Roberdo Raval – Hedonistic Freelancer

“In order to penetrate the invisible world and develop your powers, you have to live in the present, the here and now. In order to live in the present, you have to control your second mind. And look at the horizon.”
 

(from Paulo Coelho: ‘The Valkyries’)

After Web 1.0 and its new economy bubble we are now probably facing a social media bubble of Web 2.0 – The reasons might be much more complex, but it’s a nice metaphor: Facebook itself had more than 67.100.000 likes when its stock crash-landed the trading floor like no US-American company of comparable value had done since 5 years.

Illustration © dadara

Via LSD Magazine

The world has gone mobile. We live in an information society and are connected to information anywhere we go, and whatever we do, 24/7. And that has changed how we as people behave.

We never look up anymore.

Pictures by a mobile researcher from Finland. Food for thought.

Via 9GAG

Excellent viral marketing campaign for the launch of the TV channel TNT in Belgium!

Douglas Rushkoff gave some great interviews for London Street-Art Design Magazine recently. In issue 7, the psychedelically experienced social media expert talks about instant counter cultures, why Facebook and the internet in general might keep down an actual revolution and intelligent fascism vs. angry mob fascism.

In the promotion campaign for the new Beetle, Volkswagen goes Augmented Reality.

Google introduces an own Social Network Service. And in fact the basic idea as introduced on the Google blog looks very promising: “Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.” Interestingly, Google paid attention to a crucial fact of social relations which was also the backbone of my qualitative study about the change of friendship relations through Social Network Sites. There are different kinds of bonds to other people, strong ties, weak ties and also a huge “periphery”, which probably includes the biggest social capital. In fact also Facebook offers lots of possibilities to determine which of these social circles is able to access which information, a feature I personally do use a lot.
 
Still its very interesting to see that Google includes this issue in the very basic idea of its Social Network Service: “The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food—wrapping everyone in “friend” paper—and sharing really suffers: It’s sloppy. We only want to connect with certain people at certain times, but online we hear from everyone all the time [...].” So all together a rather promising new approach on Social Media. Of course, data watchdogs might howl desperately in view of another, very intimate aspect of the individual personality invaded by Google…