kip/bot/blog

From an SFO exhibit on Television in the Antenna Age, some pages from TV Guide:

Click images for readability.

I was at a meeting recently where a legend of advertising scoffed at people who were proclaiming the diminishing importance of TV. In the hyper-leveraged rhetoric of the blogosphere, people will rush to say either that it’s DEAD (“dead, it’s dead Tom, nothing you can do to bring it back”) or ALIVE and bigger than ever. We seem incapable of saying the balance is shifting (an interesting irony that even people who don’t like digital seem to prefer strict binary to nuance). Anyway, this advertising person said “I’m so glad to hear someone say TV isn’t dead. Remember when people said radio was dead? Ha! What’s the first thing you do when you get in the car?” To which someone instantly replied, “plug in my iPhone.” Hilarity ensued.

SFO’s Continental Terminal often has interesting and quirky displays in the long walkway to baggage. This month, it’s about the beginning of the TV era. The opening of the exhibit was this nifty little tidbit:

I love the line from the NYT: “TV will never be a serious competitor to radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued to the screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.” This would be a premature death – TV will never live up to its World Fair or other hype, radio will live forever, long live radio.

And today, TV will never die because ____________. In fairness to NYT columnist, though, s/he stopped short of the binary life or death account and just talked about competition for attention and engagement.

Still, an amusing look at how people can cling to the present at the expense of the possibility of the future.

Via @gadgetboy

Below is a @GigaOM tour of Leo Laporte’s TWiT studio, in progress. All sorts of interesting tidbits for how smart digital allows smaller operations to make high quality content. Simple things he did:

Moving beyond the laptop, camera and go formulation, this creates a whole new middle space for studio production.

But actually as an ad:

Similar to a recent moment at WWDC where Jobs got rousing applause for saying “it just works.”

I’m told, but am still running it down, that this actually came from a Steve Jobs WWDC presentation where he was describing the project and laughingly said, “there’s no step 3″.

Getting circulated in the twittersphere is a 7 minute video displaying front “pages” of the NY Times website across 11 months. There are 12,000 screenshots, generally displayed for a fixed period of time (with some punctuation in the form of quick holds on a screenshot). For the first minute, I thought this was just another data stunt. I stuck with it, though, curious to see if anything popped. There were a handful of images that popped even though they appeared once (Obama’s frowning face the day after the election, Jared Loughner’s disturbing head shot, World Series and big sports game shots). News stories that crossed several days (the Arab Spring, Chilean Miners) created some persistence and lasting impression. The most persistent, and memorable, parts, however, were the advertisements. Brands that bought the masthead banners for extended periods of time, and take-overs just below the masthead (also for extended periods), became visual foundations for the crazy flow of seemingly disconnected stories, nuggets, and factoids racing underneath. As someone who has grown up believing that advertising doesn’t effect me and that it’s the stuff between the stuff we really want, that odd sense of solidity in contrast to the important stuff of the real world was jarring.

Love it. Sleepy conveyor to the beginning of the cycle. Mad careening zig-zag path with randomizations from friction and other factors of physics. Slow to the end. Back to the sleepy conveyor.

From a friend, who had just clicked that he didn’t like a song, this weak “contextual” and “relevant” ad:

I recently downloaded a bunch of digital books highlighted by Peter Meyers at OReilly Radar. Meyers is a terrific thinker about digital books, going deep on usability, design, how text should be created for ebooks, and what the medium can do to enhance reading experiences.

In his “10 Innovative Digital Books” to check, he included two Bibles. Interactive, dynamic, well-annotated Bibles are of interest to the spiritual-but-not-religious side of me and to my designer side. Few texts could benefit and be enriched by interactive technology and web connections as the Bible. There are so many versions of the Bible, translation topics and controversies, archaic words that need to be understood to engage the text more fully, concordances, cross-references and allusions (or contradictions, if you’re coming from that angle) that interactive can facilitate. While I’m still bummed at how hard it is to find NRSV translations (the ones that left-liberal types like me go for), there are some interesting ones out there (which is a different post).

This post was just to highlight a great screen shot that caught me early this morning while I was reading Gary Shteyngart’s Russian Debutante’s Handbook. One of the most interesting possibilities of a digital iPad Bible is a reading plan. There are many different versions of daily scripture – to work through the New Testament or the Pentateuch or to follow themes and ideas. There are also plans to help you read the entire Bible across the course of a year. I signed up to do the last (not really, I don’t have time, much as I’d like to). This was what came up while reading about Volodya’s first encounter with Rybakov:

Another moment around why big marketing and ad ideas aren’t the center of consumer thinking. Here’s Steve Jobs halfway through his presentation of Apple’s new cloud offering.

The arc of the presentation was simple and functional: 1) the PC was the hub of digital life; 2) then other devices became equally important; 3) putting the PC at the center of today’s digital life (managing photos, songs, docs, etc.) was creating headaches; 4) so they came up with a cloud solution; and 5) “it just works”.

Rousing applause. No emotional tear-jerking, no story, no clever catchphrase. If Apple can solve the increasingly annoying and difficult issue of syncing, that will be its own ad campaign.

I just left a voice mail on a friend’s phone, making plans for tomorrow night. I was offering to cook and inviting him to join me as I got our office Makerbot working. He just sent me the transcript that was generated by his phone:’

Hey, it’s, Kip. I was calling to Bostonian will. Bermer about Saturday so most phone thing. I know it’s kind of attractive, but soon, but I think singling out and Wes turns out we can’t do this thing with the next button on Sunday. I was gonna make it lands dogs for you and and let you down for dinner and hang out and If you want the president put today insisted that out so that I have this. Ohh. 8 9 6 weeks ago at N Y C M doing the Chaska. I wanted to go to the police and see that, that’d be fun. How is it said anyway. Gimme a shout. So when you turned out that sounds you or see if they did you bye.

Apparently, it came from Google Voice apps and the partnership with Sprint, and my friend tells me it generally works well enough for him not to have to even listen to the message. And, while I’m an extremely fast talker (and am trying to break the habit of leaving long message), it’s still funny.

Useful, too: instead of playing with the Makerbot, we’ll be landing dogs and doing the Chaska.