Enjoy a hilarious improvised 48 minute “talk” by Conan yesterday at Google HQ.
Aside from the biting comedy, the clip includes a brilliant explanation about how, when precluded by his contract from performing, he turned to the Internet — Twitter, actually — and went viral.
Check out this important article in Wired. While Google still offers a variety of privacy settings, this effort to use a person’s search history to target ads is more than a little worrisome.
Get a load of this:
At various places on Media and Mayhem, I mention the names of singers and actors and other celebrities. And among the thousands of other words also used, “p–n” can be found in one place on my blog.
Well within the last several months, a virulently viral rumor has circulated on the Internet that an amateur p–n film of one of these celebrities can be found.
The result is that hundreds of people put the name of the celebrity and the word “p–n” into a google search and get to my blog.
I am sure they are sorely disappointed. You see, I use the word “p–n” to refer to those trashy MSNBC pseudo-documentaries of prison life where the main attractions are nice, bloody beatings.
Yup, undeserved and unwanted hits. And the lesson is that the number of hits a blog or a site gets can be a very deceptive figure.
Google Latitude has me thinking about Hasan.
Hasan Elahi’s remarkable ongoing project “Tracking Transience” takes surveillance to extremes you never imagined possible. Faced with government harrassment, Hasan chose to resist with an amazing public digital art project in which anyone, at any time, can learn almost anything about his comings and goings.
I’m sure some people see Hasan’s work and, using everyone’s current favorite acronym, think it is “T.M.I.”
I think it is brilliant.
By the way, in the spirit of Hasan Elahi and Google Latitude and the whole era of excruciatingly transparent transparency, here is where I am right this second. Whoopdedoo!
P.S. I really do like the concept of transparency. Unfortunately I am still uncomfortable with it as a way to actually live! So pretty soon I’ll share why I finally got too uncomfortable with Facebook and signed off.
This new Google tool raises more technical, moral, ethical, and social questions than I can even begin to answer.
For now, just check it out.
MEDIA AND MAYHEM 