18/01/08
Posted in Music, TV, Videoclips, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments » 
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An online music television based on your taste from Last.fm coded by Tim Bormans.
Just enter your Last.fm user name, and the website will play YouTube videos from your popular Last.fm artists.
You get your own personalized MTV, playable in full screen with a unique URL for you to share with your friends. Cool!
08/06/07
Posted in Interface, Music, Programming, Radio, TV, Videoclips, Web 2.0 | No Comments » Tweet This Post
If you are a Web 2.0 freak, own a Last.fm account and spend countless time digging in YouTube, LastTube is the right web service for you
The best of both worlds comes in the shape of a Mashup called LastTube that uses Last.fm’s and YouTube’s APIs.
It’s a web service that reads your preferences from your Last.fm account and “scrobbles” YouTube for related videos. I have to say that it got my preferences quite right. It even found a Bestie Boys live act on Letterman’s Tonight show.
The good: great concept. Serving audiovisual contents according to our musical preferences.
The bad: Firefox freezes while trying to load some videos.
The ugly: the Flash interface. Still, I can live with this at this stage of the project.
Here’s the developer’s blog.
And here’s some of his notes (pay attention to the development time):
Motivation: Create a “useful†client mashup using Flex 2 and public Web Services and RSS feeds in only one day without write any custom server side code.
Total development time: One day (Includes coding, testing, googling and lunch time)
Number of Developers: Just Me.
Server Side Code Created: None
Data Feeds, Web Services and Web Sites Involved: Last.fm, YouTube, Yahoo Pipes, Google Analytics.
Programming Languages and Tools Used: Actionscript 3, MXML, Javascript, Flex Compiler.
Known Issues: Sometimes Firefox “freezes†after video playing. Flash Video that doesn’t have complete metadata can “crash†the app.
Lessons Learned: Datatipfield doesn’t work “perfectly†with xml datasources. Handling Flash Video Metadata is a little bit “trickyâ€. ExternalInterface Rocks!
Btw, check the funny URL for the project.
Enjoy!
22/02/07
Posted in Design, Interface, Radio, TV, Usability, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment » Tweet This Post
Reading Kosmar’s blog I found a link to The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles. With such an appealing title I couldn’t help clicking on it, only to land on Tomski’s website, a blog about traditional and new media with particular attention to the BBC, Tomki’s employer. As Tomski puts it:
Required verbage: These are my personal views and not those of the BBC, my employer.
Here are the principles taken from Tomski’s blog developed as part of the BBC2.0 project. If you’re familiar with blogs (you should be somehow if you’re reading this) you’ll notice how familiar this principles sound to you.
Tomski: The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles:
1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)
2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)
3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.
4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.
5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.
6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.
7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.
8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.
9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Lifeâ€: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.
10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.
11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.
12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users
13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site
14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale
15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.
25/01/07
Posted in Animation, Movies, TV | 2 Comments » Tweet This Post
Imagine James Bond meets Get Smart meets Austin Powers meets The Jetsons meets Gilligans Island meets Elvis meets Tom Jones meets Sin City meets Bikini Bandits meets Martinis meets Chevrolet meets Bewitched meets Space Age meets Tiki Lounge meets Formica meets Stereorama meets Spaceports meets TV Dinners, all in the city of Lost Vegas in the year 2025.
Well this is what Atomic City is, or will be if it ever gets produced. For now this is a project of Markus Rothkranz a Hollywood computer graphics artist (Die Hard and Total Recall) who wants it to be a TV show and, why not, a movie. I don’t know if this will ever be or if it has already been turned down, but the concept and the retro-cool image of the website are awesome.
Don’t miss the trailer and the cast pictures. (with Sean Connery and Tom Jones impersonators included). Didn’t we all think that the future would look like this?
Via atomiccity.net
ATOMIC CITY is a fun high concept family entertainment science fiction television show (and possible movie) set in what we thought the future was going to be like in the fifties and sixties (60s, 60’s, 1950’s, 1960’s), kind of like a live action Jetsons but with a more silly twist like Austin Powers and the Simpsons. For everyone who grew up with shows like Gilligans Island, Get Smart, Bewitched and James Bond, this has that magic innocent charm that shows from the sixties had. Fasten your jetomatic spacebelts baby, because this is designed to be the HOTTEST SHOW UNDER THE SUN! A campy, kitschy show for all ages, this is a worldwide pop culture phenomenon waiting to happen. Tune in your coolarama tv space remote, sit back with a martini and laugh your butt off!
16/01/07
Posted in Interface, TV | 4 Comments » Tweet This Post
In my annual prections (!) for the No Som Perfectes radio show from RAC1 station, I stated that having been 2006 the year of the Video, or better said the year of YouTube, it was only natural that 2007 be the year of the IP TV.
I admit that I’m not going to make a living out of predicting the future. With iTV (now AppleTV) on its way, Vilaweb.com (the catalan online news service) creating Vilaweb.tv and providing TV on demand, and the folks from Skype and Kazaa creating p2p TV with their Venice Project, predicting the coming of age of IP TV was a sure bet (you have to admit that the Skype team has some experience on setting online trends that become industry trends).
I saw a beta testing of the Venice Project on Vilaweb.tv and this closed the circle: I was learning about IP TV on IP TV.
I rushed to the Venice Project website but they no longer accepted beta testers. You had to get in through invitation.
But not anymore. Today code name Project Venice changed into Joost and they’re now accepting beta testers. The interface looked quite innovative and the quality good enough to watch on a big plasma screen. Let’s hope we don’t get the same contents as in analog TV.
14/04/06
Posted in Quotations, TV | No Comments » Tweet This Post
This sounds as if taken from one of the meta-philosophical dialogs fom The Matrix but it’s not. Check out Desperate Housewives season 2 episode 16.
“Perception is reality. If people perceive that I have a drinking problem then I’m an alcoholic”
-Brie Van de Kamp. Desperate Housewives, season 2 episode 16.
14/11/05
Posted in TV | No Comments » Tweet This Post
A best-seller writer sipping wine and smoking a pipe in his 14 room mansion in North Carolina, his dead wife down the stairs and a 911 call. All on TV.
With this scenario one would expect lieutenant Columbo entering the room one moment or another. But no, this is real life. Real life and death.
The six part CBC documentary “Death on the Staircase, 2004”, by award winning Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (Murder on a Sunday Morning, 2002) shows the investigation of the death of Michael Peterson’s wife.
From Peterson’s desperate call to 911 on December 9, 2001 at 2:41 a.m. explaining that his wife had fallen down a flight of stairs, to the verdict of the jury in October, 2003.
Its all there, videotaped. The story has so many dramatic twists and turns that you keep wondering if you’re watching a real life documentary or a court movie. At some point the story goes back 17 years and travels to Germany to investigate a similar staircase accident in which Peterson might have been involved. At this turn the deffence attorney turns to the camera and tells the cameraman: “now you’ve got a much better movie”.
Again TV blurs the limit between fiction and reality.
More info at CBC’s website.
Videos and additional material from CourtTV.
27/08/05
Posted in TV | No Comments » Tweet This Post
DVD-RW, TiVo, Hard Disk Recording…? Forget about finding a replacement for your old VCR and get on-line!
Director General Mark Thompson has confirmed that by next year BBC’s TV channels will be made available on the internet. Users will be able to download legally any program broadcast in the previous seven days.
“We believe that on-demand changes the terms of the debate, indeed that it will change what we mean by the word ‘broadcasting’,” said Mr Thompson.
Probably on-demand will change much more than that. How about advertising?
Nearly there.
Read all about it at news.bbc.co.uk