Weblog for reading internet design.

Tom Green has a great philosophy on the medium. It’s a very “is what it is” attitude. (Is Daoist an appropriate term?) I’ll supply you with some quotes I found interesting, as I place great value on what people say.

My approach to teaching and writing about New Media technologies is real simple: Focus on the process, not the technology.

How true this is. I’ve never really had an emphasis on the technology, though that’s what I seem to be best at. I can put together almost anything I need to, the trouble I find I’m increasingly having is finding what the idea is.

This one’s from his blog:

Was hanging around with a bunch of my students a few days back and one of them asked: “What exactly is that we really do?”

The answer caught the student by surprise…. we tell stories. In fact we are the storytellers of our age.”

Sound familiar?

But the best example of the philosophy that I was previously discussing is this excerpt The Rise of Flash Video Pt. 1:

In 2003, I was in Seattle getting ready to do a presentation on Flash Video at Digital Design World when Jim Heid, the Conference Organizer, saw the title slide of the presentation and mentioned that I might be facing a rather tough crowd. I looked out over the audience, sized them up and told Jim I had his back covered. He said he wasn’t too sure about that and pointed at the title on my screen: “QuickTime is dead.” Looking out into the darkened room, I watched about 200 people in the audience open their Powerbooks; hundreds of bright white Apple logos staring back at me. It was indeed going to be a tough crowd.

Nobody really expected the stranglehold that Apple, Microsoft and Real had on the web streaming market in 2003 to be broken. Yet by Spring 2005, just 18 months after that presentation, that is exactly what had happened. Those three web video delivery technologies practically vanished, replaced almost entirely by Flash Video. This is not to say QuickTime and Windows Media are dead technologies. They aren’t by a long shot, but when it comes to putting video on the web, the Flash Player has rapidly become the only game in town.”

This is essentially the reason I switched from advertising to design, the idea that people aren’t willing to let go of things that don’t work, simply because they are familiar. If Flash Video is better, more universal, then there’s no reason to put your content on a proprietary player that certain user’s can’t access. You’re loosing money. Just like the idea that the :30 second T.V. commercial is the ultimate thing in Advertising. Guess what, with things such as Flash Video and onDemand programming, the :30 spot will die. It’s just a matter of time, and you might as well accept this fact and start looking in to better technologies.

And actually, I could expand this train of though into other aspects of society, but for the purposes of class, I’ll stop there.

This entry was posted on Monday, 15 January 2007 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Interactive Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.