Has Fox News been caught doctoring stories once again? According to a new video circulating online as of yesterday, it appears so. While trying to offer “Fair and Balanced” reporting on the recent riots in Moscow in which some thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest Vladimir Putin’s return to power, the folks at Fox News apparently decided to show viewers footage of the protests. Except the violent, fiery images shown during their broadcast on December 7 were not of Moscow at all but were actually re-purposed video shots from protests in Greece earlier this year.

Throughout much of autumn, near anarchy filled the streets of Athens as that country’s austerity bill as voted upon and photographers/videographers captured lot’s of captivating footage during those melees. It appears the honchos at Fox News thought nobody would notice if they made the protests in Moscow look more violent than they really are. I haven’t seen this anywhere on the New York Times’ Media Decoder or Poynter.org yet, so I’m hesitant to call it 100% true, but the video above doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

I had said that the Viral Video I selected for Thanksgiving was the best PSA ever.

I was wrong.

While the Shat doing a turkey-fryer love story was really entertaining, and served a good purpose, how many people actually have turkey fryers?

Now–how many people have breasts?

Yeah. I thought so.

This PSA, by the good people at Rethink Breast Cancer is all I could want it to be: It’s informational, it’s really really funny, and it is tied to a phone app, so the message doesn’t get forgotten. Which will get more women to check their breasts monthly. Which will hopefully save lives.

Make sure to watch the “credits”–they’re just as much fun as the video itself!

Who quits their day job to pursue a career telling stories? Well, it seemed like a good idea to Ben Pohl. Pohl gave up a full-time gig as a motion graphics and visual effects artist to pursue a career as a writer and director. He recently wrapped his first independent film, “Divination,” a movie Pohl describes as “madness meets magic.”

Pohl is a digital storyteller. He is fascinated by the mystery of communication and all of its moving parts. Until now, much of his time was spent locked in a basement editing on the post side of production for Victory Studios, a production house here in Seattle.

I recently sat down with the 30-year-old director at a Starbucks in Phinney Ridge. When I walked up to introduce myself, Pohl had already settled into a table, sipping an Americano as he thumbed the pages of Stephen King’s “Danse Macabre.”

Although Pohl enjoys the editing process, his real ambition is directing, high-end imagery and motion graphics. Read more…

Since we are a Digital Media program, I thought that I’d find a fun infographic that had something to do with the digital media world. So, I hied myself out to the regular sources, and lo! there was Google.

Actually, what caught my eye first was “ooooooh–pretty bright colors.” It’s probably a good thing that I was already in the right category…

Click the image to see the large-format version

Read more…

We here at the Flip are sometimes so focused on the next new thing, that what was new even five years ago is long-forgotten. But I’m going to change that right now, and take us back to what most people consider the original YouTube viral video. Since it was first uploaded in late 2004 (that’s like the pleistocene, right?), its many iterations have been viewed more than 700 million times, and made a certain Moldovan musical group (and one teenage American) famous overnight.

What’s the first viral video you remember? Leave a link in the comments.

Last week Google announced that they would finally suspend support for their once celebrated online productivity application “Wave.” Late in 2010, Google stunned developers and Wave users by announcing that they would no longer develop for the platform. They did promise that they would continue to host user generated Waves through “the end of the year.” That year lasted well into 2011 and Google will finally sunset Wave in April 2012 with a preliminary draw-down in January when current Waves will go read-only before Google shuts the service down completely in April.

This has been a strange and vexing story for a company that has avoided many of the very public product failures its biggest rivals have endured in both the court of public opinion and in the marketplace.

Read more…

Three weeks ago I began the course that originally brought me to Bremen, Germany – Wearable Computing. This subject is part of the Artificial Intelligence research group within the Center for Computing Technologies at Uni Bremen and is traditionally offered to computer science students. Recently this research group began offering their classes to digital media students in an effort to help the digital media program provide a more well rounded education for their students. This course in wearable computing takes primarily a theoretical approach while also looking at many of the practical aspects.

On the first day we covered what wearable computing is and the history behind basic computing going all the way back to the 1950s. It was quite fascinating to see how the purposes for using computers has evolved over the years. It all started with specific tasks and business computing in the 50s & 60s, then in the 80s we had the addition of more entertainment computing and in the 90s communication and information computing became mainstream. Read more…