Archive for December, 2007
What are the 2 good reasons for using DVR’s? Skipping commercials, and for watching shows when you want to watch them, right?
Well, according to this article on NewTeeVee, research from Palisades Media Group says that less than half of people with DVR’s reported fast-forwarding through the commercials, and more than half of the shows they’ve recorded were watched on the same day on which they were recorded. I don’t get it. If you’re watching it on the same day, and not skipping the commercials, what’s going on, exactly?
How does a father tell his only daughter that there’s no Santa Claus?
View it in stunning Medium Definition on our Media of the Month site!
Happy Holidays, everyone!
Great. Just great. Check out the cannon.
More here, at the website of Mattias Inks, who does all sorts of great little drawings.
I remember reading, a couple of years ago, some commentary from Kevin Drum who had worked for several years at a company hellbent on bringing about the paperless office. His eventual conclusion was that there would never be a paperless office. That, in fact, the more documents that you could generate solely on the computer, the more things a bunch of people would all separately print out. The paperless office generated more paper, not less.
Yet still, the idea of a paperless world persists. I love books, the smell of yellow paper and old glue, the look of a fine bookshelf, but here comes Kindle, and who knows what I’ll be reading on the train next year? Then i stumbled upon this delightful paper (of the scholarly, not physical, breed) - Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal (it’s long, but you can download the pdf here). It’s good stuff, and makes some interesting points…
Bored and wanting to test out our new Kaidan 360-degree single-shot panormic capture system, we thought we’d show you around our main office. This is where Asa and I and the office manager work. Doug’s office is in Siberia, which is across the hall. We call it Siberia because it’s across the hall, it’s not the main office, and Doug’s always playing his strange music there and talking gibberish.
Thanks to Christie for help taking the picture.
None of the Bunnies has ever directly been accused of being a hipster. But we’ve all been spotted in the Silverlake region from time to time and the funky chic aesthetic is something we enjoy and draw inspiration from. So in this season of mass-market consumerism, may I draw your attention to:
…which is (in case you’ve never heard of it) kind of like an Ebay but for handmade things.
Not only do I dig on Etsy’s smart use of the information age’s hyper-niche-driven economy, but I think some very clever and innovative people thought about information design and the user experience when they put the interface together. (more…)
This is cool:
At Yahoo! Research, JASMINE NOVAK has been running data analysis to identify when a search term becomes very popular, or “bursts.” Sharing this data with us, we did reverse IP lookup on the addresses in the data and plotted the patterns of activities as a particle system. Here, in a time-lapse animation, particles show queries from each location worldwide. Visualized are searches for “miss teen usa” (related to this video), “cricket” (world playoffs) “mattel” (recalls of toys with lead paint), and a close up on the Gulf of Mexico for “hurricane felix”.
This is a nice example of a clean, informative data visualization. The obvious next step is making it interactive… pair this up with Google Earth (Yahoo! may not be too interested in that, but you get my drift) and let the user spin the globe around and try out their own search terms, and suddenly you have an interesting and potentially useful cultural tool for studying patterns in viral marketing, politics, any meme at all. Presumably there is a fully interactive version hiding deep within the labs, so let us at it!
Have a look at their other projects – there’s some very interesting stuff trumping FlickrVision, SigAlert (which particularly looks like something right out of 24), and more. It’s clear they have some good designers on this team.