Alan Is Good

Another Xtranormal video by AlanIsGood:

A 17-year-old girl called 911 to help her father, who was having a very bad seizure at their home in Lincoln Park, Michigan.  In a panic, she says, “What the f***!” because her call wasn’t going through.  911 recordings begin when the caller is dialing, so the station heard her remark.  

Well, a very upstanding, old fashioned and honorable officer of the ‘law’ curses back at her and disconnects her call!  She calls back; he belittles her a bit more, and drags this on for another 6 minutes, while her father is suffering on the floor of their home.  When he finally calls the fire department, his version of the story paints her as a hostile caller.  

One last part – she rushes to the station a few blocks away to confront the cop IRL and she gets arrested and detained!  Check the video below:

Usually there’s at least a 70/30 split and two different sides to a story, but not here!  I’ve argued against online censorship in the past, but IRL censorship in emergency situations is a f***ing joke.  I’m glad that we live in the age of the internet for situations like this one.  This kind of injustice and law enforcement abuse of power has been happening for hundreds of years now, and it has left thousands of people frustrated, helpless and even dead – because the buck has always stopped with the law.  Imagine this situation happening in the 60s – no one would hear the girl’s story, she would feel frustrated and depressed with the world, and have a serious lack of respect for every cop she ever met.  

The internet, new media journalists and digital public relations have changed all of this.  No one wants negative press bestowed upon their station, business or establishment – and nowadays people are witnessing, video cameras are watching and tape recorders are rolling, ready to archive the misbehavior of a**holes with power.   

The cop will no doubt be harassed and the station will have a tough time dealing with the negative PR.  Even though he will probably keep his job, there’s a solid black eye on his career for a while.  Digital justice prevails.  Here’s an internet acronym palindrome that I think sums things up:

WTF FTW!

This video from last week has everything – Web 2.0 and country.  Credit to Scott Rodgers.  

Today the verdict is out on the people who run the Pirate Bay.  A Swedish court found four men guilty of assisting and promoting other people’s infringement of copyright laws.  While the men insist that nothing will change for them or for the file sharing world, many downloaders and freeloaders alike are concerned that the days of file sharing my soon come to an end.  

I have exclusive footage from the courtroom scene, here’s the video:

So, I actually went through the trouble of creating the very Yahoo! Pipe discussed in the video.  As our tragic hero described, this is a makeshift solution for those of us using SMS texts on an older phone who also want to know when people mention them on Twitter.  

Here is a link to the Yahoo! Pipe.  Enter your Twitter username and run the pipe to return all of your Twitter mentions in an RSS feed that is compatible with SMS texting.  Then copy the “Get as RSS” link and have the updates sent to your cell phone.  

I use Notify Me to send the RSS results directly to my cell phone.  As I hinted at in the video, I do receive the @ mentions within an hour of their being posted.   Simply register, verify your cell phone, and add the Yahoo! Pipe RSS feed as a source.  

It should be noted that since the RSS feed pulls from the public search, you will NOT receive the mentions coming from your followers that have protected their updates.  I’m working on a second version of this Yahoo! Pipe that allows you to enter your information and hopefully authenticate to recieve all mentions, both public and private.

PS: If you’re exceptionally crafty and wonder why I didn’t just take the regular RSS feed from Twitter Search and have that sent via text, it’s because the default feed is in a weird format and doesn’t tell you the name of the person that mentioned you.  The Yahoo! Pipe rearranges the feed from Twitter Search and correctly identifies the person mentioning you.  

Check out Xtranormal.com to make videos like this one.  And let’s make Friday Video a thing now.

Last week’s discussions were about the dynamics of dating and relationship statuses online.  A few people I talked to mentioned that it would be nice to see who your new squeeze had dated previously and to be able to check out their profiles.  I brought this issue up with m3rkvry and he referred me to a scene from the film Amazon Women on the Moon (1987). He helped me rip the movie and extract the scene, and I uploaded it to YouTube.

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