Music Ally

US artist John Mayer is known as one of the keenest tweeters in the music industry – he even got (allegedly) dumped by former flame Jennifer Aniston over his habit.

However, he’s going cold turkey for the first week of 2010 in what he describes as a ‘one week digital cleanse’ – like a hard drive defragmentation for the brains of the Web 2.0 generation. The rules: email only from laptop or desktop computers, voice-calls only on mobile phones (no texts or emails), no use of Twitter or any social networking site, and no visiting of any entertainment or gossip sites.

“I’ll be defragmenting my mental and psychological hard drive during the first seven days of the new year, and I invite you all to participate,” he blogged.

Augmented reality is the term used to describe overlaying computer-generated imagery on a live video feed. It’s fairly common in the world of sports TV – think virtual sponsor logos on cricket pitches, or the first-down line used in American Football TV broadcasts.

But there’s an increasing buzz around consumer uses of AR, thanks to webcams and mobile phones. Recently, some of that buzz has included music.

John Mayer

The most recent headlines relating to music and AR came from John Mayer’s launch of a video for his song Heartbreak Warfare. Fans go to his website, turn on their webcam, and hold up a printed or mobile version of a special icon, which launches the video. They then appear in the background of the video, using the live feed from their cam. It has to be said, it takes two or three attempts to work properly, but it’s pretty impressive when it does. However, the press release rather rashly claimed that it was the first AR music video – but in fact it was beaten to the punch by…

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US artist John Mayer has unveiled his latest web wheeze – an augmented reality video for his song Heartbreak Warfare. Fans can turn on their webcam and hold up a printed or mobile version of a special icon, which triggers the video to start playing with them in the background as an extra. See above for someone who’s filmed the results.

It’s being hailed as the first AR music video, although Los Valentinos have just done one too, while in August this year Sean Kingston launched an AR karaoke site, which got fans to sing along to one of his songs with an animated version of the star dancing around them.

Big Champagne has compiled a list of the most popular music artists on Twitter, headed by Britney Spears with 995,807 followers at the point the chart was compiled. Which should be some consolation to Britney for losing out in the race to one million followers to Ashton Kutcher.

The rest of the top ten is made up by John Mayer, Diddy, Coldplay, Sara Bareilles, A Fine Frenzy, Soulja Boy, Jimmy Eat World, Heidi Montag and Ashlee Simpson. Although how Heidi Montag qualifies as a music artist, we honestly don’t know. Isn’t there a separate chart for People On The Hills Who Float About Doing Not Much?

It’s interesting to compare this new list with the Top Bands on Facebook list we published in January, whose top ten was made up of Rihanna, Coldplay, Lil Wayne, Linkin Park, Chris Brown, Metallica, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Justin Timberlake.

Only Coldplay appear on both lists. Call them bed-wetters if you must, but they’re at least fully connected Web 2.0 multimedia node bed-wetters.