apr 11
2005

man date

NON-TRENDS

Yes, I realize it's a little silly to show up here at the beginning of every week to watch me get upset about the lead story on the NYT Styles section. But c'mon, the man date? Dear New York Media, why must you write trite trend pieces that cause the rest of us to consider molotov cocktailing Michael's?

MARKETING

Found on eBay: Scream Advertising. (Via BizarreBids.com, a good resource for strange eBay items.)

NYT Mag's cover story, "Our Ratings, Ourselves", tells the suprisingly fascinating story of the Portable People Meter -- a device that records all the media you've consumed in a day for marketing purposes. Pioneered by Arbitron and implemented by Nielsen, the PPM, which is about the size of a pager, accomplishes this by having all media encoded with an audio watermark. A broad range of other topics covered in the long piece: personal media device consumption, the arcane life of Nielsen labs, the shift from active to passive measurement, cable box innnovations, and direct measurement of advertising success. Two related items:
CJR asks Can Nielsen Keep up with the Way America Watches?
NPR's Bob Garfield foresees the Impending Period of Transitional Chaos for Media.

MEDIA

Fun idea: ask four people -- Lizz Winstead (co-creator of The Daily Show), Don Hewitt (founder of 60 Minutes), Mark Burnett (creator Survivor and The Apprentice), Al Primo (creator of Eyewitness News) -- how to reinvent CBS's evening news. The results are chaotic. (Reminds me of the time Wired asked for Google redesigns, and the results were a mess.)

MUSIC VIDEOS

I pretty much never have to link to a music video again after looking at this page.

BitTorrent link for the newest Daft Punk video of "Human After All."

IDEAS

William Safire's critique of privacy is a good place to jump into understanding ChoicePoint and other nefarious data-collection agencies. Sample quote: "The first civil-liberty fire wall to fall was the one within government that separated the domestic security powers of the F.B.I. from the more intrusive foreign surveillance powers of the C.I.A... But the second fire wall crumbled with far less public notice or approval: that was the separation between law enforcement recordkeeping and commercial market research."

CONSUMPTION

Fake bags become a brand unto themselves.

BLOGS

Google Sightseeing.

Kottke gives book-length update on his blogging micropatronage.

MUSIC

Slint in The New Yorker.

TECH

NYT asks "Will the Next Version of Windows Be Worth the Wait?"

LOCAL

Varsity what? Still closed.

I read every word of the Strib's multi-story Walker spread, but can't say it told me a thing. The online audio slideshow is a bit better though.

Huh, did you know that City Pages owns a local adult website, TC Uncovered (nsfw). The meta keywords include "escorts" and "domination," and there's employment and personals sections. Naughty.




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