That was what was in my inbox this morning when I opened my Gmail. Who’s Déirdre de Búrca? Well, I had the same thought myself. If you’ve ever used twitter to any great extent, you’ll know a lot of the time people just follow you for spamming reasons, so you’re best to check their profile before following back. Which I did. Turns out Déirdre is a politician standing for the Green Party in the upcoming European elections on June 5th. It also transpires she’s been tweeting since January and does it quite regularly. She has a YouTube channel which she uses as a platform to espouse her policies, and she does not appear to censor negative comments either. Oh, and Déirdre is on Facebook too, not to mention Flickr. She also has a website called ‘What I Stand For’, which she claims is used to encourage a two debate between her and the electorate in an attempt to bring back grass roots democracy.

Hey, you know what? I think I like Déirdre. She gets it. She seems to know how to engage with people in the modern era. And despite the enormous FF drag factor that the Greens must be experiencing at the moment, I think I believe her. It’s rare for a politician to capture my attention for too long, as I’m usually too busy giving out about them. But Déirdre managed it. What does that tell you?

Anyway, times must be pretty hard over there in Microsoft as they have just launched a campaign to encourage people to download and start using Silvernight with their browsers. So how do you encourage people to install a piece of software that pretty much no one uses and can only really do something that another piece of software already does very well? Sex… apparently. Through a partnership between Microsoft and Bondi Digital Publishing, Playboy Enterprises has put 53 back issues of Playboy on the Web, viewable through Microsoft’s Silverlight viewer.

OK, call me crazy here, but I’m guessing that they’re going for the computer-savvy, teenage boy market here (with apparently no age verification required on the site), hoping that it’ll tumble up through the rest of the online community.

The early signs thus far (and it is only a couple of days since this was launched) is that this is failing. It would seem people object at being told what technology to use, particularly when it’s merely an ineffective clone of an existing product.

The funny thing is that in last 48 hours I have read multiple blog posts about this campaign, and it’s amazing how often the same phrase keeps popping up, especially in the posts’ titles. I suppose it grabs your attention, and I’m a half guilty of doing it here. The phrase is ‘Sex Sells’, and it’s one of those tired old clichés that always gets banged around in advertising circles. It reminded me of the scene below from Mad Men. If you are not watching this program, you’re really missing out on something amazing. It is without doubt the best looking and best written thing on television right now. Anyway, here’s Don’s take on the aforementioned expression when working on a campaign for an airline. It’ll make ya feel good about working in advertising, just on the off chance you don’t already. Put that in your book…

Bless.

Well, they effectively dumped their website. Commercial suicide in an environment where we are constantly being told that digital media is more important than ever? OK, they didn’t quite dump it. The URL still exists, but it does something quite unusual now. This little widget now appears in the top left hand corner of your browser…

When this first appeared on Wednesday it was floating above a twitter feed that was filtering all tweets with the word ‘Skittles’ in them. You can now view this feed under the CHATTER tab, but it’s no longer the landing page. Yesterday the landing page was a Facebook fan site, now viewable under the FRIENDS tab (almost 600,000 fans and counting). Today the opening page is the Wikipedia definition of skittles. And if you hit the PRODUCTS tab? More Wikipedia definitions. The MEDIA tab? Well, if you pick video, straight to the YouTube channel, and pictures goes straight to a Flickr account. You’re getting the picture by now. In fact, in so far as I can tell, the only remnant of the previous website lies in the CONTACT tab, which still produces a little original HTML page.

When this first launched it was met with a little resistance in the twitter community. There was a rash of pornographic links and abusive messages tweeted with the ‘#skittles’ hashtag (and thus showing up in their chatter feed). Perhaps that’s why it was quickly changed to the Facebook fan site for the landing page. I’m sure something similar would have been behind the motivation for making the Wikipedia definition as the now new landing page. Then again, one could say that it was a predictable response from twitter, and one that got them plenty of media attention. That certainly seems to be the view of Brand Republic.

There’s some important things to take away from all this.

• Skittles effectively have no specific home page, instead relying on existing and popular social media sites to represent their image on the internet
• They have chosen not to censor any user generated comment or remark about their products, taking the good with the bad
• In the words of Nick McGivney (my favorite blogger on all such matters) ‘They’ve put themselves in a very interesting place: totally visible at the centre of a very public web of communications’

I suppose only time will tell if this pays off, but I think it’s a really ballsy move. A quick look at the chatter reveals that the abuse has subsided and has been replaced with something I’m sure the people at Masterfoods are a lot happier to see, mainly admiration for what they have done.

Actually, I’ve made up my mind. This is the best idea ever. Unless of course it doesn’t work, in which case, I told you so. Meh… let’s see what happens.

Right, I’ll try and explain a bit better. I have a problem, as do most people I know these days, with organised religion for reasons that are far too wide, varied and numerous to go in to here. Fill in the gaps yourself. Chances are of you’re reading this or anywhere near this website that you feel pretty much the same. I have never read The God Delusion, but that’s not really that unusual. I haven’t read much really. But I did come to the conclusion that it’s not just religion I don’t believe in, it’s also the idea of a God. My grandmother lay on her death bed with an absolute unshakeable certainty that there was nothing whatsoever waiting for her. I was blown away by that. To have such a total belief in there being nothing, to be facing it right there and then, and to know, not to waver from a belief in a total lack of belief. Pretty fucking brave. Pretty amazingly brave.

Why I want that, I can’t really say. I expect that I don’t want to be judged. I’ve never liked being told what to do, always thought I knew better, and I think the impulse to be good in your life should not be on the basis that you’re going to get your just deserts in the end. Heaven, hell, karma, whatever you want to call it. I believe (there’s that word again) that it’s inherent in human nature to be good. People’s circumstances sometimes make the sway from that course, but all things being equal, sound of mind and circumstances, people are good.

So what makes that happen? I’ve had hard times in the last few years. Not really hard, just hard times like normal people have. The temptation to ask God for help is always something I’ve had to suppress at those times. One can’t pursue atheism and then ask for help when the chips are a little down. But it’s hard to shake the habit that was taught to you from an age when you were too young to know any better. I think the mistake that I made was that I also associated spirituality as the same thing. I’m not so sure it is now. It’s possible to believe in humanity, in spirituality and in yourself without having to tie that in to a belief in a God. Isn’t it?

Anyway, I note I’m still writing the word God with a capital G. But I’m trying.

I think only myself and Cormac ever used it, being the only two people under the age of thirty in a clear two mile radius. It could only display text, and in a single unchangeable font and a single unchangeable green. I had a friend that was traveling in Australia at the time and we used to correspond semi-regulalrly on it. He once attached a photograph, which was sufficient to cause the whole system to come crashing down around our ears. We had to call an engineer to fix it. And I mean a proper engineer, with a blue boiler suit and a set of orange screwdrivers that swept in a neat row across his breast pocket. As he passed and disappeared into a room somewhere at the back of the factory, he cast a disapproving eye in my direction over the top of his bottle-bottom glasses. That, to me, was the internet. I used to think “Well, it’s all very nice for keeping in touch with Colm, but it’ll never take off”.

I have to give a presentation to management next week on an internet related subject, and as a consequence I’ve been sort of forced into thinking about what the internet is to me now. So where do you start? Available to me now is a satellite image of more or less the entire surface of the planet. I can zoom in and see my own house. I can look at a 360 degree photographic view from a good proportion of the earth. There’s a 3D rendering that makes it possible for me to fly through the Grand Canyon or walk down the Las Vegas strip. This is all over-layed by every motor-way, road, street and lane name and number. I have at my fingertips a encyclopedia more detailed and vast than the very best leather bound edition of Britannica ever, and it changes and updates constantly. That same friend is back in Australia now, and he can turn on his computer and time and see me sitting at my desk and chat as if he were beside me. He only has to think to do it and he can. I’m constantly updated on what my friends and family do and where they are doing it. I can get any song I can think of, that’s ever been recorded and achieved some modicum of popularity, and have to keep forever in a matter of seconds. Films. News. Books. Opinions. Videos. Education. Politics. Communication.

Stephen Fry is one of the best human beings alive for reasons too obvious to go into. He’s one of those people that if you could have any four people to dinner… He’s a keen user of technology, has an amazing blog and fantastic podcasts. He’s also a dedicated and regular user of Twitter, and I follow his tweets. If I were to go into my local coffee shop this morning and see him there, I imagine the conversation would go something like this; ‘Oh, hi Stephen. How are you? Fine thanks, all fine. So just back from Madagascar then? Saw the video of the baby chimps. Very cute. And the photos of the spiders. Arrrgh! How did the speech go at the V&A last night? Good, good. Well, they would, wouldn’t they?! So you’re out to dinner with your producer tonight, right? At The Ivy? Excellent. Well do enjoy. Must dash. Up to my eyes at the minute. Toodles!.’ Because of the internet, I think I’m mates with Stephen Fry. Ridiculous.

If someone had told me all this as I sat there having my head x-rayed some twelve odd years ago, I would have laughed in their face. The internet is unbelieveable, incredible and amazing. And yet we find in believeable, credible and are continually not amazed by it. The phenomenal is normal.

Why is that?

ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

Reason? Mostly boredom, but there is a relatively good case for doing so, as put forward in this 2 year old post from Marshall Kirkpatrick. Never type ‘Why use feedburner?’ into Google. Suddenly you care. I doubt I even have a single subscriber. Thankfully.

It’s an amazing sight to witness, as is the rest of the small part of the country we got to see. I can’t recommend it enough. Some more shots on my Flickr.