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Book to Become MySpace Mashup
The Internet enables some very interesting collaborations. The latest involves MySpace and Brazilian author Paulo Coelho. He plans to make a movie out of his book The Witch of Portobello, with a huge difference: the creators will be groups of amateurs, and the pieces will come together in a large mash-up.
Here's how it will work: MySpace users will be able to submit videos focusing on one of the book's characters to either MySpaceTV or the author's MySpace page. As many as 15 videos will be chosen to go into the mash-up, to be dubbed The Experimental Witch. And since every good film has a soundtrack, users will be able to submit songs as well.
The project might even receive wider distribution; Coelho mentioned that his agent has been approached by a number of people interested in buying the completed mash-up. You'd better hurry if you want to be involved; the project will accept submissions between June 16 and July 25. Winners will be announced August 24, and each one will receive 3,000 euros ($4,638).
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Webby Awards: An Overview
Tuesday saw the twelfth annual Webby Awards. The glitzy ceremony, held in New York, celebrated all things Internet and poked gentle fun at awards programs. The event went on for hours, despite the fact that acceptance speeches were strictly limited to five words. And it's no wonder it dragged on; awards were given in 70 categories, and each category boasted two winners, one chosen by the judges and one chosen by the People's Voice.
Of course, the one advantage to such short speeches is that they could be quoted in their entirety the next day, something unlikely to happen with awards given in other media. No one was surprised, for example, when Stephen Colbert, upon receiving the Person of the Year award, shouted Me, me, me, me, me! as his acceptance speech. And ad agency Tribal DDB, winner in one of the Interactive Advertising categories, made good use of its five words: We're hiring, send us resumes.
When the American Bar Association's ABA Journal won a Webby in the Law category, they showed a twisted sense of humor we think in their acceptance speech: "Had we lost, we'd sue." Social networking site Flock, meanwhile, used its five words to relish the fact that it beat Facebook. Overall, there was a lot of humor, and few surprises. One big surprise was the revelation by the creator of the wildly popular I Can Has Cheezburger web site that wait for it he's allergic to cats. Which is just the kind of twist you'd expect from the Internet. Here's a good luck wish to everyone for next year!
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Now That's Some Science Project!
Standards must be pretty high for the Canada-wide Science Fair. Just look at the winner of this year's fair, Daniel Burd. He received his award for efforts in biology and ecology. He discovered bacteria that can eat plastic bags, dealing with the growing pollution problem efficiently. Instead of taking up to 1000 years to decompose, Burd figures that bags being munched on by his bacteria will decompose in only three months.
Burd approached the problem in the best scientific fashion. He figured that if the bugs he was looking for existed, he should be able to isolate them. So he looked for them in what would be a nutrient-rich environment: his local landfill. For the next three months, he cultured soil samples from the site on a diet consisting exclusively of plastic bags.
After that, he introduced the cultured broth to some plastic food, and introduced a control sample to the same type of food, making sure both food supplies weighed the same at the start. After six weeks, the food with the cultured broth weighed 17 percent less than the control sample and food. From that, it was a small step to isolating the bacteria in the cultured broth (there were four different kinds) and testing them. He found two and identified two that proved to be particularly efficient at the task of eating plastic. By experimenting and controlling for temperature, population density, and concentration of added sodium acetate, he was able to achieve an amazing 42 percent digestion of plastic in six weeks.
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