Message from Michael - June 8, 2009 - Ingenuity and Innovation

Message From Michael                                 

                                                                                                                        June 8, 2009                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

      RAPPING BASSET HOUNDS AND JACKSON POLLOCK

      BACK TO WORK BUT HAVING FUN AND BEING PRODUCTIVE

      FOOTNOTE/ DISCLAIMER – MORE

 

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      INTRODUCTION:  Microsoft has unveiled Bing which it calls “the sound of found” and is clearly aimed as a counter to the Tyrannosaurus Rex of search engines better known as Google.  In the meantime, Google has unveiled Wave which is just as clearly aimed at Mastodon Microsoft’s Office Suite and Cloud Computing.  I thought you would find it instructive to look at the futurists who may be the real challenge to Microsoft and Google.

      RAPPING BASSET HOUNDS AND JACKSON POLLOCK:  How’s that for a headline?  They’re part of the varied selection of Webby Awards honoring the best websites.  The winners were announced earlier but will be available on a special YouTube/ Webby site starting Tuesday.  And just for good measure, add Timothy Leary to the headline.  Why?  Because if these websites had been available when he was alive, he wouldn’t have needed LSD.  They are that amazing.    So, get ready to turn on your computer, tune in to the various websites and drop out of circulation for a while, as we give you this special salute to the ingenuity of the website designers and the innovative thinking of the webware designers.

As you can tell from the headline, one of my favorites was the rapping basset hound.  The basset belongs to one of the founders of Comviq Sweden, which supplies prepaid cards for mobile phones, and the dog has become the company symbol.  The dog does the typical scratching, screeching of an LP on a turntable, but it also has an interactive feature so you can add in barks, woofs, snorts and sniffs and then record it.  You can even download the basset ringtone.  Want to try it yourself… go to the website -- http://demo.fb.se/e/tele2/beatbox/site/. It’s this interactive feature that makes these sites so fascinating… and for traditional media… frightening.  The site jacksonpollock.org, for example, allows you to use your cursor like a paintbrush, slashing lines across the ‘canvas’, throwing blobs of paint, changing colors, then cleaning the slate and starting over.  And, yes, video is the rage, but when you couple it with the three dimensional look on some of the sites, the ‘wow’ factor grows exponentially.  The designer website barcinski-jeanjean.com even asks if you have 3-D glasses before taking you on a 360 degree tour of Amsterdam with floating sheets of paper that you can click on for information.  The less flamboyant but no less fascinating “Thank You with a T” site (thankyou.thisisgrow.com/t37j) shows the T-Shirt designers drawing on your computer screen from the other side.  Also on the environmental side is Protect77.com where a massive display of nudes in the Antarctic is just part of many art projects displayed in 3-D-like visuals.

As for Timothy Leary, he could go to website behance.net which bills itself as a free platform for the world’s leading creative professionals with designs and portfolios ranging from the weird to the wonderful.  But if he really wanted to trip out, he might go to Queensland University lecturer and self described ‘digital and hypermedia poet’ Jason Nelson’s site, secrettechnology.com, which contains what it understatedly calls ‘oddities.’  Or something a little less ‘disturbing’ is web designer Joshua Budich’s My Star Wars Collection (joshuabuddich.com/SWCollection) which won both the Webby Award and the People’s Voice award in the Personal category with its compilation of hundreds of Star War toy figures.

The BBC walked away with both the Webby and the People’s Voice award (along with many others) in the news category which included Salon.com, MSNBC’s spectra visual reader and The Daily Beast.  But if you want to see the next generation of news, go to the student category where graduate students at UC Berkeley won a webby for their website (missionlocal.org) which looks at the Mission District of San Francisco, or the website of the graduate students at Columbia University who look at the Correction Corporation of America (businessofdetention.com).  That next generation can probably best be seen at People’s Voice winner, the waylandstudentpress.com website, the home site of Wayland High School in Massachusetts and the handy work of, incredibly, a freshman student, Robin Kim.

The point of all this is, yes, you will find some of the more well known websites amongst the Webby winners, but dig amongst the nominees and you will find even more fascinating places… like birdpost.com which combines birding with satellite maps… 1000awesomethings which is a ‘time-ticking countdown’ of things marvelous and meaningfully mundane… Timespentalone.com which is a multi-dimensional display of ‘thoughts and explorations conceived in isolation’… Sandrific, which displays sand collections from around the world… or Failblog.org which captures real-life pictures of people’s ‘failure to communicate.’                    

      OKAY, BACK TO WORK:   But have fun doing it by looking at the top 100 ‘Webware” winners, as named by CNET and tech editor Rafe Needleman.  Plus you will find some possible solutions to make work easier.  For example, all those markets that are going to a news sharing arrangement should look at the Infrastructure and Storage category where Carbonite, Dropbox, DropIO, Mozy, Windows Live Skydrive and YouSendIt provide online storage and file sharing capabilities.  For all of us individuals, these sites are mainly there to provide backup to your hard drive… free, in most cases.  It may not be all about ‘cloud computing’ this year, but pretty close.  As Needleman and the CNET editors say in their pick of the Amazon Web Service as an editor’s choice, it used to be that venture capitalists looked ‘askance’ at entrepreneurs if you couldn’t run your own servers, now they look askance if you do run your own services.  “The cloud is where the new Web apps live,” they say.  If you do that much online work, the thing that drives you crazy – remembering your ID and password, right?  Well, now there are two apps to do that for you.  Website OpenID, which also made the top 100 Webware list last year, creates one master identity online so you can access multiple sites without creating another specific ID and PW.  This year the editor’s choice is OAuth which allows permissions to be set up between services so you don’t have to give out an ID and PW.

As long as I’m on this productivity kick, the webware 100 offers a variety of avenues to explore.  I just recently discovered Google Calendar, but it is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ways to making work more streamlined.  Now you may have heard of Zoho (because I have mentioned it in previous MfM’s), but how about Remember The Milk, which allows you to create a to-do list or checklist and which the CNet editors call “the most portable goal setting service” in its class.  Webware Evernnote allows you to take notes on your computer and they appear almost immediately on any other machine you’re using.  Webware RingCentral let’s you use a single phone line in multiple locations.  And instead of GoToMyPC, you can try LogMeIn which is also a remote desktop application.      

You know something is really hot when it makes both the Webby Awards and the Webware top 100.  In this case it is dimdim.com which is an open source web conferencing and screen sharing application, allowing you to share presentations and collaborate on projects.  The folks at dimdim say it is a virtual classroom allowing you to synchronize with multiple users.  Two others that, I believe, have made both lists are animoto.com which promises (and delivers) the ability to produce videos from your still pictures in just minutes; and graphics processor nividia whose website speakvisualcom is an interactive, multi-dimensional testimony to the capabilities of the processor.

One of the growing trends in web sites and web software is the proliferation of recommendations and guides for consumers and businesses.  From CNET’s Webware list comes Good Guide which provides a recommendation system that is “safe, healthy and green.”  From the Webby list, you probably know about About.com but how about veryshortlist.com which provides a guide to “new and sometimes vintage entertainment and media that haven’t been hyped to within an inch of their lives.” A similar goal to ours here at MfM.  Which is why we are re-visiting the Webby and Webware lists, because although they have been covered, they haven’t been covered to the extent they deserve.

Again, the point is you’ve heard about some of the standard web and software applications, but there is so much more out there.  For example, instead of Internet Explorer, you may use Safari or Firefox.  But have you heard of Maxthon?  No?  It has been downloaded more than 200 Million times and is the second most popular browsing software in China, created by folks “fed up with the lack of customization in Microsoft’s IE.”  And you’ve heard of Digg, but have you heard of Diigo?  It also is a content sharing and bookmarking tool, but in addition it allows you to save entire web pages and actually make notes on top of the content.  And instead of Google, Yahoo or MSN, try Scour which combines the search capabilities of all three.   

      FOOTNOTE AND DISCLAIMER:  Separate from the Webby’s is the Web Marketing Association which has its own WebAward program which is still taking entries.  And as long as I’m on an awards kick, give yourself a treat and go to the Association of Independent Creative Editors website (http://www.aice.org).  My favorite here is Gnarls Barkley Who’s Gonna Save My Soul which won the music video category.  Warning – it is a little graphic, but it is also poignant and touching.  Watch it and let me know what you think.  And while I’m at it, let me add another.  If you haven’t seen Mad Avenue Blues, which is a song about The Day The Media Died, set to Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie, this is one you really, really need to watch. Here are the two links -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqRcCHk_Pc . Or http://tinyurl.com/qcz2sm.  And, definitely, let me know what you think.  Thanks to WNEG-TV Account Executive Lisa Ferrell for the lead on this one.  Oh, yes, the disclaimer.  This week’s MfM is a week late.  Looking at all the creative websites and ‘webware’ was so fascinating that I did indeed turn on, tune in and drop out.

Finally, you can find the links to both of these through search, but just in case, here they are.  You can click on them or cut and paste them.

For the Webby Awards -- http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=13.

For the Webware Top 100 ---  http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-10244820-29.html?tag=mncol           

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