It occurs to me that if the typhoon that hit the Philippines a couple weeks ago and which has killed upward of 5,500 people (with thousands more still missing) had instead made landfall in San Diego or somewhere else along the west coast of the U.S. and caused just 5% of the deaths, there would already have been two pay-per-view concerts featuring various classic rock acts, a Twitter campaign to get people to donate via text and much, much more.
Monthly Archives: November 2013
Hulu’s reach may get its hand cut off
I’m enormously skeptical of Hulu’s aspirations to be bundled with pay TV services for a number of reasons:
First, with channels like HBO, AMC and others making such strong inroads into original programming it’s hard to imagine them not throwing a fit at Hulu getting in their soup when original content is emerging as core to Hulu’s future success.
Second, Hulu plus would seem to compete with the VOD offerings available from the cable providers, who are going to throw their own fit over additional competition. Both are ways to watch older episodes of classic shows so I can’t imagine the providers sitting still while a subscription-based all-you-can-eat model competes with their fee-per-episode one.
Hulu seems to be trying to walk the line by saying it’s an “online” option for on-demand viewing, but that’s a distinction that’s not going to matter a whit to the audience, who will just see it as another option that’s available at a more competitive price point.
Classic Star Wars, this time with motion
I love these “Classic Moments” cards from Star Wars that pull, obviously, classic moments from the original and frame put in vintage trading card-looking frames. Not only are there still images but a few of them are GIFs, adding a little motion to the cards. 
It’s more than just the nostalgia, factor, though. This is a really interesting reuse of existing assets into a new form factor that adds something in addition to pulling on the heartstrings of fan boys and girls everywhere. Looking at the GIFs like the one above of the one below, it forces me to think about those classic moments in a slightly different way. It changes my perspective on them.
In a big way this is about how media consumption has changed. It’s not just about the whole movie, it’s about these small, sharable moments that unite people around a common idea. By sharing that “Wampa Attack” card I’m expressing something about the movie that others may feel similarly about. If others are anything like me they just replayed the entirety of Empire Strikes Back in their heads, with the above GIF as a prompt.
NU2 in 2014
The good news: There’s a new U2 album that’s said to be coming in the first few months of 2014, likely April. This after a bunch of false-starts and rumors, including that there would be a follow up to 2009’s No Line On The Horizon (which I like a lot of) as soon as 2010.
The slightly weird and kind of disappointing on a certain level news: The band is looking for a corporate partner to make the big official announcement during next year’s Super Bowl. Not that I’m some sort of “they’ve lost their cred, man” hippie, but I think we’re all hyper-aware of anytime U2 in particular starts sounding more than their usual level of pretentious.
QOTD: 11/1/13
” If there’s one lesson to take from every major change in how people browse the internet over the last five years — the rise of infinite feeds, the gradual retirement of slideshows and pagination, the explosion of very tall, vertically interactive page layouts — it’s that users hate to click and don’t mind scrolling. Taps are expensive, swiping is cheap. Clicking is a choice, like jumping; scrolling is inevitable, like falling.”
Why Twitter Just Turned Itself Inside Out – Buzzfeed
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about how the changes to Twitter, which bring fully-viewable images – and Vines – in-stream as opposed to only being available if you clicked “in” to the tweet, make it more like Instagram or Facebook. But those criticisms don’t quite hit home for me since the experience on Twitter is still massively different than on either of those networks.
For one thing, Twitter allows for easy sharing whereas Instagram has no native “reshare” functionality. For another, in order to do comment or reply to something on Facebook you have to click twice. So there’s still a lot of difference between the networks.
Sure, it’s a big change but along with the fact that you can now Retweet, Favorite and Reply all in-stream as well I’m guessing this will make Tweets even more engaging. And, considering this change was seen as a “gimme” to advertisers, that was likely the whole damn point.
It’s not a problem to use two spaces after a period…
…but if you do I’m going to assume you’re also a Packers fan who molests collies. 
