Video DSLR's / Waiting

Usually, DSLR’s only shoot still images. But recently, they’ve started shooting videos too. The Canon 5D Mark II is so far the best – it shoots HD video, with full color and exposure control, and it lets you zoom and focus while shooting. It’s so good, in fact, that independent filmmakers are using it to shoot films.

The only problem, though, is that the audio is weak. It only has one input, so if you want high quality or surround audio, you have to use a separate audio recording system. Plus, it’s a very expensive camera.

It’s tempting to buy one right now, just because the idea of having two in one is so much fun. But the quality of the recording isn’t good enough yet. This is still a brand new medium, and it needs to improve a little bit first. It’s still in its “beta” stage. Sometimes it is better to wait for a new gadget to improve than to buy it when it’s brand new. Otherwise, you get stuck spending a lot of money before you get the item you really want.

DJ Paige Railstone

DJ Paige Railstone is an underground DJ and singer/songwriter who became popular in 2003. Her musical style includes rock, country, alternative, and hip-hop, and she plays guitar, keyboard, and piano. But she has never been on TV or in a movie, and she refuses to play in public.

DJ Paige Railstone's mashup of Verve and Eminem

DJ Paige Railstone is not real.

There is a website called 20Q.net which asks twenty questions, then guesses what you were thinking of. If 20Q can’t guess, then it asks you what you were thinking of, and your answers are stored and used to enlarge the database. The Nerdfighters wondered if they could make up a person and have 20Q guess correctly.

So they invented DJ Paige Railstone. Paige is the Nerdfighter who came up with the idea to trick 20Q. Railstone anagrams to “is not real.” A list was made of everything about DJ Paige Railstone, and distributed online to all Nerdfighters. They played 20Q, and eventually, tricked the game.

 There is something inherently fun about tricking something, in figuring it out. The Nerdfighters collectively did this to the game 20Q. For them, the game was to trick the game. They didn’t play the game the way it was intended – they made their own game out of it. This is an example of how everything can be made into a game, depending on the view of the people playing.

I wonder if the makers of 20Q anticipated something like this when they built it.

Audiosurf

First there was surfing. Then there was Surfing USA (Beach Boys). Then we could surf the radio, then the TV, then the Internet. Now we can Audiosurf.

Audiosurf.com is a website based around a game. To play, you upload a song you like, then Audiosurf turns the song into a playable game level.

The game is very simple. You are in a glider, going along a colorful track at a speed relative to your song. As the track twists with the music, you try to catch colored blocks and avoid grey ones. The level intensifies as the song intensifies, and it gets easier when the song gets lighter.

Audiosurf is a fun twist to games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. What Audiosurf has over them is that it allows you to use any song you want.

Audiosurf gameplay to I Fight Dragons' The Faster The Treadmill

iTunes gives you a thirty second sample of a song. But who can tell from thirty seconds if it’s a song they want to buy? iTunes is not the place to find new music, and it definitely does not help people who are just starting out.

Bandcamp is the place for that. Their philosophy is: you can’t sell your music if nobody has heard it. The header from their website gives a great description: “Viral distribution. We give your fans drop dead easy tools to share your music with their friends, and most importantly we do it in a way that drives traffic back to you.”

On Bandcamp, everything is free. You enter your username, email, and bandname. Then you upload songs. Every song can be listened to in full, in high quality, for free. Then, you can sell your songs in any format (Bandcamp does it for you) at whatever price you want. Bandcamp makes spreading and selling your songs very simple.

This is definitely a great resource for independent musicians trying to get into the music industry. Every other creative medium has a way of getting itself out: vloggers have YouTube; bloggers have Tumblr, Blogspot, etc.; photographers have Flickr; artists have Deviantart… Musicians didn’t have anything until Bandcamp.

IMeem

I would just like to take a moment to mourn the loss of a great friend… *ahem* I mean website…

IMeem was kind to all. It gave everyone the opportunity to listen to anything that anyone else uploaded. It didn’t discriminate; it didn’t force you to have a membership. Its music search engine was fabulous, and its interface was sleek. IMeem was the best free online music player around.

But then it sold out to Myspace, and Myspace changed everything. The sleek interface was replaced by Myspace’s slow, clunky one. Songs are no longer uploaded from everywhere, but gathered from Myspace music players – that means no more rare songs, no more covers. The playlists are supposed to be up in a few days, but who knows what’s changed about them.

Why did IMeem sell out? It had a good thing going. It was becoming big. It could have made it on its own. Why did it sell out so soon? Oh IMeem, didn’t you know? The way to sell a website is to wait until it becomes big enough to stand alone. Wait until it is popular enough that when you sell it, nothing will change. And if you were forcdd to sell out due to copyright violations, you should have known better.

Oh, IMeem. You were a great website. You are already missed.

VidCon

John and Hank Green sure are busy – but they’re professional bloggers, so this is what they do.

This year, they are creating a brand new conference for people who are big on YouTube. It’s called VidCon. It will be held in Los Angeles in January 2010. The conference costs $40 per night and runs for three nights. Lots of the top YouTubers are already confirmed on attendance.

New Media is about new things in the world that are influenced by new technology. Five years ago, a conference based on YouTube would have sounded crazy. But now that YouTube is as huge as it is, and since it has had huge effects on some peoples’ lives, a conference about it seems like a great idea. This is what frequently happens in New Media – things change so quickly that within just a few years, an idea can sound completely stupid and then completely brilliant. A conference about YouTube is one of those things.

Wes Anderson / Style

Wes Anderson is the director of three of my favorite movies – Bottle Rocket, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Darjeeling Limited. I can always tell when I’m watching a Wes Anderson film because has his own very distinctive style.

1. Most of the shots are extremely wide-angle, showing the barrel distortion from the lens.

2. Most of the shots have a peculiar symmetry.

3. The camera’s movements (when it even moves at all) are very smooth.

4. Every movie has its own color scheme. This color scheme repeats in every scene, all throughout the movie.

It is always a good idea to have a distinctive style (or two, if you’re like Nate Williams). Being consistent with yourself and following the rules of your own design style can help you become more recognized – this helps when looking for jobs or when looking to become well known. All of the great artists (both centuries ago and now) have their own distinct styles. And since film is an art form, each director should have his own distinct style too.

What I love about Wes Anderson’s films is that his style is absurdly recognizable. His style is tremendously different from typical Hollywood films and even from other independent films. His style is by far the most distinctive in the industry right now.

LaBlogotheque

It is difficult to connect to your audience so much that they really feel like they are there, in the room. But LaBlogotheque has this mastered.

LaBlogotheque:

luh-BLOG-oh-THEEK

LaBlogotheque is a French group who records sessions with top indie musicians. But they don’t record the musicians performing live shows, they record them performing on the street – or on the subway, or in abandoned buildings, or in buildings with interesting architecture, or in front of very small groups of people…

LaBlogotheque captures musicians in a raw atmosphere, with a raw look. The on-the-street format forces the musicians to break the music down to just its basics – its roots – and perform it simply and from the heart.

LaBlogotheque’s shows capture this by employing recording and editing methods that match the raw feeling. The footage is edited into simple, deep colors – usually a red, blue-green, or yellow, with a film-like level of high contrast. This keeps the film looking messy and unready. This keeps the shows feeling close-to-home.

What LaBlogotheque is best at is capturing a soulful atmosphere and portraying it to their audience. By absorbing the colors, the sounds, and the events of the videos, the audience is able to feel at home with the musicians. The video’s viewer feels like the musicians are letting them hear a secret. LaBlogotheque does a great job of presenting it.

LaBlogotheque’s shows are available on YouTube or on their website.

Andrew Bird / Matching vs. Coordinating

Andrew Bird’s music video for his song Lull is fully animated. But it isn’t animated in a cartoon-like style. It looks like moving bits of paper. Everything is hand-drawn in actuality, but the pieces were moved around digitally – not by stop-motion.

I love this disconnection of styles. Usually, something that exists outside of a computer – something tangible, like a piece of paper – will be animated in a primarily non-digital manner (stop-motion, clay-mation, etc.). And conversely, digital pieces will be animated digitally. But in this video, physical pieces are digitally animated – this is atypical.

This is something like the idea of mix-and-match. Where originally, one thing matches with another thing, a new thing can be matched with the first in a way that coordinates. The difference between matching and coordinating is an important concept to understand in digital media. Mixing and matching allows for so many more options of styles, and for so many more outcomes.

Julia Nunes / Ben Folds

People tend to separate the internet from the outside world. Cyberspace is seen as a bit of life that is not an actual part of life. But sometimes the internet affects the real world in huge ways.

YouTube musician Julia Nunes was a sensation in herself, but when she posted a cover to the Ben Folds song Gone, a big thing happened. The song was a big hit, and Ben Folds was so impressed by it – the cover and her music – that he invited her to go on tour with him. Ben Folds is Julia Nunes’ favorite musician.

There was no contest or competition. YouTube was the only thing in play. Julia Nunes received this awesome opportunity because YouTube made the connection possible.

Julia Nunes' videosong cover of Gone by Ben Folds.

 Julia Nunes performing Gone with Ben Folds

Wait For The Summer - Yeasayer

Yeasayer's video for their song Wait For The Summer is very well-done and interesting. It pulls along a theme of apples and life - its beginning and end - as it explores the seasons and time. It explores the ideas of life through the apples, through the beetles scurrying around, and through the layering of silhouetted humans. They discovered that human silhouettes, when layered on top of each other, can create different shapes. The whole video is very psychedelic, which matches with the sound of the song.



The song itself is fast-paced, but the video moves along fairly slowly. But there are so many details in the video that it works nicely in keeping with the song. The video really works to accentuate the themes of the song.

Kids - MGMT

In January of 2008, a music video for the song Kids by MGMT was posted to YouTube by user jsalmon. It involved a boy and a girl, faces painted, dancing to the song, and clips from old shows of people dancing.

 

A few months later, in April, jsalmon was contacted by Ray Tintori, who has directed several official videos for MGMT. Tintori invited him and his two actors to be in the official video for MGMT's song Electric Feel.



Jsalmon's video has received more views so far than MGMT's own official video for Kids (which was released in 2009), and it is the first to show up in searches for the song. It's crazy how huge this video has become, and even more crazy what came out of it. The Internet is the best place to become well known for doing something awesome, because it is the fastest. We truly have the setup for Andy Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame."

Exodus Damage - John Vanderslice

John Vanderslice's song Exodus Damage has a very good video. It was filmed with old film video cameras, and it uses time-lapses and also occasional still film shots. It tells a mysterious story that follows a young man (it looks as though it was in the 1990's), roaming around with his iconic Leica, taking photos of large buildings.



The old style of filming goes nicely with the sound of the song. Both the video and the song are very crisp - they have the same feel. And the look of the video clips (and the occasional still photos) - lots of dark black colors against moody colors - emphasizes the darkness of the lyrics. The song is full of creepy, dark things, but masked with a bright melody. The look of the video really enhances that.

Project For Awesome / Good vs. Bad of the Internet

On December Seventeenth, Youtubers are taking over YouTube... for charity.

Inspired by the Vlogbrothers, December Seventeenth is the day of the Project for Awesome. On this day, millions of YouTubers, most of whom are nerdfighters or who associate with nerdfighters, post videos about charities. They all use the same symbol in their descriptions. Then everyone involved rates everyone else's videos with five stars. This accomplishes two things: it breaks YouTube's algorithms, which is fun; and it makes people aware of many good charities.

One thing that always seems to be true about everything is that there is a bad side and a good side (this concept is similar to the idea of "looking on the bright side" except that I am more cynical and creating large groupings of events and ideas). In this example, The Project for Awesome is the good side of YouTube. The bad side of YouTube is the idiocracy and vulgarity of some of its content. Every time a new internet site is made, it can either be good (and useful) or bad (and stupid). Twitter is working itself out right now. Sometimes Twitter is a stupid means of hyper-individualism. But other times, Twitter is a great resource for instant communication. Twitter can be used well if people decide to do so. Everything can either be good or bad, and that identity is always changeable.

The Tracey Fragments

Sometimes life is a little bit broken.

In the movie The Tracey Fragments, which is based on a book, Ellen Page plays a depressed, mixed up teenager. In the film, she is looking for her younger brother, whom she has hypnotized into believing he is a dog. This movie is bizarre and depressing, but its editing is incredibly noteworthy.

Most movies show you one thing at a time, but The Tracey Fragments is not like most movies. The stage is fragmented, showing bits and pieces of clips at a time.

The entire movie looks like this, and I think that the fragmented clips help add to the movie's main theme. Tracey is a fragmented girl, a little bit crazy, and the editing helps show that. Also, having a film be split into pieces lets more things be shown at once, and it gives the final piece more replay-ability. You can't watch the whole screen at once. You have to move your eyes around, deciding which spot is best. It's almost like a puzzle.

Something like this would have never been able to be done with film. Having the film be digital is the only way that a stage can be split into so many fragments at the same time. But even still, this must have been a terribly difficult movie to edit.

I Fight Dragons

Remember all those old video games you used to play on your NES and your Gameboy? Do you remember any of the controllers? You might recognize a few:

This video really says it all.

Chicago-based NES-Rock band (the first and so-far only of its kind) I Fight Dragons plays video game controllers as instruments. The controllers are hooked up to computers, and the buttons correspond to certain sounds, which are controlled by the computers. Other items include the standalone Original Gameboy, which is equipped with a Little Sound DJ Cartrige, which lets you program entire songs and play them back.

This is yet another example of technology not being used how it was intended, but in a completely new and interesting way. I Fight Dragons is truly innovative, and truly "nerdy" to be able to come up with this idea. They are an incredibly fun band, frequently drawing references to their favorite old videogames and dreaming about a sci-fi future.

IFD takes advantage of the Free Economy idea, giving out all of their songs to members of their mailing list. This helps them raise a fan-base. Apparently this was a good idea, because Imogen Heap found out about them and collaborated on a song with them.

Feeling nostalgic about your old games? Don't worry. IFD has a fun little game at the top of their myspace page where you, too, can fight dragons. It's simple, just like the old games.

Truth or Fail

YouTube has a gameshow. It's called Truth or Fail.

The way Truth or Fail works:
Each week, a famous YouTuber posts a video to the truthorfail account, which is run by none other than John and Hank Green.
The video contains two "facts", one of which is the truth, one of which is not the truth. You click on the one that you think is true, and it links you to another YouTube video.
If you picked the Truth, you are congratulated and told more about the trivia you picked.
If you Fail, then you are booed and again told more about the trivia option you picked.
Then the show continues, and you must pick the fact you think is True again.
This goes on for five rounds.


Beard Trivia with the Wheezy Waiter.

Truth or Fail is an interesting way to make a game on the internet, and more specifically, YouTube. It uses the hyperlink capabilities that the YouTube has (through annotations) to link you through a sequence of videos specific to your choosing. It is much like the choose-your-path books of the 1990's in this way. But this makes you to think about a question being asked, rather than asking you to choose a path. Something like this could, of course, be made in book-form. But having it in an online version is just a later evolution of this choose-your-path idea.

Truth or Fail also has a website that has links to all the videos.

Is This Tom?

John Green has created a new type of storytelling. He takes a conventionally written story and masks it behind riddles, which can be found at the isthistom YouTube channel.


The first video. I've only gotten halfway through the riddle.

The channel is run by Alexander Basalyga, the same man who created the riddle site thisisnottom.com. On YouTube, he posts a video-riddle every week. The video, like Thisisnottom.com, leads you through a series of riddles, and it finally ends with a book chapter by John Green. The YouTube riddle is an even further way to develop the riddle, because it opens up the ability to play with moving images and sounds.

John writes about a girl called YFN, or Your Faithful Narrator, since she has no idea of her identity. She is quite a messed up girl, as it seems. And her story, if it were real – which it may or may not be – is a strange one. The book is non-text-searchable, so don’t bother even trying. But there are hints and spoilers on the book forum. John gives the story behind the story.

This Is Not Tom

..........Hello?

Hello...........

..........Uhh... is this Tom?

No, I'm afraid this is not Tom...........

..........Ok, thanks. Sorry to bother you. I'll keep looking.

*click*

All across the internet, this is dialogue occurs between the curious viewers of Thisisnottom.com and their Google search results pages. Thousands of people are trying to figure out the extremely difficult riddles that are posted there. This is what appears on the first page of Thisisnottom.com.

I, myself, have only gotten through this one. It took surprisingly long, and as with any riddle, it seemed completely easy once I figured it out.

Riddles, of course, have been around for ages. But they haven't been on the internet for even just two decades. Having riddles on the internet opens up so many new options. Answers to the riddles can be hidden in hyperlinks anywhere on the site. They can be typed into URL's. They can be entered as passwords. There are many ways of submitting an answer to a riddle, and there are even more ways of finding out the answers to riddles. In the past, the only way to figure out a riddle was to use logic or otherwise your own mind. Online riddles can do this, and they can also use the internet as a massive database of knowledge, allowing for riddles that involve a little bit of trivia. Online riddles open up an entire new aspect of riddling.

Nerdfighters

 Over two years, John and Hank Green have accumulated a fairly massive following of people. These people, mostly teenagers, are made up of fans of their vlogs and fans of John's books (and the two have, of course, influenced each other).

To manage this fan base and to stay connected with them better, they created the Nerdfighter Ning. This is a social networking website that is made for all fans of John and Hank Green who wish to consider themselves Nerdfighters (the term nerdfighter is the title of a videogame that Hank found one day).


This is all good, and is to be expected of a tech-savvy author and his brother. But what is amazing is how loyal this fan base is, and how powerful and broad it is. There are Nerdfighters in places all over the world and all over the internet. Many of them are YouTubers, posting vlogs and/or songs. And as a general rule, Nerdfighters are excited about other Nerdfighters and Nerdfighteria (stuff that relates to Nerdfighting and/or is "Awesome").

Because they are such a massive group of people, Nerdfighters can accomplish much, in the same way that the massive group collaborated to make "I've Got Nothing" (in fact, they may have been a part of it. Their YouTube followers merge a bit). John and Hank Green's Nerdfighters work to bring Awesome to the world.

They are great because they are a silly, young-at-heart, adventurous group. They see the world differently, and they are ambitious and passionate. They are the kind of people who make other generations proud of this generation of teenagers. I believe the Nerdfighters will change the world into a better place.

Sufjan Stevens: The BQE

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about how Flickr user Ettubrute was using his still camera as a way of making interesting films. This post is about what Sufjan Stevens did in his film The BQE.

Using a very old film video camera, Sufjan made a partially documentary-style film about the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, but he did it in a very interesting way. Instead of showing just one screen of footage, he showed three, back to back. Sometimes the images connected, sometimes they didn't. According to Sufjan, the intent of the film is to give an interesting point of view of a part of Brooklyn that he loves, and to develop his photographic eye.

He did exactly that. The film transitions from being mostly photograph-like into a raging geometric maze. He used his video camera to create time-lapsed scenes. But instead of showing them simply as what they were, he mirrored them in the three-across format to turn them into something else.

Unfortunately, the clip with the mirrored videos is no longer available. This is a clip from a different part of the film that uses the three-across format to play on a theme.

ⓒ Asthmatic Kitty Records and Sufjan Stevens. I do not own this.

This is a very interesting presentation, because it is technically and literally a film. But it is set up as photography. In a way, this is a backwards approach to what Ettubrute did. But both accomplish similar things: merging photography and film interestingly.

One thing that Sufjan has over Ettubrute is his incorporation of sound. Sufjan designed the score of the film himself, so it is intended to go with it perfectly. And it does. It goes up and down in intensity and changes at all the right points, making his film even more rhythmic than the patterns of traffic already were. It sounds curious in parts and strong in others.

I've Got Nothing

During the past three months, four YouTubers got together and did something awesome. Jimmy0010, JohnnyDurham19, nerimon, and charlieissocoollike produced a song called "I've Got Nothing" under the name Chartjackers. All of the money made from the singles goes to the UK charity Children In Need. The song was released on November 9, and is only available on iTunes. Their goal is to make it to number 1 in the UK iTunes charts in 10 weeks.

music video, with introduction by charlieissocoollike:


The song was produced by the four YouTubers already mentioned, but it was written and performed by other YouTubers. People submitted lyrical suggestions, then the best was picked. Then the Chartjackers asked for audition submissions, also by YouTube. The best were chosen, and finals were held to determine the two who would sing.

BBC Switch did five minute documentaries each week on Chartjackers' progress and a thirty minute special at the end, which can all be viewed here. The song is currently number 36 in the UK iTunes charts.

This is an incredible example of the power of the internet as a collaborative space. There is no way this song could have been made if it weren't for the very many YouTubers who contributed, and it is because of the amount of contributions that the song is so good, albeit cheesy. Further, it is because of the massive following of these four YouTubers that the song is actually accomplishing its goal. This really just speaks of the power in numbers, and how that power is being applied through the global community of the internet.

Ettubrute / Flickr Videos / Uses of Technology

A little bit ago, Flickr began to allow videos to be posted. While many people have taken this as an alternative to YouTube, others take it as a furthrance of photography. 

 

Glowing Cities Under a Nighttime Sky

User Ettubrute has taken lots of still photos of the window-view of a plane ride and put them all together in smooth stop-motion. A similar effect could have been done if he had taken footage of the entire trip and sped it up. But it is more interesting that he did this with a camera, because this is not how still cameras are usually used.

There are two conflicting theories about the nature of technology usage. One is that technology will always be used how it is intended to be used, and the other is that the users of technology will use it however they want and possibly create new ways of using it. I side with the second theory.

People like Ettubrute like to redefine things, and as technology advances, the old things get redefined very quickly. Ettubrute could have used a video camera, but he used a still camera instead, and it shows his manipulation of the medium in a much more thoughtful way. I think that the subtle pauses between photos really add to the effect of the video. Combined with the piecey music, the style of photography gives the video an ethereal feel. If Ettubrute had used a video camera, this would not have been the case.

Ettubrute uses this style for many videos. The following is also enhanced by the fact that it is done with a still camera instead of a video camera.

Lawnchairs between Fall and Winter

vlogbrothers/vlogging

"Are you from YouTube?" asks a boy.

"Are you wearing a disguise?" says the boy's little brother.

John Green is the author of three bestselling young adult novels: Looking For Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns. He lives in Indiana.

Hank Green is the founder of EcoGeek, a website about environmental technology; he is also a musician and the founder of DFTBA Records, which works with famous YouTube musicians. He lives in Montana.

John and Hank Green are brothers who needed some way to stay in contact with each other. So two years ago, they began a YouTube account and called it vlogbrothers. They created a challenge called Brotherhood 2.0: their challenge was to create a vlog every day for a year in response to each other and to keep it under four minutes. During that year, they were forbidden to communicate with each other textually. If one failed to post a vlog, then the other would choose a punishment for him. This is still the basic format they use, although they don't post every day anymore, and they have added a few extra elements. John does Question Tuesdays, and Hank does song Wednesdays.

first Brotherhood 2.0 vlog, in which Hank explains the rules:

last Brotherhood 2.0 vlog, in which John discusses siblinghood and nerdfighteria:

most recent vlog, in which Hank discusses what he is thankful for:

I think that vlogging is a great way to stay in contact with people. Now that we have the technology to communicate via video, and now that it is convenient, we should use it. Video, as a medium, goes so much farther than photography as a means of portraying information and memories. Vlogging back and forth is a great way to share those memories with someone you love.

Printed Space

Imagine walking into a room and stepping on clouds, with the sky showing around you, and the bright sun in a corner. Imagine walking into a room and stepping on the ocean floor, with all kinds of fish and mysterious creatures surrounding you. Imagine walking into a room and stepping on a grassy field, with a forest all around you, your own personal oasis.

All of this can be done, because of a company called Printed Space. They take photos and turn them into high resolution wallpaper, flooring, blinds, and canvases. These can be used to decorate homes, establishments, and even public spaces...

I found this website just randomly, but after looking through it for a while, I realized that my dentist has a printed beach scene in his office. Upon further investigation, I found that the graffiti artist Banksy had used the same one as my dentist to create the illusion of a hole in an Israeli security wall. 


Sidenote: this is a fantastic example of media being used not in the way it was intended. But it is also a fantastic example of showing meaning through images.

I think that Printed Space has a brilliant product. It is already becoming popular, and I think that it is going to tip very soon, especially considering the continually increasing resolution of common cameras. People's may soon be able to use their own photos on their walls, etc.

printing on a bridge

printing in an airplane 

 

 printing in a train station

NeoCube

The NeoCube is interesting. It's a bunch of strong little spherical magnets that stick together and form gemoetric shapes. Or any other shape you can come up with. 

 

 The cube (the small one, they sell a large one too) begins with 6x6x6 dimensions, then can be rearranged to make other 3D shapes, or can be folded out and rearranged to make 2D shapes.

This looks like it would be a ton of fun to play with. I guess I can't speak for everyone, but on the whole, magnets are interesting. Probably everyone would enjoy having a NeoCube to play with. And it would be good for more than just passive fiddling.
 
It could be used as:

a stress-reliever for overworked people - having something to fidget with often helps relieve stress.

a tool for teaching geometry to students. The cube forms geometric shapes easily, and having the student make the shape himself would teach him through application, which is often the quickest and best way to teach. It would be hard to teach a 3D concept with just a 2D book.

a creative outlet. Some people aren't good at drawing or making music, but they still need some form of creative stimulation. Everybody's brain has a right hemisphere, and it needs to be used. Coming up with shapes and patterns exercises the creative half of the brain.

The NeoCube advertises itself as the "future of puzzles" but I think it could be so much more than that. They just need a better website and a better way to advertise, because right now, the website looks like it was from the 90's.

TinEye

Logos are great, and so are popular posters or ads - anything that is very well-known.

It is best at finding manipulations of very common images or photo - ones that are similar to the original, but that have been changed in some way.

You provide a photo, by upload or URL, and it finds images that are similar.

TinEye is a reverse image search.

TinEye works great for finding spoofs of images, different sizes of images, and just edited images. It usually has several pages-worth of findings, and the beginning ones are usually resized images; the later ones are the edits and spoofs.

The only problem is that it doesn't work very well yet. I tried about six images before I got one that it was able to find. It is apparently either very finicky and precise, or its database is currently just too small.

If it worked well enough, this would be a fantastic resource for finding all kinds of images. I hope they continue adding to their database so that less popular images can be found. But as it is, TinEye is still a good resource for finding spoofs of very popular images. It's good for at least that - but hey, it's only in beta testing.

St. Vincent

St. Vincent is Annie Clark, a petite, delicate looking woman. She has a sweet, light voice when she sings, and she looks like she could be talented the cousin of Regina Spektor. She incorporates strings, woodwinds, brass, pianos, and keyboards in her music in a sophisticated way.

But she isn't always this light and happy. Her music is often very dark and strange. Her guitar is harsh and "gnarly," as she puts it. Her music can be very intense and brooding, and in just a few seconds, be very calm and moderate. She uses both her guitar and her voice to create this effect, playing or singing sweet melodies, then blasting broken guitar sounds and synthesizing her voice over frazzled lyrics.

She is a paradox.

Like Nate Williams, she has two distinct styles that are very contradicting. But unlike Nate Williams, she merges them into one, making her music laughably dark, in an almost crazy way. It's as if she is happy about being upset, hurt, angry. Her music sounds is masochistic - light about being dark - in the most polite way. There's just something about the combination of her two styles that makes it humorous, but humorous in a sad way.

This combination of styles is a perfectly valid alternative to Nate Williams' separation of styles. It makes the end product thicker, with more layers, more mysteries. This is a good lesson to be learned - that sometimes the split is good, and sometimes the combination is good. And sometimes all three are good.

Nate Williams / Alexander Blue

Nate Williams

His designs are sketchy and raw. They are made with natural looking colors and look like they might have been printed on paper, or doodled, for that matter.

Alexander Blue

His designs are cartooney and rich. The colors are bright and deep, and they look like something that might be part of a kid's sticker collection, or maybe on his lunchbox.

Two designers, two totally different styles,
one person.

The person is Nate Williams, but in the design world, he is also Alexander Blue. He is one person in reality, but when designing, he goes by two names. Both styles are so distinctly different from each other that they look as though they really were made by two different people.

Shoes designed by Nate Williams and Alexander Blue.

When asked in an interview about why he designs under two names, Nate said, "I created the alter ego Alexander Blue, so I could do another style of illustration, but not confuse "Nate Williams" clients. I think every illustrator realizes you must have a strong unique consistent style, but struggles with committing to one style, so this is how I deal with the struggle."

I think this is a brilliant way to make such an artistic distinction. It keeps clients unconfused about what they will be getting, and it opens up two worlds for him to design in - it gives him more opportunity to design, because he appeals to two different audiences.

I have even had this struggle in my own work: the pull between designing with a natural, smooth look, or a bright, harsh look. My photography often goes in both directions.
I don't know if I'll go as far as Nate Williams did and create my own alter-ego. But I do think that what he did was a good idea, at least for him. At least now, I know the option is open for me. And who knows, maybe I will.

IndieFeed

IndieFeed is a simple website. Each day of the week it posts a full length song in one of six genres. Sunday is alt rock, Monday is indie pop, Tuesday is hip hop, and so on. They take Saturdays off.

Its music player is simple. The page flips through each song silently by genre until you scroll over it or click to play. The player flips through the artwork that goes along with the album and also gives a short description of the song. And at the end of each song is a short, but informative review of the band in general. Each song is also available for free download, and most of the songs are archived.


IndieFeed is a spontaneous way to find new music. It is not a good way to find tons of new bands - TasteKid is better for that. But it is a great way to get a steady input of new music. It's gives a very filtered selection, so it's great if you don't have a lot of time. Also, IndieFeed accepts submissions, so you are very likely to hear something brilliant that isn't anywhere else simply because it isn't well known. IndieFeed is a fun website to visit every day, just to hear what's new.

On Letters

In the previous post, I discussed LetterPlayground, which gave people a place to express their creativity about letters - the symbols they are surrounded with.

And it got me thinking.

That's all that letters are; they are just symbols, used to create meaning. And that's how letters began in the first place. Letters became symbols because they represented sounds of particular objects. For instance, the letter T and its design originated from the word Tree. This occurred because people wanted to communicate the word Tree and needed a way to visualize it.

Photo from Flickr

Then the idea of letters became more solidified, and they became fairly concrete conceptions. At LetterPlayground, designers create visual representations of the letters. In this way, letters have come full circle - from pictures to symbols, and back to pictures again. But this time, the pictures are different. They are being created for fun rather than for the purposes of developing a way of communicating. To quote Alanis Morissette, isn't it ironic?

Letter Playground

At LetterPlayground, users have created artistic representations of letters and numbers and posted them. Then other users can leave comments, create a list of favorites, et cetera. LetterPlayground is designed for typographic designers and for people who think creatively about the symbols they are surrounded with.

One interesting feature of LetterPlayground is the Letter Count, which graphs the amount of letters being submitted.
Another interesting feature is that LetterPlayground gives the statistical proportion of its members' occupations in a nice simple pie chart. Pie Charts are a great way to visualize large amounts of information.

LetterPlayground is interesting because it opens up a new side of typography. It allows people to really play with letters and numbers in a way they probably haven't done since watching Sesame Street as a child.

Photo from Flickr

It reminds me of the playfulness of the giant letters on the grounds of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. That's a literal letter playground. This is a figurative one.

TasteKid

You've got good TasteKid.

There's not much to say about this website because there aren't a lot of features. But the feature that it does have is really amazing. TasteKid is an extremely comprehensive band, book, and movie recommender.

That's exactly what it does - it recommends things.

Based on the band names, books, or movies you enter, Emmy (the kid who has good taste) tells you what you might and probably will like. You type in a few bands and it gives you a few dozen. And if you search a book or movie, it cross-recommends to give you answers for all three categories (and sometimes even TV shows).
What's really exciting about TasteKid is that its recommendations are exactly what you would want them to be. It's as if you had asked a close friend to recommend you something.

To top it off, you can add it as a search engine in your browser.

Pitchfork

Pitchfork is a website that acts as a resource for finding out about new bands and old bands. It's very informative and has great features. Pitchfork has a huge list of musicians, who are mostly indie artists, that it follows. It connects people to news, reviews, tour dates, and releases.

Pitchfork is an awesome way to find new musicians, because it has a tab at the top that is devoted to just that. It gives the top ten new albums and the top ten new tracks, and it updates frequently.

This website also writes great reviews of its artists. They are short and to the point, so the reader can get a very good idea of what the album or track being reviewed will sound like.

Pitchfork's news feature informs people of announced tourdates in a very helpful way. All the artists with upcoming tours are listed on one page, and when clicked, the tourdates pop down conveniently.It also has a simple list of the top tracks and albums from other music sources. Their podcast, Forkcast, gives full length songs several times a day.

VideoSongs

YouTube is full of musicians, just waiting to be heard, promoted, and made infamous.
But as Marshall McLuhan says, "the medium is the message."
Tons of YouTube musicians record covers and original songs, but there's a new format that seems to be taking hold: VideoSongs.

A VideoSong is "a new medium with 2 rules:
1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice).
2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds)."
- according to YouTube musician Jack Conte, who presumably created the medium.



The VideoSong is a great medium because it allows the viewer feel participatory with the musician. They get to see everything that goes into a song. This is also a great way for musicians to learn from each other. Jack Conte's style, like that of many others, is heavily based on found objects and playing conventional instruments unconventionally.

But Jack Conte's VideoSongs don't just sound great, they also look great. He clearly puts a great amount of effort into making them visually stunning, which they are. He uses professional software and equipment, and he is trained in video production. His videos show just as much creativity as his songs do, and the VideoSong is a great way to display both.

Glogster

Ok, so it's glog, like blog, and it ends in ster, like hipster... and I guess the letter "g" is pretty hip... right? Hmm. It sounds like some kind of emo playground... like some place all the hipsters might go to get their self-documenting fix in for the day...

Oh... it is.

At Glogster, people can make digital posters, using photos they've taken themselves or are borrowing from the internet, and then add graphics, text, sounds, and even videos. But this website is simultaneously great and terrible.

a glog by user mizzy1219

Some of the content on this site is demoralizing, and the website just opens a forum for this kind of content. The posters it produces look childish and are only occasionally visually interesting. This website is clearly made for emotionally unstable hipsters who follow the crowd and claim to be unique. Glogster is feeding an insecure, mislead generation.


However, from a design standpoint there isn't much wrong with this website. It has decent maneuverability, and it has a fun look to it. And creating a glog is surprisingly simple.

But the lesson to be learned from this is, when you make a website, make sure it lifts up the standards of a generation instead of bringing them down. Users use this website to document their lives and the way they think, but it also goes the other way. The website was made because of the way this group of people lives. I have seen a lot of "emo" stuff online, but I have never seen anything sink this low. This website is both a reaction and a cause of trend-following and insecurity, which can only continue to pull the generation down.

If I ever design a website, I will be sure to never let create a downward cycle with its audience.
It's web-design ethics: make the product beneficial, not just enjoyable and money-making.

Green Report Card

School is all about grades, and grades come on report cards.
But grades don't only go to students. They also go to entire schools.



greenreportcard.org rates college campuses according to their green sustainability - how well the school is doing at being eco-friendly.

It rates in the following areas:
Administration, Climate Change and Energy, Food and Recycling, Green Building, Student Involvement, Transportation, Endowment transparency, Investment Priorities, and Shareholder Engagement.



The website allows you to search for schools and compare them with other schools, assuming that students looking for colleges will want to consider how a potential college is doing green-wise, and make that a large part of their decision.

IUPUI isn't doing so well, but at least it's doing better this year than it was last year.
Although this is a good idea for a website and would be a useful resource for people trying to raise awareness about the environment, I don't think it is realistic for them to assume it is aimed at potential college students. Not very many people will base life-changing decisions about their education and future careers on how well a certain place is doing environmentally. There are a few, but not many. I think this website's main audience should be researchers and environmentalist propagandists.

Another good feature of this website is that it shows how well a school did the year before. It has a very nice layout and presents information quite simply.

CNN's Hologram

Last January, CNN brought two live guests into their studio by hologram. Yes, that's right. By hologram. Live. This incredible technology, which has been dreamed of for so many years (think back to Star Wars and Star Trek), is finally coming about.

This is how holograms work.

This technology is still very new and is still very much being developed, but the fact that it works and was available for CNN to use incredible.
It seems like there has been almost a race to get holograms out. It is something that people have been trying to achieve since it was first imagined. It's taken a long time, but we finally have the capability.

Of course, it's nowhere near ready for commercial use. Live holograms take too much equipment and too much space to create. Although the technology is stunning, there is not much we can do with it right now.

But in a few years, it will be much better. These scientists will keep working to develop hologram capability that can be bought for a high price by small number of consumers. Then, they will keep working, Capitalistic competition will kick in, and holograms will improve and be ready for the general consumer.

It's incredible to see how quickly the future is arriving. I remember so well wishing holograms were real when I was a kid. Now, they are real, and I'm still pretty much a kid.