Being lazy on a rainy Sunday has its payoffs, like finding these two great documentaries:

PBS Frontlines’ Digital Nation: from information overflow to virtual worlds, Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff do a great job on highlighting some of the challenges of the Millennial generation.

Also engaging was BBC’s 3D Documentary Explorer for “The Virtual Revolution: How 20 years of the web has reshaped our lives”.

Even with the 3D eating the CPU, the videos (with plenty testimonials of key web figures) are worthy of your next lazy Sunday. Beats watching American Idol anytime.

Better than a Kindle. A PR GOLD Lion in Cannes by LiveAd São Paulo.

One Thousand Casmurros from Livead on Vimeo.

To pay tribute to one of Brazil’s most respected writers, Machado de Assis, the largest TV network in Brazil was launching a mini-series based on one of his books, Dom Casmurro.

Through the launch of the mini-series, we needed to build up TV Globo’s reputation with a new generation, disconnected from the television.

We created a website with the book and divided it into one thousand excerpts. In the website, people could choose and record pieces in real time with their webcam. We enabled a large scale collective reading.

At the same time, we hid one thousand DVDs with unique scenes in public places for people to find them and hide them again once they had seen it.

In less than a month, the reading was completed.

Influential admirers talked about it in public. 33 million viewers watched the series’ first episode. The media called it the best tribute to Machado de Assis of 2008.

Almost 106 million people were exposed to press notes related to the mini-series. The subsequent media exposure was worth the equivalent of 6,7 million dollars in advertising spend.

So yesterday i went to the theater and today i find this modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

Social networks don’t get more mainstream than this.

Speaking of which, this blog now has a Facebook page, where i’ll post other inspirations that don’t quite fit in here. I’d be delighted if you’d drop by and become a fan. Promise i will not send any Mafia Wars messages.

Source: McSweeny, via Adverlab

Following yesterday’s news, i’m sharing a collaboration between blog network Prt.Sc and OFFF, that are inviting all portuguese bloggers to OFFF Screen Challenge and win a chance to be at this renowned festival of post-digital culture, taking place in Lisbon, from 7th to 9th May 2009.

*Disclaimer: As an executive member of Prt.sc, I’ll be judging the entries. That leaves all other portuguese bloggers more chances to win the 3day ticket and show your project at the venue.

The Challenge

OFFF and Prt.sc are showcasing the best of portuguese digital culture: from the garage hack to your web project, OFFF Screen is giving the chance for those using social media to showcase their projects to a wider and interested audience.

The submitted projects are preferably within the broader Catalogue theme “THIS ISN’T FLYING, THIS IS FALLING WITH STYLE · FAIL GRACEFULLY @ OFFF”.  Unleash your creativity, don’t be afraid to fail.

How to apply

Each application must be submitted by a member of  the project that has been writing for a blog at least since December 2008.

Each blog must write at least 3 posts until the 1st of May, related to the project or OFFF Festival, and tagged with  offf and prt.sc. On this date, judges by the OFFF and Prt.sc team will select the 3 best projects. These will be awarded with a 3 day ticket and the chance to present the project on the venue.

Submissions should be sent to offf@prt.sc, with project description, name and contacts, and a permalink to the post announcing the challenge entry.

All posts related to the challenge will be agregated at offf.prt.sc. For further info, contact offf@prt.sc.

There’s a recurring theme on some mainstream media that the Internet and social media are some kind of dark force, that only does bad things to your kids and those who spent too much time online don’t have anything useful to do with their lives.

As i’m never short of passion of explaining to regular “offline” folks the outstanding opportunities that the web has brought to us, let me share one of my central arguments that you can also use to bring more people in to the conversation.

The Third Place

The Third Place refers to social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace, or as i call it the private and professional spheres. The concept was created by Ray Oldenburg , arguing that these places were central on their community building role on a society.

A monthly meeting of twitter.com users in Lisbon, © twittlis

The web pushed this whole concept further, as citizens increasingly rely on digital tools to stay connected, with social media becoming their main third place. With shopping malls and other consumption temples getting emptier in a year of crisis, this trend will deepen and it’s up to us, early adopters, to show the Yellow Brick Road to newcomers.

Show your friends the best community tools available so we all can build a better society. From Kiva.org to Twitter.com, these are not only tools for digital democracy but effective agents of change.

So when those folks tell you to get a life, just reply: “Get a Third Place”.

From guerrilla marketing to urban interventions, the streets have become a new canvas for creativity. One of the most prolific projects in this area comes from Brazil, with the creative duo Anderson Augusto and Leonardo Delafuente, aka, 6emeia.

Started as a intervention to transform daily environments as a reflection of their creative work, the duo started painting gaping holes and other objects on urban landscapes, reminding us that even the most forgotten object can be regarded as art.

The video of the week goes to a recent TED talk by Peter Hirshberg, discussing “how the computer ambushed television”.

Peter Hirshberg is now on the advisory board of Technorati and authors a weblog on disruptive culture and technology, having worked for Apple, Microsoft, AOL and NBC. His talk is a a great overview on the evolution of media and the new role of the web.

Some appetizer quotes:

(…) the tech world is best understood not as a business cycle, but as a messianic movement. We promise something great, we evangelize it, we’re going to change the world, it doesn’t work out too well and so we actually go back to the wall and start all over again, as the people in New York and LA look on in absolute morbid astonishment, but it’s this irrational view of the world that drive us on

(..) when we emerged from this into what we called Web 2.0, things actually are quite different
and i think it’s the reason that TV is so challenged. If Internet 1 was about pages, now is about people. It’s a customer, it’s an audience, it’s a person who’s participating, it’s the formidable thing that is changing entertainment now.

I dreamed that one day advertising could move people the way ImprovEverywhere does. Another remarkable mission.

Just check one of the parent’s testimonials:

I believe you guys are behind the “Hermosa Beach Little League” taping that took place Saturday, March 10th, 2007. The parents will be talking about this for a long time… the kids even longer. My son was a pitcher on the Lugnuts. We had a long/tough season last year. Saturday made up for everything. I want to sincerely thank you for making Saturday so unbelievable. It was like a birthday, Christmas, and New Years Eve captured in a few amazing hours. Thanks a million for a once in a lifetime opportunity.