Isaiah Mustafa remains ridiculously charming in this new making-of video:
Some people ask to ride me, which … depending on which saddle they have, the English or the Western…. I don’t like the Western. If they have the English, I usually agree.
RIDICULOUS.
Blah blah Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever. I still don’t care about Old Spice, but I love this campaign and this actor. What a trouper!
I don’t have much to say about the visual design of the Gawker sites. I am a regular visitor of only one of them, and I usually visit from a desktop computer. I don’t have any trouble getting around the new layout. But Gawker made one big error, and that’s in the functionality for directing visitors who link to specific articles on a mobile device (at least, on iPad and iPhone): visitors ends up at a listing of headlines, which may or may not contain the headline that interests them. If they even know what that headline is, since they may have arrived from a shortened link in a Twitter message, introducing the article with a cryptic remark.
It’s fine to say, “Keep your hair on. They’re working on a fix.” or even “Sounds like you follow faux-clever jerks on Twitter.” You’re entitled to that opinion. But a basic principle of sound Web design is to make sure the user always has a “scent of information” to follow. If users find themselves someplace unexpected, a good design will help them on their way. And that’s just for people navigating the site. If they’re following links to specific pages, getting them there should be a no-brainer.
If a person follows a link to a specific page in your site, it’s just silly to think it’s perfectly fine to send them anywhere else. If your developer knows enough about the device making the request to shunt it to a different layout of the site, the site should be capturing enough about the link the user selected to get all the way there. If it dumps the user on a TOC page, your developer simply didn’t complete the job. And if hash-bangs, or whatever the new hotness is, don’t work well enough or consistently enough with the major pathways into your site, then maybe you should resist the temptation. Who knows? If an iPhone can’t find your page with your newfangled whatsit, maybe Google can’t, either.
Those of us who have been using mobile for a long time are familiar with this half-assed approach. We’ve been seeing it on television and newspaper websites for years, going back long enough that some of us could kind of understand why a Web team’s use cases didn’t capture us. But that’s not the situation today, even for those legacy outlets. So why would a new-media darling, which surely has a massive base of users on the current It Device, whatever that may be, repeat such a classic old-media mistake? Engaged audiences already greet redesigns with suspicion—why not take the time to make sure the functionality is solid?
I couldn’t care less about Jim Beam, but this is a beautiful ad.
It stars Willem Dafoe in about a dozen roles. It is directed by Dante Ariola, whose “First Taste” (for Coke) also touches on branching out, while his “Idle Thumbs” (for Virgin Mobile) tackles a series of characters. He also made one of my favorite ads: “Snowball” for Travelers. He does a nice job with these stream-of-situations stories. Maybe because of all his videogame work!
At some point in my adolescence, I was brought along to some kind of poetry group and someone read a poem with on the theme of ergot poisoning from grain. I have no other memories of the group at all, but I was reminded of it by this photo:
So, there it is. That’s what it looks like.
That, and, maybe, the Salem witch trials.
Beyond robots that think about what they are thinking, Lipson and his colleagues are also exploring if robots can model what others are thinking, a property that psychologists call “theory of mind”. For instance, the team had one robot observe another wheeling about in an erratic spiraling manner toward a light. Over time, the observer could predict the other’s movements well enough to know where to lay a “trap” for it on the ground. “It’s basically mind reading,” Lipson says.
What could go wrong?
This is MOWGLI, in a video from a few years ago. I don’t know the state of the art in this technology, but I am sure this represents something great in engineering. And my highly visceral response to this thing is NO. NO NO NO NO NO.
Cat jumps in my lap? I love it, wooza good kitty, how about a treat. But I think I might be one of those people who want robots to stay where I can keep an eye on ’em. I mean, look at that thing. You know it won’t be content to require getting power via a cord forever. It just wants to sit in your lap now, but next thing you know, it’ll be leaping onto your bed, injecting you with some kind of paralytic compound, and using your body to charge its battery.
I have mixed feelings about the Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot, too, but about 43 seconds into this video, someone tries to kick it over onto its side, and the way its little legs buckle to keep its balance inspires sympathy in me.
The clock, made by Maria Bergstrom, accepts magnets, which are gently swept by the hand when you inevitably fail to complete the tasks they represent.
Rahm made a great showing in Chicago for the mayoral race, both in real life and in … not-so-real life. Read Snarkmarket’s roundup on the election-runup activity from one of the funniest Twitter parody accounts around.
UPDATE: @MayorEmanuel revealed by Alexis Madrigal! Madrigal drew out the mind behind the Twitter stream, and gives lots of great backstory detail.
Margaret Atwood gave the keynote at O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference. The entire presentation (33 minutes) is available O’Reilly Radar.
Atwood illustrated much of her presentation with hand-drawn images, including the occasional bulleted list. Did you know she was a cartoonist in a previous life? Neither did I. “You’re supposed to do one thing,” she says. “If you do more than that, people get confused.” How true that is.
Anyway, Atwood addresses the many dimensions of technologies and the concern that a disorganized response to the massive changes in prospects for publishing could end up eliminating the author. As noted above, they are a crucial aspect of the publishing ecology, but while the death of one author can be nourishing (she does point out that authors don’t have to be dead), you don’t want them to go extinct.
By the way, she recommends authors supporting themselves by inheriting money, and notes that rock concerts and t-shirts are not an option. I’m not 100% sure about the latter part of that, but it’s true that the marketing and promotion end of that kind of self-management is difficult, and self-publishing is hard enough. Oh, just go watch it.