March 2012

[YouTube]

In this short documentary, PBS explains animated GIFs in a way that makes you never want to make or look at one again.

It's the usual narrative: GIFs were web 1.0, then they went away (except they didn't), embraced by young people around '07 (right when everyone moved to Facebook, which didn't allow GIFs), then movie clips on tumblr, then ART (cinemagraphs).

No true GIF artistes could be found for an interview because they're all semi-anonymous, so PBS used the cast of Ace of Cakes.

The pretensions of calling GIFs "cinemagraphs" have been much lampooned (Paddy Johnson dubbed them "hair GIFs") but the Net is so vast none of the smirks made it to the PBS home office.

Was writing down phrases as I watched:

"Beyond the limits of the filename"
"You have... the glitch art..."
"It makes you so cool."
Fashion Jifs!
"It's about doing the next thing in technology."
"It allows a moment to live on."
"We see [cinemagraphs] as an evolution of photography."
"Essentially something you've never seen before" (accompanied by meaningful nod).

Fortunately some YouTube commenters are helping to straighten out this mess:

*cough* 4chan. Also, Unisys' snit when it tried to extract money from the patent on LZW compression, used in the GIF format, slowed uptake.

and

"Jif" is a peanut butter brand.

and

Sorry folks, but the correct pronunciation has always been GIF as in Growl or Goon or Ground or Guess or Gimmick, etc. No 'Jif'.

I only know one hard-shell GIF maker who calls them Jifs -- he goes by the pronunciation favored by, well, the inventor of the GIF but "the street" overran that long ago.

hat tip lh - ongoing edits - the horror

Update: PBS or PBS contractor.

From a comment thread about the death of Andrew Breitbart on a site that didn't like him:

You’re only supposed to say good things about the dead. He’s dead...good.

Tried to filter out consciousness of the deceased's name and presence during his lifetime but it was hard due to his self-promotional relentlessness. A few items that got past the filter:

--He promoted videos unflattering to the Obama administration and a community organizing group that were revealed to be fake, yet he suffered no shame or loss of status in the media

--he had strange ideas (projected sexual fantasies) about a certain left-leaning, authentic grassroots organization

--he was a "hit man" for a fake grassroots organization of the right funded by a couple of billionaires who don't like having their astroturfing exposed

--I saw him shouting on TV at newscaster Cenk Ungyur, not letting Ungyur get a word in, and he seemed like the classic loud drunk in a bar

--Despite all this, if you live in LA (his home town) and write for the Huffington Post you had to say he was "basically a good man" and "had his flaws." HuffPo commenters who said otherwise were reportedly censored.

Based on these few nuggets, it seems a little bit of poison left our planet last week. America constantly enables Joe McCarthy-like bullies to dominate public life and unlike McCarthy most don't get their comeuppance; the only way to be rid of them is for them to implode.

Back during some argument we were having about social media, someone lumped Word Press in with Blogger and similar mass hosting sites. This just seemed ignorant but it turns out (d'oh) that there is a WordPress.com which does hosting. Many blogs on the internet, however (including this one) use software provided by WordPress.org, which is not a host. According to WordPress.com's "about" page, the dotcom version was launched by some of the folks involved with WordPress who thought they'd confuse everyone by keeping that name (actually they didn't say that last part).

The point being, someone using Word Press software is quite likely a self-hosting "indie" who is responsible for his/her own domain and basic admin tasks such as keeping the site free of malware. It's not the same as working in what Dave Winer called the "corporate blog silos," where a balance must be maintained between complying with the silo's rules and being freed of administrative headaches. This is no diss against people who work in a mass-hosting environment (well, maybe a little, depending on which one) but an attempt to clarify this blog's niche in the new media ecosystem.

Snobbery is what indie bloggers have etc