After hearing and reading in NAPP’s magazine, Terry White’s Podcast, and Photoshop User TVabout it for quite awhile now, I finally broke down and purchased Adobe’s Lightroom. The first version it was hard to convenience me it was much different than Bridge. Seeing more included in the second version along with the growing number of photos I am taking made it definitely worth getting. I am most excited to tag my photos with more metadata making it easier to find certain photos. Bridge gives you the rating stars, but it is still tough to find things without know where you put them. Other features of Lightroom is the no destructive editing, the speed you can edit the photo, and the quick previews. I did get V.2 and Adobe just released the public beta of V.3 so that has me a little peeved, but this is a step in the right direction for me.
The other day we had a guest speaker at the college, Kaiser Kuo. He was at UNL speaking at the E.N. Thompson Forum and gave a great talk about the Internet in China, the usage stats and their online culture. A few highlights… he discussed how internet cafes in China are widely popular with younger crowds. This lead to a brief discussion on advertising efforts in online and P2P games. The advertising seems similar to the states, but they have large numbers of youth hanging out at these cafes gaming for hours on end. The other interesting area he discussed was the usage numbers of IM in China. It is regularly used and is an effective communication tool in their country. In the US it has faded away, but still used in tighter circles. He made a great point that the digital communication in communist China has created a forum for people to discuss issues, ideas and thoughts even with the so called “great firewall of China.” To an extent this is true for every country, more so than others, but was interesting to hear his experiences.
Kuo also talked about video sites and the high usage numbers in China. (he also works for one) His company is a mix between Hulu and YouTube. He also mentioned P2P sites that allow people to share music and video, which I read about this in FREE by Chris Anderson. It is very interesting the thoughts on “intellectual property” and copyright laws. This will definitely continue to be a topic of interest for everyone.
I teach a couple advertising classes at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and am constantly looking for better textbooks. When I review desk copies of books I always ask about digital versions or other options for students besides hard copies. Many academic texts are very expensive and are consistently replaced with newer versions. In journalism and mass communications it is necessary for our students to have access to current information. Web site, blogs, and newsletters from trade pubs are great but lack the structure for students. There are many print-on-demand, publish your own, and build your own text books, but one has a great model for future textbooks.
So I read about Flat World Knowledge which offers its text books for free that you can read online. They sell print-on-demand copies of their texts as well as mp3s of the text that you can buy per chapter or the entire book. The print books can be bought in black and white or full color. They also offer a variety of supplemental materials as well. This is cool because students can customize how they would like to interact with the text making the classroom a good place for discussion, interaction and application.
The flexibility of this service is wonderful, but on downside that I see so far is the size of the library. Currently, there are only a select few texts, but as it expands it will become quite the resource for both instructors and students.
I have been reading an excellent book by Chris Anderson, FREE: The future of radical pricing. The book describes how companies like Google can offer so much for free and the business models that are emerging from prices progressively moving closer to zero. I am not anywhere near being an economist, but the ideas create an interesting discussion. I teach in a college of journalism where this topic has become more of and issue because of the current situation with newspapers going out of business and moving online. This book fittingly is available free as an audio book.
An interesting section of FREE is the piracy chapter where Anderson tells about China and Brazil’s take on copyright. I think China has an interesting model for the music industry with 95% of the music on the market being free copies, but labels become event planners. The classic example in the US now a days is Radiohead’s In Rainbows where you buy the album online and give what you like. This in turn drives interest in the band making concerts and merchandise.
Along these lines there have been some great videos online about piracy and copyright law that I think are opening the conversation about this topic.
A documentary by Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor RiP: A remix manifesto looks at issues of piracy and mash-ups. Watch it online or download it for what you think its worth!
I had been keeping my eye on Flickr in the back of my mind over the years as an option for sharing and backing up my photos. Facebook is nice to share with people on FB but they compress photos and don’t save the original, as do other social sites like MySpace. Anyway finally I made the jump and signed up for another “free” account and loved what I saw… upload multiple photos at a time, geo-tagging, great organization tools, and best of all it makes multiple sizes of the image. This is great because I can share with my family high res images so they can print them. The privacy features are nice giving control over who sees what. In my mind that is worth the $25 a year! Check it out…http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamwagler/
I saw these on our way back to Iowa for Thanksgiving, but grabbed some photos while back for Christmas. According to MidAmerican Energy there are 67 turbines in the Walnut, Iowa area. Here’s a panorama of that area near the Wings truck stop on I-80.
There is another area you pass by along I-80. It is a surreal feeling driving by these massive things. These are much larger then the older turbines I have seen and the amount of them is impressive. The surprising thing is that none of these were here the last time we went to Iowa the year before.
After listening to the Photoshop Guys talk about a company that they use to print their photos I finally got around to trying them out. MPIX is a print shop who has an excellent website to upload and do some basic editing. They have all kinds of products to print on.
For the first time, I wanted to see what they canvas gallery wraps looked like and also the different types of paper they print on. I ordered a couple of 6×9s and an 8×12. Some of them were Kodak E-Surface and the rest was on Kodak Metallic.
The metallic is a little more expensive but in my opinion well worth it. The e-surface is more of a matte finish and looks great. But the metallic’s glossier finish is amazing. The gallery wrap was equally impressive. I used to work with a Roland large-format printer so I have seen plenty of large prints on tons of surfaces.
Ontop of the quality product, I uploaded these files to MPIX’x website on Tuesday night and chose the 2nd day Fedex option and had my prints on Thursday morning. Overall great service, website and product. If your curious here are the photos I had printed.
Here is a crazy video from Radiohead using no cameras, “uses real time 3D recording instead of cameras, utilizing highly technical structured light and Lidar laser-enhanced scanners to model lead singer Thom Yorke and provide an otherworldly narrative accompaniment to the song.” The technology here creates all kinds of directions for video and scanning. I am thinking of real-time images for something like goolge street view to have live images via the web. Obviously the technology would have to become much more cleaner but the possibilities are unlimited.
On the other hand, the way the technology is being used in this video provides an amazing mood which compliments the song perfectly. Radiohead has a way of combining current technology into their music and videos that push the boundaries in a variety of fields which leads to an entire multimedia experience. The attack on all the senses makes the band brilliant. Check out the video as well as an article and behind the scenes video from Creativity Online…
On NPR this morning they had a story about the rush to patent the atomic bomb and it’s components. Here the story on NPR. So why am I posting it here, the website shows some great line drawings of the patent applications. The drawings are wonderful to look at but also very eerie to view know what the product was ultimately used for. Here’s some drawings:
So I wrote a short paper about web advertising for a marketing class (see below). The text mention banner and skyscrapper ads were not effective. Although I generally agree Apple has a couple great applications of these formats.
Apple began the “Get a Mac” campaign in 2006 with a series of television commercials featuring humorous exchanges between a Mac, Justin Long and a PC, John Hodgman. The campaign also included static internet banner ads to supplement the television effort. In November 2007, they launched a new rich media advertisement on the internet which combined a banner ad across the top and a skyscraper ad along the right side of selected websites. The ad features video of the familiar characters, Mac and PC, in the skyscraper ad commenting on and interacting with the banner ad displaying an unlit sign which says “Don’t Give Up On Vista.” In the ad, PC hits a button to light up the sign but only the “Give Up” part illuminates, he hits the button again and “On Vista” lights up. He then repeatedly hits the button with these two phrases alternating on and off. The ad is a comment on the number of PC users who upgraded to Windows Vista and were unhappy with the new operating system.Clutter is mentioned in the text as a disadvantage for internet advertising with the effectiveness of banner ads on the decline. This ad builds off the popularity of the TV commercials creating good synergy and reinforcing Apples brand image. Another disadvantage it overcomes is annoyance to the user. The initial state of the ad is static with information about the new Mac computers and includes a play button where viewers have the option to view the rich media content. This technique adds to the brand image of a class, innovation, and a customer driven company who thinks of everything. The ad is a creative use of the medium which not only breaks through the clutter of online advertising, but has created a buzz with internet users seeking out the advertisement.
