Alex Reid

Earlier this week, I was starting to get down on the promise of a diverse city election in Winnipeg since four candidates were running without opposition and only four candidates were running for Mayor. Last election (2002), three City Councillors won by acclamation because no one was interested.

But today, the Green Party of Winnipeg – led by my friend Markus Buchart – announced they have six candidates running, four of them against those four City Councillors who faced no challengers.

One of Yahoo.com’s Web Designers had his cell phone stolen, but a program he had installed on the phone automatically posted the images captured with the device on his Flickr account.

It is an amazing story that echoes my recent thread about shaming bad people. Even if Flickr is owned by Yahoo, this is not the work of a marketing ploy as many jaded web marketers believe.

Here’s a pretty good shot of someone’s Chihuahua.

The thief – or whoever bought the phone from the thief – appears not to have known the software keeps running even with a different user or SIM-card. So their shots were viewed thousands of times by people on the Web.

Despite assertions from the independent makers of the software that the tale is not a promotional stunt on their part, some Web users — who may have fallen for so-called “guerrilla marketing” tactics in the past — rounded on Clemens, accusing him of making the story up.

“This is totally a viral marketing campaign … It’s a nice implementation, with just enough flaws to be found out fairly quickly, but believable enough,” says a relatively polite contributor to one of many strings of comment to the story.

“I’ve entered into some surreal world,” Clemens told Reuters.

“People assume I’m doing it for self-promotion, marketing, a hoax or something like that. I’m talking to you because I want it to be known that it’s not a hoax. I’m just too ordinary. I’m just too unclever for that.”

He says the experience has been a lesson in the way the modern Web works: “(On the Web today), you can no longer have a separate — private and public — world. It makes you realize you have to be even more honest and careful.”

He has now disabled the software and says he is not seeking justice, revenge, or even his mobile phone. He would quite like his life back.

I love Wired Magazine’s (actually Laura Moorhead’s) FOUND illustrations, like last month’s product.

It’s not the product concept that interests me, but that the package itself could be biodegradable. This is very interesting. At the very bottom of the projected package, and you’ll see that the package is made of “100% polymerized cornstarch”. When I search for just polymerized cornstarch I get only one result in Google, unfortunately the actual patent app appears to have been modified. But the thinking is still there; making the package biodegradable.

Back in 1999, educated with the bottle deposit program in Prince Edward Island, I lobbied on behalf of the Green Party of Manitoba for a deposit program in Manitoba. I quickly learned that the so-called leading environmentalists in Winnipeg didn’t support this because their funding was largely dependent on the levy placed on plastic bottles.

So, instead of urging people to change their ways, I’m intrigued that going directly for the packaging is the way to go.

It appears that there is a product called Envirobeads which is made of polymerized cornstarch strands [ref], however it dissolves with water.

Food for thought I suppose…

John Hodgman (the PC guy from the “Get a Mac” commercials, and of The Jon Stewart Show) explains Senator Ted Steven’s baffling description of what the “Internets” actually is, as well perfectly describes the attempted two-tiered Internet reality we face in this video.

See also Google’s info page on the topic.

Lakehead University, where my dear friend Jan attends, released an interesting marketing campaign centered around US President Bush. They’re set up www.yaleshmale.com in a bid to attract potential new students. It shows a picture of Mr Bush – a Yale graduate – with the caption: “Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart.”

The University says it won’t retract the campaign, but has removed the picture of Bush from its website.

From > the BBC:

The university has defended its campaign, which also includes prizes of a car lease and handheld computer games consoles, saying it has had a positive effect.

“It was literally a tongue-in-cheek way of getting attention,” university president and vice-chancellor Frederick Gilbert told Reuters news agency.

The website had received more than 7,000 hits, he said on Monday, and online comments had been 95% positive.