A simple, ironic and funny animation, accompanied by a catchy song, that shows us absurd situations in which we would never like to face. Nobody would ever jump on a pool full of sharks or cross blindfold a motorway. Those are just two of the crazy  situations featured in the video, which demonstrates how many some decisions or actions can be stupid and silly.

The message is plain and simple: there are some actions much more stupid than these, whose consequences are a lot more serious and concerning. ICAN declares that there are 19,000 nuclear weapons around the world; it only takes one to cause a humanitarian catastrophe in a few seconds. Really stupid, don’t you agree?

Today more than 200 organizations in 50 countries are part of ICAN and its campaigns. The aim is to make aware and sensitize the world population and incite governments to negotiate a treaty banning the production, testing, use and possession of nuclear weapons, and establish a timeframe for their elimination.

Thousands of people have already taken an active part into this kind of campaigns, but there’s still a lot of work to do. If you want to share your opinion or to sign the petition, you can click on the website www.goodbyenuk.es, or follow the related events and conferences directly from the Social Networks: Facebook and Twitter @nuclearban, #goodbyenukes.

SIGN THE PETITION!!!!  

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The Italian Ruby Day is at Milano Bicocca on June 15. You can meet most of Mikamai people there and listen to Elia’s presentation as well.

By the way, follow the Mikamai developers’ blog too!

See you at the Ruby Day!

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The flooding, mudslides and devastation were all broadcast on television in Italy and throughout the World (I even got calls from friends abroad asking how they can donate to help Le Cinque Terre) while in Genova they were without power and without telephone land lines.  So what did they do in Genova?  They tweeted!

This was one of the most repeated phrases this week in Genova:

Aprite le wifi, salite nei piani alti nelle zone pericolose, usate solo il tag #allertameteoLG solo per servizio
Open up your wifi, go to the top floors and use the hashtag #allertamenteoLG only for service

Genova is already a digital city and has a project called FreeWiFiGenova where the city offers free hotspots in Genova and also along the coast but it is a sign of the times that one of the most useful things that anyone could do was to let people connect to the internet in an emergency.

And another sign of change and consideration for others is that another repeated shout out was the call for people to repeat the tweets in any languages they knew so that foreigners could also follow the emergency announcements.

Facebook could do no less. The most organized and largest group is Angeli col fango sulle magliette. They are a group of young Genovese who opened their page on November 4th and today have over 20,000 followers. They opened with the mission to take back their city through an organized manner providing the correct information to volunteer and provide help where needed.  They then did what their group says… they went and got their shirts dirty. This page has by far the most updated, credible and complete information of any I have seen about Genova. Good job guys!

Social Media has a very important place in Emergency situations. Italy and its governing bodies are definitely behind but we will soon see cities, regions and countries organizing their efforts to use Social Media to inform and protect the general public. Not just Grassroot groups like the Angels with mud on their shirts rising up and taking charge.

Just for your information here are some other situations where most of the information and organization was lead solely by social media use: Queensland Flooding, Japan Earthquake & Tsunami, instability in Egypt, Libya and other parts of the Middle East, New Zealand’s Earthquake, Joplin Tornadoes and Hurricane Irene.

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Banksy is the man whose face has never been seen, the man who, in few hours, installs, sticks and “stains” the walls protesting, against war, against political events, against all unjust that happen nowadays.

In the ‘90s graffiti changed their shape and they started to be painted with installations, stickers, stencils, posters. It was the beginning of a new mass movement called Street Art.

The new writers invaded every street and the new art spread very quickly to every part of the western world, USA, Germany, UK, Brazil, Argentina, Australia and also in Italy, France, Bulgaria and Norway, becoming the most important mass movement in the world besides punk.

Banksy‘s real name is Robert or Robin Banks, he was born in Bristol in 1974 or 1975 and he is one of the greatest exponents of Urban Art.

Expelled from school and taken to prison many times for little crimes and at the age of fourteen he started to cut stencils because just using spray was too slow, he said. He could make a graffito in half the time by using stencils and also halve the risk to be surprised and caught by the police.

He has early become an official member of the Bristol Underground Scene and made his work also in London where he found immediately many fans and followers.

In 2001, he published his first book “Banksy, Pictures of Walls” and in 2003 he painted a graffito on a wall of a private property for the single’s cover “Crazy Beat” included in the album Think Tank of Blur, the popular English band. This work had been removed by mistake very quickly and the owner of the wall, said, he had literally cried seeing the repainted wall.

In April 2007, it was time for his tribute to Quentin Tarantino: he painted a comic featuring Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns but professional cleaners of Transport of London repainted the wall deleting the iconic image.

The Transport of London claimed about the fact that the graffito created “a general atmosphere of neglect and social decay which in turn encourages crime” and their staff are “professional cleaners not professional art critics“.

Every year the Government spends at least 23 million pounds to remove graffiti from walls and in the last months it has started to take steps against writers and their illegal works. An example, in this sense, is the case of a young man arrested in March this year and was sentenced to clean walls from graffiti twice a week.

In spite of the fact that the law is still against Urban Art, many of Banksy’s works are protected by glass to guarantee their preservation.

Banksy has been such a popular icon artist since 2006 that many stars from Hollywood and the music industry, such as Christina Anguilera and Angelina Jolie, pay millions of dollars for his original works. In 2008, he went to Louisiana, for the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, where he produced nine figures on destroyed houses’ walls.

2010 is the date of his film “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, directed by himself and produced in Los Angeles: a masterpiece of modern cinematography that shows the hidden real story of Urban Art and about Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in the USA mad about graffiti.

His popularity is now on top. For many years in Camden Town and all around London, many shops have been selling T-shirts, posters, coffee cups, books and other gadgets printed with his most famous graffiti works in the world.

Obviously he is also on the web: 14,600,000 are the results on Google UK looking for his nickname, dozens of pages on Facebook, on Twitter @banksynews, tweets news about him, besides the numerous unofficial and fans’ accounts.

The trailer of his film on the Youtube official channel, posted in April 2010, has passed the 1.907.560 views’ line, his website is linked by more than 3000 other websites and it has increased its ranking for 23.136 positions only in the last week. (Source Alexa).

But popularity is a big deal, especially if it is unexpected and it gets to a street man, not a business man. Every media wants to know everything about him, interviewing his wife, friends and relatives: on the web it is possible to find some photos about him totally unmasked but no one of those has been confirmed. The masked man is still without real identity.

Whether Urban Art is considered Art or not, Banksy has surely helped to think of graffiti not only as vandalism and he has given to many cities, amazing painted gift asking for nothing back.

Paola Borrescio

Fonti:
Artlyst.com
Wikipedia
Chichester.gov.uk
Thensmc.com
Canvastown.com

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There was a prince, a simple girl, a carriage, horses, a lot of excited people, there was a promise to become the ruler of a great Country, a white and long wedding dress, the bridesmaids, a big church, flowers everywhere, paparazzi, and the live event on the BBC channel but, as all big events in theDigital Era, there was streaming on youtube, twitter and above all there was Facebook with uncounted dedicated pages and the classic funny fake accounts with the following denial.

Why the Royal Wedding was the Event of this Century? It was not the first Royal Wedding in history but for sure it was the first with a strategic marketing plan that has continuously sold theproduct “Betrothed” before and “they lived happily ever after” even after, even now.

The Royal Wedding was told and made up to be a folk tale, the same one our parents used to tell us when we were children, the austrian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim says, “to reassure us from ourfears, as not to be loved and considered”: the end “they lived happily ever after” is inspired by childrenʼ fears that are still present in adults as well. Bettelheim also has said that weddings in folktales is a symbol of a reign conquest that it means in other words have the obligation to rule: live wisely.

In a bad financial moment, in a monarchical Country that cuts investments and increases taxes, where there are a lot of strikes and studentsʼ manifestations against the Universityʼs costs every month, the royal Wedding looks like a relaxation pill, made sweeter by having one more day offadded to the national bank holidays.

Free non-stop all night street parties in every corner of London, million of tourists, live on tv and the web gone mad: it was an international event that used all the possible opportunities available in the communications market, as offline as online.

Numerous Facebookʼs pages about the event, used to draw “like”ʼs and eventually talk to the fans to other subjects at the end of the Royal Weddingʼs day.
Updated news from official twitter accounts like CNNʼs, created just for this purpose, with 32.596followers in a short time. The BBCʼs youtube channel has gone over 2.930.000 views with the frame “kiss from the balcony”.

How much did The Royal Wedding cost? There is no official news about the real costs of that Wedding from the Monarchy but It seems thatmost of the costs are not a “state question”. Security costs were about 7-20 million pounds (paid forby the state), 30 thousand pounds for Kate’s wedding dress, 20 thousand pound for her sister’sdress, 80 thousand pound for music, invitations, flowers and wedding cake. Kate’s parents have helped with a “little free private contribution”.
 
Waves of tourist came to London before, during and after the wedding and bought any kind ofgadgets with “the happy couple” on them like coffee cups, flags and pictures. The estimates arearound 800 million pounds (some say 1 billion pounds) will enter in the Nation’s coffers, besides allthe products the GDO made just for that. ASDA, for example, made a mixed packaging of steaks,wines and snacks for the street parties and jewels, hairpins and copies of the royal engagement ringfor teen-agers.
 
At the end Fake on Facebook it was.
Finished the euphoria of the event and after all the parties, in the days following the classic fakes on Facebook came up as a web phenomenon.The funniest was a confrontation between the real royal dresses and the ones in the Walt Disney’s “Cinderella” and surprise, they were the same! The fake was early revealed: the original colours of the frame were retouched for the occasion. ThePrince’s jacket was cream for real, the trousers red, the bride was blonde and the bridegroom had dark hair. Similar story for the bridesmaids’ dresses in the cartoon, they were retouched after the realRoyal Wedding.

Who knows how long Walt Disney can keep this business opportunity going?
 
Paola Borrescio

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Here’s what I did to sum up a few basic ideas about what we do day by day.

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This is the event report from Newspepper:

And here’s the chairman Todd Chaffee speaking:

Some more videos of the speakers:

Iskandar Najmuddin
Hermione Way
Cathy Ma
Dave Nattriss
Jack Riley
Tom McDonnell

You can get more news and updates on the Developer Garage website. See you in London!

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Picture by Nicola De Rosa for Yallee.it

Let’s talk about Facebook again. In 2009 Mikamai set up the first Facebook Developer Garage in Italy. In late 2010 we are proud to announce that Todd Chaffee is chairman of Facebook Developer Garage London.

These meetings are made to share knowledge and expertise about Facebook-related services, strategies and apps. And to engage the community of developers!

Todd also runs Mikamai UK. We wish him good luck with this new challenge ;)

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Two days ago was the last day of the RubyConf 2010 in New Orleans and we have been lucky enough to spend our last dinner in Lousiana with Matz and some other japanese rubyists.

Like a modern and peaceful version of the Axis powers, it was the two of us (@onigiri and @gravityblast), @yukihiro_matz, @kakutani, @ffu_, @a_matsuda (from Japan) and @bovensiepen (from Germany).

It was a great evening, where, while we were eating oysters and alligator meat, we tried to get more insider information from Matz about what he said during his keynote, but his definitive answer was “Chrismas”, not specifying which year…

We were in fact pretty excited about the latest news since for the final keynote of the convention Matz gave a recap of the last 10 years and a very interesting talk about the future 2.0 version of the Ruby language and also announcing its lite version for embedded systems called Rite.

Overall was a really nice evening and the best way to conclude the 10th edition of the Rubyconf. Stay tuned for more informations on what happened during these three days, we will write more.

Andrea Franz and Emanuel Carnevale

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