Have You Met Flat Smiley?

This is a video submission from Burning Man 2009 for the Flat Smiley Project, a collaborative new media project and community building activity for Burning Man using Web 2.0 and social media tools.

Flat Smiley invites participants to befriend him and take him along on their travels in Black Rock City as well as other regional burner events.  He is modeled after the "Flat Stanley Project", a literacy campaign for school children created by Dale Hubert.

Flat Smiley's message is: "No Burner left behind!" Using Flat Smiley is like sending a postcard from the playa for many burners who are not able to attend the event this year due to the nation's prevailing economic downturn.  It's also a really fun project to get kids involved with, too.

To play along simply download the Flat Smiley PDF file and then color and decorate it as a way to personalize him with their your creative flair. Then, very much like the "traveling gnome" prank in the movie Amelie, take Flat Smiley to the playa, parties and events and photograph and/or videotape him at interacting with the community (drink!). 

Please make friends with Flat Smiley via Facebook and Twitter and be sure to subscribe to Flat Smiley's blog updates.

As always, Flat Smiley loves pARTicipation more than he loves bacon!

Got Tix?

Earlier today we Twittered/Facebooked to see who received their Burning Man ticket yet as we wanted to see what it looked like. Here's some of the replies we received.

If you Twitter @burncast and point a link to your ticket photo, we'll add yours to our Flickr set.

iGoogle Gadget: Countdown to Burning Man!

Oh, how we love this gadget that's installed on our iGoogle desktop by Mark Laramee. It's modeled after the Mac dashboard widget created by the Builder at BurnItMan.org. It's set to Pacific Daylight Time.  You can also just grab the embed code in the window below or  if you prefer to customize it a bit, get it from Google here.

Now some people think that Google is evil and getting too big for their pants.  But in case you didn't know, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google are long-time burners and like to camp next to First Camp.

WTH is First Camp?  First Camp is kinda like the "First Family" if you'll pardon the analogy.  It's where BMorg's big wigs hang out the week of Burning Man. It's just left of the 6 o'clock radius and Esplanade if you're walking towards the Man from Center Camp.

I'm told that Google's camp location is supposed to be a big secret so don't tell nobody, OK?

Ha! Playa rumor or not? You decide!  ;)



Grab the code!
<center><script src="http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://dismalnv.com/externals/burn_widget5.xml&synd=open&w=320&h=300&title=Countdown+to+the+Burn!&border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999&output=js"></script>