Web Geek™, Senior Manager, Digital @RMIT, a social media maven, Google-aholic, simplicity, UX and customer experience advocate, and a bit of a Star Wars nut. Hit my Google + profile below for more info. Kthnxbai! 
Another beautifully drawn, deep and powerful (I think) talk that affects everything we are, were, and do. Empathy, and our fellow humans, and what we aim for, can be just as important as what we have achieved.
Love how even Star Wars comes in to this Psychological debate : )
Singer Ke$ha (she must be cool cos y'know she has a dollar sign in her name) or label Sony could not have foreseen the massive reaction that this song has sparked across the web and beyond.
A little history; the single is released with it's own official video (not all that good). The super catchy pop beats, and Ke$sha's lack of ugly helped this become a huge worldwide hit. The end right? On to the next single? Nooo, before you can say 'web community - engage!' They kinda did, and off they went with mash-ups galore, and one of the best and first, was the below, rather excellent Star Wars Version:
A great interpretation, and for most of us we thought that was it, but then the amazing happened... I'm watching the Simpsons a few weeks ago and the very traditional opening sequence and theme gets replaced with this phenomenal version (The time and money alone spent here, as well as legal issues between fox and Sony are worth thinking about);
Well thats gotta be it right? And I would have banked that was it, no more heights to achieve, but this thing has wings, and also not to be outdone by George Lucas fans, the 'trekkies' get their own also excellent mash-up; (Thnx Sam C for sharing)
Now whats the big fuss about all this? Just some videos, right? T Wrong, the fact that gets me on watching all these is that after all the wails and moans about Digital Rights Management (DRM), lawsuits galore for using copyrighted tunes, and bitter complaints from the media industry about us the customer, all of a sudden it's quite okay for everyone including a major animation studio to get thier mash up on?
This is a huge change, and without a doubt (as many a web head would have told you for years) is doing Ke$ha no harm. In fact she'll soon be adding several more dollar signs to her name as this gets more and more exposure. Nearly a million views on each version I've shown above alone, never mind the worldwide viewer-ship of the Simpsons TV & DVD sales.
Yet sadly this is still an exception, and I encounter content everyday that is still locked down, restricted, region locked, and hobbled by legal nonsense. Many YouTube Music videos for example still wont allow basic embedding and sharing. (Do you want exposure? Why even have your product online if it can't be shared?)
When customers can make videos for $0.00 to record labels, ask for nothing in return, and promote your product for you? It truly is time to wake up if you manage a brand, and start losing some control to gain more, and let customers play with your product before your time is up.
If your anything like me, and have to work with people across countries, working out time zones for meetings can be a royal pain, and add in differing systems, and the whole thing can cause problems. So unless your flava flav and want to carry huge time pieces around your neck, you really only can use some web sites, many of which are as complex as hell and just get by...
So cue a nice site that visibly allows you to select on a scale and see very simply the time in every region at once.
So simple, so straight forward and so worth sharing. Over to you.
A very different market, with some nice comparisons to the US sites to show the difference in approach required for localisation on your site.
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