Today, we are very excited to announce the launch of iWitness, a free tool for exploring social media content by time and place created by Adaptive Path.
The iWitness concept was one of the winners of last year's Knight News Challenge, an open competition that funds media innovation projects. That funding enabled us to bring in a development partner, New Context, to help turn our concept into a reality.
We’ve all read, listened to, or watched a journalism story that really grabs us. For me, the New York Times interactive feature, One in 8 Million has been one of those pieces: every time I looked at an installment, I would be thinking about it for the rest of the day.
Andrew DeVigal, the multimedia editor at the New York Times, is one of the super smart peeps behind One in 8 Million, as well as countless other interactive stories that have appeared in the New York Times. He’s been front and centre in redefining the use of interaction and…
Two days ago I spoke at New Tee Vee Live, a conference dedicated to internet video, and the chaos and convergence currently taking place there. The title of my talk, “Everything Old Is New Again, Only Moreso,” is drawn from field research we’ve done in this space, understanding how people are watching and listening to media in this Internet age.
The big secret? People want the same things they’ve always wanted, but in this digital age, they have many more options for getting those things. It gives providers new opportunities to delight customers, but it also introduces much…
I, like so many others my age, fell into user experience design from a social science and humanities background, without any formal design or human-computer interaction training. My undergraduate degree is in anthropology. And while I loved what I learned, I was frustrated with the academic approach to the discipline, which rewarded esoterica, jargon, and talking only to other anthropologists. I felt there was a huge opportunity for the field of anthropology to make a broader societal impact, but anthropologists were too concerned with tenure and writing for the right publications.
This is why, when I first came across Michael…
Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post “The Lure of the Single Click”, about interfaces that support successful engagement through a single click of a button.
Having just completed a ginormous future-of-media project, I found myself thinking of this again. Among our project activities was 24 in-depth interviews in people’s homes to understand their media behaviors. And one of our realizations is that, when it comes to media, most people are very very lazy. Awe-inspiringly lazy. I was stunned at, in a world of DVRs and streaming media, how many people still just plop down on their couch, point…
Just a couple years ago, Pandora was laying people off, fomenting concern over survival. Just a few weeks ago, they announced tremendous growth.
It’s no secret that a key to their growth has been in non-PC devices, notably smartphones—somewhere between 40 and 50% of their audience listens on mobile devices up from 0% about 3 years ago. Even 3% comes from internet-connected TVs (reference). And iPad is proving to be a valuable platform as well.
While the majority of users still access Pandora through their PCs, that percentage is decreasing, and trends suggest it will probably drop below 50% by the end of the…
I’m neck-deep on a project looking at the future of media. Of the many threads to pursue is just what is going on with television—TV on your PC, web on your TV, television content across three (or is it now four?) screens, etc. etc. Frankly, the landscape is a bit of a mess.
It’s reminiscent of the world of digital photography circa 2004. People were taking pictures not just with digital cameras (which surpassed film cameras in sales that year) but with cameraphones as well. Each camera had its own software for managing photos, and there were independent…
The web world is watching the transition of power from the old administration to the new Obama team with keen interest. Already we’ve seen the switch between the previous version of whitehouse.gov to the new version. (The new version validates to W3C standards, by the way.) With this redesign comes better access to information, a more approachable design and a new Creative Commons license for it’s content.
Additionally, Kottke points out that the robots.txt file has also changed from almost 2400 disallows down to only one. That’s a serious change in transparency.
But one of…
We started out the week right, reminiscing about a massive group twister game and balloon fight in Dolores Park, San Francisco. The event? The MP3 Experiment. The culprit? Improv Everywhere. The result? We mused on the lack of PLAY in grown-up lives, resolving to create more of it in our own.
Since we were already on a bit of a philosophical bent, we started thinking about communication and interpersonal relations. After reading about Linguist David Crystal’s perspective on text messaging, we got to contemplating…is texting a corruption, expansion, or of little impact to…
The latest edition of Esquire Magazine hit the newstands today. What makes this one noteworthy is that it has an eInk display embedded in the cover.
There was some press awhile back about this and I’ve read that some eInk proponents are not thrilled with Esquire’s implementation. I, for one, welcome our eInk cover overlords and thinks it’s pretty cool. I would have liked to see a full screen eInk display, but we’ll have to leave that to Make has more information. I can’t wait to hack this.