Jeffzilla

Team Desertaxi, who’s website and field communications I oversee, has gotten a little more press coverage. The team, and their micro-nation of Taxistan have been written up in the London Evening Standard newspaper including pictures taken from the Team Desertaxi Blog.

With this story, it seems like print media is starting to looking more closely at blog media now…. these photos the London Evening Standard printed were originally uploaded by the team from the field via satellite link directly to Flickr, and then posted to the blog using the wordpress xml-rpc.

This evening a film crew from the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), a Japanese TV network,  came to my apartment to interview me for a “60 Minutes”-like news segment for  Japanese TV. They’re doing a piece on Panasonic’s corporate name consolidation, and wanted to get my take on Japanese electronics brands, etc. I talked to the producer a bit about my electronics, what I thought of the industry, what brands I liked and disliked.  They are sending me the segment once it’s completed, so I’ll be sure to post it up…

Check out this film crew in my apartment! Thanks to Elsye for taking the shot of me in front of the camera!

Talking to the camera...

The Tokyo Broadcasting System filmcrew...

***Update- Just heard from the producer at TBS that the segment is airing on September 27th in Tokyo, Japan. Stay tuned for the video clip…

Found over on Current.com, an intense look at the Irtokte gun market in Mogadishu, Somolia, and how easy it is to buy an ak-47 Machine gun, or American m16. Apparently, this is the first time a foreign camera has every been allowed to film this gun market, and likely the last. Kaj Larsen and Christof Putzel are ushered away in the middle of the shoot, as the large crowd around them finally gets out of hand.

Morpheus Media, where I work on the SEO and Emerging Technologies team, was just listed the number 20 fastest growing small business by Entrepreneur Magazine. This is up from #40 last year. Nice!

Pushing forward on the viral, social, apparel front, CNN is now printing one-off headline T-shirts. Now, if you go to the homepage, you can click the little mini t-shirt icon next to a headline, and poof, get a black, white or grey T-shirt made with that headline, time-stamp, and CNN logo on it. Absolutely amazing.

The best part about it is it’s hackable. You can put your own headline on custom CNN headline t-shirts simply by changing the text in the url. Imagine the possibilities here - put any headline or phrase you want into a CNN-branded tshirt.

Shirts are $15, plus $4.99 for shipping. They’re luckily printed on ultra comfy American Apparel shirts, which is very welcome - screw those crappy “beefy-t’s”. Looks like they’ve partnered with Spreadshirt for printing and distribution. More info on CNN’s FAQ.

Additionally, this is purely an impulse item. The headlines are only available to be printed while the headline is in the current news section - as soon as it’s old news, the shirt is history. Finally, CNN is fixing to go ultra viral on this. They’re including links to post your shirt to facebook, and since they are strictly time limited, the buzz factor is set to be huge.

Kroosh also posted on this at nearly the same time. We were competing to see who could get it up first/get the most crawl etc. Who won?

Ah, those minutes troubleshooting video on the blog today were for nothing.. turns out that YouTube really did go down for a while this afternoon, when Pakistan Telecom apparently hijacked YouTube’s IP Range. Amazing something like this can happen.. and reminds me of the story a while back about some farmers using a high bandwidth fiber optic cable for target practice…  

Upon further reading.. looks like BBC is reporting this story too, but there’s a difference between the TechCrunch Article and the BBC Article - TechCrunch is discussing how Pakistan Telecom took down YouTube for the WHOLE WORLD, whereas BBC completely glossed over that fact, and even made it seem like YouTube access was only cutoff in Pakistan. YouTube is probably gone more permanently from Pakistan, but I think it defenitely would have been worth noting the worldwide effect  of Pakistan Telecom’s actions. What’s going on here?  

Some more clarification from ZD Net