I agree with everyone else; The Mill is simply extraordinarily, amazingly, awesomely great. I got one or two goose bumps watching this.
The Mill US Showreel 2011 from The Mill Visual Effects Studio on Vimeo.
Category: technology
Kutiman is at it again. To me, his musical video mixes are the ultimate artistic expressions of what remixes are today. It’s less than professional (but he is a professional producer I hear) in the traditional sense i.e. source material is user generated, distribution is free spread is self-propagated etc. This particular one he’s shot and directed himself which, funnily enough, could be considered taking a step back seen only from a UGC point of view… But who cares.
“find that next big thing that blows away Apple, Android, and everything we’re doing with Microsoft right now and makes it irrelevant—all of it. So go for it, without having to worry about saving Nokia’s rear end in the next 12 months. I’ve taken off the handcuffs.”
– Stephen Elop to developers
Pretty good article in BusinessWeek about the Elop goes to Nokia business. How’s the above for an open brief… Still don’t know what to think about the Microsoft/Nokia future though.
When trying to make sense of new technology and use it the right way for all different purposes, it’s important to look deeper than the visible technology and go for the behavior underneath. Technologies change fairly quickly, but the needs, and however those are met, behaviors, stay. We update our means to our ends.
At the same time, new technologies have brought about new behaviors as well. It didn’t bring about socializing, but it did bring about the swiping of the thumb and tapping of the index finger to socialize. And knitting has been around for a long time, but not knitting with headphones. That’s big in the 21st century.
-Android App Indexes Your Life & Augments Your Memory
That’s a headline in a Mashable post this morning. I think it sounds interesting and have a read. But I can’t help but think about how this would sound to someone not having gone through the evolution we’ve seen over the last 10 or so years. It would scare the shit out of someone in 1980. Not only a couple of seldom used words, but they will also mess with not only my life but my memory!
“We are helping people remember their lives,” Dexetra co-founder Binil Antony explains.
I wonder though. Isn’t living life three things really? Doing it now, remembering past-living and thinking a bit about possible future living? That’s how I see it. If you plan too much ahead or keep thinking about how good it was before, someone will tell you you have to live now, here and now or live in the moment. So an app that helps me remember life, you could argue, is taking away a part of life. Or actually, perhaps it is just augmenting it.
A lot of internet loving and opinions about where it is and where it’s headed at the FutureEverything festival in Manchester. The best presentation I heard was that of Bill Thompson, technology writer for BBC, titled And To Those Left Behind. He said that getting him (if anyone could force him, as not even a vacation can) offline is like “cutting off parts of my mind…”, arguing that with him, it’s a steady and constant stream of consciousness that affected when coming in contact with twitter, Facebook, blogs etc. I can agree with that, but in my opinion, there’s probably a needed presentation titled “To Those Trapped Within”. How many times have you worked with, or seen, people completely controlled by their gadgets?
JWT Intelligence has a post about new models for supporting long-form content that I liked and which coincided with a dialogue I heard the other day about whether or not person 1; 40+ and an avid reader with too much to do, was going to get the Kindle or an iPad to read books on. Person 2 was a bit confused by the question, as the iPad has so much more to offer than the “stupid” kindle. Sure, the screen is better for reading outdoors but that’s about it.
I beg to differ. New models of long-format is longer than articles but shorter than books and this has a lot to do with increasingly bite sized reading habits. That deals with that change by adapting itself to it. Shorter. Quicker. For new times and new devices.
The iPad is problematic for this bite sized world it you are, as person 1 says, an avid reader who wants to use the iPad for reading. Because it offers so much more.
Some technologies allows us (actually, it directs or guides us) to be really “productive” within the technology by which I mean (and it might not be the best wording) you can do a lot of things and be productive across the range. I’ll let “productive” mean more than useful productiveness, as that distinction is sometimes made. Other technologies allows us to be productive with. It’s more focused and specialized. But of course it’s about how people decide to use it?! Therein lies the rub. Because we can’t, can we?
So, the Kindle is the best device if you want to read books. Because there’s nothing else you can happen to start doing with it (more or less). And an egg timer is better than the iPhone if you want to boil perfect eggs. I’ve ended up with close to green eggs and 5 answered emails. Everything is mashing up which is cool and interesting but perhaps not helping us in every aspect.
I heard about this one guy in rural Japan who answered his axe-phone in a hurry and died.
“The cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself,” said Poole. “To fail in an environment where you’re contributing with your real name is costly.”
– Chris Poole, 4chan
“REAL change comes from people putting their necks on the line. I couldn’t remember a time when an anonymous person really enacted change in, well, anything. It’s why I sign my name to everything, even stuff that could get me fired,”
– Robert Scoble
From ReadWriteWeb
Both arguments are true. And we’ve seen more than enough evidence to verify that so is the case. It’s not either/or. When given the option, people will chose that which fits. Sometimes speaking up in public is what we need. Sometimes we need to be anonymous. Away from internet, the anonymous would hold his/her breath. Online that’s not the case. That’s quite groundbreaking, is it not?
Sometimes an anonymous person can start a revolution. Other times, many anonymous discontent people might need one public person to ignite them all. Going from reluctantly quiet and anonymous, to supporting an explosion of support. Confidence in numbers.
Location really was the missing dimension of digitally mediated [personal] communication. The variable that made the question “where are you” or “where is that happening” redundant. Of course a call to a mobile phone still calls for it, but not too seldom my calls are triggered by a check-in I’ve seen.
Where someone was when you called them was never unknown before. You called someone and if they answered, they were home. Or at work, or wherever you called to. You sent someone a letter and if they received it, they obviously came home. An early question upon calling someone might, however, have been where have you been, and that question held much more interesting information than where they were at the time of the conversation. As that’s wherever you called them.
You can tweet and move. A tweet here and a tweet there. Another person tweets here and tweets there. With location meta data you can see tweets in your vicinity. Check-ins let you see where friends and others are at. Small messages floating around everywhere and often they have very little to do with the location other than the fact that you were there just then. Check-ins are just that.
But as soon as we gather for a venue at a place, a hash tag gives the place a twitter feed. The feed belongs to, or originates from, a place. The belongs to part is what I think is a lost aspect that holds some potentially interesting ways of discovering things from the past at that spot. It’s quite interesting if that feed, with a hash tag working as the shepherd, were to be connected to the spot for that venue. Continuously. Not just the initial check-in that serves as a “Hi, I’m here”, but the ongoing conversation. They tend to part ways as the participant’s communication, about whatever the venue is about, starts flowing.
I’d like to find locations with feeds attached to them, and discover stories told from that place. To find out that, for example, music lovers had a Bob Dylan night at [location] 2 months ago. Just from being at the place. And being able to find parts of their discussions. Perhaps I’ve found a music lover cafe.
But It’s like my colleague said: “Real time is nothing after real time”.
It’s true. Just after real time, it’s nothing.
Just recently there was a gathering about the digital world called SIME (funnily enough this was discussed: The age of information is dead and the era of storytelling just began. and I’m using it as an example of how we could be stumbling over stories. How appropriate.). Some of the discussion can be found at #sime10 (don’t know for how long), and physically it took place at Cinema Saga. If you check in today (29th Nov 2010) you’ll see it’s the Stockholm International Film Festival. You won’t, however, discover that SIME 2010 took place a week before. And you will most certainly not find that SIME 09 was held in the same spot a year earlier.
You’ll find recent check-ins, who’s checked in most, but nothing about what took place here. I think that would add something useful to a place. I mean Google is intangible discovery first while a check-in is a tangible, location based, discovery first. I think the two need to be more tightly connected in the later case.
The check-in is a “story” starting point and #sime10 the story unfolding from that place. I think it’s only right that it partly sticks to that place.
But I really enjoy coincidental discoveries of a third kind of whatever it is I’m writing about here. They make me smile. They are check-ins with comments to spots created while in a car queue or some other passing situation or event. There was a queue here, but not anymore. Another person was here, in the queue, but not anymore. That person, at that time, was pissed off and told us in a comment. He/she is not pissed off anymore (I should hope). Nothing is really there anymore. Yet the comment is always what feels most real and most present to me. That’s science fiction.
