Is it wrong to follow these catastrophies this closely?

When Friday morning I saw the first tweet about earthquake and tsunami, I tuned in to watch the horrible tragedy going on in Japan.  I felt horrible. I was of course sad about all the people who was about to to suffer and lose their homes, but also I was feeling bad about actual watching. We who were safe had the possibility to see one of the biggest catasrophes in live footage from helicopters and many different cameras all around. It's not fair to say that we were enjoying, but definetely we were curios and wanted to see the enormous strength of mother nature. That felt so wrong.

This all started September 11th 2001 when I came from university to our apartment and my friend called: "quick open CNN, plane just hit the twin towers". I was already watching when the second one hit the another tower and kept watching all the details of that tragedy. That was the first time it was possible to see horrible disasters happening around the world at live footage. All the way after that I have been following these type of tragedies, but always I keep thinking, what's the point. Do I help these people by following closely what's happening or is it just causing extra misery to everyone to see all this.

I've tried to convince myself that it's important to be aware of these things, and that spreading the knowledge will help those who suffer, but I'm not sure anymore. I feel so helpless for not being able to help at all, and for the same reason I feel bad about it. Donating some money to help organizations will have small impact of help, but actual heroes are the ones going there and helping.

Maybe the main benefit of all the media coverage from these is, that people are getting more and knowledgable on the organizations who need more voluntaries and more resources in case of emergency. Also there's always people who need for help, all around the world, but also very near of you. Maybe that's the one reason it makes sense to have this good coverage.

I still think maybe we wouldn't need to be able to follow these catastrophies this closely. Definitely we need to be knowledgable on things happening everywhere in the world, but we also need to continue living and caring about the environment and people around us. I know that as the years go bye, we will be able to follow these in more and more details. Media don't have a consciense and the increasing possibilities of social media will bring us every time more horrible details of the accidents. We need ourselves to make the judgments on what helps these people in pain and what of it is just pure entertainment.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

My thoughts about book Gamestorming

I've always enjoyed events and meetings which have something special. It's always nice when organizers have used time to think about better ways to spend the time together than just regular meetings or normal events. That's the reason I bought this book, Gamestorming. I was expecting to get good ideas for organizing meetings or events. Book really hit the target.

Book made by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo is a perfect playbook for anyone wanting to make more productive meetings. It tells a bit overall about gamestorming, using game type of activities for different situations to resolve problems, and also it gives lot of good games to try with. I was familiar with few of the gamestorming games beforehand and I can say from experience that those have been really productive meetings and events when those were used.

This book will definitely have a place in my office bookshelf as playbook for different situations. I'm eagerly waiting to get to try some of these games out. I know that it does require a certain type of issues and a group willing enough to use these, but situations to use these still come quite often. For that reason I'm going to keep this book close.

Book was easy to read and games were easy to understand. Still already now, I know that I don't remember half of the games there were. I used a different tactics, I tried to detect situations, where I think these games would come handy. Then next time when I come to similar situation, I will pick up the book and check one of the games I thought would suit that situation. So my idea is to start to use it as a guide for these games and I'll learn by trying these out.

If you need to organize events, solve problems with groups or get people for meetings, this book is a really good one.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

You can do so much cool stuff with video camera's

Here's one perfect example. I happen to love these high speed camera stuff. This really cool video was taped by Tom Guilmette:

"I was working a gig in Vegas with a brand new Phantom Flex high speed digital cinema camera. I had to try it out. In fact, I never did go to bed that night.I opened up a wormhole shooting at 2,564 frames per second."

Check it out, it's wicked cool:


Locked in a Vegas Hotel Room with a Phantom Flex from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

I've always loved video taping. We used to tape lot of cool stuff back at high school. I've also taken lot of videos with my N8 and I really enjoy editing videos at work when I get the change. Currently I don't own decent video camera, I just realized I must get one. All I need is money for buying and time to shoot and edit.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Lying have become big part of social media marketing

Do you remember rear view girls? What about Jesus loves KitKat? Or Future of Digital Camera demonstrared in CES 2011. I do. All of these got viral and got lot of attention. All of these turned out to be adverstising campaings instead of real stuff.

Rear view girls was the latest of these. It was presented so that two girls came up with idea to attach camera on their back to see how guys and all others are checking their asses. Couple of days later it turned out to be a Levis jeans sponsered thing and not really real. Original video was removed from Youtube, but was at least available at time of writing this in Dailymotion.

Another one was Jesus loves KitKat. Nestle or their ad agency sent some photos to different news or websites with a picture of KitKat candy bar, where after a bite there was a picture of Jesus shown. They where hoping that it would get viral and it got. I blogged about that sometime ago already. Then after some time they actually told that it was done by them and not by any real KitKat buyer.

Then there was Future of Digital Camera demonstrared in CES 2011. Guys made a video at the time of CES, which is the world's largest consumer technology tradeshow, which seemed like they were annoyncing this camera at CES. This soon got viral, even though it raised some questions in many forums. This one turned out to be a concept from ad agency and not really a real one.

I bet there are lot more of these, but the common thing in all of these were, that the purpose was to make these look like a real thing and get free publicity because of this. These all were big fat lies.

These kind of publicity stunts, make us question everything there is in the web. It starts to be imppossible to know what of it is real and what is not. News sites and other media sites are also sharing all these content with everybody as fast as they can to be on top of the media stack, and they are not being critical with any of these content. This will cause that all these stunts get lot of attention really fast.

So is there a harm in this? I think there is. I see it to be dangerous when ads and real life are being mixed. People trust less and less on news sources if they often find out that the content they thought was real, was just another ad.

I already once made a mistake with questionable campaign againsts McDonalds, I thougt it was just another PR stunt, but it turned really to be a campaign against McDonalds. I think I'm not the only one doing these mistakes. I believe many don't even know that all of those three examples I told about are actually fake ones.

I admit I have enjoyed all of these stunts. Still I don't like they intentionally lied to me and made me believe these stuff were real. I would appreciate there being a small disclaimer saying that this is an ad campaign when it is. It would help us all to make a better and more transparent web. I guess I'm just dreaming.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

What I miss in the internet - real discussions

One reason I'm active in the web are different point of views. I love discussions on many topics. I have the luxury of having co-workers and some friends who are not afraid to discuss and disagree. With them I can argue so that it's not going to insults, but stays almost always on intelligent level. Still often those discussions are really tense and I can really feel the adrenaline level raising while having those. It's just a pity that I don't get those in the internet.

In the web I tend to follow the people I agree. I tend to comment to posts I somewhat agree. And the times when I or someone else disagree's on some subject, discussion almost always ends really shortly. Either one of the discussion partners just disappears or then it goes to meaningles "I'm right and you're wrong" type of discussions.

One problem is that in the web you don't really need to listen. You don't really need to try to understand the point, you can just jump to shouting mode and state your point. One doesn't have the possibility to explain the point thoroughly and to make sure the opposite site undestands the point so that he or she could adjust their comments accordingly.

In the web it's so easy to turn the other cheek or run away. If you disagree with someone, you can just ignore the message totally and find something else.

Web is full of happy happy, joy joy type of comments. Comments start often like this: that was a good post, here's an another point to support your point. It's much easier to go and support a post than disagree with someone you don't really know.

I'm not saying that everyone should be hostile and fighting with each other in the web, but I tend to believe, that new always start from disagreement. The only way to change and develop is to challenge. Challenge the existing knowledge and challenge the common believes.

I love good discussions where different point of views are appreciated and arguing enriches discussions. So far, web hasn't been able to bring that to me. That's why I still need real life.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen