I heard it on the grapevine....the Brits are coming

Today I'm going to combine two events, both worthy of congratulation, into one posting.

The first is to wish the revolutionary record label Motown a happy 50th birthday. It was half a century ago today that its founder, Berry Gordy, using an $800 loan from his family, launched the company that would bring black music to the masses in both America and the world. In an age of global communication and branding, it's easy to forget the racial segregation that split the USA up to and beyond the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Motown broke through the divide and found an audience, becoming in the process one of the great examples of how the media, when used effectively, can be a force for positive social change.

There's a BBC report here and you can visit the Classic  Motown website here. The site offers a great and free podcast subscription, enabling you to listen to the greats of Motown talking about their experiences, and playing some of their best known tracks. Find it here.

Motown launched the careers of Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, and Michael Jackson, amongst others. So congratulations and birthday greetings.

At the other end of the scale, yesterday saw a victorious night for the Brits at the American Golden Globes award ceremony. Kate Winslet suffered an overwhelming case of emotional overload, stuttering and blubbering her way through her acceptance speech. No matter, for her two wins - Best Supporting Actress in The Reader, and Best Actress in Revolutionary Road - were hard won and well deserved. 

Slumdog Millionaire picked up the Best Film award, and Best Director went to its visionary master, Danny Boyle.

Sally Hawkins won Best Actress for her role in Mike Leigh's film, Happy Go Lucky.

You can find the list of nominations and winners here. 

Watch the Brits blubbing and gushing here.

What women want.....

Some interesting research, that's still ongoing, about what women prefer to see in advertising.

It would appear that female audiences do prefer to see models who reflect them in size, age, and background.

The research is being carried out at the University of Cambridge.

Dove, the skin care company, has been the most prominent brand in the UK to acknowledge this fact, well before the research began, running a successful advertising campaign using everyday people to front its campaigns. The image above is taken from one of their advertising series.

You can read the Guardian article all about it here.

What's interesting too is to browse through the comments that follow. Opinion is, naturally enough, divided. There are some who think promoting 'over-sized' models is promoting poor lifestyle choices, while others, both male and female, see the use of a wider range of bodyshapes to be a good move. One or two hold a cynical feminist stance, arguing that to encourage women to feel as if they are taking on an editorial role in marketing, is a cunning ploy to suck audience members into a greater dependency on brand allegiance.

The re-presentation of the human form in the media is a complex topic and one that too easily becomes bogged down in polemical mud-slinging. However, it's the high octane level of debate it causes, and the important issues it raises, that makes it such a rich area for study.

The end of culture?

I know I shouldn't be a cultural snob, but the following extract from Celebrity Big Brother, on the British TV station Channel 4, is so dire I can't decide whether the sheer awfulness of what follows is a brilliant piece of popularist broadcasting, or the end of threshold standards of quality as we know it.

Watch it and weep. Or laugh. Possibly both.

Click here.

Words into Art (2) - The DNA of Web

It's strange how one's ability to find alternative activities rises in proportion to the amount of proper work requiring attention.

Anyway, to follow on from yesterday's posting about the fantastic Wordle.net here's another cool site you might find interesting.

Basically, it takes your website or blog, analyses it, and turns it into a visual depiction of DNA.

Digital Lives, the blog you're reading now, looks like this:

Make your own here

If DNA is your cup of tea then you might like some photos I took of DNA samples, which I've posted onto my Flickr account. You can view them here.

I could see this being used by teachers of Maths and ICT, to show how data can be re-interpreted and presented. Either way, my blog sure does look pretty, even if in its DNA state its pretty unintelligible.

Making Art out of Words - the easy way

Here is a simple, free app that I know my students are going to love experimenting with, given its immediacy and knock-out end result.

www.wordle.net is a piece of sheer brilliance. Add text, or link to a website/blog, and Wordle transforms this into an instant Java based text mashup. There are plenty of options to play around with, including a range of cool fonts, text layouts and colour combinations. 

Showing is often better than telling, so here are some results: my Delicious social bookmarking entries (a nice word cloud above), the opening to the Aeneid, and some of my poems. I've also begun to play around with simple aphorisms, and that's going to be an ongoing experiment. If  you click on any of the images they'll take you to my space on Flickr. Click on the 'All Sizes' option above each image and you'll be able to see a larger version.

The more times you repeat a word the more prominent it becomes. Cut and pasting can produce some interesting results. There's a lot that can be done with this nifty piece of software. Enjoy.