Matt Buck's Hack Cartoons

12th November 2007

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

This picture of a journalism college class from the University of Missouri is sort of wonderful and sort of terrifying, all at the same time. It's certainly a testament to the power of effective brand marketing. A hat-tip to the Silicon Valley Sleuth.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

A drawing about the use of increasing use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) inside the NHS.

There's an elegant review at the Nether-World blog of Taking Liberties, a new film about some very serious changes the government have made in UK law. These effect every person in the country, negatively in my opinion. Unfortunately, the film, unlike the laws, is a very limited release but hopefully it will soon be due for a DVD release.

The drawing was recently commissioned by Computing newspaper.

Oh, the frustrations of technology...

British Airways are running a green audit for their information management team.
[Story from Computing newspaper]

Here is a brief and slightly belated, visual report on a very interesting evening at the Telegraph Media Group. It was a meeting arranged by members of the old media, who are very interested in the opportunities presented by the new. Kudos to all who arranged and attended, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The changes to the industry and the way it has operated are going to be huge.

The gag above owes much to the great British cartoonist Larry - Terence Parkes - who had a wonderful and extremely long-running series of visual jokes based on the statues made by Auguste Rodin. Sadly, Larry died a few years back, but there will be a pint or two sunk in memory of this brilliant craftsman at the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival at which I'll be appearing later this week.

The well-intentioned arguments for attempting to regulate the web are daft.

There's a great fear in some news businesses and they aren't willing to accept both the good and the bad about human behaviour and favoured methods of communication.

Amid all the brouhaha about web 2.0, the future of journalism and suchlike, it's important to try and remember the important bit. Machines are only operated by humans - and we interact with technology in very predictable ways.

I was reminded of this by a friend who I'd pestered with another attempt at interactive cartoon animation. In return, he sent me a marvellous link to an online museum of lost interactivity. The fascination is in examining the past use of technology and entertainment to see how the future might run.

When you actually look at a 1920 acoustograph you begin to see the old point. Nothng is new under the sun.

You might call this excellent site - analysis, research or even fact-based journalism, all of which seem so unfashionable in the media at present.

Whatever, it's a pleasure.

Kudos to the students doing Interactive Media Design at Dundee for the museum - and a grateful hat-tip to Mark Crail, who supplied the information. Thanks Mark.


Museum of lost interactions
Moli
Mark Crail
Chartist Ancestors

I learned a new piece of jargon at one of my workplaces this week - multi-sourcing. It means outsourcing or offshoring jobs to more than just one supplier. This is because business has started to hear the customer noise about poor service from the huge long-term deals it has been signing in the past few years. It made for a nice reinterpretation joke.