I have a book coming out at the end of this month! If you once enjoyed this blog, you will likely find The Encyclopedia of Misinformation a delight. It was influenced greatly by blog culture of early '00s.|
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I have a book coming out at the end of this month! If you once enjoyed this blog, you will likely find The Encyclopedia of Misinformation a delight. It was influenced greatly by blog culture of early '00s.sat
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Netflix and Ch-Ch-Chilly tue
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Oh good, the login to the CMS I wrote in 2001 still works! Just a note -- I have been doing a series on Medium about art authenticity in the age of the copy. Here are all the links in one place:
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tv
If you're looking for something new from me, I've started a new site called VIEWSOURCE, where I write about one piece of video every day.
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tv
We're now two episodes into The Newsroom, HBO's newest entry in chatter-inducing Sunday programming. Reviews of the show have been brutal, but asking a media critic to judge this show is like asking a cannibal how his gallbladder tastes. Outside of media circles (amongst the vegans, to continue this overwrought metaphor), the show seems somewhat more widely appreciated. This phenomena fascinates me. We seem to have some sort of uncanny valley relationship to art. If we are extremely close to it -- if the subject matter is about us -- then it is very likely that we find the similarity ugly, a disfigured clone of ourselves. The entertainment landscape is littered with examples of subcultures (professions, geographies, lifestyles) disagreeing with how they are portrayed by mainstream art.1 It makes you wonder: When does a subculture actually ever like art about itself?2 The anxiety in appreciating art about oneself probably involves some deep Lacanian mirror stage shit. Or maybe it's dormroom pop psych: We are apprehensive about the shortcuts that art must take. We don't enjoy having our subcultures portrayed because it reduces ideas down to sketches, people down to characters. Local significance loses to storyline, depth loses to drama. So duh, of course we media people hate The Newsroom. It's characters don't act like our colleagues, it's fantasies aren't our realities. So what? Part of me wants to say, fuck it, that's our problem, not Sorkin's. But other times, I'm like, wait, that's fucking bullshit. I want to talk about the part that's bullshit. I worked in newsrooms for over 10 years, most of the time at websites attached to TV stations or networks. I've seen, and usually participated in, the creation of news around executions in Texas, riots in Seattle, hurricanes in Florida, and psychotic killing sprees in Virginia. What I offer here is not an artistic or moral assessment of The Newsroom. Despite having nuanced qualitative opinions about the show3, that's not what we'll be discussing here. Let's temporarily ignore the finer ethical and aesthetic points, which are usually finessed as blustery diatribes, and instead focus on what's believable. What's bullshit, and what's not? That eruption from Will McAvoy in the first scene. Yeah, this is kinda bullshit. It's easy to imagine an Olbermann-like figure doing this (actually, that's all he did), but it's pretty unimaginable for a Brian Williams or a Katie Couric. Or maybe our hero is supposed to be more like Dylan Rattigan or Rachel Maddow? Actually, who knows! The way this show blurs the monolithic network anchor with the opinionated cable host is precisely the kind of fake construction that feels like bullshit. Or as the greatest news anchor of our time would say, a great moment of truthiness. Having a blog. Not bullshit. Olbermann had one, Maddow has one, Brian Williams has a couple, Tucker Carlson has a whole goddamn site. Not knowing you have a blog. Complete bullshit. This portrait of social media ignorance would have been accurate 10 years ago, but television executives started to freak out about the internet a while ago. They've spent an immense amount of time catching up, so now they're better at Twitter than you. Walking into a newsroom and yelling "Punjab" to the Southeast Asian character that you know isn't named Punjab. This would never happen, even if your name is Sean Hannity. Bullshit. Calling out someone as a "sorority girl." Sensing we would deem this bullshit, Sorkin set out to prove it's not. Dating people you work with. Not bullshit. The only professionals who fuck each other more are actors. Arguing with people you date while you're working. Not bullshit. The only professionals who argue with each other more are politicians. The speech from an Executive Producer about fearing Halliburton and the lawsuit it would bring. Bullshit. I don't know a reporter who wouldn't love to catch Halliburton, Scientology, or whatever big scary corporate entity you name. The mere fact that Time-Warner-owned HBO aired this scene seems to completely undermine any truth it is seeking to reveal. Hiring a new Executive Producer without telling the anchor. I would say this is bullshit, but I've recently heard a story similar to this. Judgement: perhaps not bullshit. Running to your agent when the President of News hires an Executive Producer over the top of you. Yeah, they're prima donnas, so this could happen. Not necessarily bullshit. The ongoing debate between popularity and quality. This would never be said aloud. However, it subliminally infuses every newsroom decision. Pseudo-bullshit. Forgetting the name of your hot blonde assistant. If this show is actually modelled on Olbermann, then this is bullshit. He'd never forget that. Having a President of News who is drunk "most of the time" at work. Being a heavy drinker can still be romanticized within some media circles (especially if you hang out with bloggers), but being regularly drunk at work would simply not be permitted any more, at any level. Drink up, that's bullshit. Quoting Don Quixote. Bullshit. Quoting Man of La Mancha. Epic bullshit, fa la la la la. Vacationing in Saint Lucia with Erin Andrews. Questionable bullshit. Figuring out the oil spill that quickly. This is probably the single most annoying thing in the first episodes. If you remember the evolution of the oil spill story, it took weeks for scientists to figure out what our Happy Band of Googlers sleuthed out in a few hours. Complete media fantasy bullshit. An executive producer threatening an anchor with a fake on-air graphic seconds before going live. Reminiscent of both Broadcast News and Network, this nifty dramatic effect was as much bullshit then as it is now. Not knowing where your control room is. Crazy bullshit. FOX News hiring someone with three Mohammeds in his name. Pass. Sending an email that accidentally goes to 178,000 people. Yep, bullshit. Of course email groups like that exist, but they were introduced to corporations 10 years ago, not last year. So not only does everyone know how they work, but we all also know that not everyone has access to email all those lists. A reply-all snafu would have been less bullshitty. A fluff newsreader with a PhD in Economics from Duke and an adjunct professor at Columbia. Sure, this is supposed to be Erin Burnett, but still bullshit! She's barely old enough to have a PhD. The Three I's. That kind of bullshit would actually happen, so it's not bullshit. Minutes after delivering the sanctimonious Three I's, commenting on a reporters legs. B-------. The organization of this network. This is one of the more perplexing elements of the show. ACN is apparently a 24-hour cable news outlet, but this show gets the network treatment. Cable newsrooms are much more fluid than this show suggests, with more interaction of programming and personnel between shows. Hiding under a bed while your date fucks his ex-girlfriend. I have less expertise on this matter, so I'll let you call this one. So? Correlating quality with verisimilitude is always a dicey proposition4. But when a show places itself into history with real news events, and within a professional industry whose mandate is exposing truth, The Newsroom must be aware that it has put itself under the lens of realism's scrutiny. The Newsroom rubs so close to reality that it makes you wonder how Will McAvoy would feel about it. After a long walk, some nifty orchestration, and a verbose conclusion, he'd enter his closing judgement into the chryon: It's bullshit. Footnotes 1 For example, I lived in Fargo when the movie Fargo came out. To this day, the city has an extremely antagonistic relationship toward their portrayal as noble unsavages with snowboots. mon
ads
I'm Being Followed: How Google -- and 104 Other Companies -- Are Tracking Me on the Web. Just read it. It's great.
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film
This make-believe TED Talk from 2023, done in conjuncture with Ridley Scott's new film Prometheus, reminds me of EPIC.
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online
Compare: Gawker's story about Horse_ebooks and Shortformblog's story about reply girls. Once again, spammers are ahead of the curve in predicting the future of the internets: The Pseudo-Algorithmic Human!
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design
This is from a couple months ago, but I just found it now, and it's amazing:
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tv
In a recent episode of the WTF podcast, Bill Lawrence (the creator of Scrubs, Cougar Town, and Spin City) talks about how he hates the name of his show Cougar Town so much that he considered changing it this season. One of the main reasons he didn't is that DVRs aren't equipped to understand a name change, so the show would essentially lose any audience that had a season pass in TiVo.
Anyway, it got me thinking: Has there ever been a successful show that changed its name? mon
music
The weird personal thing for me about this clip of Chris Cornell performing "I Will Always Love You" is that I found it playing around with the YouTube app on my GoogleTV.
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tshirts
Remember Valleyschwag, the site that sent you a monthly package of promotional material from hot startups? The idea is back with Startup Threads Monthly, which sends you a monthly t-shirt from a startup. So far, it has included Boxee, Twilio, Reddit, and BreadPig.
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online
Rick says a bunch of interesting things in his new column about whether you need to a be highly networked individual to succeed online. I especially relish how he ties geography into the conversation, alluding to a midwestern startup.
And many, many more hyper-social New Yorkers and San Franciscans make successful startups than antisocial Midwesterners. Or even antisocial New Yorkers. These are things you can control. You can move to San Francisco. Better yet, you can move to New York. You can go to meetups. You can go to conferences. You can email investors. You can go to classes at General Assembly. It's in your control. Or, you can stay at home in the Midwest, reading TechCrunch and talking about how it's all rigged and an insiders game. This will frustrate my friends in Minneapolis -- those dozens of startups trying to compete at CoCo and other places. They're trying to create their own scene right now. Creative acts are becoming increasingly dependent on groups of people. Being part of a "scene" in music was undeniably important in the '80s and '90s, but now it's become as true for fashion, technology, theater, and nearly all creative arts. It's an interesting dilemma building a company in the midwest: Your success is as much a factor of your peers' success -- the community's success -- as it is the brilliance and execution of your idea. fri
media
I don't think I've ever worked with anyone who understands their audience more than Tavi. Here's a new interview where she describes who Rookie is for:
I keep just describing it as a "website for teenage girls," because I like to think it's not too niche, and I don't want to alienate anyone by saying it's for alternative girls or artsy girls or anything. At the same time, I mean, we don't speak for every girl, but we try to encourage girls to speak for themselves. Mostly we just try to avoid being condescending or making anyone feel like there's something wrong with them that they should be worrying about if they're not already. Or like we're teaching anyone how to be cool. I want people to know that they're already cool. Whatever they're into, that is enough. mon
online
Opposing visions of the gamification of the web from this morning:
Joseph Puopolo on Techcrunch: Gamification has become one of the hottest buzz words in the industry and is probably in the process of taking over a website or user experience near you. I surveyed the community services I frequent -- Metafilter, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, Mlkshk, Mixel. These services do present goals to their users and they have crafted a user experience that nudges them towards those goals -- but they do it without points, ranks and the other mechanisms and patterns advertised in the Techcrunch post above.... At some point people are going to wake up to the fact that the gamification industry is a scam. For sure, "visualizing success" is a major component of social sites, but there are still scant examples of successful sites with more game-like components like leaderboards and badges, despite the rampant startup growth. mon
msp
I was surprised to find out last night that Dan Wilson co-wrote Adele's "Someone Like You." If you're from the Upper Midwest, you immediately thought of Trip Shakespeare. Outside of that, the name might not sound familiar, though you definitely know "Closing Time," the 1998 omnipresent hit from his band Semisonic. According to a profile in today's Star-Tribune, Rick Rubin brought him in to write with Adele.
Wilson said the session commenced with Adele playing some YouTube clips of rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson, her latest favorite. "Then I went to the piano and she played guitar and we launched into writing. It was very natural and low-key. Take THAT, science. mon
sex
New research shows that online dating sites promising "matching algorithms" don't work: The Dubious Science of Online Dating. In other news, I just helped launch the new blog for How About We, a dating site that tosses out algorithms in favor of proposing date ideas.
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media
More proof that psychedelics are making a come-back: NYT profile Hamilton Morris, the host of "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" on Vice.
Mr. Morris has a grinning, laid-back persona, with an approach not dissimilar to Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo journalism. In person Mr. Morris, son of the filmmaker Errol Morris, is bookish and intense, speaking with a fastidious attention to word choice. sun
online
From an interview on ReadWriteWeb with Dens, this bit about the future of Foursquare:
The challenge isn't really that dissimilar than some of the growing pains and hazing that Twitter went through. For a long time, Twitter was "oh, it's just people tweeting what they had for lunch, or that they're going to the movies." That wasn't interesting for a lot of people. It is reminiscent of Fred Wilson's post from a couple months ago, Mocked and Misunderstood, where he posits that the most ridiculed services could be the most successful. It's an over-simplification (hello, ChatRoulette), but there's definitely something to this. sun
celeb
A reason to read the Stanford Law Review: Famous for Fifteen People. It involves a lawsuit against Facebook over whether broadcasting your Likes via Sponsored Stories is equivalent to a celebrity endorsement. The plaintiffs argue they are indeed famous to their friends. They lost, but the ruling has broad implications for the right to privacy, the legal notion of "newsworthiness," and what it means to be a public figure.
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music
When you read things like Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker, which uses psychomusicology to explain the popularity of Adele, do you end up liking the artist more or less?
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music
It seemed as though Die Antwoord would probably disappear after their last album, but they have mysteriously resurrected themselves in high fashion. In addition to that thrilling appearance on Letterman a couple nights ago, they've found their way into the Alexander Wang campaign:
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media
For those of you who like their David Carr served with a dash of sentimentality (like a Replacements ballad!), here ya go:
You can follow someone on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, quote or be quoted by them in a newspaper article, but until you taste their bread, you don't really know them. wed
books
best whisky board on pinterest by greg clayman. Perhaps this is the answer to my rhetorical question on Twitter:
So which of you will be the first to publish their Pinterest as a book? wed
sports
Three Super Bowl records set: Most Tweets Per Second (12,233), Most-Watched Show in TV History (111.3 million), and Most-Watched Online Single-Game Sports Event (2.1 million).
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politics
David Carr came out bullish on Buzzfeed, while Paul Carr rebuffs him. It's too early to tell what Buzzfeed will do, but I will say that Paul gets this part wrong:
[Peretti] is a career-long SEO guy whose entire news sense is based on what people are already searching for, or what they might be sharing on Facebook tomorrow tomorrow. The first half of that equation -- the SEO half -- is inherently opposed to breaking news. If something hasn't yet been reported, then no-one is searching for it. That's not true, and the best example of which is Kottke's subtle parody of HuffPo on Superbowl Sunday. tue
music
Sasha thinks that MIA not should have apologized for flipping the bird. I guess, sure? But that seems a particularly red shade of herring. As someone wrote on my Facebook wall when I asked "What exactly was she trying to say by flipping you off?":
That at the last instant, after making the song, being in the video, going through gigantic rehearsals, meeting with execs from the NFL and NBC, and Madonna's handlers, she felt she had to do something, anything in reaction to the massive, moneyed, orchestrated alternate really bubble she'd already bought into a thousand times over leading up to that moment. mon
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Early last year, I told Elizabeth Spiers that Felix Salmon had made a bet with John Carney: she would be fired from The Observer within a year. It didn't happen; Felix lost the bet, in somewhat grumpy prose.
All the interesting hires, the chatter about new properties, the return of the old tagline, the blog launches, the print format switch -- for the first time in a long time, The Observer has been fun to watch. I choose that infinitive carefully, because this is what Felix overlooked in the media parlor game: watching beats reading any day. mon
music
So, two questions:
1) Who exactly is MIA flipping off? It's you, right? 2) What exactly is she trying to say with this?
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music
In addition to Weekend Edition subtly asking for some slack for Lana Del Rey, Liz Phair also whips up an op-ed for WSJ.
Lana Del Rey is exactly what I was hoping to inspire when I took on the male rock establishment almost twenty years ago with my debut record, Exile In Guyville. In other SNL music act news, I think Bon Iver is the new Michael McDonald. sun
tech
Why L.A.'s Start-up Scene Beats All Others. The uber-argument in this one is that talent is easier to find, but there's also this bit:
There wasn't initially easy access to venture capital in L.A. and entrepreneurs had no choice but to build profitable business models from the start. The exactly opposite could also be argued -- that for L.A. to succeed it needs greater access to venture capital. But there's the start to some ideas in there. sun
online
The Death of the Cyberflaneur argues that the web once seemed a place for the anonymously strolling (not trolling) flaneur:
Transcending its original playful identity, it's no longer a place for strolling -- it's a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone "surfs" the Web anymore. The popularity of the "app paradigm," whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflanerie less likely. It then goes on to blame Facebook for much of this problem. sun
online
Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) Will Wright Is Back. Whah! “If we had that much situational awareness about you and at the same time we were building this very high-level map of the world, and I don’t just mean where Starbuck’s is, but all sorts of things like historical footnotes and people you might want to meet. I started thinking about games that we can build that would allow us to triangulate you in that space and build that deep situational awareness.” And maybe it includes a TV component! (His 2007 SXSW keynote is still my all-time favorite.) 2) Just.Me. Looks interesting, love the name. 3) Denton’s Memo. Okay, this commenting system (Pow-Wow) could be the real deal. However, I doubt that the product itself will be that revolutionary — I mean, how much can we do with comments? But the power will be in pairing it with an editorial agenda. Imagine if something like Reddit or Metafilter were more programmed, had the power of a media enterprise around it. 4) Newsright Launches. Sigh. These guys keep trying. 5) VYou 2.0. VYou comes out of Beta on Monday. fri
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Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) North Koreans weeping hysterically over the death of Kim Jong-il. THEY ALL DESERVE OSCARS. (This video will be a pervasive meme in 5… 4…) 2) WHERETHEFUCKSHOULDIGOFORDRINKS. (dot-com) 3) Distrust That Particular Flavor. William Gibson has a book of non-fiction coming out next month. 4) Rob Delaney’s new Comedy Central Show Using Twitter. Also, the design of those new FastCo pages! 5) Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works. mon
online
Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) The Spielberg Face. Once you’ve seen it, you can never not see it. 2) The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists. Yes. 3) WhoSay Strikes Deal With AP. The future is celebrities owning and distributing their own gossip. 4) Ebert’s Best Films of 2011. Someone kept Drive on their list! 5) Jack Shafer: Are you reading the best magazine in America? I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that Bloomberg Businessweek is my favorite magazine right now. (Also, props to Reuters for hiring Shafer and letting him write so glowingly about their primary competitor.) fri
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Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) 25 Most Viral People. (On the internet.) 2) VCs Predict What Will Happen In 2012. 3) CNN: A Social Media Addict Tries to Disconnect. Day 1: “I land at Antigua’s airport, where I’m greeted by warm sunshine, a long customs line and a man playing Bob Marley’s ‘Three Little Birds’ on a tin drum. All of these observations are ones I ache to tweet.” Hrrrrm. 4) The Death of Television. From Evan Shapiro of IFC, who is probably the smartest tv exec I’ve ever worked with. 5) SAY Media. For most of 2011, Aol was the most interesting company on the digital media scene — every week was a new product launch, a new purchase, a new scandal, a new reorg. For 2012, SAY Media could take its place. For several years, people in the industry have heard various rumors of a “blog rollup.” It’s never happened because most of the time these companies stall after buying one or two properties. But SAY Media is really giving it a go. Sure, xoJane hasn’t performed that well, and the mishap with Rookie didn’t help, but by most accounts Dogster is doing well, and snagging Frommer with its purchase of Read Write Web is tantalizing. (And the reported $5M price tag indicates they’re being tactical and might not burn out.) Now there’s rumors of an IPO, plus some chatter about a revved up CMS. You never would have guessed that the merger of a blog platform and a video ad network would lead to anything, but prepare to hear endless stories about it in 2012. thu
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1) VC Memes. Well. Done. 2) All the End Of Year Stuff At Pitchfork. 3) Biz Insider Launched an Advertising Vertical Last Week. Servicey. 5) P.R. Stunts in a Digital Era. “A lot of brands are seeing the value in a P.R. rep who has an online persona that can be used to magnify the brand message.” Some boner actually said that. wed
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Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) Klosterman on Tebow. The interesting thing here is that it seems to start as another analysis of hater culture, but then it does a few back-flips and turn-arounds and, oh christ, it's about faith! 2) WeedMaps Acquires Marijuana.com For $4.2 Million. You missed this breaking news over Thanksgiving. 3) The yearly Hood Internet dropped. 4) Pitchfork's Top Music Videos of 2011. Best year for the medium since the .90s? Sure, let's try out that idea. 5) Did You Read? This. Is. Amazing. mon
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Fifteen things that intrigue me right now: 1) You Say You Want a Devolution? Here's an interesting thesis from Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair: While there have been massive technological changes in the past 20 years, everything looks the same. That is, he suggests, if you looked at a random snapshot from 1991, the people and buildings and cultural objects would mostly look the same as today. So? Well, that certainly isn't true if you looked at 1931 to 1951 or 1951 to 1971. This is one of the broad cultural essays that "seems right" though I'm not sure why. 2) The .xxx top-level domain went live yesterday. You will know it when you see it. 3) Who's Afraid Of Lana Del Rey? I'm glad someone wrote this, but isn't the artifice of "authenticity" itself the bugbear to be slayed? 4) Fast Co Design. Fast Company has a design blog that tries "to bridge the fuzzy border between design and business." 5) New Walker Website. Waaaay back in the day, The Walker was one of the earliest organizations (and for sure, the first museum) to take up blogging, but the effort seemed to only get partial internal support. Last week, a site redesign revisited the idea of museum as a locus for content generation (or "idea hub"). Congrats, Schmelzer, nice work. (See also: The Atlantic and Artlog discuss the redesign.) 6) The Bitter Email Exchange between David Denby and Scott Rudin over the Review Embargo of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Rudin missed such a great opportunity to use a scathing Subject line! 7) Aaron Sorkin's New Project: Newsroom. People who say they aren't excited for this are lying. 8) Bjork's Favorite Recordings. 9) The Utne Reader to Leave Minneapolis. Sad. I used to have an office across the street from these guys in Loring Park. 10) JimRomenesko.com. Hello there, old timer! 11) Barney Frank's Best Insults. 12) Richard Lawson in Atlantic Wire. How fast did this become the best writing online? In just weeks, we've received thought pieces like When Fans Attack and movie reviews that read like the best of the New Yorker (so: Anthony Lane not David Denby), while still satisfying us in that off-hand impulsive bloggy way. (See also, this post on Gawker that isn't at all about Lawson but somehow the commenters turned it into a rally cry.) 13) The Trailer to Shame. 14) @FAKEGRIMLOCK. thu
media
Five things that intrigue me right now, which may or may not be “the future of content”: 1) Willie Nelson covered Coldplay’s “The Scientist” for a Chipotle commercial. All those proper nouns in the same sentence! 2) Serious Business. That’s Alex Blagg’s new “intertainment firm.” (Oh how soon they become what they parody!) His partners include a former UTA agent. Their first video is Drive-Thru, an 84% funny parody of Drive that is an Arby’s commercial. 3) dumbdumb. Will Arnett & Jason Bateman made a viral video product placement company! Here’s the reel. Is FIAT Roadtrip and Denny’s: Always Open our future? 4) A supercut of all the product placements in Lady Gaga videos. It has only 946 views. Let’s make this famous! 5) The Greatest Movie Ever Sold box office totals. Remember that Morgan Spurlock movie from this summer? The amount of money it made wouldn’t even buy you a decent apartment in Manhattan. At the box office, at least — it made millions in product placements. thu
music
Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) SPIN. For having the guts to do a Changing Face of Hip-Hop cover. 2) Azealia Banks Filthy Mouth. 3) Man or Muppet . The most fantastic moment in the new muppets movie. 4) The spooky video for M83s Midnight City . Also, the video for Vomit by Girls. 5) Rap Genius. Most people know about this already, but quickly: Its a wikipedia for hip-hop, but with the crowd supplying the meaning of lyrics. The interface is clever: line-by-line lyrics that you can click on and define. For instance, heres Kreayshawns Gucci Gucci which kindly explains that Chickenhead is old slang for a girl, sometimes an MC, who sleeps with a group of (usually popular/prolific) male rappers/emcees to get on their good side/get a boost up in their popularity and sales. See also: Rap Map. wed
online
Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) Minneapolis Is A Startup Powerhouse! Sure, why not? 2) Lets Not Party Like Its 1999. All party reporting should be like Ricks. 3) Marc Maron Podcast. I finally listened to this over Thanksgiving. So good. 4) Those Pics of DiCaprio as Gatsby Floating Around the Internet. 5) YouTube Innovation. For the first couple years after landing into Googles lap, YouTube had essentially zero new product innovation, perhaps because they were busy fighting off lawsuits. But in the past year, numerous interface, design, and product changes have made it a surprising place of innovation perhaps the most innovative department in all of Google. One very small example: You can subscribe to feeds of videos that appear on your favorite websites, such as Hipster Runoff, Kottke, TMZ, and Cute Overload. tue
online
Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) Daughterly Nepotism. Oooooh, boy. Chelsea Clinton, Jenna Bush, and Meghan McCain now all work for work for NBC. This makes me miss the 30 Rock cafeteria! 2) The Bipolar Reactions that Lana Del Rey Elicits. Watch the video and then look at those comments! 3) Slaughterhouse 90210 Entries Like This One. She’s still got it. 4) After 17 years on the web, Kottke finds the craziest thing he’s ever seen. 5) Social Media Pillows. There ya go, the beginning and end of the Fimoculous Holiday Shopping Guide. wed
online
Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) This Appealing Headline. “The Atlantic’s online ad revenue exceeds print” 2) This sentence in Vanessa’s profile of Arianna Huffington. “It’s a feat — Huffington’s characteristic gift — to aggregate childbirth, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tiger Moms, a cow, Nancy Reagan, and unconditional love into one surprisingly intimate, seamless skein, and it makes spending time with Huffington a pleasure, even if interviews with her can be stultifying.” (Also, this accompanying graphic.) 3) UC Davis Pepper Spraying from Multiple Angles. Like if Time Code were a documentary. 4) eBay buys Hunch. This one’s about as obvious as it comes. I know nothing of the back story, but I’m sure Amazon had a chance and passed because Bezos doesn’t overpay for anything. While I hope Hunch still seeks a consumer-facing solution, I’m pretty sure it will end up being integrated into eBay and slowly disappear. 5) Startup Angel Funding Rap. Check please! tue
online
Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) This NYT Map of NYC Startups. 2) How I Ended Up Leaving Poynter. Jim’s highly-detailed account doesn’t make Poynter look worse, but they sure don’t look any better. 3) Betabeat’s Most Poachable Players in Tech. The best thing about this is not knowing most of these people. 4) Sylo. I love when people do creative things with their VYou accounts. 5) Gawker Redesign Second Thoughts. Appropos of nothing, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Denton had gone in a different design direction. If, as he said, he believed so much that the traditional reverse-chronological order of blogs was broken, why didn’t he go with a information-dense gridded design (like Vulture and The Verge) instead of the two-pane iPad-inspired layout? That also seemed to have been Steve Jobs’ feedback. (Btw, traffic across Gawker Media right now is even lower than when he lost the bet.) mon
online
Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) Reddit IAmA. Most people are pretty familiar with this amazing series on Reddit, but it’s interesting that content programming this precise and defined has emerged organically out of a user-generated platform. 2) Grantland’s YouTube Hall of Fame. On the opposite end of the spectrum is this highly programmed concept which is a goldmine of YouTube esoterica. 3) Video Beast. This will probably lose a million bucks per quarter, but it will be fun to watch while it lasts. 4) RecordSetter.com book. Can an open source version of record-making outseat the Guinness Book? I think so! 5) The Top 10 Reasons Lists Are Popular With Journalists. “There’s this form of nostalgia tied to them, but I actually think of them in terms of the future.” Someone said that. fri
online
Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) Match the DeLillo to The Cover. 10 for 10. 2) Kabletown. Ive heard NBC employees including executives actually refer to Comcast as Kabletown, even at work. Ill be surprised if this will be allowed to continue forever. 3) Sarah Silvermans 13 Breakup Songs. I made it into a Spotify list. 4) Felix Salmon: The Future of Adverising and Mark Suster: The Future of TV. These two pieces say an immense amount about two things I am currently obsessed with talking about. 5) The Verge. The Verge is the tighest merger of magazine thinking and blog culture that weve ever seen. Its also proof that even crowded spaces can be broken into with the right execution. thu
online
Five things that intrigue me right now:
1) This Nick Denton Quote. "The problem is the boring people online -- they're incredibly difficult to get rid of, because theyre often really nice." 2) ThinkUp 1.0. Finally! (Sorry, Gina and Andy, but a lot of people are excited for ThinkUp, which allows you to back up all your personal/social data to a web server.) 3) Nymwars. Once it gets an official name, you know trouble is brewing. 4) ASOS iPad App. This is the end game of the merger of editorial and commerce. Amazing experience and content integrated almost perfectly into a purchase environment. (There are mens and womens issues.) 5) Uproxx. I suspect most of us wouldn't know about it if Cajun Boy weren't writing there, but Uproxx is the latest in the growing genre of web culture blogs. And judging from posts like Alison Bries GIF-Able Moments and Thirteen Movie Poster Cliches, it could be the best. wed
online
Five things that intrigue me right now: 1) Jotly. So good. I almost dont want to tell you its a parody. 2) NYT on Reality Weekly. The amazing thing here is that no one thought of it before. It will be huge. 3) Don Draper at 84. I hope he looks more convincing than DiCaprio as J. Edgar. 4) Foursquare Badges Level Up. Smart. Its the little things. 5) Minneapolis, Mark Mallman. The amazing bit here is at 2:15 where Mark turns the city into a spaceship. (Also, Minneapolis people really like Minneapolis things, dont they? Its nearly as bad as Portland.) (#Fun! I will try this for a week.) tue
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