The Vostok blog

Gary Hustwit, who directed the great film Helvetica and the not-so-great-for-me Objectified, is about to close his movie trilogy with Urbanized. In his own words:

The third documentary in this trilogy is about the design of cities. Urbanized looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design, featuring some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.

Hooray! We just got our copy of Designing Obama, a project that came out from Kickstarter in which we appear as Silver contributors, and it really is a great book. Here it is

A videosummary of all the projects resulted from Desafío Abredatos 2010 (yeah, that 48h hackathon with public data):

PS: We have good news on that. Wait until tomorrow, would you?

Via Robert Andrews:

The Financial Times is amongst those seriously preparing to switch off printing presses, parent group Pearson’s director of global content standards Madi Solomon told me during a panel at the E-Publishing Innovation Forum in London on Tuesday…

Solomon says the FT is committing to “less print” and says the FT sees a five-year trajectory for having exited print in substantial part. “They’re not saying that, by five years, they’ll completely stop it, but they do see that the sunset is going to be in about five years for them.”

Now, let’s try not to get all excited.

Until newspapers come up with a simple and efficient design for their websites we’re far from achieving what the print page did for over 400 years.

A couple of days ago Mark Mackay wrote post about the loss of quality and rigor of Spanish photojournalism, specifically at El Mundo, one of the main newspapers. The article (in Spanish), titled La lamentable situación del fotoperiodismo en El Mundo, is not a rant but a conclusion based on evidence. Worth reading if you care not just about form but also content in Spanish journalism.

We invited Aitor García and Roberto Salicio for a chat a couple of days ago. These guys have lately been up to some serious business with AbreDatos: a 48-hour contest they launched to gather new and interesting ideas to digest raw government data. The winners will soon be announced. Here’s an excerpt of that conversation:

The idea behind open data is that of accountability, enabling a system to work for it’s people and not the other way around. In the U.S. the wheel has already began to turn, initiatives such as the Obama’s administration Data.gov or a society that finds concepts such as democratizing data and e-government more and more familiar, are all important steps towards the right direction.

In Spain the wheel is turning a bit more slowly, but turning nevertheless.  The people behind AbreDatos and all of those who’ve participated are leading the way.

This is an amazing and rather critic infography about Japan made by Kenichi Tanaka. Even though everything said is true, we still love Japan. Here’s the vid:

(via Miguel Sabel’s blog)

Today we played around with Google Insights. We started out by searching ‘sex‘ (of course) and discover that Vietnam and Eritrea are the countries most obsessed about it. ‘Free sex’ is the most sex-related search, and here we stopped our investigation.

We went on searching for terms that make a real impact in our personal lives: zombies vs vampires, unicycle vs spacecraft, palin vs obama, etc. We wrapped it up with a name search, and finally… Maria wins! (thanks to Brazil, wtf).

We end up searching war vs love, and we find out our next project, Okamore, will be successful

Craig Ferguson on how youngsters ended up being the main target of marketers and all the collateral damage (funny as hell):

(seen at feroxlogos)

If you are in Madrid tomorrow you may want to attend the presentation of El Cosmonauta (The Cosmonaut – Kokmohabt) at Medialab Prado. Nicolás Alcalá and the guys from Riot Cinema will be explaining their project of filming an amazing science fiction movie applying the principles of Creative Commons and crowdfunding.

When: Thursday April 23th, 19:30h.
Where: Medialab-Prado. Plaza de las Letras, C/ Alameda, 15 · Madrid (map)

As you may know, Vostok is pretty involved in this initiative which we mentione a few posts earlier. We hope you find it as exciting as we do.