Love Love Love Love: The Best Data Visualization Projects of 2011 from flowingdata.com

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some of my faces are in here - I love the one above

"9. See Something or Say Something

The way that people use web services has gotten a lot more interesting with the growth of mobile tech. People aren't just interacting via a standing desktop anymore. Eric Fischer compared Flickr and Twitter usage in this series of maps. White indicates where people used both, blue is just Twitter, and orange is Flickr."

Transmedia Is the New Black: "Media That Matters" Conference Explores the Future of Storytelling | International Documentary Association

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Excerpt from a longer post on the Media that Matters Conference:

"...This year's theme for Media That Matters was Storytelling Across Platforms, the goal of which was to demystify the concept of transmedia. Aufderheide says they wanted to "bring it down to earth and practice, and demonstrate creative approaches to using all the media available to support documentarians' objectives." And the speakers at MTM did not fail.

The most compelling panel was a look at three successful transmedia projects--Jacqueline Olive's Always in Season Island, a Second Life outreach accompaniment to her Always in Season documentary currently in production; Roland Legiardi-Laura's new media project Power Poetry, which grew from his documentary To Be Heard; and Luisa Dantas multi-platform documentary project Land of Opportunity. What was remarkable about these projects is that while each uses a different media platform, they are all engaging and activating the audience outside of the documentary viewing experience. And for many in the documentary community, that is the ultimate goal...."

Must Read: Danny Lieberman on Digital Content Distribution Vulnerabilities #infdist

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Excerpt from a much longer & very detailed analysis:

"HD content protection – fundamentally flawed....

”The AACS design prevents legitimate purchasers from playing legitimately purchased content on legitimately purchased machines, and fails to prevent people from ripping the content and sharing it through bittorrent. The DRM people wanted something that could not be done, so unsurprisingly they winded up buying something that does not do it." ~ James Donald.

Now you understand why BitTorrent is so popular.

A popular TV series like Heroes is available for download on BitTorrents worldwide in AVI format within a few hours after airing with the commercials edited out. OK – Heroes is SD, not premium content like ” The Bourne Ultimatum” but so far I reckon the quality of the AVI download is not deterring users from watching Heroes off BitTorrent.

In world of download-only distribution, studios have an opportunity for expanding business using the Internet and a huge digital asset protection challenge. From the perspective of piracy (protecting intellectual property of the studio) and revenue assurance; being able to download HD content to a PC or PVR disk is an ugly threat, especially considering how easy it has been to crack or bypass AACS content protection in Blu-Ray and HD DVD until now. Once the content is stored on a hard disk on a Windows PC, you’ve lost control for ever.

The software and algorithms for Premium HD content protection are fundamentally flawed as Peter Gutmann shows in his article: A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

Alternatives for a download world

As the consumer Internet moves towards a download-only distribution model, the motion picture industry needs to find answers to their digital asset protection challenge without biting the hand that feeds them.Network PVR may conceivably be the most effective method for protecting digital movie content from the perspective of both the studios and the consumer.

There is no such thing as a single silver-bullet, optimally-effective countermeasure to the vulnerabilities of flawed content protection schemes, flawed software implementations and vulnerable PC operating systems. That is the mistake of an over-reaching scheme like HDCP.

Gutmann’s analysis is outstanding in its breadth and depth but he doesn’t propose a system of countermeasures which would help the studios protect their intellectual property. In order to identify the most cost-effective set of countermeasures to the threat of piracy, we start off by examining risk profiles of different digital content distribution implementations.

Digital content distribution vulnerabilities...."

Nuno Bernardo: How to use Transmedia to develop a Comedy project |Excerpt from Original Post on MIPBlog

Digital Comedy Lab

Comedy on the internet is obviously very popular. It is entertaining for the viewer and just a three-minute laugh can engage the audience in a very simple way. It is also accessible anywhere on YouTube or other social media services, and if you want to laugh at something you can access humorous material quite easily. Comedy tops the YouTube charts, whether it’s a talking dog, a laughing baby or someone having a domestic accident.

You will notice that most of this comedy is not character-driven; rather, it is sketch-driven and therefore you don’t have to connect with the characters in order to be amused. Most of these so called viral videos are one-offs. Like the 80s’ one-hit wonders, they achieve huge success with their first single but are not able to repeat that initial success and sustain a continuous audience.

This is one of the reasons that sitcom writers and creators develop strong character-based stories. Audiences connect with characters, even in comedy. As with drama-based stories, it is crucial that the audience has an empathetic connection with the characters. But the level of engagement with the majority of comedy content available on the internet is actually quite ephemeral and once consumed, people will move on from it. The point is that this transitory engagement makes it quite difficult for a comedy-based product to connect with an audience using transmedia.

full post here:

http://blog.mipworld.com/2011/12/nuno-bernardo-how-to-use-transmedia-to-devel...

Greenpeace unleashes potent multi-platform protest :: Idealog :: the magazine and website of New Zealand creative business, ideas and innovation

Powerful, emotive and starkly original, Publicis Mojo‘s latest multi-platform campaign for Greenpeace is a simple yet stunning piece of PR, incorporating everything from pop-up art galleries to support from Radiohead.

Very Cool Kickstarter Campaign: An Ever-Changing Game, Designed and Written By its Players? Sounds Good.

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Excerpt from kotaku.com post:

"The idea of user-generated content is nothing new, and success at implementing the concept has ranged from the niche (inFamous 2) to the wildly successful (Minecraft). Just this week, game designer/Carnegie Mellon professor/all around interesting and smart guy Jesse Schell launched a kickstarter campaign to support the latest project from his studio Schell Games (geddit?) called Puzzle Clubhouse.

Over at the game's Kickstarter page, you can check out a video in which Schell pitches the concept. It sounds fun enough in theory, but the the execution should be both interesting and educational, mainly because Schell is the man behind it.

From the Puzzle Clubhouse press release:

In the pursuit of that collaborative vision, Schell Games created Puzzle Clubhouse. The idea is to produce silly, fun, casual games as quickly as possible, with the help of the players, by letting them contribute artwork, music, stories, jokes, game ideas, and more. "Our long-term goal is to let the players create as much of the games as possible, with our professional developers there to help guide them," says Schell. "We're going to start small, having players submit and vote on artwork, but with each episode, we plan to push the envelope of player collaboration more and more."

Very Cool Idea: Puzzle Clubhouse: Crowd Designed Episodic Game Dev by Schell Games — Kickstarter

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From the site:

"Crowd-designed?

That's right. We're trying for something a little crazy. The idea behind Puzzle Clubhouse is an online community for a new kind of game development process, one that is crowd designed, and crowd supported. It's a creative experiment and we need your help to get it started!

Want to know more? Keep reading!.."

Apple Moves Forward With TV Plans

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Excerpt from original post by Jessica E. Vascellaro:

"...The TV device Apple is working on would use a version of Apple's wireless-streaming technology AirPlay to allow users to control it from iPhones and iPads, according to people briefed on the matter. When the company plans to start selling such a device and whether it would receive traditional broadcast or cable signals remains unclear, said these people, who say Apple may change its plans.

The technology could allow users to stream video from mobile devices to their televisions, without a set-top box. That process is already possible through its Apple TV set-top box, but it is cumbersome and some media companies, such as Time Warner Inc.'s cable channel HBO, prevent their apps from using the technology because they want closer control of how and where their content appears. An HBO spokesman says it hopes to use AirPlay once it is comfortable with the antipiracy protection...."

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204791104577106531093742246.htm...