March 2009
70 posts
B-Roll [March 24-27, 2009]
Rhomobile is an open-source framework for compiling native smartphone applications using only HTML and Ruby, so web developers can easily transition to mobile software. Most major platforms (including iPhone, Windows Mobile and Symbian) are supported. BarTor scans product barcodes and downloads related torrents onto your home PC - very similar to TorrentDroid, but this is the first app of its...
Won’t Want for Love [Margaret in the Taiga]...
WatchInterim Camp - field.
poor visibility; weather again unsettled today. surreal rocks and riven lowlands, valleys fog-shrouded. frightening depths, and emptiness. rarity of air is noticeable. what are you looking for in this hostile stretch?
Go to Vimeo. Download the source video. Turn off the lights, turn up the speakers. Play this fullscreen. Amazing.
Former MSN Video executive is now New Media... →
From Todd Herman’s blog:
Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid and President Obama’s professional political staff show alarming signs of being hard-core authoritarian elitists convinced of their own might, wisdom and infallibility and their Neitzchian [sic] belief that if I only gave my daughter over to The State she’d be better for it.
[…]
I spent five truly amazing years at...
B-Roll [March 20-24, 2009]
Really sorry about the lack of posts over the past couple of weeks. There hasn’t been much that’s caught my interest lately… I’m hoping to compensate for that by getting a couple of (exclusive?) interviews to post on the blog. Stay tuned. Network capacity concerns may lead mobile carriers to charge for data based on the time of day. Columbia Journalism Review conducts an...
“He’s always asking: ‘Is that new? I haven’t seen that before.’ It’s like, Why...”
– Michelle Obama
“I gripped the dangling fabric [of his tie] and fell to the floor, pulling the...”
– Keith’s Tie Emporium
B-Roll [March 17-19, 2009]
Nancy Baym ruminates on the differences between music fandom and narrative fandom. From February 2008 to February 2009, Twitter grew 1382%. Digital sales of independent films make up 10% of total revenue at best… to paraphrase Morgan Spurlock when explaining the situation, enough to maybe pay the monthly phone bill. John August discusses current anti-piracy efforts by major movie...
Newspocalypse - The Opinions
Please reblog this or email me if you know of any other well-written and unique proposals by influential publications or blogs. I’ll be updating this post throughout the day with additional links. The New York Times
‘I can’t imagine what civil society would be like,’ said Buzz Woolley, a wealthy San Diego businessman who has been a vocal critic of the paper there, The...
“Desperate to fit in, he laughed way too loudly. They told him to settle down. He...”
– Paul Feig
B-Roll [March 16, 2009]
Did Reagan try to convert Gorbachev to Christianity in 1988? Brand Affinity Tech has 1400+ athletes signed up to a system where advertisers can place pictures of sports stars into their ads for, essentially, drag-and-drop endorsements. The sponsorships are cheap and athletes have veto power over each individual ad in which their images are embedded. Here’s a summary of an SXSW panel about...
iLounge: On Apple Authentication and Punishment →
Kind of a shocking article about how Apple “punishes” press outlets who release information or opinions about its products that the company doesn’t want in the public discussion.
After going after “Apple rumor sites” without success, only belatedly figuring out that the constant buzz they generated was helping the company more than hurting it, [our belief is that] Apple has now...
B-Roll [March 14, 2009]
The music video for the “Jai Ho” Pussycat Dolls remix features a horribly mutilated song and blatant Nokia XpressMusic 5800 product placement. Verizon FiOS’ set-top box is getting Facebook/Twitter integration for social TV functionality and YouTube integration for streaming videos to your HDTV. Facebook Connect launched for iPhone applications - killing off the...
"Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" - Clay... →
Lots of excellent stuff in here.
The people committed to saving newspapers [are] demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke. With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced...
Submit your questions: Lostpedia to interview... →
This is your chance to blind the showrunners of Lost with your dazzling wit! You have until March 20th to post your question in the provided forum thread.
B-Roll [March 12-13, 2009]
Wanted to post these up before they age any further.
In Chinese, the word for “grass-mud horse” sounds like the word for “motherfucker”, so the grass-mud horse become both a meme and a way to bypass China’s censors. Google senior VP of sales is leaving to become CEO of AOL. Sounds like he might possibly be able to turn the company around. Jimmy Fallon finishes his...
Foot Placed Firmly In Mouth
Josh: Oh man, you spoiled The Office for me...
Alex: I thought you would have watched, complained, and blogged about it by now
Josh: I don't complain about television
Josh: except to you
Josh: because you encourage my grossest instincts
Josh: I also don't blog about television because if there's one thing I'm going to avoid, it's being more of a loser than I already am
Watch“The Daily Show” Eviscerates Jim Cramer
Part 2 of the uncensored interview is embedded above, which turned out to be the most intense, but I would really recommend that you watch the entire thing. Stewart gets a little sanctimonious towards the end (as well as the pre-interview segment), but I think the journalistic effort that obviously went into preparing for this interview showed...
Newsweek: A lot of your songs are about how bad boys are.
Kelly Clarkson: Half of them are, like, boy bashing. The other half are from other people and their weird relationships. I've had really great boyfriends, actually. I've just had one really crappy one.
NW: Just one?
KC: I've only had one bad boyfriend, and I happen to write music about it.
NW: Does this one bad boyfriend know these songs are about him?
KC: I'm pretty sure that's apparent, yeah... I don't think he cares, honestly.
Move along, move along
Some brief announcements:
The comments now support Facebook Connect. So if you’re logged into Facebook, you can post a comment under your name without registering for a Disqus account. Notes have also been added to the site design, right below the comments, so you can see all the Tumblr users who’ve liked or reblogged any given post.
A more refined and usable site design is in...
B-Roll [March 11, 2009]
Two of these links are from BoingBoing - sorry in advance, but both were too good to ignore.
Check out this performance-capture animated short, a how-to guide for destroying the world with carbon-eating nanobots. The winning story from “The Moth StorySLAM” in NYC is a compelling and well-crafted tale of online romance and big risks. This YouTube video [link now defunct, sorry] has...
“I think Michael Cera is incredible, and beyond perfect for the role…....”
– Mark Webber [Stephen Stills] on the Scott Pilgrim movie
Coalition Seeks End To Exclusive Handset Deals →
Groups they’re petitioning include the FCC, FTC and Copyright Office. The coalition members include Mozilla, the EFF and a few small wireless carriers.
JPG Magazine / 8020 Media bought by Adorama Camera →
Back to life. (If you remember, they actually shut down two months ago.)
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B-Roll [March 8th-10, 2009]
An article on web usability points out, among other things, the three most eye-catching design elements for display ads: plain text, faces and cleavage. Hilarious six-minute compilation of local news reports about Jesus sightings. [via Videogum/Everything is Terrible] Aviary.com acquires audio-editor web app company Digimix, adding to its free Web software arsenal. Verizon and Nokia working on...
RNC issues Request For Proposal to build... →
The request is being savaged by conservatives, with very good reason. Here are some hilariously vague gems:
Under General Training Goals: “…The sites should be as open as possible, adhering to web-standards that will allow for third parties to build applications to run seamlessly throughout the system.”
Objective #2: “Integrate outside products through common API’s,...
"What the Palms, Samsungs, Microsofts and others... →
…is that it is effectively doing what Windows 95 started and XP continued: cementing its users in an ‘I’m satisfied, quite possibly dependent, so why change’ mentality that will likely take years—and similarly Microsoftian stumbles by Apple—to erode. The only difference in potential between the iPhone today and the PC back in 1995 is the comparatively small size of Apple’s iPhone...
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