The whale-naming competition launched by Greenpeace provides a perfect example of how the participatory nature of today’s Internet is coming full circle, redefining appropriate organizational communications.

The as-yet-unnamed whale, a South Pacific humpback, is going to be named Mr. Splashy Pants—man, it’s as fun to type as it is to say—and Greenpeace has citizen-driven media to thank for it.

The name is on a list of thirty candidates that includes plenty of wholesome, heartfelt, inclusive appellations from myriad cultures and literary traditions. The overall tenor of these names is very much in the Greenpeace wheelhouse; they’re warm, reassuring and guilt-free—like an organic-wool pullover.

But some of those Rainbow Warriors must have a sense of humor, because they allowed Mr. Splashy Pants to make the list—and make it it did. It’s good to know the organization knows how to lighten up, but I’m willing to bet that they thought they were merely indulging in a good inside joke.

Then the citizen-driven Web found out about Mr. Splashy Pants. The ballot page was posted on BoingBoing, Digg, and Reddit. Those content-aggregator communities spread the word faster than you can say, “Call me Ishmael,” and everybody got to voting.

The results? Mr. Splashy Pants is out front with 71 percent support; Humphrey, a comfortably wry choice, is a very distant second with only 3 percent. The rest, from Aiko to Mira to Shanti, might as well hit the showers.

What’s the point? The people, when aligned behind a common cause, are frighteningly powerful. And this weight is not merely influencing the options organizations offer to audiences; it is changing the very way organizations communicate. Greenpeace has no choice but to respect the intent of these communities. Of deeper significance: They are tempering a relatively intense mission with a modicum of humor. And this is hardly hurting its message.

Other organizations, regardless of their political leanings or industry, should pay attention. There’s something Mr. Splashy Pants is trying to teach us.

EARTHTimes.org is reporting that the nation of Scotland shelled out $250,000 to develop a new tourism slogan. It will soon adorn posters throughout Glasgow’s airport, and doubtless inspire visitors to immerse themselves in the country’s rich history, culture, and diversion.

And what evocative, provocative combination of words did a quarter million buy for those clever Caledonians?

[cue bagpipes and drums]

“Welcome to Scotland.”

Did I just hear William Wallace smack his forehead?

Singapore is so intent on being a world leader in the media industry that the government has created the Media Development Authority, which is determined to put “Singapore at the forefront of the media age.”

How serious is Singapore about fostering a creative economy and a connected society? You just have to see for yourself…

My latest OnlineMediaDaily newsletter pointed me to a Catherine Holahan article at businessweek.com about the seeming downward slide of user-generated (read “amateur”) video on the Web. Amazing, considering we really just got started consuming user-generated video in 2005 when YouTube launched. Can it really be a flash in the pan?

A highlight:

Over 57% of U.S. Internet users say they have watched or downloaded online videos, according to a July study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But they’re not flocking to home videos. According to the study, viewers are most interested in news videos, followed by comedy bits and television shows. Research by Burst Media, an Internet ad network that studies the video market, echoed the findings, ranking news clips, movie trailers, comedy sketches, music videos, and TV shows as the top categories. The category that includes clips produced by users placed ninth out of 11.

I’m not surprised by that ranking, are you? But it’s not about from where, or by whom, the video is generated. This is about quality of content. And in that sense, sure, professionals have the upper hand. More years in the game, bigger production budgets, more contributors with proven chops as writers, editors, and directors. That’s not the point. The point is that user-generated content can be powerful, and can have a hell of a lot more impact than we currently expect from it.

I get that with the birth of user-generated content, the Web was flooded with, as Holahan put it, “skateboarding dogs and beer-drenched parties.” That crap will die down eventually, and good content will both rise up and find niche homes online. I leave the term “good content” vague purposely. I mean the really funny, the really unusual, the very passionate, the very dramatic, the most relevant.

In the past two weeks I’ve talked with folks about using user-generated video to help promote a park by letting visitors post video of their reactions and comments online. I’ve talked with folks who want to build a virtual museum from user-submitted interviews and stories. And I recently posted about Amazon allowing customers to submit video product reviews. All three are great applications of user-generated video. But in all three cases it still comes down to quality of content. People mooning the camera at the park, uninspired museum interviews, and lame product reviews would each render the respective intents worthless. BUT enthusiastic raves about the park, passionate storytelling, and insightful product reviews would each have greater impact than any professionally produced marketing piece could ever hope for.

Don’t write off user-generated video—just help it find its purpose.

About a year a go I recorded myself saying “Vibrate!” very loudly into my cell phone so I could use it as a quasi-existential ringtone. In quiet situations, people would hear my obnoxious ring and ask me to set it to vibrate. Oh wait, it already is! Ha ha!

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that funny, but I noticed a story in the Associated Press the other day that led me to wonder how and why we personalize our PDA announcements, alarms, ringtones, etc. Take the hottest ringtone hitting the streets, elevators, and subways of Madrid, for example: ”Por que no te callas?” or “Why don’t you shut up?”

It’s quite an unremarkable yet popular audio file celebrating a recent snap from Spain’s King Juan Carlos at Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez during a heated exchange at a summit in Chile this month. Downloads from hip-hop artists and classic rockers I get, but a dis from a presidential summit?

The choice of ringtones is clearly no longer really to notify us of incoming calls. It’s rather an exhibitionist’s overt ploy to engage someone in discussion about them and their likes. For me it’s just a distraction and gives me way too much info about the person than I need, especially strangers. I don’t need to know you’re a Smashmouth fan or that you like Stewey Griffin if we are sitting side by side on the Metrobus, do I?

Granted, ringtones can be icebreakers, but you don’t have control over when they might go off. Remember, first impressions can be deal clenchers in business and social settings. You wouldn’t want the Bee Gees singing Staying Alive while at your uncle’s funeral, would you?

So maybe a simple bell evocative of age-old technology will safeguard one from embarrassing disclosures or inappropriate timing. The aural landscape is cluttered enough with the cacophony of our culture. Let’s head back to basics. Right, Watson?

PS: According to legend, before the bell, Alexander and friends first worked up a vibrating receiver for the fledgling phone. Put it on vibrate, and you’re truly old school.

In 2000, someone at a party told me that very soon books would be obsolete. The Rocket eBook had been around for less than a year, billed itself as the “first usable, mass-marketed electronic book,” and could hold a whopping 10 novels. Other competitors were also generating a lot of press—these included the Gemstar, the Everybook, the SoftBook, and the confidently named Librius Millenium Reader (I can’t help hearing here the theme to Conan O’Brien’s “In the Year 2000″ skits). The “death-of-the-book” meme—as old as the computer—had once again been revived.

Today we know that reports of the death of books had—yet again—been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the e-book bubble quickly burst, and the digital text utopia did not arrive. People were buying neither e-books nor e-book readers. While the analog book had been evolved to gratify human sensibilities over millenia, e-book readers still had significant problems to overcome in the area of user interface. A 1999 article in the New York Times on whether such devices meant “the end of the story for books” offered some good reasons for skepticism—or at least cautious optimism:

Robert Darnton, a professor of history at Princeton University who has championed electronic publishing for scholarly dissertations, said, ”I think it’s only a matter of time before we can have mechanical devices that will make possible a satisfactory but new experience of reading.”

But he conceded: ”One thing that seems to be missing is paper, the feel of a book when you hold it, its grain, its texture, its elasticity, its whiteness. The sensation of paper is bound up in the experience of reading. We have a long-term kinetic memory of paper. How will we substitute a new medium for it or improve on it?”

Designers of e-book readers were well aware of the need for them to be book-like. The Rocket eBook was the size of a paperback. Other devices were weighted to the heft of an actual book. One device, by Everybook, tried to get closer to the feel of traditional books by using facing LCD screens. But these were not innovations that readers wanted to curl up with. The problem seemed to be the screen itself.

User reticence about digital reading was already a well-known fact. Electronic texts weren’t themselves new: The Gutenberg Project had been digitizing texts since 1971. Yet computer-based reading hadn’t taken off, even on the Palm Pilot, which had been around since 1996. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen was prescient at least in part:

“It’s a pure matter of technology: The screen resolution is too bad. We know from human-factor studies that reading speed is 25 percent lower on the screen than on the printed page.”

Nielsen thought that 300-dpi screens might solve the problem by providing the same clarity as that of print.

But as resolution improved, it became clear that it wasn’t the only problem. The fact that electronic screens are back-lit makes it both un-book-like and unpleasant for long-term reading. What was required was “digital ink” on a screen (or even paper-like medium) that reflected light in the same way as a real book. Xerox and MIT had been diligently working on this problem while the first wave of e-book reader hype came and went.

Eight years later, the fruits of work on “digital ink” (and “electronic paper”) are only just making themselves known. Today we have the iLiad (2006), the Sony Reader (2007), the soon-to-be iRiver eBook Reader, and the just-released Amazon Kindle.

With the Kindle, Amazon has one-upped other available readers by offering a wireless connection (via Sprint’s EV-DO network) that allows access to Web content and does away with the problem of synchronization to a computer. Unfortunately, the device costs $399, books at least $10 apiece, newspapers $15 a month, and blog subscriptions $2 a month. A $399 price point for the device is a problem, and history has not been kind to paid subscription models when it comes to Web content. And as Jay points out, we can’t yet be confident that we can get the books we want in electronic format. Further, PDFs will need to be converted to the Kindle’s proprietary format to be read on the device. So despite digital ink and wireless access, there are still some significant barriers to entry for users interested in e-books.

But beyond cost, content, and format, there is still the question of user interface. Do we yet have a device that gives readers enough of the full experience of reading a regular book to be a real breakthrough (as Robert Darnton puts it, “the feel of a book when you hold it, its grain, its texture, its elasticity, its whiteness”)? Perhaps we’ll need something that is much more book-like in look and feel—including multiple (digitally inked) pages that bend—before reading on an electronic device doesn’t seem, at a primal level, sterile and less gratifying than the real thing.

Today’s gadget story: Amazon released the Kindle, which will let folks browse online e-book offerings and download titles in about a minute. The target niche and Amazon’s attempt to capitalize therein is tidily encapsulated in Saul Hansell’s NYT blog:

Amazon is trying to do for books what Apple has done for music. It has linked its device tightly to its own online bookstore, just as the iTunes music store is tied into the iPod. Amazon has 90,000 titles for sale at launch, including books from all major publishers.

Of what else is Kindle kapable?

It apparently can also wirelessly access newspapers, magazines, and blogs. The screen technology is breakthrough-cool; that’s real ink, suspended with some kind of crazy contemporary Etch-a-Sketch mojo!

Still, here’s a reality the Kindle will have to overcome: According to the US Census Bureau, Americans buy something like 2.4 billion books every year. Great stuff! But when I browse the stacks at B&N or Borders, I see a heck of a lot of big-picture folios of cats in trees, WWII fighter planes, and the history of Harley Davidson. Those novelty titles have to be gumming up the works, to say nothing of all the self-help schlock and celebrity-cookbooks-of-the-instant in the mix as well.

Jeff, here’s the deal: I read about three or four books a month, and to sound unashamedly snobbish, they’re real doggone books. Right now I’m re-reading No Country for Old Men (in preparation for the film) and working through Heat by Bill Buford, All the King’s Men (because it just keeps getting better), and a book of essays by British philosopher A.C. Grayling. I clock an even 50 blogs using Google Reader and subscribe to the daily and Sunday Washington Post, the New Yorker, and National Geographic. I also pick up the Sunday New York Times most weekends, and am prone to snag The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Criterion, and Ultimate Grappling (props always to Royce Gracie).

My point? Bez, I’m a reader. And not no Little Book of Moving Cheese and Making Chicken Soup or whatever. I’m talking stuff that doesn’t belong anywhere near the back of a toilet tank. Now, you turn me loose on this gizmo, and if I dig it, why, then you’ve done something truly wonderful.

What worries me is that while plenty of people buy books, not too many of those books seem to get read. And the ones that do often have somebody like Jeff Foxworthy on the cover. I just hope you know what you’re doing. I’m rooting for you.

My MarketingSherpa e-newsletter landed the other day. Students of email marketing (and video producers) may want to check out their lead story about how adding video to an email marketing campaign scored a larger conversion rate. Let’s face it, folks L-O-V-E video on the Internet. But in this case I don’t quite get why it worked.

The case study is about a florist that regularly uses email marketing. In addition to offering the usual photos of flowers, this time around they did two things relating to video. First, they bought 15 seconds of stock video of tulips, and they provided a link to that footage in the body of the email. Second, they included the word “video” in the email subject line. Aside from mentioning video in the subject, they also used some good copy to call folks to action in the email headline. OK, launch email.

Conversions—which in Web analytics speak means sales coming from that email campaign—jumped from the usual 1.35% to 2.8%. Nice, particularly since they learned that using “video” in the subject line seemed to dissuade folks from opening the email. Usually 16.5% of recipients open the email, but this time only 14% did. Perhaps they were afraid they might open a large embedded video file or even a virus. So that leaves us with fewer folks opening the email, but more actually buying. Thank you, stock tulip footage!

And now I’m back to why I don’t get it. To sum up, we just learned that 1) users are willing to make the extra click to see tulip video, and 2) are swayed by a video of tulips more so than by a single attractive photo of tulips. They’re flowers, people, they don’t move!

Oh, the sweet promise of Internet video.

Suggesting that technology should be used to further governmental transparency, presidential candidate Barack Obama explained his plan to appoint a Chief Technology Officer. As detailed on VentureBeat:

The CTO’s mandate would be quite different from the Cybersecurity czar appointed under the Bush Administration. Bush’s czar helped defend against cyberattacks. Obama’s CTO, by contrast, would ensure government officials holds open meetings, broadcast live webcasts of those meetings, and use blogging software, wikis and open comments to communicate policies with Americans, according to the plan.

Government 2.0? Imagine the visibility and accountability. Now imagine trying to explain it all to this guy: