Augmented Journalism

If the Netherlands wins the World Cup, I will give a BJ to all my followers.

Dutch Porn star Bobbi Eden has promised all her followers oral sex in the case of a Dutch victory in the World Cup 2010. The moment she did this, last tuesday, Bobbi had less than 5,000 followers. Now, two days later, she has 65,000.

Fortunately, Bobbi is not alone. In completing this tiresome  job, she has assured herself of the help of colleagues Vicky Vette, Hybrid and Miss Gabby Quinteros.

UPDATE: we’re one day further and Bobbi has almost welcomed her 100,000th follower. She is still determined to finish her job and has promised to come up with more detailed information on monday.

UPDATE2: The morning of the finals, Bobbi tells her 109,030 followers that “things have gone a little bit out of hand”, but that #teamBJ will do as promised.

Local tv-reporter Bibi Telleman is at a music festival in Haarlem, the Netherlands. As every local reporter would do on a day like this, she tries to find out what the toilets look like. Although she is looking for the ladies’, she turns out to be at the men’s. That’s where she meets this American music lover.

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Bibi’s Translation:

The road sign in the middle says “No Parking for Bicycles”. Still nothing wrong with the famous Dutch tolerance, it seems.

In reality, people with the best glasses can read the small letters beneath the sign: “outside the bike racks“. Which covers only half of the parked bikes.

(Picture taken in front of Haarlem Central Station)

Artist Jason Eppink is building a spectacular party on the ruins of the newspaper industry. “When the last vestiges of a collapsed empire litter the landscape”, Eppink is using them for his works of post-print art. He explains:

The Print After Parties are a series of unauthorized notional raves thrown in the abandoned distribution infrastructure of crumbling print institutions. (They’re pretend parties, not real ones.)

While dead tree publishers loudly lament the fate of their aging information delivery system in the wake of the internet, enterprising trailblazers have found cheaper, faster ways to successfully meet public demand for celebrity gossip and sex scandals without razing forests, filling dumps, or obsessing over boring foreign affairs.

Abandoned by floundering media conglomerates, thousands of neglected newsracks command valuable real estate on busy street corners across New York City, remnants of diminishing demand and a disintegrating economy. Many have already been reclaimed and transformed by urban alchemists, whether as canvases for stickers and paint or clever conceptual works that turn the once important vessels of information into repositories for garbage.

The Print After Parties continue this line of collaboration with blinking LEDs, disco balls, cut-out silhouettes, and handheld radios. When the last vestiges of a collapsed empire litter the landscape, there’s only one thing to do: throw a bumpin’ party and dance on the ruins.

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If you thought our newspapers were outdated, take a look at The Times from Kuala Lumpur. Hand written from beginning to end and distributed free at college bookstores around the Malaysian capital. But what looks like a hobby project, turns out to be an ad campaign for Marathon Stabilo Pen, “Malaysia’s longest-lasting pen“. The agency that designed the campaign: “Rather than placing an ad in a newspaper, we made the newspaper the ad.”

“Gushers make me go crazy with happiness!”

Is it PeeWee Herman revisited? Will pretending to be German be enough for succesful children’s tv? Or is this just a parody that wants to criticize the commercialized and totally uninspired tv of the 21st century?

“Yes! I am so exhausted from all the fun!”

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Like most news channels around the world, Channel 9 in Australia uses camcorders to give the audience a background view on the city it is reporting from. Anchor Peter Hitchener in Melbourne was apparantly unaware of what his viewers were looking at when he was covering one of the items of his news program. A giant seagull seems to walk just behind him.

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German job agency Jobsintown.de has already won several international prizes for their ad campaigns. This year’s photography is based on the same themes as before, but the result is still brilliant. The caption: “Life’s too short for the wrong job”.

source: jobsintown.de

source: jobsintown.de

No locks needed for Dutch police…

How the dutch police lock their bikes – Ronny Lams posterous

It was an anonymous tip that set things in motion. A quick view from a helicopter was enough for the confirmation. The Lelystad (Netherlands) police was certain: the 47,000 plants in this illegal hemp plantation, hidden in the midst of a corn field, would be worth more than $6 million, when sold as weed. So there was only one thing they had to do: ruin this cannabis plantation, as soon as possible.

Yesterday they worked their way through about half of the plants as a couple of researchers from Wageningen University showed up. They were flabbergasted. Why on earth would the police kill all the plants they had been growing for so long and handled with so much care? Why would they destroy their contribution to innovation in the natural fiber industry? Slowly the policemen became aware that what they thought was the raw material for a lot of hash, in fact was an academic test site for new textiles and paper.

The university is still considering filing a complaint and demanding compensation. The plants by the way, were totally unfit for cannabis production due to an extremely low content of THC, the psycho-active ingredient for soft drug use.

The Netherlands decriminalised the consumption and possession of under five grammes of cannabis in 1976, though its cultivation on a professional level remains illegal. You can only grow three plants “for personal consumption”.