Hope everybody is having a wonderful holiday season. Mine was a pretty successful one. Thanks to everyone who has been reading the site this past year, it is much appreciated. I am going to be taking the next couple days off to get some work done and do some relaxing, so I will be back soon. Happy New Year!
[Got some books for Christmas (above) that I will
soon be reviewing here on the blog.]
Several weeks ago the Christmas decorations were taken out of the attic.
The tree was put up. Christmas cards started coming in the mail.
We went to one of my friends christmas party.
My art teacher started playing Christmas music during class.
Snow has been falling. The menu for the twenty-fifth was planned.
It is time for the holiday season.
School ended this past Wednesday with a big holiday concert, school wide secret santa, and snow covering the ground. We went out to lunch to start of our next two weeks of freedom from school. Finally, time to get some stuff done. In these coming weeks I will be working on some final art work for my college portfolio, inviting some great artists to take part in Grab Bag Book, drawing a new series of type illustration, organizing and writing a new book, and just hanging out with family and friends during the holiday season.
Later on next week I will have some new content for the blog, including my review of Once, thoughts on playwriting, ideas for the future of storytelling, and more. So stay tuned, I would like to wish all of you Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!
For a little bit I have been considering why the internet isn’t doing what I wish it was. My frustration is broken down into two areas: how we interact and communicate with people and how we publish and consume information and stories.
People
It seems that all these different tools and sites are just making it harder to communicate with the people we care about.
Facebook is getting messed up. Beacon. Tons of apps on profiles.
Google Reader new social network doesn’t work well.
Open ID doesn’t do enough. (Though it is a good first step)
Facebook isn’t that open.
Email isn’t good enough anymore.
I think the main problem is that I can’t keep track and interact with all the people I need to and want to by using one application. Facebook works for friends, email for family, Twitter for others. This is a problem, I agree that social network portability is needed. Everybody has email, but that doesn’t mean everybody is going to get Facebook. Facebook is great and all, but it is still seen as a social network, and people use email for their business, family, private, and social life.
We need a system that allows us to control all of our sites, allow each site where we have information and content to interact with each other, and make it easier for people to find friends. Open ID is a great start, but it doesn’t solve this problem.
A new system needs to be made. A system that is simple, open, and not for profit. Take Open ID and add some features. Allow people to have a profile that lists all of their other sites, social network profiles, and online presences. Have a way for me to message people and indicate how we know each other. Add a life-stream where what people do online is presented in a stream of information. Just make it so that people can track their friends and see what sites they are using. That’s it, nothing else.
Consuming and Publishing
While it easy to publish content and consume it online, it could be easier and more effective.
Feed readers are poorly designed.
Some blogs are no conversational enough and aren’t that authentic
Passing content around and re-publishing is fine, but making original content is even better.
We need a new tool. It needs to allow us to publish any kind of content we want: photos, blog posts, videos, tweets, and more. Then based on the kind of content, we need to be able to consume it. Videos need special treatment, so design it so that different types of content are viewed properly. Make it easy to share with people and save items for later. Add filters and make it organized. Then use the new system for managing people on top of it all.
Anyways, looking toward the future of the internet…I think that we will see developments in online and mobile video this year, along with re-inventing the way stories are told online. And maybe we can even work on fixing some of the things this post talks about.
What do you think we should do to solve this problem and what do you seeing being the big developments this coming year?
These are just some first thoughts on the issue and might not be the best move for the internet community, let me know what you think.
Alright, so it has been a little quiet here on the blog. So, I thought I would give an overview of what has been going on for the past week. This is where I have been, what I have been doing, and more.
Last Thursday through Sunday (6th through 9th) eleven of my friends and I headed up to Boston for Harvard Model UN. This is a huge simulation of the United Nations with thousands of high school students from schools around the world. We are broken into committees that debate certain issues and each school has to represent a different countries’ views. It all took place in the Sheraton where the Prudential Center is. Some highlights from the trip include meeting with Shel Israel, eating pizza six times, dinner on Newbury Street, going over to Cambridge for a day, and making a video of the whole thing.
Then we had a week of school. We rang the bell for the Salvation Army. Friends starting getting into college, so congrats to all of them. I announced that my first book is being published. We had a snow day and a delay in the morning. And then the week ended with a Christmas party on Friday night.
On Saturday (yesterday), two friends and I headed down to New York City for the day. We went to see the tree, the Nike Store, the M&M store, the huge toy store, went out to lunch, then we went to see Spamalot at the Shubert Theater on Broadway.
That is about it. Only two and half more days of school left. And then it is time for Christmas. Hopefully I will be getting a good amount of stuff done in the coming weeks and I look forward to sharing all that with you.
I am very pleased to announce that F+W Publication’s HOW Books will be publishing Grab Bag Book. They are responsible for bringing us HOW, Print, and I.D. Magazine along with the HOW Design Conference and a range of other wonderful books and magazines. I started this project last spring when I came up with the idea to have a collaborative visual book that challenged artists to explore their creativity.
Each of the participating artists from around the world is randomly assigned a “creative task” which is something they normally don’t do, anything from photography to illustration to design. This random task is drawn from the “Grab Bag” and the artist is also able to submit a piece of their work that comes from their normal field of work.
It is a book about trying something new. It is about exploring your creativity and learning to do new things. It is about opening up to a new idea and gaining respect for it. It’s a book of visual creations by people from around the world that have come together through the exploration of new things to create something beautiful.
The book will feature 100 artists, be around 200 pages long, and will come out in Spring 2009. Each artists will have two images in the book (one of the creative task and one from there current field of work), a biography, and a short paragraph detailing their experience with the creative task.
There are many well know and upcoming artists from around the world who are taking part in the book. And I would like to thank them all! Stay tuned for more news.
And of course I would like to send my thanks and appreciation to HOW Books!
If you are interested in being part of the book please get in touch with me.
Send an email to ethanbodnar@gmail.com For more information and to see what artists are already taken part, please visit www.grabbagbook.com
About the Author
www.ethanbodnar.com
Ethan Bodnar is a creative individual, blogger, and entrepreneur who has connected with a variety of people around the world through his personal projects, collaborations, internships, conferences, and more. At the age of seventeen, he anticipates studying graphic design in college. He resides in the United States with his family.
About F+W Publications
www.fwpublications.com
Founded in the early 1900s, F+W is a publisher of special interest magazines and books in a broad variety of consumer enthusiast categories. The Company also operates book clubs, conferences, trade shows, Web sites and education programs, all focused on the same consumer hobbies and enthusiast subject areas where the magazines and book publishing programs specialize.