Tag: video

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Digital Culture Library Issues

Google @ ALA

Here’s Google’s video relating their experience at ALA 2006. Included are shots of the booth in the exhibit hall, a little video of the party they held at Muriel’s, and snippets of interviews they did with librarians at the party. You can see the swanky glowing drinks that I talked about earlier.

I was interviewed, but evidently didn’t make it into the video…but they did put up a picture of myself and Charles at the booth:

me @ ala

The most amusing thing to me about the picture? Google put these up as a Picasa Web Album, but I’m linking to it from my flickr account. Why? Picasa doesn’t give you easy linkability…I could copy image location and paste in the URL, but that’s not a friendly user experience. Flickr EXPECTS you’re going to hotlink their images, and gives you the URL to do so.

Picasa also doesn’t give you an easy way to browse to a specific picture…this was pic 166 of over 200, and when I went back to find it, I couldn’t be bothered to click next picture 165 times. There must be a jump to picture option for usability, guys. What else…oh yeah…no multiple sizes to pick from, so the resolution you get is just what’s there. I love Picasa as a local picture manipulation solution, but Google is a long way from flickr for online experience.

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Digital Culture

What was WIkipedia created for?

Why, to list the problems and solutions the the TV character MacGyver came up with, of course.

In today’s era of fear, I can’t imagine a TV show that shows us so many ways to blow things up.

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Digital Culture

Pirate Bay

Pirate Bay vs Hollywood

Just to recap the last week or so for The Pirate Bay, the largest bittorrent engine in the world,

They were raided by the police, evidently under pressure from the United States and the MPAA. Keep in mind, of course, that this is in Sweden. You know, one of the places that isn’t the US. Their servers (along with other sites servers, which just happened to be in the same room) are seized.

Three days later:

Pirate Bay is back up, and now operating (evidently) as a distributed site in multiple countries with redundency. Ah, the beauty of Gilmore’s Law in action.

Their own take on it:

Just some stats…
… here are some reasons why TPB is down sometimes – and how long it usually takes to fix:

Tiamo gets *very* drunk and then something crashes: 4 days

Anakata gets a really bad cold and noone is around: 7 days

The US and Swedish gov. forces the police to steal our servers: 3 days

.. yawn.

And finally, an absolutely brilliant speech from some of the people responsible for Pirate Bay, given at the Reboot conference.

The attack on Pirate Bay is an attack on that grey zone. Rather than securing their own copyrights, the movie industry are attacking an infrastructure that is needed for many kinds of independent production. They are not attacking piracy in general, as the sharing of digital files can always take its physical routes. They are attacking the very possibility to interconnect metadata of private archives. But while intellectual property will surely continue to be a battleground for major clampdowns in our society, there will always be enumerable lots of open ways.

How cool are these dudes? They have their own political party. Seriously. How much is a one way ticket to Sweden these days?

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Digital Culture

This is just for Mark

No comment…if you’ve never seen or heard this…well…there are just no words. Shatner does Rocket Man.

Categories
Digital Culture

Fox news Godwin

Sometimes real life IS just like the Interweb! Watch Fox News commit a real life Godwin!

From Think Progress:

Sterling Burnett is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, an organization that has received over $390,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. This afternoon on Fox, Burnett compared watching Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, to watching a movie by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to learn about Nazi Germany.

Transcript:

That’s the problem. If I thought Al Gore’s movie was as you like to say, fair and balanced, I’d say, everyone should go see it. But why go see propaganda? You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming.

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Digital Culture

Fred = Superstar

As if we needed more proof that SILS own Fred Stutzman was quickly becoming an academic superstar, he drops the news that he was invited to speak at Google about his Facebook research.

The video is, of course, available online.

Great stuff from Fred, who has definitely found his academic niche, and is doing fascinating stuff in it. Between ClaimID and Facebook, he is definitely becoming an authority on online identity creation and evaluation.

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Digital Culture

Stop the Madness

If for any reason you missed this on BoingBoing, below is possibly the single most “80’s” video in the history of the world.

We’re talking Nancy Reagan (in her first rock video!), Tootie, and Whitney Houston singing about the evils of drugs. So bad it’s amazing.

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Digital Culture

Best. Lightsaber. Duel. Ever.

Categories
Digital Culture

Generational Film Literacy

Betsy and I were talking about my previous post, and the thought of generational film literacy struck a cord with both of us. Can anyone out there help us fill in generational “must see” films? What films give you the core, the heart of a particular generation?

HeathersBreakfast Club

For Gen X, of which both of us are proud members, we came to a pretty solid list: Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueler’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Dead Poets Society, Heathers, Pump up the Volume, Lost Boys, Empire Records, Clerks, Pulp Fiction, and a few others Bets will have to help me fill in. What have we missed?

Lost BoysDead Poets

For Gen Y/pre-millenial, the only solid choice I could come up with was Clueless. I’m less attached to that generation…help!

Anyone want to help with pre-Gen X? Boomers? Baby Busters? Help me fill my Netflix queue, people!

Categories
Digital Culture

Film Literacy

Following up Jason Kottke, I’ve listed film critic Jim Emerson’s list of 102 movies that you should see before you can consider yourself movie literate. I’ve bolded all the ones I’ve seen.

2001: A Space Odyssey
The 400 Blows
8 1/2
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Alien
All About Eve
Annie Hall
Apocalypse Now
Bambi
The Battleship Potemkin
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Big Red One
The Bicycle Thief
The Big Sleep
Blade Runner
Blowup
Blue Velvet
Bonnie and Clyde
Breathless
Bringing Up Baby
Carrie
Casablanca
Un Chien Andalou
Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
Chinatown
Citizen Kane
A Clockwork Orange
The Crying Game
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Days of Heaven
Dirty Harry
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Do the Right Thing
La Dolce Vita
Double Indemnity
Dr. Strangelove
Duck Soup
E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial
Easy Rider
The Empire Strikes Back
The Exorcist
Fargo
Fight Club
Frankenstein
The General
The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II
Gone With the Wind
GoodFellas
The Graduate
Halloween
A Hard Day’s Night
Intolerance
It’s a Gift
It’s a Wonderful Life
Jaws
The Lady Eve
Lawrence of Arabia
M
Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior
The Maltese Falcon
The Manchurian Candidate
Metropolis
Modern Times
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Nashville
The Night of the Hunter
Night of the Living Dead
North by Northwest
Nosferatu
On the Waterfront
Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Persona
Pink Flamingos
Psycho
Pulp Fiction
Rashomon
Rear Window
Rebel Without a Cause
Red River
Repulsion
The Rules of the Game
Scarface
The Scarlet Empress
Schindler’s List
The Searchers
The Seven Samurai
Singin’ in the Rain
Some Like It Hot
A Star Is Born
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sunset Boulevard
Taxi Driver
The Third Man
Tokyo Story
Touch of Evil
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Trouble in Paradise
Vertigo
West Side Story
The Wild Bunch
The Wizard of Oz

Now for the part that everyone loves about lists: what’s not on here? That is, what do I think is necessary for a degree in film literacy? Well, he did hit at least one film from my favorite directors (Fincher, Kubrick, Kurosawa) except Gilliam (and no, Holy Grail doesn’t count as a Gilliam film). This list was done in 1999, so there are no films from the last 6 years on there. Are there any truly great films from the last 6 years? Or just things he missed?

I’d be tempted to include a handful in my list: Rushmore, The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, The Ice Storm, Brazil, Memento, El Mariachi, Crouching Tiger. And then there are the specifics to generational literacy: Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Dead Poets Society, Heathers, Pump up the Volume.

So that’s 55 of them I’ve seen…over half. I’m going to add all of the ones I haven’t seen to my Netflix queue, and work my way through. For you librarians out there, how many of these are in your library?