Week's Best Posts: Long Reads, Best-of Lists, TV & Movie Biz #NGIF

We're in a New Year, and it's time for the first edition of "Nick's Great Information Friday," my weekly curation of the best posts and links in film, television, technology, and all the things I follow. I promise, this will be the last installment filled with other people's lists. Going forward, of course, we have to put up with all the damn awards!

THE LAST OF THE 2011 LISTS

• If you've been following my blog lately, you'll know that I've written "best-of" posts for television, books, software, and now movies, with the last of the four coming out as late in the year as I could make it in order to include pictures from the December glut. This post gives you links to all four sets of reviews.

• Anyone can make their own list (including me), but these guys curate a list of the best lists. I like it, notwithstanding the source:  a quirky website called Crabby Golightly.

• To review the best sci-fi and fantasy books of 2011 from ion9 ("We come from the Future") here's a good list -- not my prime genre, but worth a look.

• Check out “A Year in Transmedia,” Simon Staffans’s free ebook colllection of posts about the emerging t-m field, including an interview  with your truly : download here.

• The best of 2011's tech writing is collected for your consideration by Thomas Houston at The Verge.

• The Guardian offers "the top 50 iPad apps." 

THE LAST OF THE PREDICTIONS 

• The Next Web offers its own tidbits in "What 2012 Holds for Online Media."

• Book-obsessed website The Millions posted a very informative rundown of the most anticipated books of 2012.

• Fortune's "Guide to the Future," notwithstanding the sheer grandiosity of the headline, is a useful predictive wallow, highlighting a few trends I hadn't considered. 

THE MOVIE BIZ

• Amid the predictable hand-wringing over the predictable year-end bad news about movie box office, The Wrap's editor Sharon Waxman jumps in with some obvious and sensible advice, and renews her call for "bold" moves by the studios in digital (WB's acquisition of Flixster? "come on, I said bold!" sez Waxman.)

• Meanwhile, serial entrepreneur and start-up guru Steve Blank slugs Hollywood a bit harder in his post "Why the Movie Industry Can't Innovate and the result is SOPA."  Truthfully, Blank does a great job of showing that Hollywood doesn't innovate, but doesn't really tell anyone why they can't. It's a good read, nonetheless.

• The Atlantic's Derek Thompson dives deeper into Hollywood's business model by asking "Why Do all movie tickets cost the same?" 

• Indie Producer Ted Hope spotlights a cool infographic that displays virtually all possible film distribution options.

• IndieWire blog THE PLAYLIST itemizes its 50 most anticipated films of 2012

THE TV BIZ

• Want a quick gloss on the Changing TV Landscape? Go no further than this lovely infographic, covering the dawn of digital broadcasting (2009) through social TV. 

• Deloitte puts some numbers to the cord-cutter chatter. 

• Broadcom chip to be introduced at CES would embed a host of  "over-the-top" functions in next-gen set-top-boxes alongside regular cable channels, reported in some tech detail here. 

• Reports are that reality-TV king Mark Burnett taps his scepter upon social TV start-up ACTV8.

• BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield claimed this week that  Nielsen viewing data proves that Netflix is the 15th most-watched TV "network" in the U.S., and is second in Netflix homes.

• Mobile Content Ventures hooks up with MetroPCS to deliver next generation of live mobile video. In related news, TV Technology looks at the evolving television experience, with a look at ConnecTV, another MCV initiative that seeks to bring TV to the tablet. The consortium of TV station groups and networks has an ambitious agenda. 

LITERARY & READING

• Speaking of curating, VentureBeat has compiled a really neat list of 2011's best tech-oriented "long reads" -- itself an interesting trend, e.g., countering the web's relentless info-snack quality with major explorations of interesting topics that were once the province of "quality" magazines. I had seen only a few on this list before.

• Small press Tin House has reissued a really wild book called "Plotto: the Master Book of All Plots" a 1928 anthology that runs down 1,462 possible plots. Evidently studied by Hitchcock, no less.  

 COMPANIES & START-UPS 

• Can newspapers be tech incubators? asks this interesting GigaOm report. 

• "A Web of Apps" offers a quick gloss of new apps that help with the challenge of discovering content.

• Iconic blue chip company Kodak teeters on the brink.

• With potshots coming fast and furious over the new Yahoo CEO, Fast Company posits that Scott Thompson, the company's fourth top exec in five years, could turn the stodgy web giant around by concentrating upon turning its tonnage of "big data" into gold.  

• Never heard of Path? It's the buzzy "new" social network that offers a cozier alternative to Facebook.

• Marshall Kirkpatrick gives an unqualified rave to curation tool "Storify" because it personifies an important trend of providing context from the tonnage of information.

• 2011's "Best" - My Favorite Books, Movies, TV & Apps

 

Over the course of the last month I've given a lot of thought to the review of my favorite media of 2011 -- not necessarily "THE BEST". No, more like "MY BEST." 

Here is a handy set of links to the four posts in hopes that you might find some useful tips, insights, or recommendations that can enrich your life in 2012. 

• Movies
• Software
• Television
• Books

Please share your thoughts in the comment box below.

And Happy New Year, Happy 2012.

• Best Films of 2011 - My Year End Lists & Reviews

To try and see as many of the year-end releases as possible, I’ve saved my movie “best-of” list til last among the four 2011 posts (television, books, software & movies). 

Not only does the industry in all its wisdom release most worthy titles bunched up at year’s end, but the poorly released foreign and Indie titles begin appearing on DVD and Netflix too! Not enough time to see everything.

One tries to catch up with contenders before Oscar night, of course, but this nutty pattern creates a bit of a problem with year-end lists, doesn’t it? Do I offer you my favorites released in 2011 or viewed (by me) in 2011? 

Well, I’ll try to do both in this post with lists first, and then the reviews, which I have written throughout the year on Flixster here (if you follow me on Twitter or FB, you may have read a few, as well). 

The LISTS:

First Tier Favorites:

• The Descendants
• Hugo
• Tree of Life
• Melancholia
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
• We Need to Talk About Kevin
• Pariah
• A Separation
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• Weekend
• Moneyball
• Win Win
• 50/50
• The Help
• Poetry
• Incendies

Second Tier Favorites:

• Martha Marcy May Marlene
• Young Adult
• Another Earth
• Drive
• Shame
• The Artist
• The Lady
• Coriolanus
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Margin Call
• Bill Cunningham New York
• Beginners
• Jane Eyre
• Source Code
• Senna
• The Skin I Live In
• A Dangerous Mind

Also enjoyed in 2011, no matter when released:

• In A Better World
• Biutiful
• Carlos
• Catfish
• Gasland
• Mesrine
• Mother
• Red Road
• Dogtooth
• Inside Job

The REVIEWS

First Tier Faves:

• The Descendants. Clooney's Matt King should have it more together than he does, what with substantial inherited wealth and a rich life filled with friends and family, but we learn, pretty much as he does, that his life is a mess. And we learn, pretty much as he does, that he has the character to pull the wandering strands of his life into a pattern that might help him build a future. The razor sharp script, filled with many knowing epiphanies, gives an ensemble led by Clooney scene after scene of power, tinged with bruised humor and a lovely historical Hawaii overlay. I'd vote for Clooney's performance as the year's best male.

• Hugo. Gasp provoking and deeply satisfying, Scorcese's homage to the early magic of the movies was a blast, one of my favorites in a year when the movies themselves are front and center as subject matter (The Artist, My Week with Marilyn). Not to mention the astonishing use of 3D technology, the insanely inventive sets (like something out of Terry Gilliam), and a lovely feel for humor. It's a long way from Mean Streets to this enchanting train station, the shy boy, and the lost soul of cinema. The latter, embodied in Kingsley's charming performance, is the driver that makes the film more than just a visual thrill ride, because of course, the throwaway attitude towards culture is everywhere and mightily present today. 

• Tree of Life. The carrier of Malick's deepest emotional sense-memory, Tree of Life uses various experimental film modalities to "tell" a story, sort of. I presume it's his story, his memories of childhood in central Texas. And I presumed that the resonance, the febrile vibrations which I felt erupted because I spent my 13th and 14th years in central Texas too -- but no, my movie companions responded to the delicate and harsh gestural and emotional content of this segment of the film as strongly as I. Much has been made of the layering of different modalities -- the formation of the earth, the cosmology of the planets, the birth of empathy via the raptors, alongside his somewhat murky family story. I liked a lot of that stuff, in part because of the sheer beauty. What I decidedly did NOT like was the ending, with the zombie-like wanderings on the beach, presumably a sort of heaven or purgatory. Indeed, the insertion of the adult Jack, e.g., Sean Penn, seemed out of sync with the rest. A minor whine, because overall, I was overwhelmed.

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• Enough Year-end Predictions to Make Your Head Spin - #NGIF

My last weekly summary of interesting tweets, links and posts of 2011 is chockablock full of predictions and trends -- looks back and forward. Makes a person's head spin. For you, the year's last #NGIF (Nick's Great Information Friday).

QUO VIDEO?

A slew of video visionaries offered dispatches from their crystal balls, including:

• "Five Predictions For Online Video in 2012" offers a tidy trip down the well-worn path of prognostication -- no aha moments, but well-written and reasoned. 

• If five aren't enough, here are "50 TV Predictions for 2012" from a website called "TVPredictions" so I guess this is their thing!

• "Twelve Things That Won't Happen in Online Video in 2012" is a terrific post by WatchMojo founder and professional opinionator Ashkan Karbasfrooshan. To hear him tell it, TV will not die; cord-cutters will not make a ripple; neither Google nor Apple will rule TV… you get the idea. 

• He also asked "Is Video the New Software?" -- This guy is busy! 

NOW TRENDING

• Mashable lists five tech trends to watch in 2012, and JWT lists 100 "Things" of all sorts to watch next year in a seemingly endless slideshow. Slog through it though, there are some hidden gems. 

• Another post that got a lot of heat in the blogosphere was "End of an Era: The Golden Age of Tech Blogging is Over" by tech analyst Jeremiah Owyang. Indeed, 2011 saw acquisitions, mergers, and a lot of public mud-fighting (Arianna vs Arrington). But the END?

APP-IFICATION

• "Apt Apps" is my own year-end review of favorite software of 2011, in which I note that almost all software is now seen as Apps, thanks certainly to Apple's effective store and branding. 

• A lot of what I discuss are actually tools that make my digital life easier, which seems a good description of this post: "The  Best Productivity Apps of 2011" from The Next Web.

• The "app-ification" debate is not settled, of course: Dominiek ter Heide writes intelligently about the debate over the "App Internet" and the "death of the web" on GigaOm.

• Or, put another way, "Apps are Media," as Erick Schonfeld wrote in a thoughtful TechCrunch post. 

• Farhad Manjoo's Slate post "2011 Was a Terrible Year for Tech" decries the trend of complexity 

• Speaking of complexity, Ars Technica suggests that 2012 will prove to be Microsoft's turning point, as the rest of the world flees the era of the desktop.

FILM

• Much hand-wringing in the trade press over the year-end box office tallies, which may be lower than any year in a long time. Roger Ebert opines why, proving once again why he is so influential on the web (calls a spade a spade: Hollywood makes too much bad stuff and distributes the good stuff poorly).

• Louis C.K.'s audacious self-distribution scheme got a lot of people sitting up in the media world  -- only one of the trends that led Michael Wolf to declare that "2012 will be the year of the artist-entrepreneur."

• Among the endless year-end best-of lists, I especially like the quirky ones like this one: IndieWire's favorite movies by their in-house editors and writers. Why? Because there is NOTHING too obscure or minor that one of these movie geeks won't elevate to their top-ten list. I immediately go to Netflix and add it to my queue, because without question most will never make it to theaters. Interestingly, some of these titles are already available on Netflix streaming. Try it!

ME

In addition to my apps post this week, there were two other blips in the blogsophere out there that I contributed to: 

• Check out “A Year in Transmedia,” Simon Staffans’s free ebook colllection of posts, incl intvw w/me: download here. It includes an online interview Simon conducted with me, and more than 100 pages of other goodies for the transmedia addicts among you.

• Tribeca's Future of Film's Top 10 Transmedia Posts (two are mine) was published on Huffington Post this week if you missed it earlier. 

• Apt Apps: My Favorite Software of 2011

The “Appification” of software is undeniable, not only on mobile platforms like iOS and Android, but within web browsers (themselves software), platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon) on the desktop (Apple and others sell software directly to consumers), and for the cloud (the ultimate client-server arrangement, or so it would seem if you keep up with the tech blogs). As with many aspects of our digital lives, Apple has created an easy-to-understand moniker with the stupefying success of its App Store. 

By necessity, this review of my year in software is quirkier and more customized than any other of the other year-end lists of favorites (books, television, movies). Some of the products I’m mentioning are, indeed, not even new this year! I make no claims of omniscience: I have not researched every category extensively and test-driven the competition. In other words, I’m no Walter Mossberg or David Pogue.

And yet, I have found in conversations with even my geekiest friends that my software preferences seem to be useful. It’s no wonder, given the sheer tonnage of choice confronting the user – more than half a million in Apple’s App Store alone. We all need a little help from our friends.

I myself have accumulated more than 250 apps for my Apple devices, split between iPhone, iPad and Macintosh, and that doesn’t count miscellaneous widgets and hidden apps that I probably don’t even think of as software. 

So, in no particular order, and with no great sense of “BEST”, I offer you this year-end excursion through my software life. Please comment. I mean it.

Productivity

• SCRIVENER. Whether it’s reports for clients, articles and blog posts, or episodic fits of fiction-writing, the cornerstone of my productive life remains writing. A couple of years back, fed up with the inscrutably horrible performance of the inexplicably ubiquitous Word from Microsoft (how CAN it be so bad after all these years, I ask you? – cut and paste function doesn’t work half the time) I went on a crusade to find a better writing solution.
• The result of my search was Scrivener from a small UK developer called Literature and Latte (love that!). This year saw the release of Scrivener 2,2, which is even better, and at $45, a bargain.
• Among the many lovely features in the app is the ability to “gray out” everything but the document you are working on; the tools that group multiple documents within a project and allow easy reorganization, structuring, outlining, and prep for production. There’s lots more: try it, you’ll like it.
• TEXT EDIT. When I write quick documents, I avoid Word by using Apple’s TextEdit, which comes bundled with the Mac and is a legacy from the Apple acquisition of NeXT Computer, which also brought Steve Jobs back to Apple (Sorry, couldn’t resist). 
• EVERNOTE. I discovered Evernote a couple of years back from a tweet by Ann Kirschner, who I worked with when she ran Fathom.com, something to the effect of “how did I manage to function before I discovered Evernote.” She’s right. This darling of the future of cloud-based software makes a LOT of things simpler, simply because it syncs content between my iPhone, iPad and desktop. This is where I keep my running lists (for shopping, books, movies, etc), so they’re always in my pocket. This is where I back up all of my blog posts. This is where I often send (via email) interesting stuff to read later (a small miracle of interoperability, actually). I love Evernote (though, I’m not QUITE so slavish in my devotion to Evernote as Paul Boag, whose post called it “My single most useful application”.)  
• KEYNOTE. I was in the MacWorld audience in 2006 when Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s Power Point-killer, the elegant Keynote presentation package. But I didn’t start using it until this year, largely because of all the wrong reasons (laziness, for sure, but also the comfort level of knowing how to use PPT, horrible as it is, and the network effect of having so many slides available over time to refashion into this week’s deadline-driven presentation). Why did I wait? Keynote is beautiful, easy to use, and creates much more elegant slides. So long as I’m not wedded to various effects (which are fairly cool), I can also easily share PDF versions with clients who may not use Keynote). I also use the iPad version of Keynote, which is a terrific thing to access on trips, at trade shows, and for one-on-one presentations (not so good with groups). 
• iTALK. When I started blogging this year I found myself interviewing, both in person and by phone. I no longer own a voice recording device – and I don’t need one with iTalk, a great iPhone/iPad app from Griffin Technology. With an idiot-proof interface and the ability to port audio files to the desktop, the app is everything I need to capture interviews. I also recorded my physical therapy regimen with the device, which I hook up to speakers in my home gym so that I can keep my back in shape. 

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