In Japan more and more people are using their phone cams to snap shots of outfits and haircuts from magazines while they browse in bookshops. This is now being seen by those in the publishing industry as "information theft" and feel they are being cheated out of valuable sales.
A new study from the University of Oregon has found that local news broadcasts are being infiltrated by advertising at around the same rate that DVR users skip ads. They found that 90 percent of the newscasts contained at least one instance of stealth advertising, including product placement within stories.
On 3rd July Michael Grade CBE, Executive Chairman, ITV gave a speech outlining the declining trust viewers have for broadcast media. He believes 'old media' need to have a 'zero tolerance' of deceit or it will lose to the flood of digital media that is engulfing the industry.
A great new tool for self publishing one off hard cover (and soft cover) books of your portfolio, cookbooks, photography etc - Blurb - book store quality books for yourself or for friends.
How is technology changing the way we obtain our news?
Cooking site Rouxbe, comedy sharing site - Funny or Die , think tank TV - FORA.tv
David Lynch has a go at product placement - youtube link
Who needs the new Apple TV when you can use iRecord, an easy to use media recorder for your video ipod or psp.
Traci Ardren, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami slams Mel Gibson's latest blockbuster 'Apocalypto' for not only re-enforcing colonial attitudes but for being violent, pornographic and historically incorrect.
After being named person of the year by Time Magazine we have now been named Ad agency of the year by Advertising Age
A good technique for downloading YouTube clips onto your portable device
Design magazine FRAME is launching it's digital edition in 7 days. The digital edition will have all the same content as the print edition but due to the qualities of digital media it will have a lot more extra features
Variety have written an obituary for the 30 year old VHS format. Only 3 years after DVD became the more popular format.
Todd Zeigler from the Bivings Report lists 9 ways that newspapers can improve their websites. Adrain Holovaty believes it goes further than a list of changes and suggests that newspapers need to make one fundamental change in the way they write their content for new media delivery - a better understanding of the key data within a news story.
When cable TV arrived in the 80's niche channels and programming attracted a decent share of the market away from the free to air broadcasters. Now the internet is bringing even more niche programming in the hope of splitting the pie some more.
A small 'thumb drive' sized usb device can record your favourite FM or Web Radio station then identify the individual tracks so you’ll never have to listen to the radio and wonder what the name/artist of a track might be, or where you might get it.
For years television broadcasters have been claiming that PVR's have had the ability to remove TV commercials. But the reality is they just make it easier to skip through them - until now. MythTV have developed a new way for the recorder to identify a TV commercial and to pause the recording so your final recording is commercial free.
National Geographic have released free to download podcasts
Watch television from all over the world with this windows application TVU Player
Movies for small screens - download movies from their selection to view on your iPod, PSP or phone - Small Carrot
If your connection is fast (broadband) and your computer is quick (1GHz up) then try neave.tv a flash application for watching Youtube and google video fullscreen.
While traditional television executives struggle with new media, Apple have decided to show off there new offering in the world of non-linear programming
No time for reading books? The Daily Lit will email you an 'out of copyright book 'one chapter at a time - fitting culture into your daily emails.
In the past magazines used to be the carriers of the latest trends and fashions - Times Online looks at how the new arbiters of style are online, leaving the dead wood media in the dust.
In the world of instant news whenever and wherever you want it - when does online news become old? According to the New York Times and Albert-László Barabási of the University of Notre Dame it takes 36 hours
Some interesting podcasts from TED - TED Talks
Is the digital future for books a "grisley scenario" of free downloads and cutting and pasting? The New York Times looks at the changing face of book publishing and the physical context that currently holds the key. (bug me not for logging in)
A community of Paris based digital artists - Pleix
Ken Loach has won the Palm d'Or at Cannes for his film 'The Wind That Shakes The Barley', a film about the early days of Ireland's struggle for independence from Britain, which the director acknowledged was a critique of today's war in Iraq.
Digital Air give some good explanations behind the visual effects they use in their moving image work
A nice collection of historical audio clips in mp3 format.
Digital Video Guru compares ten of the top video sharing sites on the Internet. UPDATE: Tech crunch looks at the video sharing phenomenon and the new entrant Jumpcut
The lectures from the Economics of Open Content symposium at MIT have been made available for download in mp3 format.
Empire magazine 's list of the 50 greatest independent films
Apple has added a new way to obtain television programmes from it's iTunes music store - subscription. Fans of 'The Daily Show' will be able to buy the next month's series of 16 new episodes via Multi-Pass for $9.99, or to pay $1.99 per episode. Broadcast television is looking old.
Digital technology has given media consumers the power to produce their own content. What happens when the consumer also becomes the producer? What do the traditional producers do? The Internationa Herald Tribune looks at the rise of the amateur digital content producer
Persuasive games have released a videogame parody of working in a Kinko’s copy store. Disaffected! puts the player in the role of an employee dealing with customers.
After it's much publicised purchase of MySpace, News corporation has been made to back down on it's censoring of user posts and blocking access to competitors websites. Subscribers discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.
Mass customisation and niche cultural production are the driving force behind the demise of what has become an antiquated business model. The LA Times looks at the mass media's last blast.
Kansas State University researchers have found that the little crawling text that is put at the bottom of news programmes inhibits the retention of facts by up to 10%
Cute interactive flash animation, move your mouse around and click - Happy Seed
After Sony's PR flop with regards to the 'trojan' it placed on it's music CD's, they have now turned it's target market against them with a graffiti based campaign.
Only 14.2 percent of movie revenue is made at the theatres, while 85.8 percent came from licensing or selling their products for use in the home. Slate looks at the future of Hollywood.
Another directory listing global television broadcasts - WWIT
As more people use cable to access the internet, video footage is becoming more available online. Blinkx.tv gives you the ability to search over 1,000,000 hours of television - while TVTAD (PC only) gives you ways to search for torrents of your favourite shows.
With a new CEO and a string of flops - Disney is gambling on Narnia to pull them into the 21st century. An expensive bet, but David Teather believes it will work.
Empire magazine puts together their list of the 50 greatest independent films
DTV - the new open source free internet television browser (for mac only at this stage)
American TV channels NBC and CBS have agreed to let some viewers pay 99 cents for some television shows - without the advertisements.
A tracker for iPod bit torrents - lots of media for your ipod - podtropolis
French Film legend Gerard Depardieu has announced his retirement from acting
What used to be a way to share common interests with the people around you - popular culture has now become so diverse that today
"The national water cooler bubbles with competing monologues rather than inclusive dialogues."
"To be considered conversant with pop culture, your contemporary omnivore must try to find room in his or her consciousness for a nonstop torrent of DVDs, blogs, Game Boys, anime, podcasts, music-playing cellphones, websites devoted to celebrity news, and scores of TV channels."
The Boston Globe looks at how Popular culture is collapsing under it's own weight.
What happens when you fill your TV programmes with products (for a fee) but then sell your programme to a commercial free channel?
In many European countries like Britain and Germany, paid product placement is still officially off limits. But in America, billions of dollars is made by weaving brands into content - the IHT looks at what the BBC had to do to blur out logos in the latest series of 'Spooks'.
If you would like your television to be used for more than just playing TV programmes through - try Detour DVD
The new Nintendo Revolution Controller has just been announced. Ars have a look at it while IGN look at the possibilities
A major report into IPTV (internet protocol TV) has found that within five years television will consist of millions of shows all piped into our living rooms via broadband.
The 'less is more' maxim is now being used within media publications with reference to advertising space.
It's not from theatres or even DVD sales - but licensing to Television that Hollywood gets most of it's income from.
The internet is taking over as the distribution network for content and Television is no exception. DTV is currently Mac only but will grow to other platforms soon.
Film studio Sony will have to pay $1.5m after faking quotes on movie posters for four different movies.
Each of the movies were of a very low standard (A Knight's Tale, The Animal, The Patriot and Hollow man) so they made up a critic called David Manning - who went on to praise the films.
James Bowie at AIGA searches through the United States Patent and Trademark Office records over the last 20 years and tries to find any social trends in Logo Design.
William Gibson looks at the cut and paste of William Burroughs
Essay followed by discussion with regards to the little network logo animations that appear on the bottom right hand corner of the television.
Paid product placement in Newspapers and Magazines has increased by nearly 20 percent while online and video game product placement is growing even faster - just ask Missy Elliott
With less people tuning in, more competing media and more ways to avoid the commercial breaks - advertisers are looking for new ways to get in front of consumers.
After explosive sales over the last seven years DVD sales are starting to lose steam.
90 percent of DVR (Digital Video Recorder) users are skipping past the advertising.
1. Hollywood cannot control its marketing costs or star salaries. The growing importance of DVDs increases the "needle in the haystack" problem for any single film and thus locks studios into more marketing, creating a vicious spiral.
2. TV is now so much better, and offers artists greater creative freedom. Why watch movies?
3. The Internet is outcompeting cinema, whether at the multiplex or on DVD.
4. Big TV screens are keeping people at home, which lowers box office receipts. This also hurts the long-term prospects of many DVDs.
5. The demand for DVDs has fallen because movie lovers have completed their core collections, just as the demands for classical CDs have fallen.
5. The demand for DVDs was due to fall in any case. Forget the collectors, you buy DVDs to have a stock on hand so you don't have to run out to the video store on short notice. Now everyone has a stock. Stocks must be replenished every now and then, but there is no longer a large new cohort simultaneously building up a stock from scratch.