Employee Generated Content

Southwest Airlines flight attendant David Holmes has become something of a minor Internet hit after passengers posted cellphone videos of his hip-hop inspired takes on the standard cabin announcements.

Brands, esepcially in the UK, are trying more and more to distinguish themselves through their staff, who are now seen as the front line of a brand. B&Q, Asda, Sainsbury's and more all want to show their authenticity and fluffy personality, which makes perfect sense.

The disturbing thing is though someone, somewhere is now probably trying to sell this clip....

Little red riding hood

Awesome video, by a Swedish University student who was given a school assignment to reinterpret the fairytale Little red ridning hood.

http://www.tomas-nilsson.se/

Sticker Prophecy

Beautiful data

After recently reading through a lot of old emails in search of something else, I got really distracted by an old post in Ping Mag, which had an interview with Boris Muller. In an attempt to share some other great examples here are some edited highlights:

Based on Buckminster Fuller’s legendary Dymaxion map

Gorgeous 3D mapping
You’ll know this one...
Napoleon’s march to Moscow
History flow – visualisations of a topic’s life story on wikipedia
Feltron annual report
TED talk with some great stuff
Loads of lovely ways into Digg data
Dopplr’s raumzeitgeist map
Facebook friend wheel
Live US flight paths
The Wattson – see how much electricity your home is using
Nike Plus
Movie charts

User generated TV

In the crowd-funded arena, one name keeps popping up: Mark Bowness the man behind Tribe Wanted, the experimental island community he founded, was the focus of a BBC documentary series. Two other ventures - VIPbandmanager and the Liverpool Culture cafe - haven't taken off as quickly, but Mark has high hopes for his latest project: Have you got the nerve TV.

Have You Got The Nerve aims to be a new type of TV production company: one that's created, lead and inspired by a group of 3,000 executive producers. Fusing the collaborative power of the internet and the enduring mass appeal of television, Nerve will take on three genres: documentary, drama and entertainment. Content will be made both for TV and online viewing.

To sign up as an executive producer, anyone can pledge to pay a one-off fee of GBP 60 as soon as 2,999 others have agreed to do the same. Once the 3,000 execs have joined, Nerve will be open to more people, who will pay a small monthly fee have access to the the platform. These members will also have input into programming, but only the executive producers will share in Nerve's profits. Revenue sources will be the traditional 10% cut of production value that TV production companies get, plus earnings from book deals, online social networks, games, mobile content, etc.

Will the crowds be able to create content that's more engaging than traditional producers? And will Nerve be able to reach a wider audience than user-generated Current TV? I'll be watching ;-)

Website: www.haveyougotthenerve.tv