Trevor Filter works in branding, media and modern culture as an analyst at Siegel+Gale (disclaimer). He lives in New York City. This is his personal tumblelog, which is mostly a conduit for exploring the proper way to use sarcasm on the internet.

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“The Wilderness Downtown,” by Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire have teamed up with Chris Milk and some Google engineers to produce one of the best seamless emotional experiences I’ve seen on the internet lately: an interactive music video for the single “We Used To Wait”—just type in the address of the house you grew up in, and prepare to get wrapped up in the warm, fuzzy feeling of sepia toned teenage angst.

Despite all the extra browser chrome and pop-up windows, this really brings out my favorite part of the internet: creative, personal, and interactive pieces of art that leverage modern tech for new meaning. In that sense, Wilderness Downtown is most similar to Office Max’s holiday elf videos and the related Jib Jab flash presentations, except far, far more polished (and entirely HTML5).

In this case, most of the content for the video is already out there (Google Maps satellite photos), but it’s been repackaged in a fresh and totally unexpected way. Very well done.

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This is actually what Google Street View looks like in Japan.

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Other things I’m thinking about right now

These things are swirling around in my head. In no particular order:

  1. How might we preserve the important aspects of our culture for future societies? Which types of artifacts will convey the most meaningful information: machines which demonstrate our capabilities, or recordings which convey our stories?
  2. From a more modern perspective, is Google’s style of aggressive and sometimes reckless industry advancement and technological innovation actually a good thing for society? For the economy? For capitalism? For Google?
  3. How does celebrity influence the ability to produce meaningful things (e.g., Andy Warhol, Dave Eggers, Lady Gaga)? Is it necessary, to some extent?
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Google Buzz is the straw that broke my back

Wow, too much social media today.

My initial impressions: Buzz is pretty cool. It’s far more personal than Twitter and even more accessible. Maybe it even collects all my media together (which should ideally help dearly in a situation like this); but seriously, unread badges are the worst interaction design element ever*, and I think I have finally reached the point where I have too many of them.

So, I’m checking out for a while. I’ll be back soon.

* Unread badges are simply bad design.  
I’m going to explain this now, because I know I’ll get crap for it: the problem with unread badges is that they are all designed to draw attention and denote importance (after all, most are bright fucking red), but the number scale that each one uses is completely wrong, because it focuses on quantity and not quality. Three (3) important email messages from friends/coworkers are much more critical to me than fifteen (15) mailing list emails, and yet an unread badge count implies 5x the opposite.

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This is just begging to be made into a tumblr, or a Media Lab research study, or a line of t-shirts, or something awesome. Update: Nevermind; this ship sailed five to ten months ago. Update 2: Nate points me to an online tool for comparing two Suggest phrases. Apparently I’m just really late with this. Update 3 (Feb 22): I’m not so out of the loop after all! According to HuffPo, the search string “How do I get my sister to sleep with me” hit the Google Trends chart today… See quite a few more funny search suggestions in the related slideshow.

This is just begging to be made into a tumblr, or a Media Lab research study, or a line of t-shirts, or something awesome.

Update: Nevermind; this ship sailed five to ten months ago.

Update 2: Nate points me to an online tool for comparing two Suggest phrases. Apparently I’m just really late with this.

Update 3 (Feb 22): I’m not so out of the loop after all! According to HuffPo, the search string “How do I get my sister to sleep with me” hit the Google Trends chart today… See quite a few more funny search suggestions in the related slideshow.