Animation is a very unique art form; it allows the filmmaker to control their story down to each individual frame. Each object, shadow, and line must be created and placed. The camera does not capture unintentional backgrounds, extra frames, or incidental light, there is only what the animator chooses to show.

The digital revolution in media production is dramatically changing the techniques, forms, content, and function of modern animation and is actively remixing it with other media forms so much that digitally-created animation is now nothing short of a new mode of cultural production and a totally unique form of motion-graphic storytelling of its own right.

The diversity of software tools available for creating moving images on a screen has contributed to the rise of a tremendous and diverse number of styles, techniques, and looks. The multitude of distribution channels further enforced the trend of convergence towards forms more suitable for display on multiple screen sizes and configurations.

As Manovich puts it in his review of Adobe’s AfterEffects, a popular suite for creating digital animations: “[A]s software remixes the techniques and working methods of various media they simulate, the result are new interfaces, tools and workflow with their own distinct logic. In the case of AfterEffects, the working method which it puts forward is neither animation, nor graphic design, nor cinematography, even though it draws from all these fields. It is a new way to make moving image media. Similarly, the visual language of media produced with this and similar software is also different from the languages of moving images which existed previously (Manovich, 2006).”

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Beginning with 1990s, multinational super-agencies dominated stock photography industry. Getty Images and Corbis are the leading corporations of the industry by bringing together new licensing models, digital media management tools and a comprehensive offering of creative and editorial imagery, microstock, footage and music. Therefore, it is more accurate to call it visual content industry instead of stock photography in the digital era. Both based in Seattle, Washington, Getty Images and Corbis distribute their products online and they have customers in more than 100 countries around the world; most of their sales come from outside the United States.

In order to have a better idea about the expansion of the industry, I will particularly examine the market leader Getty Images and its major acquisitions beginning with its foundation from 1995.

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Image by Geek and Poke

I’m a huge fan of leveraging web resources, especially the new ones like social media that have popped up in within the past decade.  But, I’m going to play devil’s advocate.  I don’t think we know enough about social to solely rely on them for lead generation and monetization.  I believe that social media provides a platform to develop conversations that create relationships, which eventually may help generate leads.

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The O’Reilly Webcast: Youth & Creativity, hosted by Julie Baher and Bill Westerman, presented an insightful picture of youths’ social media activity beyond Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.  Interestingly, Baher and Westerman found that the latter platforms were in fact not often used by “creative publishing” teens to express themselves.  Rather, those teens were using more niche sites like planet renders and imeem that enabled them to “have something to say, or sense of self around their topic of choice.”

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INTRODUCTION

With the proliferation of social networking sites, we are increasingly reliant on our online profiles to accurately present our personalities. But do they? Dr. Scott Counts of Microsoft Research’s VIBE Group explored just how people’s perceptions are impacted by the advent of online identities.

In a recent presentation of findings, Dr. Counts discussed studies that delved into the ways we self-present our personalities via online profiles and how others perceive those presentations.  The results were interesting, and proved the promising reliability and accuracy of the newfound ability to “right-click” on someone via their online profiles.

Below are the insight summaries from two of the Mircrosoft studies that focused on how people perceive personalities via online profiles.
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During the 2008 Presidential election, the Obama campaign pushed the envelope in two significant ways: they set out to change the face of the electoral map by mobilizing new and young voters; and they took the guesswork out of their resource allocation strategy to achieve that goal.

Any real change to the political system needed a change in the electorate. Rather than fighting over the same aging, well-off, white constituents, the Obama campaign went after the young and unregistered voices–a heretofore untapped resource estimated at 55 million potential voters as of 2004 (Hayes 2008). Read more…

Johnny Lee was a Ph.D. student in “Human-Computer Interaction,” a rather abstract concept for most people. His research paper would be read by a small circle of researchers. His thesis would be reviewed by a small panel of top professors.

In December 2007, Johnny Lee posted a YouTube video related to his research.

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I looked into several sites; Slashdot and Apache for their contribution rules and resulting rank and reputation process. I then considered potential application to MCDM site.

SlashDot Moderation. I like the idea of Slash Dot’s moderator process for filtering out the “wisdom” of their crowds.  Read more…