Aug
30
I hope everybody has seen Epic 2014. Epic 2014 is the original flash online movie made by Robin Sloan for the Museum of Media History.
Set in 2014, Epic 2014 charts the history of the Internet, the evolving mediascape and the way news and newspapers were affected by the growth in online news.
It coined the word "Googlezon" from a future merger of Google and Amazon to form the Google grid, and speaks of news wars with the Times becoming a print only paper for the elite culminating in EPIC Evolving Personalised Information Construct.
As a flash animation, this film is extraordinary, not just for it’s use of technology but for it’s fantastic perception looking forward. And by the way I like this picture below.
Epic 2015 is a new updated vision of the future built on Epic 2014 set but now set in 2015.
Aug
29
Aug
29
Read full story here
Is Google throwing a smoke screen? Because I think that "TV" does have plenty to fear.
"Mayer said Google had failed to foresee the huge popularity of
user-generated content - its original model for online video emphasised
"premium content" which viewers would pay a small fee to access. The
success of YouTube over the past year - rapidly eclipsing Google Video
in popularity - took many by surprise."
My prediction is that in the future, ALL content will be delivered "On
Demand", via TCP/IP, by whatever types of wires, or wireless connection goes into your house. TVs
will be a computer monitor, and a freeview box or cable box, will be a super sky+ also known as a computer.
Whether the company that owns those wires will also be the
deliverer of the content, remains to be seen… I hope not.
Jonathan
Aug
29
Flickr’s great for exploring photos by photographer, tag, time, text and group, and now it’s also great for exploring photos by place with a new geo tagging functionality. The geotagging features are Ajax driven, integrates Yahoo Maps and Yahoo Search.
There are a couple of short video tutorials which give the 90 second overview on how to geotag your own photos and how to use all the controls for searching and exploring geotagged photos. Watching them first will give you all of the information you need to get up and running.
Well Flickr offers now a very nice plateform to explore picture in a funny way and I can imagine that lot of people will mash up this function with games, hide and seek, treasure hunt… Imaginations and strategies are welcome.
Vincent
Aug
26
Over at eMarketer.com James Belcher is commenting on how RSS is still attracting a great deal of interest with people in the digital advertising industry but the popularity of the technology is far from mainstream with the people we’re trying to target.
Apparently only 2% of the US Internet using population actively use RSS on a regular basis, and only 9% know what it is at all.
But, as he correctly points out, the main reason for this (something I have voiced often myself to people I work with in my own agency when trying to persuade them to buy into RSS at this very early stage) is that RSS simply isn’t available in mainstream products (and by that we generally mean Operating Systems) at the moment. Yes, it’s in OS X and Safari, but that’s hardly mainstream for most of the world, as much as that probably annoys many of us, and the real tipping point for RSS will undoubtedly be the release of Windows Vista in 2007 (fingers crossed!).
Until then, RSS will remain a technology on the outside looking in but it truly is a powerful tool and I cannot wait until it’s firmly embedded in our tool kit as digital marketers.
One thing I just want to point out from James’s post is that he says that marketers are interested in using RSS to get around spam filters. Whilst this probably is true for a lot of people in this industry I really hope that it’s not the majority of us. To think like that, to treat RSS as a broadcast medium, is such an old school traditional DM way of thinking. It’s more than that - it’s to do with the whole shift in the advertising relationship and how we communicate with our audience. Spam filters are in irrelevant if your already speaking to people who have choosen to listen in the first place.
Howard
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Aug
26
Not to say too much about this, but AdWeek are reporting that Agency.com have pulled from the Subway pitch.
Ho hum.
Howard
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Aug
26
Net Neutrality is undoubtedly a big issue right now regardless of whether it’s a problem, not a problem, or not relevant to the internet users who are outside of the USA.
But, coming in from the "it’s a problem" camp, a collective of Internet celebs (term used very loosely) have formed a group to promote the cause through a music video and really quite nice flash web site over at wearetheweb.org.
You remember them; Tron guy, Peter Pan, Dancing Baby and Leslie Hall amongst others.
The site itself, designed by SpaceLab, is really well done, if in a typically web 2.0 style, but it’s well worth a visit. The video embedding is spot on and even providing YouTube style code snippets for you to embed the video in your own site and take advantage of a viral element for their key message.
Like I say, whether you’re for or against net neutrality, it’s still worth going to see this site for a well produced entertaining site that will reunite you with celebs you had probably long forgotten.
Howard
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Aug
25
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ask interesting, open-ended questions of a group and collect and aggregate their answers.
Aug
25
Semapedia maps virtual world to the physical one
howard | 
Information design, Statistics, Travel, User generated, Web/Tech, future, web2.0 | 
08 25th, 2006| 
No Comments »
howard | Information design, Statistics, Travel, User generated, Web/Tech, future, web2.0 | 08 25th, 2006| No Comments »
Semapedia is a great new project that is linking virtual world wikipedia articles to real world physical locations.
By using the cameras that are in most mobile phones nowadays users can scan in a barcode sticker, which will be posted on physical objects, and in turn, download information about that place straight to your phone’s browser.
- People get given stickers that look a bit like crazy barcodes, you put them on places & objects & use the reference number from that barcode to create a review, or a piece of information about that place or object on the Semapedia website.
- Anybody with the new Nokia phones (and all next generation mobile phones I guess) can download a piece of software that translates these barcode things with the camera on the phone.
- The idea is you walk along, see a barcode somewhere, use your camera phone to translate the barcode, It then pulls the information about that place / object straight off the Semapedia site straight to your phone.
- Think about restaurant reviews… album reviews (Sema-codes on CD’s in shops?) …semicodes on billboards in Tube Stations (the barcodes can be as big as you want them to be) … possibilities are endless.
Exciting stuff! So far the technology is only working on Nokia handsets, so I couldn’t actually test it on my Sony, but readers for most other phone platforms are on the way via the Kaywa Reader software, and their web site allows you to register your email address so they can tell you when version 1.1 is out.
By bringing social networks and collaborative user generated content into the physical world this begins to bridge the gap that can seem so wide at times.
See, social tagging does have a real-world use!
Howard
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