Esquire magazine’s e-ink cover

To celebrate their 75th birthday, the October cover of Esquire magazine features an ‘e-ink’ cover created by E Ink, an American company founded in 1997 based on research started at the MIT Media .

The Esquire cover is pretty basic from a functionality perspective, simply flashing a message exclaiming ‘the 21st Century Begins Now’ on the cover and an animated ad inside. There doesn’t appear to be any interactivity at all. It’s bit of a ‘look what we can do’ gag as opposed to actually advancing magazine publication beyond what they were doing 150 years ago.

This throws up an interesting debate about the future of print vs. the web and how much people still like to read a physical object or whether they prefer the interactivity of the web. Think Amazon’s Kindle (also an E Ink product) or the Plastic Logic Reader.

Sadly it’s in the US only, but judging by the logistics involved (refrigerated shipping!) I’m not surprised.

Modernista – aggregation in the extreme

Whilst browsing Business Week’s Best and Worst of the Web this morning there was one particular site which really struck me as something new.

We’ve all been using sites such as flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us for a while now to host our portfolios. I myself have a bunch of (badly organised) stuff on flickr which, somehow, persuaded my current employer to give me the gig. Having a blog or one-page portfolio site with links or aggregations of all these things is one thing. Overlaying your site over the rest of the web and navigating between the relevant pages is something totally different.

If I visit the site of Boston-based ad agency Modernista I am confronted with their wikipedia entry but overlaid with a small navigation in the top left corner. Using their navigation you skip to their ads on YouTube, their print work on flickr and their digital work linked from del.icio.us. What they’ve effectively done is ‘brand’ each of the sites with their own little device. This removes the age-old tyranny of the agency having old/outdated/stale site content.

I love this. It may be a bit gimmicky. It may have been done before, but never as effectively and elegantly. In fact, I’ll stop trying to explain it, go and have a look for yourselves.

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Oh no! I haven’t posted for weeks. How bad am I… My blog will have lost ‘Google juice’ (whatever that is), my technorati rating will have dropped through the floor. Whatever! I have a feast of things to come. Sometimes these things just take time.