David Emery OnlineWatch these kids play Star Wars on a giant touch screen
Coolest thing ever, right? The world needs an iPad version of this, stat.
Visit ➔Internet angered by website redesign
With radical features like black text typeset in Helvetica against a white background, a traditional blog river, bold headlines, faster load times and a fashionable 8-bit style logo, there are .. wait, there's nothing crazy at all! So what on Earth are its readers complaining about?
I like the focus on readability, the reduced clutter etc but – like most people, I hazard a guess – the problem I have with the new TechCrunch redesign is it doesn’t look very nice. It’s just not very aesthetically pleasing.
Just because the mob is up in arms about every redesign (or even slight tweak) doesn’t mean there’s not some truth to it every once in a while.
Visit ➔'How I Met Your Mother': Your Face Here
The news is this: thanks to groundbreaking technology, it is now possible to sell ads in old episodes of TV shows by digitally inserting things like TV screens in bar scenes or billboards on sidewalk scenes, and having those digital screens carry timely ads, for example, as EW noted, for the release of 'Bad Teacher' in an episode that was shot in 2009.
Great technology and all, but do advertisers seriously think they get a return on investment from taking the time to insert a product into the background on a rerun of a TV show?
I mean, really?
Visit ➔Things that are blogs
Things that are blogs:
Frequently updated webpages with content arranged in reverse chronological order
Things that are not blogs:
The Hype Machine
Blog posts
Blog comments
See also: “I’ve just posted a blog”.
Visit ➔The Collapse of Complex Business Models
Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
I could have quoted the whole of this to be honest. Really interesting.
Visit ➔Experiential Rights
Call it Kaplan’s Law: the more value a non-music company adds to the fan/artist relationship, the bigger the threat to those who’s business depends on being between the two.
Ethan hits the nail on the head here. Rights is hardly a sexy subject to talk about, but it’s an undeniable anchor that the whole industry is moored to (which – to stretch the metaphor to breaking point – is no good if you sitting in your speed boat, ready to set off).
turntable.fm is the perfect example, as it’s now blocked outside of the US due to “rights issues”. What this really means is that the US current has an easy way of licensing the specific model that turntable.fm uses – that of an online radio station – that other places don’t have (in exactly the same form at least). It’s the same system that Pandora (similarly US-only) uses, and to be perfectly frank I’d be surprised if it continues past 2015 (when the setup is up for renegotiation) as the major labels think they should be paid far more per play then the currently get from Pandora or turntable.fm (and damn them if they can’t stay in business as a result).
It’s a pretty complicated mess, it has to be said…
Visit ➔Secondary attention and the ghosts in the corner
I remember seeing a talk once from a guy who did sound for the ER (on TV, not in actual hospitals). He was telling stories with the sound - foreshadowing moments, enhancing themes, adding drama - all via secondary attention. And I've always wanted to try and use sound as a way of telling you what's going on in/on/with the web. We've been mucking about with a few varients of this - from the abstract and arty to the slightly less abstract and arty - and we're going to try them out via some boxes which Adrian's building for us.
There’s something really interesting in all of this. Not sure exactly what it is yet, though.
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The Horrors - Skying
Love the new album by The Horrors – ‘Endless Blue’ (wait for the guitars to kick in about half way though!) and ‘Moving Further Away’ (wait for the guitars to kick in about half way though!) are particular highlights.
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