The Door

I don't know why, but it is things like this that make me love the Internet. As many of you might know, John Calipari, the basketball couch at Memphis is considering a move to fill the coaching vacancy at Kentucky (one of the top jobs in college basketball). He has yet to announce a decision, so a Memphis TV station decided to put up a live web video stream of the door to the Memphis athletic department so people can watch for Calipari leaving with all his stuff. Another live web video stream is watching the gate in front of his house.

So, now naturally, the door is getting a lot of press and fans (it even has two Facebook groups devoted to it - 1, 2). Speculation is raging about the fate of the door. Plus, if you heart the Door, here is a t-shirt for you.

All this in less than 24 hours. Seriously, how great is the Internet?

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

Avid readers may remember this post where I showcased a very cool example of displaying complex information in a understandable way - a topic that I find fascinating. Today, a colleague forwarded the video below to me. It is another superb example of taking something that is very complex (the credit crisis) and using visual media to make it dynamic, interesting, and clear to anyone who might watch. It is particularly impressive that he was able to hold my attention for a full 11 minutes - which is a very long time given today's short attention spans. Rarely do I spend more than a few seconds on something like this. We have all become very good as scanning the internet and synthesizing information, so it is really cool when something is of a high enough quality that you want to watch it all the way through. And he used Adobe Flash, After Effects, and Illustrator to create this, so yeah Adobe!

Credit to Jonathan Jarvis, a student at the Art Center College of Design, for this excellent piece.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Live music social networking

I came across a really cool social networking site today that revolves around music and live shows. SonicLiving can read your Last.fm, Pandora, or iTunes library and basically cross reference that with a database of all the live shows in your area or any area you specify. It took less than five minutes to sign up and have a list created of all the artists from my music library that are playing in San Francisco over the next month.

I really enjoy going to concerts, but I don't often think about looking up information about where my favorite artists will be. So, I know that I miss tons of good concerts simply because I didn't know about them. This seems to easily solve that problem by creating only one place that I have to go to.

Check it out and become my friend if you join - my username is mniemitz.

NFL.com Replay Re-Cutter

Adobe has been working with the NFL to create a Replay Re-Cutter built on our Premiere Express hosted service. The new site debuted this week and it is pretty cool.

Basically, you can easily cut together a custom highlight reel of your favorite team from this week's game or from several games throughout the season. You can choose which highlights you want to include, add pictures, graphics, transitions, and music. This service is built on the Flash platform, which the NFL and NBC are also using to stream Sunday night games on the web and give the viewer the choice of which camera angles to view and basically provide a custom viewing experience for the football fan.

Being a huge fan of the reigning Super Bowl Champion New York Giants, I cut together a quick highlight reel of our Week 2 thrashing of the St. Louis Rams. Check it out!

New blog additions

Why blog about restaurants and music in two places, when Yelp and Last.fm will bring them here for me?

Check out the new additions to the blog - Yelp and Last.fm embedded feeds in the right hand panel towards the bottom. 

The Yelp feed will show you my recent restaurant reviews and give you easy access to them to see where I'm eating and what I think. This is pretty mandatory for me in San Francisco since I have discovered that a foodie in Boston is a fast-food eater in San Francisco. I need to get up to speed quickly.

The Last.fm feed will show you what music I am listening to. I have a bad habit of getting obsessed with a song or band and playing them constantly until I tire of the music. So, don't be surprised to see that I'm listening to a lot of the same music over and over. Right now, I'm on a Gavin DeGraw kick after his new album dropped about 2 weeks ago.

The Whale Hunt

Most of you may not know that one of my casual interests is scientific visualization and exploring new ways to display quantitative and complex information. To me this kind of work is a poignant intersection of science and art and I believe that technology gives us some amazing tools to display information in visually appealing and approachable ways to lots of people. I had some great opportunities to do this in my old job and in many ways this interest lead me into the educational technology field.

So, when the 12th Webby Awards were announced last week, I was not at all surprised to see the work of Jonathan Harris recognized yet again. To quote his own bio, Harris's work revolves around "designing systems to explore and explain the human world." (Go here to listen to Harris describe his work.) I guarantee that you will be amazed at the work he has done and my particular favorite has been his Phylotaxis site.

That is, it was my favorite, until today when I explored his Webby Award winning site, The Whale Hunt. A big part of Harris' work has been linking vast quantities of data to a powerful interface for viewing that data. So, rather than pull the data from some outside source, Harris decided to create the data himself by taking thousands of pictures (one every 5 minutes for 7 days) during an expedition to Alaska to join an Eskimo whale hunt. The challenge was to design an interface that told a human story in a deeper way that just viewing the images. So, Harris considered the way we view images and how an interface governs that in order to mimic the experience of living the story. One example (which is astonishingly simple yet simply genius) is to speed up the display of the slide show during periods of the expedition when Harris was experiencing stress or excitement. I encourage you to explore the site. As you do, try to think about how difficult it can be to display complex information and the challenges (and advantages) of doing this online and with technology.

If you're really interested in this topic, check out the work of Edward Tufte, who has written some clever books and essays about displaying quantitative information. His work has applications not only in science, but also in business, education, and art. In particular check out his essay on PowerPoint.

Bubba the Driller

I'm not generally one to shamelessly promote my own work, but prior to coming out West I was doing independent education consulting work and educational multimedia production. There are two big pieces of work that I just have to mention.

I just finished a big interactive online game for elementary school students that was based on a cartoon character that I had helped to develop back when I was in DC working for JOI. Check out the interactive game and let Bubba give you a tour of the JOIDES Resolution, a scientific ocean drilling vessel. I loved creating this project and getting to flex my creative muscles at the same time as teaching little kids about science. Plus, I enlisted top help for the voice of Bubba - my brother!

More very exciting news about my past contract work - Last summer and fall I worked with a teacher from Colorado to create a website and poster that documented an oceanographic expedition to the Indian Ocean. Rory Wilson, a middle school science teacher, participated in the Sea90E expedition and had an interactive website to connect with students all over the world while he was out at sea for 2 months. After he returned, we created an educational poster to highlight the scientific discoveries of the expedition, complete with classroom activities on the back.

Here's the super cool part - the Sea90E website and poster have been nominated as a finalist for the Association of Educational Publishers Distinguished Achievement Awards in the Science Teaching Resources - Posters category. I'm told that just being a finalist is a big deal, and it seem like it is considering most of the other finalists are the huge textbook companies and other organizations that do these types of things all the time. There is an academy awards style banquet in June in DC where they present the awards. I probably won't be able to go, but it sure will be exciting if we win.

Check out these two educational resources and let me know what you think...