Too much?

In Sweden, where topless sunbathing even in pools is accepted (The Bare breasts network or Bara bröst in Swedish) , the following ad of Jägermeister has been slammed by the Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising (ERK). The same thing happened in the past with a poster ad for Lavazza coffee (read here and here).I wonder what would have been the case in Greece or in any other country. Have your say, what do you think?

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I don’t know what’s worse

I wasn’t intending to comment on the Zachopoulos-gate (or DVD-gate) that has been dominating Greece for the past month because I didn’t think I could add anything new. (some entry points to the story in english, german, italian for those of you who don’t know much). However, today I came across two articles that discuss something very interesting and I felt I need to comment on.

Both articles (here and here, unfortunately available only in Greek) argue that due to the recent scandal (and not only) the domination of the two leading political parties, the liberal-conservative New Democracy, which is governing since 2004, and the socialist Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), is diminishing.

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Having said that, my comment is simple and to the point. On the recent elections (September 2007) and having very vivid memories of the unprecedented destruction that Greece faced due to the fires (I don’t have to bring back the tragic figures again), Greeks have shown their preference on the two aforementioned political parties allowing them to dominate (and for one of them to form government).
Despite the fact that such a catastrophe did not have a big impact on the election results, it seems that a scandal like the one revealed nowadays involving sex, corruption, publicity, journalists, politicians, cultural affairs (?) etc. has more impact on the Greek society. That is of course if we had elections soon and based on their outcome we could compare, now it’s only an estimate. It’s a long way to the next elections (if no surprises pop up) and Greeks have shown they suffer of short-memory, therefore, I wouldn’t be so optimistic to think that the domination of the two leading parties is over (I hope time proves me wrong on this one). Even if that was the case, I feel it’s still sad to see a country reacting in a scandal like this and not in catastrophe like the one of the summer of 2007. I don’t know what’s worse…

Web 2.0 and more…

Motivated by my supervisor’s, prof. Paul Johannesson (SYSLAB), uploading this video about Web 2.0 on the lab’s homepage, I spent some time browsing youtube for some interesting videos related to it. It is a term that is quite often misused constituting it one of the hottest buzzwords of our days . Obviously, there several videos available, but here’s what i came up with:

Tim O’Reilly on What is Web 2.0

The Machine is Us/ing Us by Dr. Michael Wesch