Passing By::::....

I love this concept. Film things passing by. Submit it to YouTube. They assemble all these videos into the longest looking- out- the- window video ever.

From the site:

Passing By presents two films that piece together brief segments from many different journeys into ever growing sequences of sights-seen-along-the-way, while looking out of the window of a car, a train, a plane or even just pushing a shopping trolley around the local super market.

I probably like this concept so much because I have a few hours of footage of things just passing by that I'm going to now have to piece together and send to them.

Do this: Go to your MP3 player, put together a Roadtrip Mix, fullscreen a Passing By movie, and relax for a while.

The Wonderful Invalid

I want to know more about this:::...

-----UPDATE-----

Ben found this. Thanks Ben!

The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Trask the Wonderful Invalid

MahaloToDo : Sundance Film Festival

Hey MahaloToDo,

I'm going to be going to the Sundance Film Festival this year and I thought it would be useful to me and a lot of people I know if we had a page that gave us information about the festival, fun things to do outside the festival, good restaurants to check out in Park City, etc.

Thanks!

-Justin

Seven-Year-Old's Laptops

The Laptop Club is a really interesting look into usability from a child's perspective. You can see this one has the "Open" and "Close" buttons taking up a massive amountWhat would laptops look like if you let a seven-year-old design them? This is a really of real-estate. Most of the buttons are related to different activities, interests, or purchasing (this girl really likes pets, but in the others many are socially related through the Internet). What I think is most interesting is that most of the buttons take them directly where they want to go and the actual alpha-numeric keyboard is two rows on the very top, arranged alphabetically, not QWERTY. No typing for these squirts- they just want it to work. I've never seen QWERTY as such a tyrannical arrangement.

Yndi Halda!

This band is great. And by great I mean ridiculously good, transcendent, immolating, post-rock. They are from the UK. There are five members in the usual arrangement; the fifth being on violin.

Pretty much my rule of thumb is if the song is over 12 minutes long and you can keep me interested, it's automatically one of my favorite songs. These guys have managed to do it fourfold (though I can only find three of the songs for free online for you all to download) on their first, eponymous album. They've apparently got a new one in the works called, "The Heavens Will Fail."

Go enjoy the hell out of this band. Bands! Download! Rock!

Download Below

+We Flood Empty Lakes
+Illuminate My Heart, My Darling
+Dash and Blast

It's Always Sunny Promo

Like, a year ago I was over at Ben's house. While I was there I remember his roomates had a show called, "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" Tivo'ed. I'd never seen and only heard about it, but I must say I was sufficiently impressed. It wasn't until I became totally obsessed with The Riches and started seeing ads for it that I Tivo'ed it myself.

The show is amazing. Literally. It's definitely goofy and crude, but underneath it, it manipulates poignancy with master strokes. A good example of exactly this is the episode, Mac Bangs Dennis' Mom. I was just sending my BFF Alex the clip where Charlie and Dennis write the song, "Dayman" and I stumbled upon this YouTube ad.

Also, if you're a Sunny fan, listen for the Dayman riff. :)

Five Bulldogs and a Monkey

MahaloToDo

Dear Mahalotodo ,

I love what you do. Something I'd really like to see you make happen is:

A List of the Best Contemporary Japanese Rock Bands.

Maybe some sites for MP3s, reviews, etc. Last.fm just isn't doing it for me.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

-Justin

----UPDATE----

Here's the link to the page they produced for me. Pretty well done except that one band is missing. Definitely a very cool service and one of the best marketing ideas I've heard of in the last few years.

Diller Hearts Lemons

Good timing since I just wrote about this:

Barry Diller, the guy that brought lonely people the Home Shopping Network, has expressed interest in buying AOL if Time/Warner ever ditched it. Apparently, Time/Warner has had it on the shelf for a while with a $20b price tag that has to be almost intentionally dissuasive. No way in hell AOL is worth $20b. None ways. Total. Totally none ways.

The way this article reads, he hints at creating an online property empire ala RUPERT MURDOCH! Which is fine and not a bad idea if you've got the pockets for it and the vision to align all your holdings. But Barry, dude, do not buy AOL unless for some reason you feel like dropping a small country's net worth on what is effectively the worlds' biggest 8-Track Player. Right when AOL was at its peak, it had several millions of users roped in and interconnected through this new-fangled thing called "Instant Messaging." How do you fail to capitalize on this and make a network out of these people? You could have stemmed Myspace and Facebook. I guess hindsight is what it is, but let's just hope you know what you're doing, Barry. And really ask yourself that because I know several Internetpreneurs that don't.

One line from the article works on two levels (one of which is humorously ironic) if you read "content" as its homonym and read way too deep into it.

AdAge says Barry says: "And it's a content business ... Which we love. We've never lost our content heart."

Go Barry.

Totally Balls-Out Marketing Campaign

Recently, I've noticed a lot of ads for Buckley's Cold Remedy that have really caught my attention. There's a whole series of them where a blind taste tester compares the taste of the liquid sniffle and cough medicine to things like; Public Restroom Puddle, Trash Bag Leakage, Snail Trail Accumluation, and Used Mouthwash.

Ew.

But it works! (The message, that is, I haven't tried the syrup). It's unexpected, it turns you on your ear, and people are used to medicine tasting like medicine. Why not make it taste horrible and place all the emphasis on the fact that it works. It actually reminds me a lot of the marketing tactics from Made to Stick. Obviously I'm writing about it right now, so kudos to the marketing director of Buckley's.

They're even taking their gross-factor campaign viral on their Myspace page, offering a prize to whomever can best showcase the disgustingness of Buckley's.

I'm going to go get really sick so I can see how well this works now.

AOL 24 1994

Yesterday I was watching something- I don't remember what- but I saw at the end of the title "AOL/Time Warner" and thought to myself "What a horrible and horribly overpriced acquisition. And why is Time Warner continuing to mar their brand by appending AOL to it?" I'm sure that AOL still has some usefulness in third and second world countries, but then the A in AOL would be pointless and, really, it's just going to make America look bad.

Come on AOL. Remember when people used to think you WERE the Internet? And now even my mom has come to terms with the fact that you're a pain in the ass and do nothing but take too long. Maybe it will become cool to use AOL again in the retro-kitschy way that people put the guts of a Razr into a Zach Morris cellphone brick or people still write text adventure RPGs to run on DOS, but I severely doubt it.

Then I found this video that echoes those sentiments. I bet this would be funnier if I actually watched (read: liked) "24", but it's still pretty hilarious.

The 80's took about 15 years to be funny. Now the mid 90's are funny. If this keeps up, in 5 years, six minutes ago will be fraught with hilarity about how stupid things used to be.

Google Phone SDK Available

Google beats Apple to opening their phone. Oh wait, there aren't even any phones that have the Android OS.

Bad Apple. I'm waiting for the Apps before I buy my iPhone. I wonder if anyone else is.

This video shows how easy it will be to create an app for the Google Mobile OS (seems like I could almost write an app for it). I expect very, very cool things to come from this. They're hitting the open source wave at the perfect time and applying it somewhere that has never seen it and has so much consumer appeal.

Fantazma Gloria

Yes.... Please. This is good shit stuff.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of painting. I've been studying design. I've even been going so far as to boning up on user interface design just to understand the underlying principles behind it because I think that (at least a part of) the value of art is how the viewer interprets it. Which is to say, interacts with it.
So I came across this artists' series, Fantazma Gloria. Which, aside from having a pretty cool name, also does some pretty impressive art. The videos are especially creative. Almost cool enough for me to overlook how much I dislike the music and how dissonant it is with such rich animation. (sorry shitty band in those videos. I'm sure someone still likes you. :) )

Anyway, go to the website and enjoy it. It's well done and tasteful.

Songbird 0.3

Check out Songbird! It's a new media player built on Mozilla with an integrated browser. And by integrated browser I don't mean that it's got Firefox embedded in the pane, but is actually a very well articulated browser made primarily for the social aspects of music and for searching and downloading MP3s. It even appears they're going to include things like "most downloaded" right into the main pane as well.

I feel like saying that this thing is two version updates away from pushing iTunes out of my dock, but that's probably not fair since they're not even at a 1.0. The main thing it's missing, of course, is the iTunes Store. I'm also curious as to whether or not it will support the iPhone. Then there are the tiny details. For example, I really enjoy seeing the cover art in the bottom left corner of my iTunes player. Also, no MP3 conversion ability. I've got a love/hate relationship with OggVorbis files and I'd love for this to quell the hate.

There are several things Songbird already has going for it. But rather than list them, I'll just say "API". Anything you can imagine to make it better is there for you. Go rock that *@&! and make it better because I think it's prettier and almost cooler than iTunes and I look forward to looking at it more.

Oh, and they have really cool offices.

The City

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Information R/evolution

Hooker Safari

Corey Helford has a very cool series right now called Hooker Safari. I mean, c'mon, with a concept like that what's not to like?