it's 2007, and time for me to flirt with blogging in a different way.  no more pointless droning [vow to only drone with excellent points], particularly when the meat [or soy] of the post is the multimedia content.  which in this case, it isn't.

for a blog ostensibly about sharing, it's fair to say that i'm not exactly leading by example. until now, i was emailing this crap to friends...and trying to reserve the blog for my own multimedia projects. we all know how that's working.  so...this effort is their amnesty.  no more clogged inboxes with hilarious/harrowing videos.

the meat: check out how group94 [an obscenely talented, award-winning web design firm out of Belgium] turns a failed promise into a opportunity.  sometime last year, they asserted that they would launch a new website of their own on [or by] January 11th.  this plan wasn't realized, but instead of just letting the date pass quietly, they emailed their entire subscriber base to actually remind them of the failed promise.  bold, yes, but they turned a pretty neat trick in the process.  like a comedian who proves his/her talent through self-deprecation, group94 just accomplished the following:

• they put a human face on their company, which is a particularly good idea when that face is attractive and it's voice genuine/personable, as is the case with the maligned Project Manager, Tamara Schauvliege,
• they made me laugh - group94 seems like a fun place to work, or work with,
• they implied that their site always takes a back seat to YOUR site, by listing & linking to four other client sites they've been working on,
• they demonstrated the power & value of the moving image as a storytelling device, and their chops at delivering it in interesting ways [the full browser view was great, and the overlaid lines felt like more of a design touch than the more likely effort to distract from grain when delivering flash video at that resolution].

personally, my two favourite touches are the beginning, where her bosses seem to almost force her into the chair [as if it's a hostage video], and the part where her follow-up promise on when the new site will finally launched is bleeped out.  but beyond simply seeing an engaging video & laudable communications tactic, i'd suggest you take the opportunity to check out some of their work.  it dazzles.

i tend to take for granted that all rational people [with access] love the Internet.  that they understand it's inherent appeal.

but then, every once in a while, a friend self-deprecatingly refers to themselves as a 'luddite', suggesting that they're somehow immune to the charms of the web.

rather than question their ambivalence, i'll take a moment to explain my passion for the online world.  it hinges strongly on what sucks about adults and what rocks about kids.

if you have a senior citizen, philosopher or deity around, ask them for some fundamental truths about youth and aging, and eventually they'll say some of the following:  that youth is fleeting and it's freedoms are to be cherished.  that life tends to follow an arc from the simple to the complex and, eventually, back to the simple.  that somewhere along the way, our experiences have the potential to harden us to the world and that the challenges and realities of these experiences make us more cautious and less inclined to ask questions and take risks. 

most of my favourite people understand these truths implicitly. most of my favourite people, to borrow from dylan thomas, instinctively rage against they dying of the light [of their youththful exuberance].  they're allergic to life's drive towards the complex.

i had lunch with one such person, a close friend, last week.  he's slightly less close of late, because he now has a 2 year-old son.  it's ok - i wouldn't have time for me either, if i were him.  over tasty barbecued chicken, he shared one of the more common insights about new parenthood - that everything old becomes new again.  if you don't know any kids and are deliriously into your hip, adult life, this might seem a bit tedious - but i believe it's at the root of why we find babies so insanely captivating.  when sleeping, they reek of untarnished possibility. and when they wake you can see them struggle earnestly to make sense of the world around them.  of course, this can lead you to ask the same questions about your own world which, for the unprepared, can be an unsettling process.

when kids are around, the banal becomes wondrous.  fingers and toes, snow, letters, cardboard boxes, apple cores, tires, clouds, insects, hair, puppets, colours, wind - everything.  they are the personification of relentless imagination and curiosity.  instead of hammering that point into the ground, i'll suggest that you watch Begin Here, a video from the archives of the inspiring Daniel Liss.  [i wonder what his daughter is drawing lately?]

anyway.  this post isn't meant to convince people to go out and get knocked up.  personally, i'm not close to having kids [much to my mother's chagrin]. i'm just saying that i love the Internet because it's a giant playground for the born-again curious.  my favourite parts of it somehow help people to learn, imagine, experiment, create, express and share.  essentially, they make us feel like kids again.

it's why i love sites like, say, How Stuff Works.  or videos like 12 Verses in Water [above] from NY video art collective Squigglebooth [which actually prompted this ruminatary post in the first place] and Between You and Me one from NY filmmaker Patryk Rebisz. or so many other parts of the social web [a term i place far greater value in than the problematic web 2.0].   projects like the Box Doodle Project and Post Secret also come to mind.  as do the places that simply give you a place to put your offline creative work, like YouTube.

increasingly, we get our banal through the Internet too.  but for now, it's a hotbed of the weird and colourful.  so instead of watching CSI tonight, get in touch with your inner, online, kid [in the non-Mark-Foley kind of way].  go pull someone's e-pigtails and eat some digital glue.

i'm really confused these days. 

suddenly, my RSS reader is jam packed with feeds from main stream media.  that isn't the surprising part - The NY Times, Guardian, Washington Post and others have been gettin' their feed on for ages.  the surprising thing is that these feeds are getting better.  in some cases, they're indiscernible from the feeds of the indie bloggers i've preferred for ages.  which is probably because they are the feeds of the indie bloggers i've preferred for ages.

i was recently put on to Pop Candy, a culture blog written by Whitney Matheson for USA Today.  this girl has indie written all over her, which makes for a jarring juxtaposition when compared to the publication she's ostensibly blogging for.  whereas USA Today comes across as diluted, Pop Candy is timely and snappy.  it's a disjointed yet refreshing experience to get independent-feeling content from USA Today.

there's plenty of reason to believe that the broadsheet itself is rounding a corner, though. it's publisher [Gannett] has been very public in announcing sweeping changes to how they will gather & report the news.  every newspaper seems to be buzzing about the same things: building & serving niche communities, decentralization, multimedia, social bookmarking, crowdsourcing and, generally, transitioning from print brands to media-agnostic information brands.  Pop Candy is symptomatic of these changes.

but i digress [big time]. check out one of Whitney's recent holiday music recos: the Woxy Holiday Mixer.  if you like your festive with a heaping side order of street cred, i strongly suggest you tune in.  you'll be surprised how many great musicians have holiday tracks.  for the next week or two, it just may inspire me to switch off KEXP.  sure, christmas has become hideously over-commercialized to the point of almost sucking - but that doesn't mean the music has to.  wouldn't you rather drift into your turkey coma listening to Belle & Sebastien, Mazzy Star, Sufjan Stevens and David Bowie?

there's a special place in my heart for the iconoclasts of our world. their maverick  sensibilities coupled with a healthy distrust of established paradigms makes me want to reach through the ether and give 'em a great big hug.

take Lars Von Trier, for instance [Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, etc].  whether or not you enjoy dogme films is besides the point.  while many of us can look at the world we live in and declare with swift certainty that it's either a) total crap, or b) getting there quickly, few think to take action.  fewer still write manifestos offering a different vision of how that world could or should be.  and almost none walk their talk with enough dedication and talent to transfix and inspire others.  Lars Von Trier did just that with his dogme 95 filmmaking philosophy - and he's at it again, with lookey.

as detailed by the consistently insightful british film blog netribution:

"Film as media has one great flaw - it's a one-way media with a passive audience.  As much as I love to dictate the storyline and control the experinece I still wish that the audience could take an active part." - Lars von Trier

in the start of a new concept, the release of Lars von Triers latest film, The Boss of It All, apparently contains between five and seven visual clues which the Danish director calls Lookeys. With a 30,000 Kroner (approx £2,750) prize to the first Dane who identifies them all and understands how they connect, the Lookey  is hoping to encourage greater audience participation.  The winner will also get to appear as an extra in his next film: Anti Christ.

if other such attempts at viewer engagement in film exist, i'm unaware of them.  that KFC ad comes to mind - the one that aired in early January, where a secret  message was encoded specifically for Tivo/PVR users who could view the ad frame-by-frame, leading them to a coupon for a free chicken sandwich.  not exactly the kind of engagement Von Trier had in mind, i imagine - though who doesn't like a good chicken sandwich?  besides chickens, that is?

if other examples do exist, i also doubt they've been introduced by way of a format or set of rules, as Von Trier seems wont to do with regularity.  he doesn't just want to be different - he wants others to follow suit.  remains to be seen if this becomes commonplace for filmmakers in the never-ending battle for a chunk of the attention economy.  Von Trier enthusiasts are engaged-types to begin with, so they'll undoubtedly eat this up.  and the fact that the clues are [allegedly] not obvious - that there is some mystery involved - should likely add some viral oomph to his efforts.

regardless, it's worth a lookey.*

*proudly serving horrible jokes since '75.

tags: larsvontrier, dogme, lookey, iconoclast

resolved: the more diverse/massive the web gets, the greater the need for gatekeepers. or tastemakers.  or aggregators.  or alligators.  whatever.

it's why boing boing is one of the most popular blogs on the Net and why iTunes celebrity playlists are so successful.  we don't know what to read/view.  we need cultural-ninja dopplegangers - smarter, cooler, less-busy versions of ourselves to do it for us.  in some spheres of life middle[wo]men can make you want to gauge your own eye out with a rusty spoon, but when it comes to separating the wheat from the chaff of online video, sites like Glumbert are a godsend.

this assumes, of course, that you find value in seeing well-produced shorts like Jason Reitman's Sexual Consent, a safe-yet-steamy 6-minute send-up of the rather litigious culture we live in.

reitman is best known for two things: being the son of Ivan Reitman [Animal House, Ghostbusters, Kindergarten Cop, Dave, etc.] and recently directing the satirical feature Thank You For Smoking.  i'm sure he's known for other things, but not by me at the time of this post.

during my efforts to discover what makes reit-LO tick, i discovered that the short was actually produced in 2004.  it's curious what causes an idea or piece of content to tip when it tips.  robert scoble wrote about the same phenomenon when sales of his seminal book-on-blogging Naked Conversations [co-written with social media evangelist shel israel] received an unexpected boost long after initial release.  in their case, Amazon had paired Naked Conversations with a more recent release [Chris Anderson's fascinating The Long Tail], and their own sales/traffic spiked as a result. 

not sure what did it for reitman jr, though my money's on YouTube.  Sexual Consent was posted there in early October and has clocked 50k views to date.  it might also help that he has another feature in pre-production [Juno]...and, undoubtedly, being profiled by a popular video-tracker like Glumbert doesn't hurt either.

click on the image above to dig the smart satire of jason reitman.

tags: sexual, consent, jasonreitman, glumbert

ok.  this may just be a test, but it's one worth commenting on.

apparently there are 27 of you reading this.  or 25, excluding my 2 subscriptions to my own blog [through different RSS readers].  i know, it's pathetic. but if politicians are allowed to vote for themselves and actors allowed to buy tickets to their own films, then i'm allowed to subscribe to my own bloody feed.  so step off.

in truth, there's a point in doing this.  by subscribing to your own feed, you find out if there are problems as quickly as everyone else does.  and if you care about what it's like for your reader/viewer/friend to 'experience' whatever it is you're posting, it's worth understanding the variety of ways that people can actually end up experiencing it.  while the functionality of most RSS readers/aggregators are relatively similar, the end result of how your post looks coming out of them can vary pretty significantly.

a confession: i rarely read blog or news posts on the actual sites.  it's just way too smooth and efficient to skim through them in a reader.  invariably, i'll end up reading 20 or 30 posts or articles in greater detail on their home site, after i've finished skimming the feeds.  but i'm looking forward to a time when Newsfire [Mac OS X newsreader] incorporates a bit more of the design aesthetic from the original source into their reader.  at present, aggregators are the great equalizers. they distill the experience of a blog or news feed down to it's barest elements.  Newsfire just doesn't care if your blog is pretty, which is both brutal [for designers] and brilliant [for you].

which brings me to the point of the post.  one of the facts that RSS readers deem essential is the author of the post.  this is particularly useful for blogs with multiple authors - like blogTO, Midnight Poutine or Boing Boing - so you can easily distinguish the posts written by geniuses from those written by total chumpmonkeys.  at the top of every post viewed in Newsfire is the time the post was published, the source of that post [ie. wade weighs in] and the author.

as evidenced by my recent 5 month sabattical from blogging [the first five posts just killed me], my efforts thusfar have been a little lacklustre.  no quality control to be seen for miles.  however, having recently committed to getting my @#&*! together, i no longer find it acceptable that RSS readers refer to me [the author], as: noemail@noemail.org.

at first i found it kind of funny.  what was it trying to tell me? does the Web think i'm a loser?  that i either don't have an email address...or that i might as well not, because nobody in their right mind would bother emailing me in the first place?

either way, this post is essentially a test to see if i've rectified that problem. which, if you're curious, is caused by an empty email address field in the SmartCast section of your Feedburner account [huh?] and is resolved by, well, entering one.  so the moment i click save, i'm rushing off [or doing the mouse movement equivalent of rushing off] to refresh my RSS feed and see if i'm now yesemail@yesemail.org.  or something to that effect.  baby steps.

note: i acknowledge that blogging about my blogging challenges isn't the ideal way to retain my 25 readers.  i'll blog about something like Kramer's racist tirades or t-shirt magazines next time - promise.

i've always been a big fan of the NY Times Multimedia section.  personally, i find audio slideshows and interactive features allow for extremely rich, compelling and textured storytelling.  the inclusion of sound, in particular, being paramount.  try to imagine the most moving or affecting films or tv shows that you've seen...and then imagine them without the score, or voices. 

this sensibility has definitely led me to appreciate the works of certain film directors over others.  if you haven't already, run to the video store [or your fancy on-demand setup] and check out the works of Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu [pardon the exclusion of accents] to see what i'm talking about.  he's best known for films such as Amores Perros, 21 Grams and the recent Babel - and has been quoted as saying that the only reason he makes films in the first place is because he sucks as a musician [i'm paraphrasing].  this guy has a ninja-like understanding of the delicate tango that exists between sound & the moving image, with each element enhancing the other.

anyway.  we're talking about journalism here, not film.  and i'm not saying i'm about to stop reading the Sunday Times or throw out my copy of Walrus - just that there are different ways to weave together media, and that some of these ways can be more effective in evoking an emotional, visceral response from an audience.

last month, i started to play around with a couple of audio slideshow software packages.  specifically, sound slides and boinx fotomagico. without question, fotomagico is more complicated - but allows for greater functionality & control.  because i'm apparently a total idiot, i've been having issues exporting the finished project.  they typically come out as quicktime movie files, but i've yet to figure out how to manipulate the custom export settings to allow for the greatest crispness in image quality and transitions while minimizing the file size. 

as you'll see on this [my first fotomagico project, complete with annoying 'demo version' type in the bottom right corner], the images end up OK - but the transitions are horrible.  what's meant to be a smooth dissolve comes out as a pixelated mess.  i'm sure this is my own fault - not the program's.

i'll figure it out.  if any of you have any brilliant ideas, though - please share.  in the meantime, enjoy my snaps from a recent trip to NYC, set to the music of tomihira.  i'm about to purchase this, so soon i'll be able to add ambient noise & voice-overs to make the audio more a bit more tailored.

every once in a while, i feel like throwing fuel on the fire. 

i tend to avoid tire fires, prairie fires and fires commonly found in holes, though.  not that i've ever found a fire in a hole.  but, based on every Vietnam War film ever made, it would seem that hole-fires happen with great frequency over there.  [i imagine scores of Vietnamese hedgehogs falling asleep while smoking.]

anyhow.  whenever the anti-web brigade asserts smugly that the web is mostly good for wasting time, i feel it my duty to prove them...uhhh...right.

which is why i recently submitted this video to vlog your face, a public video art initiative by new york-based arts collective meerkatmedia. 

so what are you waiting for?  vlog your face already.

well, they weren't lying.  that wasn't your average tech conference.  not that i would know - i've never been to a tech conference, let alone a nerdfest like vloggercon.

but ohhhh, what a nerdfest it was.  sweet, scrumptious, rambunctious fun.  you want panels?  they had more than you can shake a stick at.  who shakes sticks at panels, you ask?  good question.  perhaps i can find out for you at StickShakingCon.  looking for workshops?  this conference was drownin' in 'em.  how about accusations of tastelessness [by this dude, directed at this dude]?  yep, they had a little bit off that magic too.  something for everyone.

anyway, it's over, and it's all very sad.  the part about it being over, i mean.  the experience itself was exhilarating, for several reasons. the biggest being that it's rather validating to be surrounded by 500 people whose presence proves that you aren't totally insane for feeling passionate about, well, what you feel passionate about.  it's also great to put faces, handshakes & hugs to names. and to contemplate *accidental* falls into swimming pools, when surrounded by hundreds of people with recording devices.  a certain video blogger from nottingham had my hopes up that he would seize the opportunity for a guaranteed spike in site traffic by taking a belly-first swan dive, off the upper balcony, into the pool.  hopes...dashed.

i'll also note that the city of san francisco is chock full of dazzle.  someone please tell me one thing wrong with that place?  other than the transience of the population, and the apparent dearth of breakfast burrito guidebooks?  besides those two things.  there i was, expecting to engage with it on the kerouac/beatnik/jazz-club tip...and then i'm steamrolled by all these other crazy tips.  like the fact that there's an ocean there.  and a bay.  and beautiful, lush, rolling green hills [mount tam/marin headlands] to hike/play around in...overlooking the aforementioned ocean and bay.  did i mention they have an ocean?  down by the bay, no less?

then there's the places with fun names - like sausalito, tiburon and bolinas.  i'll be entertained for at least the next few weeks just saying the word 'sau-sa-li-to'.  i'll actually go so far as to say that san francisco is such a powerful/magical place, that it can turn you into the person you've always dreamed of being.  take hats, for example.  i barely ever wear them and yet, in san francisco, i bought three.

there's so much post-conference stuff to do.  i met an utter crapload of people, and now need to focus on reaching out to said utter crapload, to ensure that i don't drop the ball on this whole social networking/web 2.0/community revolution thing. please, vlog nerds, be my friends.

oh yes.  days before heading west, i managed to throw together a promo for the event.  if you do happen to check it out, and subscribe to my feed, and then erect a shrine to my presently mediocre vlogging skills in your home or office, i have this to say to you: thanks.

also, you can check out pictures of breakfast burritos here.

this week's meme is somewhat less satisfying than last week's first ever 'meme of the week', if only because it doesn't involve a certain politician being satirically eviscerated for a sustained 25 minutes.

however, tango [a UK fruit beverage company]'s parody of this sony bravia ad does have a few things going for it.  first off, it's a meme about another meme.  what kind of postmodern loopiness is that?  we're talkin' expontential memes. meme squared.  the advertising equivalent of a mash-up, i guess.  secondly, fruit is good.

the original ad came out sometime last year.  sony decided that the best way they could introduce their new, sexy, flat-screen, plasma doohickey was to release 250,000 bouncing balls through the streets of San Francisco [an idea almost as brilliant as this, which has become quite the net meme in it's own right].  so, the effect of the bouncing balls was pretty dazzling, and off to viralville the commercial went.  just ask jose gonzales.  talk about right place at the right time.  the dude just happens to write a song that, when coupled with 250,000 bouncing balls and a cute frog, hypnotically compels people to run out and buy plasma screen TVs.

anyway, meme of the week gong goes to tango's parody ad.  props to you, tango, for replacing balls with fruit.  i actually tried that once, but if you've ever been kicked in the mangos, you know it's not the best idea ever.

tags: tango, sony bravia, meme, jose gonzales