The Dangers of Walking, Technological Hindrances

Cell phone usage has been banned from car usage. If a cop catches you fiddling with your radio dial and veer on the road slightly, you can get a ticket for careless driving. They have found that technology can be dangerous when you need to pay attention, and they are penalizing people for trying to do both things at once.

What about walking?

In an age of cellphones, I-pods, blackberries, PSPs , Nintendo DSs, and sidekicks, I find that most people walking on the widewalk are doing anything but pay attention to where they are going.

Obviously running into someone on the sidewalk isn't the same as careening into another car at 60 miles an hours, but let's talk about frequency. There are probably more people at any given moment apologizing, cleaning up spilled drinks, and dusting themselves off right now than there are people crashing cars because they were on their cellphone.

People don't know how to walk as it is. They aren't aware of flow of traffic, they don't properly gauge speed and direction, and they don't bother to adjust their course.

How often do you do the sidewalk shuffle with someone? You know, when you try to take a step in one direction to clear them, and they end up taking a step in the same direction. You both step back and forth a few times until one of you gives up.

In a way, technlogy has stopped that much. Instead of trying to avoid people, most just barrel straight through, oblivious to what was in front of them.

Mix a person checking their blackberry with the fact that they already had no real care for others around him, and you have a very annoying menace to society.

Multiply by ten hundred thousand. Put them all in Manhattan.

The Next Evolution of Media

One of the subjects that I would base my master's thesis research on would be blogs. I'm fasinated at the idea of what blogs would mean in terms of media and advertising. Apparently i'm not the only one, Rupert Murdoch would agree.

Creating a website to suppliment a tv show isn't a new concept. May movies now just set up myspace accounts instead of building their own site. Other sites like ilovebees.com created sites that drove up hype for certain products.

The newest mix into this is from Heroes, where a character in the story now has his own blog on which he posts supplimental storyline goodies. Watch the show, read his blog daily, get a little dose of Heroes every day. (kudos to BT for link)

One simple RSS feed click and you know have Heroes as part of your daily routine. Not only that, advertisments are integrated into his story. In one entry, he talks about the great gas mileage on his Nissan Versa. Next to that post, you see a small advertisement from Nissan about the Versa.

Blogs are what we do daily anyway. We read about what some person watched or tried or ate or drank or used and we do a little research ourselves. We get a window into their lives, take on their recommendations, and wait for the next post.

Hiro may be fake, but this is the next step in the entertainment industry.

Bring on a supplimentary storyline that fans can read, perhaps intergrate some inside comments from the blog into the actual show as a reward for readers, get a mass audience and push products, drive up hype, and create a user experience that combines tv and blogging into one super entity.

Blogevision?

You heard it here first.

New Age of Advertising, What's in the Future?

We live in a world of Divx, Xvid, streaming video, embedded flash, TiVo, DVR, SageTV and other ways of watching tv without actually watching TV. Who sees commercials anymore?

Sure, presently live TV probably does fairly well. I only have a vague understanding of ratings, but somebody tells somebody that tells a network that this show on this timeslot gets this many viewers. This many viewers means this much money an advertiser needs to pay to get however many spots during that show.

I don't watch live TV anymore. My DVR let's me watch shows 25 minutes after it starts, and I can just fast forward through the commercials. If I start at 8:45, I can pretty much get through the 8-10pm timeblock on TV without being bothered by a single commercial.

It isn't really that bad though, because I still have to fast forward through commercials, and the interesting ones or the ones who's product I care about, I'll actually stop and watch, at least, if it's the first time I've seen it. So that hefty advertising budget isn't being wasted.

A relatively new product that I was introduced to called SageTV is actually smart enough to automatically skip commercials once you record it. Downloaded divx and xvid tv shows have commercials editted out. There's thousands of people watching shows without commercials.

How do advertisers solve this problem?

Well, product placement is becoming more frequent, and this is a great solution. I see someone drink a pepsi, I want a pepsi. Next time I see it in a store, I might buy a pepsi.

Why not take it further? Why not write it into the script to talk about a new product? "Hey, what's that you're drinking there?" "Oh this, just the newest Dr. Pepper flavor. It's great, wanna try?" "No thanks. So how about that hot date you had yesterday?"

Is this a far fetched solution? Not really. Take a cue from the radio talk show masters. They mention products all the time in conversation format. It's a commercial, but it involves their lives, and listeners listen and remember the products.

Will shows be ruined by product placement? Well, depends on the show. Lost would be really weird if suddenly 22 cases of Sprite Zero Remix 2 was mysteriously dropped into the camp. Product placement won't ruin the realism of a show simulating real life. Remember the old days when products were relabeled? Now that ruins realism.

If not more product placement, what about shorter commercial blocks? Forget 30 second spots. Commercials are tiring. The first three months after superbowl, the tv is packed with replays of every single superbowl commercial. It was interesting the first second and third time it was played on superbowl. It's not interesting after that.

Five second spots, a minute worth of commercials. I think most people know what the product is. They don't need 25 seconds of a chipmunk crashing a car and high fiving another chipmunk to understand that car insurance is needed. I don't actually have a good method for how a 5 second spot would play out, but trust me, if I had a perfect solution, I'd be in the marketing business, not writing this blog; whoever discovers the key to 5 second commercials is going to be a rich person.

In the end, it boils down to the fact that shows need advertiser support in order to stay alive. If a show isn't getting ratings, it gets canceled. With less people watching commercials, advertisers are less willing to pay for the same spots. All this great technology that supports the habits we love are going to end up destroying that habit.

Especially torrents and other forms of P2P. Think about it. If your favorite show is downloaded 50 thousand times, that's most likely 50 thousand people who did not see the commercials.

I hope the user community can appreciate this. They should do their part too. Leave the commercials into your video. If people are that annoyed at fast forwarding through a couple commercials, let them be annoyed. It might inconvenience you, but from an business standpoint, it might legitimize peer to peer.

Let's put it this way. There might be a day when an advertiser looks at a timeslot and decides that the ratings aren't worth the premium price a network wants, but then does a query on popular torrent sites and finds that on average, the show on that time slot gets downloaded 50 thousand times before the next episode airs. They also know that the file leaves in commercials. Though they can't be confident that the viewers actually watch the commercials, they can at least feel like there's a chance that a percentage of that 50 thousand does.

So what does the future hold for advertising? Massive product placement? Shorter commercial spots? A more sympathetic p2p community of the business needs of a network that creates great shows?

One can only hope the solution keeps viewers in mind and not just satisfies the business end of the television world.

Visual Demands, Websites Learn to Use Space

With the invention of widescreens, better video card technology, and generally cheaper computer equipment, I can see a major problem occuring.

First off. Screens are getting wider, not longer. This is great for movies and tv. We're used to a wider screen because of how the movie theatres do things. It also makes sense visually. Unfortunately, we read mostly from top to bottom. Most books you read are longer than they are wide. Newspapers, magazines and even flyers, they're all long. So are webpages.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that vertical monitors need to be invented. That's ridiculous. Plus, most wide screen monitors can be flipped vertical, and if you have a somewhat decent video card (or good drivers), you can manually flip your screens vertical.

My issue isn't that though. My issue is web site publishers that are still making websites for 800x600 resolution. I've always pushed websites to be only 800 pixels wide for the sake of those people with old technology. But really, it depends on your audience.

If you have a healthcare site, I would submit that you should keep your to be 800 pixels wide, and probably no more text on the page to have a user scroll too much. Your target audience is probably not that proficient with the web, and having a website not fit their ancient technology would sway them from perusing your site.

If your website is about cutting edge technology though, you might want to reconsider your 800 pixel width stance.

So how to get around it? Well, first off, you could say "screw them" and design your site for 1024x786 or go all out and target people with 1280x1024. Just think about it, what are the chances that your target audience is comfortably using those screen sizes? Imagine how much space you'd have to work with.

Next, consider that in the future, sites will be made specifically for wide screens. There can be flash applications that will purposefully use the wide screen format in order to give a more movie-like presentation to their site. There will be sites that have a wider width format, perhaps allowing for more ad space on the right side, so that if users aren't using the proper screen size, they will get a horizontal scroll bar that does nothing more than hide the ads. Or perhaps hide more general information like top hits, most comments, or even user polls. All supplimental things that their frequent users will use, but the casual visiter who doesn't care, doesn't need to see it.

Thirdly, consider being more dynamic. Though my site isn't the perfect example of visual design, it does dynamically resize to fit any screen resolution. It even looks decent on wide screen. There will also be dynamic flash apps that can resize automatically, but everything from css to just properly nested tables can create a stretchable layout that everyone can enjoy.

Lastly, if you're too scared to move away from 800x600, at the very least, CENTER your website. There's nothing worse than full screening a website, only to find it left aligned and hugging the left side of my monitor. The website takes up a third of my screen, and the middle and rightside of my monitor is just filled with white space.

So stop thinking in 800x600. Step it up. Let me enjoy my widescreen monitor. Take advantage of the fact that people have more space. Live it up. Take a risk. Set the new standard.

And screw people who are using 800x600. They don't deserve to be on the internet.

Cinematics, Me, My Movies, and the Movie Industry (or CineMMMMI for short)

Before I get down and dirty, let me introduce to you my new best friend.



Like the hot blonde on the subway yesterday, I just want to stare at her ches--er, the screen all day. The rundown? 24" widescreen, 1080p, and alot of yummy desktop screen space.

This let's me watch HD-DVD movies in all it's HD-DVD glory. Ever watch a movie on your non-widescreen monitor and get really annoyed that the HD feed is letterboxed? Ever watch an HD movie on a 62" widescreen HDTV? If the letterbox didn't annoy you before, it really does after that.

Besides trying to justify why I blew so much money on a widescreen monitor, I really want to talk about the movie industry.

Because of the things that I mentioned above, there's almost very little reason to watch a movie in the theatre anymore. Granted, there are still some movies that must be seen on a big screen surrounded by giant megaspeakers, but there are other films where that surrounding doesn't make a difference.

The cost of movie theatres is also rediculous. I could watch a movie for close to 15 bucks a person, or I could wait two months (the dvd release times are getting shorter and shorter) and buy the DVD for 20 bucks.

Why doesn't the movie industry just suck it up and release movies in theatres and dvd at the same time? I understand that they are trying to maximize the amount of money they make, but there are different ways to approach it.

You know how many families would watch a movie and then buy the movie immediately after? For example, a family of four go see a kids movie. The kids love the movie so much that when they are exiting the theatre, they see the DVD right there on a sales rack and scream and kick until the parents spend the money to buy the dvd so they can watch it again at home.

I mean, sure, that may be an isolated incident, but imagine the possibilities. If you lowered the cost of movie tickets down to let's say 5 dollars (and i'm using NYC's 15 dollar movie ticket as a gauge, so your country-suburb 6 dollar ticket might scale down differently), how many people would go see a movie just to see it, so that they could decide on if they wanted to add the dvd movie to their collection? I can't prove it, but I speculate that DVD sales would rise if more people were exposed to the movie.

People always talk about the death of theatres, and the theatres have been able to adapt so far in staying alive. I think the movie industry and the theatre companies need to work together once again to adapt to these new entertainment conditions.

Because really, if they don't, I'm just going to watch movies at home on my shiny new 24" widescreen monitor.

I Hate the Internet

Ok, I don't hate the internet, but there is this subculture that exists that I truly do want to spit on. I believe they're mostly 12 year old pre-teens who have too much money and time on their hands, who think they're older than they really are. But maybe they're college kids who miss the days of calling each other poopy-face or saying a girl has cooties and running away.

It's the world of forum posters and commenter(er)s. Every once in a while you'll see an amazing video on youtube or find a forum link to some really awesome news article. After finishing said video or reading through link, you go back to the original linking page and read what everyone else thought about it. There's always the handful of people that throw out blanket statements.

Person X is not as funny as Person Y, therefore person X cannot possibly ever be funny.

This is old news, thanks for wasting my time.

This was already done, you're a loser.

What you said couldn't possibly be relevant, even though i'm contributing nothing but negative comments.

These nay-sayers and kill-joys really think that their insignificant comment out of the 12000 other comments mean something. I wonder if they actually come back to the site after posting their bullshit to check on other people's reactions.

Personally I've never bothered with posting on a site as big as youtube, where 1000 comments are written every minute on a particular link or subject. What's the point? Who are you trying to impress? Why bother typing "This sucks" and nothing else?

This forum culture sickens me, the people on there prove their idiocy daily. They are the type of people who have to say something, because out in the real world, every word that comes out of their mouth is ignored. Their parents hate them, their friends--friends? what friends?--punch them in the mouth whenever they try to open it, and overall, the words that begin to form on their tongues probably don't match with the ones that their brains thought. So they think they sound witty, but really, they're just retarded.

So let's lump them all together. The forum posters, the commenters, the myspace taggers, the millions and millions of people who try to raise their post count, their feedback scores, and have the largest numbers of friends--You're all losers. Nobody in real life has 46,000 thousand friends. That's like standing in times square and handing out your phonenumber to everyone. Most people will take it, but nobody is really calling you to hang out--Your ten thousand forum posts means you just spewed alot of shit out of your brain that will be lost in the tons and tons of shit already available on the internet. Your feedback score means you spent your life evaluating others instead of making one for yourself, and really you're all so insignificant that you have to try to stand out on the internet by marking it with your dumb friends count

Sometimes I wish Kevin's Smith ending scene for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was real. I wish you could really track down every douchebag on the internet and just physically assault them.

myspace.com/virtuallyinfamous.

A Season of Games

The Steam client by Valve is redefining the way we play video games. Similar to iTunes, you can purchase games on Steam. These games are tied to your account and you begin downloading the files needed to play. If you install Steam on another computer, you will redownload all those files needed, as long as you sign in with your account.

Valve is also creating an Episode system for the games that they have out. Basically these episodes are expansion packs, but for some games like Sin Episode 1 is the "expansion" to the old Sin game made years ago. Because it's on a new engine (the HL2 engine) it might as well be a new game by itself.

I see great potential in this system. Hopefully Valve can see that the episode system can be more than just expansions, but really, whole "Seasons" of games can be released. Of course, a season for a video game might not be the same length of time as a season for a tv show, but it would be amazing to have one long continuous storyline.

Having an episode system means that more time could be focused on developing the new game's core engine and how it will run, with less focus on the storyline. The game could debut with a small story, a pilot episode. If people like it, they buy the next episode which could come out as 3 month release buckets. It may seem like such a short cycle isn't feasable, but you have to realize, if the engine and core game was developed in such a way as to provide an easy way to great new storylines, maps and scenarios, it is possible.

Pricing could be reduced for the initial launch of the game and episode prices could rise. If a two hour movie dvd is worth 20 bucks, 20+ hours of an Episode of a video game should be worth that if not more, right?

Assurances would have to be put in place to allow users to skip episodes. Just like a consumer might not watch every episode of a tv show, a video game should have the same philosophies.

Steam is already set up to market itself. Whenever a user logs on, it lists the lastest new games and package deals. It's like tv guide.

My only issue with Steam is pricing. Why is the game the same price for download as it is if I purchased it in a store? Though there are those who would argue that the cost for releasing a game isn't in the packaging and materials, I'm sure something could be done. At the very least, give consumers the incentive to purchase things through steam by giving a small discount, so that they don't let the superficial argument of owning the actual physical game deter them from consolidating all of their gaming onto one system.