kottke.org is 10 years old!
“Three cities, two serious relationships, one child, 200,000 frequent flier miles, at least seven jobs, 14,500 posts, six designs, and ten years ago, I started “writing things down” and never stopped. That makes kottke.org one of a handful of the longest continually updated weblogs on the web…something to be proud of, I guess.”

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Google Sky
“To help you explore the far reaches of our universe, we have teamed up with astronomers at some of the largest observatories in the world to bring you a new view of the sky. Using Google Maps this tool provides an exciting way to browse and explore the universe. You can find the positions of the planets and constellations on the sky and even watching the birth of distant galaxies as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope.”

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You don’t have much to do today?
The Guardian 50 most powerful blogs and Wikio standing

Which made me think while I was reading the Guardian ranking how powerful China’s getting on the web…
Jinglei is a popular actress (and director of Letter From An Unknown Woman) in China, who in 2005 began a blog (’I got the joy of expressing myself’) which within a few months had garnered 11.5m visits and spurred thousands of other Chinese to blog. In 2006 statisticians at Technorati, having previously not factored China into their calculations, realised Jinglei’s blog was the most popular in the world. [...] Last year her blog passed the 1bn clicks mark.

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Tim Hamilton for Uniqlo

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Andersen is a single mother living in Oregon who was sued by the record labels in February 2005. She eventually filed a counterclaim against the RIAA, and when the labels voluntarily dismissed their case against her last June, she filed a malicious-prosecution lawsuit. In it, Andersen accuses the RIAA of fraud, racketeering, invasion of privacy, libel, slander, deceptive business practices, and violations of the Oregon state RICO Act.

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Communist Cuba has authorized the unrestricted sale of computers and DVD and video players in the first sign that its new president, Raul Castro, is moving to improve Cubans’ access to consumer goods.

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I’m sorry for the short break!

Here we go…

Hilarious photoshop mistakes on poster, book covers, etc…

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Shockwave traffic jams recreated

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It’s a bit old but still…”[...] calling her a “budding Picasso,” a “pint-sized Pollock.” Within a few months, she sold more than $300,000 worth of paintings. And then, just short of her 5th birthday, the bubble burst.”

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Music and advertising; how/where to discover a talented band for ads songs. “South by Southwest has become the nation’s biggest showcase for emerging music talent, speeding the ascent of stars like Amy Winehouse and the Strokes. [...] But increasingly the tone in Austin is being set by a new guard of talent scouts, especially those from industries like television and advertising who can score licensing deals for new music acts.”

Some more about the music industry and advertising
“[...] the market for commercial music licensing is in the neighborhood of $3 billion. [...] A recent Forrester Research report recommended, among other things, that pop stars embrace “Nascar-style,” logo-splattering sponsorships and get used to promoting their favorite boxer briefs to help make up for the industry’s shortfall. ”
via emergetrends

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ETech Yearbook 2008: Meet the Faces of Innovation, featuring the BoingBoing crew, Tim O’reilley, Lifehacker editor, …. a lot of girls actually, I was quite pleasantly surprised.

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Show yourself on TimeSquare: I in the Sky, a cool project by Raul Vincent Enriquez. ” [...] Enriquez’s latest art installation, which launches Thursday, aren’t trying to sell anything. The only concept Enriquez says he is trying to convey with his new piece, I in the Sky, is the importance of eye contact.We just need more eye contact; it’s what makes us human,” the Brooklyn-based artist says. “I think it’s really fascinating. It can be the invitation to a fight or a sign that you’re understanding somebody.”

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I’m sorry but this is just too funny: “Actress Serena Kozakura’s conviction for willful destruction of property has been overturned by the Tokyo High Court because her large breasts revealed flaws in the testimony against her.”
Scott Adams takes on the subject

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NIN download-only last record that went online on the 4th reportedly made 750,000$ in 3 days. (They already sold their 2 500 packages at 300$)

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Artist of the day: Kid Cudi

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Patrick Swayze has 5 weeks to live, according to the National Inquirer. I’m not a people guy but c’mon, it’s Patrick!

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Cool websites: I’m having a really busy week and I’m out of stuff to post. In the meanwhile, please enjoy those really nice website:
Adobe Cards
Coke Zero Game
Nokia: The world is my canvas/: The ad to go with it
Chanel Mobile Art
Toyota IQ
Ikea (room ideas)

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Ads

Videos
A street advert for the Californication serie (which I urge you to listen)
Awesome slowmo ad for Schwepes
A tv spot to announce the new Volkswagen UK website (which took something like a 6-10 ppl team over a year to complete)
the website

Not videos
March Against the Terrorist Organization FARC
Japan Airlines sushi luggage tray
Water is life: 4000 litres de peinture, 75 000 euros (a project by the artist Henk Hofstra)

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Artist of the day: This friend of a friend’s jazz group is quite good and they’re at Showcase this vendredi, 5E to enter.

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Capping a relentless rise in recent years, oil prices hit a record high during the day on Monday [...] [at] $103.95 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, broke the record set in April 1980 during the second oil shock. That price, $39.50 a barrel, equals $103.76 today, when adjusted for inflation.”

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“The $100,000 Veuve Clicquot Vertical Limit wine cellar is handmade and sheathed in sleek brushed steel, with each shelf individually lit and lined in Veuve yellow.”

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The Marsh Chapel Experiment: The goal was to see if in religiously predisposed subjects, psilocybin would act as reliable entheogen. (i.e. psilocybin: active ingredient in magic mushrooms/ entheogen: a psychoactive substance used in a religious or shamanic context). All of the members of the experimental group reported experiencing profound religious experiences, providing empirical support for the notion that psychedelic drugs can facilitate religious experiences.

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37 signals workplace experiments includes four days work-week, paying for the employees courses (like cooking, or flight courses) and a company credit card for every employee to buy books and stuff… it’s all about passion. I just found my new favorite company.

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It’s one of my first post on the U.S. primaries (which I’m following with an avid interest), but I just didn’t want to post too much about it, and since this one is marketing related, I thought it would be nice: “Reinforced with a coherent, comprehensive program of fonts, logos, slogans and web design, Obama is the first presidential candidate to be marketed like a high-end consumer brand.”

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“…the generation that has grown up naturally creating their own hypertextual narratives as they click their way through the web, that transmedia narratives that leverage the true media behaviours of this generation are coming to the fore, and that people should read more in general because reading is for awesome people, then the time is ripe for another pop at hypertextual literature.”
That’s great.. to put it more simply, from what I got from it, it’s basically a story that supports itself on other stories, so you need to know the other ones in order to understand what’s going on in the story your reading.
It also made me think about that part: “creating their own hypertextual narratives as they click their way through the web”, which I never actually could put words on but is so true. That’s exactly how I navigate the Web, going from one link to another and creating a Web on a particular subject (which you might have come to realize by reading this blog!…). I’ll def dig up the subject a bit more and come back to that in some days…
A bit more on the same subject: Nonlinearity
And I now have to read this book
And this one.

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Another insight on the (different) japanese culture: “At Edelstein boarding school, the schoolboys wear lip-gloss, the headmistress has a weakness for homoerotic comic books, and there is only one subject: how to serve female visitors. Welcome to Tokyo’s first schoolboy cafe, the latest in a flurry of eateries in Japan where customers and waiters role play themes from manga comics.”

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The L-E-I-L-A texts: “When you send a text message on the Verizon network, you can address your text by choosing a name out of your contact list, or you can address it by typing in a phone number. You can also type in a name. And if you type in L-E-I-L-A, then– bizarrely– your text will come to me.”

on a scale of 1 ta 13 how much did u like dat prom dress i tryed on yesterday?
from a 540 phone number.
Approximately 7.5. But seriously, 540 girl, don’t you think it’s a little early to be trying on prom dresses? [...] I know BRIDES who don’t get dresses this far in advance. What you lose a lot of weight before June? Or get pregnant?

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“Predictably Irrational,” [is] an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. [...] You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship. [...] “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. [...] “We may work more hours at our jobs,” Dr. Ariely writes in his book, “without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.”

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In the last 500 years, humain activity has forced 816 species to extinction. [...] WWWF flipped the perspective on this shocking reality by transforming an undergournd passageway into an animal shooting range. Only this time, the animals had the guns. Each gun was equipped with an infrared sensors the triggered the sound of gunfired as someone walked by.
via I believe in advertising

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MS Office Live Workspace goes.. hum, live.

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Artist of the day: I saw Fazil Say in concert yesterday and it was really, really good

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I came across this interesting post comparing the cost of interaction in real life and in the digital world. Noah was pointing to another article on the shrinking advantage of brands. Which really got me thinking since I’m working on a project related to the importance on the net in building a brand.
“The cheaper interaction gets, the more connected consumers can talk to each other – and the less time they have to spend listening to the often empty promises of firms. In fact, when interaction is cheap, the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: information about expected costs and benefits doesn’t have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches – instead, consumers can debate and discuss expected costs and benefits in incredibly rich detail.”
“Well in a non-digital world, interaction costs were high: You had to purchase products. In the digital world, they’re unbelievably low. Nothing is ever more than a click away online. In the offline world you had to get over high interaction costs by creating needs/expectations and you did that mostly with advertising/communications.”

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Ilya Vedrashko from adverlab/billboardom came out with two outstanding post over the last week. The first one is a collection of army recruitment ads which really shows 1: cultural differences and 2: what the army in different countries put forward/encourage.
The second one ask the (important?) question: should ads in adult magazine features naked people?

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I’m far from being a gun person but I came across this video presenting the Magpul FMG-9. It’s foldable gun the size of a, hum, a big wallet. “Small enough to fit your pocket“. And it’s a scary idea. “So suppose you’re out walking your dog late at night or taking out the trash and any problems should occur…”

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I’ll most probably go to the next Likemind coffee thing in Paris, if it sounds interesting to you, see you there!

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Good50X70 is a poster competition for charities. “Entrants are asked to design posters (on as many briefs as they wish) and the posters selected by the jury of graphic design luminaries as the best will be given to the charities to use for potential campaigns and exhibited around the world.” The current briefs are for Unicef, WWF, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, LILA (Italian League Against Aids), Emergency and AMREF (African Medical & Research Foundation).

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Talking about competitions, Wolda ‘08 is open for entries. “Wolda is the high-profile graphic design awards scheme that rewards the best logos and trademarks designed throughout the world.”

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Artist of the day: The libertine

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