Whilst flying back from a fun editorial strategy meeting in Cleveland, I loaded up the Gumball 3000 movie from 2005 onto my iPod Video and laughed out loud at the antics of the crazing driving from the drivers of the fastest automobiles on the planet.  Famous celebs, rich business men and rich kids sped 3000 miles across the US - much to the fury of the law.  The point of all this is to highlight the new, 2006 Gumball 3000 has just begun - a journey from London to L.A, via Belgium, Thailand and, er, Salt Lake City.

Utilizing the power of Web 2.0, ALK, the official GPS suppliers to the cars in the race (sorry, rally), are providing live access using their state of the art software - showing regular Joe’s like you and me, exactly where the exotic cars are…

Click here to track the Gumball 3000 cars using world-wide GPS.

In addition, and because I’m a good guy, I’ve found a bunch of links to videos of previous Gumball 3000 rallys from the last couple of years - some of the files are pretty big, but trust me, they are well worth the download.

6 days in May trailer (13.5 MB)

Gumball 2006 overview (151 mb)

Gumball 3000 - The Movie trailer (5 mb)

Gumball 2004 Aiya Boys trailer (4.5 mb)

Cuban Brothers movie (86.5 mb)

Ruby Wax - Gumball 2001 (144 mb)

Jackass - Gumball 2001 (135 mb)

Playboy TV (18.5 mb)

Jay Leno with Adrien Brody (18 mb)

Bad Boys interviews (12 mb)

London Tonight TV (5.8 mb)

Big Breakfast 2000 (8.5 mb)

Big Breakfast 2001 (3 mb)

Jackass Promo (5 mb)

From New York 2 Los Angelos (4 mb)

Gumball 2000 video (2 mb)

MTV News (3 mb)

Don’t forget to bookmark this page as I’ll update it with the latest videos as they appear. 
Also try http://video.google.com/ - search for Gumball: Long and you’ll find a nice batch of videos - each over an hour in length.

Here’s the timetable of events for the Gumball Rally 2006:

Gamespot and IGN have proven that the steel curtain between editorial and advertising is more of a thin paper wall rather than a church/state scenario.  It’s come to light that game publishers such as EA, Activision and Ubisoft have been purchasing editorial known as previews to readers, or Gumballs to advertisers for $7,000 a pop.  Whilst I don’t have a problem with this, it shows that pretty much any website can be bought, for the right amount… More details after the jump.

Here’s the scoop from Kotaku:

Shortly after the first Preview Ho, I was contacted by a former media buyer for various game publishers. This person was irked by the game media’s pretense that previews were pure editorial. But unlike their readers– or for that matter, me– my source had hard proof they were much more than that.

“I was the media buyer who made the purchase,” the source told me, “signed the insertion order, and then followed up to make sure that what we had been promised was in fact delivered.”

This source sent me some invoices for a game studio client.  Several were from Gamespot, and while most of the items referred to legitimate ads, a couple mentioned something called “Front Door rotation”– or what Gamespot staffers refer to as a “gumball”. Gumballs are those thumbnail screenshots you see on the front page of Gamespot, when you visit the site– clicking on these takes you to an article about the game.

In the Gamespot invoice I looked at, a gumball for two weeks cost the media buyer’s client over $7000.

“You can purchase messaging plus units that increase the likelihood of an article about your game showing up on their front page,” the source said. In other words, if you want your game to get more editorial prominence, you pay extra.

Then the source showed me an invoice for the same game, this one from
IGN/Gamespy. What Gamespot calls a gumball, Gamespy calls, less charmingly, a “Gamespy Spotlight”. But the content and the principle is basically the same: the Spotlights are those thumbnail screenshot links that you see on the site’s front page. “What you’re looking at on the front page is not what the editors decided is the best game,” the media buyer informed me.

First noting that the practice is “pretty common both in print and online“, Peer Schneider, IGN’s VP of Content Publishing, described their Spotlights as “’sponsored’ slotting, sometimes called ‘digital reprint.’ This is a practice where advertisers want to make sure coverage of their titles is seen. For example, some magazines sell their cover image (or part of it) to the highest bidder.” Schneider insisted IGN and GameSpy don’t sell their “top story” placement to anyone. “We have, however, designated spots that can be ’sponsored.’ What this means is that a publisher interested in exposing more users to a title (including games, movies, etc.) can book a one-day sponsorship in what we call ’spotlights.’” Like Kasavin, Schneider enunciated a principle of strict separation between editorial and ad sales.

After watching Scratch, the history of DJing, Turntablism and Scratching featuring all the old skool greats - Jazzy Jay, Grandmaster Flash, Grandmixer DXT, Cash Money and Mixmaster Mike and Qbert I hopped over to Google video to see if I could pick up some old skool jams.  There’s not really a lot there yet, but I found The Message and a couple of other Sugerhill tracks.  One other cool track was Grandmaster Bush, thats right, the President himself cutting, scratching and dropping a couple of transforms…

Grandmaster Bush on the wheels of steel

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five - The Message

Scratch starts with an origin story. Grand Wizard Theodore (the “Thomas Edison of the movement”) recalls the day, way back in 1975, when his grandmother told him to turn down the music he was making in front of his Bronx River Houses apartment. In order to hear her, he put his hand on the turntable, holding the record in place. As he moved his hand, slightly, a new sound rose up. And so, he smiles, scratching was born.

The story of scratching involves many such moments — accidents, discoveries, instants of creative inspiration. Then again, it’s not just one story. Part collective history, part social documentary, part personal reflection, and part political rumination, Doug Pray’s film tells multiple stories, intersecting, reverberating, leading in and out of one another. Less weary and ironic in tone than Pray’s Hype! (which looked at grunge and its commodification fallout), Scratch treats its subject and subjects with due respect, as well as good humor and appreciation. In part, this celebratory mood is a function of the movement’s politics and acute self-understanding. Despite the increasing appearance of “decorative” DJs in occasional pop acts (who might remain nameless but they know who they are), for the most part, DJs have held onto their culture, and continue to expand and complicate their art. Thus far, in other words, there’s no mall muzak or Ralph Lauren flannel shirts associated with turntabling.

Source: PopMatters

Microsoft will upgrade the CPU used in its Xbox 360 games console early next year, the CPU’s manufacturer announced today. The new CPU will be built using technology that can reduce heat and power consumption, as well as potentially increasing speed.

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One of the most important parts of preparing for a football tournament, as any fool knows, is picking the official song. The problem is, they tend to be picked by grey men in grey suits at the Football Association, which is why we once ended up with the Spice Girls being involved in an England song. Thankfully, the days of roping the squad in seem to be behind us, but this year’s pick of Yorkshire stadium rockers Embrace has already proven to be controversial, before anyone’s even heard the song.

Led by Danny and Rick McNamara, Embrace had a few hits in the late 90s before almost completely disappearing at the turn of the Millennium. However, they made a remarkable comeback in 2004 with the Coldplay-endorsed album Out Of Nothing, and are expected to make a similar splash with new album This Brand New Day, out this week and full of solid but fairly uninspiring anthems. Is that what we need for our own England song - called World At Our Feet - this summer?

Well, it can hardly be much worse than the last two World Cup tunes, can it? In 1998 we had the Spice Girls with the Lightning Seeds and Echo and the Bunnymen, one of the strangest super-groups of all time, and they churned out the instantly forgettable - and instantly forgotten - (How Does It Feel To Be) On Top Of The World. In 2002, bizarrely, TV personalities Ant and Dec were chosen to belt out the insanely catchy (as in, it’s so catchy, you’ll go insane) We’re On The Ball.

That was clearly an attempt by the FA to latch onto the laddish appeal of David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s Three Lions, which had overshadowed official releases at both Euro ‘96 and France ‘98. Unfortunately, what they forgot to do was to actually bring out a decent song, instead of just throwing in some very dated and frankly rather cheesy dance music and getting the artists formerly known as PJ and Duncan to shout ‘We’re on the ball!’ ad nauseum over the top of it.

They fared a little better two years ago by getting The Farm out of retirement/obscurity to re-release their classic All Together Now, but it only just made it into the Top Ten (beaten by Peter Andre’s Insania, amongst other things), and hardly inspired the fans in the same way that Three Lions has done for the last ten years. Indeed, the only other song to have had any similar impact was Vindaloo by Fat Les in 1998, which had exactly the right ingredients for a good footy song.

It was catchy, patriotic and belligerant (’we’re gonna score one more than you!’ was the refrain) as well as much rather more cool than Ant and Dec or the Spice Girls. Or Embrace, for that matter. But rock bands have a precedent for success in this field with 1990’s World In Motion by New Order, which not only survived Keith Allen being in the video but also John Barnes rapping: “Catch me if you can, ’cause I’m the England man. And what you’re looking for is the master plan.”

Genius. And for those of you who loved his appearances in that song and the infamous Anfield Rap, Barnes is promising to come out of pop retirement, if the material is right for his image: “If you write a rap like Kanye West or Busta Rhymes, something which gives me a bit more street cred, a bit of a gangsta rap, then I will gladly do it,” he said. “As long as it has a bit of soul and rhythm to it then I’ll do it.” He’ll be singing on The People’s Anthem this summer, with DJ Christian O’Connell, who is organising the effort, boasting: “Now that we have Barnesy on board, whatever tune the FA comes up with has no chance.”

Way back in 1970, the World Cup holders added a number one single to their list of honours with Back Home. It’s still remembered fondly by people of that generation, but nobody with glasses the size of those worn by Nobby Stiles should be let near a pop single. Basically, it was rubbish. the same can be said for the 1982 effort, This Time, which had Kevin Keegan’s perm and woolly jumper replacing Nobby’s specs as the visual representation of the quality of the music.

In 1986, the squad unleashed We’ve Got The Whole World At Our Feet, but the days when it was deemed acceptable for a bunch of ugly footballers to be allowed to sing songs to the general public were drawing to a close, and it only got to number 66 in the charts. No wonder the FA brought in New Order four years later. Of course, there’s also been plenty of dismal unofficial efforts released, particularly in the last few World Cups.

Four years ago, Terry Venables released a double A-side single called England Crazy, which featured him doing a swing version of the song and a ‘terrace chant’ version. The video saw him riding round London in an open top bus with Des Lynam and Paul Gascoigne. We’re not making this up, you know. Fat Les tried to repeat their success of 1998 with Who Invented Fish & Chips? (Pop It In the Onion Bag). Unfortunately, it was rubbish, and didn’t even chart.

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