Rea McNamara

The social media conference has become as much of a cliché as, well, the social media expert.

These one-day summits or boot camps promise to connect and inspire, charging an “investment” upwards of $499 (plus GST!) for panel discussions and keynotes that’ll fast track you on the latest web 2.0 technologies.

The panels buzz with catchy AdWords-approved titles: “Real-Time: Does it Matter?,” “Privacy in the Facebook Age,” “How to Promote Yourself Online like a Rock Star.”

Toss in the swag — free totebag and notebook! — and you’ll end the night at the free drinks soiree supposedly getting your ROI (Return On Investment).

But doesn’t information want to be free? And if you’ve got Mashable and ReadWriteWeb in your RSS reader, what’s that VIP Pass really worth?

Dig deep enough, and the social media conference is actually free. Sure, spend a day out of the office listening to speakers proselytize on leadership, branding, and “community engagement.”
Or you could just Google the speaker’s slideshare, and cut an hour-long presentation into 20 quick mouse clicks through the presentation’s slides.

Then again, maybe you want to feel like you’re really there.

Well, if any social media conference is worth their cutting-edge speed on the next high-level success strategy, they will have a projected tagcloud streaming the audience’s real-time tweets.
These tweets are helpfully hashtagged, and voila! That content is viral for your curbed consumption.

Yet here’s the worrying thing: have you ever sloughed through a social media conference’s hashtagged stream?

Last week, I scrolled through such a feed, and was struck by the jingoistic mindcasting on how to sell a networked future that’s supposedly is here and now.

“True creativity is original ideas that add value and are actionable,” read one iPhone tweet. “FIND THE BRIGHT SPOTS and leverage them in your strategy,” went a retweeted HootSuite nugget.

Read between the lines — wait, can you even? If these real-time results say anything, it's an alarming present state: the bounce rate for an evangelistical echo chamber preaching to the converted.

Conferences a mouse click away

Think social? How about anti-social, especially with these three ad nauseum web 2.0 panels.

• UR Personal Brand Lifebloggers: It tells how to monetize your ideal persona and be Internet famous: Be real, be authentic! Embrace the Twitpic-ing of your breakfast.

• Death of the Critic: A roundtable on the future of arts criticism in the digital age by professional ‘legacy media’ critics — who still haven’t set up their own Wordpress or Twitter account — mourning the loss of the broadsheet’s long-form (or re-writing Newswire press releases).

• The Live Keynote:  A cocky turtlenecked guru unveils company’s latest software to an audience full of developers. Elusive marketing stats and the promise of ‘convergence’ are dramatically punctuated by powerpoints. The enthusiastic applause distracts you from the product’s high price tag.

Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw.

Bloomsday fans, hold off on ordering that Guinness round: Wednesday may be a cause for protest rather than celebration, especially if you’ve been trying to download that iPad webcomic adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The day honours the lewd — yet transcendental — journey of fictional Dubliner Leopold Bloom, with readings and pub crawls. But commemorations are possibly marred by the censorship of the Irish literary classic in Apple’s App Store. 

Thanks to Steve Jobs’ strict no-nudity clause, Rob Berry and Josh Levitas’s Ulysses Seen webcomic has been banned from iPhones and iPads, specifically for its cartoon nudity.

Of course, App Store censorship isn’t an isolated incident. Earlier this year, Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Mark Fiore saw his NewsToons iPhone app rejected by Apple, since its satirization of “public figures” violated the company’s iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.

Yet it doesn’t stop there. The no-nipples edict has affected edgy magazines like Vice and Dazed & Confused, the latter reportedly dubbing their magazine’s iPad version the “Iran edition,” as reported by Anna Leach of British tech blog ShinyShiny.

There are those that argue Apple’s right to such censorship.

Ever since Steve Jobs emailed Gawker’s Ryan Tate about his “Freedom of porn” App Store vision, many have countered that Apple has every right to its closed content garden, likening it to a mall or even a Wal-Mart.

But this goes against Jobs’ promise to media companies that the iPad would make paywalls and e-magazines a solution to print’s current toil.

Now that Apple is trying to cut out digital publishing favourite Adobe, as well as ensure a cut in mobile advertising with their iAd platform, print is now contending with a compromised future: no final say on their product -- especially if it’s sold in Apple’s App Store.

Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw.

When I’m feeling nostalgic — or you know, workcrastinating — I sometimes lurk on ghost town social networks, riffling through the old profiles of online-only friends I lost touch with.

They exist in the past tense: they last logged in three or four years ago, so their profiles are now littered with outdated comments and “403 Forbidden” images. Even though they might have been a Friendster connection that eventually became listed on my Myspace Top 16 “Friend Space,” they somehow never migrated to Facebook, or more likely, allowed that particular online version of themselves — whether as a Myspace party promoter or Livejournal mommy blogger — to no longer be updated.

It was strange then when I recently reconnected on Tumblr with a Livejournal-era Internet “friend” — a Virginian musician and writer who wrote scroll upon scroll of entries on hardcore punk, his band, and that novel that was always in-progress.

I should also point out that the ghost town social networks I lurk upon contain my own expired identity productions, fixed by different aliases and dated user info. (Yes, there was a time that I listed as interests The O.C. and “pirates!”) 

Of course, I clicked on the “Follow” Tumblr button, and a day later, received an emailed notification that he was following me. And just like that, we were back to being regular Internet friends, the irregular Livejournal comments now replaced by irregular “likes.”

Lo and behold, this latest iteration of my Internet friend — no longer oh-so Livejournal lengthy — is relatively the same guy. He’s regular with music posts, whether it’s analyzing the chugging metal guitars on a Rihanna track or Henry Rollins’ creepy crawl spider tattoo. Even though we abandoned our past online selves, we’ve re-connected on a different social networking platform. But if we lose touch again, I won’t necessarily be a sad faced emoticon — our following one another is fleeting and tenuous. After all, you can never “like” button friendship.

Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw.

Ray Heard — a silver-haired surfer who can “still hang 10 on a Hobie dating back to Frankie Avalon” —  just might be Facebook’s un-official news director, thanks to his daily stream of news links for more than 600 friends, many of whom are big names in Canadian politics and news.

Even though it’s been more than 20 years since the septuagenarian stepped into a newsroom, his hard news sense now transmits in his status feed.

“I post provocative stuff,” he says of his opinionated news shares. “I never say I’m taking a walk with my dog.”

So what exactly makes this veteran newsman Facebook gerontocracy?

For one, his experience. Peter C. Newman calls him a “power broker,” and a quick glance at the Facebook info backs the label. Born and raised in South Africa when apartheid was at its worst, Heard cut his teeth as a London Observer reporter covering the White House. “I was in Selma (Alabama), for the assassination of Martin Luther King, I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot, and of course, I covered Watergate.”

After heading the Global news department in the 1980s, he went into politics as John Turner’s communications director — hence his Liberal slant, eventually settling into corporate communications where he consulted everyone from Royal Bank CEOs to Izzy Asper.

For friends that include Maclean’s Andrew Coyne and Zoomer’s Moses Znaimer, he shares links with a healthy dose of opinion. “This is the biggest ecological disaster, ever,” reads one update from last week linking to a Huffington Post story on the Gulf oil leak. “Yet, it’s still a sidebar in our mainstream media.”

Heard thinks his news shares correspond with newspapers’ current “transitional period.” While online news sites struggle to involve readers in a “participatory” news cycle, social network sites like Facebook and Twitter fill the gap, spinning out the news as social objects to be shared.

“Whether we like it or not, everything’s gone viral. Look at the oil spill in the gulf — you can find out more about that on YouTube,” he says, commending online news sites like the Daily Beast and Huffington Post for its relentless coverage.

“Hard news is still what’s gonna sell, whether it’s newspapers or (on the) iPad.”

The only challenge, he cedes, is “getting people to buy online what we call a newspaper.”

Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw.

Last Monday morning, Twitter users were outraged by its latest outage. Everyone — from your mom to Ashton Kutcher — had zero followers.

The micro-blogging service’s following/follower popularity-o-meter had been wiped, and you can bet your 140 characters that calamity ensued. Hackers were blamed, cap-locked red alerts were issued. The great real-time searchable hierarchy was disrupted.

“Today ordinary tweeps can feel as cool as Ashton Kutcher: everyone is equal with zero followers,” sagely tweeted tech skeptic Evgeny Morozov, ForeignPolicy.com’s Net Effect blogger. “Hail Twitter Socialism!”

Yet the Twitter socialist movement wasn’t meant to be. The site issued a report stating that the 0 follower/following had been set to resolve a bug that allowed any user to “force” follow other users — like your mom or Ashton Kutcher — by tweeting “accept @username”.

The loophole was discovered by Turkish teen Bora Kirca, who was misindentified as the #Twitterhack when popular tech blog Gizmodo broke the story.

“Such an accident led to a big chaos,” said Kirca to the New York Daily News. “I want to apologize for all Twitter users, I didn’t intend to harm anyone.”

Did Kirca truly harm anyone? Obviously not, but he did reveal the value we place on our follower/following. No longer are your following/followers “friends”: more often than not, they’re celebrities, newsfeeds, or even Zodiac facts.

Strangely enough, the most sense I’ve gotten of Twitter’s changed usage has been by observing the experiences of two friends who just joined. One is a writer, someone who signed up purely for professional reasons — to stay connected with other writers, to build his readership — and likens Twitter to being “a live business card.”

The other friend is a part-time student giving social networking another go. He approaches Twittter as a “customized stream of information,” and has already unfollowed users who “tweet insignificant things like having computer problems or complaining that the plumbing in their building isn’t working. These insignificant things don’t interest me, especially if I don’t know that person personally.”

As Twitter expands and has its outages, it’s usefulness changes: no longer is it a means of connecting with friends, but a personal broadcast medium. While the following/follower hierarchy remains, at the very least, we — including your mom or Ashton Kutcher — run and own these channels: while we can’t force anyone to follow us anymore, we can be abitrary in who we follow.

Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw.

City Sonic, a new Canadian documentary series, imagines an urban adventure perfectly tailored for the smart or iPhone owner.

Already into its first season, this series of location-based films pairs celebrated Canadian filmmakers with musicians to explore the places where past and present Toronto music scenes collide.

The shorts — which can be viewed online or in a recently launched iPhone app — comes with appropriate GPS capabilities, fulfilling a stroll-friendly street cinematic experience for a film series that's been screened at North By Northeast and the Toronto International Film Festival.

The Toronto music films are intimate first-person stories and play off the “you had to be there” feeling inherent to live music. So director Bruce McDonald tags along on a Massey Hall tour with Geddy Lee, who reminisces on his journey as a teen watching Cream “rock the joint” to Rush's own sold-out concerts there in the mid-1970s.

Or you can watch Broken Social Scene's Brendan Canning — sitting on the bed of a Drake Hotel room in white terrycloth robe — speak on the Queen West cultural revitalization in the early 2000s, and his band's eventual success. If you actually visit the place where the film takes place, users can unlock additional content (like rare archival footage and extended interviews) by typing in a City Sonic site-specific code.

As we do the Foursquare “check-in,” it's inevitable that our entertainment optimizes for multi-platform consumption. Business Insider calls it the “best screen available model,” and predicts a soon-to-be augmented reality where iPhone apps unbundle cable television packages in providing our favourite shows and movies on-demand.

“We wanted to create City Sonic as a cross-platform series while still maintaining a whole cohesive experience,” explains David Oppenheim, the series' interactive producer. “By going across multiple platforms, it allows you to pursue non-traditional financing and revenue.”

For the next season, Oppenheim hopes that City Sonic will launch in other Canadian cities like Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. He also sees the series' app and mobile site include a Foursquare-like “leaderboard” for future events, concerts and contests that connects city music fans together.

Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw.

Last year, Ernest Hemingway tweeted one of his own quotables: “That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best — make it all up — but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”

Well, not the writer himself, but an enthusiastic fan posing as him on Twitter as @ehemingway.
The legacy of the original Hemingway lives on, as his tweet-, text-, and status update-like style dominates our online language. Blame Papa (who won a $10 bet for his short story, For sale: Baby shoes, never worn) for engaging in micro-fiction, a literary form perfectly in tune with the other lumps of online data we regularly consume.

Toronto-based writer Julie Wilson believes 140-character word counts are akin to the poet’s stanza constraints. “You have people talking, responding and observing the world — putting creativity out there in a public way that’s completely fascinating,” she said.

Since 2006, Wilson — the “Gossip Girl of the book world” who’s worked for publishers such as House of Anansi Press — has maintained seenreading.com, a popular “literary voyeur” site that captures people reading on the subway, in parks, in coffee shops. She imagines those readers as characters, and spins them into micro-fiction postings.

However, she’s still concerned about how this changes our definition of literature.

“If it can be delivered in a tweet, does that suggest there’s any less thought or labour?” Wilson muses.

“As a reader, I’m the sort of person that if you get me in a sentence, I have to put the book down because I’m caught by how wondrous it is,” she says. “That’s the power of micro-fiction.”

Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw.

Feeling chatroom nostalgia? Dump.fm allows chatters — pining for grainy animated GIFs and photoshopped images past their 15 minutes of viral fame — to talk with each other using their favourite pictures.

This latest Internet phenomenon is definitely a web 2.0 update: Think of it as a microblog photo entry on speed, with a twist. Dump.fm encourages users to “chat” with images of what were once Internet fads, in a fast-paced environment that screams Information Superhighway.

The site was recently launched by artist Ryder Ripps, in collaboration with artist/director Stefan Moore and programmer Scott Ostler. Ripps is a 23-year-old New York-based artist, whom wired.co.uk crowned the “Indiana Jones of the Internet” for founding Internet Archaeology, an online museum of “graphic artifacts” dating back to when Geocities and Angelfire ruled the web.

As the digital native gets older, it’s inevitable that a fondness for a time when they were sassygal_69@hotmail.com. Dump.fm images reflect this tech nostalgia with shared jpegs and gifs that reference the perverse, 4chan Internet underbelly.

“Love it or hate it, but LOLCats is a part of our history,” says Ripps of the cute kitty animations’ lingering viral fame. “Say what you will about it being rudimentary and ugly, but (these) are real references that elicit a strong emotional response, especially if you grew up with (the Internet).”

But doesn’t the mash up of unrelated images into a real-time, hyper-speed stream diminish the images’ value? Not necessarily, suggests Ostler. He believes dump.fm users communicate in casual back-and-forth fashion. “It’s not as transient as it appears to be. There are long-term patterns... and sometimes one person [can often] direct and completely change the flow and content of a conversation.”

Ripps believes this shared image searching of world wide web junk is a salvaging of Internet memories. It’s acknowledging an emotional idealism to online pasts, like his own as a nine-year-old in an AOL chatroom.

“It didn’t really matter what the conversation was, but the novelty that someone on the other side of the earth was sharing that with you” was what made it special, Ripps explains.

Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw.

I think I need to go on an information diet. Every morning, I wake up and check my Gmail. I dive first into personal correspondence, and then pick or delete the various Facebook event invites.

Then there’s my scroll through Twitpic breakfast snaps and bit.ly-shortened news linked tweets, my Facebook status feed and my Tumblr dashboard and — oh, don’t even get me started on how many Firefox tabs are open by now.

As you can tell, I worry that I’m a bloated, attention-deficit info junkie who’ll often choose the latest Kelis music video over an in-depth analysis on the Afghan detainee issue.

I got thinking about this after reading a Mashable.com article on social media stress. Writer Soren Gordhamer (job title: Silicon Valley Wisdom 2.0 Summit organizer) offered four tips on cutting back the stress 2.0. His practical advice — disconnect, take deep breaths and eat healthy foods — was possibility discounted by his “Apps to Live By” recommendations: Work that body and download iPractice, a $2.99 Yoga Journal iPhone app for a how-to-Sun-Salutation lesson.

Do I really need a smartphone’s alarm ping for “om” reminders? It’s a Catch-22 situation for our digitally-augmented lives: In order to streamline my information diet, I don’t need to exactly lower my intake, but just rely on the aggregation. Replace keyword searches with social bookmarking sites. Trust the status update search engine that is my Facebook network.

But then again, it was thanks to a linking Tumblr posting that I speedily-then-stopped-to-re-read a 2009 SantaCruz.com article by Paul M. Davis praising “slow reading” and a re-assessment of our “power user” statuses.

“No matter the media, we need to rediscover the discipline of slow reading that has been lost in the frenzy of never-ending RSS feeds and social network life streams,” Davis concludes. “It is, as it’s always been, essential for us to read slowly, be engaged with what we read, to constantly challenge ourselves to re-learn how to think, to be critically engaged.”

So until our brains become totally rewired, I guess Mashable’s onto something with the deep breaths. Did I mention Gordhamer’s conclusion? “Learn to surf.” I’m not sure what that entails, but I’d like to figure it out (on my own).

I think I need to go on an information diet 

You know that Socialite has a blog, right? Everyday, I curate link round-up the latest updates on the on/offline tip, as well as offer meta-sneaks into my weekly column. Starting today, I’ll be attempting to ‘Serenity now!’ on stress 2.0 by sharing ways in which to cut back on the daily online information intake. If you can bear to another subscription in your RSS reader, please add http://socialite.posterous.com.

Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw.

It’s a story that the stick-it-to-the-man interwebs will always fall for: Indie rock band finally ditches major record label and strikes out on their own.

This month, power pop quartet OK Go — who achieved YouTube fame (more than 50 million views) with their now-classic Here It Goes Again treadmill routine — announced that they were leaving EMI to form their own label.

Frustrated by EMI’s “no-YouTube embed” policy, the band publicly protested (capped by lead singer Damian Kulash’s much-linked-to New York Times op-ed), fans’ inability to embed the band’s YouTube-hosted music videos on blogs and other web sites.

The announcement of course, comes at the success of the band’s latest viral hit, This Too Shall Pass.

It features an un-broken video of a Rube Goldberg machine that topples dominoes, swings sledgehammers and enacts other museum of science-worthy wonders. 

It’s now embeddable, thanks to the video being sponsored by American insurance giant State Farm (did you catch the logo on that red toy truck at the video’s start?).

As YouTube becomes the web’s dominant video channelling service, you bet that majors have an active interest in ensuring that they keep their advertising share ($3 to $8 per 1,000 views, to be exact) on the pre-roll, text and overlay advertising on YouTube music videos.

When a music blog embeds a video however, those ad profits are lost.

But what might be even a greater loss is missing out on the interwebs’ short attention span.

When OK Go release the first label-approved version of This Too Shall Pass (featuring a stunt cameo by the Notre Dame marching band) the non-embed video only had 10,500 views in its first week. Compare that with the first week views for the Rube Goldberg version: Six million.
OK Go clearly lucked out, especially since YouTube themselves just announced their “Musicians Wanted” Partners Program, which will directly pay videos’ ad revenue to the indie acts (and yes, OK Go was announced as one of those partners).

As music evolves as a digital property, it goes without saying that the rules of the game have changed. Slick MTV-approved music videos now co-exists with quirky, low-fi YouTube single shots.

“It’s no longer discreet chunks of music,” said Kulash in an interview with online video business news blog NewTeeVee.

“It’s a cloud, everybody can access it, and it’s taken some people longer to get that than others.”

– Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw

It’s been suggested its time to add yet another title to journalism’s endangered species list: The film critic.

As print continues to suffer from dwindling ad revenue and the conundrum about whether to charge for online content, the front line journalists continue to get the pink slip.

Last week, venerable Hollywood trade paper Variety ousted its longtime chief film critic, Todd McCarthy. For those of us who go by Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer, this may not register a rotten rating. But industry insiders see it as a sign that the critic’s printed value has now been eclipsed by the studio-approved Ain’t It Cool News-esque Internet hype machine.

“If Variety no longer requires its chief film critic, it no longer requires me as a reader,” fumed legendary film critic Roger Ebert on his Chicago Sun-Times blog.

While Ebert may gripe over McCarthy’s sacking, he’s also the rare critic who’s evolved beyond his “thumb up” movie poster edict. As more web-attuned moviegoers seek blogger opinions and GreenCine Daily website debate, Ebert has kept up with @ebertchicago tweets and daily blog entries, showing his fellow critics how to adapt to this new media environment.

This was especially prevalent in the recent Esquire profile by Canadian journalist Chris Jones, who showed how Ebert’s online journal became a vehicle for his will to continue reviewing despite losing his ability to speak and eat due to a series of cancer surgeries.

“There is no need to pity me,” he wrote on a post-it note to Jones. “Look how happy I am. This has led to an exploring of writing.”

Jones reveals how Ebert’s candid entries has created a dream audience — readers-turned-commenters whom Ebert regularly engages with. It’s led to a rediscovery of Ebert as a brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.

Shortly after delivering on Oprah his Oscar picks (with his new “Roger Jr.” computerized voice), Ebert extended an invitation to the Ebert Club. It’s an attempt at a paid online content model: A $4.99 yearly subscription that includes value-added benefits like access to a private discussion thread and “winnowed” @ebertchicago tweets.

And it might just be the thing that takes the film critic off journalism’s endangered species list.

– Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw

If there’s any lessons one can get in “identity management” — that careful curation of who you “are” online — look no further than the digital dating profile.

First, there’s that all-important profile picture — finding those “best light” multiple headshots that visually communicate who you are and what your lifestyle is. Then there’s the off-hand but carefully-worded profile (like that quirky “first date” description), and then, the first message you send that either makes (a casual “how’s it going?”) or breaks (a “ur hot!!11” compliment) that offline coffee date.

Perhaps this seems all too rehearsed and deliberate. But how’s this any different from the time you spent concocting your LinkedIn professional headline or the care you put into live-tweeting reactions to the Oscar’s red carpet fashions?

Like it or not, identity management is work, but there’s still a certain amount of freedom granted. Whereas in real life we have bad hair days and more often than not, spend our Saturday nights in, online can be an entirely different story. Your hair always looks fabulous (and if not — well, that’s what un-tagging is for) and as far as your Facebook friends know, you did RSVP “attending” that downtown dance party.

Kim Hughes, the Dating and Relationships expert for Canadian dating brand Lavalife.com, thinks that we’re finally reaching a point online where we take for granted online this deliberate curation.

“We accept that people have a somewhat public face on LinkedIn while the face on Lavalife will underscore the more romantic side, which differs entirely from that Facebook profile,” says Hughes. “It’s not difficult to reconcile that if it comes from an authentic place.”

But authenticity is a tricky thing. A 2008 Cornell University study assessing online dating profiles’ “deceptive self-presentation” found that we regularly fib about our age, weight and income. These inaccuracies, however, were proven to be so subtle and small, since the online users were still intent on making that offline coffee date happen.

“The great thing about Facebook is that people tend to be uninhibited because they have a measure of control over who sees their profile, so they tend to be more forthcoming and natural,” explains Hughes. “If somehow we could bring that over to the online dating side, that would benefit everyone.”

– Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw

Chatroulette — that person-to-person video chat site that everyone’s talking about — is possibly yet another “everything old is new again” online voyeuristic fad.

Think of it as a speed-date through fleeting face-to-face human encounters: “Accept” when the site asks for permission to use your webcam, and be prepared for a wheel through the superficiality of random webcam chat.

The first-time experience is intimidating. There’s the laughing teens who’ll judge with a glance and soon disappear, or spending all of five seconds with shadowy Halloween masked figures.
The perversions you’ll encounter are straight out of a 1990s AOL chat-room. But stick with the exhibitionism a little longer, and suddenly, it’s been three or four hours of “nexting” through real and unfiltered encounters.

It’s how I met a Brazilian girl whom I mostly communicated with by copy and pasting English responses Google-translated into Portuguese, or when a friend of mine and I went back and forth with an ex-skateboarder from the Netherlands with old school hip hop YouTube clips, setting off an impromptu dance party that lasted into the wee hours of a Saturday morning.

The site now has 10,000 to 16,000 users, and those numbers are quickly growing, as is the collective fascination it’s sprung for the thrill of an un-mediated gamble on talking with strangers worldwide. Chatroulette was just exposed as the brainchild of 17-year-old Russian, Andrey Ternovskiy, who shared in an email to the New York Times the site’s inspiration: “I myself enjoyed talking to friends on Skype, but got tired of talking to each other — so I decided to create a little site to connect randomly to other people.”

Indeed, Fast Company sums up the net’s latest parlour game best as “self-published entertainment.” It’s a disconnect from our networked culture’s demands for transparency and fixed user identities, and the site’s pseudo-anonymous nature (outrageous masked figures and celebrities like the Jonas Brothers or Paris Hilton have already been screencapped for public posterity) reflecting our yearning for ye old Internet chatroom: Meaningful yet still entirely disposable mingling with strangers.

With files from Metro World News

– Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw

You may not know it yet, but Casie Stewart is your new favourite online VJ, the latest update on that oh-so-’80s on-air media personality.

Since November 2009, the 27-year-old daily-blogger has garnered much attention for being the “online voice” of those venerable millennial-only pop culture channels. A day of work usually involves updating the @MTVCanada Twitter for its more than 27,000 followers, or posting episode clips on MuchMusic’s official Facebook page.

“I blogged my way into the coolest job ever,” says the digital marketing co-ordinator for MuchMusic and MTV Canada.

For the past four years, Stewart has led the “recorded life” via her “Casie Stewart: This Is My Life” blog. Click onto her Google profile, and you can catch this “rad social media chick” 24/7 on any networked stream: Buzz, Twitter, Tumblr, Formspring — you name it.

“If you want to build your personal brand, you got to live it,” says the self-described “geek chick” who  flaunts “goofy” black frames in profile pics with her trademarked platinum pixie cut. “You can’t fake it.”

So Stewart’s self-packaged “realness” is now RSS-feeding into a big brand’s multi-platform. But this Cambridge-raised social media starlet has “always been goal-oriented,” whether it’s self-publishing a poetry collection at 14 (the Toronto Star called her Keats’ “teen muse”) or posing as a SUNshine Girl in 2001.

Whereas her previous employer (an online casino company) “hated” her life-streaming, MuchMusic and MTV Canada love it. “They said they didn’t want me to give up on that,” she says. “That’s what keeps me on trend.”

– Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw

Even as we amp up that “Go Canada!” pride, there’s still no shaking Vancouver 2010’s “Bailout Games” label.

The Guardian recently reported it as a six-billion dollar investment with no return, and social media has been blamed for NBC’s loss of US$250-million on its media rights investment due to an audience increasingly fragmented by new media channels, dwindling the value of television ads for Olympic corporate sponsors.

So all eyes are on W2 Culture + Media House, a “cultural and arts infrastructure” that will host international bloggers, technologists and journalists during what has now being called the first “Social Media” Winter Games.

Located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the 13,000-square-foot Woodward's Building is a media arts centre providing 24/7 webcasting, digital media labs, and a TV studio for outlets like CNN iReport and Rabble.ca, and curating cultural programming featuring 150 DJs, VJs, as well as visual and media artists.

“This will be likely the first and last independent social media centre,” says W2 executive director Irwin Oostindie, who positions Vancouver between Beijing 2008’s failed open media environment and London 2012’s likely monetization of social media.

“It’s an interesting experiment where we’re living in a country like Canada with this remaining free space for citizens to engage and direct democracy through digital storytelling.”

W2 is also positioning itself as a mediated space, allowing for marginalized voices to emerge. It will host the Legal Observer program led by PIVOT Legal Society and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, with mini camera-carrying volunteers monitoring Olympic security for any human rights violations.

But citizen-led media access comes at a cost. W2 doesn’t offer free wireless for its mostly unaccredited journalists and bloggers: The Centre lacks core funding and relies upon a user-pay system, which speaks to the greater issue of sustainability for Canadian new media innovation.

“The Olympics is a mega-media moment highlighting this state of transition and the new world we’re in,” explains Steve Anderson, a national co-ordinator for media issues non-profit OpenMedia.ca.

Anderson considers community media centres like W2 vital in developing socially-driven media. It why he’s involved with the Fresh Media Olympics, a W2-hosted conference using the Olympics and its worldwide coverage to analyze social media’s impact on the traditional media landscape.

So maybe this isn’t the Bailout Games. According to Oostindie, there’s a bright side to media rights holders losing their investment on the biggest marketed event in sports: “We can actually look at equitable distribution so that producers and consumers... will in fact be underwriting their own cultural consumption.”­

– Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw

Nicoel Mitchell-Duff  is the mayor of 32 places in Edmonton — on Foursquare, that is.

The location-based social networking game lets users connect with friends and “check in” their downtown whereabouts. Frequent a venue enough, and becoming the mayor of that location is within reach: That’s how she became mayor of the Starbucks in her Central McDougall neighbourhood.

While the thought of making your daily GPS-pinpointed travels fodder for yet another status update feed sounds too much of an overshare, it’s worth noting that Foursquare — with 300,000 users worldwide — is fast becoming what many are predicting as the next Twitter.

Mitchell-Duff — who works in experiential marketing and also uses Twitter and Tumblr — uses Foursquare as a crowd-sourced city guide. It’s how she found out about the recent re-opening of the Art Gallery of Alberta and a ton of new brunch spots: “It’s definitely given me an opportunity, or rather a reason, to explore my neighbourhood and (find) new things to do.”

Which is why Mitchell-Duff added a new Foursquare friend — Metro Canada. The partnership has spurred much attention, as it’s the first news outlet the one-year-old platform has partnered with.

What’s it like to be friends with Metro? During a weekend shopping trip at the West Edmonton Mall, Mitchell-Duff got a Metro “tip” on her iPhone to venture into the food court and try a vermicelli bowl at the Urban Foodie-approved Hoang Long Noodle House.

There’s also the Metro “badge” that she recently unlocked, an in-game status symbol that marks you an advanced Foursquarer. (Mitchell-Duff is second on Edmonton’s top 100 Foursquare leaderboard.) Local Mayor deals announced every Friday in the paper finally provides discounts for those frequent check ins.

Eventually, predicts Robyn Payne, Metro Canada’s marketing and research manager, the Urban Foodie tips will include geotargeted news to provide further context to downtown exploration.

“We want to tie local news and facts into locations,” she says.

While Mitchell-Duff's quick to note a few kinks — she wishes there were more downtown tips, and tips were filtered by the city users are in — she’s hoping that the newspaper at the very least gets more players in town and making mayorship more competitive.

“I’m kind of itching to organize an Edmonton Foursquare meet-up.”


– Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw

Correction - February 8, 2010, 1:15 p.m. EST: A previous version of this story incorrectly spelled Nicoel Mitchell-Duff's name. It has since been corrected.

Perhaps you’ve noticed how protest has become an online centre of attention.

Our current civic information structure is defined by undirected links, mash-ups, updates and postings. More so than ever, individual activism can snowball mass change.

It’s how an Albertan graduate student’s impulse to create a Canadians Against Proroging Parliament Facebook group kicked into high gear a movement that’s led to local chapters, freely distributed banners, catchy sloganeering and this weekend’s national Canadians For Democracy! Not For Prorogation protests.

The barrier to political activism has never been lower. Log onto Twitter, and the pro and con opinions can be accessed by typing in the hashtags #capp (Canadians Against Parliamentary Prorogation) or #roft (Right of Twitter, a play on 'Right of Centre'). Want a non-partisan news stream of links about the proroging issue? Try #cdnpoli or #canpoli.

If protest is unnerving authority by behaving unexpectedly, social media accomplished this. The “dead zone” announcement of prorogation went front page with users re-distributing mainstream media dispatches of staged photo ops and talking point memos. If anything, this online culture of participation has undermined Stephen Harper’s culture of secrecy.

“By itself, social media is not going to overthrow the Harper government,” said University of British Columbia professor Alfred Hermida in an interview published by Canadian online magazine The Tyee, analyzing this Canadian “online uprising.”

The BBC News vet — who studies the Web 2.0 impact on journalism — ultimately considers social media “an indicator of social change.”

But, “liking” a posting dissecting the torture probe or even re-tweeting a humorous quip by @cheddar_harper (Stephen Harper’s cuddly, ginger tabby kitten is a popular Twitter user) doesn’t necessarily guarantee attendance at the Jan. 23 rally. Evgevy Morozov, a Foreign Policy magazine contributing editor and commentator on the Internet and politics, pinpoints the downfall of web politics with the appropriate phrase “internet slacktivism.”

He describes “feel-good activism that has little or no political and social impact,” and warns, “Let us in the future be a bit more skeptical about the need to recreate the protest wheel.”

But why would we expect online protests to only lead to traditional mass offline protests?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing anyone’s right to democratic action. But if social media has already re-booted citizens’ “idle chatter,” surely we should consider how it also updates “the protest wheel.”

It’s these online connections that are enticing me to make those offline connections with people in my community — or at the very least, serve up a steaming plate of perogies.

It’s strange when you realize the Internet is old enough to cause nostalgia. I won’t bore you with my reminisces, but I’ll admit to a Geocities home page I had that briefly included (as I was learning HTML basics) a blinking yellow and black diagonal “Under Construction” sign.

In this dial-up recall, that “Under Construction” sign was a declaration of my new-to-the-net status. It’s an enduring piece of early Internet history, and even a testament to the animated GIF’s democratic viral.

Today, the animated GIF is still alive in cyberspace; being used as a quick visual status update, as an insider-to-insider type of shorthand, and are being collected and shared among enthusiasts.

Scroll through comment threads, and you’ll catch postings augmented by mini-cinematic loops of pop culture: That Jersey Shore Snooki punch, the bared fangs of a True Blood vamp. There are even online communities devoted to collecting animated GIFs, and honouring those who make them.

Indeed, this web relic’s re-discovery owes much to the net artists who’ve made these small graphic file formats an artistic medium in itself, says Canadian writer and artist Sally McKay.

“Artists who use technology are very interested in older technologies and pushing them beyond commercial and mainstream use,” explains McKay of the current “retro” appeal. “It’s that real involvement of the medium in a very direct way, (since) it’s so easy to access, share and upload.”

The former co-owner and editor of influential Toronto art magazine Lola, McKay recently published an essay analyzing animated GIFs on Art&Education, a contemporary art website launched last summer by Artforum.

Canadian artist Lorna Mills, who shares an art blog called Digital Media Tree with McKay, is quick to dismiss any “sentimental aspects” to the GIFs she creates from her own and found videos.

The visual artist and flash game programmer — who is developing video for mobile delivery on iPhone and PSP, amongst other platforms — says her remixing of nature broadcasts and Hollywood movie footage as a deliberate “repurposing” of mainstream images.

“It’s sort of like an art of participation that illuminates to me how I define myself as an artist,” Mills writes via e-mail. “Making images amongst many many image producers that don’t position themselves as artists, yet (still) manage to engage me fully with their creations.”

What can’t social media do? Google “social media trends 2010,” and you’ll encounter the usual sea of predictions from relevant influencers and naysayers.

A top result is TrendSpotting Market Research’s Trend Predictions in 140 Characters. Its “tweet style” forecasting makes for a breezy read of what it sees as buzz worthy — like transparency, location-sharing and privacy.

It’s an enlightening read from the frontline figures in social marketing and “technical evangelism,” who continue to report warm and fuzzy web views.

Indeed, transparency and especially location-sharing are profitable bets: It’s why many are banking on Foursquare, a smartphone app that mixes GPS-pinpoints with social gaming.

Part friend-finder, part city-guide, the application encourages users to “check in” at various locations around the city — and the world.

And then there’s Blippy (A.K.A. the Twitter of personal finance), which simply asks: “What are your friends buying?” The service asks you and friends to “passively share” with one another credit card transactions. “Ashvin spent $16.47 at Amazon, Sammy spent $11.52 at iTunes,” reads a screengrab of typical updates on Blippy’s site.

So when Twitter CEO Evan Williams tweets a prediction forecasting the profitability of transparency (“Many of the great businesses of the next decade will be about making information about our behaviors more visible” he said), it conveniently leads to a 2010 trend I’ll be following closely: Privacy.

After all, Facebook’s no longer a “private” social network. Even though the recent privacy option changes comply with recommendations from Canada’s Privacy Commission, your default update option isn’t “only friends” or  “friends of friends” — it’s “everyone.”

These changes were supposed to make privacy options easier. Instead, warns digital rights non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, it “will actually reduce the amount of control users have over some of their personal data.”

Is privacy dead then? Last week, a Twitter debate between British web 2.0 academic Andrew Keen and TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld settled on the following conclusion: “If 21st century default is living in public,” wrote Keen. “Privacy will be the new scarcity.”

But Schonfeld later blogged on TechCrunch a more practical view: “When public is the default, you deliberately select what to keep private instead of the other way around. It’s not that privacy disappears. But it becomes more a matter of emphasis and a conscious decision.”

Social media has finally come of age in 2009, playing roles in world events and pop culture. Here are some of the biggest moments this year.

Jan. 29
Brit actor and writer Stephen Fry blogs praise to new and old 100K followers: "I love your wit, your kindness, your observation." An early adopter of the social networking site, @stephenfry headlined a year of celebrity tweets and twitpics.

Feb. 24
"We've hired three full-time bloggers and we're going to launch a site that's going to be synonymous with our show," explains new host Jimmy Fallon on the hip net-savvy Late Night strategy for beating Conan, Dave & Jay.

March 2
"Interweb the rainbow"? Skittles' remixed tagline inspires a marketing stunt: Redirecting visitors from the candy brand's official website to a Twitter #skittles topic search. (Two days later, inane and profane tweets forced a homepage re-think.)

April 11
"No one is laughing now," assures Britain's Got Talent judge Piers Morgan on Susan Boyle's "I Dreamed A Dream" performance. Instant fame hit as 2009's top YouTube clip (100M hits!) for the Scottish songstress who trumped frump and slacked Simon Cowell's jaw.

May
The White House uses Flickr — so can you! State visits and pick-up basketball games: These were the ops in the White House's first monthly Flickr photo set, part of Obama's follow-through on a social media-savvy American presidency.

June 14
Twitter user @Change_For_Iran communicated from opposition frontlines during Iran's election protests. Crowd-sourced #iranelection tweets and cellphone footage on YouTube dominated mainstream media coverage.

July 17
Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart announces Facebook's violation of Canadian federal law: "We found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates," she says, citing the indefinite storing of users' personal information. (Facebook revised the policy in November.)

Aug. 14
"The Internet and devices like the BlackBerry or the iPhone have made the office pretty much redundant, thereby collapsing life and work," explains web 2.0 academic Andrew Keen, on a recent survey that found BlackBerry users work an extra fifteen hours per work.

Sept. 14
Thirteen-year-old style blogger Tavi Gevinson's "MAAAAAAARRRRRRRCCCCCCCC" blog posting of front row point-and-shoots from Marc Jacobs' Spring 2010 show.  More seats were reserved for bloggers and online fashion publications than ever before.

Oct. 31
"Unfriend" is Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the Year, so understandably, @stephenfry posts an almost-last tweet ("Think I may have to give up on Twitter. Too much aggression and unkindness around. Pity. Well, it's been fun").

Nov. 1
Fry's now one million followers convince a turnaround tweet: "A mood thing. Sunshine will help. So sorry." Later crowned "King of Twitter" at London's 140 Conference, Fry praised Twitter for letting celebrities "cut out the press from our PR requirements".

Dec. 1
"I will wear you out": Us Weekly's releases Tiger Woods' cheating sexts (sexy mobile texts). The golf great's now a mere mortal for an activity that, according to a recent MTV-Associated Press poll, 33 per cent of 'texxxt-ing' teens partake in.

Canadian Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother (a.k.a jaimeleigh) is supposedly a Tumblette: young, sexy and an over-sharer. The Tumblette  — a vogue-ish tag for a female type who blogs on the website Tumblr — “lifecasts” with an edge.

She lives in public, fully aware embarassing personal details — shared through links, videos and texts — are archived and indexed.

On her “for the story goes” Tumblr, the Toronto-based Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother bares all daily — from a series of self-point-and-shoot photos the 20-something blond snapped for a Semi-Naked-Picture-Day, to a controversial posting that included a spreadsheet mapping her bed-hopping history.

“People have a weird love for these sexual things,” says Fairbrother, who in person, is surprisingly demure. “We all talk about it... yet if you’re honest and shameless about it, you’re judged.”

At first glance, Fairbrother’s Tumblr is a female version of Tucker Max, whose drunken bro-ish hijinks recently made it to the big screen in I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. 

It’s made Fairbrother a love-her-or-hate-her Tumblette: She’s garnered a cult of 800 to 900 active followers and, last week, was ranking higher than other micro-celebrities and fellow oversharers, like Internet star Julia Allison.

Call it narcissism or savvy self-marketing, but Allison pioneered the 24/7 fame ball lifecast via 24/7 text, photo and video postings with her site, Julia.Nonsociety.com

Fairbrother’s quick to recognize her Tumblr began over a year ago as a lonely, soliloquy-ing stream.

Her postings quickly garnered followers, especially through Tumblr’s unique re-blogging feature — the re-posting of content allows users to trace how one post is amplified or subverted by other users — which created a dialogue that would bounce between her, her followers and even non-followers.

“It’s emoting — you want to complain and hear six people say, ‘I hear you, sister,’” explains Fairbrother of Tumblr’s idyllic social fantasy. “You do have a community who know your stories... but (they’re) strangers who know you very well.”

As a result, Fairbrother isn’t just a Tumblette speaking within a echo chamber — she’s connecting across different niches and communities, showing different facets of her self, online.  Her embarrassments, like it or not, break barriers.

Tumblr-ing
Last week, New York social media-ite Justin Johnson traded the usual down-on-one-knee with an online video marriage proposal posted on Tumblr. More than 9,900 “liked” the proposal (His fiancée Marissa Nystrom’s response: “YESSSSSSSS!”), but cynics like BBook.com called it an “advertising stunt” for the up-and-coming platform’s future marketing initiatives.

Famous Tumblr
Justine Bateman (a.k.a. Family Ties’ Mallory Keaton), shown, is strangely enough one of the most-renowned celeb Tumblettes. The former 1980s child star runs online production company FM78.TV (responsible for an online IKEA campaign) and recently testified on net neutrality in front of the U.S. Senate.

Addendum on Monday, Nov. 23, 2009 at 11:06 a.m. EST: True to her style, Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother has already Tumbled about this column here.

– Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw

Selected creative work with Renata Kaveh.

Selected tear sheets from Worn Fashion Journal. Art directed and styled David Waldman-shot photos for ‘Belle Pied’ feature in issue no. 8; Art directed Alyssa Katherine Faoro-shot editorial for issue no. 9.

Selected shots from Inspiration Point column for Eye Weekly. Art directed and styled on figure, off figure and product shots for print. Collaborated with photographers Alyssa Katherine Faoro, David Waldman, and Ashlea Wessel.

Century 66, a storytelling project exploring the closeted history of Toronto fashion. The beloved clothing staples of unconventional female artists are ‘product shot’. Their distinct relationship with style is elaborated in the personal stories that come attached to these pieces, and how these pieces are photographed. In collaboration with photographer Alyssa Katherine Faoro.