Earlier today, my friend Richard Yum posted a Tweet saying that Starcraft 2 sold 3 million copies last month and that he “bet like 90% of those were sold in Korea.”

Its a smart bet for Richard if history is anything to go by. According to the infographic below, 50% of copies of the first Starcraft were sold to South Koreans, but that was ten-years ago. Since then, interest in the franchise has exploded:

I’ve never played Starcraft – how good is it?

-Parker

It used to be that you could get away with just a website. Then you needed way to collect email addresses so that people could subscribe to it. Then those forward-looking social media pros started saying that RSS was the future of communications, then Twitter. Whatever the medium, its always been about making it easy for your audience to get updates from your website.

With that in mind, I set up a Facebook Page for BlogCampaigning. All it will really do is pull in posts from here, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t become a Fan.

-Parker

While Parker is wasting away his time I entered the workforce. Last month I started a job at a recently-founded game design studio in Berlin.

Currently, my main job is writing the design document. A design document is basically communicating the overall vision of a game to each and every team member. It’s goal is to describe the overall concept of the game, target audience, gameplay, interfaces, controls, characters, levels, media assets, etc. In short, everything the team needs to know about the design of the game.

It gives programmers an idea of what modules are going to be used, artists know how interfaces will look like and so on. Basically, as Tracy Fullerton puts it in “Game Design Workshop“, a “good design document is like sound blueprints for a building. Everyone on the team can refer to and add comments while they do their separate tasks and understand how their work fits into the game as a whole.”

The documents ensures that everyone is directing their efforts towards a common goal and not interpreting what they know about the tittle in their own unique ways.

Accordingly, I have to communicate with the whole team. As we’re still preparing the prototype, I mainly talk to the main game designer (my boss and the founder of the studio), the artist responsible for the characters and visual design of the game world and the author of the game’s story. This is to agree on the fundamentals of the title.

At the same time, this document will also be the basis of a pitch to the owner of the platform we are planing to release the game on and publishers. As such it also needs to be concise and very visual, containing concept art, flowcharts etc.

The document will end up having between 50 – 100 pages, and it may also include subsections or sub-documents on certain aspects of the game which need a more detailed explanation. There’s still a way to go but the job is actually quite fun.

One of the reasons this is so fun because although this document is traditionally written by the main game designer,  this work was delegated to me. This means that I also have some input in regard to the game’s design. Yesterday, for example, I spent most of my day trying to think of possible achievements and how they would influence the game play. I loved it.

Of course I’m quite curious  to see how the final product will develop. I can’t wait to play the prototype!

-Jens

If you spent the latter half of your summer following Heather, Jens, Adam Gorley and myself on Twitter in hopes of a quick-fix for your BlogCampaigning cravings we’ve got news for you: We’re back to blogging here.

Jens was busy writing love letters to his girlfriend Jenna, but he also got a job at a video game design studio in Berlin. We’ll have a post up shortly about his experience writing a game design document.

Adam Gorley did some serious renovations on his house. I hear he even dug out his own basement. Has your editor ever dug out a basement? I didn’t think so.

Heather spent some time traveling, and got to see the west coast of Canada for the first time.

In May, I started a new job at Radar DDB. That’s been keeping me pretty busy, but not so busy that I didn’t also go to Las Vegas, New Orleans and Vancouver on separate mini-vacations.

I have no idea what Espen has been up to.

Thanks for reading BlogCampaigning, and stay tuned!

-Parker

I’ve met a Jon Gauthier a few times and while I  knew he was an entrepreneurial fellow, I didn’t know he was starting up his own courier company.

The company, Good Foot Delivery, “provides a personalized point-to-point delivery service on foot or via public transit as well as employment opportunities to people with developmental disabilities.”

I think this is a great idea, and while I don’t want to downplay the hard work that Jon probably put in to get Good Foot off the ground I also think its a great example of how easy it can be to get a project like this off the ground with the help of social media. Its great to see that Jon was able to use his skills to do something he was really passionate about while also giving back to the community.

Read more about Jon’s company, Good Foot, in the Toronto Star and then vote for them on the Pepsi Refresh Project website.

Keep up the good work, Jon!

-Parker

It happens to me every summer.

The sun comes out, and all of a sudden I’d rather be playing soccer, riding my bike or sitting on a patio instead of working on BlogCampaigning.

Don’t worry, though. I’ll be back soon enough with some stuff here. Expect updates about my new job, thoughts about the advertising industry, why I think Toronto is Canada’s #1 Second Class City and lots more. I’m also big on the idea of those infograpahic-type things that you see everywhere these days, so maybe I’ll even try and put one together.

Until then, follow BlogCampaigning on Twitter to stay in the loop. Or just get outside and spend some time enjoying the good weather.

-Parker

Turbonegro was a Norwegian rock band that exploded onto the scene in the mid-1990s. Jello Biafra even called their 1997 masterpiece Apocalypse Dudes, a wild mixture of glam, rock’n'roll and classic 1970s US punk, possibly the most important European record ever.

Yet there was something else that set the band apart from the rest, their denim-mustache-Tom-of-Finland-look, basically a move to piss of the Norwegian metal scene which couldn’t be shocked by much. Except homosexuality.

During their 1998 Darkness Forever tour the mental problems of singer Hank von Helvete became such an issue that the band broke up in the waiting room of a psychiatric emergency ward in Milan, Italy.

After their split they slowly developed into a cult phenomenon. A tribute album was recorded and the momentum from their old records would continuously grow. Part of this resurrection was the blossoming of the so called Turbojugend (Turbo youth), a fan club with chapters all over the world.

What started as a joke became the Turbo equivalent to the Kiss Army. My dentist was in it (seriously!).

A Turbojugend member can be recognized by their specially-made denim jackets with the Turbonegro logo and “Turbojugend [name of chapter]” stitched on the back. In the late 1990s Turbonegro’s German label Bitzcore would print up Levi’s jackets with the “Turbojugend Oslo” logo on it, but eventually changed Oslo to St. Pauli.

After a while these jackets became so sought-after, so that Bitzcore-run Turbonegro mailorder would start printing up Levi’s jackets with different chapter names on them.

The jackets are also known as a “Kutte”, a German word originally referring to denim jackets/vests worn by metal fans. There’s one crucial rule about the Kutte; it must never be washed. The only exception is when someone pukes on it, then the owner is allowed to clean it with lukewarm water and cover the smell with a fragrant.

I got mine at a festival in Germany about seven or eight years ago. I hasn’t been washed ever since (but then again I haven’t worn it in the last… three years or so).

-Jens

A few weeks ago, a young producer and musician by the name of Jeremiah Vancans sent me a song he thought I’d like, called “PR Girls”, that he produced for his group The Deli Boys.

From his description of the song:

“It talks about the large boot, small dog, fancy bag culture that has taken over the city streets across our nation. We recognized a type of girl that was repeatedly emerging from the deep jungles of urban culture. Owning the street with their over-priced bags, they developed their own language of terms by using weird melodic lisps and slurs. These women, no matter if they were in the Public Relations field or not, were dubbed ‘PR Girls’. This term catapulted the idea of writing and producing this song. We hopes you like.”

(If you’re reading this post via RSS, you might have to click through to listen to the track below.)

The Deli Boys – PR Girls

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

What do you think? Is this what you think of when you think “PR Girl”?

And on a related note: whatever happened to Kim Kardashian’s reality show about PR Girls?

-Parker

Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was ousted by his own party this week; he increasingly lost support because of backflips on election promises, badly implemented policies and the suggestion to introduce a super tax on mining profits.

The polls began to worsen and the power hungry, poll-driven Senior fraction of the Labor Party decided to waste him. His successor is Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female Prime Minister.

“Why should I care?”, you might wonder.

Under Rudd Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, tried to introduce his much criticized internet filter, an issue I covered on this blog before. I won’t repeat what’s wrong with it but just would like to point to this video as an example of Conroy’s competence.

Conroy also called Google’s Street view snafu “the single biggest breach of privacy in history“; however, this did not stop his department to craft an Orwellian scheme that may require Australian ISPs to log and retain details of all people’s online communications and Web browsing activity.

At the same time no one really knows what’s going on because the government imposed secrecy provisions on all the parties with which it is negotiating in this matter.

“[T]he process remains completely opaque and we are being asked to agree to the imposition of a generalised surveillance regime with nothing but the vaguest reassurances about its scope, intent and the potential hazards of abuse, misuse, maladministration and outright oppression. (Well, actually, we’re not being asked at all. It’s just happening.”

It gets even scarier given the government’s intention to link the information gathered from monitoring internet activities to identifiers such as pass port numbers.

This opens up…

…the real possibility of mashing together all of the personal information available in your data matching matrix to (your income, your tax history, you bank account details, your medical records for starters) to your online life – your tweets, your Facebook account, your email, your Chatroulette history, your 4square tracking data, your blog entries, the link you clicked not realising it was taking you to a snuff porn site, the link you clicked knowing it was taking you to a celebrity porn site, the comments you leave here today, all of it.

However, now that Rudd is gone there is a chance that things might change. 

Under Gillard the Labor Party is likely to look to move on from all the unpopular policies that have been driving down its popularity; accordingly, rumours are rife that Conroy will be replaced by Senator Kate Lundy.

As Thenextweb points out this is something also Internet users outside of Australia should appreciate:

You should care because of the precedent it creates, and the global flow on effect such a precedent would create.

After all, similar schemes were considered in other countries, one of the being my native Germany.

However, the question remains in how far Lundy is really able to achieve a change in policies and in how far the Labor Party is willing to distance itself from previous policies.

Explains Thenextweb

While the opportunity to replace Conroy may be too good to pass up, the reality for the electorate is that no woman is an island, particularly in Government, and without support for a radical departure from the existing strategy, Lundy will be as effective as the man who preceded her.

At the same time she does seem more competent than Conroy and has history of engaging with new technology and its role in Government. So there’s hope of Australia getting over its traditional conservative censorship hangover – something we should all be grateful for.

-Jens

Twenty-odd years ago, a whole generation of kids grew up tinkering with Commodores, Ataris, and clunky Intel 286s. Back then families shelled out a good chunk of change to participate in The Personal Computer Revolution, hoping to give their kids a head start in the hazy future of computers and electronics. It wasn’t all fun and games though. These devices weren’t just toys, and they encouraged anyone, adults and kids alike, to delve deeper into their mechanic and electronic underpinnings.

For our generation, I hope we also pass on the favour to the kids, to allow them the opportunity to tinker, to think, to come to terms with the future in their own way. Here’s the state of the art in exploration, to the delight of kids and adults alike:

For the toddlers, the One Laptop Per Child project’s OLPC XO-1 junior convertible tablet takes the crown as the cutest, bubbliest tablet currently not on the market. A few years ago, it was possible to get these laptop/tablets via the Give One Get One program, which donates a device to the developing world for every one purchased. The project has since discontinued this deal, but it’s still possible to find these on eBay. However, the best way to get one of these is to participate in the OLPC project itself. The project has loaner models for volunteers, whether as coder, hardware developer, or even evangelist. The hardware itself is fairly hackable, and as the OS is based on Fedora Linux, with large parts of the UI based on Python, it’s an easy and early entry point for kids into the wonderful world of UNIX. There is a higher spec “high school” version currently in development: the XO-1.5.

For the curious teen, looking to brag about the biggest, baddest robot on the block, there’s the MakerBot:

MakerBot photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid laughingsquid.com

The MakerBot is a construction kit for the modern age. It’s a cheap, do-it-yourself, DIY 3D printer. For $950, it allows you to construct objects from models designed on a computer. The base material is ABS plastic, which the MakerBot spits out layer by layer to form the finished product. A video is worth a million words, so here’s Bre Pettis, a founder of Makerbot Industries.

Missing a Lego piece? Maybe you can make one yourself. Or perhaps try to refine this experimental Coke and Mentos driven engine. Tons of space for learning and fun here.

For the fledgling adolescent, wanting to know more about why one boy is so different from another, or needing information on coming to terms with family histories of illness, we have the gateway to genetic analysis and biotechnology in the upcoming OpenPCR project. While the science of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is more advanced, the goal remains the same: it’s a tool for enlightening and learning about our world. The OpenPCR is a low-priced, DIY box for replicating DNA, as the first basic step in genetic screening, testing, and analysis. The purpose of the PCR process is to create enough copies of the microscopic DNA from a sample, so that we can visualize it, and use other tools to break it apart or match it for certain patterns. The project is requesting funding at their KickStarter page, which has a good video intro to the process.

Why would kids be interested in this? Because they can use it to prove that they really do hate brussels sprouts, so don’t even try making them for dinner.