their school work.

• Grade point averages of Facebook-using students were found to be a full grade point lower than those of non-users.

• Studies show electronic multitasking adversely affects grades and learning ability.

• 7th grade students found to be unable to discern valid websites from hoax websites. Researchers at the University of Connecticut showed seventh-grade students a website about the endangered “Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus” and all but 1 of 50 children thought the information on the website was valid.

Remember when you were a teenager and all you wanted in the world was some privacy?  Well Fast Company tells us that, “Despite what the Facebook CEO and other tech luminaries seem to think, a new poll shows 15- to 18-year-olds are just as worried about the vanishing world of online privacy as older generations.”

Of course!  How are any of us supposed to seem cool or mysterious with our naked baby pictures floating around online?  (Check out our previous post, “Babies Have Online Presence Too”) Or if some of our most embarrassing moments show up in a search engine? 

The results of a new Zogby poll (commissioned by privacy advocacy non-profit group Common Sense Media), found that of the 400 teens aged 15 to 18 surveyed, the majority want more control over their personal information. Fast Company reports, “The vast majority of teens understood that search engines (88%) and social networks (79%) were tracking their browsing habits for ads. However, many were not sure whether their data was secure: More than half of the respondents said they either did not think their personal information was private or were not sure. A whopping 92% of teens surveyed believed they should be able to request the deletion of all their personal information held by a search engine, social network, or marketing company.”

And by the way, Zogby also ran a separate poll of adults on privacy, the results of which very closely mirrored the teen survey.

Common Sense Media released the report last week in Washington alongside FCC chair Julius Genachowski and FTC chair Jon Liebowitz, two agency heads who will be intimately involved in privacy policy in the coming years, so let’s all keep our fingers crossed for more control over our personal information with internet speed!

Internet security company AVG surveyed web-surfing moms in North America (USA and Canada), the EU5 (UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), Australia/New Zealand and Japan, and found that 81 percent of children under the age of two currently have some kind of digital profile or footprint, with images of them posted online.

“Our research shows that the trend is increasing for a child’s digital birth to coincide with and in many cases pre-date their real birth date. A quarter of babies have sonogram photos posted online before they have even physically entered into the world,” says AVG’s CEO, JR Smith.

According to the research, the average digital birth of children happens at around six months with a third (33%) of children’s photos and information posted online within weeks of being born.

While it’s completely understandable why proud parents would want to upload and share images of their children with friends and family around the world with internet speed, it also can create challenges that no previous generation had to deal with. AVG’s CEO put it this way:

“First, you are creating a digital history for a human being that will follow him or her for the rest of their life. What kind of footprint do you actually want to start for your child, and what will they think about the information you’ve uploaded in future?

“Secondly, it reinforces the need for parents to be aware of the privacy settings they have set on their social network and other profiles. Otherwise, sharing a baby’s picture and specific information may not only be shared with friends and family but with the whole online world.”

Read more about it in Businesswire’s article Digital Birth: Welcome to the Online World .�