Alex Reid

Two Norwegians dressed in scuba gear waited in lawn chairs for the Google Street View car to pass and when it did, they chased the car with pitchforks. Now their act is geo-tagged on Google Maps (see here) for digital immortality.

It’s amusing.

I find this interesting because it could be a new trend of jacking Google Street View leaving the public to wonder if it’s just weirdness or deliberate.

My man Andy Barron captured some shots from a Conan live show last night.

It’s a good week for Twitter.

The micro-blogging company has struck a deal with the largest library in the world to archive every public “tweet” since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, Library director of communications Matt Raymond announced today.

“Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition,” Raymond wrote. “I’m no PhD, but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data.”

Raymond says the Library has already been mining the Internet since 2000, when they began archiving congressional and presidential campaign websites but this move is part of a larger mission.

The Library also operates the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program which is “pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations”.

Twitter also announced it now has 105 million users, a quarter of the number that Facebook boasts. And yesterday Twitter announced they will serve limited advertising.

It was inevitable, we just didn’t know how – or how users would take it.

Twitter has announced it will serve up “promoted tweets” clearly identified as such and will only appear one per search result page. It’s the first step in their business model change. Right now they want to wait to see how people take it in.

The Federal government via MP Shelly Glover and the Province of Manitoba via Trade Minister Peter Bjornson have announced a shared funding boost of $1.8 million to Manitoba Music (which New Winnipeg Media is a corporate sponsor of) – a not-for-profit industry association designed to help local artists and companies market their music beyond Manitoba’s borders.

The money is part of a four-year plan under the Canada-Manitoba Western Economic Partnership Agreement (WEPA), in which both the Province of Manitoba and the Government of Canada are contributing $25 million each over four years to “to strengthen economic activity and improve the quality of life in western Canadian communities.”