Slashdot Mirror
Graffiti Bridges Worlds for Cell User
babokd wrote with a follow up to a piece we ran about the phenomenon of Grafedia, graffiti with links to the internet. The idea has caught on, and 'a communion of the real world with the Internet' may become more and more common. From the article: "It's all around you -- and not just in the phone lines and cables running under the streets or in the airborne Wi-Fi streams....If you send a text message to an e-mail address scrawled in paint on a subway advertisement or on a sidewalk, for example, you could get some digital pop art on your phone in return. An adhesive arrow on a telephone pole could hold the key to the history of a nearby building."
Not that anyone ever saw real examples of it.
"For a Good Time, text 443544"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
$> look building
You see an email address scrawled on the bricks.
$>grafitti email address
You get some nice pop art in return.
$>look light pole
You see an adhesive arrow.
$>look adhesive arrow.
You find the key to neaby building!
$>use key on door
You unlock the door.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Smells like someone is trying to bring back viral marketing again. It was a stupid idea the first time.
Clickable Graffiti, or Not
When we first heard of Grafedia, we thought it was an amazing new technology: take a photo of a word with your camera phone and it turns into a clickable link. The truth is more mundane, although you wouldn't guess that from the hype. The word does indicate an e-mail account - e.g. word@grafedia.net - but the picture-taking is superfluous. All Grafedia really is is a mailserver whose e-mail accounts return files to anyone who e-mails. The "twist" is that the person who creates the account has to upload a file and then tattoo, spraypaint, or engrave the word out in the wild. It's more like an invitation to urban blight than an honest-to-goodness new medium. John Geraci, who dreamed this up, sees it as an extension of the Internet. He and at least one Grafedia fan Wired interviewed claim that they don't advocate vandalism. Meanwhile, we wait for software that can read words from photos and turn them into links.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
how's this any different
than scrawling a phone number
on a bathroom stall?
In other news, Microsoft applies for a patent on graffiti.
Am I the only one feeling that only a minute amount of graffiti fits into the first category?
The campaign to counter all those idiot vandal grafitti advertisers should be titled:
"Say it. Don't spray it."
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
but I don't want to text "goatse" and get any "pop art" while walking around downtown.
Graffiti is not art, it is vandalism. Anything that encourages it should be outlawed.
I know that their are possible legitimate uses, but vandalism centric services really should not exist.
Eye-spam is just as bad as other spam.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
5. Advertising.
Pay for a crappy service that invites people to vandalism and will probably only be used by corporate 'underground' marketing? No thanks.
Makes me wonder how some things get accepted to slashdot. Then I thought about it and it became crystal clear. If you want a story accepted onto slashdot, you have to buy hookers for the editors.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
C'mon, this is soooo last generation. I propose some new forms of "interactive art":
- Murderesqueism
- - murder victims left in public places with hyperlinks or other obscure clues left on the body.
- Popup Exhibitionism
- - beautiful women with URLS and other monikers tatooed over their abdomen, chest, and derriere, exposed at random times, with no provocation, to strangers.
- Licensism
- - the replacement of random car license plates with cleverly crafted URLS or AOL screen names.
Or, instead of trying to legitimatize vandalism, we can simply use RFID sticks for everything. IMHO, that would be cooler, because you'd have no idea of a sticker contained embedded data until you tried to scan it.This is not a followup and it hasn't caught on.
This is a textbook example of the kind of marketing I read about in an earlier article. I can't find it now, but the example used was the phrase "suits are in".
The idea is, you feed this kind of information to dozens of different news sources' fashion, entertainment, life, news departments. Three to five of them will run stories which will read basically the same:
Catchy lede paragraph
Information about the product
Quotes from the manufacturer
Quotes from an industry group
Anecdotes from users
Catchy summation
This is standard marketing practice and not much more. Once you know the format, you can spot many of these articles. However, I can't find the original source on the "suits are in" marketing expose - does anyone have it?
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
You have been eaten by a grue.
Texting to an autoresponder - yeah, cool. Would you like spam with that?
...for example, you could get some digital pop art on your phone in return.
We used to call it viruses, spam, spyware, and adware. Digital Pop Art sounds much friendlier.
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.