An innocent couple falls victim to airline shenanigans. So where do they go when they can’t leave the gate area for… well, for who knows how long? “To The Cloud” to access the recorded TV shows on their home PC. Three hour delay? Bring it.

When buzzwordy people refer to the “cloud,” they’re referring to a countless number of interchangeable servers that exist nowhere specific for the express purpose of serving you content. YouTube’s servers, for example, are “the cloud.” The word itself comes from the amorphous shape you’d have to use to represent these servers in a diagram.

The characters in this ad, instead of availing themselves of an actual cloud-based service (such as Hulu, where this ad is playing), prefer to log into their home computer with remote desktop (which would be impossibly slow, and would not make use of any clouds) and transfer a recorded tv show—why would they have recorded tv shows in the first place? Like from television?

The agency that wrote this spot obviously doesn’t understand the cloud concept in at least two ways, and, by extension, it sounds like Microsoft doesn’t either.

So, it’s been almost a year since I signed up for Google advertising on the right side of this humble blog. Year One earnings statement below:

No one told me you have to actually click on the ads to make money! I’m going to take that as a sign of the intelligence of my readership.

Ads to be removed shortly.

Oh, nicely done! This is a Flickr gallery of a Berlin public art project that helpfully and elegantly reminds the public when certain advertising images are a complete Photoshop fantasy.

On second thought, I’m not sure whether this goes beyond the proof-of-concept above. I’d like to know more about this! Perhaps we could raise money to do this in NYC?

Via Jason Kottke

The city is covered in advertising now for the upcoming release of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV.  I, personally, am into the ads.  They’re all characters from the game, apparently.

Her expression is significant, from an ad perspective.  From this website:

In advertising, art and photography, the direction the subject is looking or the flow of the composition can affect the tone of the image. Left is the past, right is the future, up is positive, down is negative. For example: a subject looking up and to the right is looking positively into the future.

So: the tone of the image says “I’m looking at the future, and it’s as sweet as my lollipop,” or something.

UPDATE 5/5: The game is great!  I wish I had more time to play it!  

I think the reason why the ads are so thick down here is that Rockstar Games has an office at Broadway and Houston.

Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s great that Kodak is ass-vertising instead of creating a groundbreaking digital media product, such as:

• a gigapixel camera
• pro photo software like Aperture
• a better graphics file format that contains multiple resolutions (like you see the thumbnail and the web version, but if you right-click you can go to kodak.com and get the print-version)
• an internet printing and shipping service that presents itself at the level of a printer driver (ie is an option when you go to print and charges reasonable rates)

But enough of that.  The reason for this post is that, also via BoingBoing, I noticed that France’s parliament has voted to introduce an amendment to legalize filesharing.

That must be giving the RIAA and MPAA a Christmas aneurysm.  Which of course is happy news to most rational people, as the copyrighters’ response thus far has been to sue companies, sue grandmothers, and compromise the quality of their product via ‘crippleware.’

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is trading files like it’s 1999.

I just cannot comprehend why the record and motion picture companies haven’t shut this down by now.  I mean, fuck the record companies, but let’s get real for a second.  They could, in an afternoon, make all this go away.

Here’s where I would start: offer a salary of $100,000 w/ benefits to everyone who has *ever* worked at Limewire, Acquisition, or Kazaa.  Hire everyone at p2pnet.net, while you’re at it.  Start by measuring traffic and tracking what’s actually going on out there.  Spend a good three months doing this.  Discover stuff like what labels are getting hit the most, what that would equal in dollars, and to what extent there’s a legal alternative.  Most importantly, you have to come up with a statistic that says how bad filesharing really is, and you have to figure out a way to come at that question from the perspective that some filesharing is actually good for business.

Then you methodically shut it down.  Make RIAA servers all the available ultrapeers on the network.  Return bad search results.  Control the system.  Make sure that every single available download is a compelling advertisement for a legal alternative.

Or whatever; sue some more grandmothers and keep the party going.  It’s up to them, and, if history is any indication, the party’s going to go on forever.