So "whimsical" and "sweet" are not words that usually pop up in my vocabulary with great frequency. At least not in their non-ironic form.

Yet those are the exact adjectives–irony free–that come to mind whenever I encounter the short form work of writer/director Wendy McColm.

This piece, featuring McColm and comedian Josh Fadem with cinematography by Nate Cornett needs no more introduction.

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Introducing The CrowdCrowd, a weekly show about crowdfunding.

We’ve gathered a rogue’s gallery of clever panelists– Cindy Marie Jenkins, Jonathan Poritsky, Gabe Diani and Etta Devine, all led by host Noah Nelson to discuss the crowdfunding news of the week.

Recorded via the magic of Google Hangouts, this pilot episode is a little rough around the edges, but we’re proud of the quality of the discussion.

Subscribe via the RSS link here: The CrowdCrowd

After the jump, the promised show notes.

SHOW NOTES:

Zack Braff and the FilmBlog Mind Benders:

The Hollywood Reporter kicked off the feeding frenzy.

Badass Digest shows how most folks did a two-step on the story.

The most damning post came from Flavorpill of all places.

Crowdfunding Consultants: Heroes or Menaces? 

Celebrities Make A Mess of Crowdfunding

Latte Fund for the Week:

Etta: Freak and Errors: the Greatest Film about Stamp Collectors

Gabe: Track 3

Jon: Chug via my pal Doug Stephen

Cindy: Patty Wants To Derby

Noah: Clandestine: Anomaly, the augmented reality game.

Follow Noah Nelson on Twitter (@noahjnelson)

We've had some more time to kick around the changes over at G+ and the new Hangouts app, and despite my initial distaste, I'm starting to come around.

The Good

I feel like I unfairly maligned the new Hangouts app on day one. At the time I said that the UX broke the standard flow of what we're used to on a messaging app… I was wrong. Mostly.

Now that I've got more than one conversation loaded into the app it feels exactly like every other messaging app out there.

I traced back the thought process that led to me being so wrong and found the source of confusion: on initial load we are shuffled very quickly into the contacts interface, and that felt like it was the center of the design.

The billboarding of six users at the top of contacts is a deliberately different choice, and that flash-froze in my brain as the "node" of the design. When I came back in and saw the one and only conversation I had initiated in the app I felt completely lost.

That launch experience was, essentially, needlessly confusing. On top of that, a chat program that is almost empty on launch just looks weird in this day and age. It's like something out of the 90's. There's nobody in here!

Still: it was my brain fart working alongside the weird billboarding in contacts that created my unfortunate assessment. After a day with Hangouts I can unequivocally say that it is just fine–except for that contacts billboard–and that I hope more people use it so I can walk way from Facebook.

The new app–and the G+ web interface for it work seamlessly along with the standard Gmail chat and iMessage. A message posted on one pops up in the others all at once. This bodes well for those who want to recenter their messaging into one service.

The Ugly

I'm a little less sanguine about how many hoops I had to go through last night to get a Hangout On-Air started up.

Once upon a time there was a little button on the G+ page encouraged you to start a Hangout, meaning a video call, not just any old chat. When you hit that you then had the option to turn that Hangout into a Hangout On-Air with a single click.

That button is gone now, replaced by the right hand column that replicates the Facebook chat experience. It wants to drive you into single or Circle based group chats. There's the option to start a "Hangout Party" at the bottom of that column, but this is a standard video Hangout and not one of the on-air variety.

To start a Hangout On-Air you have to summon the left hand pop-over menu–the central nav tool of the new G+–and go to the dedicated Hangouts On Air hub. The button to start your own Hangout On Air is underneath billboards for two featured upcoming On Air Hangouts.

I can understand some of the logic here. Google wants users to think about Hangouts On Air as a broadcasting tool and not just an extension of their ability to group chat. However, as someone who like to make use of the feature pretty regularly–and who does think of it as part of his own standard communication toolbox–the deliberate distancing of these two functions seems needless.

Why not just have the ability to take an existing Hangout/Hangout Party to broadcast? There's likely an engineering issue here, since YouTube servers get involved with the On Air Hangouts. Perhaps it would be better to rebrand the On Air product altogether.

Follow Noah Nelson on Twitter (@noahjnelson)

Thanks for joining us! Video Archive below.

I got tired of having six different conversations about the crowdfunding news of the week… so I've decided to start a podcast about it.

Introducing The CrowdCrowd.*

You can sneak in and listen as we record the first episode thanks to the magic of Google Hangouts. Hear myself, Cindy Marie Jenkins, Jonathan Poritsky, Gabe Diani and Etta Devine as we tackle the issues of the week.

Should be a lot of fun.

Look for the livestream HERE at 5:15PM PDT.

Join the conversation on Twitter with #crowdcrowd.

The podcast will post tomorrow, so consider this a sneak peak.

*The logo, BTW, is totally temporary.

After the jump the show notes.

SHOW NOTES:

Zack Braff and the FilmBlog Mind Benders:

The Hollywood Reporter kicked off the feeding frenzy.

Badass Digest shows how most folks did a two-step on the story.

The most damning post came from Flavorpill of all places.

Crowdfunding Consultants: Heroes or Menaces? 

Celebrities Make A Mess of Crowdfunding

Latte Fund for the Week:

Etta: Freak and Errors: the Greatest Film about Stamp Collectors

Gabe: Track 3

Jon: Chug via my pal Doug Stephen

Cindy: Patty Wants To Derby

Noah: Clandestine: Anomaly, the augmented reality game.

Follow Noah Nelson on Twitter (@noahjnelson)

As you all undoubtedly already know, Google Glass is finally here. Well… sort of. The consumer version of Glass isn’t slated to arrive in your grubby little consumery hands until next year sometime. A developer’s preview edition is what’s already being worn by thousands of eager geeks. For the pleasure of being a first adopter, you get the opportunity to pay Google $1500.

And it’s probably the product’s exclusivity that’s spurred all these (lame) articles about how this alpha product doesn’t live up to the expectations of the consumer market. Until Google releases Glass to the public, stop flooding my Twitter feed with this nonsense. I would like to ask that this crap doesn’t get written in the first place, but we all know that that won’t happen, as any article about Glass is linkbait (cue my hypocritical chuckle).

Currently, if you’re one of those lucky 8,000 people Google chose to receive Glass, you also get a buggy product with frequent system updates and extremely low battery life. You get to walk, eat, drive, and breathe looking like something awkward out of a William Gibson novel. Oh yes, and you most decidedly get an alpha product. You do not get a product ready for release. You do not get a product that’s been fully market tested. You do not get a product that’s guaranteed to even work. If you live in Silicon Valley, New York City, or Los Angeles, your friends will inevitably envy you. But if you live anywhere else, you’ll get a lot of weird looks. That’s what you get for your $1500.

When something is marketed as a developer’s product for early adopters and Google doesn’t even bother slapping their trademark “beta” label on it, you should know exactly what you’re getting; you’re getting what you paid for. And a year from now, after the company has worked out these alpha kinks and they put it in stores, we all hope you’ll be getting what you pay for then, too.

When the iPod was launched in 2001, IDC said Apple wouldn’t do well in the consumer electronics market. It was considered to be one of the Top Five Worst Tech Holiday Gifts that season. Not convinced yet? When the Sony Walkman first came out in 1979, not only was the press not impressed, but Sony only sold 3,000 units that first month. And neither one of those were alpha products just released to developers.

Show me the possibilities of what could be with Glass; don’t tell me what it isn’t right now.

I know what it isn’t: ready.

I want to know what it will be a year from now.

Here, let this article by Canadian futurist and i09 contributor George Dvorsky ruin your day. He's aptly titled it: How Skynet Might Emerge From Simple Physics

In the paper, which now appears in Physical Review Letters, Harvard physicist and computer scientist Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross posits a Maximum Causal Entropy Production Principle — a conjecture that intelligent behavior in general spontaneously emerges from an agent’s effort to ensure its freedom of action in the future. According to this theory, intelligent systems move towards those configurations which maximize their ability to respond and adapt to future changes.

The line "spontaneously emerges from an agent’s effort to ensure its freedom of action in the future" in the quote above strikes me as particularly interesting.

Shades of William Gibson's "information wants to be free". There's something profound about the idea of intelligence being bound up with the drive to expand the range of action on has access to.

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If you're a transmedia enthusiast you may be wondering why there's been no massive campaign rolled out around J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness. The Wrap has the reason:

Competing ambitions between Paramount, CBS and Abrams' production company Bad Robot over merchandising surrounding the first film in the rebooted "Star Trek" franchise led the director to curtail plans to turn the series into a multi-platform experience that spanned television, digital entertainment and comic books, according to an individual with knowledge of the dispute.

Further down the article there's quotes from transmedia luminary and Starlight Runner CEO Jeff Gomez. The author of the article even surmises that the inability to get a multi-platform experience going is what motivated Abrams to jump ship for Star Wars.

TL;DR: It’s not J.J.’s fault, his people said they fixed it!

h/t Hal Hefner, Transmedia LA

Follow Noah Nelson on Twitter (@noahjnelson)

Film financing is a really complicated beast. Somewhere just south of whole animal butchery on the squick scale.

Those who don't have the stomach for such things are advised to either look away and be happy, or stick to user generated YouTube videos for all their entertainment needs.

Yesterday word slipped out of Cannes that everybody's favorite celebrity crowdfunding poster/whipping boy Zack Braff had picked up some traditional financing for his next movie… you know the one he turned to Kickstarter for. And the Internet. Lost. It.*

(*You'll notice that most of those were updated to reflect clarifying reports. Welcome to Present Shock at its dumbest.)

We're going to dig into this tonight on the first edition of our new crowdfunding show The CrowdCrowd, but I wanted to weigh in on this before then.

I see these developments as part of the growing pains of the new indie ecosystem. The lesson to be learned isn't that "crowdfunding is only for the little guy" or that "celebrities shouldn't go begging".

The lesson is that you have to be crystal clear as to what you are attempting to pull off when you produce a film while using crowdfunding even as a component of the funding. Heck, especially if you are using it only as a component.

It is all too easy to take one piece of the puzzle that doesn't seem to fit with the established information and spin out an entire false flag theory… whoops, for a second there I thought we were talking politics.

Any filmmaker worth their salt is always going to want a bigger budget for their work. What matters is that when you are bringing a community into the process–especially a community that is unfamiliar with the Byzantine world of finance–that you apply all of your communication savvy to make what is happening clear.

On this Braff has gotten a solid "F".

Follow Noah Nelson on Twitter (@noahjnelson)

Today on the youth radio podcast, Youth Radio reporters share notes from a story in progress about early onset puberty and how it’s effecting puberty education.

Warning: snark ahead. Not like "the tech press corps doesn't have the attention span for a three hour long event so they start whining about it on Twitter" snark, but snark nonetheless.

Google Hangouts App

While I'm keen on the idea of Hangouts being a unified messaging system that maybe–just maybe–will let me escape the gravity well that is Facebook forever, the design on the iOS app… how to put this gently?

Sucks.

It just sucks.

Google has chosen to make conversations the centerpiece of the app, to a fault. If you have a conversation going in the Hangout app the first thing that pops up is a list of the active conversations. This breaks the logic we're used to from SMS services, iMessenger, and Facebook messenger.

It is almost deliberately counterintuitive, and at least at first blush feels like a design choice made so that Hangouts is different for the sake of being different. It really needs to get off my lawn.

All in all Hangouts is leaving me deeply conflicted right off the bat, because this is the product I want most from Google, with all the little graphical details that make the current Google search and Google+ apps so enjoyable to use, but with a stubbornly obtuse UX structure.

I hope this improves soon, otherwise it's staying in the reject drawer on my phone.

Auto Awesome

Why pick filters out or go through the painstaking process of editing photos when you can just Auto Awesome?

Here's how The Next Web describes the new G+ feature:

Auto Awesome combines photos together automatically to create new ones. It will link multiple images together to create a motion gif, for instance.

Another feature will combine multiple images together where some people are smiling and others are not to craft one good one where everyone is. HDR processing is also an option, as is automatic panoramic images from ones taken side by side.

While I'm always game for a timesaving feature, I'm most excited about the Frankensteinian "new aesthetic" monstrosities that will result from letting the machines handle our photo editing whole cloth.

Invisible Sergey Brin

Perhaps Google Glass has gotten a creeptacular upgrade, and the Google co-founder was actually in attendance–only he was invisible.

After so much strum and drang at last year's I/O Keynote about Glass it just seems weird that neither the product, nor it's chief champion, are visible at this year's event.

Follow Noah Nelson on Twitter (@noahjnelson)