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Riding the New Silk Road

nytimes.com

91–100 of 161 posts

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#92
post #16

It seems to me like we're finally witnessing the birth of a 21st century news paper. The New York times has always been well regarded for it's journalism. Now we're starting to see what can be accomplished when a credible journalism outfit is complemented by equally credible digital designers.

And yet, I can't see this being developed into something regular; I mean, artfully done as this is, eventually they're going to want to make money.

Why not? The NYT, through embracing digitization, has been able to maintain one of the largest subscriber bases in post-Internet newspapers. An increasing proportion of their revenue is coming from subscriptions instead of advertising - if they can develop the right tools, they can pump these out with relatively low cost.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#93

This is the first time I've seen gif-like videos used in a news article.

I do feel it's a bit distracting from the content for me; not every picture is gif-like, and I found myself scrolling to animated ones. I'd like to know how 'average' people would like the content presentation, from a reader standpoint, not a hacker standpoint.

I thought it was pretty tastefully done. It could certainly be abused as an effect, but overall I think this is what 'newspapers' are going to look like in the decades to come.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#95
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you being snarky? They were randomly greyed out and then just black for me.

I guess you did not notice the animated GIFs? Edit: or may be those are videos?

Video - it appears to be the simpleVideo library, located at https://github.com/markupboy/simpleVideo .

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#96
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're called http://www.reddit.com/r/cinemagraphs

Actually, they're just really nice high quality animated gifs (someone below analyzing the source states that they are actually video, which is possible). A cinemagraph is a still photo that has one (or few) moving parts of the image, typically in a near seamless loop. A cinemagraph is a bit more involved to create than a gif, requiring at least some basic compositing.

I'm being served h264 encoded HTML5 video embeds:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-ro...

The file size is 874k. If it were an animated gif of similar quality, the file size would be massive.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#97
It's a nice design but the article seems like a puff piece to me. Is this really the future of newspapers? Nice graphics combined with a folksy story about transportation trends in the shipping industry?

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#98
Pakistan and China are also planning a railway network between China's eastern provinces and sea port in Karachi. Coupled with the above, this can create rail routes between the Europe, east and the far east, i.e., India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore. Amazing.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#99

Wow, the presentation of the photos really made an impression on me -- it's just like Harry Potter. It's amazing that even after almost 10 years of YouTube, having video presented to you in a slightly different way can give you a feeling that you're experiencing the future.

Agreed. I personally find very short high quality video with no sound to be more pleasurable to view than short videos with sound. The first few times I used Vine I had my phone on vibrate and thought it was so smart of them to not include sound. Of course Having sound is nice sometimes but when you're browsing a bunch of short videos I think the sound kind of ruins it. Not to mention it's harder to produce a quality 6 second video if you need to account for what the viewers are going to be hearing too.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#100
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> long-term economic and military decline of areas like the Middle East It put in motion the long-term decline of the Venetian Republic, as well, which made most of its money trading with the middle east. Interestingly enough, this also led the Venetians to focus a bit more on their land conquests in northern Italy, so there are some areas that received more attention at that point: swamps drained, villas built, and…

The decline of Venice has less to do with the decline of the Middle East and more to do with the rise of the Ottomans -- whose conquest of Constantinople shuttered a 2-century long dominion of the Bospherous (and the substantial trade thereof) by Venice. Additionally, Mongol incursions at the north end of the Black Sea made the increasingly-expensive trade with the Ottomans very expensive. On top of all that, the agi…

I just finished reading City of Fortune (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400068207/ref=pe_180000_31...), and this is closer to the truth - the rise of the Ottomans, the fact that Christian Europe couldn't get its act together after the debacle that was the 4th Crusade, etc etc - at one point, Venice was almost single-handedly fighting the Ottomans.
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