I understand that the movie industry is trying to find whatever they can to both increasing the number of people going to the movies as well as a way to try and stop movie piracy but this idea of counting on 3D movies to save their asses is not going to be their holy grail.

It’s not so much that movies currently in production are getting a 3D make-over or that any new movie in the pipeline is being rewritten to become a 3D movie but apparently movie companies are going back to the vault to re-release 3D versions of old movies.

I get that Avatar has prompted everyone to rethink their opinions about 3D movies but that doesn’t mean that the same process will work for future, current or past movies. As Alex Billington wrote in a post over at FirstShowing.com about this threatening trend

What would James Cameron think about all of this? We know that he doesn’t like converting live-action movies shot on regular cameras to 3D. Late last year, he publicly criticized Tim Burton for doing this with Alice on Wonderland, saying that it “doesn’t make any sense to shoot in 2D and convert to 3D.” So although it’s his beautiful movie Avatar that is causing Hollywood to go 3D crazy, I have a feeling that he wouldn’t be happy with everything they’re doing now. The studio execs are all hungry for 3D and are going to convert almost everything they can (including summer tentpoles). But will the 3D even look good? Probably not.

“You wouldn’t want to remake Star Wars, or Close Encounters, just because you can do it in 3D. It’s bad. Then you’re just back into terrible remakes of good movies,” producer Gavin Polone told The Wrap. Polone is developing the sequel to Zombieland, which as we already know will be in 3D as well. “Zombieland makes a lot of sense — it’s an action movie, there’s stuff coming at the camera. We’ll write to it. You don’t want to make a heavy drama that way.” Of course he’s right, but I don’t think that’s the concern. My concern is that Hollywood is going to convert every damn action movie to 3D just because Avatar made over $100 million.

This is another fine example of “just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should”.

Movies to go 3D in 2010 – gawd I hope not. is a post from: The Inquisitr

Where are your lawsuits now, music industry?

Piracy was down by roughly a third in the UK in 2008, but streaming was way up in the same period. Savvy UK teenagers are using sites like Pandora, YouTube, Grooveshark and Spotify to stream content and music to their computers in lieu of filesharing. One former pirate and current streamer told the Guardian:

“I didn’t even realise it was illegal for a long time, until I heard that the government were trying to stop it. That did put me off, but one of the big reasons I stopped doing it was because I would get viruses, more pop ups on my computer. While I was at uni I started listening to streamed music using MySpace. Bands would be friends with other bands and it was a great way of discovering new music. I don’t really feel the need to own all that music, I know it’s always there.”

The shift seems largely inspired not by some moral obligation to maintain music industry profits, but rather, sheer convenience. As has been shouted at the music industry time and again, the business models that will flourish alongside technology are those that offer convenience and aren’t ripping consumers off left, right and center.

It seems that the music industry can accept that the entire revenue generating model has changed and change with it, using tangible merchandise like tour tickets, memorabilia and the like to boost profits alongside ad-supported streaming. Or they can continue to behave like litigious buggy-whip factories and keep trying to circumvent technologies that bring fans to music most efficiently. Which do you think it will be?

Piracy down, streaming up in the UK is a post from: The Inquisitr

As the news hit the web that Michael Jackson had died there was such a spike in traffic right across the web that Google thought there was an attack taking place against its service. Even here at The Inquisitr we experienced load problems as our team quickly tried to keep our readers abreast of what was happening.

However cnet News has confirmed that Goggle did indeed think it was being attacked

Google has confirmed that the surge of Michael Jackson-related searches on Google News Thursday was first interpreted as an attack on its service.

Google News was inaccessible for some people Thursday afternoon right as rumors of Jackson’s death began to circulate, replaced by an error message reading “We’re sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”

Of course, those queries were quite legitimate, as millions around the world searched for accurate information regarding Jackson following reports that he had suffered cardiac arrest. The spike in queries began at about 2:45 p.m. PDT Thursday, and Google thought the traffic was an attack for about 25 minutes before realizing what was going on

Source: cnet News :: Google thought Michael Jackson traffic was attack

And from the graph it looks like that even though traffic has quieted down somewhat it still is above the traffic before his death.

The day that Michael Jackson punked Google is a post from: The Inquisitr

Twitter is without any doubt the current darling of the Internet with number of users sitting at around the 6 million mark and growing. The numbers of course depend on who you listen to but that doesn’t change the fact that it looks like Twitter is here to stay. As with all services there will always be people who will love nothing better than to slice and dice any kind of data sets that can be derived from analyzing usage and traffic.

In the case of Twitter there is a big interest from PR companies such as Waggener Edstrom who monitors Twitter on behalf of its various client, but especially Microsoft. As result of this targeted need the folks at Waggener Edstrom have developed a piece of software called twendz which they use to monitor and analyze the Twittersphere.

What makes this really interesting though is that they are making the same tool they use available to everyone for free. The idea behind twendz as told to Mary Jo Foley by a company spokesperson

“Twendz marries twitter search with real-time sentiment analysis. twendz is able to effectively generalize the attitudes and feelings about a particular topic, product or brand as the conversation happens. So, for example, the latest top trend on twitter is about the new iPod Shuffle. twendz is able to tell you how people are feeling about the new iPod, and it can summarize those feelings and attitudes for you over time.”

Source: Mary Jo Foley – ZDNet

Now this could be kind of interesting to play around with .. definitely something to bookmark.

You to can be a Twitter trends analyst is a post from: The Inquisitr