think native

Ok perhaps I’m exaggerating a tad, but this is a pretty exciting little application, allowing you to create actors and sets in order to make your own animated movie. Some of the efforts from the community are reasonably alright, considering they were made with a free desktop application.

So with technology like Emily becoming a reality, how long until consumers will be able to create their own photo-realistic computer animations? Increasingly creativity and talent will become the only barrier to entry for yet another creative medium..

Wikipedia is completely run by volunteers, but there are costs associated
with running such a big site. They are looking to raise some money to help
keep them going for another year, so if you love wikipedia (and who
doesn’t), then you can donate here:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Now/en

Go on, you’ll feel all warm and gooey inside.

You’ve got to love the Monty Python boys, apart from being madder than a box of frogs and funny as hell, they’re also pretty savvy guys.

In a rather amusing video, they’ve announced that pretty much the full library of Monty Python skits will be posted to a dedicated YouTube channel, in high quality video. So you’ll be able to watch Monsieur Creosote eating that last wafer thin mint, or the rapid demise of the killer rabbit via holy handgrenade as many times as you like, gratis.

And by offering such a smorgasbord of free content, the team hope to generate more sales of their DVDs. They, like many other content owners have realised that you can’t beat ‘em, so you might as well join ‘em, taking advantage of free distribution and brand building to generate sales.

Read Chris Anderson’s theory on Freeconomics here

Not since the Cola wars of the 80s do I remember such blatant and aggressive competitive ad campaigns coming out from two bitter rivals. Isn’t it fun to watch them pull ponytails and scratch each other’s eyes out?

Of course it all began here:

Then lately it’s Microsoft’s slightly desperate sounding rebuttal:

The latest smackdown move from Apple feels a little petty, but it’s still pretty funny:

 Your move, Gatesy.

Here’s a nice idea, alternative movie posters listing the brands that have been placed into each film.

View them at ANTREPO04

I’d like to see the Casino Royale poster, but maybe they couldn’t fit all the different brands in.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain playing the theme from Shaft!

And the very talented Newton Faulkner’s one-man performance of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Being sold in as a way of discovering music you forgot you have (a compelling proposition when you’ve got a few weeks worth of continuous music on your harddrive), the new Genius function in iTunes 8 uses the listening behaviour of all (opted-in) iTunes listeners over time to create an recommendation engine integrated into the media player itself. This engine draws songs from your library that ‘go well together’ with a 1-click playlist set up. The new iPods will allow you to do this on the go too.

Pretty sweet, looking forward to trying it out, though I suspect it’ll get better with time rather than being great from the start.

Here’s a nicely done piece of content (*studiously avoids the word ‘viral’*) to promote caterer.com, a jobs website. Not sure what the ins and outs are legally when nicking Gordon Ramsay’s ‘brand’ (they could argue it’s a parody I guess), but hey it’s still funny!

 Genius.

This is a cool idea - flickr won’t let me grab an image to post so you’ll just have to trust me that it’s worth clicking on Thanks to Mal for drawing my attention to it.

Michael Hughes - Souvenirs

Could this be sleeveface for the masses?