NetDynam 2.0

(Pwn (below: Various pronunciations) is a leetspeak slang term derived from the verb “own”, as meaning to appropriate or to conquer to gain ownership. The term implies domination or humiliation of a rival, used primarily in the Internet-based video game culture to taunt an opponent who has just been soundly defeated (e.g., “You just got pwned!”). It was popular among Counter-Strike gamers before spreading through the more general Internet world. The past tense and past participle, pwned, may also be spelled pwnd, pwn’d, pwn3d, pwnt, poned, pawned, or powned. Source: Wikipedia )

Enterprising parodists on May 19 created a Twitter account and feed to mock BP, BPGlobalPR.

Chris Matyszczyk reports (5/26) from CNET,

CNN did contact BP and asked the company whether it might feel its image was being polluted by this rogue global PR force. BP reportedly said it had seen it, but was sure that people would realize it’s not really the company’s work.

Perhaps this underestimates people’s notions of what is and isn’t possible in today’s often ugly, cynical world.

Still, I know there will be sticklers among you who will attempt to invoke Twitter’s fake pages policy. It reads that impersonators “should not be the exact name of the subject of the parody, commentary, or fandom; to make it clearer, you should distinguish the account with a qualifier such as ‘not,’ ‘fake’ or ‘fan.’”

It’s unlikely Twitter will get too picky about this, given that it gets some nice PR (happy to help, as always, chaps) out of it all, and given that BP seems unlikely to complain. BP has made its first wise PR move in allowing this site to gush black humor while the nation’s beaches are threatened by a far more painful darkness.

90,000+ followers, and counting.

Sometime in the next few days, BPGlobalPR’s following will surpass in number BP’s number of employees worldwide.

BP America’s Twitter following? 8,000 or so.

Although the official feed doesn’t offer any black humor, it’s funny in a different way.

political cum parody half hour weekly on the national broadcaster has occasionlly left me with nothing to say, i mean left me thinking. beyond their pieces. sometimes i was not sure whether we were viewing something serious or another parody. this week is the last show for the season, who knows, maybe they’ll not return. a pity.
the blog site has links to all their shows i believe and excerpts of stories they’ve run. the usual invitations to comment, and requests for tips and videos to be sent in – some of which are aired on the tv program, and then archived on the site.
last week they reported on the breaking story of one of the recent wikileaks leaks, and the blog features related stories, including a telephone interview (and transcript) with the founder and mystery man, julian assange. together with suelette dreyfus, they wrote “underground” – originally published in 2003 now available from project gutenberg – about the hacker community in australia in the 80s and 90s. some say the main character in the book is a thinly disguised julian assange, since dates and places seem to match.
as for wikileaks itself, we find out there various forms of information that big corporations and the military do not want to have on public display. and indeed we can see that even cryptome.org (and the inimitable john young… or well, maybe he does have his imitators) has met its match in microsoft in the last couple of months when the site was shaken down after cryptome dared to publish microsoft’s (and others such as paypal and ebay) offer to sell you information on whoever you might want to find out about…. wikileaks calls it ‘spying’, but i spose microsoft might consider this information would be available only to the most revered of institutions and for the best of reasons.
all in all, i’m a big fan of the low-budget, down home reporting style of hungry beast. i was about to embed a video of one of my fave skits, but back on the site i read this response to a comment:

Hi Nick, Due to our licensing agreement with the ABC, all HUNGRY BEAST video content on the website is Geo-Blocked. This means videos can only be viewed within Australia. Cheers, HB

however, you may be able to see it on youtube… although lately there’s been some funny buggers over there too… if anyone is watching ‘over there’ let me know if you’re able to see the vid below… mind you, there are a few intertextual references to australian identities which might make some of the jokes hard to fathom.

Having read resources offered by Frank, I’d like to elevate one. Clay Shirkey: Gin, Television and Social Surplus. April 23, 2008.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

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And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

Questions about how people use time, these days, may be framed (and analyzed,) within the rubric of behavioral economics. (I can’t do this myself, like Mr. Shirkey, I’m only able to offer phenomenological intuitions.) Still, I bring the frame of ‘time investment’ up because I suppose a finely differentiated analysis of how people actually deploy their time, with various internet utilities comprising part of the picture, would enrich intuitions.

For example, as I’ve mentioned before, a music fan can acquire more music (mp3s) than this fan can expect to deal with in the old sense of ‘dealing.’ This is true for other resources, such as ebooks, articles, movies, software; is true for any ‘object of potential interest’ discovered in the web, (or candy shop,) of intended and unintended distribution.

Time deployment exists in various contexts. These contexts can be described too. (I’m fairly sure Shirkey’s idealization doesn’t wash, were it to be suffer the details.) I wonder if cognitive surplus is accompanied in specific cases with its own surplus-derived stress?

What would constitute a robust conceptual ecology with respect to the factors of time investment and anticipation of benefit? Each of these is a very broad brush. For example how would time spent commenting on blog posts be accounted for were some benefit to figure into the account?

Another feature–these days–I term, truncation. Twitter exemplifies this, yet, also there are the short form messages tacked to Facebook walls, terse emails, blog and forum comments, abbreviated annotations of various sorts, and, of course, text messages.

I reckon truncation is not the result of having too much time.

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