David Lidsky's Blog, page 3420
October 28, 2013
Yes, People (Especially Millennials) Are Sharing More Photos And Videos
If you hadn't noticed already, a report from the Pew Internet Project released Monday will make it loud and clear: People are shooting and sharing more photos and videos than ever before. This trend bodes well for image–sharing apps, such as Snapchat and Instagram, which respectively have 9% and 18% marketshare among cell–phone owners, the report found.
With 58% of American adults owning a smartphone, the Internet has an influx of content creators and curators. Of 1,000 adults surveyed, 54% of Internet users said they post photos or videos they created, up from 46% last year. Meanwhile, 47% are curating and reposting photos and videos found online, an increase from 41% in 2012.
Altogether, image creators and curators make up 62% of Internet users, a rise from 56% last year. It's young adults who are the most fervent multimedia sharers, with 26% of cell–phone owners ages 18 to 29 using Snapchat and 43% using Instagram. Overall, 81% of millennials have uploaded photos and videos, while 68% have reposted others' images online.
October 27, 2013
Lou Reed, Dead at 71
Rolling Stone is reporting that Lou Reed dies this morning of as–yet unknown causes. Reed was a musician whose solo career was so long and varied that you almost forget he formed The Velvet Underground before embarking on his own. During his time with that band, Reed helped create albums that would influence generations of musicians to come. It is often said that while the first Velvet Underground album may only have sold 30,000 copies, everyone who bought one started a band because of it.
[image error]After Lou Reed left the Velvet Underground in 1970, he went on to a solo career that went on to a career that spanned several decades and spawned at least one enormous commercial hit with "Walk On the Wild Side." Reed explored many different styles of music, chasing his muse seemingly with little regard to record sales or many of the other trappings of the music industry. His release of the avante–noise album Metal Machine Music, which may or may not have been an attempt to get out of a major label record contract, is considered by some (or at least this writer) to be one of the great punk rock moves in the history of music.
Vital to the last, Lou Reed's final album was a collaboration with Metallica. Reed is survived by his wife, musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson, who is a legend in her own right. And as many on Twitter will be quick to point out, it is perhaps fitting that Reed died on a Sunday Morning.
"SNL" Imagines How a Wes Anderson Horror Movie Might Go In This Parody Trailer
When you have a cinematic signature as recognizable as Wes Anderson's, it inevitably invites parody. (And sometimes homage that borders on parody.) Hot on the heels of the first preview for his latest aesthetically precise movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a new digital short on Saturday Night Live expertly imagines how a Wes Anderson horror movie might go.
[image error]Starting with the appropriately fanciful title The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders––rendered in Futura bold font, of course––the sketch attempts to replicate the immaculate composition of a Wes Anderson film, but in a horror movie context. Guest host Edward Norton does a passable Owen Wilson in playing a man whose house is terrorized by masked killers. It's a little too Tenenbaums–heavy to be a truly effective career–spanning parody, but the sketch features plenty of smart touches––like a killer in a neat tweed suit brandishing both a butcher knife and a gramophone.
It may not be enough to hold fans over until the new film comes out in 2014, but it will at least give Wes Anderson Halloween costumers some fresh material to work with.
October 25, 2013
10 Most Popular Stories Of The Week: The Best Design Duos, Fart Repellent Underwear, And Much More
1. Google Autocompletes The World's Opinion Of Women––And It's Not Pretty
Co.Create
The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women use Google's autocomplete feature to show sexist attitudes hiding in plain sight.
2. This Map Shows What Every Country Leads The World In And It's Not Entirely Flattering
Co.Create
With the help of this map, we now all know Mongolia leads the world in velociraptor bones.
New Xbox One Commercial Highlights Gaming And TV–Watching Experiences
We're now less than a month from the launch of the the next–generation gaming consoles. As both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 look to differentiate themselves from one another (and from the still–pretty–good current–gen devices), the Xbox campaign is now in full gear––and they're taking aim at the interactive elements of the console, which extend beyond games.
[image error]But the games are a big part of the campaign, too, which is a switch from the first spots from Microsoft. Those highlighted what a swell experience watching football is on an Xbox One–equipped television. In the new 90–second spot from agency CPB and director Bryan Buckley, it's the combination of games, TV–watching, and app–connectivity that gets top billing. You can use your Xbox One for gaming, the awesome–looking mech that crashes into an office building at the start of the ad suggests; you can use it to both watch sports and play sports games; you can navigate with nifty voice controls and touch–free hand gestures to watch Star Trek: Into Darkness; you can issue voice–commands so you can Skype with your homie about something awesome that just happened in a soccer game (which'll presumably be swapped for something more American when the ad hits US shores during Sunday Night Football this week).
[image error]It'll remain to be seen if the option of Skyping from your TV, or controlling your console with your voice and with touchless gestures that may well be buggy for the first few months that the product is on the shelves are the things that people really want from their gaming console––so it's smart of Microsoft to highlight that the experience of battling zombies and leading an army of Centurions is a big part of what they're selling, too.
These Insanely Detailed "Porcelain" Vases Are Actually Made Of Soap
Experience Meekyoung Shin's perfectly rendered copies of ancient porcelain and busts in person and you'll detect a waft of fragrance emanating from them. Inspect more closely (not too closely, of course), and your inklings will be confirmed. These sculptures smell.
The scent can be sourced to Shin's sculpting material. Despite appearances––the craftsmanship is immaculate, enduring––the Korean artist works not with stone, but with soap. "It has a similar density or texture to stone," Shin tells Co.Design, describing why the medium isn't an altogether crazy substitute for, say, marble or granite (materials found elsewhere in bathrooms?).
Her latest exhibition, "Archetype," at the Sumarria Lunn Gallery in London, offers a smattering of objects that back up her claim. The forms––based on Chinese vases, Hellenic peoploids, and most recently Renaissance canvases––are sensitively sculpted, with a precision associated with age–old, rock–solid materials.
The New York Times Fights "Snow Fall" Fatigue With More Snow Falls––And It's Working
This weekend's New York Times Sunday magazine hits us, yet again, with another "Snow Fall"–esque multimedia feature. The difference? This time, you may actually want to read the whole thing. Similar highly stylized Times projects, while very pretty, "are bad for the web and bad for readers,"critics have argued, with too many bells and whistles that ultimately overwhelm readers.
"A Game of Shark and Minnow," however, is an evolution in the format, as the Times responds to the backlash to the Snow Fall–ification of the Internet, with better versions of Snow Fall. "I think we're aware of those criticisms with the other projects and it's in our heads for sure," Steve Duenes, the Times's associate managing editor, told Fast Company.
[image error]"Those criticisms" for Snow Fall–type projects come in two variants: price and utility. Snow Fall required lots of resources: The Times brought in a physicist to recreate the avalanche, for example. Not even the paper of record can afford that level of production on a regular basis. Since the current media business model can't support all that went into Snow Fall, we've seen the more accessible elements of the piece show up in other Times projects (and all over the Internet). Most notably, parallax scrolling, the design element that makes different layers on the page move at different rates. (Fast Company used the feature in this article about unplugging from the Internet.) That trend, however, has started to feel gimmicky as more sites have adopted it.
Meet The Safest Man In America To Have Sex With
Soft–spoken Ramin Bastani has lost track of the number of times he's been tested for STDs, but in the last two years, he guesses it's about 50. So, "I hate needles even now," he says. When he does subject himself to the process these days, it's not because he's been getting frequent anonymous action. It's for company research.
Bastani is the founder and CEO of Hula, an app that helps users find and rate clinics that test for sexually transmitted diseases. Bastani is no Rico Suave––he describes himself as awkward. But at a Health 2.0 conference earlier this month, he was introduced to the crowd as the "safest man to have sex with in America," and the title has stuck.
[image error]Ramin Bastani"Oh, my girlfriend hates that one," Bastani told Fast Company.
"Truth Is Truth:" Steve McQueen On Making "12 Years A Slave"
Lean close and gaze at what art historians refer to as the "Mona Lisa of photography"––the eight small copper daguerreotype panels of the "1848 Cincinnati Panorama" by Charles Fontayne and Williams S. Porter, one of the oldest photographs of an urban city. Look closer, thanks to cutting edge digital technology and the incredible resolution of the daguerreotype method and see what experts describe as the first candid images of free African Americans.
Trace these tiny figures busy at work, perhaps some at play, on the Ohio River landing, and think back to the 19th century and thousands of African Americans settling north in search of new lives away from injustices in the south. Imagine the everyday fears of these free men and women may have had––the worry about being captured and returned to bondage due to laws favoring slave owners.
Jump 165 years and watch English actor Chiwetel Ejiofor and London–born, Amsterdam–based filmmaker Steve McQueen bring to vivid life this nightmare of lost freedom and revisited cruelty in 12 Years a Slave, the true story of Solomon Northup, a free African American in Saratoga, New York, who's kidnapped in 1841, sold into slavery and ends up working on a Louisiana plantation for 12 years until regaining his rightful freedom in 1853.
Watch Twitter's Video Pitch To Investors
Getting ready to pitch itself to investors next week, Twitter posted a video of its IPO roadshow presentation online Friday.
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