Category: The Future

we all need a little Carl Sagan this week:

A film by Michael Marantz, via Daring Fireball.

Edit: Readers like this version:

If you followed the news coming out of CES this year it seemed like every third post on Engaget was the unveiling of a a new tablet. That along with all the high powered smart phones makes 2011 an exciting year for people who produce content for these types of devices. Photography and video are a natural fit, because of how well they scale, so it’s really about publishers getting on board and producing lots of content to consume.

Voted best of CES was the Motorola Xoom:

You can find a good tablet wrap up (here).

When Kodak stopped producing the film last year they gave Steve McCurry the last roll. He hand delivered that roll to Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas the last lab on the planet to process Kodachrome. On December 30 they discontinued the processing forever. Here’s a frame from that last roll and more can be found on McCurry’s blog:

There’s a fitting tribute to the Kodachrome Generation over on David Burnett’s blog (here).

Truth be told, the last ten or 15 years were not easy for anyone what actually WANTED to shoot KR. Kodak slowly closed labs around the world, and the mere act of getting your film souped became Herculean. (Actually, Hercules shot tri-x.) So when the marketing people at Kodak (this actually happened ten years ago at a dinner in DC) would say that “there is no demand for the film anymore… no one wants to use it..” I had to remind him that at some point anyone using the film — or any film — actually wants to be able to SEE WHAT THE HELL THEY SHOT! You can’t expect people to wait a week to see their work. The technology existed to create small mini Kodachrome processing machines which could reasonably be installed at any good sized one-hour lab in the country. But for reasons known only to the geniuses at Kodak’s planning department, no serious consideration was ever given to supporting that project. They sure could have sold a lot of film if only we’d been able to see it in a timely manner. Perhaps it’s a parable for what technology is doing to our society.

The Road Ahead or The Road Behind
by George Joseph Moriarty

Sometimes I think the Fates must
Grin as we denounce and insist
The only reason we can’t win
Is the Fates themselves that miss

Yet there lives on an ancient claim
We win or lose within ourselves
The shining trophies on our shelves
Can never win tomorrow’s game
You and I know deeper down
There’s always a chance to win the crown

But when we fail to give our best
We simply haven’t met the test
Of giving all, and saving none
Until the game is really won

Of showing what is meant by grit
Of fighting on when others quit
Of playing through, not letting up
It’s bearing down that wins the cup
Of taking it and taking more
Until we gain the winning score

Of dreaming there’s a goal ahead
Of hoping when our dreams are dead
Of praying when our hopes have fled
Yet losing, not afraid to fall
If bravely, we have given all

For who can ask more of a man
Than giving all within his span
Giving all, it seems to me
Is not so far from victory

And so the Fates are seldom wrong
No matter how they twist and wind
It is you and I who make our fates
We open up or close the gates
On the road ahead or the road behind.

via, pleasefeedtheanimals.com and John Wooden.

Here’s to 2011. May everyone achieve great success through hard work and perseverance.

The website Mossless Magazine is looking to print a real magazine and they’ve taken to Kickstarter to try and fund it (here). The magazine itself looks pretty cool with four 50 page booklets each dedicated to “emerging photographers based in NY” and they’ve got 7 days left to raise a couple grand to make it happen.

What’s interesting is a recent project at Kickstarter that may have revealed the true use of a website that “helps people collect funding for creative projects.” Product designer Scott Wilson, founder of the Chicago-based MINIMAL studio, started a kickstarter project to build a watch out of an iPod Nano (here). When the new Nano launched geeks everywhere were murmuring about what a cool nerdy watch it would make, so Scott decided to do something about it. But, rather than follow the normal course of funding and developing the project in-house then getting it into stores and selling it he took to kickstarter to fund and pre-sell. He was initially looking for $15,000 to get it off the ground but by the time it closed last night he had nearly a million dollars pledged.

A similar project to build an iPhone tripod (here) had the same kind of success as they went 13 times past their pledge amount. So, what this reveals about kickstarter is that manufacturing projects put forth by people who have a track record of creating solid products, that fill an immediate need will be successful (provided the internet helps spread the word as well). I think there are photography projects that fit this mold as well, we just haven’t seen them yet.

I ran into this post from Christopher Kilkus (here) about a shoot that the client couldn’t attend, so he setup a computer with a webcam so they could watch the shoot remotely. What initially struck me as creepy and weird on second thought makes sense when you think about cutting cost and collaborating with people all over the country. Heck, Nick Knight pioneered studio shoots live on the web 10 years ago with his SHOWstudio site. There’s even remote webcams that could roam around set controlled by the client (here). Anybody else have experience with this?

Treesaver, a startup founded by Roger Black and Filipe Fortes, is a platform for combining text and pictures in a layout that scales to fit any size screen. I was pretty excited about it when their teaser video came out several months ago and here’s the first story using the technology: http://www.publicintegrity.org/treesaver/tuna

It seems very workmanlike. Not sure why they didn’t create something super glossy to demo the features of this platform, but maybe there are serious limitations that prevent real design to occur (effing algorithms…). One thing I’ve never understood is why photographs get smaller online. When space is not an issue, most of the photography (if it’s good) should fill the page. Using photography to decorate a page is a waste of time, money and effort. Nice try.

Last week the NYTimes Bits blog reported on a study that website usability expert Jakob Nielsen conducted (here) that purported to show how generic/bad photography is ignored by people visiting websites. Well, duh. It’s amazing how much filler there is online… heck even in magazines these days, which I’m chalking up to the rise of inexpensive stock. People feel like they need a photo but aren’t willing to spend some money to get something decent (or don’t have a clue what good photography looks like). I believe very strongly that as the web space matures the need for high quality imagery will increase. This report confirms that.

“…the random or stock images on Web sites are completely ignored by users, add more clutter to the page and don’t necessarily help from a business standpoint.”

doesn’t go down!?

In a paywall experiment everyone is watching, this summer Murdoch owned papers The Times and The Sunday Times of London started charging for web access. In a press release yesterday New Corp. said they had gained 105,000 paying customers because of this. According to the NYTimes (here) website visitation was expected to drop 90% once the walls went up but according to Nielsen that number only fell by 42% (1.78 million).

Tech blog GigaOm further parses the numbers to reveal that out of 105,000 paying customers only 50% are subscribers which the writer paints as a failure: “after four months of selling its new paywall system, News Corp. has only managed to convince a little over one-and-a-half percent of its readers to pay something for the newspapers’ content — and has only been able to convert half of that already tiny figure into actual monthly subscribers.”

TechCrunch picks up the failure story and does some quick back-of-the-napkin math to show why it’s not actually true:

Basically, those 50,000 monthly subscribers are paying $12.80 a month, or $640,000 a month total. Let’s say the other 55,000 pay-as-you-read crowd is generating another $160,000 a month in subscription revenues (I am being generous here and assuming two days a month per person at $1.60 per day). That comes to $800,000 a month, or $9.6 million a year in online subscription revenues.

What did they give up in online advertising revenues? At 41 million estimated pageviews a month, assuming a $5 CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions), that was only $200,000 a month in online advertising revenues.

[…]Depending on the actual CPM, financially they are doing at least two to four times better than they were before. And that is with only about 1.5 percent of their former readers becoming paying subscribers.

In the end this strategy will work for many publications, because the CPM’s will go up under a paywall. Advertisers want to reach engaged readers and there’s no better test of engagement than making someone pay for access. The problem all along has been the cost of making the leap both in increased infrastructure and temporary loss of advertising and subscribers. Media companies and their nearly retired owners aren’t about to take any chances.

From Seth Godin’s Blog:

This year, fewer than 40% of voting age Americans will actually vote.

A serious glitch in self-marketing, I think.

If you don’t vote because you’re trying to teach politicians a lesson, you’re tragically misguided in your strategy. The very politicians you’re trying to send a message to don’t want you to vote. Since 1960, voting turnouts in mid-term elections are down significantly, and there’s one reason: because of TV advertising.

Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent’s supporters. If the TV ads can turn you off enough not to vote (“they’re all bums”) then their strategy has succeeded.

The astonishing thing is that voters haven’t figured this out. As the scumminess and nastiness of campaigning and governing has escalated and the flakiness of candidates appears to have escalated as well, we’ve largely abdicated the high ground and permitted selfish partisans on both sides to hijack the system.

Voting is free. It’s fairly fast. It doesn’t make you responsible for the outcome, but it sure has an impact on what we have to live with going forward. The only thing that would make it better is free snacks.

Even if you’re disgusted, vote. Vote for your least unfavorite choice. But go vote.

And so, to save society, we’re going to have to rely on our old friend, the invisible force that has saved humanity again and again. It’s a little thing I like to call bullshit.

Bullshit is the next growth industry. People who deal in it are going to be more valuable than surgeons — yes, the same people who convinced us that bottled water comes from an enchanted mountain spring and made uneducated mothers believe that contaminated baby formula was a life-giving health potion. Only they can save us.

As civilization advances, these heroic protectors of FARTS (Forced ARTificial Scarcity) will build a culture where we will pay for things we can get for nothing, based purely on a vague superstition that it makes us better people. You know, the way an Apple logo will hypnotize people into paying twice as much for a product when cheaper alternatives litter the landscape.

Read it on Cracked.com via Bosacks.

Quite an interesting article coming from Cracked of all places. There’s plenty of BS’ing that goes into selling products with superior photography, but I don’t believe it’s all hooey.

This made the rounds already but still good for a laugh on Friday.

These two stories seem to go together.

Seth Godin asserts that while one recession is over, the recession of the industrial age is here forever.

The networked revolution is creating huge profits, significant opportunities and a lot of change. What it’s not doing is providing millions of brain-dead, corner office, follow-the-manual middle class jobs. And it’s not going to. (story here)

Over in AdAge we have the story of a mass exodus from large agencies:

Since the beginning of the year, a veritable Cannes jury worth of senior creative talent has shrugged off the leashes of big agency networks for their own start-ups or for creative pursuits outside the ad industry. (story here)

I’d like to believe this is the end of the brain-dead office job, but I really doubt our love affair with corporations is going away any time soon.

Amazing what people will think of:

via Big Orange Slide.

Wow, Roger Black is at it again. After releasing the controversial magazine and newspaper design templates Ready-Media he’s got his hands on a platform for publishing content online that will automatically adjust the layout to the size of the screen. With the recent announcement that Kmart is selling a 7 in. tablet for $170 bucks and the Android OS being sold in every size and shape of phone available the hand made rigid templates media companies use to publish content online are looking to become a very costly portion of the bottom line. In comes Roger with Treesaver to save the day:

Adaptive Page Sizing Demo:

Continuous Reading Demo: