It was a bit tl;dr though so some bright spark made it into a snazzy video.

Et voila…

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook from Alex Trimpe on Vimeo.

Over the last couple of years the frequency and ridiculousness of these stories has escalated. Two years ago it was MySpace Thugs Trashed my House or similar and in the last year or so Facebook has been accused of being responsible for identity fraud, economic ruin, murder and cancer.

I was most pleased last month when eight newspapers and one news television channel were forced to apologise and pay settlement charges to a family after running stories describing how a “Facebook party” had gone “out of control” and that gatecrashers had “trashed” the house in Marbella. It came out that the news “journalists” involved didn’t know or didn’t care that the party wasn’t gatecrashed, only led to very minor damage and in any case was organised on Bebo, not Facebook.

The worst example of a paper using a web application to fabricate a story was last month when the Scottish Sunday Express, as Graham Linehan put it so well, won the race to the bottom by describing the impish Internet behaviour of Dunblane teenagers as “shaming the memory” of those who died in the Dunblane massacre 13 years ago.  They too were forced to apologise.

This year’s main headline-grabbing SM service is Twitter. So I shouldn’t be surprised that last week a story broke about the upcoming report by Sir Jim Rose that will make recommendations for an overhaul of primary school education. The leaked report features many recommendations including the teaching of health and environmental matters and that certain topics from history, notably WW2 and the Victorian period should not be taught at a primary school level. There is also going to be a recommendation that by the time pupils leave primary school they should be familiar with modern sources of information including blogs, wikipedia, podcasts and twitter. Guess what the headlines were?

Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary schools shake-up
The Guardian

Pupils ‘should study Twitter’
BBC online

This is a leak from a report recommending the biggest shake up of primary education in 20 years and they focus on Twitter? There of course followed lots of discussion on public phone-ins, panels shows and editors columns about how disgraceful and silly this was. Calm down everyone!

First of all, the report hasn’t been formally published yet. Secondly, when it does get published, the recommendations won’t automatically be Incorporated into the curriculum. Lastly, and crucially, the recommendations, as far as I can tell aren’t saying there should be lessons about Twitter. They are saying there should be an emphasis in teaching kids how to use many sources of information available on the Internet to research a topic as well as gaining fluency in keyboard skills and common desktop applications. Isn’t that a good thing?

The above two articles were at least fairly balanced; unfortunately the same can’t be said of the Daily Mail who are rapidly becoming a parody of themselves. In characteristic fashion, they combined the dumbing down of broken Britain with Twitter and a big dollop of hell-in-a-handbasket editorial slant to produce this work of art.

Exit Winston Churchill, enter Twitter… Yes, it’s the new primary school curriculum

Primary schools could ditch traditional lessons in favour of teaching children how to use social networking sites such as Twitter, it emerged yesterday. 

Under the blueprint for a new primary curriculum pupils would no longer have to learn about the Romans, Vikings, Tudors, Victorians or the Second World War.

They even managed to squeeze in some tub-thumping about sex education and drugs.

Compulsory sex education will start from five and children as young as nine will be taught to make ‘informed decisions’ about taking drugs and drinking alcohol. 

Throw in a couple of outraged history professors, a Tory spokesperson for education and an outraged mother and we’ve got ourselves a story! 

Sigh… 

As always with Daily Mail online articles, the entertaining (and slightly frightening) comments by members of the generally racist public almost eclipsed the silliness of the article itself and I should thank Jane from Solihul for inspiring the title of this post with this nugget of knee-jerkery.

If this isn’t the dumbing down of education in this country I don’t know what is. At this rate eventually the UK will have a generation of complete ignoramuses. So much for Tony Blair’s mantra in 1997 – ‘Education, Education, Education’!

Experienced Daily Mail commenters will realise that Jane from Solihul missed a trick by not claiming that the report is a result of ‘political correctness gone mad’. Or immigrants.

Hey Jane, maybe if you had been educated in primary school on the importance of taking information from a range of sources and using your own critical reasoning to form an opinion, you wouldn’t swallow Daily Mail rhetoric and sick it up disguised as your own thoughts when chatting at the school gates. And maybe your corner of the world would be a better place for it.

For those of you who, unlike me, have a life instead of monitoring twitter trends, Skittles have revamped their site and the content has almost been completely replaced by relevant pages from third-party social media applications. Visitors to Skittles.com are now directed to the twitter search result for the term “skittles” and invited to navigate their way about Skittles’ social web presence by using the flash navigation menu that overlays the page. [update: the homepage is now set as the facebook page as predicted my moi ]

The ‘Home’ and ‘Chatter’ links both link to the twitter search results for the term Skittles, the products links for each flavour lead to the relevant information on the Skittles Wikipedia entry. There is a ‘Friends’ link that goes to the Skittles facebook page and the video and photo links respectively lead to the Skittles profile on YouTube and Flickr search results for the term… well can you guess?

There are only two actual web pages in use: the product overview page and the contact form.

My first impressions were that this is very brave and very cool. I did have some reservations, however.

Firstly, the idea is not original. Dave Kinsella showed me the Modernista “Unsite” about this time last year.

Remember: a year in social media is roughly equivalent to one dog-year.

I don’t think the skittles implementation is as good. Modernista use javascript menus cleverly to help the user navigate to the content they need, rather than just pulling up a live stream of search results. Even worse, the skittles flash menu cannot be moved by drag and drop which means there is a chunk of the page on the top left that the user will never see. This is especially annoying when trying to navigate around text-heavy wikipedia pages.

I also couldn’t understand why the Homepage was set to the twitter search results. Ok, having a ‘Chatter’ link is pretty cool but why duplicate it on the homepage? All that will do is encourage twitter users to tweet the word skittles over and over again in order to try to get their tweets to appear on the…

*sound of penny dropping*

Aha! That’s it. The cheapest and most effective viral campaign there is. Genius.

I  was mildly concerned (but mainly interested and excited) to see what cunning ways people would try to subvert the idea. There is the most potential for amusing disaster on the Flickr search page. After all, a picture can speak a thousand crude words whereas there’s only room for about 2o crude words in 140 characters.

Unsurprisingly though, it was those cheeky scamps on twitter, led by mischief and Techcrunch UK’s Mike Butcher, who attempted to cause trouble for skittles.  This was closely followed by some wikipedia attacks (which I suspect will stop as soon as Wikipedia lock the entry).

I suspect that Skittles knew this would happen; they make users fill in an age declaration and those underage can’t continue.

I also don’t think that people acting the goat does Skittles any harm. The negative comments, especially the obviously silly ones, reflect only on the user posting them and at the same time as they are revelling in their cleverness at getting rude words to appear on the skittles home page, all their followers are busy investigating what all the Skittles posts are about.

For good or bad, skittles was the number 1 trending term on twitter for most of the day and with twitter’s current high profile, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more mentions of Skittles in the mainstream media in the next couple of days.

I’m also betting that thousands and thousands of people who wouldn’t have thought about skittles ordinarily will now find their hand inexplicably drawn towards that brightly coloured bag while they are queuing at Tesco or picking up a paper. And that’s what it’s about.

There are some naysayers out there, including the normally astute Paul Fabretti, who are of the opinion that people mindlessly twittering the name Skittles, and people talking about the  promotion rather than the product doesn’t actually add any value. I couldn’t disagree more.

Buying a piece of confectionary is an impulse decision. You’re not buying a car so you don’t need loads of information about price and product. When was the last time you saw an informative ad for sweets or chocolate?

“But what about the general public?” I hear people cry. “The ordinary web users who haven’t heard of twitter, flickr, facebook, and wikipedia. They will be scared and confused when visiting the site and throw their laptop in the bath and never buy Masterfoods’ confectionary again and…”

Ok no-one actually suggested that last bit but you get the idea.

I happen to agree that the current homepage , while a great PR stunt, is not ideal in the long term. I think that Skittles will change it to something else in the near future – why else would ‘Chatter’ and ‘Home’ be duplicated?

But are there really any regular web users who have never heard of social networking and the most common web apps? More importantly, are there any regular web users in the target market for skittles that would be repelled by the use of such tools?

I suspect not. All in all, great work Skittles.