#Campaigning

Personally, I think there is nothing like poking fun at the stupidity of certain initiatives to illustrates how flimsy and foolish they are. Laughter, IMHO, is the greatest weapon in the activist’s arsenal.

Great little ad from Australia’s GetUp on the plans of the Rudd government for internet filtering throughout the whole country (yes, shockingly for a democracy like Australia, the same sort of thing you’d expect from China, Iran and some other sadly misguided repressive regimes).

Frightening short piece from the Atlantic about the effects of Tiananmen censorship on cultural memory. I find this amazingly Orwellian and chilling as all hell. I think we all hope to live in a world where censorship doesn’t work as a form of repression.

I have spent a lot of time over the past three years with Chinese university students. They know a lot about the world, and about American history, and about certain periods in their own country’s past… But you can’t assume they will ever have heard of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance. For most young people, it’s just another day.

Amnesty International’s Annual Report for 2009 , the definitive report on the state of the world’s human rights is now live.

Pretty smooth sailing technically this time round due to using Drupal (the same CMS we use on the main amnesty.org site and some excellent dev help from the fine, fine folks over at CivicActions (except for a worrying little last-minute technical terror of a bug that slipped through).

Kind of surprised this one I missed entirely on launch. Augmented reality (ie. virtual layers over views of the real world) application where what a virtual bear gets bumped around your surrounding environment for WWF China’s Biodiversity Protection Programme (dead link). A bit gimmicky, but a very interesting experiment (much like augmented reality games and near-future social network games scenarios).

Developed by Bartle Bogle Hegarty China and Qdero.

Loved this post from Seth Godin on “pick anything” moments .

In that moment, “do nothing” was not an option.

Do nothing is the choice of people who are afraid. Do nothing is what you do if too many people have to agree. Do nothing is what happens if one person with no upside has to accept downside responsibility for a change. What’s in it for them to do anything? So they do nothing.

Leading on from the Gary V. post on doing great stuff and not being a simple “me too” social mediarati (and something I meant to blog a lot earlier), let’s face it, it’s not that it’s easy to do. A lot of organizations and companies are finding themselves in the position of building communities from scratch, or possibly harder, having to try and wrangle existing communities of users (some of them passionate, some of them aware but ambivalent, some of them pissed off) and engaging them. Tricky.

Great animation on the “we know that we don’t know” dangers of global warming. Really well done.

You can hear more about this campaign from Leo Murray on the site.

From Ethan Zuckerman’s My Heart’s in Accra blog from a talk he did at ETech :

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

It goes on to suggest that any sufficiently useful tool will be used by activists (and that that is an excellent gauge of how well your tool works for all you startup moguls out there). It’s also got some fantastic sorts of examples of people using tools in repressive regimes that I have to admit I wasn’t aware of (my favourite being Tunisia and airliners.net which is a site my father uses), so there are some great examples here if you want to see how activists are doing it for themselves when they don’t have a top 10 advertising (or now, “digital”) agency at their disposal.

Animation on the then versus now world of brand communications.

And what works. Which kinda of harkens back to the cluetrain manifesto idea that markets are conversations. And in fact, not just the traditional idea of a market, but any market; attention span, fundraising, information consumption has to have people with something interesting to say and to interact with. advertising and sloganeering is no longer enough.

I think this is pretty cool: Ads while you’re browsing are constantly becoming more and more intrusive and annoying.

The Add Art firefox plugin works in conjunction with AdBlock (also part of the download) to block the incoming ads and place a curated art exhibit in their place. The images are local so as not to slow down your browsing experience.

Love this. Anything to beautify the browsing landscape. Now if I could just somehow to do the same with billboards in the real world.