artist unknown
Pixel Time
Olia’s post about Alexander Schlegel’s pixel arts utility took me back. In the late ’90s an internet magazine called word.com (“brought to you by the creators of Vibe and aims to be a hip magazine for the 20-something generation” –new on the net, 1995, now a total dot com relic) had a feature called Pixel Time that worked much like Schlegel’s page. They had contests and posted the best results regularly, and hosted an archive of hundreds of mostly stunning past entries by amateurs and professional artists from all over the world. The best surviving reference to it I found on cursory search was this page from 1998, which posted three winning Pixel Time entries as an animated GIF:
*moment of silence for all the great, past internet art that went down the drain with someone’s server and business aspirations in the ’90s*
YouTube “Overlay Ads”
Per the New York Times, Google is putting the final nail in the YouTube coffin with “overlay ads”:
…Google believes it finally has found the formula to cash in on YouTube’s potential as a magnet for online video advertising and keep its audience loyal at the same time.
The company said late Tuesday that after months of testing various video advertising models, it was ready to introduce a new type of video ad, which it said was unobtrusive and kept users in control of what they saw.
The ads, which appear 15 seconds after a user begins watching a video clip, take the form of an overlay on the bottom fifth of the screen, not unlike the tickers that display headlines during television news programs.
A user can ignore the overlay, which will disappear after about 10 seconds, or close it. But if the user clicks on it, the video they were watching will stop and a video ad will begin playing. Once the ad is over, or if a user clicks on a box to close it, the original video will resume playing from the point where it was stopped.
This doesn’t matter much to me–all my favorite YouTubes have already been deleted for “terms of use violations.” Really glad I made the decision to put only one “art video” on YT; it’s my belief that my two headed, self drawing deer will only be improved by an erectile dysfunction ad scrolling along the bottom. [thx again GuthRie]
Afterthought: No offense intended to my artist friends who are using this medium. You have my sympathy if your content gets a “little extra something” from Google. Mriver on the MTAA blog says they won’t be messing with “art or home movies” but that sounds about as plausible as the Democrats standing up to Bush. (This afterthought not translated by Gizoogle.)
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