Here’s a slideshow of images from the My Home 2.0 Block Parties. Episodes are on the air now in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, so check out the schedule on the site at 2pointhome.com.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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After discovering that both Axe and Dove are owned by Unilever, Rye Clifton created this mash-up of brand “viral videos” that have conflicting messages and uploaded it to YouTube, where it has been seen over 56,000 times (and counting).

The ball is in your court, Unilever. [via SocialTNT]

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Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is clearly frustrated. Reznor has always been smart about using the internet to connect with his fans, but in a recent update to his site he details how the Universal Music Group lawsuit against YouTube is preventing him from growing his audience and building a community around his music.

It’s a nice example of how the music industry continues to both stifle innovation and leave huge amounts of money on the floor while using the courts to desperately hold on tight to the antiquated ways they’ve made money in the past.

Reznor’s post is a great read not just for his POV on the legal brouhaha but also for the way he approaches communications with his fans.

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We held our final FiOS My Home 2.0 event at the Zaharko family’s home on Saturday in Pittsburgh, and all 11 of the Z’s performed an ode to our campaign. It was an extraordinary finish to the most emotional — and taxing — of our campaigns…

Technorati Tags: FiOS, MyHome2.0, Pittsburgh, Social Media, social networking, Verizon

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Team Fortress 2 is a great multiplayer FPS by Valve that recently came out for Xbox, PS3 and PC machines.

The PC versions have a unique feature where you can upload images and then “spray” them on walls for all the other online players to see. It was obviously made to give the players a place to smack talk and show off.

But here’s the interesting thing….recently I’ve begun to see user generated ads created and placed in the game..

Most of them are for various clans that play together or websites that collect and share information about the game. It got me to thinking, what would happen if this idea really caught on and what would it evolve into?

Would independent musicians start uploading info of themselves like they did with MySpace? Would other video games start spraying their logos around to grab some early buzz? The limits of this format are, like its concept, fuzzy and undefined.

Here’s my favorite video of a user uploaded spray. It shows just what happens when you realize your teammate isn’t what he seems to be.

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I got no idea who that Mailer guy is that Steve is talking about but writer Ira Levin’s death bums me out.

Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, The Boys From Brazil….Here’s a guy that could really write. A lot of the nightmares from my childhood were caused by this guy.

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(See also Garfield’s Boomer Roots Are Showing)

Technorati Tags: Celebrity, New Journalism

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I just spotted this campaign and love it. You play a simple vocabulary game that adjusts in difficulty to be just challenging enough as you move along. For every correct answer that you get, 10 grains of rice are donated via corporate sponsors towards world hunger. You even get to see a little rice bowl fill up as you play along! Strangely gratifying in itself.  So far the program has donated 856,444,020 grains of rice to those in need.

And my mom told me I was wasting my time playing video games… Go play and feed the world @ Free Rice.

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This just in from Gregg Hale, one of the Campfire partners, who’s off producing Seventh Moon, a new horror film with director Edwardo Sanchez:

“I’m sitting under a tent at the northernmost tip of Hong Kong’s New Territories; less than five miles from the mainland city of Shen Chen. Ed and I are likely the only non-Chinese speakers for miles. We’re in a field surrounded by huge circle of above-ground crypts. Ten basically naked men painted white are beating the shit out of a blood-covered car sunk frame-deep in one of the field’s many ruts. It’s 10:46pm and our day has pretty much just started.

“Last week, we were smack-dab in the middle of thousands of open graves. Here, the dead are initially buried in wooden coffins only a couple of feet below the surface so they can be easily exhumed in a few years and the bones transferred into big clay urns that are then stored in the kind of crypts from among which I’m writing this. The broken-open coffins and the grave markers are simply abandoned until enough time has passed for the land to be re-used. For what and for how long they wait, I don’t know.

“For the last three months I’ve been in Hong Kong making a horror film called ‘Seventh Moon’ with Ed and one of my other Haxan partners, Rob Cowie. It’s been a long, strange trip that’s drawing to a close in just eleven more shooting days. I’m anxious for it to be over but I also know I’ll miss the daily adventure this project has been. I’ve struggled to adapt to a new style of filmmaking and struggled to impart some of my American ways on our Hong Kong crew. It’s been a see-sawing balance of being amazed at how innovative and hard-working they are and dumbfounded by the things they will let slide.

“But a balance, nonetheless: as of right now we’re on schedule despite two days of rain and under budget despite more additions than subtractions to the things we wanted to shoot. Knock on wood. Cross my fingers and hope to die. Stick a finger in my eye . . .

“I spend the vast majority of my waking hours with an all Cantonese-speaking crew. We live in a non-Gwuilo (the Chinese word for non-Chinese) part of town and the only non-Chinese we regularly see are the few other non-Chinese people that also reside in our building. I actually feel a little weird when we go to the places were the tourists and the expats congregate. Like they’re invading ‘my’ Hong Kong; a fantasyland where I’m the adventurous artist pushing the boundaries of international filmmaking. In reality, I’m a naïve newcomer to an utterly modern city where ‘international’ is completely, absolutely and totally the norm. The boundaries were pushed long ago and I’m operating well within the confines of safe. At least as safe as one can be with ten naked Chinese dudes beating the shit out of car less than fifty yards away.”

Technorati Tags: Blair Witch Project, Campfire, Edwardo Sanchez, Film, Gregg Hale, Haxan Films

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Looks like Google trying to steal our thunder, taking our name and a facsimile of our logo for their recent developer talk. Even more suspicious, this first talk focused on their new OpenSocial API. Hmmm, Campfire, social networking… We need some advice on this one, so tell us what you think:

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