" There were lots of small children in the audience. I thought about asking one little girl if she had voted for the paddle, the rod or the cattle prod." In 1995, a company called Interfilm revolutionized the movie industry. Oh, no, wait, it didn't. Audiences at Mr. Payback, "the first interactive movie," pressed buttons on a joystick attached to their seat to vote on the actions of the characters on-screen -- for instance, what kind of physical abuse a captured thug should undergo. Despite the pedigree of director Bob Gale (writer/producer of Back to the Future) and co-star Christopher Lloyd, critics were not impressed. The company folded a week after releasing its third interfilm, "I'm Your Man," scored by Joe Jackson, which did, a few years Interfilm was the brainchild of "conceptualist" and guy-with-gigantic-glasses Bob Bejan (Dateline NBC interview), who now works at a next-generation, data-driven marketing agency that delivers strategic, multi-channeled communication solutions designed to cultivate and sustain relationships between brands and their audiences. Watch: Clips from "Mr. Payback." The making of "I'm Your Man." (warning: A. Whitney Brown.) Read: the New York Times on the 1998 DVD release of "I'm Your Man." Booklet copy from the "I'm Your Man" DVD.
posted by escabeche on Aug 31, 2009 - 43 comments

Mortal Engine (highlights; interview) and Glow (interview) combine dancing and projected video to stunning effect. The secret? The dancers aren't following the light — the light is following the dancers. [more inside]
posted by nebulawindphone on May 9, 2009 - 24 comments

Steve Coll [pdf], Marissa Mayer [pdf], and Arianna Huffington [pdf] testified today at the Senate Commerce Commitee's hearing on The Future of Journalism, but clearly the main attraction was David Simon [pdf].
posted by Jeff_Larson on May 6, 2009 - 22 comments

Steve Brill has a crazy idea that just might work. Would you pay a modest annual fee (about the cost of a magazine subscription) to read the New York Times online, if it means the survival of the world's greatest newspaper, er, news-gathering organization? It's an interesting idea.
posted by nance on Feb 9, 2009 - 172 comments

Omeka is a newly available, open-source web platform, bringing good-looking, functional online exhibitry within reach of smaller museums, libraries, and arts groups. From the Center for History and New Media.
posted by Miko on Sep 10, 2008 - 10 comments

Wikipedia Updater Fired For Scooping NBC on Tim Russert's Death -- "When Tim Russert collapsed ten days ago, his colleagues at NBC held off reporting the news for almost two hours so his family wouldn't hear about it from the media....The news appeared on Wikipedia 40 minutes before the NBC report, with all of the verbs in Tim's entry changed from present tense to past. It appeared on the New York Times's web site 5 minutes before the NBC story. It zipped around Twitter all afternoon. According to the New York Times, the person who updated the Wikipedia entry 40 minutes before NBC reported it worked at Internet Broadcasting Services, a company that provides web services to TV stations including NBC affiliates." [more inside]
posted by ericb on Jun 23, 2008 - 75 comments

Max/MSP is a graphical programming environment primarily used for music, video and multimedia. Max/MSP has sometimes been described as a digital erector set. David Tinapple describes Max in this way: "it's like you're drawing a diagram of what you want the program to do, and then when you're done drawing the diagram you've also sort of accidentally programmed it". [more inside]
posted by Crumpled Farm on Apr 21, 2008 - 27 comments

Indiewire put out their second annual film critic's poll recently. There Will Be Blood tops the list, with Zodiac, No Country for Old Men, Syndromes and a Century, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days following behind. [more inside]
posted by Weebot on Dec 28, 2007 - 40 comments

The Homicide Report, by Jill Leovy: An L.A. Times blog built on the list of homicide victims reported to the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office each week.
posted by docgonzo on Feb 14, 2007 - 12 comments

WSJ: Moguls of New Media Have nearly a million friends on MySpace and you get $5000 endorsements. Make a comedy podcast with cocktail recipes and you get endorsed by Steve Jobs and get interest from advertisers. Post seemingly impossible self-potraits on Flickr and you get hired by Toyota. The Wall Street Journal looks at these and many more "whos' who of new media". from BlogHer
posted by divabat on Aug 1, 2006 - 22 comments

A Swarm of Angels is about making a £1 million movie and giving it away to one million people in one year. By using the Internet to gather together 50,000 people willing to pay £25 to join an exclusive global online community – The Swarm – the project’s ambition is to make the world’s first Internet-funded, crewed and distributed feature film. (more inside)
posted by slimepuppy on May 12, 2006 - 31 comments

Interesting (if biased) article on the downside of Craigslist's populist appeal in the form of it's contribution to the imminent death of the print newsmedia, especially in the SF Bay Area.
posted by jonson on Dec 5, 2005 - 64 comments

Osama bin Laden, littérateur and new-media star. A thought-provoking analysis of bin Laden's adept use of Koranic language and the Internet by Bruce B. Lawrence, an Islamic scholar at Duke who edited a new anthology of bin Laden's public statements called Messages to the World. The Western media -- says the millionaire mass-murderer formerly trained as a useful ally by the CIA via Pakistan's ISI -- "implants fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media are doing!" Know thy enemy. [via Arts and Letters Daily.]
posted by digaman on Nov 3, 2005 - 57 comments

Mr. Print, Meet Ms. Web; Ms. Web Meet Mr. Print... As a long-time Argentinian exile, I'm quite proud to report that, amidst (and notwithstanding) the economic chaos, my favorite daily newspaper, Clarín, is experimenting with a (free and complete) Internet edition that ambitiously attempts to combine facsimiles of the printed pages with the Web-friendly version. It even has (perhaps excessively) an estimated time for reading! What do you think? [In Spanish, but, for the purposes of the present evaluation, not important. Please click on "Ingresar".]
posted by Carlos Quevedo on Nov 12, 2002 - 14 comments

The end of free online news is in sight according to Reuters. I think they are premature, but assuming for a moment that this is in fact the trend, what will this do to Metafilter? {More inside}
posted by BentPenguin on Oct 17, 2002 - 45 comments

Suck, Feed and Plastic on the ropes? (item two) Word is that Automatic Media is feeling the pinch and time is running out. The company behind the three already-mentioned properties relies on advertising revenue it is simply 'too hip' to attract, writes to the Dotcom Scoop, and it has apparently tried to license out the Slash-based community publishing system used on Plastic as well. Will they survive? And should they? Discuss. (via MediaNews)
posted by frednorman on Apr 4, 2001 - 19 comments

Public Broadcasting Gets Funky
The CBC (sort of like NPR, but Canadian, federally-funded and with TV too) has a stealth project, 120seconds. They are planning to embrace new media in a big way and this is their start: stories, music, film, experiments. Not bad.
posted by sylloge on Aug 11, 2000 - 3 comments

Does new media want moms around the office? Mothers in Silicon Alley talk about the struggles they've had to face with trying to juggle their (male) bosses and their children. Even working from home doesn't cut it in some bosses' eyes.
posted by maura on Jun 14, 2000 - 9 comments