And the nominees are…

In more Oscar news, Micheal Sporn compiled a list of animated shorts submitted for nomination for an Oscar this year. The list includes links to the artists websites. There are some VERY good films among the group.

See you this time next year Mr. Sporn!

My Watchlist for 2009

I’m very nearly entering the third year of running this blog. We’re also entering 2009 very soon. I try to make some projections when I can on what I foresee happening in the coming 12 months. Having recently attended DevLearn08 and seeing Tim O’Reilly speak, I was even more excited than normal to do so. With Adobe MAX behind us and many other big conferences on the way, this seems like a perfect time to do so.

In the face of a global recession, it’s difficult to determine what may actually come this year due to impending cutbacks, but most of these seem to be likely. Some have even been put in motion already, so it truly is a matter of execution for 2009. I would anticipate that with the slowdown, some bigger projects may be getting pushed off (I know some of my clients have a number of efforts ‘on-hold’, so I wouldn’t be surprised if many are doing just this). I have chosen to leave these more amorphous topics off the boards for now.

1. Marginalization of IE6, possibly 7, too. – I sense a rising tide of hatred amongst my web designer/developer friends. Hatred against a nearly eight year old web browser. I know that I am beginning to approach supporting/focusing on IE6 as an “additional cost” of development, rather than a given. IE7 is the “current” version of Microsoft’s browser, but with the trends growing in the industry, even this fact doesn’t make IE7 the dominant client on the web any longer.
2. IE8: MS finally gets on board with standards! – Currently at “Beta 2″, this browser will make final release sometime in 2009. With the list of features and pre-release buzz surrounding it, I think this will get much quicker acceptance amongst users and a far more rapid deployment by corporate IT departments. Hallelujah! It’s performance on the Acid test at least makes me hopeful!
3. Rise of Webkit – Perhaps bringing a CSS3 usage increase? Webkit is the rendering engine behind Apple’s Safari browser. It also powers Adobe’s AIR runtime. It also now is the core rendering engine for Google’s Chrome. Each one of these by itself is a small chunk of the market for web visitors, but when combined, it looks to be comprising about 15-18% of the audience share on most of my sites these days. This share is just about equivalent with IE6 or IE7 at this time for me. I would expect that this will grow throughout 2009, with Chrome getting a Mac and Linux release sometime this year.
4. Continued growth of SaaS (Cloud Services, Data/Apps) – Many many players have thrown their hat in the ring in this area. Even small shops are starting to build in the Amazon and Intuit platforms. I have used a steadily growing number of sites build on the Google app engine as well. With the APIs available and the scalability and great uptime, it is really only going to grow. What does this mean for the end user? Well, beyond the typical privacy concerns, etc, probably not much. However, for the developer, this brings a new set of tools to learn, but hopefully also a significantly increased boost in productivity.
5. Yahoo’s Near Certain Demise – Is this a true sign of the flip from the original static web to next gen tech? With Yang’s departure and nary a suitor to come it’s rescue, this web stalwart looks to be faltering big time. I can only hope that Delicious and Flickr weather the storm!
6. Semantic Web tools/progress - Drupal 7! – RDF FTW! The heralded “Semantic Web” has been discussed and pushed for some time. Here is where 2009 is a tad different… there are actually projects and vendors set to release semantic web citizens. CMSs and blog software that produced well formed RDF content. This is a huge first step! Drupal is poised to release a major revision to the venerable open source content management tool that will be a full fledged RDF generating CMS. Nice!
7. Flash Platform’s Continued Dominance in the RIA space – Flash Catalyst, Flex 4, Mobile Flash,The Open Screen Project and on and on… Adobe is really on a roll right now and everything MS seems to be doing with Silverlight is either playing catch up or just a shot in the dark. With a number of key content providers lining up to use Flash as the delivery platform things really seem to be headed in Adobe’s favor here.
8. Microblogging goes mainstream – Twitter has certainly hit critical mass amongst the geeks. It’s nearly hit the average web user as well judging from the talk I hear from friends and family. The scalability issues seem to be resolved. I am guessing that the next milestone will be for the average SMS user to get wired up for Tweeting. Facebook’s status message has primed the pump for many of the Social Media/Networking casual users. I venture that 140 characters will be the new IM for a lot of people over the next year. Will the dominant player be Twitter? Maybe, maybe not. With Twitter having no real business model to speak of, it is uncertain how they plan to monetize it and make it a sustainable business. I would recommend Twitter look at charging access for it’s API for commercial Twitter clients/services, rather than put ads in your private timeline, but that topic could fill an entire blog post on it’s own.
9. USA gets a CTO/CIO – We can only hope he/she is a good one, right? While it may not be “CTO” as the final title, or in post, I think that the revisions planned for the FCC and the web may be what we need to put this net neutrality crap to bed (among a ton of other thorny issues). Forbes recently published an article listing Bill Joy as a front runner. He or a number of the other candidates look great. Though not listed, Lawerence Lessig would be excellent choice, too, IMHO.

So that’s it… not a 10 item list, but I’m running low on time here. What do you think? Emerging trends for the comining year? I’d love to learn what you are keeping your eyes on.

The show opened well and the run finishes this week. The overall response has been positive. We received some favorable reviews and quite a few questions as to whether we would be putting the Oresteia on the road. It was nice to get notes from folks and to hear their comments and criticisms. We will be working on the documentary aspects of the project until the end of the semester and will be posting summaries on-line by mid-December [a short prelude can be found above which is a clip from the wee morning hours during the final push to finish the show-- so glad we are beyond that].

I am starting to produce on a animated short that is being directed by Matt Forcum next semester. We hope to turn out a five minute piece by next May. There are nearly twenty students on the crew, but Matt and his team will be doing the heavy lifting on this gig. My only other short term plans include a rebuild of my office into a space that is a bit more conducive to my design process and the completion of our 3D screening room at the GCC. Pics of both will be forthcoming, too. Today brings relaxation with friends and some much needed frivolity!

Massive Generative Art Show in New York!

Awesome! Check this video out…

Can’t wait until this show travels through Chicago! Via Phillip Kerman.

The Iona Group has launched the redesigned Morton Economic Development Council website, marking a major milestone for this group. The site uses high quality web design and development coupled with great images shot by V-Gallery to inform users about the excellent opportunities available in Morton for business owners.

The website’s search engine friendly structure and easy-to-navigate information architecture are wrapped in a pleasing design sure to impress visitors. The content management system ensures that the Morton EDC Staff will be able to update the site often and with little difficulties. Advanced analytics, CRM capabilities and integration with Google maps are among some of the features employed in making the site a best-of-breed example of what a small community can do to enhance its business development efforts.

The rapid development timeline was made possible through the employing of best practices based design, stressing web standards and separation of content from presentation, a major focus of Iona’s web development process. Open source technologies power the backend of the site, ensuring a wide array of supporting modules and extensibility options, paving the way for easy future enhancements to the site’s features.

DevLearn ‘08 Recap

I just spent 5 days in San Jose. One of the managing partners , John and I went to DevLearn08. It’s a conference put on by The eLearning Guild focused on development topics and emerging technology in eLearning.

A little context for you. The consulting company I work for, The Iona Group, develops rich media communication solutions for a variety of clients and purposes. One of those areas being eLearning instructional design and content production for corporations, educational institutions and non-profit organizations. Really though, that is just one facet of the tech I work in daily, with a large portion of it being large scale web design and development, rich internet application development and tradeshow/exhibit design and development. It’s a pretty multidisciplinary company, with little zealotry allowable in development technology platform or final deliverable format.

That said, it allows a great deal of research time and in turn, insight into a number of niche technologies and trends today. Web communities, rich interactions, multimedia installations, high definition video production and motion graphics and a number of other high end, deep subject matter areas are where we play.

All that in mind, when it comes to my assessment of the DevLearn08, I have to pause and take a deep breath. While I was impressed with the breadth of technologies, techniques and emerging trends I observed, and the sessions I attended, I had some preconceptions that I held shattered, when it came right down to it. I was under the impression that most companies had already joined the blogosphere and the wiki community on some level. The actual adoption of web2.0 tools in the average corporate eLearning group seems very low in my opinion, with less than one out of three eLearning Guild survey respondents stating that they have implemented or are in the process of implementing web2.0 technologies in their eLearning efforts.

Before getting to that let’s recap the event’s details, speakers and focus. The event took place from November 9, 2008 to November 14, 2008. It was held at San Jose’s Fairmont hotel, a beautiful place with a lot to offer conference goers (the neighborhood is densely packed with restaurants and entertainment). There were three keynote speakers, Tim O’Reilly, Dan Roam and John Medina. The conference seemed to be meant to acclimate eLearning professionals with some of the more advanced or new technological trends in eLearning today.

The first day was the Adobe Learning summit a co-located conference at the Fairmont. It was largely a commercial for Adobe’s eLearning focused tools, Captivate, Presenter and Connect. No real surprise here. There was a sneak peek given of Captivate Next (4). It looks pretty kick ass, IMHO. Flash widgets, AS3, much more flexible import and export options including respect for CS4 file layers really make this a tool worth looking out for. Additionally, they made mention of a dedicated eLearning development suite that looks to add some great capabilities to Flash, Dreamweaver as well as revised versions of a few other applications. I’m sure a lot more will come out this week with Adobe MAX going on in San Francisco. Really really cool stuff. After the day’s infomercial, there was a reception held at Adobe’s headquarters. It was a great night for networking and I got to meet some excellent people, guild members and staff alike. Not bad at all!

The next day was a collection of symoposiums and workshops. I attended a symposium entitled “The eLearning 2.0 symoposium” put on by the guild’s Tony Karrer and Brent Schlenker, DAU’s Mark Oehlert and Jane Hart. A day well spent, no doubt, full of revelations on my part as to where in technology’s adoptance timeline eLearning professionals sit. We were each provided with a copy of the eLearning Guild’s 360 report on using web2.0 technologies in the corporate eLearning marketplace. This report is packed with insights and I would highly recommend you join the guild to gain access to this invaluable resource. The day consisted of presentation coupled with loose team exercises focused on how and when to employ some technologies like wikis, blogs, rss, microblogging, as well as authoring tools and techniques. It was a open and honest discussion, where some participants voiced their concerns and barriers they encountered in implementing these technologies in their workplace.

It was here that I recognized the same old story I hear time and time again in working with clients on eLearning projects. Many of the people were seemingly unaware of the potential that these tools held for their team. How did a Wiki or blog contribute to the overall learning efforts for their company, etc., etc.? The ones that did recognize the need to allow for informal learning and collaboration seemed stagnated by their corporate hierarchy or held hostage by non-progressive IT teams. Sad. I feel that the afternoon helped many of the people in the room, with Mark Oehlert spending considerable time talking about the internal sales process in getting stakeholders to buy in to informal learning and advanced technologies. He really did a great job of stressing that when selling the solution to the IT or C-Level execs to focus on the business need and minimize the talk of the actual technical implementation. Simple advice, but effective.

The subsequent days were a blur of presentations and sessions. Some were more valuable than others. There was an alarming amount of sessions that really came off as advertisements for a product or service, which always smacks as tacky to me. I was sure to make note of this on the evaluation forms and hope the guild takes notice. I heard a number of other attendees making mention of this, too.

Some real brightspots…

• David Wilkins from Mzinga gave an interactive and fun presentation to a full room about eLearing 2.0 success stories, discussing the Intelpedia and a number of other informal learning approaches like community produced forums/knowledgebases.
• I also attended an interesting session on using cinematic techniques in the rich media you use n your training. This was largely about cinematography, and while the presenter wasn’t that great, the topic is definitely something that many eLearning producers should pay heed to. Production quality matters. People are tired of talking head videos delivered at a postage stamp size. With Flash’s ability to display HD quality video and the continued drop in CDN and videos server cost, it’s only a short matter of time until such quality will be expected in your training content as well.
• Reuben Tozman from EdCetera gave a fascinating session on Semantic Web technologies impact on training/eLearning content production. While the topic is a bit heady and probably won’t have a direct impact on content producers for some time, this is essentially the bridge to what will undoubtedly be known as web3.0. All content will have meaning. All content will be readable, searchable, findable by machine and accessible to users. Bold stuff!

All in all, the conference was a resounding success. I got much more familiarized with the eLearning community (while I have developed a lot of learning content, I have never really socialized much with the community at large), we got a chance to demo our stuff at DemoFest 2008 and I met a lot of great eLearning professionals. If you are one of those, don’t be surprised if I drop you a line soon.

Adobe MAX Twitter Fountain

Came across this widget, thought I’d give it a try… A pretty cool way to keep up with what’s going on at Adobe MAX this year.

Minority Report Interface is Here: g-Speak

I’m a huge fan of Phillip K. Dick and really thought that the adaptation of Minority Report to the big screen was an excellent movie. Tom Cruise starred in it, but many people remember the technology depicted in the movie more than the story itself, or so it seems when talking to friends.

The retina scanning, computer vision, highly targeted ads and sounds, jetpacks, sick-sticks, mag-lev track vehicles and of course the beautiful larger than life gestural interface that they used for piecing together the clues and crimescenes were great science fiction technology. Useful, seemingly unattainable and of course super sexy! Remember this:

Well, that style of computing is a little bit closer to reality now, thanks to Oblong’s g-Speak. Take a look and prepare to be jealous of these guys:

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

When will something like this be in your home? Well, it might be a while. But tradeshows/exhibits could get this very soon, it seems, judging by the overall completeness of the design. Beyond that, large scale systems, like logistics, medical imaging or perhaps spatial/environmental design would probably benefit most from easy visualization/manipulation as seen in g-Speak. There is a little more information at engadget on this, and I found a pretty useful bit of information at Manual Override.

It’s a brave new world! Let’s just hope we don’t get pre-crime departments along with this.

Prepping for a Big Month: Exhibits and Conferences Woohoo!

We have been heads down at work. We have 3 interactive exhibits set to go live this month. One at a corporate headquarters that uses Red5 for multiuser sync, motion detection and high definition video and moton graphics on 3 52″ LCDs. One that broadcasts live data streams detailing savings gained from a grey water reclimation system and overlays the infographics on high-definition video on a huge 1080p 120Hz display. The other project is a pair of kiosks set to be installed in Bermuda (no, I don’t get to go there to install ).Once we have some photos/videos of the installs, I’ll try and post them.

Beyond that, we are exiting a first round of usability testing on a great new elearning development application we are building at doctumlearning.com. We used Silverback for our testing. It’s a really really cool tool for Macs that records a screencast and a video feed from the iSight to create a record of the test. Hard to argue with video evidence, after all. The app is coming along strong, feature complete and ready to build some training. We’ve put together a great interface and the Flash based content it outputs is pretty dang nice.

Related to that, I will be attending DevLearn ‘08 next week. You can catch up with my twittering and possibly blogging from there. Tim O’Reilly is giving the keynote. Dan Roam is going to be there speaking, as is Dr. John Medina. Should be really really cool. We’ll be demoing at demofest, showing of the work we did with the International Society of Arboriculture that uses the Doctum platform. Psyched!

There is a one day Adobe elearning summit going on there, too, I’m definitely hitting that one. Are you planning on attending? Let me know! I’m interested in meeting up with other developers out there, so track me down.

If you twitter, be sure to check out the dl08 hashtag on twitter search and the devlearn08 one as well. This blog post here has a list of fellow twitterers headed to devLearn. Check it out.

Big Daddy Jumps in the Pool: MTVMusic.com Launches

Prior to working at The Iona Group and spending time freelancing doing flash game development and other assorted web design tomfoolery, I designed websties for Rollingstone, Downbeat, TheSource, Tunes.com and Emusic. It was a great gig. Lots of fun. Fun people, great music, awesome subject matter. Then the dotcom bomb hit. I was laid off along with virtually everyone in my Chicago office. That said, I (was) am a huge music fan. Love the feel of a new set of tracks. Love buying tunes, love downloading them love the feel of a new, well packaged disc when I get one. I have a iTunes library that would span a couple iPod classics. I am a completist. I have all of Nine Inch Nails stuff. Suicidal Tendencies. Pavement. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Poster Children. Guided By Voices (I’m not sure if I actually have all of this… does anyone?) TRS-80, Muse, Radiohead. I also love when a new music site launches. Pitchfork, Pandora, Last.fm, all of em. I like music blogs (music for robots ftw) and love to watch videos online.

You get the picture. I love music.

As a music fan, a flash designer with a strong interest in social media and RIA design, and as someone who has worked on and designed major music portals in the past, you can probably connect the dots and see that when a new music site launches, or redesigns (btw, Rollingstone.com is looking pretty good lately) I’m all over it. So when mtvmusic.com launched recently, you can probably guess I was all over it. After a few days of surfing, spending a couple hours sampling some of my favorite videos from over the years, I have to say over all… A really good effort for a first version of a site like this. What do I like?

1. Deep content – Most bands/artists I looked up had more than just their biggest hit available. Helmet, Faith No More and Tribe Called Quest all had deep cuts available for viewing. Nice work.
2. A minimalistic uncluttered design – By and large, they avoided MTV-ing it. It focuses you on the video and is not overly junked up with other animated or large elements.
3. A solid player – I have yet to experience an error with the Flash player controlling the videos.
4. An API - With the help of the Mashery, they have published an API to allow you to access and search the library at MTVMusic
5. A sprinkling of user community  features throughout – You can comment on and favorite videos, create a custom user profile URL and do a couple other standard social networking type things.
6. There is finally a way to watch videos on MTV again. Yay!

However, there are some key tings that need to be improved upon in order to really live up to the MTV brand with this new site.

1. Expose more content while you are viewing a video. After choosing a video to view, you no longer have access to any other tracks that artist has in the system, no other songs that may have been charting at the same time that that one was or other key cuts in that genre. The content at the media asset view level is primarily user comments (blecch, who cares about the 42nd person to say “I love the Talking Heads” on Once In a Lifetime?) and a large ad for a featured old school video like “Welcome to the Jungle” or Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”… I would think some contextualization and exposing of related content would lead to a much longer user experience and wikipedia like deep surfing session as the user jumps from video to video.
2. Absence of MTV History on the video content. Really, the only editorial content on the site is some cribbed Allmusic bios. Weak. We don’t need another allmusic.com, we already have a great one, allmusic.com. Dig out the archives and make note of what makes that Prodigy or Fat Boy Slim video notable. I’m sure that that info still exists somewere, get on it!
3. The player and site has no playlist/shuffle functionality. – There is currently no mechanism in the site to simply “watch MTV”. You watch one video and then mus search or browse to another video. With the lack of video navigation cues on the site, you can guess that this leads to a pretty disjointed experience.
4. Lack of the best music shows the network had. Yo! MTV Raps, Headbanger’s Ball and 120 Minutes could easily be recreated here, complete with episode lists done chronlgically containing the playlist for the show. Wanna see what Rikki Rachtman was rocking out to in the summer of 1991? No problem! Now, let me be clear… I don’t want old reruns of the show up there, I just want the videos.
5. The API is half baked. No direct links to the video files themselves for integration in custom Flex/Flash apps. No genre search. Metadata search about the videos is very very limited. There is currently no exposed way to search for Spike Jonze videos, for example. There is no way to find videos from 1983. No way to find metal videos. On and on. A stronger API would allow developers to add the features like playlists, etc before the site actually does, so it’s really in their best interests to get this rolling.
6. The videos appear to be encoded as FLV. If the videos were available as H.264 clips, you could get MTVMusic on your iPhone, Apple TV or any number of other mobile/settop boxes. As it is right now, you need the Flash player. Bummer. Beyond that, some of the tape transfers are pretty bad. Lots of scanlines, interlacing and macroblocking like artifacts are apparent on some of the older clips.

I’m sure I could pick some other +’s and -’s about the site out if I spent a bit more time writing this, but you get the idea… a great start, but still in need of so much in order to really jump to the top of the pile. I’m sure they have their eyes set on youtube (obviously with the comments taking center stage on the video’s screen), but I would caution against blindly adding social media content just to keep up with Google. Really, I just want my MTV, so anyway they can help that happen is probably to their advantage.