New Media Predictions ala 1974

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New Media predictions recorded at the International Symposium on the Future held in the spaceship at the Dundas Drive-in Park in Canada, 1974.

Click here to digg this!

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Halloween Murder Mystery Party – Baron Digbody’s Castle

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Greetings,

We’ve created a series of Zen Mixes for Baron Digbody’s Castle – the creepy castle caper written by the Moustache and previously featured as an interactive online mystery at http://www.moustachemysteries.com.

We will post a couple characters each week leading up to Halloween. You can also get the booklet along with links to all the mixes below and host your own mystery party. We have done so several times with this mystery and it is a blast! Full instructions for the mystery party are given as well. The mystery can be played with 8-12 characters. The links to the mixes are special private links so you can e-mail a link to a guest and they will only know how to access theirs.

This Week’s Characters:
(the first four characters are the optional characters so stick with us…)

• Introduction by the Moustache
• Boris the Botanist
• Bartholomu the Butler

Have some fun… host a mystery party… these cost over $20 in the store and you are stuck with the environmentally taxing packaging. Plus, no other mystery is quite as zany as a Moustache Mystery!

How Long Would it Take to Eat Earth?

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This vlog sheds light on how much volume there is in our world. It does this by imagining the world is filled with apples and then we calculate how many years it will take for everyone in the world to eat the earth.

Take a Tapoll here to see if you can predict the results before you watch the vlog:

http://www.tapoll.com/poll/id/628766020

Have fun!

Psychedelic Dancing as Exercise 03 – Video Feedback with Dan Zen

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Here is a mash of two mixes – psychedelic dancing as exercise to Inagadadavida by Iron Butterfly. The song (not the mash) is a 17 minutes and makes for a great work-out without a dull moment – try it at home! If you can dance to the whole song as I have done many times, then guaranteed you will improve your physic, your balance and control of your body – all without the monotony or difficulties of other exercises.

The first mix shows a controlled feedback where a video camera is pointed at television that shows its signal – the video camera is set to black and white and inverse so light is dark and dark is light. The triangles come from the corners of the television. Just a slight shake, sends quakes down to the infinite center. Moving closer to the TV effects differences in spoke smoothness.

The second mix is a view of infinity itself broken up as the edge of chaos is traversed. An awesome effect! Please note that the feedback video is a 15 year old VHS video played on the TV and video’d with my camera. So the quality certainly could be better…

Both these mixes make use of the fact that Zen Mix can use a previously made Zen Mix in place of a picture. So you can superimpose flv video on flv video – here is how:

1. Upload your videos to Vimeo.com or Blip.tv (not YouTube). Then open Zen Mix and paste the URL to the flv (it must have .flv on the end not .swf) into the flv field in Zen Mix. Zen Mix will not play without a graphic so just use http://www.danzen.com/graphics/s.gif – an invisible little graphic. Continue to set the size and position of the video by following Zen Mix instructions.

2. Save your Zen Mix and continue until it gives you the HTML code. Copy the HTML code into a text editor (for instance notepad) and copy the URL to the .swf file. It will be something like: http://www.zenmix.com/zenmix/mix.swf?danzen/psychefeedback01. Save this URL for the second part of the next step

3. Refresh Zen Mix, create a new Zen Mix and paste the URL to your second Vimeo flv file into the flv field. Then paste the URL from step 2 into the picture field.

4. Press continue to position and resize the videos and then continue again to set the blend effects. Save your file as the final mix.

5. Note that control of the first video will not work if the video controllers for both videos are in the same place.

All this sounds complicated but once you do it once or twice it only takes five minutes. Hope you enjoy the mash! Remember that you can make them too at http://www.zenmix.com!

Tapoll Predict-a-Poll on Vlogging

Dan Zen has launched Tapoll, the Predict-a-poll Web 2.0 site. There is a poll on the site that asks you to predict what people will say when asked about Vlogging as well as asks you to vote about Vlogging.

http://www.tapoll.com/poll/id/899690442

If you are interested in getting more people to take the poll then please post the link on your site!