Quirky social-news site Reddit always seemed an unusual acquisition for Manhattan media giant Conde Nast, and it's never been more evident: asked by Conde Nast overlords to stop running advertisements on behalf of advocates of California's Proposition 19, which supports the legalization of marijuana, Reddit decided they'd do it anyway.
Because Conde Nast said its main concern was obtaining revenue from those controversial advocacy groups, Reddit's solution was that they would simply run the ads for free.
"This was a decision made at the highest levels of Conde Nast," an announcement from Reddit read. "Reddit itself strongly disagrees with it and, frankly, thinks it's ridiculous that we're turning away advertising money...We're trying to convince Corporate that they're making the wrong decision here, and we encourage the community to create a petition, so that your anger is organized in a way that will produce results."
Conde Nast's official response: "As a corporation, Conde Nast does not want to benefit financially from this particular issue."
Reddit's users, many of whom are outspoken marijuana legalization advocates themselves (Reddit operates a sub-site called "Trees," devoted to weed-related news), had been up in arms over the decision. Dozens of users said that they would be instituting ad-blocking software in protest. Recently, pro-legalization ads have been making headlines because of the revelation that while Google's policies are relatively liberal, Facebook will ban ads that contain images of "drug paraphernalia, or tobacco." The iconic green cannabis leaf doesn't make the cut.
Representatives of the advocacy group that created the ads, Just Say Now, said that they are particularly concerned about Conde Nast's rejection of the advertisements because the group supports medical marijuana ballot initiatives in addition to Proposition 19.
"Reddit's decision to side with its users and Just Say Now is a big step forward to fight against corporate nannies like Conde Nast and Facebook, who'd rather censor marijuana than encourage an open discussion," a statement from Just Say Now organizer Michael Whitney read. "The reality is that a majority of Americans want to end the war on marijuana, and it's time for Conde Nast, Facebook, and other censor-happy corporations to catch up to the rest of the country. Just Say Now is thrilled to have the support of companies like Reddit and Google in allowing a debate about ending the war on marijuana."
This is the second time in fewer than two months that Reddit has vocally expressed dissatisfaction with its Conde Nast parentage. Last month, the site put out a call for user donations to help make changes, claiming that Conde Nast's budget allotments to Reddit wouldn't cover them.
This post was expanded at 4:15 a.m. PT on Monday with comment from Just Say Now.
On Thursday night, rapper Snoop Dogg detonated an armored truck to smithereens in the Nevada desert as a promotional stunt for social-gaming company Zynga's Mafia Wars: Las Vegas title, and that seems to have gone smoothly. But another Mafia Wars marketing stunt is ticking off authorities in San Francisco, according to a blog post on SFGate.com.
The promotion, which entailed gluing dozens of fake $25,000 Mafia Wars-branded bills to the sidewalk in several locations in the city's Hayes Valley neighborhood, is designed specifically to spread the word about a "Mafia Wars" contest with a $25,000 prize. And it reportedly earned the ire of the San Francisco Department of Public Works--which is tasked with cleaning up the bills. The office of City Attorney Dennis Herrera sent a legal notice to Zynga over the campaign, which it says is costly and time-consuming for cleanup crews, and has requested "e-mails, work orders, scope of work, contracts, marketing plans, or other records--that show when and where the graffiti in San Francisco was placed, and by whom."
Zynga is not commenting on the matter; advertising agency Davis Elen Advertising, which had been hired to orchestrate the stunt, provided a statement.
"In doing work on behalf of Zynga for the recent Mafia Wars Las Vegas game launch, Davis Elen Advertising led a series of street marketing activities throughout the City of San Francisco," the statement from the agency read. "We take full responsibility for the program, regret any inconvenience this advertising has caused to the city and its residents, and are working with the City to immediately resolve the issue."
That makes the whole snafu sound a bit like a New York incident last year in which an edgy marketing agency in the employ of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) hired a well-known local street artist to vandalize the client's own ads; MoMA, unaware of the campaign at first, dumped the agency.
Plus, it's by no means the first stunt to backfire when "guerrilla" tech marketing clashes with local authorities. In 2002, Microsoft earned the wrath of New York City authorities for plastering MSN butterfly decals around town to promote the launch of MSN 8, and spray-painted Linux penguins on the streets of Chicago and San Francisco got IBM in trouble in 2001.
The nuttiest of them all was likely the incident in Boston in January 2007, in which LED displays to promote the forthcoming "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" animated film were flagged as suspicious electronic devices, resulting in road and river traffic shutdowns and subsequent transit headaches.
Seriously?
(Credit: Zynga)Social-gaming powerhouse Zynga launched its latest game, "Mafia Wars: Las Vegas" earlier this month, and it promised eager players that when the game hit 10 million users, it would celebrate by detonating an armored truck in the Vegas-area desert and live-stream the whole thing on the Web. Yes, really.
Well, the milestone has been hit, according to a release on Thursday, and Zynga has made good on its promise to blow up the truck. Oh, except there's an addition: the truck will be blown up with the help of rapper Snoop Dogg, whose name I will never be able to hear again without thinking immediately of the performer being addressed as "Snoop! Snoop-a-loop!" by Will Ferrell's "Frank the Tank" character in "Old School." The act will be performed at 6 p.m. PDT on Thursday, streamed live on the Mafia Wars Las Vegas site.
Considering that Snoop Dogg's most recent high-profile appearance has involved him getting sprayed in the face with the ammunition from a whipped-cream brassiere in pop singer Katy Perry's video for "California Gurls," I suppose that he must have been more than willing to do something spiced with a bit more testosterone.
It's not clear whether Snoop Dogg was specifically hired for the gig because his nom de guerre ties in amusingly to Zynga's cuddly canine mascot, or maybe just because the whole idea of Snoop Dogg blowing up a truck in the desert is so ridiculous, it can't possibly be met with any backlash. (Or can it?)
I can imagine Zynga executives calmly seated across a boardroom table from prospective investors in the company's most recent massive funding round, explaining why they absolutely need another cash infusion. To fuel growth, obviously. To launch new titles. To make some acquisitions. To buy more Facebook ads to promote it all.
"Oh. And we want to blow up an armored truck in the Nevada desert. Except it won't be us doing it--it'll be Snoop Dogg."
The "Mafia Wars" series has been a parade of hits for Zynga, and the new Sin City edition has already boasted, according to Zynga, 30 million fights and 600 million robberies. Its Facebook-based games, such as FarmVille, have been decked by gaming aficionados as silly--but the company, meanwhile, means business.
It recently hired former Facebook and MySpace executive Owen Van Natta and formed a joint venture with SoftBank in Japan to fuel international growth. And the number of people willing to pay real money for virtual accessories in aquarium, farm, and frontier homestead games has apparently won Zynga sufficient financial security to hire a rapper, a lot of explosives, and a truck that won't be getting returned to its owner in one piece.
What's next? Will the next FarmVille milestone be commemorated with country star Kenny Chesney blowing up a tractor? This is obviously very important and newsworthy, people.
Obviously, 'My World 3.0' is the one where everything operates in slow motion.
Pre-teen girls think pop singer Justin Bieber is a musical sensation. The rest of the world basically considers him to be one chipmunk-cheeked, tow-headed Internet meme. The latest: somebody found that if you slow down Bieber's song "U Smile" to an eighth of its original speed, it sounds awfully trippy. And more than a little bit mesmerizing.
More specifically, the stretched-out song, clocking in at 35 minutes and 29 seconds, sounds like the ambient soundtrack to an edgy indie film set either in outer space or underwater and helmed by a director who's high on magic mushrooms.
Fans of wacky Internet phenomena, well accustomed to Bieber's status as an in-joke, have gone absolutely nuts. So, of course, "Have you listened to it yet?" has become the Twitter question du jour, with skeptics speculating it's actually a hoax and that only a brave few have been willing to speed it up to prove that the result is a sugary Justin Bieber song.
One commenter on Internet meme hub BuzzFeed pointed out that the audio file was likely created with a piece of software called Paul Stretch. Another pointed to a slowed-down version of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up"--the song that was reborn with the "Rickroll" Web fad--which sounds similarly bizarre (and yet is somehow still recognizable, and far less palatable than the lengthened Bieber).
Some commenters on BuzzFeed, as well as on audio hosting service SoundCloud where a user named "shamantis" uploaded the original file, pointed out that it sounds like it could have been the work of Icelandic experimental music act Sigur Ros. This led one SoundCloud user to point out, "Let's hope that Sigur Ros [sped] up 800 percent doesn't sound like Justin Bieber."
The world's largest whiskey collection in Edinburgh, Scotland. Don't worry, eager biofuels researchers won't be raiding it.
(Credit: CC: Flickr user Danny Nicholson)Alcohol has no place behind the wheel of a car, but a team of Scottish scientists believe it might be perfect for the fuel tank: Researchers at Edinburgh Napier University's Biofuel Research Center, according to a report in Sky News, say they have successfully used whiskey by-products to form a butanol biofuel.
Lovers of fine scotch and bourbon may rest assured that this fuel is made from by-products, not the whiskey itself, so that no potable spirits are being put to waste.
The researchers' formula combines pot ale, which is a fluid coming from distillery equipment, with the grains left over from the production of whiskey. Oddly enough, Sky News added that it's derived from a process that was used to manufacture explosives during World War I and II (yikes--let's hope this fuel goes through extensive safety testing), and that butanol fuels can be up to 25 percent more efficient than their better-known ethanol siblings.
Some start-ups and researchers have highlighted the amusing correlation between drinkable alcohol and experimental biofuels, with one company, E-Fuel, even unveiling its home ethanol generators at a bar and claiming that you could technically dump tequila into them to produce fuel--explaining on a more serious note that early experiments in alcohol-based biofuels had been curtailed by the onset of Prohibition legislation.
Last year, beer manufacturer Sierra Nevada Brewing entered into a partnership with E-Fuel to start testing the use of beer by-products as feedstock for ethanol fuel.
The mugshot of a suspected auto thief recently apprehended in Evesham Township, N.J.--and posted on its Facebook page. No, he hasn't been tagged.
(Credit: Facebook/Evesham Township Police)Police departments maintaining a presence on Facebook and Twitter are nothing new, but Evesham Township, N.J., is taking social-media law enforcement a step further by controversially posting arrest photographs on its Facebook page--like the names and photographs of people arrested for drunk driving. While the police department's Facebook page has been around for about six months, the decision to add DUI photos was added only on Monday.
Before you ask, no, this is not the township in New Jersey where "Snooki" was arrested for disorderly conduct. But if the rabble-rousing "Jersey Shore" star found out there was a police department that might give her antics even more attention than usual, maybe she'd show up and try to pull off some hijinks.
"This arms the public with information and puts a face with a name," an Evesham officer told the local Courier-Post newspaper on Wednesday, drawing the Facebook "wall" feature analogous to a virtual bulletin board. "We've got a lot of information on our wall. We're only as good as the information the public gives us."
The idea of having your face slapped onto the social Web may indeed be an effective crime deterrent. But it's not without some very vocal critics, even beyond those who may have been arrested in error or charged with particularly inoffensive misdemeanors. In the same Courier-Post article, Rutgers University law professor Bernard Bell commented that "it seems at the very least to be bad policy and inappropriate for a police department." Not to mention the fact that Facebook photos, of course, can be "tagged." The potential to tag legitimate mugshots seems like it could open a particularly ugly can of worms.
Representatives from the Evesham Police Department were not immediately available for comment.
It can all go far belong mischievous young Facebook users tagging their friends in grainy security-camera photos of convenience store robberies. The complexities of putting police data online were raised last month in a debate between high-profile digital academics Jeff Jarvis and Danah Boyd, with Boyd raising the specific situation that when arrest records are easily accessible online, it can disproportionately impact people in less fortunate socioeconomic circumstances.
"The rhetorics of harm and damage of this...are very important and I don't want to dismiss them," Boyd said at the time. "What happens when these decisions continue to magnify inequality?"
(Credit:
JetBlue)
Once upon a time, a weird news story was just a weird news story. Now, thanks to the Web, it's an international sensation and everyone can be a part of it: a reality-show-hungry couple claiming their kid flew away in a balloon; a strange, dead animal washing ashore; an oddball clan of Alaskans getting improbably close to the White House.
This week, it was the ridiculous story of Steven Slater, a JetBlue flight attendant who cursed out an uncooperative passenger over the intercom, activated the plane's emergency slide, and escaped with a beer in hand. Not only is it tailor-made for a Zach Galifianakis character with anger management problems, but it's the perfect wacky, speculative, and yet somehow socially provocative news story that will get the Internet fired up.
For JetBlue, which has crafted itself as an airline with a sense of humor and a savviness with regard to new-media "conversation," it wasn't going to be able to get away with a simple "no comment" on this one.
The Steven Slater saga is, almost without a doubt, the nuttiest airline-industry online PR snafu since film director Kevin Smith made sure that every single one of his million-plus Twitter followers knew that Southwest Airlines had informed him he was too overweight to fly. And as it had with Smith, the public opinion steered in Slater's favor, with his I'm-mad-as-hell tirade making him a sort of working-class hero. In addition to about a zillion Twitter quips and Facebook status messages about him (many evoking actor Samuel L. Jackson's profanity-filled tirade in the 2006 film "Snakes on a Plane"), Slater inspired blog posts with headlines like "As A Flight Attendant Who Longed to Jump From a Plane, I Get Steven Slater" and late-night TV comedy routines that more or less wrote themselves.
"JetBlue really does have the best in-flight entertainment!" exclaimed Comedy Central pundit Stephen Colbert in his crowning of Slater as "Alpha Dog of the Week." NBC's "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" even enlisted over-the-top blogger Perez Hilton to perform a reenactment of what happened on board, with Hilton screaming into a fake intercom about experiencing a "full-on double rainbow of rage." (That's an allusion to yet another Internet meme.)
JetBlue, which was one of the first big companies to embrace the use of Twitter as a communications and branding tool, couldn't really have gotten away without saying anything, or even just releasing the standard "no comment" statement of yore. It's chugged plenty of "conversational marketing" Kool-Aid, and couldn't easily retreat from that strategy in this situation. And indeed, a delay for a few days was making some critics impatient. An AdAge article Tuesday pointed out that "if JetBlue is observed to be taking the matter lightly on Twitter or in discussions with the media, it could be used against the company by Mr. Slater or the Federal Aviation Authority."
On its corporate blog, JetBlue broke the silence Wednesday--undoubtedly after extensive consultations with its legal counsel. "While we can't discuss the details of what is an ongoing investigation, plenty of others have already formed opinions on the matter," a company representative wrote in a post. "Like, the entire Internet." The blog post explained that out of respect for the privacy of the individual, it wasn't saying any more. But it attempted to end on a positive note: "While this episode may feed your inner 'Office Space,' we just want to take this space to recognize our 2,100 fantastic, awesome, and professional in-flight crew members for delivering the JetBlue Experience you've come to expect of us."
The incident in itself probably wasn't going to reflect too badly on JetBlue, as Tuesday's AdAge article pointed out. Unlike the Southwest-Kevin Smith incident, this wasn't an an exercise of controversial airline policy or a customer-service mess--it was, very obviously, the act of a rogue individual. And Slater, as has been well-publicized, quit his job as part of the noisy tirade, meaning that the airline wasn't going to have to deal with publicly or not-so-publicly firing him. Where JetBlue was really at risk, image-wise, was in how it crafted its response.
There is, also, still a vulnerable spot: As JetBlue emphasized, there is a pending investigation into the incident. The "Save Steven Slater" campaigns are already brewing; JetBlue may want to brace for the barrage of an epic wacky fan stunt if it looks like he'll face significant legal or disciplinary action--and even still, that's pretty tame.
They say launching a tech company is a gamble in and of itself, but sometimes that just isn't enough to bet on.
An Antigua-based sports betting site called Bodog has opened up speculation on when Facebook will reach the milestone of one billion users around the world--and also whether the company will go public by the time this happens.
The odds are good for both of them. Bodog places 4/6 odds on Facebook hitting a billion users before January 1, 2012, and 11/10 on the company going public before reaching that user count. A release from the company said that it's more skeptical about the billion-user milestone occurring first because "in our world there's no such thing as 'almost guaranteed'," quoting remarks from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this summer.
Facebook recently hit 500 million users around the world and continues to grow fast, but a Bloomberg report earlier this week suggested that it will continue to delay going public, allegedly ruling out a 2011 IPO.
The whole thing is, in part, a big publicity stunt--Bodog has been known to capitalize on tech news in the past by launching bets for what company Google would acquire next (back in 2007, there were 3 to 1 odds that it would buy Facebook!), when Apple would supplant Wal-Mart as the biggest music retailer in the country, and naturally all things iPhone.
As a side note, Bodog says the odds are 500 to 1 that Paul Ceglia, the man who claims he owns 84 percent of Facebook based on a contract he once had with Zuckerberg, will get what he says he's owed.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's interview on "ABC World News" on Wednesday night was pretty boring. But according to one hilarious rumor Thursday, the 26-year-old founder will soon be showing up on a very different kind of prime-time television.
Apparently he will be voicing a cartoon version of himself in a cameo appearance on "The Simpsons."
New York Magazine's pop-culture blog Vulture claims to have heard this much: "Lisa (Simpson) decides to help fund Nelson's new bike company. While attending an entrepreneurs convention, the two encounter Zuckerberg, who reminds the kids just how many famous billionaires--including himself--have dropped out of school."
The episode in question would likely air in October, right around the time that the Facebook creation-tale film "The Social Network" hits theaters. Which, of course, is probably a good public relations move on Zuckerberg's and Facebook's part, as Facebook has not sanctioned the creation of the film and Zuckerberg alluded to it in the "ABC World News" interview as "fiction." Appearing on "The Simpsons" right around the same time is a very public move to show that he can, indeed, poke fun at himself ("poke" pun completely intended).
CNET has contacted Facebook for comment to find out if any of this is remotely true. Because, if so, it would be awesome. Even though, as we made clear a few April Fool's Days ago, we still think "Saturday Night Live" would be a funnier place for him to show up.
Earlier this month, an octopus named Paul living in a tank in Oberhausen, Germany, proved capable of successfully "predicting" the results of his home nation's World Cup soccer matches--and then went a step further and correctly selected Spain as the winner of the final.
Of course, there's now an app for that.
An iPhone app development company called uTouchLabs just released an app called "Ask the Octopus," which lets users input two options for any query and then has a cartoon "octopus oracle" choose one much in the way that Paul would gravitate toward one of the two flags with which he was presented.
It costs 99 cents in the App Store.
The app does not, however, give users an option to kill the octopus if they don't like what he has to say. That may sound brutal, but the option reared its ugly head as the World Cup drew to a close: Paul's predictions were taken so seriously that when he finally (and correctly) predicted a Germany loss, there were widespread outcries for him to be chopped up and baked into a delightful seafood paella. We can only hope that the honorary iPhone app's decision-making expertise is never met with such vitriol.
