Alternative Currencies

Ok, now I'm not suggesting anything as strange as this eBay item, but I've been thinking for a while about alternative value exchange systems like the LETS scheme and others. Shouldn't the Internet have made this much more workable sometime ago? Were we waiting for Web 2.0 to establish the flexible types of glue that a true exchange system needs? Alternatively are we just not interested enough, or already well-served by the US Dollar/Euro and Paypal? Perhaps we're looking in the wrong place and we already have a perfectly good system of attention exchange, built on the foundations of Google Ranking, blog inter-linking and article rating. If so, how do we monetise our assessed value, and more to the point: What's the web now worth?

Technorati Tags: Future, Internet, Media, Networks, technology, Web

Insane Artists

Berlin artists use parasitic Mac mini in Subway:

A group of artists in Berlin have released a movie of a suction cup equipped suitcase which contains a Mac mini, a digital projector, and a battery power supply. They stuck the suitcase on the side of the subway and projected images in the subway tunnels as the train was moving.

Woah, hold it right there.. Having watched the video showing what they did I'm astonished that they're still alive. In London they would have been shot dead before they could say "But officer, I have an Arts Council Grant". Let's get this straight: A guy walks into a subway and fixes a metal case to the side of a tube train. People get onto the train and it pulls out of the station. No-one stops the guy, and he leaves the subway. This would seriously make me think more than twice about the safety of using the subway, and someone ought to be fired for letting it happen. Unless it's all a ruse of course, and the subway are in on the act. Would that make it less interesting artistically?

Technorati Tags: Apple, Art, Cities, Creativity, Macintosh, Terrorism