Thursday, October 29, 2009

The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon

Richard Gale's brilliantly funny horror movie short (rated PG).

Monday, October 26, 2009

Yahoo Abandons More Than 20 Millions Pageviews (Closing Geocities)

5 years ago I paid 1/3 of my bills with a 1 page Geocities site. Today Yahoo takes more than 4.8 million geocities pages offline permanently. That's about 11.9 million visitors a month, who made about 21,420,000 pageviews a month, now getting some sort of 404 or "we removed this page" site instead of what they expected (data from Quantcast and Alexa).

Yahoo didn't make enough money with Geocities to keep it online because they didn't know how to, because they didn't try.

5 years ago Yahoo stock was trading near $35, today it closed at $16.87, losing 2% of it's value today. It's a shame to see a company misstep as badly and often as Yahoo has, and I'll miss the opportunity to make money with them through their Geocities sites.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Kid Shreds on Accordion

Aleksandr Hrustevich plays amazing accordion (rated PG).

19% of US Internet Users Tweet

Twitter and Facebook have been to big too ignore for sometime now. While estimating pageviews of sites is inexact, some numbers help reveal just how big these 2 sites have become.

The army of Twitterers is growing quickly, per the Pew Internet Project report released today. The report found that 19 percent of all U.S. Internet users now use either Twitter or smaller services, such as Yammer, to share social updates. This was up 8 percent from the 11 percent who used such services in April 2009

(from Adweek). Things change quickly, and twitter is a big part of the audience, as is Facebook:

In the US Facebook accounts for, now get this, 1 in every 4 or 25% of our total pageviews

(from Drake Direct). Drake bases his numbers on compete.com data, which can be imperfect. Alexa estimates Facebook got about 4.5% of global pageviews in the last month. Suffice to say, big enough to be important to anyone doing anything online.

Disneyland Halloween Fireworks

Phone video of Halloween Screams - a villainous surprise in the sky (rated PG).

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Search Comments on YouTube in Real-Time

YouTube's real-time search of comments may compete, someday, with Twitter for in-the-moment audience reaction to moving pictures.

Comments Search moves into Test Tube, the place where our engineers and developers test out new features and gather data and feedback before pushing them out to a wider audience. This feature allows you to search the comments people are making on YouTube in real time. The full comment will appear on a continuously updated results page, and 'trending topics' indicates the hottest topics of conversation on YouTube at that particular moment

(from YouTube Blog).

TV Windows Collapsing

Traditional television viewing patterns are collapsing and the industry needs to quickly figure out how to profit in a world where people can watch TV shows anytime, anywhere, NBC Universal's TV chief said.
The challenge now was drawing viewers to network shows at designated times when people can either record those shows or turn to online outlets to watch at their convenience, said Marc Graboff, Chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios.
Networks need to figure out how to make their content more immediately available in a lucrative way, such as by charging viewers to stream episodes shortly after airing - narrowing viewing 'windows' - or providing them to multiple outlets, he told an industry conference.
The biggest U.S. networks are currently struggling with declining advertising revenue, dwindling viewership and rising production coasts [sic]

(from Reuters, via Yahoo News).

Grocery Store Musical

Six undercover actors burst into song in a grocery store in Queens (rated PG).

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Projection on Buildings (flash)

Impressive and stylish projections on buildings (rated PG).

Friday, October 16, 2009

Video Mapping Room (flash)

A room with images projected on the walls (rated PG).

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Video Stairs (flash)

Three flights of plasma video stairs were created as part of a new store in Hong Kong (rated PG).

Friday, October 9, 2009

Hollywood's Present is Online

Many talk of online video as a wave of the future; they are flat wrong. It is now, right now. I know a government employee that 4 months ago discarded their TV and now watches only online. I know a lawyer that uses Tivo as an on-demand that in combination with online TV and DVDs doesn't watch broadcast, cable or satelite live, ever. I have never owned a television, yet I watched three shows tonight and also appear on TV from time to time. Anyone who thinks online entertainment is a future, and denies it is a growing present tense event, is either not paying attention, about to lose their job or both. All things are more online and mobile than ever before and they are right now (I write this post on my phone; please forgive any spelling mistakes ;-).

"Hollywood's future is in Bannen's hands" by Lisa Marks may be over selling a single show as some sort of vangard. I love that this show is being made and am excited to see it, but Sony is not first with web content that costs more than $1 million (Seth MacFarlane, Burger King and YouTube did that over a year ago) and the CEO of Sony Pictures (parent of Crackle) said he "...doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet... Period." This show may be Sony's late, half-supported-by-the-studio attempt to be in the now.

A month online is equal to a year offline, and to not learn from history a from a year ago (like 12 years online) is to retrace steps taken by many before, and risk being obselete before you've begun. In 3 months, the generation referred to as digital natives will be the largest and most important demographic for entertainment. This demographic is already watching, listening and experiencing their entertainment where and when they want to and media companies are only just now pretending this will happen? That is like acting as if the wheel or fire might catch on when it's already the year 1500. People's careers and livelyhoods as employees and stockholders are suffering because of antiquated thinking (yes, 3 month old is antiquated). Get present or be irrelevant; there is no half way.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

555 KUBIK (flash)

Building projections on the visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle (rated PG).

Building Projections (flash)

Video mapping building projections at a secret festival in the North East of England. The theme and logo of the party was the heart (rated PG).

Advanced Video Mapping (flash)

Advanced techniques for projection mapping onto architecture (rated PG).

Valid HTML Code is Better Than Invalid Code

Valid HTML code will look better more places, function as designed more often and be well liked by things like search engines. The W3C Markup Validation Service is a good one since they are the organization that maintains the specifications.