David Emery OnlineYouTube overlay HD ads
I think this is new – I certainly haven’t seen it before; YouTube is now running overlay ads over the top of HD videos. Click the link above to see it in-situ (you’ll probably need to click ‘Watch in HD’), or click the image below for a bigger view:
TUAW goes hands-on with Rolando
This looks absolutely lovely, although I’m not going to get it yet as I’ve just bought Sim City for the iPhone instead (which seems to be pretty good from the 10 minutes I’ve spent with it). It’s very encouraging that there are already got too many games to get for the iPhone – I think it’s very rapidly establishing itself as a very viable platform fo games developers.
Visit ➔2008 Greek riots
Brilliant photos from The Big Picture, as always. From a photographers point a view it’s interesting to note that some of the best photos in the series are technically quite poor – out of focus or very noisy. It’s always worth a reminder that it’s the moment you’re capturing that’s most important, not how you do it.
Visit ➔Jack Peñate - Tonight's Today
We’ve just put up a one page site for Jack Peñate to showcase the first track from his forthcoming second album – what I’ve heard of it so far sounds like it’s going to be really, really big:
(And I managed to scratch my ‘Trade Gothic’ itch at the same time.)
Visit ➔The Team Love Library
When Team Love started we had the simple and possibly self-defeating notion that posting all our albums on the website as free downloads would be a good detour around the wreckage of the music industry and a way to avoid getting bogged down in the number one topic of discussion and distraction: piracy, illegal downloads, P2P networks and so on.
Five years later and the debate still drones in the background, and while some bands have adopted a mutated version of the “free download” (pay what you wish, etc), we’ve decided to reshape out policy in a different direction and introduce the Team Love Library. Each month (or so) we’ll be rotating the Library’s selections, featuring different Team Love albums as well as exclusive content such as unreleased songs, live or remixed versions of TL favorites.
Very smart – they’re currently giving away 6 albums (all of which are slightly old, I think) of MP3s for nothing (other then your email address). A nice way of utilising old catalogue to help promote new records.
Only slight issue is that I couldn’t download anything due to pesky country restrictions (they don’t put out most of these releases in the UK), but that comes with the territory* …
* Please excuse this awful pun.
Visit ➔SimCity iPhone Impressions
I am far too excited by the idea of this – it could totally be the iPhone killer app games-wise. Better not cost too much…
Visit ➔New York I Love You
The classic – and I really mean classic – LCD Soundsystem song as sung by Kermit. Brilliant twist at the end as well, for any LCD/DFA fans.
Visit ➔Lily Allen Shows Off Newish Song, EMI Shows Off Newish YouTube Strategy
Usually when a new track makes its way to the Web, YouTube fills up with unauthorized rips of the track, featuring visuals that are promo pics (sometimes stitched together with your Windows Media Maker wipes, often static) and maybe the lyrics on the side. They’re also embeddable, so people (cough cough) can stick them on their blogs, or what-have-you. Parlophone decided to beat the YouTubers at their own game, though, creating an embeddable video that not only streams the song, it gives details on how to preorder the album.
You know what, this actually is a pretty good idea. I’ve been championing for a while the idea of having an easily embedable song player – I’m looking at you, Last.fm and Hype Machine – and this is a pretty good pass at it using the already existing YouTube architecture. Would be nice if the audio was nicer quality though.
What makes this doubly interesting is that EMI are almost certainly a YouTube partner, so will be receiving ad revenue from these YouTube plays…
Visit ➔Last.fm Best Of 2008
Really nicely done – love the design, especially the font choices and the little graphs (some of which are powered by the Google Chart API, which I always forget about). However, the content isn’t exactly interesting – the singles chart particularly; I guess that what’s popular in this context isn’t actually a metric that contains much insight.
Visit ➔Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on stage: Textpattern 4.0.7!
We are happy to announce that Textpattern 4.0.7 is finally ready for public consumption.
During long and – sometimes – laborious months since the last release in February, we added new features and enhanced existing capabilities, but nevertheless we expect upgrades from any previous version to be seamless and smooth.
Lots of good new features here, especially the tag related ones which make Textpattern even more flexible – well worth an upgrade.
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Making Iron Man
Beautiful set of behind the scenes photos from the set of Iron Man, taken by Jeff Bridges (who played the villain in said film).
Visit ➔My Game Face
Brilliant photography series of children concentrating whilst playing computer games. Interestingly enough, they’re actually stills from video captured via a RED ONE camera – the line between video and photography is getting ever more blurred…
Visit ➔Idlewild's next album
Idlewild are pleased to announce plans for our forthcoming new studio album with an opportunity for our fans to be involved from an early stage.
This exact idea – pre-order the album direct from the artist, then get it well upfront of the traditional release – has been banded around for a while now, so it’s interesting to see someone make a proper go of it.
The whole industry is watching with interest, no doubt.
Visit ➔Leona was robbed
LEONA LEWIS has been robbed of a No1 single by a blunder which has left the singer’s team and fans furious.
The superstar was due to release her version of Run for download this week after she performed it on her return to The X Factor on Saturday.
But due to a bungle at Sony, the song has not been available online and this week’s planned internet release has been shelved.
A nice story – I think we can all enjoy the idea of Sony screwing up such a thing – but sadly from what I hear, untrue. Sony have purposefully kept the song off digital retailers to push people to the new deluxe edition of her album instead. And it looks like this sacrifice of single sales is going to work as well – the album is set to to be #1 this week.
It’s bad enough to block consumer choice and up-sell a whole album to people who probably have it already, but to then try and claim that it’s a screw up is quite deliciously evil.
Visit ➔Google Adds Voice Recognition to iPhone App
I have a very good feeling about Google’s new iPhone app that does voice recognition. I’ve been playing with this voice recognition application for several weeks and I have to say that I’m really impressed. First and foremost, the voice recognition works really well.
It’s actually quite wonderful to be able to lift your phone up to your ear, speak a phrase and have the results pop-up on screen for you. It works surprisingly well, even with my non-US accent, although I’m not sure if I’ll ever actually use it.
Also, fyi for everyone that’s not in the US – you need to enable it in the preferences after you update, as it’s not on by default.
Visit ➔RED Camera: I'm RED with ENVY
You want to shoot 24mp images at 100 frames per second? OK. And you want the system to be 100% modular so you never have to buy an entirely new “camera” again? Check. And, you probably want to use all your Nikon, or Canon, or PL mount lenses too? No problem.
I really, really want one of these – they’re just stunning. Anyone got a spare $25,000 I could borrow? I’m good for it, I swear…
Visit ➔MySpace Launches Profile 2.0. No, You Don’t Have to Switch
…today MySpace is introducing Profile 2.0. Unlike Facebook’s recent redesign, MySpace’s redesign is fully optional and will remain so for a long period of time – MySpace’s official blog mentions years. Facebook’s gradual rollout of the redesign was carefully handled, but there were still a lot of angry users who wanted the look and feel of their old profiles back. As a result, MySpace isn’t taking any chances here.
Two things: 1) The whole ‘new’ Facebook fiasco should be ignored, but is a good reminder of how much people fear change. MySpace could have never done the same thing, as people have spent a lot of time customising their profiles already. 2) Obviously this looks a bit better, but it’s still not exactly great, is it? Also, does anyone know if you can upgrade a music/band account?
Visit ➔Ian Rogers' Digital Music Manifesto
On the connection between artists and fans: “Think about perspectives that matter. The artist, and the fan. I was on a panel last week in London at Musexpo and I listened to my friend Rob Wells from Universal Music Group talk to a gentleman from Nokia about Nokia’s Comes With Music for half an hour, and I was just sitting there thinking, these guys could talk for an hour and not mention music, an artist or a fan.
I bumped into Ian when he was in town last week – he’s a really nice guy and up to some very interesting things. Well worth a read.
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