In a fast digital era, there are moments and details that are still worth caring about.
Find out more about the graphic designer John Dyer Baizley and the singer Gillian Welch.
Analog details
The Vaccines – Wetsuit Instagram Video
Music band The Vaccines collect Instagram pics form fans to realize this video that perfectly represent the music festival atmosphere.
Enjoy it.
Links
Obey Giant – Sticker – Marina Del Rey [flickr.com]
I’ve added a new page with some links to other websites where you can join me.
Click on the Links button up here and have a look.
Google search goes social and personal
Google introduced a new social layher in his search engine to tailor the results on what your friends suggest to you, to find people and pages on google+ more easily.
You can switch this new option on/off as you like it.
Spotify is your preferred record shop
DJ Shadow: Endtroducing cover art
When I was a kid and I started listening to the music there were only few ways to get it: listening to the radio, watching MTV, borrowing vinyls, cds or cassettes from friends, or simply heading to a record shop and buy it. I spent hours in these dusty places, looking for imported records hardly to find before the internet era, talking with shop owners about new releases, availability and dreaming to put my hands over a limited edition vinyl.
Now things are different: all the music you want is just one click away and you can instantly buy a song, an entire album or a collection of mp3s.
Spotify, a music streaming service born 2006 in Sweden, introduced a new way of listening/buying audio: based on a catalogue of over 15 million songs, it’s unbelievable how simple it is to listen instantly to music, discover new artists and share them over all your social media accounts. The free account lets you listen to all the music you want with some ads, or if you prefer, you can go premium with just 4,99€/$ a month and even better bring all your mp3 on your mobile (even without connection) for just 9,99€/$.
Buying a CD in a shop usually costs 15 to 20 euros/dollars, on itunes 9,99, on Spotify you have unlimited music. Okay, if you’re a casual listener buying a cd or mp3 once in a while is ok, but if you need more than a new album every 2 months, then this is the solution at a reasonable price.
I have a huge collection of vinyls and cds, and I personally miss “the record shops” era, but this is really awesome: all the music you want, available everywhere you are, without carrying anything else than your smartphone or laptop. It’s amazing.
There are other services like Spotify out there, but they’re not at the same level: Deezer, Grooveshark, Rdio, Mog, etc. Main differences I noticed, testing all of them, are basically two: catalogue and user interface design. Spotify has more choices when it comes to older music from indie labels, and has a dedicated app both for Mac and PC and it’s not web based like most of the other services. This means that you can have all your mp3s and Spotify music in the same place, and sync it with your smartphone or iPod.
The bad thing is that Spotify is not available worldwide yet, but there are many tutorials on how to get it outside UK or US.
The World of Online Music [infographic]
The decline in music sales is represented in real life, where lots of record shops, from megastores, to tiny places, are continuously shutting down.
Yesterday I get in a bar to have a coffee, right where there has been for more than 20 years, the most important record shop of my town. The owner remained the same: now he sells coffees and lunches instead of cds and vinyls. He told me the market was going down since 2005.
I was astonished in finding that a beautiful place of music (where I worked for a period) turned into a café.
ifttt: Put the internet to work for you
I came across to this new web platform launched last september in San Francisco.
It simply gathered lots of tasks you can activate to connect your social network profiles, or get instant alerts through sms and email of different thing that are happening on the web.
For example you can save all your Instagram photos to Dropbox, or, every time you are tagged in a photo on Facebook, it will be sent to Dropbox. You can also transform Twitter direct messages in sms or make a task that
“if rain tomorrow then SMS me“.
The website is clever, clean and very easy to use for everyone. It’s good if you want to automatically activate tasks to all your profiles, not only for duplicating status updates: backing up pics on Dropbox is awesome and really useful for me.
Try it here.
Social Media & Christmas gift purchases
Social media experience and interactions between customers and brands, drive the holiday gift purchases.
36% of people are more likely to buy something from a brand that has a social media presence, more than brands that do not. Another interesting point is that 52% of consumers are willing to pay more for brands they trust more.
What’s your behaviour when shoopping in these holiday season?
Google Currents wants to be the new Flipboard
If you own an iPad you already know Flipboard or Zite: personalized magazines that enrich your consumption of your favorite contents from rss feeds, facebook, twitter, flickr, etc.
Now it’s Google time to give our news a new shape on tablets and smartphones with Currents (now available in the U.S. iTunes Store only).
There’s also a “self-service platform“ that gives publishers the flexibility to design, brand and customize their web content: you can instantly see how your content is displayed on an iPad, iPhone, Android or on a different tablet.
I give it a try with contents form my own website (rss feed) and here’s the result for the iPad:
The Rise of Smartphones, Apps and the Mobile Web
A recent research by Nielsen, shows the fastest grow of mobile penetration (in U.S.) and the video consumption on both Featurephones and Smartphones.
If your your website isn’t yet tailored for mobile devices, well, it’s definitely time to refresh it.
Key findings :
- The majority of 25-34 and 18-24 year olds now own smartphones (64% and 53% respectively)
- The majority of smartphone owners (62%) have downloaded apps on their devices and games are the top application category used in the past 30 days
- The number of smartphone subscribers using the mobile Internet has grown 45 percent since 2010
- 87 percent of app downloaders (those who have downloaded an app in the past 30 days) have used deal-of-the-day websites like Groupon or Living Social
- Younger groups text the most. In Q3, teens 13-17 sent and received the most text messages (an average of 3,417 each month)
[via Nielsen]
Twitter Head Animation
Twitter Head from Geoill on Vimeo.
Project Details:
The animated infographic called Twitter Head is a fun design that visually displays information about Twitter.
TwitterHead is the second of a series of information graphics about social media and technology by Geoill LLC.
Twitter Head is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License so it is available for people to publish on to their sites.
The sources of information is from wikipedia.org and pewinternet.org.
CNN Ecosphere: plant your thoughts on a Twitter tree
CNN Ecosphere is a proeject that involves everyone who wants to say something about “climate change”.
The process is simple: you can “plant” your thought on a virtual tree using Twitter with this tag #COP17. During the COP17 Conference on Climate Change” in Durban (28 November – 9 December 2011), all the tweets will be planted as trees all over the globe, to create a connection of thoughts about the climate topic.
Join the discussion now (#COP17)
How you take control of your digital life
Even if what we do online is recorded forever, you still have control on what part of your life you want to share with the rest of the world. Just think a couple of seconds before puslish a photo or write a sentence on twitter.
[via personal]