Dr. Gabor Forgacs made that prediction. Now, he is making it a reality. Gabor is a University of Missouri researcher doing groundbreaking work in regenerative medicine. He is also the Scientific Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Organovo, the latest company to receive support from you, the donors of the Methuselah Foundation.

Thamarberber @Maxime Verhagen: I assume that @wouterbos is fake …??

MaximeVerhagen: @Thamarberber completely fake.

WouterBos: @MaximeVerhagen. Liar. I tweet so I exist.

MV: @wouterbos no wouter told me himself that he feared to get into trouble when he starts to use twitter

WB: @MaximeVerhagen Openness and transparency are important, so I changed my mind. Twitter is an excellent communication channel with my supporters.

MV: @wouterbos I know wouter as someone who is tenacious. This would contradict with  what he previously said in interviews about twitter.

WB: @MaximeVerhagen I know perfectly well what I said in the Financial Times. However I can change my mind.

MV: @wouterbos within a few weeks?

WB: @MaximeVerhagen your trifle with the leaked photo of the Treveszaal showed me the power of this medium.

Of course this is not new. The hijacking of identities takes place continuously. It starts to become a worry when nobody doubts the virtual identities and people start to spread stories about them without any thought. On the Internet everyone has the power to pretend he is someone else on the internet. Celebrities have even hired flacks to feed content into their Twitter streams, their blogs, and the various other online channels of faux authenticity. Just imagine what could have happened if this fake Minister of Finance tweeted about a certain Dutch bank that about to collapse due to the crisis? And people started to believe this! Could this fake Minister be responsible for another crash in the financial system?

In the last years we have seen many new communication channels. People and companies are using MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Qik, Digg, Del.icio.us, Gmail and so on to communicate with each other. And this is not even a complete list. Just think for example of all the virtual worlds out there. Almost every day a new communication channel is launched. How can you keep up with the pace of the Internet? And how can you keep up with all your virtual identities, assuming that they are all yours.

I don’t have the answers to the questions above. I do think however companies should be aware of the problems that could pop up due to the fact that people can discredit their brand by using fake identities. In these modern times Corporate Communications must have a policy for monitoring and controlling virtual identities! As we have discussed in the book Me the Media (download the book for free or buy the hardcopy version on Amazon) everybody becomes a broadcaster and receiver at the same time. Empowered by the Internet. So mark my words, this story will continue…

Note: On the end of March the fake Wouter Bos Twitter account was given to the Communications Department of the Ministry of Finance. The real Wouter Bos has since then posted one tweet.

“http://twitpic.com/135xa- There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”

As the news story developed, about “two new tweets (with the word “plane” in it) every 10 seconds came in. Within minutes that went up to 200 to 400 Tweets every few seconds. There were tons of first-person accounts too.” Via

This wasn’t the first time that Twitter had beaten the old media. It happened with the Mumbai attack (the tweets were later on combined within Google Maps which gave an interesting overview on the bombings) and with another plane crash as well.

Interesting to see is that earlier this week Jaiku, a competitor of Twitter and owned by Google, announced that it wouldn’t continue the development of their service, but that it would go open source. This offers great new opportunities according to founder Jyri Engeström:

“Soon, anyone, for free and with little effort, will be able to install and modify the Jaiku code, launch it on App Engine, and run their own microblogging platform… and what we’re seeing here is the accelerating trend away from microblogging being a destination to microblogging being a pervasive and ubiquitous part of the fabric of the web itself.“

Combine this with the fact that Yahoo BOSS engineer Vik Singh created a Twitter-Yahoo mashup called TweetNews and we can see the future of news. Micro-blogging platforms can be used to track down breaking news stories. Combine this with professional journalism and we have got the perfect new media company!

Sander Duivestein

May 25, Phoenix, the next Mars Explorer, landed on the Red Planet. Phoenix has a DVD-ROM on it, visible for all aliens, next to the US flag image.

What on Earth and for heaven’s sake, I wondered, does it say in the text block just beneath the disk’s center? This thing, made of a special silica glass, of course is meant to be Me-marketing par excellence: the first digital library representing human kind as such, our archetypal Me, on this most of the time icecold planet nearby.

To get a clue, I loaded a fairly hires picture from the web, oversized it on a PowerPoint slide, put on my +1.0 reading spectacles, focused my eyes, and tried to decipher the text. It wasn’t easy at all, but finally I managed to get the full picture. However, I’m not sure about the word with the (? ? . . . ? ?) behind it. Someone help me please, to solve this final mystery!

Well, below is what I made of it, imho a little hilarious and actually strictly relevant for the record to visitors in some down-to-earth space museum:

“This archive, provided to the NASA Phoenix mission by The Planetary Society, contains literature and art (Vison of Mars), greetings from Mars visionaries of our day, and names of 21st century Earthlings who wanted to send their names to Mars. This DVD-ROM is designed to be read on personal computers in 2007. Information is stored in a spiral groove on the disc. A laser beam can scan the groove when metallized or a microscope can be used. Very small bumps and holes ( ? ? not sure about this ? ? ) represent the zeroes and ones of digital information. The groove is about 0,74 microns wide. For more information refer to the standards document ECMA-268 (80 mm DVD Read-Only Disk).”

This discovery was made on June 1 by Jaap Bloem, co-author of the Me the Media book, currently in Dutch, but to be published in English and French as well (jaapbloem@gmail.com). On June 7 the text was submitted to the Wikipedia Phoenix spacecraft lemma.

A reminder to help you along: Part 5, the dramatic Epilogue, concludes with the following memorable words:

The third media revolution has put the spotlight on Me. But how will we deal with all these different Me’s? Will ICTainment bring us all back into line? Are blogs really a weapon against the evil producer? Or will social networks enable us both to engage? Can you imagine the producer and the consumer sitting as equals at one table?

We, the individuals, have taken control. But when everybody is in control, who exactly is in charge?

The Hopi tribe of North American Indians has an old saying, which goes: “He who tells the stories, rules the world.”

So, What Actually Is Your Story . . . ?