Ok. They still have it. Radiohead comes out with their House of Cards video and maybe it will do for the digital generation what the gloved one did with Thriller back in the day: redefine the music video.

As we learn over at Google Code:

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

And we’d be remiss not to include the making of:

And if you’re particularly inspired, grab the code, mix and mash your own and show the world what you got.

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By far the highlight of the weekend was a visit to the recently opened Newseum, which is dedicated to the history of the news media. It’s outstanding. I was there a good three hours and barely scratched the surface.

There’s an incredibly moving exhibit of Pulitzer-Prize winning photographs, featuring a film with the backstory on images that have been burned into America’s consciousness (Jack Ruby blowing away Lee Harvey Oswald; Vietnamese children running away from the effects of a napalm bomb; a firefigher cradling an injured infant after the Oklahoma City bombing). I could barely make it through the 9/11 exhibit, still having a difficult time processing what happened that awful day.

Guilty of being human I needed something to get me out of the funk I fell into viewing some of the 9/11 exhibit, so afterward I checked out editorial cartoons (provided by The New Yorker). They’re all hilarious, but, to me, the funniest one in the pack is a cartoon of a bunch of white guys sitting in a TV studio with the caption (more or less): “Here we are on a media program to talk about the media and examine how the media influence media.” (It’s funny because it’s true.)

“G-Men and Journalists: Top News Stories of the FBI’s First Century,” is riveting. The exhibit examines the (often tortured) relationship between the news media and the FBI as seen through some of the most notorious crime cases of the last century. They’re all here: the Lindbergh baby kidnapping; the kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst; the D.C. sniper, with addendant artifacts. But the most compelling (and creepy) part of this particular exhibit is the Unabomber’s cabin, from where he hatched his diabolical schemes that killed three people and injured 23 others. What’s even scarier is reading (the rather lucid) excerpts from the anti-technology manifesto the Unabomber sent to The New York Times and The Washington Post. “G-Men” reminded me of what my dad once said about the Police: “Everyone hates cops. Until they need one.”

One final word about Newseum: Go!

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Eric Mongrain calls it laptapping, and he does it well too.

The Montreal native can be seen in Quebec this summer, and the UK and Ireland this Fall.

Otherwise, you can always find him on YouTube.

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Case in point: a client dropped off a batch of dvd’s with recordings from a conference. We have to scrub through them, run audio filters over anything that sounds particularly craptaculous and trim out the dead air at the beginning and end of each file.

This is all prep work before we upload said files and associated PowerPoints and PDFs into a digital media store we created for them.

Good times, although not as glorious as we’d like.

Which is why we’re particular fond of coming across this nugget at the end of one of the files.

For any and all who toil away in anonymity, who don’t get the kudos and back slaps they deserve, this one’s for you.

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The The Cannes International Advertising Festival is going on right now and a French AIDS prevention campaign just won the bronze medal. This is great, of course. So are the ads although some think they’re a bit weird. “That’s the most penis heads (L) I’ve ever seen in an ad,” writes copyranter.

Over at Salon, Catherine Price writes, “The guy looks like he’s just been shot out of a follicle into “outer space” — a dark, nebulous world of boobs, mouths and legless women’s crotches (which look disturbingly like overripe apricots).”

We here at ScribeMedia are hoping that when we kick of the next series of Reporting AIDS episodes, we might get a word or two from the campaigns creators.

The ads can be seen in their fullscreen glory here.

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Lisa Nova on the crack pipe that is Twitter.

Tweet.

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Easy as One-Two

To view our Media Wall, visit PicLens and install the plug-in. It’s available for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

Then return here, select this link and enjoy.

Users without the plugin will be able to view the Media Wall within their regular Flash player (v9).

Background

The Economist ran a story earlier this month about different companies and their attempts to think outside the browser. I was struck by Cooliris and their PicLens browser plugin.

To create the Media Wall, we simply put together our Media RSS file. For details on how how to do it on your site, visit the PicLens Webmaster’s guide.

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From our favorite radio show comes this delightful animation about a husband, a wife and one Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.

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For the uninitiated, fantasy sports lets those of us whose fantasy it is to play or otherwise be involved in professional sports to “own” a make believe team. The “players” on the team are any that belong to a professional league; and one builds a team by drafting and trading players just like real-life sports managers do.

The success of one’s fantasy team is based on the statistics that the real-life players generate throughout the year.

For example, if I played fantasy baseball, and Red Sox slugger David Ortiz was one of my big boppers, I’d apply his output during his last game along with the rest of the players on my team to generate a score. My opponent would do the same and the winner between me and my opponent would be the collected output that our fantasy players generated in their real world games.

As a side note I’ll add that that if Ortiz really was on my team, I’d be bummed since in real life he recently injured his wrist and has been placed on the disabled list. That means the man known as Big Papi is no longer generating for my fantasy world.

All this is to say that there’s fantasy baseball and fantasy football and fantasy golf, soccer, hockey and even cricket. Sports sites such as ESPN have whole sections dedicated to these fantasy worlds and grown men (yes, mostly men) will argue with life or death intensity over the supposed fantasy value of Player A versus that of Player B.

With 18 million people in the States participating, and numerous sites charging or otherwise monetizing this participation, there’s a lot of money to be had. And for those following the business of all this, Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association want a cut of the action.

However, earlier this month, the Supreme Court essentially ended a three-year legal battle between MLB and fantasy sports providers. The case is made bite-sized by Salon’s King Kaufman:

MLB Advanced Media, baseball’s lucrative Internet arm, had refused to renew a license for a St. Louis company called CBC Distribution and Marketing, which runs fantasy leagues. MLBAM, in partnership with the players union, planned to run its own fantasy games at MLB.com, and restrict the number of licenses it granted to a small number of other large sites.

CBC sued, arguing that ballplayers’ identities and stats are in the public domain. Baseball’s argument was essentially that a player’s stats, in connection with his name, are a part of his unique identity just as his face is. It’s not a ridiculous argument, but it lost.

While most reported this as a business and/or legal story, what’s overlooked in the details are two ideas I believe much more interesting, and much more important as well.

First is the entire idea of what content actually is. The second is what happens to content once we figure out what the answer to that very important first question.

Content is a mysterious game. We think of television programs, books and paintings as definitely and deliberately content. It’s something we read, watch and look at. But thinking this way confuses the delivery medium (a film) with the medium itself.

It also leads us to overlook the bits and bytes of our digital culture. For example, the code that creates the software that creates this Web site is content, legible and understandable to those who speak the language. Go through the many files of code that come together to create the page you’re reading these words on and you read a blueprint rather similar to what an architect creates when thinking a building.

Major League Baseball’s argument was fought over the very question of what content is, and who controls it. In their view, generated statistics are part of the sum total of content generated by any given game.

The fact that the New York Mets’ Pedro Martinez pitched 6 innings, struck out 4, walked 2 and gave up 3 earned runs is a fact MLB wants to claim as their own. In essence, they’re saying, these stats are content we’ve created and can assign value to just as this or that painting that hangs in a gallery was created through actions of a painter and is now content with an assigned value. Our content, they appear to say, is not merely the game, or the televised reproduction of that game, but the historical facts, figures and statistics that the game generates as well.

In our day and age where content is simultaneously long-form king and and short-form pauper, there’s a land grab going on by very smart people hoping to monetize both.

Or, perhaps I should say, a mind grab.

That is, while many struggle to figure out business models for content — with even venture capitalists arguing that content itself will eventually be free — all tend to believe and understand that owning or controlling content is in some way very, very important. And lucrative.

And so we see organizations like MLB and the Recording Industry Association of America pushing outwards to lay greater claim over what’s traditionally been seen as their rightful property.

I call this mental squatting, the deliberate attempt to expand one’s hold on content and ideas outwards into the public sphere through copyright, patents, and redefining what the boundaries of content are to begin with.

This is not to say that copyright, patents, trademarks and the like don’t serve an important purpose. Instead, mental squatters attempt to expand their private rights against the commons by making things like copyright ever more stringent, ever more exclusive, and ever more punitive to those who they believe infringe upon them. And if we spin out the MLB argument that the historical results of their games constitutes their content as opposed to being part of the public record, we stumble upon some absurdities.

For example, should newspapers license the right to publish stats from previous night’s games? Should Michael Lewis have licensed the right to use stats when he wrote Moneyball, the much quoted book on managerial innovation in the Major Leagues? Should the cottage industry of statisticians and hard core fans license stats from MLB if they want to publish a comparative study of Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and my now injured David Ortiz?

I don’t think so either.

But this is just one example of many that revolve around issues of how content is created, distributed, bought and sold.

It was just the other day that the Associated Press tried to determine how bloggers could quote and attribute them, and just last month that Malcom Gladwell celebrated a group that kicks back, thinks big ideas and then files patents on them in search of future revenue.

And it will be tomorrow, the next day or the next that we have another battle between corporations and the public over who has control and rights over the creation, manipulation, distribution and monetization of ideas, culture and technology.

Stay tuned. There’s squatting in the public commons but there’s still ambiguity over where those commons begin and end.

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LA-based director and animator Andy Huang takes just four minutes to pass a chilling critique on our relationship with the media images we find before us each and every day, asking us how and where we place our desires, and at what cost.

Called Doll Face, the film won the 2007 CINE Golden Eagle Masters Award for best best student short.

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