A Design for Living: Habitat & Twitter

Furniture store Habitat has apologised for causing offence after accusations it exploited unrest in Iran to drive online Twitter users to its products.

Keywords - called hashtags - such as 'Iran' and 'Mousavi' were added to its messages so people searching for those subjects would see the firm's adverts.

Users of the networking site reacted angrily and the posts were removed.

The retailer has said the use of the hashtags were "not authorised", but declined to say who was responsible.

Contributors to Twitter posted messages claiming Habitat should be "ashamed" and saying it was "piggy-backing" on the political situation in Iran.

One of the controversial messages - called tweets - which appeared before being removed by Habitat, read: HabitatUK: #MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card.

From the BBC.

Lost in the Information Sea: 130,000 inflatable breasts

What an excellent piece of viral marketing.

More than 130,000 inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australia.

Men's magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.

The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP's parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt.

From WA Today in Australia.

Get your Huff on: Ariana on blogging

In one particularly revealing moment, Ariana talked about how journalism should not be an exercise in covering all sides of a story, but an investigative search for the truth - which is usually on one side or another.

More tips here.

Have cell phone can blather

Second stage (and thus first change) is literacy. The approx 6-7 year old learns to read. And goes to school and discovers friends not selected by the parents or not out of the back yard of the home. New friends, new influences. Now things like brand competitiveness starts to emerge, I want Levis brand jeans, not the ones mother had suggested, etc.. But most importantly for readers of our blog, any digital media will not be powerfully (probably fully) able to be used. Yes, we have lots of videogames and basic computer programmes for even younger kids but after they learn to read, they can go Google and discover the digital world for themselves. If for some reason you don't have the PC and connection for them at home, soon they will find a best friend who has a PC and broadband in their room and suddenly spend a lot of time visiting that friend.

The above and a ton more cellphone aphorisms, can be found here. Tomi T. Ahonen is a "five-time bestselling author and consultant on digital convergence and mobile telecoms", who is based in Hong Kong. Ahonen lectures at Oxford University's short courses on high tech and convergence.

Thankfully not on life.

Serial Will Eat Itself

The producers of Web serials — including the name-brand ones like “Afterworld,” “lonelygirl15” and “quarterlife” — seem forever anxious about their audience numbers, and they crunch and recrunch them. The producers of “lonelygirl15,” a thriller about a teenager stuck in a cult, claim that they have attracted 100 million views over more than 550 episodes. Marshall Herskovitz, the creator of “quarterlife,” a repertory drama about artsy 20-somethings, counters that his show has drawn 10 million views over 36 episodes — 50 percent more, on average, than “lonelygirl15.” This is possible, since the unit of success is the flimsy “view,” meaning virtually any click on any part of a series, anywhere on the Web. But it’s clear that we’re not talking about numbers advertisers can remotely trust. Are there really any hit Web serials?

The NYT romps through the "numerati" take on web serials.

Square the Circle

Self-promotion should make you slightly uncomfortable. The best journalists know the absolute necessity of humility; when accomplishments lead to hubris, that's when trouble arrives. (I suppose this is true of every walk of life.) That's why self-promotion should never be motivated by pure ego, or resort to the kinds of slippery tactics that journalists love to expose in other fields.

Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication.

This from the MediaShift Idea Lab