Big news today!

For the last year, we’ve had the great pleasure of working with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum to redesign their website. It didn’t take more than a second after meeting everyone at the Rock Hall to see that they are extremely passionate about the preservation of rock and roll.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum shares an immersive, interactive experience complete with sound, video, and lights, not to mention all kinds of stuff from your favorite rock and roll artists. The music nerd in all of us wet our collective pants over Mick Jagger’s Union Jack cape (from the Stones’ 81-82 world tour), the larger than life-size photography of Jimmy Page in mid-backbend, or the phone in the Annex’s John Lennon exhibit (if it rings, answer it. Trust me). Rick’s mind was blown by the hand written lyrics to “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division, and David Byrne’s original polaroid artwork for the cover of “More Songs About Buildings and Food.”

But all this needed some help translating to the web. That’s where we came to play.

The passion behind the “most powerful art form ever created,” to quote Greg Harris, Rock Hall’s VP of Development, wasn’t translating well in the online world. Static, informational pages dominated the landscape. Media types present in the offline experience were placed sporadically throughout the site. The mission of preservation and education of a legitimate art form wasn’t being fulfilled, and the story of rock wasn’t being told as it should be.

But today – no longer.

The experience design of the new RockHall.com shifts the focus of the site to the content that makes the Museum unique, both in the educational, historically oriented content we create, as well as the information about the museum and its programs. The Rock Hall is actively creating new educational programs, events, exhibits (and so much more), and we needed to capture and translate that online.

The best things come in eights. Hotdog rolls. Octopus legs. Sides of an octagon. Pizza slices. Cheese wedges. Loopwheeler hoodies per day. What? Oh yes…Only eight loopwheeler hoodies are made each day. Thus is the allure of the AW77 Loopwheeler, the star of the Nike Sportswear line. And now, Nike wants everyone to know just how much they care about these hoodies and how they have perfected them since their initial design in 1977. The same year that Elvis performed his last-ever concert. Coincidence? Yes, completely.

Enter AW77 Stories, our new site for NSW in conjunction with Vice. London stories serves dual purpose, much like swiffers. It showcases the AW77 along with several other products from the NSW line in situ. All products are modeled on subjects that live in a giant, interactive panorama. Further inspection unveils some beautiful shots of the products awesome details. We all really dug the two-color pocket zips.

The site also showcases several London influencers, curated and shot by Vice.

You know that Red Bull makes an energy drink. You may even know that Red Bull puts on those wild events where people drive shit off a dock into water. BUT did you know that Red Bull invented it’s own sport (Red Bull Air Race) or a helicopter that can do a back flip? Has two Formula 1 teams? Hosts a Cliff Diving world series? Could definitely take your dad in a fight? Throws the biggest world wide break dance competition? Made downhill full contact ice hockey racing a real thing? Probably not.

That was the problem for Red Bull online: diffused presence, minimal cross-pollination of their awesome properties, poor search, and no clean way to show off and share their sickness. The truth is, Red Bull is everywhere, and they wanted to show everyone who has ever taken a sip of their magical beverage what they mean by “Red Bull Gives You Wings”.

We spent the last few months working with Red Bull and just launched the new Redbull.com! It’s pretty fabulous really. We took all their different properties across the globe, housed them within one awesome CMS, made the site content driven, and got out of the way of all the sick content that you really want to see. Oh yeah, and it’s built in HTML (unlike their previous sites that had heavy use of Flash) so it’s now search friendly and easily shareable and trackable. Bitchin, right?

Take a look at the homepage. It’s built to be modular and highlight the best of the best. It even has a feed that is sortable by media type.

As a result, my posts may be numerous, terse, nonsensical and/or random. Also, since I’m usually not using Tumblr itself to “reblog” content, items may not always properly attribute a source, but I’ll do my best to resolve that where it seems warranted. Otherwise it’s probably safe to assume that anything awesome or funny comes from Benjamin, Rick, Noah or some other Barbarian, and anything transit-related comes from Streetsblog.

Sorry in advance for the additional clutter. But hey, if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, right?

Really, required viewing.

So, as some of you may have heard, the Google Books Settlement has begun and they have created a website for authors or heirs of authors to claim their books.

I had noticed a while ago that Google Books had indexed several of my Grandfather’s works through the various anthologies he was in in the 50’s and 60’s. My grandfather, for those of you who don’t know, was a fiction writer for the Saturday Evening Post and whatnot. He died a few years ago, and was a sort of a comedic Jack London writing humorous short stories about life on the Alaskan Frontier. His most successful work, Backward Boy was anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Literature Short Stories and appears in several short story compilations by Random House. That are now all out of print. One Google Book scan of Backward Boy can be found here

So, I went through the Google Book Search Settlement site and claimed an “insert” – what they call a copyrighted short story, etc. And now my family will get 60% of any ad royalties and a $15 check or something like that. Kind of cool!

My grandfather’s case is further complicated by the extensive use of pseudonyms – Garfield Scrog being the only one I have, thus far, definitively identified. It’s gonna be a pain in the ass to find them all, and I’m curious to see if Google eventually thinks I’m sort of spammer or not an heir but a publisher or something as I claim works by 10-12 authors. But so far, all Garfield Scrog has up on Google Book Search is an article he wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 1962 So no worries just yet.

The site itself was a little counterintuitive at first – I imagine many authors and heirs are going to have a hard time figuring it out. But once you get the terminology and it’s site philosophy, it kind of makes sense. I can’t help but wonder if the site is intentionally obfuscating to newbies. I’m a hard core web user and it took me three valiant attempts over three weeks to claim our works.

Anyway, it is exciting! And I will let you know if we ever get a check. I haven’t seen any other blog posts from people actually going through the process, and though it’s probably only interesting to a few people, I do think it’s setting some interesting precedents for the payment of content creators on the web.

Speaking of transparency: Being the nerd that I am, I was fascinated by Netflix’s recent blog post about the nitty-gritty of the encoding process for their “Watch Instantly” streaming service. Of particular interest to me as a Mac user was the amount of effort they’ve had to put into switching to Silverlight—basically re-encoding every item in their library, much like YouTube did when they began supporting RTSP streaming on mobile devices. Of course, this transition also opens the door for the new Xbox streaming service, so maybe I shouldn’t feel so special, but it’s still quite a feat.

I’ve been trying out Netflix’s new Silverlight player at home and I’ve been very pleased with the results so far. The automatic bandwidth adjustment isn’t entirely seamless on my slow home connection, but I have to say that the frustration of the occasional “buffering” progress bar is far outweighed by the joy of being able to watch old History Channel documentaries and episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (ad-free!) on my Mac Mini at home. That plus terrestrial high-def TV makes it that much easier not to be a cable subscriber. Yay!

(By the way, in case you haven’t heard: If you’re a Netflix member who’s interested in joining the Silverlight beta program, you can opt in here.)

Andy Berndt at Google, good friend of ours, making some advertising for Burger King through Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy fame. The ads, created by Seth, will precede his Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, an interesting experiment in online syndication through Google AdSense. Instead of creating content for a website and driving people to that site to aggregate eyeballs and then sell media this “series” will be exported across the web via Google (and YouTube). I was always wondering how they would make decent money on this syndication but now it makes sense: relevant preroll. Nice.

Can’t wait to see how this plays out. I’m certain the ads will be funny, if nothing else.