[see below the fold for the photo] You may remember Benrik from the Facebook app or the Recession Blocker we previously featured on The Digitalist.
Well this is a whole new level. A Benrik super-fan agreed to have himself pasted to an advert on Old Street for as long as it takes. For all I know he may still be there…the diary clearly did change his life.
David Blaine eat your heart out.
On Monday I attended a fascinating day of talks and discussions hosted by the rather wonderful Open Rights Group looking at “Creative Business in the Digital Era“. The Open Rights Group is dedicated to protecting and promoting digital rights at this precarious point in their history, when the struggle between closure and openness is still on.
The premise of the day was simple. In the digital era information and hence media (and the creative industries) exist in a frictionless environment where data can be copied and disseminated with ease, moving outside the traditional revenue earning channels and fundamentally threatening the business models of publishers, record companies and film studios, amongst others, not to mention artists, retailers and all the other subsidiary industries dependent on the sector. How, in this situation, to make money?
Facebook is still the site everyone loves to talk about. According to Techcrunch, themselves quoting Comscore, Facebook received 32 million unique views against 71 million for MySpace. So while Facebook has not caught up, it is still catching up, growing 118% in the past year, the result being Facebook continues to attract the most commentary. Facebook hit a wave of negative publicity when they were accused of ruining Christmas. In short their new Beacon ad system incorporates certain purchases into the newsfeed: if you mention to me that you’d like, say, a new Aston Martin for Christmas, and then on your newsfeed appeared “Michael has bought a new Aston Martin”, some of the surprise, the glee, might be taken out of the (large) equation.Many saw it as an intrusion too far, an entangling of business interest and personal financial transaction in a sphere supposedly dedicated to social interaction. However fighting the hysteria was read/write web who argued that no one really cares, at least compared to the way people cared when the newsfeed was first released. Even they thought that without a clear opt out Beacon could seriously missfire. In the end Facebook has baulked at a blanket publishing of user activity on third party sites and has incorporated an opt in function, the catch being that you will keep being pestered by Facebook until you have actively logged in or out of Beacon postings.
