Link: kameraflage(tm)

Advertisers place hidden messages in ads etc - consumers can reveal the message by taking  a photo with a cell phone (or, one supposes, with any other digital camera).
(In photo above, lightning below cloud appears only when seen via digital camera).

Link: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/09/second-life-mac.html

Big players are involved here - in addition to HBO, there's the filmmaker's representation by UTA.
This is probably the biggest deal Second Life has been involved in to date.
So much for Second Life being "over".

Machinima refers to content created using games, virtual worlds, etc. as a cinema studio.
This approach represents the simplest and most accessible way for people to stage a cinema/video production without a lot of resources. Typically, cast members will inhabit characters in a vritual environment, then record the resulting action. Action is typically scripted, but there are lots of different approaches.
More info here:
http://machinima.com/

This just in - machinima for Dummies.
http://www.machinimafordummies.com/

Tags: Virtual worlds, consumer generated, machinima, long tail

Nice set of infographics by Lokesh Dhakar.

Begs the question - why does a novice customer have to explain the product in this way? Why aren't Starbucks doing this?
And by the way - why do we have to learn a new vocabulary for "small, medium, large" to buy coffee drinks?

Jon K (of Ren & Stimpy fame) produced a new animated bit for the Comcast website:

http://www.comcast.com/nintendo/

Right up there in banner territory - which I usually scroll right past.

moral: give people content they'll actually like, and you won't have to worry about forcing them to watch your ads via increasingly obnoxious tactics.

Surprisingly, I already feel better about Comcast (they're not even in my market, AFAIK...).

I'd even come back to their site if I thought they'd do more of this.

Technorati Tags: Advertising

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

In sociology, Nalini Kotamraju has argued that constructing arguments around "class" is extremely difficult in the United States. Terms like "working class" and "middle class" and "upper class" get all muddled quickly. She argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income. In other words, all of my anti-capitalist college friends who work in cafes and read Engels are not working class just because they make $14K a year and have no benefits. Class divisions in the United States have more to do with social networks (the real ones, not FB/MS), social capital, cultural capital, and attitudes than income. Not surprisingly, other demographics typically discussed in class terms are also a part of this lifestyle division. Social networks are strongly connected to geography, race, and religion; these are also huge factors in lifestyle divisions and thus "class."

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~nalinik/

Steampunk is an aesthetic that looks back to Victorian-era machinery, which often was quite elegant, using heterogeneous materials including lots of wood and brass. Victorian tech also often revealed its own complexity, rather than trying to appear simple, as modern devices do.

People are starting to apply this aesthetic to computing devices and other hi-tech applications; see link below.
Some of this stuff is gorgeous – not a word I normally use about technology.
And it’s all handmade.

Wired has a great overview article here:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/multimedia/2007/06/gallery_steampunk

MAKE magazine has some blow-by-blow accounts of actual fabrication:

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/06/steampunk_lcd_monitor_mod.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

Boing Boing regularly follows cool steampunk artifacts - not just computers.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/13/steampunk_computing.html

Steampunk Workshop seems poised to start a business:

http://www.steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml

Reclaiming the early keyboard aesthetic:

http://www.steampunkworkshop.com/keyboard.shtml

And finally, why stop with gadgets? Do your whole office:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/13/nautilusinspired_off.html
So how long before consumers get tired of black plastic boxes and start demanding technology that has some (any!) sense of style? I've seen a few feeble efforts in the marketplace, but unless you're willing to do it yourself, at this point in time most of us are stuck with some seriously ugly junk in our offices and living rooms.

Technorati Tags: consumer tech, Hardware

Facebook has opened up an extensive API to allow outside programmers to piggyback apps on their platform. This means that you could write a widget and have it adopted by millions of FB users in a matter of days (as has happened to iLike and others).
Note: make sure your servers are ready!

Developers’ page: http://developers.facebook.com/get_started.php

Here are some of the more popular apps that have already been developed:
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/06/04/this-weeks-top-25-hottest-facebook-apps/

Marc Andreesen has a great analysis of the significance of all this here:
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html - basic point being that the former Web application has become a platform - in a way that many sites could and should have done, but haven't. And a platform beats an application every time (e.g. dedicated word processors vs. flexible desktop computers - we all know who won that one).

So what can brands do to leverage this? Well - what would you do if you had an application that millions of people were using every day, in a social-network context? You've got access to the Facebook API, so you can see your users’ profile, friend, photo, and event data. Hint: no spamming!

David Sacks has a great article on how social-network-as-platform transforms users’ ways of finding what they want on the web:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/31/the-new-portals-its-the-bread-not-the-peanut-butter/

Sacks notes:

"Your friends push information to you that is likely to be useful, and if not you can tune your preferences until it is. Facebook promises a kind of Socratic knowledge: it tells users things they didn’t even think to ask."
And he goes so far as to say "Much of what we know as “Web 2.0″ will eventually be rebuilt on top of Facebook." Bold prediction - we'll see!

Technorati Tags: Software tools

This is for anyone who thinks their skill in commercial art - or any other executional discipline - will keep them happily employed for the rest of time:

Pixilu.com cleans up your digital photos for anywhere from $1.49 to $9.99.

Thanks, Guy:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/reality-check-p.html

“Hold on to your tips n’ tricks long enough, and someone will make a button out of them”
-- Kai Krause

The clock is ticking...

It's only a matter of time before the disciplines of digital imaging, page makeup, color management, and all the other things that separate a thriving studio from a garage operation become freely accessible services, at an acceptable level of quality for commercial work.
At that point, the competitive strategy of agency studios needs to shift if studios are to survive.

Remember what happened to typesetting? Type is now free, and you can't make a living as a typesetter any more - that task is being done in stealth mode, by people who are getting paid to do something else (like layout or retouching).
Is it as good as professional type shops used to deliver? Of course not. But the market voted with its dollars - computer typography is good enough, and Nearly Free beats $35/foot (plus paste-up!) any day.

So all of us who rely on execution to pay our bills need to keep moving further upstream, closer to the creative process - managing, selecting and otherwise caring for images, for example, rather than fussing with them as the computers can do faster and cheaper.
We humans are good at judgement, contextualization, the subtleties of style; machines are better at speed and accuracy. Let's stop competing with them and focus on what our strengths are.

Not totally sure what's happening here, but it looks like the Coke machine is a superhero in these YouTube shorts.

So... what's he doing to the other vending machines in #2...?

Japanese Vending Machine Robot Superhero! » Japan Probe:

We (TracyLocke, that is...) used one of these for our biggest client's international sales meeting almost exactly a year ago.

I first saw it at CES earlier that year ("vaporware" jokes abounded).

MIT Advertising Blog link:

Here's a pretty cool piece of tech. It's a screen made of dry fog, which means it's a screen you can walk through. More officially, "Using nothing more than tap water and ultrasonic waves, FogScreen projection screen machines employ a patented technology to create a smooth foggy airflow that captures images just like a screen. You can walk right through a FogScreen projection screen without getting wet. The microscopic fog droplets actually feel dry to the touch, just like air." Wonder if you can combine it with Reactrix.