Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Grassfitti and Internet Search Movies


This week's reading about crowds, electronic data, and collective intelligence reminded me of an incident in 2006 in which AOL accidentally released keyword data from 3-months worth of internet searches. I wondered whether anyone had attempted to mine that data and what they might have found. In researching that, I came across this. It's a documentary made using search terms from one of the users. You can watch the full thing here.

That got me thinking about the ways in which innovation is about connections, whether it be through networks or just one person's individual realization (a cell phone can be a cow!). I also wondered why we haven't talked much about art (secret innovation projects and Marge Simpson aside) in our class discussions, because I think that art (broadly including film, photography, literature, etc) is also often about those connections. That's not to say that art always equals innovation, and maybe there's kind of a gray area between what's innovative and what's not. What do you think?

Also, on the same website, Guerilla Innovation, which some of you may be familiar with, there was a link to a video about Grassfitti "sustainable graffitti"(grass can be graffitti!). The whole video is kind of long, but if you skip to about 2:00 in you can see the actual process and results.

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