a little happiness to send off Summer…

This tee from Despair, Inc. slays me. Meditate upon it and smile.

In a world where the customer can be a media channel, companies who have sent customers on endless bureaucratic, labrynthic searches are in for some lyric revenge. Fly the friendly skies…

Using software like Boinx’s istopmotion, you can have your own animation studio.

Handmade and live animation is all the rage. Get some for your own channel.

Seven Billion Channels seem too distant? Check out this.

As my good friend Brian Newman has been pointing out recently on his blog, advertising is in big trouble. Interuptive advertising in particular. The hard numbers are coming in. Read his post before watching the video below.

One of the best takes on this tectonic plate-shift is by Seth Godin . The “TV Industrial Complex’s Un-doing” is the theme. The banks and the auto-makers can’t be having all the fun…

Start at the 2:50 mark for the meat:

I was sitting in my auto yesterday waiting for my oldest boy to finish play rehersal.

A few high schoolers were out on the open campus smoking their cigarettes.

My stream of conciousness from that point forward went something like this:

Shame, these guys are starting a habit dozens of my associates are trying to quit, after years of trying. Smoking has been such a legacy habit, I mean look at the smoke lighter built into my car. Smoking is hard-wired into this car. There is an ash tray, and lighters in each armrest. Why did they build three lighters into the basic design of this car (toyota), can’t the back seat passengers ask for a light from the front seat?  Why not one lighter in front and just three ash trays? I haven’t used that lighter for anything but a cell phone charger. Funny how technology changes. Using cigarette lighters as chargers for various and sundry electronics is probably why they are still built into cars. Fewer of us smoke, and smoking is discouraged on airplanes, restaurants, and theaters, but here in the car it not only serves a private toke,  but all these gizmos need charging too, so leave the design as it was. I guess I charge my iPod too. Above the cigarette lighter is a cassette player and above it is the CD. I have used them less that the cigarette lighter. Why? Because I listen to podcasts and music on the iPod when I drive. When I don’t listen to the iPod, I have the radio on. Radio is the oldest technology in this car! Save maybe the tires.

So there I sat, finding myself amongst three hard-wired-into-my-car legacy media systems; tape, CD, and Radio.

I wonder what other uses the cassette player and the CD might have beyond their legacy uses? I haven’t used either one in two years, at least.

Just use the cigarette lighter to keep my iTunes on tap. Funny…

When you are deciding about whether to buy the 1080p or the 720p flat screen TV for your home theater, pause a moment to remember Philo T. Farnsworth.

As a young electrician, he imagined lines, or rows, of electrons forming an image while plowing potato fields in Idaho in the 1920’s. Driving back and forth amongst the potatoes, the young inventor imagined  the rows being tightly presented, so Seurat-like images could be transmitted to screens.

This led to the invention of the first purely electronic television and the issues of screen resolution. We are just now fullfilling Philo prophecy that one day, scanlines can be so tightly assembled they’d look like, “pictures hanging on the wall”.

Them is some “High Def” taters.

This talk by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of HTML, URL’s and by default, the internet as we know it, is a must see. Here is the Philo T. of our day. He didn’t invent the internet, but he increased it’s resolution beyond anything the ARPANET offered.

It will take sometime, precisely 16:51, but will bring you up to speed on what may be in store for our Billion Channeled world.

(Notice how little Berners-Lee looks like Al Gore…)

What do you get when you mix financial and visual literacy?

See Here: