Five videos, for about 40 minutes of enjoyment. So . . . enjoy.
I hardly ever post two things in a day. However, I'm sick today and officially my last post was Sunday night. Plus, I've run into some great video recently. I don't know why or what's going on, but I'm starting to think this whole video revolution might have some teeth . . . Consider this channel NoahBrier.com
First up is a beautiful 2 minute introduction to typography "created by Vancouver Film School students Ryan Uhrich and Marcos Ceravolo through the VFS 3D Animation & Visual Effects program." (via swissmiss)
Next up is another beautiful animation, this one is a trailer for the film I Met the Walrus. A brief intro from the website (as transcribed by Flagged For Follow Up): "In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview."
Next up is some environmental messaging. I guess this was part of Live Earth (though I didn't see it in New York) and it's titled "A Beginner's Guide to Giving a Damn" (via ian tait). I can't quite decide what I think of it, though it's cute and it makes me laugh that they admit that part of being green is making other people feel bad for not caring.
Last up are two Ted videos. The first is slightly old (and I'm pretty sure I've linked to it before), anyway it's pretty much the most amazing demo I've ever seen for a technology Microsoft recently purchased called Photosynth. I've watched this thing at least 10 times and it gets no less amazing.
Finally, here's someone I find incredibly inspiring, designer Jonathan Harris. He's the guy behind some of the coolest information visualizations on the planet including WordCount, 10x10, We Feel Fine and his latest project, Universe. One of the things Harris mentions in the 18-minute presentation (which can get a little boring at times, I will admit), is the power of collecting passive information. Since that's something I've written about in the past it was especially exciting to hear him talk about it.
With video on the web, it's not about what you're saying, it's about how it's said.
For as long as I remember it's been my feeling that part of what made the internet so powerful was that it finally gave us a way to understand networks. Prior to the web, networks were mostly invisible and we didn't have a great grasp of how they worked.
The problem with my argument was that I didn't really ever have anything to back it up. I mean, I had my understanding, but I hadn't ever read anything that explicitly spelled things out this way.
I am repeatedly asked a few basic questions when I lecture about networks: Why did it take this long? Why did we have to wait until 1999 to discover the impact of hubs and power laws on the behavior of complex networks? The answer is simple: We lacked a map. The few network maps available for study before the late 1990s had a few hundred nodes at most. The enormous World Wide Web offered the first chance to examine the intricate anatomy of large complex systems and established the presence of power laws. As other large maps followed, we gradually understood that most networks of practical interest, from the language to the sex web, are shaped by the same universal laws and therefore share the same hub-dominated architecture.
In case you didn't feel like reading that, my bigger point is that whatever it is we take away from the surface web (say watching videos or reading blog entries), the structure is equally important to our understanding. You might even say the medium is the message.
Think of it this way: The message is the bright shiny object, the low-hanging fruit. It's the 3 minute YouTube video of the guy lighting his farts on fire. It's the thing that makes you laugh. The medium, however, is also communicating some very strong messages, letting you know that you can find entertainment on new screens, that three minutes is the ideal time for your shortened-attention span, that if that idiot can light his farts and get 70,000 people to watch it, so can you.
Most everyone concentrates on the message, and rightly so, those watching the video most likely don't care about the deeper repercussions. Much of that communication is covert. The thing is, if you want to understand what's really going on and make something meaningful, you need to be in touch with that covert communication.
Here's how McLuhan broke it down:
What I am saying is that new media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had thought and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.
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Mostly random thought (from Twitter): Wow, I am now getting Ground Zero Mosque comment spam ... I don't know whether to be impressed or disturbed. (31 August 2010, 11:54 am)
Q: What is this site all about?
A: I think Michael Bierut explained it nicely a few years ago in response to people asking him why he didn't write more about design on Design Observer: "But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be." Replace "graphic design" with "media/marketing/technology" (or whatever you'd like to call my field) and you've got my deal.
Q: Where else do you live?
A: Good question. All over the place as a matter of fact. On Tumblr for more randomness, Twitter for short bursts, Dopplr for places I'm going, Delicious for things I'm reading, last.fm for music I'm listening to, Flickr for photos I'm taking and Facebook because I don't really have a choice. (Oh, and Amazon for stuff I want people to buy me.)
Q: I meant that literally. Where do you live?
A: Oh, sorry, Brooklyn, New York is where I call home at the moment.
Q: Any other side projects you'd like to tell us about?
A: As a matter of fact, yes. There's How Much Does it Buy?, a calculator for the rest of us. Holy Crap! Facts (and accompanying Twitter feed) which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Da' Bears Blog is, in my opinion, the best Chicago Bears blog on the web (I don't write it, I just helped it get off the ground) and Tweemail is a little PHP script I wrote for getting Twitter updates by email. I'm also always working on a few other things and will let you know when they're ready for public consumption.
Q: Um okay.
A: Yeah, that's a fake question mostly so I can throw in this one other quote I like that I think sums up some of what I try to do here. This one comes from Albert Einstein (or at least the internet says so) and goes something like, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Words to live by.
Hi, I'm 