Here are my weekly notes:
- Had fun celebrating a few friends’ birthdays yesterday – Happy Birthday to Janice, Andrew, and Jane! We started out at Laser Quest (I won the first round) and then nearly filled the Boston Pizza Lounge downtown. Good times!
- Al Gore thinks that Web 2.0 needs a purpose, and of course, that green should be the purpose. In a somewhat related story, Al Gore has joined Twitter!
- Sounds like the New York Times (NYT) is in financial trouble. It’ll be interesting to see how they cope with this situation.
- Told you netbooks were trendy – Walt Mossberg wrote about them this week. On Tuesday, the laptop turned 40 years old.
- One of my favorite apps now has a native app for the iPhone/iPod touch – Remember the Milk! So far I love it. You can find out more here.
- Flickr now has over 3 billion photos. Facebook is still the champ of course, with over 10 billion photos.
- Did you like the “hologram” that CNN debuted during their election night coverage? It apparently cost over $300,000. Don’t be fooled – it’s essentially a fancy green screen.
MasterMaq's Blog 
The whole “hologram” thing is silly. I’m aware that CNN’s holograms weren’t holograms. In the future, however, when we do have the technology to create holograms, using them purely for television broadcasting makes no sense.
It will be more expensive to create holograms (at least initially) than it is to just do what CNN did, or what we normally do, with current greenscreen technology. With either holograms or greenscreen, you will produce the same result for the viewer at home. Greenscreen will always be cheaper for television, because it costs less to edit the video feed than it does to create a physical 3-dimensional projection.
I can certainly see how true holograms will be useful in live presentations and other types of events where people can walk around the entire projection and perhaps even interact with it. But for news broadcasting, I just don’t see how it’s viable.
This is the kind of half-baked promotion that gave virtual-reality a bad name. It was clear that the CNN anchor was looking at thin air and that the effect was created in the same way that movie fx track camera position to super-impose digital components. They did the same thing with the virtual house of representatives but didn’t call that a hologram. Given that they only showed 2 angles of the person, it also seems like it was a waste of cameras too. The use of the word hologram was quite irresponsible.