SA’s new interactive video web site:

His shampoo bottle said to lather, rinse, repeat.

Did you hear the one about the coder who was stuck in the shower? This joke killed them at ETech. This year I was honored to be invited as a guest speaker to present a sneak peak of Social Animal’s 360 degree interactive music video at the ETech emerging arts showcase, a platform for artists to present their vision of the intersection of art and technology at ETech 2009.

ETech is the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, O’Reilly Media’s flagship “O’Reilly Radar” event. It is a technologist’s R&D lab, workbench, and playground, specifically designed as a conference to expose new ideas and to learn from the people behind them. ETech is the only place for first access to the innovations and disruptions that are changing the way we live and do business – access people need to stay ahead of the curve in their respective workplaces. This year’s theme at ETech focused on how the way we live is changing — through policy, technology and ideas.

ETech is better experienced than described but I was pleased to be able to spend time with other artists who employ a technology approach like Aaron Koblin, who talked about making art with lasers (I drove up with said laser in our backseat), Alex Bisceglie and his partner in innovation Nick Spears, with whom I’ve been cooking up a collaboration involving video to be displayed in his wonderful spherical display, The Orb, and the guys from Uncommon Projects. Also really enjoyed talking with Nick Bilton from New York Times R&D, who convinced me that my quaint love of paper may not influence the company’s delivery method moving forward.

Anyone who hates children and animals can’t be all bad.

Last week I directed a quick commercial for an apparel client’s kid’s line. The spot is called Suburban Carseat Blues, a parody of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, although many people don’t have memories that go back that far and therefore may think that I started this card turning thing, that I’m speaking for all of us, and that I’m the spokesman for a generation. A generation of curly dimpled lunatics.

Apostrophe’s

Oops. While I was in Rome, SA delivered a quick commercial to our client with an apostrophe missing in the subtitle of the word “Let’s”. By the time the spelling mistake was discovered, the spot had a quarter of a million views on YouTube and it therefore wouldn’t be practical to remove it. So far nobody has mentioned the omission. Except me, here. Shhhh.

Then, I caught this Library Newsletter that had also made an apostrophe error, apparently adding the apostophe that we’d mistakenly omitted to to a place where it doesn’t belong in “ricochets”.

Lets Let’s all be more careful about apostrophe’s apostrophes.