nearestexit

From the YouTube Blog:

We’re happy to announce a new way to add interactive commentary to your videos — with Video Annotations. With this feature, you can add background information, create branching (”choose your own adventure” style) stories or add links to any YouTube video, channel, or search results page — at any point in your video.

Uploaders have control over creating and editing an unlimited number of annotations on their videos. To start annotating, first make sure you have videos uploaded into your account. Log in, then go to view one of your videos. On the Video page, click the blue “Edit Annotations” button to the right of the video.

As you play your video, you can insert commentary by adding speech bubbles, notes and highlight boxes anywhere you want. You can also use the menu on the left to save a draft, delete commentary, edit start/stop times or add links to your annotations. Once you save the final version, click “Publish” to reveal your annotated video to other users. (Note: Video Annotations are shown by default, but the viewer can turn them off while watching a video through the “Menu” button on the bottom right of the video player).

I like the idea of creating a series of videos linked together with the interactive video annotations. Interactive storytelling isn’t anything new, but YouTube will make it easier to create something fun. I could also see this being used as a simplified prototyping tool by interaction designers. And finally, it might be a nice way to quickly add closed captioning to videos.

MSNBC recently launched Spectra, a visual newsreader that “merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum into an expansive news viewing experience”.

Part of MSNBC’s NewsWare products, Spectra provides a customizable and clean interface that allows a user to browse headlines by color-coded subjects. You can even grab stories and add them to your Newscollector to be saved and read later (However, as of this post, this feature seems a bit buggy in Apple’s Safari browser).

Spectra Visual Newsreader

I seem to keep coming across articles on interactive displays. First I noticed Microsoft’s ‘Surface’ technology. Next was Adobe’s interactive wall developed by Brand New School.

The latest: the CityWall.  From the web site: “The CityWall is a large mutli-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki which acts as a collaborative and playful interface for the everchanging media landscape of the city. The content displayed on the CityWall is periodically organized into themes or events that are currently taking place in the city such as festivals, carnivals or sports events.  CityWall was developed by the Ubiquitous Interaction group at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.”

http://citywall.org/

A great read about the economics of bottled water comes from a Fast Company article this month. Here are some of the highlights:

• $15 billion will be spent on bottled water in 2006
• We drink a billion bottles of water every week
• 1 in 6 people in the world have no dependable, safe drinking water
• The entire bottled-water business today is half the size of the carbonated beverage industry yet there marketing budget is only 15% of what the carbonated beverage industry spends.
• San Francisco’s municipal water comes from Yosemite National Park. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle for once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35 (the cost of the Evian). Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
• Aquafina (Pepsi) and Dasani (Coke) make up about 24% of the bottled water market. Both are simply purified municipal water.
• American’s went through about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year. Made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, water bottles are totally recyclable. Our current recycling rate for PET is only 23%, which means we pitch 38 billion water bottles every year into landfills (more than $1 billion worth of plastic).

It’s interesting to note how pervasive the water bottle has become in our culture. Growing up, I can never remember carrying around any kind of beverage. At school, if I was thirsty, I’d use the water fountain. Now, I can’t seem to go anywhere without my ice-filled Camelbak water bottle (of course, I do live in Phoenix compared to growing up in Pittsburgh). I wonder how the impact of a simple convenience: the automobile’s cup holder helped make beverages something that needed to be with us at all times. Or is it just the nature of our culture today?

The July 2007 issue of National Geographic has an article on swarm intelligence, where ’simple creatures follow simple rules, (with) each one acting on local information.’ No one creature sees the big picture nor tells any other creature what to do.Along with the many examples nature provides on swarm behavior, the article touches on several examples of collaborative behavior such as Wikipedia, the military’s research into reconnaissance bots, and even Google’s page ranking methodology. The article concludes:

Such thoughts underline an important truth about collective intelligence: Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part. For those of us who sometimes wonder if it’s really worth recycling that extra bottle to lighten our impact on the planet, the bottom line is that our actions matter, even if we don’t see how.