Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Someone e-mailed me this Tibetan Personality Test. It’s kind of fun, kind of spooky. Not sure what to make of it. Was supposed to email it, but it is better to let people who want to try it to CLICK THIS.

As a loyal Conan O’Brien fan who has even dragged his three younger brothers to a live Christmas holiday taping, I enjoy how far Conan can go out on a limb. Previously it was a look alike Finnish stateswoman, and now an accidental dot com, HornyManatee.com.

I will not go into how this came about. The results are an outpoouring of repressed manatee love and expression that perhaps only a manatee and the humanity of the Internet can provide.

If you feel hurt and wronged by this, then go to the alternative manatee web site, TammyFaye.com and you will surely be soothed.

If you have a great music video or animation demo reel, then you want it to look great when you upload it online for the world to see. DVD quality. Now you can do just that at the Zudeo.com High Definition Movie and Video community web site. Powered by the Azureus peer to peer platform the client app implements the BitTorrent protocol using Java language.

Video clips and animation that get compressed into oblivion by YouTube, appear clean as the original artists and producers intended them to be. The Zudeo system is set up to accomodate large files. You can upload a full length DVD quality movie if you like.

Azureus and Zudeo will be names to watch in the near term future as the excitement over online video, high quality downloadable content, and new player devices heats up.

Recent press release and Wired article about Azureus, HD Vids Trump YouTube.

If you are interested in submitting content to Zudeo’s web site, click here.

Monday I participated in a design review for Youthgive, a youth oriented charitable community web site. At the table were a number of writers, thinkers and designers with strong knowledge of web design and Internet development, such as Howard Rheingold and game developer Anselm Hook. Part of what we did was to share links to innovative web sites such as OpenLayers, Wayfaring, Wetpaint and ID Mashups.

Following up and tracking many of the new mashups, creative displays of local based information, I found MappedUp. Of course anything that looks this cool was done in Flash. MappedUp is an application that tracks a large number of RSS news sources and displays their latest items on a world map, geographically and in real-time. It’s been developed by Jeroen Wijering a grad student in the Netherlands.

GG Bridge from Presidio. Originally uploaded by goblue72.

So, it was good get outside and see what other folks are doing. A meeting on the Presidio campus with the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin Headlands out the window allowed the mind to air out a bit. I need to do this more often.

Finally I ended the week by impulsively starting up another blog, Tubular Times, devoted exclusively to the explosion of online video. It’s on Goggle Blogger, which handles Flash video more gracefully than this WordPress blogging software does.

Children of all ages, now it's fun time! Monkey Vortex is avant-garde Internet Radio Theater. Above is a Flash animation recently completed to provide visual shine to the Monkey Vortex chant. Need a new perspective? You'll find one in the Monkey Vortex.

In today’s news, Norman Pearlstine, a long time top manager at Time Inc., the magazine division of Time-Warner, will be joining The Carlyle Group a Washington, D.C. based global private equity investment firm with more than USD$40 billion of equity capital under management, as a senior advisor.

I briefly met Mr. Pearlstine while at Time Warner, when hired to work on their experimental “Full Service Network” interactive television effort in the early 90’s. When introduced as a technical lead for the New York office, he half jokingly asked me, “Are you the one who is going to save us?” I good naturedly replied that I’d try my best. We knew we were in over our heads.

The Time Warner Cable FSN project was a technical boondoggle in deep trouble and would not be able to launch their tests at Celebration, FL for the scheduled date 4 months away. From what I gather, something was launched over 2 years after our meeting, but by that time broadband internet was all the rage, and TW was eying AOL as their path to interactivity. Back in those days, I advised TW to use the Internet as a channel on their interactive cable TV service, but the idea was dismissed, although not by Pearlstine himself.

In the days leading up to the FSN’s proposed Spring 1993 launch date, I had a longer discussion with Walter Isaacson, who was then the Managing Editor of Time magazine. In order to protect my immediate superiors at Time Warner Interactive, I was not able to disclose to him how feeble the FSN effort actually was. How would that look in a Time magazine article!? Even if I had told Isaacson of the many flaws in the system, I’m not sure what good it would have done, but I regret not having a deeper, more honest discussion. So much for office politics and paranoia.

Today I continue to work as the consultant behind the consultants, advisor to the advisors. I spend more time in the real world, hands on in leading edge places, from which many of the upper echelon are insulated and unaware.

Web sightings found while admiring the fine paintings by Yoon Lee. One link took me to a calendar at Fecal Face.

Who would name a web site Fecal Face? Probably some wise guys in San Francisco, and this is an very unique and fun web experience indeed.

Fecal links you to further weirdness, such as humus which is an edgy online magazine composed in Flash. “Humus is a territory where images, creativity, thoughts and expressions have no border line or demarcation line. Feel free to contribute with: Graphic design, Motion design, Photography, Drawings, Illustrations, Poems.”

Back to Yoon Lee. I like the way she uses 3D software to simulate giant brush strokes. If only one could actually control that kind of gestural painting by hand. I’d have to see these up close and in person to further understand these, but they remind me of a controlled Jackson Pollock travelling through hyperspace.

On the subject of blending computer graphics and painterly techniques, I blogged about the tedious rotoscoping of A Scanner Darkly which has finally reached theatrical release, and not surprisingly received numerous “style over substance” reviews.

ClassWar 1

Originally uploaded by Greg Palast.

Why does Yahoo Finance insist on publishing Robin Leach type articles about lifestyles of the rich and famous, and have the audacity to call these people, the other half? Come on now, it’s the upper crust of 5% they are flaunting in the rest of our faces. If you really care, then that is sad, since you probably also wish you could have attended Ken Lay’s funeral with all the trimmings.