David John Mead

I expect my natural disaster in HD…

On Saturday @jules23 & I were sitting down after digging out the drive when she said about a lot people on Twitter talking about the expected tsunami hitting Hawaii.  This was a result from the recent quake in Chile. We turned on CNN and what did we get? Some guys video (which looked sent from a mobile phone), from a balcony being Skyped through a web site that was not affiliated with CNN. Cut that with voice over from a local Hawaiian TV station and some random shots of a guy surfing.

Paparazzi can get HD video of Jennifer Aniston picking her nose from 300 yards away but world-wide news agencies can’t do better than Skype? C’mon.

After cycling through this same stuff for about 10 minutes we switched to MSNBC.

They were no better. They had similar file footage spliced into a 3 minute reel of camera crews on a cliff watching a helicopter, that was telling some surfers to get out of the water.  The anchor had to keep telling us that this was file footage from a least two hours ago.

Both channels kept saying the Hilo Bay would be first hit but no one seemed to have a camera there.  We were told New Zealand experienced some tsunami effects, but again no video or coverage from their local channels. Same for the Pacific coast beaches on the mainland. Nothing from the helicopters, other islands, people at the scene.

Checking in an hour later we still saw the same, now 4 hour old, file footage! And here’s a news flash. If its 3 hours after it was supposed to happen its not breaking news!  Overall I find this embarrassing for news channels in the 21st Century.

The trend now seems to be:

1. Grab 40 seconds of amateur/file footage
2. Loop continuously
3. Repeat the two facts you have both as on-screen graphics and voice-over
4. Ignore all other news and scheduled programming
5. Bring in an “expert” or “eye-witness” and get them to repeat the same two facts
6. Go to #1 and repeat

I wasn’t expecting a Poseidon Adventure type wave to roll in, but I did expect some research, commentary, and on-camera interviews. Is that too much to ask?

Technorati tags: fail, tsunami, cnn, msnbc, news

Slick future visions from Microsoft

Tonight I headed over to Office Labs from Microsoft. There you’ll get a glimpse into some of the “What If?” things being considered by going to the Envisioning section.

I particulary like the Productivity Future Vision video, which builds on the surface technology currently being played with-taking it the next step with ’smart paper’ (near the end of the video).

One thing I can’t get into is the whole false ‘perspective’ thing. I’m not sure why folders have to stack in 3D when the rest of the display shown work so well ‘flat’.

Technorati tags: future, vision, microsoft

Playing with Unify from Unit Interactive

I was lucky enough to get a beta invite for Unify recently. Unfiy is an in-browser content editor, developed by Unit Interactive.  The nice thing about this is you do not need any special programming or a CMS to maintain the content.  The beta testing is coming to a close, but I wanted to share this video to show how easy it is to use.

(View full size)

I really liked the way it worked and would really consider it for some of the HTML only sites I build at DMWebsites.

Technorati tags: unfiy, beta, test, content, editor, in-browser, unitinteractive

That old Hammer feel…

British band Kasabian have a new single out called “Vlad The Impaler”. They offered a free download of it from their website this month for a couple of days. Its a pretty good song, and even though the deadline has passed you can still see the video up at the site.

Kasabian – Vlad the Impaler from Kasabian on Vimeo.
It really captures the look and feel of the Hammer Horror films I remember watching late at night. Very cool.

Google videochat denied…

I was looking forward to trying the latest whizzbang from Google.  Videochat.  But after clicking on the “get started” button in both Flock and Chrome, all I got was this 404 error.

Maybe it’ll be up tomorrow. Another case of Google running before it can work?

Technorati tags: google, videochat, 404, fail

The connectedness strikes again…

So I’m catching up on my RSS feeds and I saw that Jon Hicks posted about one of my favorite bands, Stars of the Lid.  They are releasing a film (not until 2010 mind you) of what looks like a series of live performances, similar to Sigur Ros’s excellent Heima.

Stars of the Lid . teaser 1 from ZF-Films on Vimeo.

Now the people that made this also had some footage of dancers, shot on the amazing new red camera (which I just read about in Wired). When I took a look at that, I recognized the background as W6th in Cleveland, just outside my old employer, Optiem.

MorrisonDance pt.l from ZF-Films on Vimeo.

Never take for granted how people will find you on the internet. Now if you’ll excuse me it’s time to add some Dead Texan and SOTL to a favtape of mine.

Gary’s 15 minutes of truth…

Gary Vaynerchuk’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo is bang on.  Very akin to Jason Fried’s (who was also at the Expo) talk at SXSW this year.

Look and learn son, look and learn.

Technorati tags: keynote, gary, veynerchuk, talk, inspiring, web2.0expo

I remember what the future was like…

Is was the 90’s and I was just hearing about this whole Internet thingy. I worked on an industrial estate at the end of the Fenchurch Street (train) line in Essex.  We still had a computer that took 5¼” floppy disks and the new Windows machine was solely for the Director.

My knowledge of “the net” came from William Gibson, .NET Magazine and a book called Virtual Reality by Howard Rheingold.  Mr. Rheingold’s book become something I read, and shared with friends.  This was what was going to happen!  It was filled with descriptions of old arcade games that emulated motorcycle rides through to teledildonics.

After getting a PC and connecting to “the net” (which really was more frustration than excitement at the start) things didn’t quite pan out the way I foresaw them.

I looked for that book recently, just to re-visit some of the ideas, but found it was one I left behind when we moved to the US.  But as chance would have it I ended up connecting with Mr. Rheingold (virtually) the very next day.  As I fired up Miro, there he was.  A featured channel – vlogging about the social media classroom.

I recommend subscribing through Miro or the RSS feed to see why he’s starting this classroom and the tools he’s included in it.

Technorati tags: howard rheingold, social media, web2.0, vlog