I’ve been loving the heck out of the The Boston Globe’s beautiful photoblog “The Big Picture.” It is filled to the brim with epic photography and thoughtful commentary. Click here to read an interview with the creator, Alan Taylor.

(I know this wasn’t the most thoughtful or in-depth post, but I really want you to check out these photos.)

(via Kottke)

Just caught sight of this on ChangeThis:

The creator of BzzAgent, co-founder of WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) and author of The Grapevine, Dave has a new book out. It is entitled The Word Of Mouth Manual: Volume II, and in a rather unorthodox move, he has decided to self-publish it. The physical edition costs $45.00, but he is offering a digital edition to you free of charge.

If you’d like a copy, simply click here to download the PDF edition.

If you’d like a copy of the physical edition, you can find that here.

I’ve only scanned it so far, but it looks like a great read. Also, Seth B. Minkin did the illustrations for this book, and I love them. Enjoy.

The music from this new VW spot, by DDB London, is a made from a compilation of sounds recorded in and around the Golf and was composed and produced by Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll.

When I saw this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Lasse “Crazy Eyes” Gjertsen’s “Hyperactive…”

…and Wieden + Kennedy London’s ‘06 Civic Choir:

Dear Europe: Why do you get all the special hotness?

(via Fresh Creation)

Yesterday, in the middle of good conversation, a friend challenged me on a few key talking points. “Oh come on, that’s not true,” she said four different times. Alright then, let’s settle this.

Q: Was the Atari game “E.T.” so terrible that they ended up burying millions of them in the desert?

A: Yes it was and yes they did. Snopes says this:

The sheer awfulness of the finished product was unprecedented…Atari, stuck with millions of games and consoles that were largely unsellable at any price, sent fourteen truckloads of merchandise from their plant in El Paso, Texas, to be dumped in a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico in late September 1983.

Q: Do people have a “milk-line,” like cats and pigs, along which any third nipple is located?

A: Little gross. Little weird. But lotta true. eMedicine says:

Supernumerary nipples are located along the embryonic milk line…In humans, the embryonic milk line extends bilaterally from a point slightly beyond the axillae on the arms, down the chest and the abdomen toward the groin.

Q: Do armadillos carry leprosy?

A: They are unclean. Michigan State University says:

Wild armadillos have been known to be infected with the bacterium that causes leprosy (Hansen’s disease).

But here’s the silver lining:

The only cases of transmission from armadillos to humans have occurred in rare incidents in which people ate undercooked armadillo meat.

Q: Are Daddy Long Legs unbelievably poisonous, but unable to bite us because of their tiny little mouths?

A: Oops, this one’s not true. University of California Riverside’s entomology department says this:

They do not have venom glands, fangs or any other mechanism for chemically subduing their food. Therefore, they do not have poison and, by the powers of logic, cannot be poisonous from venom. Some have defensive secretions that might be poisonous to small animals if ingested. So, for these daddy-long-legs, the tale is clearly false.

So, friend, you’re 1 for 4. Not bad. But still, I hope you learned your lesson.

ps: In retrospect, that was a nerdy conversation.

(Updated 6/13, a few hours after publishing)

From SexyPow(tm)!

The new album by Icelandic band Sigur Rós, “Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust,” which means “With a buzz in our ears we play endlessly,” is available for listening on Last.fm. This gives you a two-week head start to collect scene points before the album’s release on June 23rd.

(via Dailyswarm)

This is an amazing piece of artwork by Blu.

I can’t imagine how much planning and time went into this. I’d love to see something on “the making of.”

Hat tip to Carter Martin for pointing it out.

I just signed up for an account with the new (new to me….recently relaunched) music database Soundflavor. This site not only lets you search for specific songs or artists using genre, lyrics, subject, mood, decade, artist, or album (good for finding out who the hell sings that song you’ve had in your head since last Thursday…but don’t have enough to go on to Google), it also makes new music recommendations based on the songs or artists you find (like a more search-oriented Last.fm).

Each artist page brings together videos, streamable songs, recent news, and similar artists collected from across the web. Disappointingly, I don’t think it includes discographies.

If you’re into sharing music, or being a good friend, you can build your own playlists or auto-generate recommended playlists to share (or post to your blog…except for WordPress…lame). Here’s a link to my Elliott Smith One-Click playlist (includes music from The Weakerthans, TMBG, and Damien Jurado).

Unlike Last.fm’s “similar artist radio,” which plays a song once before it disappears into oblivion, the savable playlists of recommended music allow you to catalog and revisit new artists worth digging into.

The next time I need to settle a bet over a song or whip up a genre-driven mixtape, I’m heading to Soundflavor.

(via TechCrunch)

I finished my Age of Conversation article. It’s titled “The Creative Multiplier,” and is about how new media can change creatives’ perspective on creativity and influence.

And yes, somewhere along the way the advertising industry totally nouned the word “creative.”

In order to get my mind right and have some conversation on the topic, I asked several good friends the following question:

New media has democratized large-scale expression. Because there is now access to tools (like iMovie, GarageBand, digital cameras) and distribution (creating a podcast is free, blogging, youtube, etc), more people can be “writers,” “designers,” “film producers” than ever before.

How do you think this affects creativity, in practice and in perception – both as a job and as a lifestyle and a hobby?

The responses varied a good bit, but were all insightful. Here are some favorites:

Doug Williams from Trabian -

It’s smashed distribution channels and smashed production barriers. So, it’s created kind of an anarchy of creativity. It’s good in the sense that creative people can have their voices heard on the exact same platform successful creatives can have their voices heard.

For some it’s good, for some, they’re just rehashing fart jokes.

The downside is that those barriers held within them revenue streams and profits that allowed companies to assume the risk in developing truly talented individuals.

It also helped filter out the good from the bad – of course, some really good things got filtered out…and the “mainstreaming” of creativity was a downfall to that system. So…in a sense, it’s empowered creatives.

However, it’s removed a fundamental distribution channel designed (although it can be debated how effectively it worked) to reward creative people, put them in front of thousands of people, and to invest in them.

Ches Campbell from SWA Group -

I think the more access we have, the more creativity can take place. Without the tools to do things, we can’t create……the best example for me would be digital cameras and photoshop. I can do all the photo imaging I want on my own in my house, or at a coffee shop or anywhere without having to own a bunch of equipment or going to a studio somewhere. Same with other forms of digital media.

It inspires me to actually go for it and do somethign instead thinking “I should do this,” because I actually have the means to do things

Charlie Trotter from Trabian:

One interesting side-effect I’ve experienced lately is how that affects people who make their living being creative. I can jump on Vimeo or Flickr or LOLZIES! and post my latest fit of creativity to rave reviews. They are pieces I feel good about, am proud of, etc.

When people do those kinds of things for fun, I think we get some really interesting, organic pieces of creative work. But when I try to bring that energy into my professional work, it’s more challenging because now I’m trying to please several different people with several different subjective views.

I wonder how this generation will react to professional pursuits having grown up with the creative enabling social media offers, because many of them will have spent so much time creatively only answering to themselves.

Brad Garland from The Garland Group -

From a business perspective, it allows the small businesses of the world (AKA the mom and pop’s) to compete on a level playing field with any other company, no matter the marketing budget. SmBs have the ability to promote themselves and share and connect with other that they once couldn’t afford before.

For example, our company is essentially created a television station for viewers of the financial services world. Yes, it wouldn’t show up on the top 1000 channels on your cable box but we are able to connect, network, and share with those that are interested in that field. We’ve had over 22K views of our content over the last 3 months and because of that content, it has turned into magazine articles, speaking engagements, consultant jobs, and connecting with people that we would not had the opportunity before.

Cheryl Doerksen from Currency Marketing -

Well on one hand I think that it definitely serves to encourage and stimulate creativity. With such easy access and easy to use tools, people are able to work on their own little projects without feeling the often creativity-constraining pressure of the cost factor. On the other hand one could argue that it begins to dilute creativity because people start to put everything up as ‘creations’ that may or may not have originally been dubbed as something born out of creativity as much as boredom.

As a job I think that more and more people are (or should be) being encouraged to exercise their creativity and access to these things enables that movement and increasing prioritization of the importance of expressing and fostering creativity.

Chad Gowan from All Speeds -

I think it opens up a lot of doors to dabble, maybe effects ones focus on what they really excel in. But another perspective could be that it doesn’t limit people from finding that one niche or the creative outlet that makes them all fuzzy inside.

Daniel Miller from The Leet World -

It sets the talented people apart, content is king. If your content is good, the theory is that it should rise to the top. Thats not always the case (unfortunately), thats what the internet brings to the table.

The flip side to the coin is while making content is cheap, and its a great creative outlet, its hard to get noticed by someone who wants to pay you for your intellectual property. Its like finding a needle in a haystack the size of the Pacific Ocean. And i think alot of people want to say that creating something is a reward in itself.

When you have to work a day job for 9 hours a day, then go home and do a hobby for free it starts to wear on you. It’s a double edged sword.
/end rant

Carter Martin from CM Design -

• Competition is now in theory infinite
• There’s no excuse not to try
• The cream continues to rise to the top, no one is ignorant / ambitious enough to keep cracking away at creative things unless there is some form of audience or they’re making a living off of it.
• Most creativity is spawned from within, but its continuation is for the most part based on the positive or negative reaction of others. Any reaction is reason to continue, but silence kills the spirit.

Thanks to everyone I talked to for your perspectives. I feel lucky and thankful to have smart friends.

Care to weigh in?

Over the past couple of days, both MySpace and Facebook have launched individual answers to the issue of data portability – the idea that your data from any given online service (from your profiles to your online photos to your Gmail acount) belongs to you and not the service.

On Thursday, MySpace (the shadier of the two) launched the MySpace Data Availability project. The New York Times breaks it down like this:

The new MySpace Data Availability project is its first in a series of initiatives by the company to support data portability, allowing users to take the content they create in one network and easily add it to other sites, MySpace said. Until now, social networking sites like MySpace have favored the “walled garden” approach, where they essentially lock their users into their own site.

MySpace said that it has signed agreements with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter to participate in the project. Over the next several weeks, MySpace users will be able to add their MySpace data to those sites with the click of a button, noted Chris DeWolfe, CEO and cofounder of MySpace.

Today, Facebook (the classier of the two) announced “Facebook Connect,” the next step in the Facebook Platform. Like MySpace’s project, Facebook Connect lets you take and use your Facebook info with you across the web. Their blog post from earlier today explains some specific features:

Trusted Authentication
Users will be able to connect their Facebook account with any partner website using a trusted authentication method. Whether at login, or anywhere else a developer would like to add social context, the user will be able to authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment. The user will have total control of the permissions granted.

Real Identity
Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.

Friends Access
Users count on Facebook to stay connected to their friends and family. With Facebook Connect, users can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. Developers will even be able to dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites.

Dynamic Privacy
As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.

While your data is still essentially owned by the network, these steps to make it easier to distribute and use are significant. Even with all of the awesomeness that comes with Web 2.0, it’s still been a complete scatter-brained beatdown keeping up with each individual online service because they couldn’t interact with each other.

But now, it looks like social apps are ready to be social with each other. That’s very sweet of them.