kip/bot/blog

From Guy Kawasaki’s blog, Start Cooking. Smart use of video. Rather than shoveling video over to the site, they edit stills into the video for clarity of picture. This is perfect for instructional videos where you actually need to see some detail on-screen (ie, the image and information are more important than the narrative.  Editing stills and holding them provides the additional benefit of allowing for screen grabs. The clippy energy that comes from working with stills turns out to be on-brand and in-synch with the perky voice-over.

This is a use of video and motion graphics which is not explored often enough. With higher bandwidths, it seems like many go straight to ‘internet as TV and b-roll vehicle’. Video/motion on the web is still, very often, a lean-forward, engaged experience and the viewer still has his/her hands on the input device. Building content that has hi-res moments, allows for screen grabs, pauses, and rewinds to catch a moment is a potentially big play in certain areas: instructional/DIY content, TED talks, presentations in general where rich complex slides are used, travel/sightseeing, etc.

I’m pretty blah about my HDTV. There’s not so much content that I’m wowed all the time, SD content looks like crap, and I’ve watched enough seasons of TV shows on an elliptical trainer with my pre-Touch iPod to just think it’s a big TV. I always rave, though, when someone asks. After all, I spent $3000 on the damn thing so it damn well better rock.

But I am smitten anew and lasting. Connecting Apple TV to my girlfriend’s flickr account, I just saw her pictures from Savannah, Charleston and the Wellington Equestrian show in HD glory. The TV brought out the full resolution in a way that flickr on a computer can’t even come close to. The Ken Burns effect (which pans or zooms and pans across photos a la Ken Burns Civil War and other documentaries), sometime mucks things up, but usually does a great job of keeping it lively, making familiar pictures fresh, and enlivening dull pictures.

One of my favorite flickr’ers is Magic Fly Paula, a woman about whom I know nothing aside from that she lives in Portugal, and has cool sets like Invisible Cities, Imaginary Libraries, Imaginary Books, Star Diaries. Much of her work is photoshopped and there’s a mix of Jules Verne (wood and brass) and Umberto Eco (philology and polymath wordplay) and Calvino (fantastical).

So I put her photostream on my HDTV with Renaissance era masses and chants and it was incredible. I looked at J-Rube’s slides from Ecuador and got a great travelogue.

They just need to connect it to the interestingness feed, or the popular or most recent feed and it would be perfect. (Perphaps that’s a project for me to work-around.)

Worthwhile piece in the NY Times blog section, taking up readers’ arms against Jobs’s statement that no one reads anymore. Starts out wispy, romantic reader:

The Mac, Pixar, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes. This stuff is cool. Lighter than air. iGetit. But it’s just product, dude.

Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.

This is a view I’m sympathetic to, but being a designer for marketing groups, I’ve learned the hard way to let go of even my most strongly held opinions (not to mention beliefs, principles and ethics ). But it doesn’t take on the figure cited by Jobs: “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.â€?
Towards the end of the piece, the author takes on this argument. He notes that Jobs got the number from a report that has many question marks over it. Then he cites some other data, with the snobby aplomb of a serious reader:

Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller number — 27 percent — had not read a book lately, which means nearly three-in-four have read a book. Steve Jobs may be many things – maestro, visionary, demi-god – but he apparently isn’t a careful reader of certain market reports.

The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.

Most companies would kill for a market like that – more than one-fourth of the world’s biggest consumer market buying 15 or more of its items a year. And half the population bought nearly 6 books a year. If only Apple were so lucky. The latest Harry Potter book sold 9 million copies in its first 24 hours – in English. “The DaVinci Code,� a story of ideas even with its wooden characters and absurd plotting, has sold more than 60 million copies.

I’m not sure that puts the point to rest, though. The blog also acknowledges that publishing isn’t growing briskly, that some companies are merging to survive, and the industry had a puny 1% growth last year.

(Re: the picture. We still have a ways to go on search. Finding this picture took quite a bit of work: “Captain Kirk” + reading, “Captain Kirk” + eyeglasses + book, etc. Didn’t yield anything. It wasn’t until I remembered that it was Tale of Two Cities he was reading that I had any luck. Even then, I had to switch out of images and troll sites for it, and even THEN I had to settle for a picture that looks like he’s on the toilet.)

In today’s NYT, an article about Obama’s surge has a quick paragraph summing up what it means:

The sheer consistency of Mr. Obama’s victories over the last few days certainly suggests that many Democratic voters have gotten past whatever reservations they might have had about his electability or his qualifications to be president.

Now perhaps there is more polling data or, more important, tracking data, showing that many voters once thought he was unelectable or unqualified have recently changed their minds and think he is electable and qualified. If that were the case, though, why not say “exit polls in the latest string of victories show voters who had once considered him unelectable or unqualified are seeing him in a different light”? Better yet, why not tell us what caused this change?

Presumably there was no data to support that. Instead, there is a hypothesis that voters’ primary reasons for voting for a candidate are: 1) they have the money, organization, strategy, and personality/character/demographic/skin color to be a strong candidate against the likely Republican nominee (electability); or 2) their previous job experience maps to the skill set needed to be leader of the free world. It follows, then, that a vote for someone is based on these two factors and increased numbers of votes means an increase in these two factors.
This is a classic case of an unvalidated assumption. Ever since Nixon’s sweat glands lost him the 1960 election, we’ve had examples of more emotional, thin slice evaluations of candidates. A trip down memory lane:

Don’t trust him, don’t like him.

Wimp. Artificial.

Tough. He paid for the mike and he’s gonna use it, don’t you dare OReilly him.

Cool? Self-confident? Oh yeah: eminently qualified to be the leader of the free world, and with
a good strategy for getting elected.

Not to mention that people will gladly vote for candidates who represent something other than electability or qualifications — hope, trustworthiness, I want this guy to be president even if he’s not electable (Nader), outsiders can shake things up (Perot) . . .

I’m not unhappy about the results, just the poor thinking masquerading as analysis . . . at the NYT of all places.