Month: March 2010

Great rant on dialog writing from David Mamet to The Unit http://bit.ly/ba2xAA but it applies to everyone writing dialog.

(Caps from the quote)

THERE IS NO MAGIC FAIRY DUST WHICH WILL MAKE A BORING, USELESS, REDUNDANT, OR MERELY INFORMATIVE SCENE AFTER IT LEAVES YOUR TYPEWRITER. YOU THE WRITERS, ARE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE EVERY SCENEIS DRAMATIC.

A good discussion of the segmentation of market into high end (Apple) and “good enough” Acer http://bit.ly/9NPWrL

While Apple have been claiming the high end markets, others have been working on a different tactic.

On the contrary, companies like Ikea, H. & M., and the makers of the Flip video camera are flourishing not by selling products or services that are “far better” than anyone else’s but by selling things that aren’t bad and cost a lot less. These products are much better than the cheap stuff you used to buy at Woolworth, and they tend to be appealingly styled, but, unlike Apple, the companies aren’t trying to build the best mousetrap out there. Instead, they’re engaged in what Wired recently christened the “good-enough revolution.” For them, the key to success isn’t excellence. It’s well-priced adequacy.

Audiences Don’t Pay for Content (they never have until now) http://huff.to/a62xKB Beyond newspapers. Worth a read.

We need to stop blaming digital technologies as the reason that consumers stopped paying for content and recognize that digital technologies may actually be the opportunity to get the consumer to pay for content when they were never willing to do so before.

Why ‘TV Everywhere’ Will Fail http://to.pbs.org/dxVqpG Propping up old model, not new model.

TV Everywhere is designed to prop up the existing cable model business, not to provide a true customer-centric service, and therefore will fail.

Is HTML 5 worth your time? http://oreil.ly/bkBf0m – HTML5+CSS+Javascript = yes but Flash has headstart on development environments.

HTML5 itself and Flash are vastly different. They have different things that they’re trying to do. But the HTML5 plus CSS plus JavaScript package is more. I think that’s an easier comparison to make to Flash because Flash is supposed to be this total environment. You can put things on the screen and you can script it and you can define interaction. And HTML5-CSS-JavaScript lets you do that as well.

We got to the point a couple of years ago where the HTML-CSS-JavaScript stack can technically do just about anything that the Flash environment makes possible. It’s just a lot harder at the moment to do that in HTML5-CSS-JavaScript because Flash has about a decade’s head start on authoring environments.

Publisher Experiments With ‘Free’ And Sees Book Sales Increase 20x http://bit.ly/aQXBLy Obscurity is a bigger problem than ‘piracy’.

Much of the talk by the big 6 publishers has been stress over cannibalization of print sales, or the idea of replacement sales, by ebooks. For midlist publishers such as ourselves, I believe we fight against substitution. We capture the “browser” market. If our title is not available or visible, a customer will simply substitute for another one in the genre. Free gave us the visibility that we could not purchase.

Television’s Next Business Model? http://bit.ly/aDBAFB “maybe we should begin to look at each TV show as a stand-alone “Web property.””

I like the idea of TV shows as “web properties” that wrap up a community around a show rather than attempt to force the community around a channel. Channels are dead – I don’t even know what networks the shows I watch are broadcast on and I don’t care.

What exactly is Piracy? http://bit.ly/93zbrv Technical copyright breaches that aren’t morally wrong.

Of course there is no such thing as “piracy” or “theft” – it’s a civil dispute over unauthorized distribution. The referenced post asks where the lines are reasonably drawn. It’s not as clear as some would want you to believe.

Darpa wants storytelling cameras! http://bit.ly/bdIpWq Recognize objects and tell stories.

This is exactly the type of automatic metadata acquisition that is really going to radically change pre-post: what happens before we get to the editor to finish and put the heart and soul into the edit. How soon can we get it to our First Cuts?

The idea is to create machines that are endowed with what remains an exclusively human ability: visual intelligence.

and

Darpa wants cameras that can capture their surroundings, and then employ robust intellect and imagination to “reason over these learned interpretations.”

 

15 Lessons Old Media Must Learn from SxSW http://bit.ly/b86yWj An eclectic collection.

Second time today I’ve read about how gaming/games will be part of the future of work and play.