What do you get when you splice Mary Poppins with some creep-tastic music? One impressively sinister movie plot:
Videos like this are the natural offspring of popular video and social networking sites; you can see mash-up spawn all over the web on YouTube and beyond. You don’t have to be a genius to make one yourself. Here are some examples and websites to whet your appetite:
1. The Trailer Mash: Users create new twists to movie spots by remixing and changing up the soundtrack. Scary Mary, above, is just one example.
2. Terminator vs. Robocop is a mash-up with some of that video annotation that Nick mentioned a few posts ago. It was created by the people at AMDS Films, but I’m guessing most of y’all don’t speak French.
3. Vader Sessions includes Star Wars clips with quotes from James Earl Jones’ various roles spliced in. It gets really good when he starts talking about being a breadwinner (3 minutes in or so).
4. Total Recut has it all — source clips, video editing tools, and contests, with categories from political to education to advertising to trailers.
5. Check out The Recycled Cinema for a history of found video footage and a more academic approach to mash-ups.
6. For the politically bent, Political Remix is a blog-style video mash-up site with some very moving and politically charged messages.
7. Jumpcut is Yahoo’s answer to the video and social networking equation. You can use it to upload source material, edit your clips, and share your remixes. Still in beta (what isn’t these days), but the is design slick, unobtrusive, and very user-friendly.
A few years back our friend Dave Schroeder of Pilotvibe decided it was time to put the Midwest on the ‘flash’ map, and started Flashbelt.
For those who don’t know - its an incredibly educational and inspirational 3 days of presentations, panel discussions and workshops. Speakers typically have a focus, whether industry (advertising, commerce, education) or specialty (flash audio, as3, animation etc) and often are well-known for their groundbreaking work in a specific area or project. Its a refreshing mix of Adobe Scientists, authors/gurus, well known designers/developers and independent experimental producers. Our own Nick Longtin even presented last year.
Whether you are someone who sells interactive projects, designs for the web, or develops flash interactive or other, I would highly recommend catching at least a couple of presentations. You will learn and walk away inspired. It rivals the feeling of Spring in Minnesota for the interactive industry.
With social networking all the rage, our lives becoming increasingly hectic, and Internet connectivity nearly ambiguous, it’s not surprising that many people maintain some exclusively digital friendships.
I haven’t seen many of my digital friends in over 10 years, and probably wouldn’t even recognize their voices. Even my brother, who is serving in Iraq right now, has become an all-digital sibling.
Whenever I hear of more Minnesota casualties on the radio my heart skips a beat, I rush home to the computer, and check his Facebook page hoping to see a recent update so I know he is still alive.
All this has led me to conclude that social networking sites don’t necessarily bring people closer together. In fact, sometimes they make people feel farther apart.
Net neutrality, the concept of treating all Internet traffic the same, has been a hot topic of late. Even our esteemed statesmen in Washington have mulled over the subject. Traditional ISPs have stayed out of the debate, letting other players squabble over the politics of packets and pipes.
But now a major ISP is taking matters into their own hands, and causing headaches for many of its users. The ISP is Comcast, and the users are music enthusiasts (illegal file traders). Specifically, Comcast is disrupting the popular Bittorrent file sharing protocol by mangling its data packets.
Unfortunately the problems don’t stop with Bittorrent. Other applications, like Lotus Notes, are also experiencing strange behavior when connecting through Comcast. This is a very scary situation.
When ISPs decide what customers can and can’t do with the bandwidth they pay for we all lose, and lose big. So much for net neutrality.
Remember two or three years ago? Before Britney got fat, the dollar tanked, and the iPhone was only an Apple fanboy’s wildest dream? Back then urban computer nerds were promised fast, cheap, wireless Internet access courtesy of their good friends at the government.
I am, of course, talking about municipal Wi-Fi. In my fair city of Minneapolis things are under way with US Internet. Although I can’t sign up for it yet, the fledgling networking proved critical in the bridge disaster response.
Other cities are not having as much luck. Various explanations exists for the failure of municipal Wi-Fi, and even Google seems to be unable to pull of this feat. I believe the final nail in Wi-Fi’s coffin will be driven by 3G.
I have a Treo 700p on Sprints 3G network, and enjoy DSL like speeds throughout the city, and even in Wisconsin Dells. Why would I bother with Wi-Fi, when my phone gives me lighting fast access to email, and can even be used to connect my laptop to the Internet?
As cell speeds increase, and cities struggle with Wi-Fi, more and more people will discover they don’t need municipal Wi-Fi. Poor Wi-Fi (sniff), we hardly knew ye.
Some time ago a friend invited to Goodreads, another one of these social networking sites where you open an account, add your friends, blah blah blah. As the name implies, this site targets a pretty strictly defined audience: bibliophiles. It’s a tool for book lovers to share their passion with their bookwormy peers — you can rate and review books and read through your friends rants or recommendations.
At the time, I wasn’t interested in adding yet another social networking site to my repertoire. Now that Facebook has a Goodreads app, I’m coming around. The app’s actions within Facebook are somewhat limited (Facebook directs you back to the Goodreads site to do anything more than rating a book), but it keeps my virtual bookshelves handy, and I secretly hope it guilts my friends into joining it too.
Current known competitors: Shelfari (I’ve heard the navigation isn’t up to snuff), Revish (which looks to be more text and less visuals), and LibraryThing (still in beta but doesn’t look bad).
I’m planning on using it to stay in touch with book group members while we’re all off reading the book of the month.
“There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” - Bertrand Russell
(Note to Austin — I think any one who reads Ulysses reads it for the latter reason…am I wrong? )
I’m currently ignoring an interview with David Heinemeier Hanssen, the creator of Ruby on Rails (a favorite programming tool of mine) for the sake of some decompression. Talking about code always makes me want to write something big from the ground up, though, which I need to avoid right now (way too busy!). Besides, I always have ArcSite to tweak and improve.
I decided to spend my Saturday at this all day conference called MinneBar. Lots of fun so far - went through a Ruby on Rails re-introduction course, and I’m now about to listen to a discussion of Net Neutrality. More later.
You are paying for 7MB of pure, broadband DSL speed, but are you getting it? To know for sure check out Broadband reports speed test. After you’re done (and presumably disappointed) browse through the rest of their site. It’s a great resource for all sorts of information, tools, and networking goodness.
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