Off to Mexico: No posting for a week

Avatar: Special Effects Bonanza

Fox Studios and/or James Cameron aren't letting the trailer be embedded, but it's on YouTube in HD. Countdown to December 18th!

Matias Aguayo

This is all acapella.

Mac and PC

A picture is worth a thousand words and all that sort of thing...

Múm

I'm owed a gold medal for braving Saturday night's torrential rain to go and see Múm at Poisson Rouge. They were playing as part of the CMJ 2009 festival. Soggy feet aside, it was a good gig. While they don't sound just like Bjork or Sigur Ross, they do share that uniquely Icelandic otherwordliness. My favorite track was marmalade fires (it's on their MySpace) page.

In a double whammy Icelandic post, I was kinda shocked to hear McDonald's is completely pulling out of Iceland.

Facebook Accounts for 15% of UK Traffic

Facebook accounts for 15 per cent of the UK's web traffic, according to new Hitwise statistics. One in seven British clicks go to the social-networker, making Facebook the UK's most popular website.

These big number puts Facebook at twice Google's amount of traffic– which is in at number two with 5.8% market share. The length of time people stay on Facebook has also increased, with the average user spending 26 minutes 14 seconds a session, adding a full five minutes from September last year.

To be fair to Google, its services do dominate the top 10 of the UK's most trafficked sites, with YouTube, Gmail, Google, Google UK and Google UK Image Search making up half of the 10 places.

Bombay Bicycle Club

Add up the band members' ages, and you might get to 21. These lads are young. And good.

Dripping Design

Just a cool table. Details here.

Chinese Create Artificial Black Hole in Lab

Now that's a headline that sells. And the article in MIT's Technology Review is actually quite readable for those of us who don't understand astrophysics. The applications include invisibility cloaks, absorbing light and other sci-fi classics.

Ukraine Got Talent

Kseniya Simonova is best-described as a sand animator. Maybe more surprising is that she'd appear on Ukraine's Got Talent, the local version of American Idol.She tells a mesmerizing story with nothing but dark sand, background music, and her fingers: the Nazi invasion of the Ukraine, civilians fleeing, a tomb for an unknown soldier...

Brakesbrakesbrakes

Rock music at its best: 2 or 3 chords, basic lyrics and plenty of attitude.

SpeechBreaker

Speechbreaker lets you create your own version of what a political speech from Gordon Brown, David Cameron or Clegg (the Liberal Democrat guy) should be. Click on the words to splice together sound bites. Add applauses. Post it to YouTube. Et voila! A user-generated political speech to be shared with the world.

I created my own classic speech of Brown ripping into Blair and posted it to Youtube, only to find I was not the only person to name my video Gordon Brown speaks the truth. In fact most of them are some variation on the theme...

We Own GM

With the U.S. government plunking down $30 billion dollars to save GM, we all own it now. We Own GM is a great crowdsourcing Web site where, as owners, everyone can submit their own ideas for the future of America's carmaker. Quite literally.

Reactable

Me and my legos are starting a band...

A Landscape of Airwaves

A Noospheric Atlas of the United States to be more precise. This current project from artist Brett Ian Balogh maps what people watch on TV, with each color representing a different media (TV, FM, AM). They're really beautiful representations of the ethereal.

More pictures here.

(via PSFK)

The Slew

The Slew's heavy sound is made up of Kid Koala + the rythmic section of Australian band Wolfmother.

The Global Internet

This graph from The New Scientist (click to enlarge) is sobering:

• China has 253 million Internet users against the US' 220 million. So far, so good. The shocker is that only 19% of China has access to the Internet compared to 72% for the US. And the data are from 2008.
  
• India? 60 million users with just 4% of the country online.

That's a lot of growth potential... The Internet of 2025 will be in Mandarin.

The Drums

Obama Nobel Prize: Media coverage

I think everyone (except the Nobel Prize Committee) was left scratching their heads with this morning's announcement of Obama getting the Nobel Peace prize. However one might feel about the new president, we can probably all agree that it seems a little premature...

I wondered how Fox News would handle this compared to say, CNN. While the story's headline is "fair and balanced", there's some hefty editorializing in their choice and juxtaposition of headlines. There's a point of view in design and layout choices...

FOX NEWS (around 11 am ET):


FOX NEWS (around 11:15 am ET):
It starts getting worse... In-office-president-gets-Nobel-Peace-Prize not that much of a big story after all and gets relegated. Fox News to world: Our business is war not peace...

Obama Gets Nobel Peace Prize >>> Doomsday



And just for comparison:

CNN (around 11 ET):


MSNBC (around 11 ET):

Italy Vs. Brazil - Never Friendly

The Virgins: Rich Girls

Dead Beat Summer: Neon Indian

80s pop gets the filtered treatment.

Rio Smackdowns Chicago

Everyone seemed a little in shock when Chicago didn't win the 2016 Olympics despite the Obama's strong push for it. But watching the two videos backing each city's bid, it's pretty clear Chicago screwed up their marketing. The Chicago fire? Didn't that happen two centuries ago, in the 1870s? I'm wondering if there's been any news coming out of Chicago since. Aside from Michael Jordan, that is.

Obviously, the decision isn't made solely on the back of a video, but watching how they package themselves, I know which one gets me excited...

Alice in Wonderland

Talk about falling down the rabbit hole... This video is part of a presentation by Google at this year's Advertising Week.

It’s part of an 80+ page presentation of the best digital campaigns from the last 12 months with a focus on Google's applications, but with very cool creative and technical chops.

More here (launches Google Docs Presentation)

Yo La Tengo

Wave Machines: Keep The Lights On

No, not Rain Machine. Not Secret Machines either... It's Wave Machines from Liverpool.

I know that somewhere there must be a secret committee that decides on which words are to be included in a band's name for the upcoming year. Last year was all about Ponys and this year it's Machines.

My suggestions for next year are:

• Scratchy: The Scratchy Heads. Or Scratchoramic Sounds
• Socks: The Smelly Socks or The Black, Black Socks or Naughty Sockeses.
  
• Sour: Obviously... The Sour Faces or SourSourSour
  

2010 should definitely be an 's' year...

Advertising Week - part 2

Microsoft is getting into the tactile interface big time. They were showing this interactive screen, called Microsoft Surface, during Adweek. The most impressive was the third picture, which is a demo of the screen's scanning ability. Apparently, certain types of data can be manipulated once they're scanned in, although this machine did not have that ability for some reason...

An interesting fact is that most (all? this was hard to clarify...) of the applications are from Vectoform. Looks like Microsoft is trying to catch up for their own Minority report interface.

I Hate Young People

I Hate Young People is a Web site that allows people to upload videos about what they hate the most about young people. And vice versa... From Britney to smelly old folks, it's the generational gap in all its glory/horror.