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Luke Ritchie

Luke Ritchie

Friend of Playgroup

  • Loves: Chilies, HBO, Rugby
  • Hates: Guilt, Courgettes, Failure
  • Inspired by:
    • JJ Abrams
    • Baz
    • Jack Bauer
  • My links:

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iTunes 9 Ideas

Last Saturday Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) embedded a video on his blog using a player called Seesmic. In his video Kevin talks about some of the changes he would make for the next Itunes release and ends by asking users to comment by selecting the reply button in the top right hand corner of the player.

Quickly six users post their video reply all beginning with 'Hi Kevin' and in a matter of hours Kevin posts a reply beginning 'hey william' and then another 'hey taylor'. From one living room to another, Kevin responds personally to these video replies, thanking them and commenting on what they have said.

Seesmic's video blogging application was originally developed to make video uploading easier for those using webcams but it automatically opens up the possibilities for future blogging as it quickly connects you with the author.

So unless your camera shy by the time you have commented on this blog you could have left me a video reply using Seesmic.

http://www.seesmic.com

Fireworks over beijing

They pulled it off. They tricked 4 billion people. And people are still being fooled as the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony is still one of the highest downloads on BitTorrent.

What amazes me is not lip syncing the national anthem or forging the ages of athletes or even faking the weather with silver-iodide. It is electronically inserting giant computer generated footprints onto our television sets and passing them off as fireworks.  

It is probably best to ignore ethics when discussing the opening ceremony. China had something to prove and its technicians should be applauded. It lasted only 55 seconds but took almost a year to create.

Meticulous efforts were made to conjure 29 footprints in the night sky, from seeking advice from the Beijing meteorological office as to how to recreate the hazy effects of Beijing's smog at night to inserting a slight camera shake effect to simulate the idea that it was filmed from a helicopter to then perfectly inserting it into 4 billion living rooms as beautiful footprint fireworks.

Britain the bar may just be too high...

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