This blog is about web 2.0, traditional media and advertising, how they affect each other and how they affect us (especially me). It is also about stuff I like such as art, design, animation, music and photography. what I feel like writing. Nothing written here should be taken too seriously...
The Sandpit is a 5 minute short film created by Sam O’Hare (@duskzero) using a digital version of the tilt-shift technique (the kind of effect that makes life size photography look like miniature models).
The movie was shot on a Nikon D3 as a series of 35.000 stills at 4 fps (as fast as the camera would go) and the tilt-shift effect was added at post-production time. It took O’Hare 5 days and two evenings to complete the shooting.
Res nou pels geeks però una introducció a les xarxes socials i a l’impacte que tenen a la societat. Ha estat molt interessant participar a la Universitat de Lleida a les jornades que l’associació ASPID, una associació de discapacitats físics de Lleida, ha organitzat al voltant del tema xarxes socials.
No havia tingut mai abans ocasió de conèixer la relació dels discapacitats físics amb un món sense cap barrera ni arquitectònica ni tecnològica.
This video was prepared by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books. Originally meant solely for a DK sales conference, the video was such a hit internally that it is now being shared externally. Posted by Penguin Books to YouTube the 9th of March 2010.
Although this technique has been used before in several other TV commercials is still fresh and the message gets delivered loud and clear. And if such a message is said by Penguin Books, one of the top British publishing companies, it gets even louder. You’ll read about it.
I just found this weird dummy text in the tutorial for the Symphony CMS.
He aquí al Oso Eduardo bajando las escaleras con la cabeza—plom, plom, plom—de la mano de Christopher Robin. Es la única manera que él conoce de bajar las escaleras, aunque a veces piensa que deber haber otra forma mejor que seguramente la descubriría si pudiera dejar de darse golpes en la cabeza y pararse a pensar.
Some questions came to my mind after reading it:
Why is Oso written in capital O?
Why is he walking down the stairs on his head?
Why is he holding hands with Christopher Robin and who is Christopher Robin.
If they’re so close as to hold hands while walking down the stairs why doesn’t Christopher Robin tell Eduardo the Bear the right way to walk?
Who chose this sick example to create a dummy text when there’s clearly better texts such as:
El veloz murciélago hindú comía feliz cardillo y kiwi. La cigüeña tocaba el saxofón detrás del palenque de paja.
(Weirder than the Oso Eduardo story but at least it contains all characters in the Spanish alphabet plus all the accented vowels)
Most of Segura’s comments are applicable to many areas other than design if not to life itself. I particularly love the one I used for this post’s title.
A good design is nice to look at, but an idea makes you look at good design.
Design is not just a “visual” medium. It is a complete experience, one which draws emotion from intelligence and makes the experience a memorable one, which in turn drives you to act.
Clients tend to ask for what they want, not for what they need
(about pitching) I do not, have never and will never do free work. Period. It is ridiculous to ask someone to do this. No client that asks you to do this will do it for you. It is disrespectful, devalues our industry and the talent in it. People only value things they pay for. So, if they want your work for free, then they don’t think very highly of you.
Don’t let things happen to you. Make things happen for you. If you’re going to dream, dream big, it’s free.
Called Skinput, the system is a marriage of two technologies: the ability to detect the ultralow-frequency sound produced by tapping the skin with a finger, and the microchip-sized “pico” projectors now found in some cellphones.
But how does the system know which icon, button or finger you tapped? Chris Harrison at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, working with Dan Morris and Desney Tan at Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond, Washington, exploit the way our skin, musculature and skeleton combine to make distinctive sounds when we tap on different parts of the arm, palm, fingers and thumb.
(Documentary entirely in Catalan. Excerpts translated into English after the video)
“I tu quin diari compres?” (which newspaper do you buy?) is a 40 minute long documentary by the Catalan public TV on the changing of the news landscape in the digital world. It covers issues about media convergence, citizen journalism,social networks and the search for viable business models online.
The newstand in the journalism faculty of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona sells 80% less newspapers than 10 years ago and they survive selling candies. We’re witnessing the crises of the newspaper business model while there’s no clear digital alternative.
You don’t have to find the news, news simply find you.
You know exactly what’s going on, they can’t hide it from you.
Nicholas Lemann, dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City
What’s really important is that we have a lot of different points of view published digitally. Will this substitute journalism? Clearly not. The crowd can’t do it.
I’m a New York Times and a Philadelphia Inquirer subscriber and I’ll continue to do so because I want these two newspapers to exist.
I don’t mind paying for the subscriptions but I’d prefer if newspapers talked about the things that really worry me. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t and when they don’t I search the internet for information about the issues I’m interested in.
Newspapers are more concerned with the news that help them selling more rather than with news that people want to know. Sports sell more than social issues.
The only question I have is whether the business will be print or multimedia. So in this difficult moment of transition you have to be as flexible as possible: you have to produce good print journalism, on the web, on iPods, on mobile phones, on computers and if they invent a watch we also have to be able to serve news there.
If you have an excellent content it translates into a good business whether it’s print or whatever.
Sílvia Barrosso, editor of Avui.cat, largest Catalan online medium
I didn’t find adapting to the immediacy of the online world difficult. You just change your mindset and accept that you’re a radio.
In principle I work for the printed version but I end up working also for the digital one.
I five years time I’ll cover an event and bring my video camera. I’ll produce the written column, the video, the digital column… everything. I’m not ready but I have no choice.
All newspapers, if not there yet, are on the verge of having more readers online than on paper.
Traditionally the business model for the newspaper was based on advertising and sales. Online sells don’t exist and advertising revenues are minimal compared to print.
We assume that if newspapers move to the web they will survive but this is not a certain thing. A successful online publication has profits of around 3% while a successful newspaper can yield a 30%. With this margin the capacity to reinvest in professionals to improve content quality will diminish resulting in a loss of quality.
Google news hierarchy is done by a machine; the most read news are the most important and the most important are the most read.
We left to the robots what they do best and we don’t want to do. We don’t devote any effort to cutting & pasting information nor the last minute news. This is done so the few resources we have can work on information that’s different from the rest.
Big newspapers are also disappearing from the internet. Now who gives you credibility apart from the brand? Most of the times a contact from your social network. You click on the link without knowing where the information came from.
We will survive without some well know mastheads that’s for sure.
Google is so successful because it organizes information the way people like it and that’s why we like it.
We usually don’t have today’s newspaper but we know what’s going on.
Someone in my Twitter network has posted a link that I assume it will be interesting because I trust this contact as a news source.
Contents can be generated by professionals and the big challenge for people is to filter these contents in order to get what really matters. It used to be easy before in the newspaper era where one-size-fits-all. If you don’t like it I’m sorry. Now all the information is available and the challenge is for the technology to serve me the five items of news that really matter the most to me.
The great thing about being a citizen journalist it’s that I’m not necessarily accountable to do things the way the other journalists do. I can be very personal and tell exactly what I think to my readers.
Some rewrite without even crediting the source expensive that may well be news stories of journalists who have invested days, weeks or months in their work.
Let me remind Rupert Murdoch than he can shut down the indexing of his contents by Google right now by disallowing Googles’s robots in the robots.txt file.
But be carefull because when you do, and that’s why you didn’t do it, you’ll be denying access to all website that aggregate and link to your news and overnight you’ll start losing most of your traffic.
Luís Collado, head of editorial contents Google Spain
We never had any request to disallow Google’s robot from any news company. Not even Murdoch’s.
What internet gives for free is all kind of news bulletins, sports, financial information, wheather information… but what it doesn’t offer is investigative reports.
The important question is not if there will be newspapers. The important question is if there will be journalism and the answer is yes.
Kamal Dhillon, a 17 year old Canadian student is the 2010 Glassen Ethics Competition winner. This year’s essay topic was: “Is it OK to download music, movies and games without paying?”
Her answer was: “Not wrong, just illegal“. I love the refreshing views she has on copyrights, file sharing, and free culture. Some highlights follow.
I support the act of file sharing and argue that the free sharing of these forms of intellectual property would likely produce, overall, more good than harm for society.
Everyone knows that it’s illegal to download movies, games and music without paying. Why, then, do so many people simply ignore copyright laws?
The fact that something is illegal doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily immoral.
Not only do we think that the copyright laws are unjust, we also know that it’s easy to get away with breaking these laws.
No matter what laws are put in place, technological advances by ingenious young computer geeks mean that youth will always be one step ahead of the authorities.
…most young people believe that it’s morally acceptable to share their music, movies and games with others.
…the movie industry opposed the introduction of video recorders. They were short-sighted. It turns out that the VCR was one of the best things to happen to the film industry.
A recently published, three-year study on online music sharing concluded that 95 per cent of all downloads were illegal, yet the worldwide digital music business grew by 25 per cent in 2008 — the sixth year in a row that it has increased.
(about taxes on recording mediums) If I buy a book, and lend it to a friend, should I be charged because they haven’t paid for the book themselves?
(The funny thing is that I copied and pasted this excerpts from a magazine that has a nice Copyright sign at the bottom of the page. This could create a hole in the space-information continuum)
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