I met Shilpi Gupta over at the Sundance HQ at the festival two weeks ago. After winning a Jury Prize for her short she got this write up in the SFGATE. She also has a bunch of (long) comments comming in over at the origional post.

When Shilpi Gupta didn’t receive an honorable mention at the Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony a week ago, she was disappointed. But moments later, the first-time filmmaker found herself on stage, behind the podium. Never mind an honorable mention she’d won the Jury Prize. Gupta’s 24-minute documentary, “When the Storm Came,” tied for top honors in the short filmmaking category, besting 82 films.

“I was so adamant that a documentary wouldn’t win,” the 26-year-old says a few days later at a cafe near her Berkeley home. “I never expected even to be at Sundance, much less to win.”

Sean Bonner has joined us today as the official blogger of The Unofficial Apple Weblog. You probably know Sean from his blog, Blogging.LA or sixspace.com. We’re psyched to have him on board.

Of course, we’re looking to make the Apple blog a group blog, so if you’ve got what it takes let us know.

best Jason & Brian

Here is an interesting film linked to from the famous Boingboing.net:

Steve Seid, Video Curator for Pacific Film Archive and Peter Conheim of Negativland present a finely tuned montage of egregious product placement shots, drawing on 70 filmsremoving the gratuitous and unnecessary plots and leaving behind just the exhilarating core of consumerism.

Commercial cinema is becoming just that, a commercialninety minutes of seamless advertising, corralling all artistry within the comfy confines of the saleable. In years past, the propmaster, like Wile E. Coyote, had a pantry filled with generic products: Acme beer, Acme cereal, or Acme explosives. Later, product placement infiltrated the Dream Factory with an array of lovely goods and foodstuffssneaky salutations to the merchandised environment. Now Product Placements surface in forms more numerous than flavors at a Baskin-Robbins: insinuated into dialogue, thrown front and center like loss leaders, even engulfing entire features until they become little more than cross-promotions for toy manufacturers. That most forward-thinking of films, Minority Report, heightened the practice with its talking Armani billboards and customer-friendly Gap, raking in a cool twenty-five million in the process. Value-Added Cinema offers up the stuff dreams are made of.

Slashdot covers this interesting tidbit on the value Googling your dates. Speaking of which, why doesn’t Google have a dating site yet? (Perhaps their “I’m feeling lucky” button is them tipping their cards?)

pgrote writes “So you’re a guy on the run – you decide to switch towns, put down some roots and start dating again. But if your special new friend happens to be someone who checks her potential dates by searching on Google, you’re in trouble. Seems that LaShawn Pettus-Brown was caught by his date’s discovery of him on an FBI site of fugitives, even after local Cincinnati news media couldn’t find him. Score one for the Internet.”

From Blogopoly comes this question: What if Google didn’t like Blogs?

Google likes Blogs. Blogs do well in Search Results Listings on Google. This is because Blogs contain fresh content and are richly interlinked, despite their relatively small audiences. Some would go so far as to say that Google over-represents Blogs. I personally don’t think Google over-represents blogs, blogs just happen to adhere to the formula for a popular webpage. Regardless, Blogs are a great way to increase search rankings for your site on Google, and thus Google is a great tool for increasing the reach and visibility of your blog. What if Google didn’t like Blogs? read on…

I wonder if Google taking down Booble means they are going to do their own adult search engine? Not really necessary considering Google is making a ton of money off of porn today.

The adult search site says Google sent it an e-mail that says in part, “This Domain Name is confusingly similar to the famous GOOGLE trademark. Your Web site is a pornographic Web site. Your Web site improperly duplicates the distinctive and proprietary overall look and feel of Google’s Web site.” The message also disputes that Booble.com is a parody because it does not create a composition that comments on the original.

“The Google demand letter as reproduced on the Booble site states a plausible argument as to why it is not a permissible parody,” said Martin Schwimmer, a Mount Pleasant, N.Y. attorney specializing in trademark and domain name law. A parody comments on the entity it is satirizing, Schwimmer said, but Booble in general does not do so. The one parody element Schwimmer noted is the bar beneath the search box, seemingly a takeoff on Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” bar. The Booble version has various messages including “I’m feeling confused.”

It seems some people can’t seem to find the RSS reader in My Yahoo. Here is a one click way to add it:

http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss

It’s still very new, but www.2rss.com has lists of feeds, software, scripts, articles and all the rest.

This is insane.

Word is spreading (Silicon quoting The Times here) that Google may postpone their IPO. This is clearly positioning by Schmidt. If I had a nickel for every company that was planning to go public while the CEO played it down I’d have, well, like a couple of bucks.

Google is reported to be having second thoughts about its $16bn flotation in the spring because of concerns that market conditions are not yet right. If true, the delay or even postponement of the hotly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) will be a blow to the tech industry, which is pinning its hopes on the Google flotation signalling a turnaround in fortunes.

But, according to a report in The Times, Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt is prepared to wait until the right moment to go public. In a round of private meetings with business leaders in London, Schmidt said Google is in no rush to float because its cash position is so strong. “An IPO is not on my agenda right now,” Schmidt said, according to the paper.

The reason behind Schmidt’s change of heart is reportedly advice to delay the float from investment banksthat claim the tech market will continue its rise. Richard Holway, director at market analyst firm Ovum Holway, disagreed with the assertion that tech stocks are on the up.