As Christmas approaches I'm getting a head-start on my weekly round-up of favorite posts and links with this contribution to your mental lifestream.
Best-of Lists
The lists, they just keep on coming, don’t they: reviews of 2011, predictions for 2012 and beyond. Among the posts that caught my eye this week were:
- Walter Mossberg’s roundup of best 2011 gadgets.
- Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read/Write/Web discusses the “Top 10 Feed & RSS Technologies of 2011." Yes this sounds geekier than hell, but it's really more of a rundown of how one excellent observer uses web technologies to learn more about the world. I'll be making my own such effort in my year-end list of favorite apps, coming soon to this space.
- Innovative consultants and curators par excellence offered a slightly askew 2012 trend roundup from ten innovators. (As it happens Fortune Mag published a glowing review of PSFK, the consultancy of tomorrow --whew!)
- The great Storify tool offers a step-by-step guide on how to turn your Facebook photos into the story of your own personal 2011, should you need a way to compensate for all those cards coming into your mailbox from people you didn’t send cards to (even e-cards).
Film
Who are they trying to fool, anyway, those list-makers: we are in the midst of the High Holy Days of film, and it all leads up to the Oscars. The Academy has published its list of the 265 productions eligible for 84th Academy Awards.
I’ve seen 56 and counting. How about you? BTW, I will publish my own year-end top movie list after Christmas (still have more to see), but if you cannot wait to read reviews of the movies I already reviewed, check out this link on Flixster.
Film Comment published its annual year-end survey of film critics and editors, naming Tree of Life as Best Picture. Secret sauce is the list of best unreleased films. Enough to keep you going through the summer months of comic book movies!
MY STUFF
Tribeca’s Future of Film picked their Top 10 Transmedia posts of 2011, including two of mine!
Georgia Tech has posted videos from the Future Media Fest Conference, including the panel on the Future of Television in which I paraticipated. There are some good talks here.
MISCELLANY
One of my very first and favorite Twitter discoveries was “Very Short Story” or VSS – inventive proof that one could say something “fictional” in 140 characters. Now you can read 300 of them in book form: Very Short Stories 300 Bite-size Works of Fiction.
Keep up with Apple’s plot to assault television as we know it, courtesy of some good reporting from the Wall St. Journal.http://www.inc.com/magazine/201112/evernote-2011-company-of-the-year.html
The Wrap profiles YouTube sensation Freddie Wong, one of the many young creatives whose popularity on the video sharing site have pioneered another method beyond conventional Hollywood.
Inc. Magazine names Evernote as Company of the Year. (Note: Evernote is one of my favorite apps, to be detailed in yet another forthcoming year-end post).