At long last Verzion have got the iphone. So if your like me, your thinking "so what?" And to be honest you wouldn’t be wrong in your thinking. Either way, it was interesting to see the Daily Show’s take on the excitement from the states. Unfortunately Comedy Central don’t allow you to view or embed videos outside the states plus comedy central are well known for takedowns on youtube.
Category: media-and-expression
Ben Johnson’s crowd experienced art
Art talking place in front of a live audience. I like the idea but lets get it right, its not crowd sourced or even participatory art. Its more like watching a designer working on a piece of work. There is no input from the crowd, just watching and waiting…
If your in London, this is certainly worth checking out however its ending soon, so you’d better be quick.
The best advert of 2010: Old Spice vs Thinkbox
Interesting the differences and between the number one voted adverts of 2010 online and offline. For me the Old Spice advert was extremely clever and certainly does something very different while the Thinkbox advert is what you would expect from TV advertising, fun, entertaining but thats it. Of course I’ve also not included the follow up ads for old spice which made the whole thing so much more interesting for us all.
The best of the web advertising, The Old Spice Advert
The best of TV advertising, Every home needs a harvey Advert
Know your meme public message broadcast
I love know your meme and have been catching up with the episodes I’ve missed for a while but I love this almost like a public service message episode which is attached to downfall.
In response to Constantin’s attempted takedown of these satirical videos, the Institute for Internet Studies offers this helpful public service announcement explaining how to dispute a wrongful copyright claim on the grounds of Fair Use.
The future of publishing is writable
Imran posted a link on his facebook wall.
The future of publishing is writable, Trends of smaller, easier, and more personal content signal a shift away from read-only publishing.
There are three convergence trends in publishing that are already apparent.
One clear long-term trend is that smaller pieces of information are being published. Considering just modern digital forms of publishing, there is a roughly chronological progression toward smaller publications: emails, Usenet postings, web pages, blog posts, blog comments, tweets, tags.
A second trend is a reduction in friction. As access to easy-to-use and inexpensive publishing technology increases, it becomes economically feasible to publish smaller and less valuable pieces of content. We have reached the point where anyone with access to the Internet can easily and cheaply publish trivial, tiny pieces of information — even single words.
The third trend is the rise of publishing personal information. Our inescapable sociability is driving us to shape the Internet into a mechanism for publishing information about ourselves.
These three trends — smaller, easier, more personal — provide a framework to examine the development of online information publishing.
Absolutely…
In a session at BarCampManchester4 titled Ebooks, I was invited to talk about my Kindle ebook reader. I said I have never bought a book from the Amazon Kindle store and may never do.
So the obvious thing people thought was that I download ebooks from questionable sources. But in actual fact most of my ebook collection is either creative commons licensed ebooks such as cory doctorow’s books or there self published content formed from scraping websites using the much loved calibre and its scripts. Its scripts work with everything from standard sites, google reader, instapaper, readitlater, etc, etc.
I’m not saying I’m a self publisher but if you do look at the percentage of ebooks I’ve made/republished compared to the ones I’ve bought or downloaded. Its clear going by my own habits is we going towards a writable, self publishing future.
Kindle everywhere your ebooks everywhere…
Amazon are really cornering the reader market. Not only do they have one of the best ebook readers, but its also one of the cheapest (using there ability to ship many of them). But what really smashed it for them has to be the app which pretty much runs on everything. From PC’s to Android phones. Windows phone 7 to the ipad. Now there launching a kindle for the web. This will optimise any browser into a ebook reader. Impressive stuff.
But I’m worried…
This all seems to be out of the same play book as Apple and there itunes music ecosystem. I can already imagine the special links being sent around social networks pointing into the kindle ecosystem. The only saving grace is the kindle for the web.
Hopefully Amazon will follow the Google approach with these things and leverage the web not fight against it.
If Amazon screw up, Google seem to be right behind with there own ebook store.
What does this mean for the Kindle device, well this is all good news for the Kindle. Kindle is a fantastic eink device but shouldn’t be the only place to see ebooks. Hopefully more people will make there way through ebooks on devices like their phones then make there way towards reading on a eink device. I use to read my ebooks on my PDA (compaq ipaq) and it was painful but I found myself getting use to it. Now I can’t imagine using a phone or anything LCD like to read large amounts of text. But thats just me…
Its great Kindle is everywhere, and people can choose how they want to view the ebooks, period. Choice is good!
Now if they can just sort out the ability to buy a book and ebook version at the same time that would be great.
Robert’s web? Another internet inspired show
Robert’s web joins the long list of TV shows built around web based content. However this one is more a combination of Know your meme, Inst msgs and the digg reel. Got to say its certainly a lot more funny that Rude Tube and a lot more topical that the digg reel. Not quite up to the level of Rocketboom when it was still popular but it certainly works for a mainstream tv show.
For Sale: Escape Magazine the almost complete set
Escape Magazine seems to have almost no history or mention. There’s my blog post written in April this year and the magforum which has this reference.
Short-lived title from Maxim publisher Dennis aiming to explore the World-Wide Web. The first issue was withdrawn for legal reasons. Jennifer Aniston was on the cover.
Obayifo left a comment he had issue one, the one which was withdrawn. It must be worth a lot of money now? I could really do with issue one to complete my collection but then again I am selling my collection, if anyones interested?
Once again, I really do think Escape was a head of its time. It was .net magazine crossed with loaded or maxim. Its slant towards Internet culture was great. Yes it was a men’s magazine but beyond the front cover it had some very interesting articles. For example in issue 2 beyond the half naked cover of Sandra Bullock you had,
- Emails of the rich and famous
- Better that Sex?
- Skin up? (about Tattoos)
- Xmas Goodies
- Net Girls
- From Watchmen to Soul Men
- Your place or mine? (about swinging)
- I don’t need this pressure, Ron (Rob Atkinson vs Championship manager 2)
- Surfing for the board generation
- This man is sick (about a guy selling a very dodgy cdrom)
- Orgasmatron (interview with mike saenz, creator of Virtual Valerie)
Ok maybe thats not the best advert for the magazine… *smile*
Someone did point me to den of geek which I have to say is not quite as punchy as Escape’s writing staff but its not a bad substitute.
Now time to make a start on the rave flyers…
Inception the most pirated movie on Bittorrent for the last month
Inception has been the most pirated movie on Bittorrent for the last month now. 4, 3, 2, 1 week(s) ago. And its had some very strong challengers from Scott Pilgrim, The social network and Wall street: Money never sleeps.
I did notice that when the HD version of Inception did hit the scene, the pirate bay was overloaded for a good few hours.
I’m sure the chief’s hollywood are cursing the scene for being so well organized and getting a hd rip out before they could get the retail DVD out. I’ve personally had my Inception Blu-ray/DVD/itunes (Triple Play) on pre-order for about 2 months now. I’m sure when Amazon do send it out, it will sit on my DVD rack with great prominence (my first blu-ray). Now I need to get myself a inception movie poster because they are great.
Also great to see Inception is still in position 4 of IMDB’s top 250 of all time right behind Godfather part 2.
Hacked Kinect, welcome to the future
Hacked kinect brings futuristic user interface Found via Tdobson on twitter,
Microsoft’s Kinect is a marvelous piece of technology. However with Microsoft trying to lock it with only the Xbox while there could be several amazing uses for it, Adafruit announced a bounty for anyone who develop an opensource driver for it.
Hector Martin developed the driver and won the bounty. He also released the driver as libfreenect. Now we have the first application which use libfreenect to use Kinect as an input device.
Interesting stuffs await!
Amazing!!! Kudos to the hackers, I can’t wait to hear what’s next…