SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

Fans who attended Rock Werchter, the Belgian music festival that ended Sunday, were being tracked by Bluetooth scanners as they enjoyed the music of  Coldplay, Nine Inch Nails, Fleet Foxes, Metallica, Oasis and numerous other bands.

Researchers from the University of Ghent set up a network of 36 Bluetooth scanners at the festival site as well as on a few surrounding roads and bus stops that noted each of the 80,000 daily attendees as he or she came within 30 meters (approximately 100 feet).

The resulting data is the first time a large crowd has been tracked in a live situation, according to the researchers. They added that privacy wasn’t a concern since they only tracked MAC addresses (the unique identifier assigned by the manufacturer) and therefore cannot be linked to an individual user.

Some fans who attended the UK’s Download Festival last month encountered a different unexpected Bluetooth application. Local police and the Leicestershire Drug and Alcohol Action Team asked if they wanted to opt in to receive free informational animated messages. Among those that were sent out were friendly advisories on alcohol and drug use.

(Title lyric from the Dead Kennedys.)

Gerd Leonhard went public with Futerati, a Twitter-API-based site that brings together the eclectic assortment of people that inspire his thinking. Basically, Gerd has curated his extensive personal collection of tweeps into six categories: futurists, thought leaders authors, activists, startups, and others.

A brief comment explains why each person is included, and of course it offers their latest tweets and a link for clicking through to that person’s Twitter profile for more information and ease of following.

“One of the most important realizations that has recently transpired via my Twitter pipeline is how much I am gaining from the ever increasing Sharism i.e. by what others are sharing with me,” Gerd explains, adding that Futerati is a way of paying it forward.

(Title lyric from Jack Johnson.)

Application developers 9astronauts have created Billie Tweets, an art project they refer to as “a Twitter tribute to Michael Jackson.” Basically it plays the incomparable Billie Jean video, featuring Michael Jackson at the height of his powers, accompanied by a waterfall of random tweets that have each word of the lyrics highlighted in order, kinda like Twitter karaoke. The effect is oddly hypnotic.

(Title lyric from Pearl Jam.)

Some pundits, many of them traditional reporters, wrote about Michael Jackson’s death pitted new media against old media. Others said the reporters had a lot to learn from each other. But if they’re going to continue and be successful, I don’t think there should be any clear difference between them. Bloggers, Tweeters and their ilk need to work on improving their credibility. Those in print, radio and TV should improve their understanding of emerging media – not just its tools, but also its culture.

As for the mercifully few curmudgeons who are jumping on the bloggers who got it wrong, as though those errors prove we can’t trust digital media, I suggest they look up how many reputable newspapers reassured readers that all of the Titanic’s passengers were rescued.

(Title lyric from Beautiful South.)

It’s been 30 years since Sony Corp. introduced the Walkman to an amazed world. Somewhere deep in my closet of obsolete gizmos that I can’t bear to part with is a Sony Walkman that not only played stereo cassettes with auto-reverse, it also had an AM/FM tuner and – in what was cutting edge for the time (1986?) – received a few channels of TV audio.

I couldn’t find the exact model on Pocket Calculator’s Walkman Museum, but subsequently I was surprised to learn that newer ones are still available.

(Title lyric from Veruca Salt.)

One of the events honoring Michael Jackson provides a test for judging who “gets” Web 2.0. Basically, any entertainment executive who doesn’t understand why the Liverpool Street moonwalk flash mob was wonderful should hire someone who does.

Here’s what happened. The Prince of Pop died Thursday afternoon here in Los Angeles. The brilliant Rob Manuel, 8 hours ahead in London, woke up to the news and Twittered that a tribute flash mob would be fun. By 6 pm London time, Milo Yiannopoulos had  leveraged the power of social networking into having many hundreds of otherwise unaffiliated people gather to dance (or at least happily mill about – see picture) to Billie Jean at one of London’s busiest commuter rail stations.

(Title lyric by Michael Jackson. Image borrowed from here.)

Angel of Death, the web series by Eisner Award-winning writer/cartoonist Ed Brubaker, is morphing from 10 parts on Crackle.com into a 90-minute movie on Spike TV.

The White Rock Lake Production will air July 25 at midnight ET/PT. It stars Zoe Bell (pictured in character as Eve, the assassin of the title), Lucy Lawless, Doug Jones, Ted Raimi, Brian Poth, Justin Huen and Jake Abel. Paul Etheredge directed and John Norris produced.

It’s not the first time Spike TV has picked up a show from the Internet. In April it started running MoCap, LLC, the darkly humorous adventures of a low rent motion capture company trying to get a foothold in the world of video games. Worldwide Biggies produced six half-hour episodes exclusively for Spike TV.

(Title lyric is from Ozzy Osbourne.)

A piece in the Economist analyzes the media coverage of the protests in Iran is more nuanced than its headline indicates: Twitter 1, CNN 0.

It notes that when the violence flared on June 13, CNN was showing a repeat of Larry King interviewing the mechanics of Monster Garage.

Meanwhile, Twitter and YouTube were flooded with information and images as they provided an infrastructure for an international exchange.

The article goes on to discuss how the traditional media picked up, and how “desk-bound bloggers” like Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey/ of the New York Times brought a journalistic discipline to what had by then become a tsunami of frequently useless or redundant data.

President Obama warned Irani officials that, “The world is watching.” But that was only made possible because of what many people previously dismissed as toys and gadgets.

There are, of course, those who disagree with me.

(Photo is of Neda Soltani. Title lyric by Iggy Pop.)

Nine visions for the future of journalism have been recognized by the 2009 Knight News Challenge, an honor that comes with enough funding to make a practical difference without making anyone wealthy. I think it’s important to notice that these awards are for the future of journalism, not the future of newspapers.

• DocumentCloud, a project by the New York Times and the non-profit ProPublica, is creating an easily searchable, free, public online database of public records.
• Crowdsourcing Crisis Information from Ory Okolloh and Ushahidi is a growing platform designed to strengthen the reporting and understanding of breaking news events by creating a free web map and timeline that combines and plots reports from citizens and journalists using email, texting and other communication technologies.
• Mobile Media Toolkit from Katrin Verclas and MobileActive is expanding their work supporting the use of mobile devices and applications to create and broadcast local news reports.
• MediaBugs by Scott Rosenberg is creating a wiki-style “neutral environment” for reporting, tracking and helping to resolve errors in news coverage.
• Councilpedia from Gail Robinson and the Citizens Union Foundation of the City of New York’s Gotham Gazette wants to make local legislators’ voting records and campaign contributions available to the public – again, wiki-style.
• Data Visualization from Aaron Presnall of the Jefferson Institute is creating a suite of online tools to help people understand the meaning and implications of community news and information.
• The Daily Phoenix from Aleksandra Chojnacka and Adam Klawonn is helping people using the Arizona city’s new light rail system to inform themselves about Phoenix through news, games and social networking.
• Virtual Street Corners is a digital media public art project that uses life-size screen images and AV technology to enable real-time chat between residents of two neighborhoods, providing a window and spurring discussion into others’ lives.
• CMS Upload Utility from Joe Boydston and the McNaughton Newspaper Co. is creating a quick way to convert and load multiple newspaper files to a web site.

(Title lyric by David Johansen

The latest Electronic Frontier Foundation newsletter reports that YouTube no longer logs account cookies for videos viewed on the official White House website.

EFF and the Center for Democracy and Technology worked with YouTube on the initiative. They were prompted by concerns about privacy, especially since YouTube accounts are linked with Gmail, Calendar, and all of the other nifty things Google can do. The organizations now want the government to adopt a similar no-tracking policy across all of its websites – including places like the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

(Title lyric from the Beastie Boys.)