The New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

Excerpt:

"...For the past several months, the R&D Lab has been working, quietly, on a time-based representation of how the Times’ news content is being shared in Twitter’s social space. Its name: Project Cascade. Superficially, it’s a data visualization, but it’s actually a tool that could, ever so slightly, change the way we think about online engagement.

It’s the product of a collaboration among Mark Hansen, the UCLA stats professor who spent a spring 2010 sabbatical working at the Times as what Zimbalist calls the paper’s “futurist-in-residence” — that casual title alone offers evidence of the scope of the R&D Lab’s ambition — along with Jer Thorp (data artist in residence) and Jake Porway (data scientist). And it has, despite its pragmatic uses, a firmly artistic attitude: Hansen, along with the artist Ben Rubin, designed the “Moveable Type” screen installation in the Times’ lobby, and Thorp, whose work we’ve written about previously, has converted data from the Times’ API into visualizations that are both revealing and stunning...."

Toolkit | 5 Lessons About Transmedia from The IFP/Power To The Pixel Cross-Media Forum - indieWIRE

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Having caught most of the day via the live stream, grazie to indiewire for summarizing key points of a day of great talks:

Transmedia Is Not Just Applicable to Entertainment

The Concept Isn’t Entirely New

The Living Room Has Evolved

Experimentation Is Essential

Transmedia Won’t Kill The Movie

OK Go Project Inspires GPS-Spun Art Around the World [VIDEO]

From mashable.com

"...In November, viral video masters OK Go teamed up with Range Rover in the Evoque Pulse of the City project, in which they set out to create a huge “OK Go” sign, written in GPS across their hometown city of L.A. They used the Range Rover Pulse of the City app [iTunes link] to do the scrawling.

The project, and ensuing video for song “Back From Kathmandu,” garnered them tons of attention, as well as a MTV OMA nomination for Most Innovative Music Video.

At the time, OK Go also asked fans to create their own GPS-etched journeys, which have been compiled and edited by into the above video. Seems a fitting vid to feature on Earth Day.

This isn’t the first time a person has created GPS-spun art. This past summer, literature lover Nick Newcomen drove 12,328 miles across 30 U.S. states to scrawl “Read Ayn Rand” via GPS data inputted into Google Earth."

If an ecosystem like BitTorrent grows to 160 million users, it's not a piracy environment, it's just a new environment.

Getting your book in front of 160 million users is usually a good thing

"Pirate's Dilemma" author Matt Mason on BitTorrent.

by Jenn Webb@JennWebbComments: 715 April 2011

Excerpt:

What are some of the obstacles environments like BitTorrent face as promotion platforms?

Matt Mason: One of the biggest problems peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent have is the stigma of piracy, but P2P is actually a new and better way of distributing information. Piracy has been at the birth of every major new innovation in media, from the printing press to the recording industry to the film industry — all were birthed out of people doing disruptive, innovative things with content that earned them the label "pirate" (including Thomas Edison).

I think of piracy as a market signal — it signifies a change in consumer behavior that the market hasn't caught up with. If an ecosystem like BitTorrent grows to 160 million users, it's not a piracy environment, it's just a new environment. Media is an industry where the customer really is always right. If people are trying to get your content in a new way, the only smart thing to do is to find a sensible way to offer it to them there.


Very interesting argument here - read the full article on O'Reilly radar

Sebastian Junger Remembers Tim Hetherington | The Magazine | Vanity Fair

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....I’ve never even heard of Misrata before, but for your whole life it was there on a map for you to find and ponder and finally go to. All of us in the profession—the war profession, for lack of a better name—know about that town. It’s there waiting for all of us. But you went to yours, and it claimed you....

One Step Closer to Cancelling Cable? Yup: HBO Go likely to pave the way for more TV on your iPad or iPhone

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Christopher Brinckerhoff's full article is on appolicious.com

"...HBO Go, the cable television network’s portal to accessing content online, was first made available to Verizon FiOS consumers last year, and will be available to HBO subscribers with iPhones, iPads and Android devices May 2.

The HBO Go app is the latest example of the ongoing migration of television programming to mobile devices. The app, with its recently expanded library of programs, is one of many approaches to offering television content on the go...."