The Requisite End Of Year Lists And Review 2010

• Based on the aggregation of billions of search queries people typed into Google this year, Zeitgeist captures the spirit of 2010. 

• Heart-breaking, revealing, and beautiful, the year in images by The Big Picture, part I, II, and III.

• Popular Science's The Most Amazing Science Images of 2010.

• Ideas of the Year: The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and Popular Science's 100 Innovations of the Year.

• Making Ideas Happen: The 99% Most Popular Tips, Interviews & Think Pieces.

• Retweet, double-dip recession, vuvuzela, and top kill are just a few words of the year.

• Top Ten Most Retweeted Tweets of 2010. Top Ten Twitter Trends of 2010.

• 2010 Memology: Facebook's Top Status Trends of the Year.

• New York Magazine's The Year In Culture.

• Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers.

• Creative Review's Top Ten Blog Stories 2010.

• The Bygone Bureau's Best New Blogs of 2010.

• Science: The Breakthroughs of 2010 and Insights of the Decade.

• The Millions continues its tradition of measuring The Year in Reading.

• Top Ten New Yorker Stories of 2010.

• A space chimp, a good-smelling man and a World Cup anthem are among The Campaigns Creativity Loved.

• BBH Labs' presents The State of the Web 2010.

• Kinetic type animations became even more mainstream in 2010, used in opening title sequences, to teach typography, in a NSFW music video, and our favorite, to retell The Gettysburg Address:


• Time's Top 10 Everything of 2010.

• ReadWriteWeb's Top Trends of 2010: Privacy.

• Brand New takes a look at the best and worst identities of 2010, MTV, Gap, Aol, they are all there.

• The Dieline's Top 100 Package Designs of 2010.

• My Modern Met's Top 12 Banksy Pieces of 2010.

• The Year In Media Errors And Corrections.

• Flavorpill's Most Fascinating People of 2010.


• YouTube, with its ability to catapult someone from obscurity into infamy, launched new music careers, helped change what an advertising campaign is, took over the Guggenheim, and served as the depository of raw ingredients for a multitude of remixes and mashups.

• The Best Viral Videos Of 2010: A Retrospective by Videogum.



• Mashable's 10 Most Innovative Viral Ads of 2010.

• The Best Cover Songs of 2010.

• Paste Magazine compiled the best 25 music videos of the year. However this year, thanks to new technologies and the influence of the social layer, the music video was reborn as something that you engage with and not just watch: Sour/Mirror connected to your Twitter and Facebook stream; You Make Me Feel changed based on your local weather; Killing Me let users tell the world what was, well, killing them, via the hashtag #killingme; We Dance To The Beat let you create your own version of a video via an audio visual beat machine; Soy Tu Aire, has painterly mouse action; but the most surprising and exciting music video (should they really be called videos when they are this engaging?) was the perfect experimental mix of technology, artistry and innovation in the poignant and absolutely personal The Wilderness Downtown.

• Many websites transitioned from Flash to HTML5 giving it a lot of momentum. Due largely to iOS devices not supporting Flash, and now even the Macbook Air ships without support for it, 2010 was the year when HTML5 began to make its presence known.

• In addition to all the advancements of the digital world, there is still extraordinary print work being produced and FPO compiles The Best of 2010.

• Macworld's The Year For Creatives.

• One Club's Best of the Digital Decade.

• 20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web.

• How Online Reading Habits Have Changed Over 2010.

• We agree with Frank Chimero, The Elements of Math and BBC's A History Of The World in 100 Objects, are two of the best things on the web in 2010.

• Most Contagious 2010.

• Data Visualization & Infographics: With so much data coming at us from all directions we need help making sense of it all. There are the 10 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year, Journalism In The Age Of Data and of course the Jedi master of data Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes:


• Zombies, Sci-Fi and Alice: Wired.com’s Best Video Interviews of 2010

• The Best NASA Photographs of 2010.

• Decker's Top Ten Best (And Worst) Communicators of 2010.

• Forbes' The Year's Most Creative Advertising Ideas.

• Angry Birds: We resisted as much as we could. We refused to download the game, but in a moment of weakness and 'encouraged' by friends, we got it. And like everyone else got addicted to this simple and clever game. In 2010 Angry Birds catapulted itself into millions of mobile devices and became this generation's Pacman. What started as a game on the iPhone is now a huge industry with hard-to-find merchandise, a movie deal and even a bank.

• 20 things that became obsolete this decade.

• The New Yorker's Theater High Points.

• 2010: The Year The Internet Went To War.

• Discover's Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of the Year.

• And just when you thought there was nothing new to be discovered: National Geographic's Top Weirdest New Animals.

• Vanity Fair's The Top Ten Worst Top Ten Lists of 2010.

• Made By Many's Best of 2010/Trends for 2011.

• Harvard Business Review's Six Social Media Trends for 2011.

• Trendwatching's 11 Crucial Consumer Trends of 2011.

• 10 Disruptive Trends That Will Shape Our World in 2011.

• Fast Company's 2011 Consumer Internet Predictions.

• Ten Crowdsourcing Trends for 2011.

• Mashable's 10 Predictions for the News Media in 2011.

• Pantone has a decidedly rosy outlook for 2011.



• And lastly, Ringing The New Year With A Drink For Each Time Zone.

A Thought About The Beatles on iTunes

via apple.com

From a business and even legal point of view this is a huge success for Apple. However, launching The Beatles on iTunes would have been so much more successful if they had said nothing yesterday. Music lovers know it is new music Tuesday and we frequently check out what was released on iTunes. Had Apple just released The Beatles discography on iTunes and let us discover it, people would have gone crazy. "OMG! Did you see The Beatles are on iTunes!" would have been tweeted and updated all over the web. Instead they promised an unforgettable announcement and the first response from most music lovers was 'that's it' because we've had The Beatles in our iPods and iPhones for years.

YouTube Play Live From The Guggenheim Highlights

Last night the YouTube Play event took place at The Guggenheim in New York and was streamed live on the web. Conceived by YouTube and The Guggenheim, it was billed as a biennial of creative video but it is so much more than that. Taking over and transforming one of the world’s most iconic museums, the event made no distinction between live performance and video, art and technology, culture and commerce, high and low brow, it was simply a celebration of passionate creative work. Kudos to everyone involved, in particular the production crews responsible for staging such an extraordinary event.

Here are some highlights of the evening:

Introduction.
 

The amazing video mapping building projections.

Jarbas Agnelli, creator of “Birds on the Wires,” and the Noname Ensemble from the Julliard School.


Pogo, creator of “Gardyn,” and many amazing video mashups.


Kutiman performs “Hungarian Dance #5” by Brahms, accompanied by the Noname ensemble from the Julliard School, YouTube Symphony Orcherstra players and video performances from around the world. 


The LXD translates the video work “Seaweed” into dance.


Everynone uses video to honor the power of words.

OK Go, kings of the YouTube music video, closed the evening with a delightfully subtle acoustic performance.


I find myself profoundly inspired by this event and hope you find yourself inspired too, wanting to share your work with the world. 

 

Seaweed: @theLXD - excerpt from YouTube Play at the Guggenheim

via youtube.com

Last night I connected my laptop to my tv and watched YouTube Play live from the Guggenheim, while one of my friends, someone I’ve known most of my life, watched in Korea. Three different locations around the world connected by technology to celebrate art, passion, creativity.

This moment that pays tribute to the amazing video work of Seaweed and the truly extraordinary LXD encapsulates in a nutshell why it is awesome to love and want to do creative work today.

Procrastination: What are you waiting for?

Last week we posted a short animation showing the many ways in which we end up avoiding work. Since then it feels like everyone is in a procrastination state of mind.

First there is the book review for “The Thief of Time” in The New Yorker. In it we learn

what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off.

And

Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals.

Much of procrastinating is an inner negotiation about what should happen, and why.

The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing… . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.”  

Brain Pickings, in the post 5 Perspectives on Procrastination, highlights points of view on procrastination “from the scientific to the philosophical to the playful.”

The Procrastinators is a series of 11 episodes of monologues about procrastination produced by Dutch artist duo Lernert & Sander. “Artists, writers and filmmakers talk about concentration, focus and the fine art of wasting their time.”

Clearly the many ways in which we procrastinate are universal. 

We created a new series of 11 episodes of monologues about procrastination. Artists, writers and filmmakers tell about concentration, focus and the fine art of wasting their time. Premiere: July 4th, at the Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam at Limboland Live. Online september 2010, on limboland.tv Camera & Lighting: Ram van Meel Audio recording & Mixing: Diederik Idenburg Music: Danny Calvi English subtitles: Tom Johnston Assistent: Wilfred van der Weide Special thanks to: Wendela Scheltema, Kim Tuin, Peter Frank Heuseveldt, Noel Lozen and Egbert Steenwinkel The Procrastinators Club: Aux Raus - Jop van Bennekom - Boris van Berkum - Guus Beumer - Ewoudt Boonstra - Matthijs de Bruijne - Arjan Ederveen - Bas Fontein - Dirk van der Heuvel - Cindy Hoetmer - Ernst van der Hoeven - Florentijn Hofman - Frank Houtappels - Peter Jeroense - Alex Klaassen - Bert Kommerij - Pieter Kramer - Esma Moukhtar - Piet Paris - Michael Schaap - Coco Schrijber - Mo Veld - Victor Vroegindewij - Martin de Waal - Micha Wertheim - Job Wouters - Roel Wouters

An interesting pattern begins to emerge from all these accounts of procrastination. Prolific creators often actively engage in procrastination in a methodical and disciplined way. Apparently writers can not begin to work unless their households are sparkly clean. 

I view this as less procrastination and more psychological distancing. 

In the article “An Easy Way To Increase Creativity,” published in Scientific American, Oren Shapira and Nira Liberman state 

scientists have demonstrated that increasing psychological distance so that a problem feels farther away can actually increase creativity.

We then can conclude there are degrees of procrastination and one of those degrees is less about avoiding work and completely about letting the subconscious percolate. Cleaning the kitchen and organizing the bookshelf as a way of thinking. The trick is to know what is motivating our desire not to work. 

On those times when I find myself procrastinating I stop and ask myself: what are you so afraid of that this is the better choice? That usually gets me going again.