tuesday

0 comments

Netflix and Ch-Ch-Chilly
How have decades of mass media and technology changed us? I return to my hometown to find answers.

wednesday

4 comments

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:

---

Part 1: This Is Not a Vermeer ^TM
Can anyone own a masterpiece? Five very dissimilar people share a common desire: To own a Vermeer.

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Part 2: Uber for Art Forgeries
So you want to own a masterpiece? It's easy! In part two in this series about artistic authenticity, we explore how to score that painting you have always wanted.

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Part 3: Forgeries Gone Wild!
How widespread is art forgery? Experts say it's wildly rampant. Is it time to reconsider the economy of images?

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Part 4: The End of Authentication
Woo-hoo! You just discovered a Vermeer in your aunts basement. But who will verify if it is real? Maybe no one.

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Part 5: The Artist, the Thief, the Forger, and Her Lover
How did the Mona Lisa become famous? The biggest art heist of all time connects the forger and the thief.

monday

8 comments

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.
² The answer? Lawyers always love seeing themselves.
³ It's bullshit.
⁴ Didn't those dragons in Game of Thrones grow up just a little too quickly?

monday

10 comments

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?

friday

1 comment

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.

monday

0 comments

We already proved that we could have a trailer for anything when Charlie O'Donnell created a trailer for a venture fund:

But Esquire goes even further, with trailer for a magazine article:

[via]

friday

3 comments

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.)

thursday

0 comments

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.

tuesday

8 comments

by ADM

I thought it would be funny.

So I walked into Fimoculous on Christmas and started blogging anonymously, without telling Rex, the owner, beforehand. Which -- you guessed it -- means that pretty much everything posted here since then is by me, not him. (How: I spent time as a house-guest here about a year ago, and the keys were still under the mat.)

Just after I started, I learned that Rex had recently been in a kerfuffle in which someone accused him of saying "anonymous blogging is bad," and that he was later characterized as saying "blogging is dead." Even better. My Operation: Goldilocks was evolving into A Scanner Darkly -- turning against itself, or at least appearing to. It seemed like a good opportunity to indirectly engage both of these issues.

Is blogging dead? I don't want it to be, which is another reason I tried to revivify this blog, which was about 10 years old and staggering around like a zombie. In my opinion, there should be room in our online discourse for blogs like this one -- offering a consistent, often thoughtful perspective, collecting and observing things of interest to its readers. But being consistent, thoughtful, and observant requires effort and time, and it requires the same of its audience.

And that, I think, is why blogging, for the most part, appears to be moribund: Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, etc., are media that have evolved such that there is no expectation of prolonged engagement with pieces of content on the part of their writers or readers. Consider the recent widespread use of the shorthand "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read). This dismissive assessment is commonly interpreted as fair, expected criticism of the author, not the reader who offers it because he couldn't be bothered to read the content simply because it was long, regardless of its undiscovered merits. The media that are replacing "traditional" blogging value brevity above all, so much of the incentive to write anything that is both long and thoughtful diminishes (since few will bother to read it), and the self-motivation required to do so will only increase over time.

It's funny to be talking about blogging -- which for its entire lifespan has been dismissed broadly for being superficial and narcissistic -- as being a besieged outpost of well-developed, thoughtful writing, but I think that's exactly what's happening. It's no one's "fault" -- it's just the natural evolution of popular content production and consumption towards the most frictionless state: from books to periodicals to personal websites to blogs to Twitter to the Like button. When a medium comes along that's easier than clicking the Like button -- maybe thinking you Like something -- you can be sure everyone will speculate about and then bemoan its death before moving on.

But, even blogging isn't dead yet. There are some people out there who are still committed to the form, even if it seems no one else is, regularly posting smart, thought-provoking analyses and observations of their respective interests. A few that come immediately to mind:

• Joanne McNeil at Tomorrow Museum
• The brilliant Danah Boyd, whose research and insight into social media and youth culture is unmatched
• Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG, who is at once reportorial and speculative
• The visionary architect Lebbeus Woods
• Errol Morris and his "too long," multi-part monographs, some of which are probably the best things ever published originally on the web

And there are others who take the time to put together coherent, original posts:

• Star Wars Modern, where I'm not always sure what's happening, but I appreciate the effort involved
• Nav at Scrawled in Wax, usually correlating academic concepts of post-modernism with pop culture
• Amy at Amy's Robot, who has been writing witty, thoughtful posts on pop culture and politics for NINE YEARS. Collaborators (like me) have come and gone at that site, but Amy is still there. Someone oughta be reading her.

A confession before I continue: for every one of those sites I mentioned, I have often found myself getting the gist of a post, thinking "that's a good insight," and then skimming the rest of it. Does that matter?

Continuing, let me also mention some more widely read sites that I think demonstrate originality and effort:

• John Del Signore at Gothamist, whose humor brings color to stories without obscuring them
• The Big Picture photo blog, started by a developer at the Boston Globe who is now launching a similar project for the Atlantic
• Yeah, what the hell -- I'm leaving it on this list: even Boing Boing can be pretty good sometimes, when it's not being a caricature of itself...
• Maybe you have your own suggestions to share in the comments

And lastly, if you miss Fimoculous now that it's zombified, just replace that section of your brain with Pop Loser, which I've been ripping off mercilessly for the last month and which strikes me as the blog that is the spiritual inheritor of this one.

Will any of these blogs still live in 5 years? Will new ones rise to take their place? So far, trends appear to indicate no: aggregation, automation, voting up, "liking," etc., seem to be resulting in a hivemind where thoughtfulness is replaced with promulgation and sameness. Maybe we need a "link aggregator in reverse" that shows the links of interest to you that everyone else like you hasn't Liked yet.

And what of Fimoculous? You'll have to ask Rex. I'm leaving the keys on the counter and heading back to my cabin in the woods. It's so relaxing there! Especially in the easy chair.

Thanks for reading, or skimming. And thanks, especially, to Rex. See you next time.

Update: Rex offers his take, on Tumblr.

sunday

0 comments

This correction needs a correction: Appended by editors to Carr's "Skins" takedown: "...It is thus not the case that the youngsters cast in 'Kids,' the British film that was the model for 'Skins' and was rated NC-17, 'could not legally see it.'" Kids is American, not British.

saturday

0 comments

Perspective: Here are two consecutive posts from the Wired blog Threat Level:

• Egypt Shut Down Its Net With a Series of Phone Calls
• [US] Internet Kill Switch Legislation Back in Play

In such a case: Nothing but its own waste left to consume.

monday

0 comments

NYC has hired Rachel Sterne as its first Chief Digital Officer. She is 27 and will be making $115,000. NYC's tech entrepreneurs are said to be happy with the choice -- she's one! First assignment: find the real nerds in this town.

wednesday

0 comments

Huh. Wordpress.com shut down the blog Reblogging Julie, the super negative Julia Allison site that you forgot. Peter Feld writes: "If the U.S. State Department is serious about wanting to shut down Wikileaks, they obviously need to hire Julia Allison."

wednesday

0 comments

A few weeks ago, Elvis Mitchell dropped out/was canned as co-host of the new At The Movies. Now, his replacement has been named, just three weeks before the show premieres: "Roger Ebert announced Tuesday that he had chosen a young and relatively unknown Russian-born movie critic, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, to serve as a host of his new movie-review program, Ebert Presents At the Movies, which will have its premiere Jan. 21 on public television stations around the country." Read a few of his posts... The kid has to dial back his academic tone or it's going to be flat.

monday

0 comments

James Franco is having a moment: Oscar buzz, Oscar hosting, soap opera appearances, a book or two. And he's doubling down: Reportedly, he's wrapping up talks to write(!) and direct(!!) As I Lay Dying and Blood Meridian. Is this for real or what? It's like Joaquin Phoenix in reverse.

sunday

0 comments

This new personal genome sequencer, branded "Ion Torrent", is the size of a desktop printer, takes just 2 hours to run, and costs only $50,000. Which means in a few years, the price will come down, everyone will have one, and it will interface with Facebook. Who's coming over for my sequencing party in 2013? Bring your pets.

saturday

0 comments

Tomorrow Museum: The Blog in 2011: More Pictures, More Words. "Some 1,600 word blog posts are better off paired down to epigrammatic tweets."

friday

6 comments

Some stories around 4food's beta launch last night: CNET | Eater | Thrillist| Gizmodo | NYT | SlyOyster. We open full time on September 9.

wednesday

9 comments

Wait, did everyone read NYT's takedown of The Economist? (And can anyone believe that sentence exists?) UPDATE FROM CJR for anyone who questioned whether this was actually a takedown.

tuesday

0 comments

Michael says, "You know Dina was praying for it." He did not specify if he felt she was praying for the hit or for the plane to go down.

I was reading this Daily Intel post and first I'm like no...God has better things to do than shake up Michael Lohan. Then I saw that the Time Square bomber had been apprehended and realized no... no he does not. --SK

tuesday

1 comment

If you're not good enough, you might just not be good enough. Stop using the woman thing as a crutch and work on what needs to be done in order to break-through. I want to change the call to action from asking men to give us a chance to asking women to step it up and make sure you're making it known if you want to be in tech/business and will be successful in it.

-Eileen Burbidge --SK

monday

2 comments

My friend Melissa's awesome slideshow in Vulture: The Cheesiest Cheeseball Guitarists of All Time! On Vinnie Vincent:

Vinnie Vincent was such a guitar-soloing egomaniac, he got kicked out of the band known as the Vinnie Vincent Invasion. He was also fired from KISS. Three times. Once for "alleged unethical behavior": Hopeful fans have speculated that he was axed for wearing women's clothing, but really, both bands were probably tired of him (a) insisting on playing his guitar with a samurai sword and (b) repeating one extremely irritating chord for two and a half minutes (as he did on the song "Invasion"). Gotta hand it to the guy: he might not have been reliable, but he sure was consistent.

thursday

0 comments

is miley cyrus a liberal trojan horse into the country music world? or does this guy just really, really hate her? also, if you want to feel the warm embrace of the country community, do scroll down into comments, because it's fun to call a teenager a tramp. -- FB

thursday

0 comments

Looking at this kinda cool thing, when i noticed a banner for "The Happiness Exhibit: A photo project to document happiness across America."

It's sponsored by Lay's, who insists that Happiness is simple. It's a flickr-powered micro-site for sharing happy photos. If you upload a happy photo, maybe it will appear in an ad (for potato chips, natch) in People magazine.

There must really be that Internet Niceness I keep hearing about if I can go from Joy Division to simple happiness in only one click. -- FB

wednesday

0 comments

so i've grown tired of my snarkiness today and spent a little time looking at things i really love, like robots, and cool, fun stuff.

once i got my head back on all straight and optimistic, i went straight over to see some smart happening on Faris Yakob's blog. because that's where you go when you need an intellectual pick-me-up.

and then, feeling nostalgic for memes & 'idea multipliers', i wound my way over to BBH Labs and some thinking about crowdsourced creativity and open source creativity. and then, glancing at the twitter feed, stumbled upon this:

maybe the optimism wore off just a little. -- FB

tuesday

0 comments

we can't all be the olsen twins, but apparently we can try.

today i learned that david lynch has his own coffee brand.

dan aykroyd launched a vodka that seems to be based on the worst Indian Jones movie.

bill wyman wants you to find loose change on the beach.

these are, of course, very clear and compelling 'synergies' between products and brands. and lord knows the star power of these three will mean investors will make tens of dollars. -- FB

monday

0 comments

Joss Whedon to maybe helm The Avengers movie. FOX to probably let him finish.

Seriously, is there a genre for behind-the-scenes fanfic yet? Because I kinda want someone to imagine the sexual tension (and its inevitable, completely bonkers resolution) between Joss & Robert Downey Jr. -- FB

tuesday

0 comments

The central premise of this essay at online literary mag Wag's Revue - that both the ubiquity and SEO-focus of Google mean that quantity reigns over quality - feels a bit over the top.

But, beyond being really funny, it does make two important points: 1) that "the fact that the internet emerged in an advanced capitalist society where knowledge is intensely privatized and proprietary [means] the valorization of surplus value trumps ethical concerns"; and 2) that SEO depends on finding and tricking 'e-rubes' to fall for AdSense ads that no-one I know ever actually clicks on.

Might lean too far toward the Keen-Carr side of the spectrum, but it's smart and well-written enough to make it worth a read. -NA Update: PDF of the essay.

wednesday

0 comments

You've got 4 days left to hear this Radio 4 episode on electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, best known for her work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop including the theme for Doctor Who. -JM

wednesday

0 comments

Your favorite BBC Radio 1 DJ for the next 5 minutes rest of the afternoon : Ras Kwame. Streaming on BBC1 Player and by download from his Ning Network. Featuring the best in Funky House, Dancehall, Dubstep & more... via the British Music Embassy at SXSW (which was awesome) :DS

wednesday

0 comments

I'd be wary of a site that offers to call your cell phone for you in case you can't find it. Who knows what telemarketing list you'll end up. Plus side: Oh, there it is! Whoops, and just figured out how that site works as spam. So no links for it! Never mind, different spam site. Go ahead and use at your own risk. -- DG

monday

2 comments

Ryan Brown:

So, admidst all the conversations about Chatroulette's marketing potential, some enterprising video editor went ahead and gave the medium a chance. Mind you, this isn't actually on behalf of Fancy Feast, and it's not entirely revolutionary, but it IS more than just shouting out loud.

I don't believe for a second that this guy isn't trying to get himself a job doing viral marketing campaigns on ChatRoulette.

He even admits to making this "spec ad specifically for the medium" which we all know is industry slang for "Hire me, crowdsourcing ad agency!" -- DG

monday

4 comments

David Foster Wallace's papers are all going to the University of Texas, including some "juvenilia" like 200 books from his own library, poems, and college/graduate papers. Why Pomona didn't get these is sort of head-scratching, but UT is building up quite the collection. In case you wanted to hear what Chuck Klosterman thinks about this:

"He definitely is the writer I've ripped off the most," said Klosterman, author of "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs," on Monday. "Wallace showed me that you could present ideas that were insightful and complex, but the presentation could still be as entertaining as any sort of writing whose sole purpose was to entertain. Considering how dense his work could be, it was almost never confusing."

Unlike say, having a quote from Chuck Klosterman in your article that has nothing to do with the subject matter of where DFW's materials are ending up. --DG

monday

1 comment

Hey, right at 2:30 you can spot Adam from Mythbusters making a cameo as the drowning kid!

sunday

0 comments

I guess I'm on the record being annoyed with NYC's recent look-at-me-look-at-me glee over a handful of successful startups. Obviously, it's not that I don't want this fair city to succeed; it's just that I shun boosterism for its own sake, and there's a lot of that here. Go social media!

That said, Jenna Wortham's Sunday NYTimes piece on the scene hits all the right spots, namechecks all risers, and generally feels informed about what's at stake. If NYC digerati can position themselves as the next version of their key fracturing industries (media, fashion, finance, advertising, publishing), it should be poised to find the next versions of those sectors. --RX

friday

9 comments

The New York Times Magazine has a long article about an online phenomenon in China: "human flesh search engines:" [via Waxy]

They are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It's crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online -- with offline results.

The article opens with the story of a woman who appeared in an anonymous web video stomping a cat to death. Viewers organized an effort to identify her. Shortly thereafter, living in a small town in a country of one billion people, she was identified. And ostracized.

The article suggests such efforts are more mainstream in China than in the US, though identification and subsequent harassment of "people who have attracted their wrath" is common among certain online communities here, too. In fact there are exact parallels: a group of users on 4chan have also tracked down a cat abuser (among many others).

But perhaps all online communities and social networks are essentially human flesh search engines, or easily transformed into them as desired -- although usually with less malice. We might not be much more closely connected than we have been in past years, but with 400 million people on Facebook alone, discovering (and persisting) those connections is becoming trivial. Powered by the data and photos in these social networks, recent technological advancements such as real-time face recognition built into cellphones will soon erode, if not entirely dissolve, anonymity.

With your anonymity goes your privacy. Does it matter? Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg says a desire for privacy is no longer the "social norm." But maybe such social norms were a casualty of his -- and others' -- business models. Uploading a photo of myself doesn't mean I want everyone to be able to identify me on the street. Emailing clients regularly doesn't mean I want them to see the names of everyone else I'm in contact with. But to Facebook, Google, and other companies, it does. This is the bargain we've made: give me convenience and connectedness, and I'll give you my anonymity and privacy.

We know the short-term consequences of this already -- insurers checking up on us, bosses peering into our personal lives, and so on -- but what are the long-term social and psychological consequences? Adults today have had years of disconnection from their pasts and had the option of growing up and evolving outside the gaze of their childhood peers, their relatives, etc. But today's kids will spend their entire lives on the social web. Will this hold back their personal growth in any way? Would you be different if everyone you've known from elementary school and beyond could look in on you at any time? Will today's kids grow up acting more conservatively because they know their behavior (and that of their friends) will be publicly and permanently documented? Or, will this instead cause a greater liberalization of social behavior as they become adults in a generation that accepts everyone acts foolishly, and everyone's foolish acts are publicly and permanently documented?

Or maybe the problem will solve itself. It seems possible that if nearly everyone you've ever met is your "friend" on Facebook, then your social network will eventually become so diffuse and the amount of information available will be so overwhelming, no one will bother checking up on anyone they don't really care about. Sound familiar? Maybe the social network will supplant the role that the internet played in our lives 10 years ago: others could often find you in its vastness if they cared, but they didn't. Just as ten years before that, we all had our names in the phone book, but no one called. The social norms adapt.

How do you see them evolving in the next 5 - 10 years? And how will Facebook and Google respond to or drive the changes? --ADM

thursday

0 comments

If Windows 7, Mac OS X, or Ubuntu Linux aren't doing it for you, maybe try out a state-sponsored operating system from your favorite dictatorship: North Korea's Red Star or Cuba's Nova. Both appear to be Linux variants.

Engadget reports that the North Korean distro looks a lot like Windows, with just a few minor differences: the equivalent of the "Start" button has been replaced with a red star, and Firefox is called "My Country." Oh, and: it doesn't connect to the internet...just the local, gov't-approved BBS.

One advantage over Windows: since it's Linux, maybe the source code will be released and you won't have to guess how the government is spying on you. --ADM

wednesday

0 comments

Threat Level reports that the Chinese hackers who attacked Google and more than 30 other high profile companies a few month ago targeted the companies' source code management systems, meaning they had access to -- and apparently the ability to modify -- the "crown jewels" of their targets' intellectual property: their software. The victims of the attack used Perforce to manage their code, and according to Threat Level, Perforce seems to have an extremely weak security model. (For instance, anonymous users with no password can add users to the system.)

Adobe was another victim. I'd hate to think what would happen if the security of Flash were compromised. Heh. --ADM

tuesday

0 comments

It's interesting to me that no sector of the mass media learned from any other sector as each one got its turn to react to the ongoing digital revolution. The newspaper industry is in the same throes as the film industry was, just as the film industry's struggle mirrored the music industry's.

For the last year or so, it's been the book publisher's turn to demonstrate it has learned something -- anything -- from the last 15 years. But, as the kerfuffle over pricing and DRM have demonstrated so clearly -- they haven't.

The latest WTF moment comes from Macmillan (them again): CEO John Sargent says he wants to sell "hardcover" eBooks. As TUAW's TJ Luoma astutely points out, there are only a few reasons to get a hardcover instead of a paperback, and they either don't apply or make no business sense in the digital realm:

• You want to buy the book soon after it's published? eBooks take care of that. You can have it a few seconds later, in fact. If the publisher delays releasing it because it's a "paperback," they're just shooting themselves in the foot.
• You want a collector's item? Too bad! THEY PUT DRM ON THE EBOOK. Not much resale or nostalgia value there!
• You want bigger type? Press the "+" button.

Panic moves like this are just like the nonsense we saw from the music, tv, film, and newspaper industries.

Here's my (free!) business plan for book publishers: Since you're going to have to do it eventually anyway, give your customers what they want now. Four other industries have already learned these lessons for you -- and in some cases are still learning them. They spent a lot of years and money (and angered a lot of customers) so that you wouldn't have to. Wishing things away is not effective. --ADM

tuesday

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Joel Spolsky, widely known among programmers for his exceptional blog, Joel on Software, has a thoughtful piece in Inc. about corporate blogging.

He credits fellow developer Kathy Sierra with helping him verbalize something he may have only intuited:

"To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur's blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn't. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium seems so personal, and often it is. But when you're using a blog to promote a business, that blog can't be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it's hoped, become your customers... So, for example, if you're selling a clever attachment to a camera that diffuses harsh flash light, don't talk about the technical features or about your holiday sale (10 percent off!). Make a list of 10 tips for being a better photographer. If you're opening a restaurant, don't blog about your menu. Blog about great food. You'll attract foodies who don't care about your restaurant yet."

But are corporate blogs necessary or even desirable? Despite running one for 10 years, Spolsky isn't convinced. He observes that many successful companies -- Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. -- have lousy blogs, and Apple has none at all. Finally (and relatedly), he announces that in a few weeks, he will be retiring his blog. He makes a good case for doing so, but it seems to me that companies who lack a large customer base and name recognition could gain a lot by blogging the way he did. --ADM

tuesday

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You may have been hearing that chef Jamie Oliver wants to change the world through better food. And he has a show on ABC to help him accomplish just that. In this teaser video, he goes to a school in "America's unhealthiest town" (Huntington, WV) and shows the kids tomatoes, an eggplant, and cauliflower. The kids don't recognize any of them. --ADM

monday

2 comments

The tradition of issuing deadpan ripostes to spammers goes back at least a hundred years, from Mark Twain to those guys who get West African 419'ers to do miraculous things.

Here, Lonely Sandwich finds a middle ground between the two with this breezy reply to a pay-for-play scammer who offered to "review" his iPhone app (for a small fee, naturally). --ADM

monday

0 comments

NYT's Motoko Rich breaks down the costs and profits associated with creating and distributing eBooks vs. regular books.

If I'm reading it right, for each hardcover sold, publishers are left with revenue of $4.05 before overhead. For an eBook, they end up with "$4.56 to $5.54, before paying overhead costs or writing off unearned advances." Hence their reluctance to continue with the $9.99 pricing so favored by Amazon.

Related: Did you see that author Douglas Preston got into all kinds of trouble with his fans for suggesting they had a "sense of entitlement" for wanting cheap eBooks? He eventually apologized and reframed his comments after an outcry. --adm

monday

6 comments

The NYT's Lens blog features an essay by a photographer/videographer who has been covering bomb squads in the Iraq War over the last six years. He says The Hurt Locker is completely unrealistic:

The film is a collection of scenes that are completely implausible  wrong in almost every respect. This time, its not just minor details that are wrong...More disturbing and implausible yet is the way the protagonist repeatedly endangers the lives of his team members. The soldiers I have worked with over the years are like brothers to one another. Never have I seen stronger bonds between men. Any soldier who routinely endangers his own life or those of his squad members would not be punched, as the movies star is in one scene. He would be demoted and kicked out of his unit.

Does it matter? --ADM

monday

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Serious Eats has a profile of Robert Caplin, the photographer who takes many of the photos that accompany the New York Times' restaurant reviews. FAQ #1: Does he get to eat the food? "We aren't supposed to sit down and have a meal, but the chef often insists you try something..." He also takes pictures of things besides food, and has a blog. --ADM

monday

3 comments

This week's guest editor is ADM, someone who I have known online for, oh boy, nearly a decade. He's already picking up items you'll see talked about in other places all week. I think you will enjoy his curation.

(In the meantime, one of my upcoming and exciting projects got written up in NYTimes' style mag, T: Refashioner. Much more on this later, but this will be exciting.)

sunday

0 comments

Walmart is now selling locally-sourced food. They call it "Heritage Agriculture." Just another case of greenwashing? Let's find out: The Atlantic has a full report, including a blind taste test with a panel of foodies, comparing the offerings to the local Whole Foods'. --ADM [via BAR]

thursday

1 comment

In keeping with today's "celeb" theme--Wayne Coyne is famous, right?--here's a profile of a guy who moderates Oh No They Didn't, arguably the most impressive celebrity link blog community in the world. It's written in a refreshingly understated tone (especially for The Awl), with both the writer (a friend of mine, full disclosure!) and the subject downplaying the predictable excitement one must feel when getting ripped off by Perez Hilton, racking up 2.5 million pageviews on Gawker and tapping into Dina Lohan's psyche, resulting in a peaceful glimpse into a surely hectic mind. --FD

tuesday

1 comment

Haven't gotten around to reading The Guardian's collection of great authors' "Ten Rules for Writing Fiction" yet? Here are two good best-of lists: NYMag // Flavorwire. The second one even has the quotes Photoshopped onto their respective writers' photographs, ready for some insta-Tumbling, as well as some excerpts so you can judge the authors' words against their own advice. --FD

monday

4 comments

PresenTense, a hip Jewish life magazine, has launched its latest issue entirely on Google Wave, marketing it as the first magazine ever to do so. It's a bit distracting--it's never easy to read an article when you're inside a giant chat room. But I like the idea of using Wave as a full-issue magazine browser instead of having to download the PDF or click through all the individual pieces, especially for small publications. --FD

monday

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Know your celebrity Buddhists! The Daily Beast does a nice round-up, which I've narrowed down to four surprising categories: 1) Rich people of Asian descent 2) Rich people who have met the Dalai Lama 3) Orlando Bloom 4) Orlando Bloom's girlfriends. Notably absent: Tiger Woods' girlfriends. --FD

sunday

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While watching a promo for Chuck Todd's show on MSNBC, Matt Yglesias finds a great, seemingly-harmless soundbite to illustrate the problem that afflicts most of today's high-profile political news coverage. Todd is an unusual target, but when he's quoted in his own promo saying, "I love politics; I wish every day was Election Day," it's worth doing a double-take, as Yglesias does, to consider that this "treat every day like it's election day" approach provides as much irrelevant coverage as the rise of the pundit-fueled infotainment on cable news does. --FD

tuesday

10 comments

Sweet: The Wired iPad App: A Video Demonstration. --MM

monday

0 comments

"BowLingual, Dog-to-human language translator which got The 2002 Ig Nobel Peace Prize, is planned to be released for iPhone in summer 2010, Tokyo-based Index Corporation announced. The latest BowLingual will have Twitter support, by which dog owners can send what their puppy says to the world directly on iPhone."

How does Zuki feel about that?? -- MM

saturday

0 comments

NYT tracks down the creator of Chatroulette. He's a 17-year-old Muscovite.

Bandwidth bills show sums which shock me as a teenager, but I am not very worried.

monday

1 comment

The 100 Greatest Science Fiction or Fantasy Novels of All Time. Yikes, this makes me feel small and inept.

monday

3 comments

If you slow down Lady Gaga, it sounds like a cross between Metallica and Michael Bolton.

sunday

0 comments

Here's that new Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary ($364.68) that you many have seen lauded in the New York Times Magazine. Check out the video "How to Call Someone Stupid In Old English Using The Historical Thesaurus of the OED":

monday

1 comment

The giganto list of 2009 lists is finally winding down, but here are few highlights to appear recently: Ad Tunes' Top Ad Music, Onion A/V Club' Top 10 Electronica Albums and Mixes, Eat Me Daily's The Year in Food Blog-to-Book Deals, The Auteurs' Movies Posters of the Year, Techmeme's Top 10 Objectively Biggest Tech Stories, Art Fag City's Best of the Web, The Atlantic's Best Cocktails, Stereogum's 10 Most NSFW Music Videos, and The Yale Book of Quotations' Most Notable Quotations.

monday

35 comments

While compiling this list, I asked a few people a dumb question: What was the biggest online event of the year?

Random answers included Oprah joining Twitter, Michael Jackson's death breaking on TMZ, and Susan Boyle coming and going. Someone even tried to argue that a writer who detailed his firing from The New Yorker on Twitter was momentous.

Sigh.

But frankly, I've got nothing better. So try this out: Matt Haughey selling PVR Blog on eBay for $12k was the most emblematic online event of 2009. Why? Because the amount seems both ridiculously high and preposterously low at the same time. It proved that if there was ever a time when you couldn't tell what the fuck something was worth, this was it.

With Kim Kardashian making $10k per tweet, even internet fame seemed synchronously bankrupt and filthy rich. Or as someone else asked, how didn't we notice that Perez Hilton had accidentally become more famous than his namesake Paris? And how is it possible that more people are reading Reblogging Julia than Julia herself?

So it's time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title "Best Blogs" from this annual list and change it to "Most Notable" blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year's list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.

So here they are, the 30 Best Blogs of 2009:

[Previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008.]

Special thanks to these exceptionally nice people for contributing ideas to this list: Caroline McCarthy, Joanne McNeil, Melissa Maerz, Chuck Klosterman, Soraya Darabi, Mat Honan, Katie Baker, Erin Carlson, Noah Brier, Jason Kottke, Taylor Carik, Nick Douglas, Lockhart Steele, Matt Thompson, Anastasia Friscia, and Kelly Reeves.

wednesday

0 comments

I wanted to pick The Awl for best new blog of the year in Bygone Bureau's roundup, but Womack took it, so I chose Mad Men Footnotes instead. And rather than actually talk about it, I choose to rant about Tumblr.

Whether your metric-of-choice is book deals or raw numbers, The Kids Who Tumble graduated to big boys on the playground, not so much by stomping the other kids as by inventing their own game in the corner. Tumblr's make-or-break premise was always that the semi-closed platform (insular, secular, participatory) would eventually make a deeper connection than the open online systems (cosmopolitan, egalitarian, populist) powered by Feedburner and retweets. Whereas anyone can read blogs or tweets, tumbling nearly demands participation.

sunday

0 comments

The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists -- the shopping list, the will, the menu -- that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

--Umberto Eco, Spiegel. (Well, okay! Check out the update to the 2009 List of Lists.)

tuesday

3 comments

This Financial Times article about the downfall of MySpace and its conflict with News Corp is pretty funny for all kinds of anecdotal reasons, but my favorite bit is this:

Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends' pages without having to open a new browser window.

Oh really? So that's what Ajax is!

tuesday

2 comments

Your new favorite Wikipedia entry for the next five minutes: Catullus 16. It's a 1st century BC poem, the first line of which is translated, "I'm gonna fuck you guys up the ass and shove my cock down your throats." [via]

saturday

6 comments

If you've ever wondered how much of Tracy Morgan's shtick is an act, or if he can even stand outside of his stage self, his interview on Fresh Air will set it that straight. Around 13:00, he breaks down crying talking about his mother. Even Terry Gross is shocked. It's sorta amazing:
He also apparently broke down at a Barnes and Noble reading.

tuesday

1 comment

Robin says: "If Dan Reetz didn't exist, it would be necessary for Cory Doctorow to invent him." He's talking about this interesting Russian guy who lives in North Dakota who built his own book scanner.

thursday

16 comments

I'll give anything a chance, which is why my TiVo gets overloaded in the Fall when I allow every new show to get at least three episodes of viewing. It's now the third week, which means it's time to clean out the TiVo. As of last night, I have officially dropped Cougar Town, Melrose Place, Leno, The Beautiful Life, The Middle, The Forgotten, Glee, and Eastwick. That leaves Flashforward and Community as the only new shows that will survive this bloodbath.

tuesday

2 comments

Following the New Yorker profile, Gawker is offering $1000 for photos of blogger Nikki Finke. If you include Eater's little gimmick to give you $25 for shutting down your food blog, this is becoming a strange little trend: micropayments as a form of promotion.

friday

0 comments

Nice: new Eater redesign. Also, Curbed bought Down By The Hipster. Update: Despite NYT's story, we already knew about the Curbed/VVM ad sales deal, but Fred Wilson put his usual twist on it by pointing out that local media's hidden asset may be its sales force.

thursday

1 comment

The Six Apart kids gave me a preview of this last week, and it's out now: Typepad Motion. It wraps the social graph onto your blog platform. (It essentially combines Typepad and Pownce, which they bought almost a year ago. Another analogy might be "a cleaner, more extensible Ning.")

thursday

2 comments

When the Obama administration came into office, utopian hope spread across the digital land: the internet was finally going to be used for governance. More than a mere fund-raising tool, the medium would reveal its true self as an instrument of self-organization, problem-solving, and collaboration. Like Twitter and Google before it, Change.gov would become a verb!

We're now nine months into the administration, and it's time to ask the question: Is the internet changing anything?

In January, I noted that the only time I ever visited a government website was to download tax forms. In the intervening months, that hasn't changed much. Is it just me?

Anil makes the case that the most interesting startup of the year has been the federal government. While all the new dot-gov sites he lists look cool, I have to wonder: are there any practical examples yet? (It was a HuffPo puff piece, so I hope he expands it.)

The primary criticism of the Obama administration is similar to my concern: good planning, questionable execution. Apps.gov is cool and noble and interesting... but I'm trying to think of use scenarios where it will be used effectively. Is it my lack of imagination?

It's possible that the limited innovation has nothing to do with the the administration -- perhaps it's the shortcomings of the medium itself. (It strikes me that the Internet and American pragmatism have similar historical tracts.) Or maybe it's just too soon. That's a common answer to much of the anticipation of the past year. That seems to be Anil's answer too, as he closes with a notion that returns us back to that utopian vision:

And it's likely that soon they'll be platforms that spawn their own ecosystem of developers, users and applications, just like Facebook or Twitter or the iPhone. When that does happen, we can safely say that dot-gov is the new dot-com.

wednesday

0 comments

Have you ever picked up a pill, wondered what exactly it was, noticed an indiscriminate marking on it, and pondered whether you should just toss it down your gullet? Wouldn't it be cool if could look up what exactly the drug was from those indiscriminate markings? Well, there's a website for that!

thursday

1 comment

Whoa. How would you like to spend the weekend with Herzog? Here you go: Rogue Film School. From the description:

Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

The price is not unreasonable: $1,450. [via]

monday

1 comment

If you watched the VMAs last night, here's that Twitter visualization that iJustine was showing off. It's by Stamen and Radian 6.

monday

4 comments

The first time I met a writer was the first time it occurred to me that one could be a writer.

I was a college sophomore who, through a random set of instances, walked into a very large auditorium containing a very small audience. Jim Carroll was on a dark stage reading from a collection of stories, Praying Mantis, that he had just put out. His crackling, stuttery, affected voice filled the room as he said, "This is 'Tiny Tortures' (mp3)." I actually counted the number of people in the audience: eight.

Carroll had survived modest success in the '70s as a rock singer. "Catholic Boy," which sounded a little like The Clash meets the Stones, and "People Who Died" (mp3) were small hits in 1980. But after that he lived in relative obscurity for over a decade, until Leonardo DiCaprio came along to play him in The Basketball Diaries.

When I walked into that dark room, Carroll was reading something called "A Day at the Races" (mp3). I grew up in a town about the size of your apartment building, so this was the first time that I ever heard someone read their own work. And I was mesmerized.

I happened to know the student council person who booked him at this random midwest college, so I asked her if I could take Carroll out for the night. Frightened by his stories of heroin abuse, she was relieved that I would entertain him. So at a bar called Whitey's on a cold winter night in North Dakota, Jim Carroll drank with me. He told me a hundred stories about people and places I had never heard of. And he frequently snuck in the bathroom to do I-don't-know-what.

I had never met someone like Jim Carroll, but his writing eventually led me to people like William Burroughs and Patti Smith. I never talked to him again after that night, but every time I walked down St. Mark's -- 10, 15, nearly 20 years later -- I thought of him. It was one of those incalculably small events that probably changed me forever.

Update: NYT obit.

saturday

2 comments

Creepy real-life details on the new Werner Herzog:

Produced by David Lynch, the film is based on the true story of a southern California actor who kills his mother. And proving life can be stranger than fiction, Herzog said the real-life actor was known in some circles for playing the role of Orestes, who in the Greek tragedy kills his mother.

Herzog said that, when he decided to do the film, he visited the man after his release from a mental institution, where he had lived 8 1/2 years after being declared unfit to stand trial.

"From a distance, I could tell he was still kind of dangerous, still really insane," Herzog said. He recalled finding in the actor's small trailer home a poster of Herzog himself with a crucifix over it and a candle beneath. "After that meeting, I never contacted him again."

friday

2 comments

T-Pain has launched his own Auto-Tune app for the iPhone.

thursday

2 comments

I'm sure this isn't news to Minneapolitans, but I just noticed that The Uptown Bar is closing. (It was famous locally for a variety of musical reasons. The Replacements and Soul Asylum and Husker Du practically lived there, and Tommy and Bob Stinson's mom still worked there.) I saw my pals from Communist Daughter play there last time I was in town in May. [via]

saturday

1 comment

Jay-Z's "Run This Town" and the Occult Connections. And here we thought that awesome-crazy conspiracy mythology embedded in pop culture died in the '90s! "'Run This Town' is an announcement of the coming of a New World Order, lead by secret (Luciferian) societies." And more:

Further in the song Jay-Z says: "I'm in Maison, ugh, Martin Margiela" which is a upper-end fashion store. English speaking people usually pronounce the French word "maison" to sound like "mayzaun." Jay-Z however says it to sound like "mason" as in Freemason. There is an obvious double-meaning here meant to catch the ear of the listener. He basically says "I'm in Mason" to make people say "huh did he really say that?" as "I'm a Freemason" but he then continues by saying "ugh, Martin Margiela."

Update #1: Jay-Z on Bill Maher. Watch, watch, watch. Update #2: Jay-Z showed up at a Grizzly Bear show. I can finally disagree with the man: "What the indie rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring."

thursday

1 comment

New Jay-Z, featuring Kanye and Rihanna.

tuesday

0 comments

"You Don't Own Me," Lesley Gore (1964): mp3

saturday

5 comments

There are two clashing worldviews. There is my view, that a human being is in charge of his or her own life and, with sustained focus, can reach higher and higher achievement every week, gradually approaching (and maybe one day reaching!) a virtuous, peaceful, and happy life.

The other view is more of a victim mentality: that life happens to you, that infinite frustration and suffering are unavoidable, that the only reasonable way of coping with such an awful world is to attack whoever seems to actually enjoy life -- because surely they are dishonest or crazy and must be brought back down to Earth.

-Jakob Lodwick, Being Gawked At, and not that different from my interpretation.

friday

3 comments

What kids searched for this summer. Seeing "sex" and "porn" at #4 and #6 reminds me of how, from age 10 to 15, I looked up "fuck" every time I picked up a dictionary. Some terms you might also need to Google:

• "Webkinz" (#16)
• "Runescape" (#37)
• "Nigahiga" (#99)
• "Miniclip" (#18)
• "Poptropica" (#54)
• "Hoedown Throwdown" (#61)
• "naked girls" (#86)

friday

4 comments

North Dakota is home to protectionist policies ranging from agriculture co-ops to state-run insurance to a law demanding that all pharmacies be locally owned (banning the only advantage of a Wal-Mart: cheap drugs). There is the state-run Bank of North Dakota, which in a year that saw private banks taking federal bailouts, returned $30 million to the state's general fund. More importantly, these state organizations operate in competition with private business, a fact that keeps everyone honest and is a system that, while quite successful and popular here, is clearly going to destroy America if partly implemented on any national scale, such as with health care.

This nails the contradiction of the state, which has two of the more progressive senators -- Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan -- yet is culturally more red than Utah. If you ever wondered what a libertarian socialist economy would look like (and who hasn't?), North Dakota is basically it.

Conrad, the senior senator, was on Charlie Rose recently, speaking about the glories of social co-operatives. Co-operatives!

thursday

0 comments

In 1991, Norwegian churches started to burn, just after an underground circle of metal musicians had formed. While reporters and police scrambled for answers, more and more churches went up in flames. They had no leads until Varg Vikernes, one of the architects of an underground music-art-political scene known as BLACK METAL took credit and was quickly arrested. While he was in police custody, the media ran a largely fabricated story of satanic rituals, abductions and sacrifices. This film reveals the true story behind the music, murders and church burnings, and shows what happened when these young men, who tried to change the world using music, art and violence, found that they could not control what they had created.

You may have heard of Varg before -- he was charged with four counts of arson (all historic churches) and of murdering his bandmate (via 23 stab wounds). He smiled as he was convicted to a 21-year sentence. After 16 years in prison, he was released a few months ago on parole. Here are the documentary's creators, who also seem crazy, but in the exact opposite way satanist nazis probably seem crazy, discussing the film in a sorta Christopher Guest kinda way. [via]

wednesday

4 comments

I actually own a copy of Lotion's album Nobody's Cool (1996), which infamously (at the time) had liner notes from Thomas Pynchon. Now, 13 years later, it turns out at least part of the back story was a hoax. (Conversely, it seems that the new book trailer is actually narrated by him.) And just to be annoyingly elusive and insinuating, just like the master, I'll add: a prominent dot-com mogul grew up in an apartment right next to Pynchon and describes him as very normal. GUESS WHO!

tuesday

2 comments

The letter-box wars are back!

Television operators, the people who buy and produce things for people to watch on TV, are taking the position that films photographed in the 2.40:1 ratio should be blown up or chopped up to fit a 16:9 (1.78:1) ratio. They are taking the position that the viewers of television do not like watching 2.40 films letterboxed to fit their 16:9 screens, and that a film insisting on this is worth significantly less -- or even nothing -- to them. They are taking the position that no one will dare challenge them and risk losing revenue.

sunday

0 comments

So a Washington Post writer -- Ian Shapira -- wrote a story about a generational consultant who's paid to talk about what the kids are talking about. A writer at Gawker -- Hamilton Nolan -- picked up the item, excerpted huge sections, and attributed it at the bottom. Now the writer feels like Gawker essentially stole his story. Good quotes follow and Neiman crunches the numbers. Update: Mediaite expands it. Update: Gawker has a decent response, mostly cuz it takes your eyes off the ball by saying that the downfall of newspapers has nothing to do with Gawker and other aggregation-type-things, which is true, except that wasn't really the original point.

wednesday

17 comments

Let me ask you, what kind of person do you think Scarlett Johansson is?

You have probably never met her, and I definitely have not, yet we both seemingly feel like we could describe her personality with reasonable accuracy.

This is peculiar.

It's not shocking to learn that humans enjoy making personality judgments based upon scant evidence. But with celebrities it seems exceptionally dubious, since we actually know literally nothing about them first-hand. Lohan, Aniston, Springsteen, Cruise -- why do all these people seem to have well-formed personas? How much of it is real and how much is manufactured? What are the sources we use to scrape together these mysterious portraits?

There are a few known mythological origins. Maybe that profile in Rolling Stone had some lasting influence, and perhaps those eight minutes on Leno left an impression. But these sources, mediated and filtered and manicured, seem exceptionally unreliable. So what else is there?

Oh yeah, we have their work. Scarlett gave a lasting impression in Lost in Translation, so perhaps we know a little more about her because of how she gobbles sushi with Bill Murray. But wait -- she was acting. Can we really conclude anything about her personality from these flickering screen moments?

I've spent an inordinate amount of time considering this question: why do we think we know people who we'll never actually know?

Here's my best guess: we trust gossip.

Before mass media, gossip was merely personal information shared about a mutual acquaintance. In other words, pre-modern gossip was the original conversational marketing: valued information shared by reputable sources.

With the onset of broadcasting, publishing, and eventually the internet, the intimacy of gossip bred with the entertainment industry, birthing the hybrid offspring known was celebrity gossip. Of all the animals in the media zoo, celebrity gossip emerged as the most chimerical creature. Every day, hundreds of weird little stories pop up on sites with names like Hollywood Tuna and Egotastic and Celebrity Puke. Sometimes they make outrageous claims (Amy Winehouse just ate a drunk baby!), and other times the narratives are ostentatiously mundane (Tara Reid just ate a taco!). Through these morsels of checkout lane anti-matter, we form lasting opinions about celebrities.

That finally brings us to today's launch of GossipCop.com, a site that I did the strategy/design/development on. The premise is simple: investigate the accuracy of the daily anecdotes, the rampant rumors, and the cubicle grist known as celebrity gossip. Think of it as TMZ meets Smoking Gun. Or maybe Perez Hilton meets Columbia Journalism Review. Whatever -- the prevailing idea is that even seemingly unknowable information can be investigated in today's info-rich economy.

My three favorite features on the site:

+ Truth Meter. Every post investigates a piece of celebrity gossip and provides a rating, from 0 to 10, based upon the likelihood of the story.

+ Paparazzi Patrol. Rather than churn out more celebrity video, Gossip Cop looks at the underside of the celebrity gossip business. By turning the camera back on the paparazzi, the site reveals the gossip creators for what they are. (This feature was originally dubbed "Papsmeared," a name I really loved but which was ultimately dropped.)

+ Twit Happens. With its direct interaction and unfiltered access, Twitter could end up being the greatest invention in celebrity journalism since the camera. It is quickly becoming the ultimate device for determining how impressions are made, rumors are debunked, and celebrity battles are fought. This hand-picked list contains the best tweets of the day.

Truthfully, I'm not much of a celebrity news consumer. But I hope this site adds a new angle into the salacious, rumor-driven celebrity culture.

And maybe I can finally get to know Scarlett.

monday

0 comments

After all those take-down notices last week, it looks like the Alice In Wonderland trailer is back up.

tuesday

1 comment

Meme clash: Honan's Ask A Flowchart for Single Serving Sites. Uses its own websites, such as AmIDoingThisRight.com, to come to the final app to end all single-serving apps: WiredSingleServingSiteGenerator.com.

monday

51 comments

Today we announced the launch of Mediaite.com, a new site that covers all dimensions of the media world. I advised on it, including doing the design and development. Most of my previous launch projects had the support of a media entity with dozens of employees, so this was a different kind of challenge, involving such wonderful tasks as recalling the inner-workings of DART and building WordPress plugins. It's been a while since I was involved in a bootstrappy startup, so this post is for the few people who are interested in the nuances of moving between big and small media, for however long that historical distinction remains.

Power Grid

Although a lot is going on with the site, this feature will probably garner the most attention. The Power Grid ranks 1,500 media personalities in a dozen categories. It will predictably get criticized for some sort of navel-gazing, but just as with pageview counts and most-emailed articles lists before it, the index will also predictably be ctrl+refreshed by industry obsessives. All new metrics go through their hazing periods, and media hazing is the worst form of it.

As this month's Wired overtly suggests, the abundance of data should pose a new frontier for publishing. As personal data migrates online, accusations will arise about the narcissism of measuring thyself, perhaps even yanking in some conservative trope about the decline of society, or some liberal invective about the end of privacy. Everyone will eventually settle down, and we will all learn a little more about each other. The world will go on, and no one will take Twitter Followers that seriously. (Except Dan, who is on a mission to pass me. Please don't follow him.)

The Power Grid itself posed many technical challenges: how to build an extensible algorithm, how to gather the data, how to differentiate industries, how to eliminate outlying factors, how to display the information. Watching the launch of Tumblarity, with its mercurial display and confounding numerical obfuscation, was a lesson in information design. (It took me days to figure out if you wanted a big or small Tumblarity number.) While the Power Grid doesn't reveal every single data point (mostly because that would be visually overwhelming), enough data is available for surmising the gist of how rankings are calculated.

And it's more than just a game. If you want to get a snapshot of Joel Stein or Kevin Rose, there is some interesting data to investigate. If you have an active, data-focused mind, you can imagine future iterations of the Power Grid: new data sources, APIs, visualized trending data, other industries. Who knows...

Voice

The tone of Mediaite is opinionated, but factual. It will be more reported than most blogging today, yet it will take stances where it needs to. The site's editors (Colby Hall, formerly of VH1; Rachel Sklar, formerly of HuffPo; Glynnis MacNicol, formerly of Mediabistro; Steve Krakauer, formerly of TVnewser) provide the corpus of the site in TV, Online, and Print, while user contributions end up in the Columnists bucket.

I'll be writing occasional columns too.

Identity Design

"Nostalgic futurism," "pixelated pop art," "newspaper retro" -- these were some of the early identities we toyed with. After running through iterations of each, we ended up with something calm, simple, flat.

Information Design

If you follow online design trends even marginally, you've seen the grid take over the scene. It's a fine system, especially when applied to data-rich sites. But it also suffers from a deficiency: it makes you think vertically. Take a look at the NYTimes.com, undeniably one of the best designed news sites. Here's a test: Start scanning the page while thinking about how your eyes move in conjuncture with scrolling. Do you see a pattern? Your eyes are forced to move up and down with your scrollbar. This unnatural movement is because the site is built as stacks of content. Grid design implicitly enforces this kind of thinking, because it tries to build nicely aligned columns.

This is problematic, because I don't think people actually want to scan content this way. Blogs have proven they read content this way, but it seems easier to scan content horizontally.

This was a small innovation we discovered in redesigning msnbc.com, which was was reconceived in other prominent sites. These "horizontal sites" build a new kind of importance hierarchy. Designers don't realize it, but unaligned vertical stacks are a remnant of the way that newspapers were designed -- in columns, up and down. These new layouts are more like movie screens and wide monitors, with action moving left and right.

Platform

Except for the Power Grid, it's all built on WordPress, which I haven't used in five years. Some hacking was required to get the front page to have a non-blog layout, but enough advancements have occurred over the years to make it only mildly painful.

Conclusion!

If you hang around in the NYC media bubble long enough, you develop the social depression of a collapsing industry. The west coast is full of a giddy frisson about the inevitable demise of big media, while the midwest is skeptical of everything that gets force-fed to them from the coasts. NYC, which has essentially zero awareness of any of this, continues to constantly be shocked! when a TMZ or Pitchfork or The Onion comes along from the hinterlands with a massively successful enterprise.

The reasons for this amounts to a lack of vision. Even smart people, vampirically bound to the past, seem completely blind to developing new formats. The standard for online innovation right now is "launch another blog," which no one seems to recognize is about as depressing as launching another newspaper.

Mediaite is a hybrid model, borrowing some successful formats of the past and mixing it with some new ideas.

See also:

Howard Kurtz: Just the Messenger.

monday

1 comment

There's a new video of Leighton Meister on the internet. No, not that video! This one, a video from Cobra Starship [snicker]. The plot is pretty much an episode of Gossip Girl, and except for that breakdown bridge at the end, it's pretty good, right?

sunday

4 comments

Michael Jackson, James Brown, and Prince on stage together. Prince wins, right?

thursday

17 comments

NYC puked all over itself this week over this question: Should you write for free? (My answer, which is meaningless without a wordy explanation, but nonetheless: No, except for limited circumstances.) For anyone who cares, I'll fulfill my duty as link rounder upper: Simon Dumeno in Ad Age probably got the ball rolling, but Foster Kamer at Gawker picked it up and pissed off everyone, most of all Rachelle Hruska (whose Guest of a Guest had a Styles profile last weekend) who gave the best smack-down you've seen in a while, even though Maura Johnston dissented/quibbled, but meanwhile Emily Gould was forcefully explaining why she writes for free, and by that time everyone with a Tumblr had something to say about everything from The Awl to HuffPo. The end.

tuesday

5 comments

Koogle, the new "kosher" custom search engine for ultra-Orthodox Jews that filters out "prohibited" content and shuts down on the Sabbath. What's next -- custom search engines for hipsters, Scientologists or foodies?

sunday

2 comments

Every NYT Styles story should be like this one: Bartender, Make It a Stiletto. There's really some guy out there who gets his jollies by lying down on bar floors wrapped in a blanket and asking people to step on him? Has anyone ever encountered this dude?

tuesday

1 comment

If your self-esteem is down today, why don't you try perusing Rocketboom's Talent Search, where they are trying to pick a new host. Hire her!

monday

-1 comments

I kinda helped with this one: In One City, Two Soirees Ages Apart. Gawker sorta loved it.

friday

3 comments

I've grown skeptical of most new collaborative communication tools. They always seem to suffer from an inherent problem: they feel like they were designed by project managers for project managers. (When I worked at Microsoft, I called this PMware. Microsoft is basically packed with PMware.) This use-case is, needles to say, quite limited. But I can see Google Wave spreading to a larger audience. The demo is 80 minutes long but O'Reilly has a summary. It essentially collapses IM and email into a wiki-like space. It's pretty cool.

sunday

3 comments

Predix: Krysten Ritter is the next big something-or-other. She owned the second-best Gossip Girl epp, and just missed that almost-happened spin-off; she's recently had the best drug and sex scenes in Breaking Bad; she's the only thing saving the otherwise ignorable The Last International Playboy, BuzzKill, and How to Make Love to a Woman; girls loved her in Confessions of a Shopaholic; I loved her in Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls; and her band might be better than those three other Gossip Girl bands -- and probably able to catch some Bats For Lashes zeitgeist. Best part: like no one is following her on Twitter.

thursday

2 comments

Everyone's quoting various parts of that Denton interview, but this was the surprising stat to me: "Nielsen research shows that nearly 34% of Gawker readers have their own blogs, a key influencer statistic. Gawker readers, it turns out, have their own audience." Update: Biz Insider digs up more numbers. "Turns out they're young, computer-savvy, RSS-reading atheists with good cholesterol:"

sunday

16 comments

I attended the n+1 panel discussion on the '90s on Friday. I had a question that I wanted to ask, but the q&a was dragging on, and raising my hand felt like a complicated extension of a prolonged My So-Called Life marathon (so good, yet who has the time?). Had I raised my hand, this is what I might have asked:

Nostalgia wasn't always like this, right?

History wasn't always this flat, and everything didn't always seem to happen at once. While we like to point at a decade where "accelerated culture" became normative, nothing actually sped up in the '90s. Everything just ground down to a black hole slacker halt. It was timeless, dude.

Sure, there was that whole internet thing, gnawing at time and space while scrapping our quaint notions of subculture and identity politics. But postmodernism was pimpin, and all of history was being prepped for the pillage. Beavis and Butthead, the Beastie Boys, Jeff Koons, Napster -- these were the princes of pastiche, gobbling up the table scraps the Boomers left behind.

Let me say it more clearly: the '90s invented nostalgia. Or at least nostalgia as we commonly now know it. There was always that anxiety of influence playing its fatherly games, but the '90s morphed anxious fear into an international pastime. The decade obsessed about historicizing itself precisely because history felt as flimsy as the Berlin Wall that had crashed into it. I Love The '70s could not have existed in the '80s, but I Love The '90s could only have existed, instantaneously, in 2000.

This way of thinking -- nostalgia for nostalgia -- now seems commonplace. But it didn't exist in the Reagan '80s or the Wategate '70s. Fukuyama was fugged up enough to see these signs and declare it the end of history (the '00s version of which is the world is flat). He saw the right symptoms, but came up with the wrong diagnosis.

Nostalgic for itself, the '90s were indeed a trap. But never mistake ambivalence for apathy. While the rock gods of yesteryear all perished in accidental pools of vomit, it took an act of will -- a shotgun blast to the head -- to break with the past. Or at least try. It was like that Dostoyevsky Wannabe character in Slacker who asks "Who's ever written a great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?"

And that's why this panel itself seemed yanked out of the past, like that Indiana Jones scene where they find the Ark of the Covenant in a warehouse. The format itself seems tied to the days when the culture wars still mattered and you couldn't Skype your way to Tokyo. I remember panel discussions about "the future" all the time on CNN circa 1995. Now they prop up two bozos to fight out the definition of torture. (Look! Nostalgia for nostalgia!)

Oh yeah, a question? Can we talk about Courtney Love please? Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

See also: Foster | Leon | Bakes.

tuesday

2 comments

Given the number of renowned media types that were involved with Inside.com (Kurt Andersen, Deanna Brown, David Carr, Michael Hirschorn, Stephen Battaglio, John Battelle, Sara Nelson, Michael Cieply, Rafat Ali, Noam Cohen, Fred Wilson, Richard Siklos, Alex Pappademas, Kyle Pope, Greg Lindsay, and, in the end, Steven Brill), isn't it a bit strange that it has no wikipedia entry? Update: Waxy started one in the comments.

sunday

0 comments

A feature film about open source release for free: Rip: A Remix Manifesto (trailer). Stars the usual suspects: Lawrence Lessig, Girl Talk, and Cory Doctorow. Wired's Underwire has an interview with the director.

wednesday

0 comments

The Twitter Approval Matrix. Julia owns the banal/navel-gazing quadrant, but she's gotten quite good at making fun of herself.

wednesday

1 comment

In addition to that Talk of the Town piece, Brett Easton Ellis is also this week's A/V Club interview. He disses his own movie: "Less Than Zero is obviously bad, and we don't need to talk about why that didn't work. And American Psycho -- that is, I think, an impossible book to adapt. But whatever, it was the greatest hits from the book, more or less. Mary did a very good job of keeping that movie together, as did Christian Bale, and I think Roger did a terrific job. And with The Informers, I think there is really an outstanding movie floating out there somewhere, and I hope one day people might be able to see it. I am not comparing The Informers to The Godfather on any level, but there's that famous story where Paramount asked Coppola to cut like an hour out of the movie, because they didn't want to release a three-hour movie. And Coppola did, and showed it to the executive, and it was terrible. It moved very slowly at two hours. And then when he put the other hour back in, it moved very quickly. And that's all I want to say about The Informers."

tuesday

1 comment

Just launched: Life.com, which Heffernan calls "hands-down the Web's greatest photo site."

friday

0 comments

A music vid practically made for Friday blogging: "Kitty Get Down," The Ropes. (Also, note the conversation about the "metaphor" of the kitty. C'mon, we all know what that kitty means.)

thursday

0 comments

Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger.

tuesday

4 comments

Sorta interesting project: msnbc.com* just launched The Elkhart Project, which uses one city in middle America through which to view the economic crisis. I heard they actually bought a house in town, where journalists/producers will be staying while they file reports, which makes it somewhat reminiscent of reality television (though it appears to be completely online, not integrated into the cable network). Also, the project is interestingly launched on Newsvine's platform. [via]

tuesday

0 comments

Urlesque is counting down The 100 Most Iconic Internet Videos this week.

monday

27 comments

So let's see if this starts any debate.... my pal Matt Haughey recently wrote a little ditty called This Is How Social Media Really Works where he essentially argues that this new marketing force is completely unnecessary:

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need "social media marketing" after all.

I've been known to rant about this new breed of internet expertise too, but that's probably because NYC seems to have more social media experts than rats. But for the sake of argument, a counter-example of Matt's attempts to find a swingset, here's a story from Ad Age about buying an air conditioner. It makes a compelling case for a more subtle presence for brands to exist in online social spaces. Thoughts?

sunday

5 comments

Old time (very old time) readers of this site know that the last time the Red River of the north flooded (12 years ago), I lost everything I owned in the fire that started in the middle of the flood. (People have short-term memory for these things, but it was the largest evacuation of an American city in the 20th century. Brokaw broadcast live on location for two nights, and it was the only time Bill Clinton ever cried on national television. This Pulitzer-winning photo shows the block with my apartment and the newspaper I worked at.) I've been hitting refresh on local news sources and contacting old friends all weekend. It currently looks like the damage won't be as bad, but that doesn't make The Big Picture's slideshow any less eerie or reminiscent.

wednesday

6 comments

Your favorite band for the next five minutes: School of Seven Bells. No really, watch the My Bloody Valentine-ish video for "Half Asleep" and then watch this interview with the twins and then say "dream pop" three times while clicking your ruby converse. Then go do a Google Image Search for "Deheza sisters" on your own. Just remember me when this replaces your sicko Taylor Swift / Miley Cyrus fantasy left over from the Grammys.

wednesday

0 comments

A VH1-ish countdown for the rest of us: 50 Greatest Documentaries. It's a 100-minute Channel 4 special.

tuesday

9 comments

After owning it for six days, my Kindle was stolen in Austin. Bad timing, cuz Jacob Weisberg says it's gonna change the world.

thursday

0 comments

SnarkMarket: Hacking Your Own Comfort Level into the System.

wednesday

0 comments

"Downtown Train," Tom Waits.

saturday

1 comment

"Snarking is cultural vandalism. I have arrived at this conclusion belatedly. I have been guilty of snarking, and of enjoying snarks. In the matter of snarking, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But it has grown entirely out of hand. It is time to put away childish things. I must restore my balance, view the world in a fair way, hope to inspire more appreciation than ridicule. No doubt there will always be a role for snarking, given the proper target and an appropriate venue, and I reserve the right to snark when it is deserved, as in certain movie reviews. But in general I must become more well-behaved." Who? Roger Ebert. [via]

friday

5 comments

So the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is going to become the first major metro daily to go online-only. The staff will be slashed to 20 employees. Although this sounds sad, can you imagine what you could do with good technology and a staff of 20 people to write about everything going on in town? Either way, it's worth looking at my old friend Mike Davidson's post on this whole thing. Mike started Newsvine with six employees in the P-I building, and it's amazing to think that it out-lasted (big time) the daily.

wednesday

4 comments

Daft Punk is doing the music for the upcoming flick Tron 2.0. (I have no Tron jokes to make with this link. Please write your own.)

wednesday

3 comments

Just downloaded the Kindle for iPhone app. Product comparison with Kindle forthcoming....

friday

7 comments

So now we can add this to the canon of newspaper-saving stories: App Out Of It, Paper-Boy! At over 6,000 words and starring many of the city's brightest meta-media bylines (John Koblin, Matt Haber, Gillian Reagan and Doree Shafrir), this should -- finally? -- be the think piece that identities the problems and presents the solutions. However, if you read closely, it's more of a "throw everything against the wall" approach than a cohesive web strategy.



Some of you might recognize the rhetoric. It feels like one of those "brainstorming sessions" that marketing/editorial execs love to hold. If you've ever worked for a big media company, you know exactly what I'm talking about: every six months, it's the same dozen people trying to predict the future. (I enter a guilty plea: I've held as many of these as anyone. You know why? Because if you work for a lumbering big media company long enough, the only catharsis is trying to imagine the impossible.)

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's first admit that this story is fighting the good fight. This sort of cultural rhetoric is juicy and readymade for the <blockquote>:

The media of the 21st century is one that is blogged -- not a negative thing, see later in the piece! -- and merged with the users' own experiences and viewpoints synthesized with the original. If postmodernism came to literature in the '80s, it's got to come to journalism now.

That sounds right! But what does this future look like? That's where you start to see the gaudy side of postmodernism, a pastiche of the greatest hits of the past decade. It's basically the Girl Talk version of product development, including all of the following:

+ Personalization. "How about customizable home pages for users? So when they go to NYTimes.com, it will display, say, only international news and science headlines, and eliminate maybe sports- and style-related articles. Users could set preferences to display more new podcasts or video posts and drag and drop any reporters' column into a specific space on their home page."

+ Hyperlocal "A combination of local news and location-based technology has the capacity to be the foundation of this kind of distribution system."

+ Audio Stories. "Maybe Times reporters should file mp3s of their articles, reciting their reporting, along with their print stories, so people riding on the subway, and listening in their cars can participate."

+ Flashy Advertorial. "FlipGloss, a California-based ad start-up that just launched their beta site last week, is one company offering a model for high-end publishers and brands. Their interactive Web advertising translates the visual experience of flipping through a magazine on the computer screen."

+ Mobile. "The idea is this: The news must go mobile."

+ The Live Web. "Everyone in the new world has a status. Newspapers can take a lesson from 'status culture' by integrating it into their sites. What are readers reading right now? How many people have their eyes on one story? Who are they emailing it to? Where are they blogging it? How are their friends using the site?"

+ RSS Readers. "If they want their Twitter feed or del.icio.us links integrated into their home page, so they can see what their friends are reading, let them set that preference as well."

+ Audio Comments. "Users could comment on the article, by calling into the Times and record a comment, which will be automatically transcribed and posted on the website."

+ Subscriptions. "Premium access -- one better than the failed TimesSelect project -- will bring in revenue."

+ Applications. "The Times already has an application that is free for download on various devices including the iPhone and the BlackBerry -- with simple headlines and easy reading. But applications with added data, personalized content and social media would be more valuable."

+ E-Ink. "Perhaps more newspapers should be meeting with mobile device manufacturers and designers to make sure they are catering to consuming news on the go. Can you imagine the next Google/New York Times Android-powered portable reading device?"

Wheh!

Although none of these are bad ideas (some are quite good!), none are particularly novel. It presents this mashup as innovation, even though all of them have been around for a decade. But nostalgia-as-futurism is not really the big problem with this story. The fundamental concern is more prosaic: this story proposes that doing everything is the solution.

This spaghetti-throwing exercise accidentally reveals the actual looming problem inside media companies. Contrary to popular belief (propagated entirely by people who have never worked there), good ideas are not in short supply within big media companies. (You want to meet an aspiring futurist? Stop by the online department of a media company.) By far the biggest problem is focus.

Let's put this simply: there's a management problem inside big media, not an innovation problem.

But in fairness to this story, I am glossing over the prevailing thesis, which does deserve some attention: applications are the future of news. ("If news sites entered these other areas -- became social, hyperlocal, mobile -- perhaps they could retake the center stage and bring paid readers and advertisers to the same place?") That bit of futurism is worth contemplating, but it also deserves some scrutiny. We have some hardware-as-future precedent to discuss. Until recently, the software industry also thought it should build itself into hardware. But Google came along and nuked all of that. If the Mountain View idealists taught us anything about application development (and the word "Google" appears 27 times in this story, so they must, right?), it's that the browser is still the king. iPhone apps are cool, and they undoubtedly should be explored, but will newsy-retrofitted hardware and custom applications ultimately be the savior? TimesReader, anyone?

Despite all of this, I still recommend you trudge through the theorizing in here. The industry quotes are decent, and the thesis holds up most of the time, except when it's subverted by its own gizmo doohickey fascination. There are clearly some good ideas in there, if you can dig them out from the busy thicket.

p.s. This piece also happens to coincide with a lackluster redesign of Observer.com. It's unfair to hold the writers up to the mirror of the tech/biz units of a company, but it also makes the whole thesis a little suspect.

friday

6 comments

This is going to be fun... On Monday night at Santos Party House in Chinatown, my team (Peter Rojas, Gavin Purcell, Kelly Reeves, Nate Westheimer) is going head-to-head against Michelle DeForest's team (Bre Pettis, Caroline McCarthy, Irene Polnyi, Tim Shey) in a little something called Know Your Meme: The Game Show! Pwn, Win, or Fail! Hosted by the Rocketboom kids, it's a live game show that should be stellar fun. Our team name is the Chocolate Boxxy Babies -- come on out and WATCH US CRUSH DEFOREST!

wednesday

5 comments

A link-heavy and quote-filled NYT story about the current controversy on Tumblr.

wednesday

66 comments

An Interview With The Founder of 4chan

A month ago on the eve of ROFLcon, I interviewed the founder of 4chan for a magazine story that never ended up running. He chatted about everything from the techincal complexities of keeping 4chan alive to the anxieties of operating the most controversial site on the internet. By the end of the interview, I was thinking "This kid has seen stuff that would make my eyes burn, but he seems so smart and sweet about it all." (He started the site when he was 15; he just turned 21.) It seemed like insightful stuff that should run somewhere, so here it is....

Like many successful internet phenomena, 4chan is a shockingly simple idea: an online bulletin board where anyone can post pictures.

This simplicity is deceptive.

4chan is actually one of the most robust, complex, annoying, disgusting, illuminating, perverse, fascinating online communities ever created. It is the direct or indirect source for many of the strangest internet memes: RickRolling, LOLcats, Sarah Palin's email hack, Anonymous, Chocolate Rain, and many other minor and major feats of esoterica (i.e., fucked up weird porn). Most of these viral specimens arose from the site's most popular image board, /b/, which can be the source of considerable hand-wringing and fist-clenching for anyone who has dared navigate its murky, anonymous waters.

4chan's founder is a 21-year-old New Yorker named Christopher Poole. Known as "moot" to the site's devotees, Poole is disarmingly well-spoken and pragmatic about what he has created. "It's my belief that the community should dictate its norms, standards, and rules," he says. "I've left /b/ to its own devices, with very little intervention."

Of all the memes spawned from 4chan, is there one you feel most attached to?

At the last ROFLcon [in Cambridge last April], someone asked "Do you like RickRolling?" I said something to the effect of "Screw RickRolling!" Everyone gasped because that was the cool thing at the time.

But now they'd probably agree.

Yeah, once Nancy Pelosi does a RickRolling video with her cat on YouTube, you know it's done.

But then I remembered that my favorite was something called Weegee, and only two people in the crowd were like "Yeah, Weegee!" That's a good sign -- that no one knows what it is.

What is it?

Weegee is just a vectored photo of Luigi from Mario Brothers placed in completely random situations.

Sounds harmless. Does it bother you that most people think of 4chan as only being the most controversial board, /b/?

We have 44 image boards at this point, so in that sense it's a small part of the site. But /b/ accounts for 30 percent of our traffic. That's where the attention is, that's where the headlines are coming from. That's also where a lot of the rowdiness and lawlessness goes on.

What do you think of that lawlessness?

Some of it can be healthy, as long as it remains within certain boundaries.

What boundaries?

Like that we don't actually break that law. Because of the lack of rules, 4chan has fostered an environment where there's a lot of creativity and good things coming out of it. But at the same time, when people go out and do crazy things...

Which kinds of things?

The best example is when Jake Brahm was arrested for posting a bomb hoax. [In October 2006, Brahm was arrested for threatening to blow up multiple NFL stadiums. He was sentenced to six months in prison.] And after that we saw a lot of copycat stuff. People were getting arrested for saying they were going to do the same thing. Law enforcement was coming every week and asking for our help.

When you started the site, did you expect any of that?

Absolutely not. Its popularity has been entirely an accident. I was 15 years old and into anime. I threw up one image board, which was the original /b/. At first it was all anime. As people started posting other things, I added more boards and /b/ remained the random board.

4chan has blown up over the past five years. It's gone from 100 people to 4.75 million per month. And /b/ is pushing 100 million pageviews.

What makes it so big?

At the time, it was very unique. Image boards and anonymous BBS had been big in Japan, but not in the West, where we were used to bulletin boards and blogs. When 4chan started, the format was new. And it was unique because of the anonymity aspect.

What was your scariest moment running the site?

Probably the first time I was contacted by law enforcement. At the time I was 16 and I was living with my mother. That was shocking.

Given your user base, are you worried about your own identity theft?

Yeah, I originally hid behind the moniker because I was 15. It was not appropriate to use my real name at the time. My friends didn't know, my parents didn't know, my educators didn't know. Back then, people didn't appreciate the site so much, but now I can point to good things like LOLcats. Back then, they would have just seen porn.

When did your family find out?

Only when those articles came out last year. I kept it a secret from almost all of my friends and family until 2008. It was five full years of living a double life.

Was your mom shocked?

I don't think anyone was put-off. Four years ago, it was just a porn site. It's matured a lot into something a little more presentable. Now I think they can appreciate it as more than that.



One of the most interesting things about 4chan is that nothing gets archived. Threads disappear within an hour. It's a contradiction -- 4chan is known for creating memes, yet it's designed for them to die so quickly.

The lack of retention lends itself to having fresh content. The joke is that 4chan post is a repost of a repost of a repost. There was a guy who was downloading every image from /b/. He calculated that 80 percent of what's posted has been posted before. So it's survival of the fittest. Ideas that are carried over to the next day are worth repeating. The things that are genuinely funny get carried over.

The reason we're seen as a meme generation factory is because of the unique qualities of the image board and the lack of retention. On other bulletin boards, threads are archived indefinitely. All the big threads have been around for months or years. But with 4chan, something has to be really good to keep getting posted.

How involved are you with Anonymous?

I'm not involved at all.

What do you think about it?

I think it's interesting. When Scientology tried to make the Tom Cruise video disappear, there was this instant mobilization of thousands of people who banded together overnight. They had plans to stage a worldwide protest. I thought that was pretty incredible. I was fascinated by it.

Are there situations where they go too far?

I would say so. Submitting bomb threats -- stuff like that is going too far. You need to be smart about it. You can't just throw it all away with threats, you have to be proactive and productive.

Because there's no membership policy, it seems like anything can get attributed to being an act of Anonymous.

Yeah, now it's become more of a buzzword for the media. Now anytime something happens, it gets labeled as "an act of international hate group Anonymous."

That's why I always personally felt that the movement was destined to fail. You've got two types of people: You have the Anonymous members who are genuinely passionate about dismantling Scientology, but then you have the casual hangers-on who are just there to troll. Because you can't filter it and because the membership is open, Anonymous will always be held back by the bottom rung who are pelting Scientology with eggs and bomb threats and these mischievous juvenile acts. They are holding back the people who take it more seriously. For every step forward Anonymous makes, they can go 10 steps back with one negative headline.

You must feel something similar. 4chan has a mixed public image too.

4chan certainly has a stigma.

And Anonymous seemed to emerge out of 4chan.

Yeah, I would say that's definitely the case. Anonymous culture emerged out of image boards. The rules of these communities spawned some of the original thinking behind the group. But once the Scientology protests started, people outside of 4chan joined. At that point it diverged into its own thing.

How much does it cost to run the site?

About $6,000 per month. That's actually not too bad for a site that is all rich media and has 300 million pageviews. I don't have any overhead past that. I don't have any employees. I don't have an office.

Are you making your money back?

Just barely. We're trying to convince advertisers that our community is worth their ad dollars. That's been a really uphill battle because of our content. Advertisers will Google us and see that we're huge, but they'll also see all these threats and hacks. It scares them away. Overcoming that stigma is difficult.

Have you thought about dropping the controversial board?

People have suggested dropping /b/, but that's the life force of the site. I can't do that. It was the first board, and it will be the last board to go.

I imagine you've seen so many strange things doing this site. What's the most demented thing you've seen?

I'd be happy to email you something. [Laughs.] I've seen some horrible shit. I like to think that I've grown as a person, but at the same time I think a little piece of me continues to die every year.

What have you learned from all this?

I'm still trying to figure that out. I need to start thinking about getting a job. I don't have a resume. I've been asking myself, what have I learned about the internet, what have I learned about myself? At this point, I've been unable to articulate that.

wednesday

8 comments

A follow-up to yesterday's post: In an article in Newsweek, I mention that the first post on the new Whitehouse.gov is hopeful: a message of transparency. But actually, even before we get to the administration's goals with the site, isn't it fascinating that people actually care about Whitehouse.gov? Know what I mean? When I put the before/after shots of Whitehouse.gov on Flickr yesterday, it didn't occur to me that it would take off quite that way. But now it has 219,000 views, and people suddenly seem to care about a website they probably never had reason to visit before. This seems like a radical break. (After all, when was the last time you went to a federal government site for actual information? I download tax forms sometimes, but that's about it.) For the first time in our digital lives, the internet might actually fulfill one of its earliest utopian ideals. There are many obstacles, but it feels like a hopeful time for the hive mind to finally get its true test. If the Obama administration can shift their web efforts from providing information to creating knowledge, we could be on the precipice of something radically different: people participating with governance. Update: Oh, I guess this explains the Flickr traffic.

tuesday

5 comments

The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House? Wired looks the various obstacles for opening up governance on the internet: a ban on endorsements could limit external links, all written communication must be stored so all previous versions of web pages must be archived, the first amendment might limit comment filters, etc. Update #1: WhiteHouse.gov has been updated (my side-by-side comparison photo went sorta viral), with a blog post on change. Update #2: Kottke notes the robots.txt change. Update #3: Change.gov is now shut down.

monday

2 comments

David Carr interviewing Mike Tyson at Sundance about the new documentary, Tyson:

Tyson: I'm getting over all this, all these cameras. That's a straight ticket back to picking up cocaine. All of this is very frightening and intimidating.
Carr: Will you tell me more about how that becomes a trigger. I just walked down the street with you, and I couldn't stand being that closely observed, I couldn't stand people swarming around me. How does that impact how you see yourself?
Tyson: You being a former addict yourself, I don't know how it works in your particular situation. But I never get high because I'm depressed or sad. I always get high because everything is going great.
Carr: Right. Everything's going your way.
Tyson: Do you understand that?
Carr: Oh, absolutely.

friday

2 comments

For anyone following Dodgegate, some links: Rick's Soliloquy, Peter's Last Days, Caroline's Eulogy, Gawker's Take-down, Rachel's Thoughts, and Dens' Retort.

thursday

11 comments

Dodgeball is shutting down (which is news for about a dozen New Yorkers), but Dens is working on a replacement.

sunday

1 comment

It's been interesting to watch the dial move up and down and back up again on Jimmy Fallon's web show. Heffernan takes on the difficulty of reviewing such things in today's NYMag, and he's also been getting good coverage at CES and NewTeeVee reevaluates their previous diss. Update: just noticed that Gavin was interviewed about the show, where he releases the news about the show bloggers!

thursday

1 comment

Interesting place to see Girl Talk reviewed: Technology Review. It opens at a Girl Talk show in Philly, but winds its way to other mashup artists, such as DJ Earworm and Lenlow. The second page has a create-your-own-mashup app.

monday

3 comments

"Why would anyone pay a dime to read professionals' advice on breaking into an amateur medium that rewards people who make up their own rules?" Good question.

friday

15 comments

Everyone is doing their predictions for 2009 right now, and everyone who isn't is claiming that the future is too bleak or complex to predict. What you see below takes both perspectives into account and says: fuck it, let's have fun with this.

However, don't mistake this satire as an empty gesture. If not literally true, I believe most of predictions below in some metaphoric sense. In other words, to hell with the Black Swan!

So here we are again -- playing Nostradamus in media, technology, and pop culture -- with 36 predictions for 2009:

1. Hatahs. 4chan digitally antagonizes an entire race of people into self-inflicted genocide.
2. Facebook. By the middle of summer, you realize that you're logging into most websites via Facebook Connect. You get a creepy feeling in your gut about this, but it's so damn convenient.
3. Politics. After a freak caribou attack injures Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Sarah Palin joins The View.
4. Newspapers. At least three major daily newspapers cease to exist. The most likely members of the carnage: the Denver Rocky Mountain News, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
5. Yahoo. Fuck it, Lycos buys it.
6. Twitter I. Facebook finally buys Twitter, but only after a price war with Google ramps it up to a ridiculous nine-figure valuation. Unsurprisingly, this is Twitter's big plan "to make money."
7. Twitter II. But seriously, just like those stories in 2001 about people who [shock!] make a living off of blogs, the "Twitter professional" will somehow become a reality.
8. Twitter III. A major news event happens that no one live twitters. NYT writes three stories (Styles, Tech, and Media) about this phenomena, quickly dubbed "Twitter Shock."
9. Starbucks. After trying everything else imaginable, they introduce a new "buffet" option, which is a surprise hit.
10. Daughter Moguls. In the most convoluted assassination plot ever devised, Christie Hefner, Shari Redstone, and Elisabeth Murdoch join forces to commit triple patricide. Vanity Fair dedicates three eInk covers to the incident, with heads that morph from father to daughter.
11. Magazines I. Some rich kid on the west coast launches a magazine called Charticles, which consists only of... yeah. Choire Sicha commits suicide in his St. Mark's apartment by paper cutting himself to death with the debut issue.
12. Magazines II. Monocle raises its newsstand price to $1295.00.
13. Magazines III. Doy, of course Portfolio goes under. The final cover story is mysteriously about cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney.
14. Gossip Girl. In the Christmas '09 episode, Chuck and Blair finally fuck again. The recession ends.
15. Subscriptions. Against all seeming rationality, several new online subscription publications show up on the scene.
16. Where The Wild Things Are. You know what? The movie actually does suck. Gen X icons Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers are pilloried by a millennials who claim old people just don't get it. They're kinda right.
17. New York Times. After Brian Stelter notices that David Carr has refriended Jayson Blair on Facebook, the New York Times asks Carr to take a drug test. Upon failing, he returns to Minneapolis to run City Pages, which ends up being the last remaining alt-weekly at Village Voice Media.
18. Online Video. Something's gotta give. Two of the "big" three -- Revision3, ON Networks, Next New Networks -- cease to exist by the end of the year. And when 23/6 and Funny Or Die expire on the same day, Alley Insider's headline is "Funny Or Dead In 24/7." Normal people have no idea what any of these things are.
19. Terrestrial Video. Something's gotta give. One of the "big" five is morphed into a cable outlet.
20. Daily Beast. Tina Brown uses her consulting role at HBO to pitch a reality series about her own website. No one thinks it will go into development, but then Aaron Sorkin and Mark Burnett sign on. Julia Allison and Arianna Huffington are super pissed.
21. Tina Fey. First woman knighted. Now Oprah's pissed too.
22. Google. They do a lot of stuff that no one expects, but the surprise application of the year is some sort of mashup between three core Google products: Reader, Chrome, and Docs. Oh, and maybe Android, just to make this pshit sci-fi.
23. FriendFeed. Not only does your mom still has no fucking idea what it is, but your friends don't either.
24. Publishing. 49 books are published that chronicle the end of publishing.
25. Music. Proving that fake stuff always wins, Lonely Island's album debuts platinum -- the only album to do so this year.
26. Lara Logan. Dueling February covers of Parenting and Playboy.
27. Gawker Media. Nick Denton predicts armageddon, using copious Excel graphs to elucidate his point.
28. Mad Men. After negotiations break down with AMC, a rumor floats that a movie is in the works. It is eventually released in 2012 on the same day as the Arrested Development movie.
29. Diablo Cody. Released in September, Jennifer's Body becomes the first young adult movie since Heathers and Clueless that resonates with grown-ups. While you try very hard to think of a new reason to hate her, Diablo casts Sasha Grey in her next film. Backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash ensues.
30. Words. Webster's Dictionary names undershare word of the year.
31. Online Media. Trying to take advantage of cheap labor, hundreds of "me too" small startup publications launch. They will call themselves "online magazines," but they will be blogs.
32. Microsoft. They! Will! Suprise! You! (Actually, no they won't. You hear this every year. Their online version of Office will be begrudgingly cool, but it will have one severe flaw that renders it unusable.)
33. Apple. After Biz Week's "Is The Innovation Over?" story appears, Steve Jobs retires at the end of the year, surprisingly citing health reasons.
34. Education. 37 percent of the people you know go back to grad school.
35. Digg. It does not get bought and Kevin Rose does not go on a date with Jennifer Aniston. Every boy in the Valley weeps at a shared realization: their sense of worth is over-valued.
36. Rupert Murdoch. He dies in a freak yacht accident. Sumner Redstone, Padma Lakshmi, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Rachel Sklar, Hoobastank, and Shaquille O'Neill are also on board, but all survive. Foul play is suspected, and an investigation reminiscent of the board game Clue ensues. A rumor spreads that Murdoch's cryogenically frozen brain is in an Anaheim basement next to Walt Disney's frontal lobe and the Arc of the Covenant. Michael Wolff sells his next book, The Brain Eaters, for $10 million. 17 people buy it; 4 read it.

Previously: 2007 predix | 2006 predix

tuesday

1 comment

As 2009 encroaches, and "What are you doing for New Years Eve?" becomes the question you hear five times an hour, the list of 2008 lists is finally wrapping up. Here are some of the best recent additions: Merlin Mann's Top 10, The Copycat Effect's Top Ten Evil Clown Stories, NYT's Year in Pictures, PC Mag's 100 Favorite Blogs, Esquire's Best Bars, Fortune's 21 Dumbest Moments in Business, fourfour's 44+ Reasons To Love 2008, WSJ's Best And Worst Ads, Daily Beast's Top Ten Thinking Man's Sex Symbols, Wired's Vaporware Awards, Cracked's 12 Most Embarrassing Photos, This Recording's 13 Personalities That Mattered Most, DJ Earworm's Mashup of Billboard Top 25 Hits, and Howard Wolfson's favorite music (yep, that one).

tuesday

19 comments

If we could bundle up the internet into a few snappy headlines, 2008 might look like this:

+ Commenters Went Crazy
+ Twitter & Tumblr Went Mainstream
+ Rickrolling Went Very Mainstream
+ Big Media Went Nowhere
+ Oversharing Went Wild
+ Politicos Went Online
+ 4Chan & Lifecasting Went Awry

If not exactly an admirable time capsule, it still felt something like progress. I personally began the year promising a reduction in my daily internet intake, yet ended it with 100 additional sites in my rss reader. Perhaps it was a resolution meant to be broken.

In previous years, this list was dubbed "The Best Blogs You (Maybe) Aren't Reading." But that wordy contrivance seems presumptuous in these niche-filled times, where everyone seems to read everything yet no one seems to read the same things. So I took some advice that Lindsay gave me last year and dubbed this a collection of "notable" sites instead. That appellation seems more appropriate.

Maybe half of the blogs listed below are new, and the other half deserve attention for having reinvented the medium in some way. Consensus is an impossible task in a world this diverse, but that shouldn't stop us from pointing out excellence when we see it. So here they are, the most notable blogs of the past year:

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

Special thanks to Rachel, Noah, Andy, Emily, Spencer, Matt, Lindsay, Joanne, Matt, Karina, Kelly, Robin, and Taylor for their tips -- and inspiration -- in compiling this list. See you next year!

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

This list on previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007

friday

10 comments

It was a year that chimed in with idealism, and clanked out with pragmatism. "Hope" began the political season as an optimistic revelation, but concluded the year as a is-that-seriously-the-best-we-can-do? mantra right up there with "don't be evil."

Perfection was the goal, so music set itself to the task of eliminating the blemishes. Auto-Tune diluted the rough edges, but the economy fell apart and Kanye's mom died while undergoing plastic surgery. So much for perfection.

By the end of the year, we were searching for compromises. Once garish, Will.I.Am's take on "Hope" ended up sounding down right utopian.

There's a lot of fun to be had in the albums below, my picks for the best of 2008. Some of you will be disgusted by the likes of Lady GaGa, whose filthy rich party lifestyle is more gaudy than throwing a potlatch outside a homeless shelter (which is not that dissimilar from Kanye's Gucci soliloquy on SNL).

But compare that party-with-what-ya-got materialism to whatever "hopeful" nostalgia that the cosmoblogosphere was scolding you into: Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend. When asked to pick between a luxury simulacra and faux authenticity, I'll take the loot any day. I have no idea where these indie kids found cause to overuse the word "beauty" in this weary pastoral, but this year's Pitchfork bands felt more like a retreat from the future than nothing else since -- fuck, I dunno -- prohibition. Fantasy, indeed.

Then again, I banged my head to Chinese Democracy, so what the fuck, right?

Here they are, my favorite albums of 2008:

Previous Yearly Music Roundups: 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007

friday

1 comment

Your favorite song for the next five minutes: Kanye West's "Love Lockdown," remixed by Flying Lotus.

wednesday

1 comment

MTV is giving the College Humor kids their own show.

sunday

1 comment

Who's not totally getting fucked over by the economy? North Dakota! (My family is small-town bankers from NoDak. This quote from the story is pretty much them: "Our banks don't do those goofy loans.")

thursday

3 comments

The yearly ginormous list of lists plods on this year. Thanks in advance for emailing me links. Some of the best lists added so far: Pitchfork's Top 40 Music Videos, Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year, Yahoo's Top Searches, Entertainment Weekly's 25 Entertainers of the Year, This Recording's Top 20 Albums, Paste's Top 50 Albums, Yahoo Movies' Top 10 Trailers, Multinational Monitor's 10 Worst Corporations, and NYT's 100 Notable Books.

tuesday

2 comments

Dorota from Gossip Girl to get her own web show spin-off, like The Jefferson's!

monday

1 comment

Sternbergh on Quality Show Fatigue: "Maybe the furor around shows like Mad Men is not the product of some rampant mass hysteria. Maybe it's the expression of a yearning for the last remnant of the traditional viewing experience we once shared. Long gone are the days when we would all sit down on Thursday at 10 to watch L.A. Law. So instead, to retain some sense of communal experience, we cling culturally to a single show. We don't want to admit we're splitting off in a million directions; we want to believe that all our eyes still occasionally turn in the same direction. (For the past year, the election campaign served this purpose -- the one great show we all tuned into.) So it doesn't even matter that not many people, relatively, are actually watching Mad Men. What matters is that everyone's talking about it."

monday

2 comments

Urban Outfitters' breaks down your shopping list -- the narcissist, the name dropper, the party girl. That's everyone on my list!

sunday

0 comments

The NYT Mag story on Google's international legal quandries is worth reading. The backdrop is how free speech is defined country-by-country (holocaust denial, for instance, is illegal in France and Germany), especially as it pertains to removing content from YouTube. Lest you think that America is free speech oasis, it also tells the story of how Joe Lieberman has been trying to get YouTube to take down videos produced by Islamic terrorists, even if they don't feature hate speech or violent content.

thursday

0 comments

An imagined conversation with Jeff Jarvis. Also, I love this quote from Denton: "Jarvis' own career depends on a permanent revolution. He needs it to be 1792 [in France] so he can continue to get his consulting gigs and so people can listen to him when he says, 'The system is broken! It's broken!'"

thursday

2 comments

Your favorite video for the next five minutes: b4-4's "Get Down". [via]

friday

2 comments

Kottke breaks down the cultural logic of old, by showing the half-life of movies and music. "Watching The Godfather today is like watching Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) in 1972." While this is certainly true in purely linear terms, I wonder if something has happened (postmodernism!) to cause the timeline to shrink in the past couple decades.

thursday

3 comments

Valleywag is being shut down. Paul is leaving; Owen will write for Gawker.

tuesday

2 comments

People, people, people. You don't understand. Your quaint rules about ownership -- they don't apply to Kanye.

tuesday

0 comments

Eliza Dushku is playing a grown-up!

friday

9 comments

After correcting a human error in entering data gave him another 100 votes, Al Franken is now down only 237 votes (~.01% of the total vote). Previous Minnesota vote recounts have changed votes by 3500+ votes. The official recount begins in two weeks. If there's a tie, it ends in a coin flip (for real). Update: recount votes could swing Franken.

thursday

3 comments

Your favorite song for the next five minutes: MIA & Blaqstarr cover Tom Waits' "Way Down In The Hole." Love.

tuesday

0 comments

Since I'll never actually take the time to write down all my thoughts about the complex entity that is Malcolm Gladwell, being quoted about some of them will have to suffice. Quoting myself: "I think he should be filed under self-help. Read his work closely and there's something about it that is supposed to make you, the reader, feel better about yourself. You may seem insignificant -- but you're actually an influencer! You might make rash decisions -- but this is good!" (For the record, I think Gladwell is a magnificent stylist, but also find his rhetoric occasionally problematic.)

tuesday

5 comments

I sure wasn't expecting to see Derrida invoked in the financial crisis debacle in this week's New Yorker!

For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always "deferred," moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings -- a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an "aporia," from a Greek term meaning "impasse." There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect.

saturday

3 comments

The NYT Mag's cover story profile of Lauren Zalaznick -- president of Bravo, Oxygen and iVillage; producer of Kids and Swoon; another Brown semiotics grad; masstige's greatest impresario; and ultimately the person behind Top Chef, Pop-Up Video, Project Runway, and so forth -- is actually pretty fascinating. Snippets: "Like a softer version of its MTV cousin Beavis and Butt-head, Pop-Up Video was television that let the viewer enjoy the medium while also enabling him to feel a little bit superior to it." And: "Zalaznick's innovation was to make the actual narrative itself about people selling stuff, and buying it too"

thursday

0 comments

While Jezebel adeptly stems off Tina Fey backlash, NYT celebrates the return of 30 Rock. But there's a whiff of a second backlash in this line: "As with her Palin impersonation, Ms. Fey is an expert borrower: she reworks classic formulas from the past and mines her own experiences. Her satire hews so closely to the original that it is almost mimicry." Update: Gawker Biting the Hand That Feeds?

tuesday

10 comments

An update from yesterday's post, some stuff I watched on MTVMusic.com today:

"Sunday" by Sonic Youth

"C.R.E.A.M." by Wu-Tang Clan

"Naughty Girls" by Samantha Fox

"Africa" by Toto

"Ring the Alarm" by Beyonce

"Atmosphere" by Joy Division

"Only Shallow" by My Bloody Valentine

"Juicy" by Notorious B.I.G.

"99 Problems" by Jay-Z

"Come To Daddy" by Aphex Twin

"Knives Out" by Radiohead

"Protection" by Massive Attack

"We Share Our Mothers' Health" by The Knife

"Leave It" by Yes

"Rich Girls" by The Virgins

"Tom Sawyer" by Rush

"Willing To Wait" by Sebadoh

"Shady Lane" by Pavement

"Stratford-On-Guy" by Liz Phair

"Just Dance" by Lady Gaga

"Don't Bring Me Down" by ELO

"Is It Love" by Gang of Four

"Like a Virgin" by Madonna

"Whatever You Like" by T.I.

"Space Oddity" by David Bowie,

"Smooth Up" by Bulletboys

"Bathroom Wall" by Faster Pussycat

"Galang" by MIA

"Got Money" by Lil Wayne

"Mama Weer All Crazee Now" by The Runaways

"Feel The Pain" by Dinosaur Jr.

"Y Control" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

"Connection" by Elastica

"LES Artistes" by Santogold

"Last Night" by The Strokes

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan

"Just Like Honey" by The Jesus & Mary Chain

"The Ledge" by The Replacements

"Kick It" by Peaches

"Shoplifters of The World Unite" by The Smiths

"Nude as the News" by Cat Power

"All Is Full Of Love" by Bjork

"Frontin'" by Pharrell Williams

"Girls And Boys" by Prince

"Rusty Cage" by Johnny Cash

"Holy Diver" by Dio

"Pet Cemetary" by The Ramones

"Talk Talk" by Talk Talk

"Crimson and Clover" by Joan Jett

"Peace Sells" by Megadeth

"Mother" by Danzig

"Rapture" by Blondie

"Raining Blood" by Slayer

"Rise" by Public Image Ltd.

"20th Century Boy" by T. Rex

"Victoria" by The Fall

"One Word" by Brian Eno

"Ziggy Stardust" by Bauhaus

"It Was a Good Day" by Ice Cube

"Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely" by Husker Du

tuesday

5 comments

Your favorite remix for the next five minutes: Kanye West vs. Radiohead - Reckoner Lockdown. Update from the comments: there's a video too.

saturday

1 comment

With the massive downturn of journalism jobs, Ana Marie is going with the sponsorship model to cover travel expenses in the final days of the election.

friday

1 comment

Bad news for NYC publishing: it looks like Radar magazine is folding. Website might survive. Update: AMI (which owns Star and National Enquirer) bought RadarOnline.com. Also: Maer Roshan exit interview.

tuesday

3 comments

The Chuck Bass "Womanizer" advert. They need to spin him off with his own show, right?

tuesday

1 comment

Several people emailed me the crazy Michele Bachmann video last week, but I never bothered linking to it because I already knew the Minnesota congresswoman was super crazy. I had my own tussles with her back in the day (back when she used to pay attention to blogs!), but now it turns out that spewing craziness onto the national scene will get you even more tv appearances.

sunday

13 comments

Robin goes to bat for the Amazon MP3 store. Are others using it? Update: @amazonmp3 provides daily sales on the site, including some entire albums for $1 or $2.

thursday

0 comments

Andrew Sullivan's "Why I Blog" from The Atlantic will probably be the most quoted thing on the internet for the next few days. So here are a few quick excerpts for faking your way through conversations:

A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.

The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is -- more than any writer of the past -- a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.

Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human -- whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.

A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.

People have a voice for radio and a face for television. For blogging, they have a sensibility.

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm's length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth.

The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, bloggings gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding.

wednesday

7 comments

Maybe I'm drunk right now (okay, I am), but I think this might be one of the most important discussions of our time (well, if you exclude the economy, Iraq, the energy crisis, and the downfall of America): Rachel Maddow vs. David Frum on MSNBC. It's about the tone of politics vis-a-vis the state of media's sarcastic approach toward it.

tuesday

4 comments

Previously an unbearable download, Joost has relaunched as a web-based app. Its competition will be Hulu, iTunes, and YouTube, in that order.

tuesday

0 comments

Ad Age: Dumenco's funny column about the clusterfuck/circlejerk that is Tina Brown, Michael Wolff, Barry Diller, Harry Evans, Arianna Huffington, and Dumenco himself.

monday

7 comments

Chicago has mysteriously become ground central for the local online media battle. The Onion recently launched its entertainment portal, Decider, in Chicago. Huffington Post last month launched its local effort in Chicago. NBC just launched a new affiliate site, NBCChicago.com, that is heavily entertainment-based. Curbed and Eater will be spreading there soon, and EveryBlock also hails from ChiTown. And in addition to the normal Gothamist and MetroBlog presence, Gapers Block has a huge following.

monday

1 comment

Video on political humor from the New Yorker Festival, which I attended with Rachel. Panelists were Samantha Bee (Daily Show), Andy Borowitz (Borowitz Report), James Downey (SNL), Todd Hanson (The Onion), and Allison Silverman (Colbert Report).

sunday

0 comments

If you're into that kinda thing, the Pitchfork 500 book has its own website and is available for pre-order.

saturday

7 comments

Well-known internet people get engaged via Twitter. The rest of the nation hurls.

wednesday

1 comment

Google analyzes search queries during last night's debate. The spike for "walk softly" is funny.

tuesday

3 comments

Kanye's new video: "Love Lockdown" (which premiered on Ellen, for whatever reason).

monday

6 comments

I seem to have at least one conversation per day about Mad Men -- there's always at least one person in my life who wants to talk about Draper's lechery, Peggy's baby, or Joan's bosom. Lately, many of those conversations meander toward questioning the psychology of advertising, which is of course what Matthew Weiner wants us to be thinking about. Eventually the role of product placements comes up, which is the perfect manifestation of contemporary advertising's darkest psychoses: deception and desire.

Since the episode where Betty buys Heineken, I've been obsessed with the singular question of whether Heineken was an actual product placement. (This question nagged me more than what the fuck was going on with Peggy's baby.) Finally, New York has published a story that answers this question and several others about the product placement game: What Tina Fey Would Do for a SoyJoy?

Among other things, it reveals that Heineken was indeed an embedded advertisement. Doy, of course it was, just like Snapple in 30 Rock and Staples in The Office. The author, Emily Nussbaum, goes on to say that within the top 10 shows alone, there were 26,000 product placements on network television last year. The first half of her piece prepares us for the inevitable:

If two decades ago music fans raged when Nike co-opted the Beatles' "Revolution," these days the most "independent" musicians vie to be on Gossip Girl. James Bond drives a BMW, Carrie Bradshaw drinks Skyy vodka.

So just shut up, this is the future.

The second half lets you down with more examples to embarrass your heroes: that Ben & Jerry's bit with Colbert? Yep. That SoyJoy sketch on 30 Rock? Yep.

SoyJoy becomes the example to eventually make Nussbuam's ultimate point about how product placements might not actually be helping the product. She talks to Joss Whedon who confesses that he didn't know that SoyJoy was even a product, much less a placement. She concludes:

It occurs to me that the 30 Rock integration was a failed experiment. After all, the product looked to me (a woman 18 to 49!) like a punch line.

And so it is a return of the repressed -- Mad Men. The entire show is one big game of sublimated knowledge: Who knows what about who slept with whom? Lust and greed are the currency at the offices of Sterling Cooper. When mixing power and sex, desire and deception are the emotional outcomes. Advertising is merely the by-product of this formula applied to capitalism.

If there is one prevailing tone in Mad Men, it's the fraught tension of not knowing. This also happens to be the exact tension of product placements. And now that my curiosity has been satiated about Heineken, I must seek out a new victim to interrogate. Or to put it differently: Are Utz better than nuts?

sunday

1 comment

PaidContent has a screengrab and quotes about Tina Brown's new site, The Daily Beast, which is supposed to launch tomorrow morning. Update: it launched.

sunday

0 comments

"Town Without Pity," Gene Pitney.

thursday

1 comment

Disenchanted by the lack of good information about the economic bailout, Matt starts a new site, The Money Meltdown, to collaboratively assemble the best information.

wednesday

23 comments

There are a hundred Klosterman interviews out there right now, but Steve's is the best. I'm going to grab this quote, even though only five people will know these North Dakota towns, including the one I grew up in: "[Owl] is sort of a synthesis of the cities that we talked about the most -- towns like Napoleon, Langdon, Munich, Thompson, Cando, Larimore, cities like that." Update: an unexpected rave from This Recording.

monday

2 comments

The other night while we were, ugh, group blogging, Katie noticed that I have a tattoo on my right arm -- a small Chinese character. "What does that mean -- irony?" she asked. The idea of a tattoo of the Chinese character for irony struck me as the best idea ever! Anyway, BoingBoing has a post that explores the question of who owns the copyright of the tattoo -- the tattooed? the tattooer? third parties?

monday

5 comments

New Yorker: SFJ on Timbaland. "When you hear a rhythm that is being played by an instrument you can't identify but wish you owned, when you hear a song that refuses to make up its mind about its genre but compels you to move, or when you hear noises that you thought couldn't find a comfortable place in a pop song, you are hearing Timbaland, or school thereof."

sunday

4 comments

NYC imports from Japan which imported from Victorian England: New York Lolitas, an NYT audio slideshow (more). The interviews are strangely fascinating. They hang out in Chinatown, there's a Meetup Group, and the beginnings of a documentary.

saturday

5 comments

"Small Town," John Cougar Mellencamp.

wednesday

4 comments

"The Boys Are Back In Town," Thin Lizzy.

sunday

0 comments

Twitter is now getting regular attention in NYT: Technology Doesn't Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds. See also: Clay Shirky's Web 2.0 keynote on information overload.

sunday

1 comment

"Wealth fantasies now constitute a genre of their own, one that is matched at the other end of the spectrum by a doomsday literalism also prevalent on television." Comparing Gossip Girl to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a clever way to discuss two shows that most people aren't watching. And like the teen drama, the women in the Terminator redux -- a mom who is more like a superhero robot, and a robot who is like the dream girlfriend -- command the narrative. With themes of corporate power, technological alienation, and evangelical yearning, it's the best show on television that people are missing.

saturday

1 comment

The Anonyblogger. Fake is the new anonymous.

monday

5 comments

ESPN Mag has an excerpt from Chuck's newest novel, Downtown Owl. I can guarantee this will be the only book to ever feature a passage about my high school sports+girls rival -- Wishek, ND (pop. 800).

monday

0 comments

Is Google Starting Its Own Country?

saturday

1 comment

To refresh your memory, the video. Van Halen's "Right Now" is the theme song for the Republican National Convention, sure to be blasting from the speakers of the hockey area in St. Paul where all the action is going down this week. Across town, Republican booster Sammy Hagar will be performing at First Ave during the convention. "Come on turn, turn this thing around." You got it.

RIGHT NOW
(Van Halen)

Don't wanna wait 'til tomorrow.
Why put it off another day?
One by one, little problems.
Build up, and stand in our way. Oh!

One step ahead, one step behind it.
Now ya gotta run to get even.
Make future plans I'll dream about yesterday, hey!
Come on turn, turn this thing around.

(Right now) Hey! It's your tomorrow.
(Right now) Come on, it's everything.
(Right now) Catch your magic moment.
Do it right here and now.
It means everything.

Miss a beat, you lose a rhythm.
An nothin' falls into place. No!
Only missed by a fraction.
Slipped a little off your pace. Oh!

The more things you get, the more you want.
Just trade in one for another.
Workin' so hard to make it easy.
Whoa, got to turn. Come on, turn this thing around.

(Right now) Hey, it's your tomorrow.
(Right now) Come on, it's everything.
(Right now) catch that magic moment.
Do it right here and now.
It means everything.

Said a lie to me.
Right now.
What are ya waitin' for? Oh! Yeah!
Right now.

(Guitar Solo)

(Right now) Hey! It's your tomorrow.
(Right now) Come on, it's everything.
(Right now) Catch that magic moment.
And do it right, right now (Right now).
Oh, right now!

It's what's happening.
Right here and now.
Right now, it's right now.
Oh!
Tell me, what are ya waitin' for?
Turn this thing around.

saturday

2 comments

You never see the word "anarchist" in print, unless the Republicans are in town. Police are raiding houses in Minneapolis right now, rounding up activists who police say have criminal intent (with buckets of urine and machetes -- medieval!). I'll be in Minneapolis/St. Paul all week, trying to track down all these crazies (bandannas and ties -- they're both just regrettable attire to me). Updates on Fimoc will be light, but I'll point you to other places I'm writing throughout the week.

saturday

4 comments

I own about 1,500 CDs. The dude with the largest record collection in the world owns about 1 million albums, and 1.5 million singles. Rocketboom interviews him, shot in a style sorta like Errol Morris. He's trying to sell it for $3 million.

friday

1 comment

Funny: Press Release for Las Vegas Las Vegas. "Slated to open in 2014, the Las Vegas Las Vegas will bring all of the glitz and glamour of one of the world's preeminent vacation spots, Las Vegas, right to the heart of beautiful downtown Las Vegas."

wednesday

60 comments

Haughey on the demise of commenting over the years. It's tough because I love blogs and I love comments in blogs, but I'm starting to think there's this "new generation" that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you'd never say anything in a comment that you wouldn't say to a friend's face. Yes.

wednesday

6 comments

Here's an unexpected move: The Onion has launched a CitySearch/Yelp competitor called Decider. It's only available for Chicago right now. I've heard rumors that several of the local papers (now in 10 cities: NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, DC, Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, Denver, Austin) are performing poorly and some might be shut down.

monday

1 comment

Trailer to New York I Love You. Directors include Scarlett Johnansson and Natalie Portman. Cast includes Robin Wright Penn, Isabelle Adjani, Kevin Bacon, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Hayden Christiansen, and Ethan Hawke. From Moe's take-down: "New Yorkers are conned -- by their permalancer gigs and their sperm donors and their pretentious/prodigious collections of books written by misanthropic pervs and the commodity fetishism (not to mention the materialism!) and the constant distraction of mere survival when you have so many parties to attend and an overabundance of self-esteem -- into thinking that they are actually 'independent,' and that the last thing they want to be is 'codependent' when interdependence is the operating principle of human civilization."

sunday

1 comment

Since first hearing about electronic books in the early '90s, I've always thought the place to break through with an actual digital book reader would be with text books. Lugged around the 50-pound organic chemistry book? Yep. Been annoyed with the highlighting of the previous owners? Yep. Wished you could markup a book with searchable notes? Yep. Amazon has confirmed they are working on a version of the Kindle for students.

saturday

3 comments

Esquire doesn't publish most of its content online, so we can't talk about this intrepid "Almanac of Steak" spread in this month's issue. (It begins with this delicious bon mot: "It seems so simple, steak.")

What little it does publish comes out several weeks after it has been printed. So I'm going to run a little bit from my friend Chuck's column this month, which may or may not eventually show up online. It was written in Germany, where he had been living for a few months, but it's about American media, which is why I want to repurpose it here. Here's how it starts:

Like a cop in an unmarked car across the street from a meth lab, I watch America. I am not in America, but I start at it. I stare at it all day and much of the night, compulsively, over the Internet and on TV stations I only intermittently understand and through newspapers I cannot read at all. I moved 3,960 miles east of New York, unconsciously hoping I would forget that America is there. It was a horrible plan. American became pretty much the only thing I have thought about for fourteen consecutive weeks. Which would be totally fine, I suppose, except that nothing ever happens.

It then goes on to argue that most media is filler. I end up disagreeing with some of what he says ("filler," for instance, which might be mistaken for "niche" in other cirucmstances, is a completely relative term -- more relative than even everything else that seems relative lately). At one point he says "Everyone I've ever met seems completely aware that the mass media is a) too large, b) mostly bad, and c) getting worse." Perhaps.

The dismay eventually winds its way around to this conclusion, which will likely bristle media professionals but resonate with media consumers:

The mass media is the single most detrimental entity within the United States right now, and it's having the exact opposite effect of its theoretically intended one -- it's making people less informed and less complete. It is much more harmful than I originally perceived. But it's more interesting than I initially realized, because the people who are most acutely aware of this problem are the people making the problem worse. Bloggers blog about how blogging ruins their lives. Newspapers deliver insignificant reports on the declining significance of newspapers. Entourage is a commentary on shallow celebrity-driven entertainment such as Entourage. A writer named Nicholas Carr wrote a long essay in The Atlantic Monthly about how the Internet is making it difficult for people to concentrate on long essays, which was subsequently published on the Internet. I'm writing a column in a magazine that could essentially be read as an essay against magazines, and I don't think anyone will find that strange.

I don't know why this bothers me. It doesn't seem to bother other people. And it's not like this revelation is going to change my life; I'm still going to write essays and profiles and "idea!" articles, because that's a good job and an okay life. My involvement (or lack thereof) in all of this is irrelevant. Yet as I sit here, across the Atlantic Ocean, browsing random online reactions to fake news I have not seen (nor need to see), I find myself growing more and more depressed of all the things I used to love. It's not difficult to be the cop in the car watching the meth lab, but you will drive yourself sad. You'll find yourself thinking, Maybe the lab will blow up. Maybe the lab will blow up. Maybe the lab will blow up. But it doesn't blow up. It just sits there, falling apart and declining in value, while the people sitting inside lose their teeth and get crazy high.

Update: It just occurred to me to provide a link to the column via Mygazines, the controversial magazine sharing site that will likely get shut down for copyright infringement.

saturday

0 comments

NYT story on Unconvention, an attempt to do non-partisan political art around Minneapolis for the Republican Convention. That "non-partisan political" description may sound like a contradiction, and Eyeteeth has photos of confrontational graffiti showing up around town.

thursday

0 comments

io9: 20 Things That Should Be Their Own Genres (But Aren't). "10) My clone plagiarized my memoir!"

tuesday

6 comments

The Upgrader: Hotlist Microcelebrities. You upgrade/downgrade the various internet celebs that you think have a chance of persevering over time.

tuesday

3 comments

In an otherwise random Variety story about Tina Brown's upcoming startup, this line about PaidContent's Rafat Ali is buried: "an Inside.com alum who is reviving the online destination as part of an overall expansion." This headline should read: HOLY FUCK, INSIDE.COM IS COMING BACK. (I'm guessing it will be in a vastly different form, but still.)

wednesday

0 comments

How much of a meme has it been this summer? So much, that it's even in The Onion now: Local Idiot To Post Comment On Internet. "After clicking the 'submit' button, I will immediately refresh the page so that I can view my own comment. I will then notice that my comment has not appeared because the server has not yet processed my request, become angry and confused, and re-post the same comment with unintentional variations on the original wording and misspellings, creating two slightly different yet equally moronic comments. It is my hope that this will illustrate both my childlike level of impatience and my inability to replicate a simple string of letters and symbols 30 seconds after having composed it."

tuesday

1 comment

A Guide to NYC's Celebrity-Owned Bars and Restaurants. Tim Robbins owns the Back Room? Huh. Update: some of it is bunk.

wednesday

0 comments

The Observer: Leon Neyfakh reviews David Carr's memoir, saying the book "turns the traditional memoir on its head, assuming as it does that its author knows nothing about his own life and must research it as though it were someone else's."

sunday

4 comments

Irony alert: 3,500-word NYT story on how kids don't read anymore because of the internet. "Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author's vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends."

thursday

7 comments

I've often wondered about the legal difference between prostitution and pornography.

It seems an obvious paradox that both acts are essentially the same: sex in exchange for money. However, there is of course one key difference: a camera.

Culturally speaking, this appears to be an extremely revealing detail of the modern psychology. Sex for money is legal only if it's recorded and distributed. The camera, it would seem, validates everything.

But it almost seems like a legal loophole that could be exploited. Imagine this scenario: The vice squad arrests some dude for picking up a hooker. "I wasn't soliciting sex," he claims. "I am making a porn movie." Does his claim to record and distribute the sexual act make it legal? Does he have a First Amendment case? It sounds like a glib question, but it's a legit case!

(Shhh, don't steal my idea, but I want to write a Law & Order script about this. I've already got a title: Get Off The Bang Bus.)

I've talked about this elsewhere, but the tricky part of the First Amendment in the coming years will be answering this question: what constitutes free speech in the age of personal media?

I've ranted about the slippery slope that Josh Wolf, for instance, created by essentially claiming that any act could be constituted as journalism, and hence protected by the First Amendment. If you think about the logical conclusions of that, the danger becomes clear. Would this include corporate security tapes or accidental photos? If journalism is simply saying it is, we're opening ourselves up to some slippery cases. (And don't mistake that remark as fear of actual so-called citizen journalism. That's what I want to make sure we protect!)

Anyway, back to porn... It turns out that the legalities are even more complicated [via]. The basics are this:

• There actually is no legal precedent for protecting the creation of pornography, except in California. (Keep in mind that creation and distribution are different.)
• Porn creation has never been legally tested in other states, so it might be illegal.
• This is why Cali is the porn capital.

The First Amendment will get some tricky questions thrown at it in the coming years, as one of these "personal media" cases eventually trickles its way up the Supreme Court. Given the current makeup of said body, I'm worried what the outcome will be. Sometimes, it may be better to not test the law.

monday

0 comments

Two psychiatrists "believe they have discovered a signature mental illness of the YouTube era: patients who claim they are subjects of their own reality TV shows." You mean, I'm not? [via]

saturday

0 comments

MODERN GUILT
(Beck)

Hey....Hey...da da da da

I feel uptight when I walk in the city
I feel so cold when I'm at home
Feels like everything's starting to hit me
I lost my bed ten minutes ago

Modern guilt I'm staring at nothing
Modern guilt I'm under lock and key
It's not what I have changed,
Turning into convention
Don't know what I've done but I feel ashamed

Standing outside the glass room sidewalk
These people talk about impossible things
And I'm falling down the conversations
Another palm beats into you

Modern guilt is all in our hands
Modern guilt won't get me to bed
Say what you will
Smoking my cigarette
Don't know what I've done but I feel afraid

Da da da...
Da da da...
Da da da...

thursday

1 comment

Hey West Coasties, don't forget, you have your own Julia too. "I wonder if the discrepancy between Internet fame and real fame has something to do with being so hate-based?"

thursday

0 comments

As always, without comment...

THIS YEAR'S GIRL
(Elvis Costello)

See her picture in a thousand places
Cause she's this year's girl.
You think you all own little pieces
Of this year's girl.
Forget your fancy manners,
Forget your English grammar,
Cause you don't really give a damn
About this year's girl.

Still you're hoping that she's well-spoken
Cause she's this year's girl.
You want her broken with her mouth wide open
Cause she's this year's girl.
Never knowing it's a real attraction,
All these promises of satisfaction,
While she's being bored to distraction
Being this year's girl.

Time's running out. She's not happy with the cost.
There'd be no doubt, only she's forgotten
Much more than she's lost.

A bright spark might corner the market
In this year's girl.
You see yourself rolling on the carpet
With this year's girl.
Those disco synthesizers,
Those daily tranquilizers,
Those body building prizes,
Those bedroom alibis,
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.

tuesday

6 comments

Whoa! Someone has started a project to do a video version of Girl Talk's Feed The Animals, with part 2 and part 3 of what looks like a 14-episode adventure now on YouTube. (Side note: I was thinking the other day about doing a database journalism project with the album, breaking it all down into statistical units. There's all sorts of metadata: sample lengths, year the songs originally appeared, genre, etc. With all this data, you could crunch the numbers to reveal some new information. For instance, I'd like to know the median year-of-release of all the samples. That sounds interesting to me!)

tuesday

5 comments

Because there's absolutely nothing else on tv this summer: The Office webisodes (just one episode right now). How bad are things in tv land? Very grim -- I'm watching Swingtown.

monday

0 comments

Good issue of Technology Review this month, populated with articles about various Web 2.0 conundrums (privacy, data portability, internet gridlock) and companies (Plaxo, Facebook, KickApps, Twitter, Pownce, Qik).

sunday

0 comments

NYT profile of the downforeveryoneorjustme.com creator, who uncoincidentally works at Twitter.

friday

3 comments

Without comment, I give you:

19TH NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
(Jagger/Richards)

You're the kind of person
You meet at certain dismal dull affairs.
Center of a crowd, talking much too loud
Running up and down the stairs.
Well, it seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years.
And though you've tried you just can't hide
Your eyes are edged with tears.

You better stop
Look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.

When you were a child
You were treated kind
But you were never brought up right.
You were always spoiled with a thousand toys
But still you cried all night.
Your mother who neglected you
Owes a million dollars tax.
And your father's still perfecting ways of making sealing wax.

You better stop, look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your nilne-teenth nervous breakdown.

Oh, who's to blame, that girl's just insane.
Well nothing I do don't seem to work,
It only seems to make matters worse. Oh please.

You were still in school
When you had that fool
Who really messed your mind.
And after that you turned your back
On treating people kind.
On our first trip
I tried so hard to rearrange your mind.
But after while I realized you were disarranging mine.

You better stop, look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.

tuesday

2 comments

The internet was spectacular yesterday. Within moments of the photos of the Olsen twin and Nicole Richie party showing up on the internet, everyone's rss readers and chat windows lit up like a Soundgarden show in 1993. Seconds before it exploded, I emailed my online muse, Spencer of GoldenFiddle.com, requesting 30,000 words of analysis. Who else could possibly explain this incomprehensible blend of nostalgia and futurism, celebrity and diary, class and style, party and funeral? "It's like art," I said. He delivered this response, the only poetry worthy of our time:

concept-less art, perhaps.

a flannel party? weeeeeeeeak theme!!!
and the madden boy doesn't even oblige.

weak.

these pictures are actually reassuring and hilarious
because i think it highlights how uncreative these million dollar babies are.

sure they're cute and carefree and cobrasnake and everyone's having a good time, (where are the adults?)
but they've been rich so long they fucking suck at spending it the right ways.
plastic plates and forks? store bought pinata? no art on the walls, no rugs, no nothing.
just cupcakes candles those retarded oversized wine glasses and the worlds ugliest marble countertop for miles.

that little munchkin olsen is living a permanent freshman year, god bless her her caffeine-addled soul.
she's like some g-rated iggy pop, flopping around, everybody telling her she's so CRAZY!!!!!!!!
funny thing is i have pictures that look EXACTLY like these, too. wasted, flannel shirt unbuttoned, untucked, too many cigarettes in my fingers.
i was 15.

nicole richie has the world fooled with her whole mom-routine.
she's the mastermind here. she's the smartest guy in the room.
she's fucking brilliant if you ask me. that smile is deadly. she's so far ahead of this bunch. she has shit mapped out.
and she may be hoisting a smart water, but it's just to wash down the scripts.
so, where's that new born, anyway?

the dudes are just loving it.
fucking slime-balls that don't even know it.
brody jenner jrs in training.
posing, smiling, lying, networking, being the guys.
they're all 5 steps ahead, too. they know where their night is going.
they've got plans. MK has no plans. she has drugs and sychophants.
what the fuck else does she need?

robert downy jr would laugh in these kids faces.
he'd flip the dinning room table over, call them pathetic and main-line their absinthe.
then he'd call charlie sheen over and they'd piss on the curtains.

i bet every girl in that dining room has had 47 abortions.
the sisterhood of the xanax and dark-colored sweatpants.

the sad part is that mary kate has nothing to return to.
rdj lifted himself out of hollywood hell and got back on the A-list.
the olsens don't have that opportunity. they're never going to be actors again.
they never really were. it's just more of this until something bad happens.

saturday

0 comments

Create your own Yahoo resignation letter: Yahoorezinr.com. Poor Yahoo.

thursday

1 comment

The download page for the Girl Talk album (Feed The Animals) is up, but it's very, very slow.

wednesday

6 comments

Over the past couple months, I've been working with New York Magazine to develop some stories related to internet media. The first is "The Microfame Game", an analysis of how micro-celebrity is generated, with advice on how you -- yes you! -- can use the internet's self-publishing tools along with the new networked media machine to generate well-deserved acclaim. The eight-step plan is intentionally cheeky, but it's also probably helpful, if you're the kind of crazy person looking to create a successful online identity.

My original inspiration for writing about this topic was Kevin Kelly's essay 1,000 True Fans, which is a motivating take on how small amount of renown can be turned into a successful career. In thinking about the idea, I smacked out the three paragraphs below, which never made it into the story but can serve as the spark of the original idea:

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to stand in front of large groups of people and scream at them. I wanted to proclaim my love for their mid-size city and then show them my genitals. I had no interest in becoming a musician, because I wanted to be a rock star.

Before the internet, or before whatever weird historical moment we're in that causes us to overuse the phrase "before the internet," being a rock star used to signify something grandiose. As subcultures arose, the term itself became imbued with meaning beyond music: one could be the "rock star of sushi" or the "rock star of hedge funds."

And now, with an eroding mass culture, and with the internet slicing everything to tasty bite-sized morsels, the "rock stars of _____" are the only rock stars who matter. With subcultures now the dominant culture, the only solution is retreating to the fringes and joining these new niche rock stars, the microfamous....

Read the Full Article at NYMag.com.

tuesday

1 comment

The Amazon page for Chuck's new novel, Downtown Owl, now has a description. Release: mid-September.

friday

0 comments

Slog + Gawker + Commenters = Mean Commenters Are Running Bloggers Out of Town. This seems like a good way to wrap up a truly fucked up week on the internet.

saturday

0 comments

Anyone else watch the pilot of Swingtown (you can watch it here)? NY Mag and The New Yorker both panned it, while NYT and WaPo were more forgiving. I'll give it a B for now, but I'm not hopeful. It was interesting to see CBS promote Last.FM on-air, in the form of a boring mini-site full of '70s songs. Liz Phair also contributed the show's theme.

tuesday

1 comment

There's a cool graphic on the homepage of NYTimes.com right now called "How They Voted," breaking down Democratic voters demographically. [via, which has a movie, if you miss it.]

sunday

0 comments

It's Internet Week in NYC. Which means posting here will probably be light, but jokes on Twitter will be flowing. (Seriously, "internet week." Hahahah, that's like its own punchline!)

wednesday

33 comments

Paul Graham discusses cities and ambition. The setup, that different cities send distinct messages, works as a decent framing device for discussing urbanism, but some of the messages are debatable. Berkeley ("You should live better") sounds right, as does Silicon Valley ("You should be more powerful"), but New York ("You should have more money") sounds off. I propose NYC's should be "You should have more influence," defined as a combination of power and connections. Interestingly, none of the messages sound particularly attractive, except perhaps Cambridge ("You should be smarter"), which I find sorta boring. Propose your own city messages in the comments...

tuesday

4 comments

MuxFind.com, for searching Muxtapes, and thereby pretty much recreating Napster in a browser. (It says that the service is not associated with Muxtape. If that's true, Muxtape might wanna shut it down before everyone gets sued outta existence.) Update#1: Fred likes it. Update: #2: Anthony thinks it should be open-source.

wednesday

0 comments

YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation. [via]

tuesday

2 comments

Scarlett Johansson's much-maligned album drops today. Quick take: with Tom Waits covers produced by Dave Sitek, it's not as bad as you've heard, nor is it great. The song that one most hopes will be a hit, "I Don't Wanna Grow Up," is emblematic: getting some sort of '80s shimmer treatment, like a down-tempo Pet Shop Boys ditty, is interesting for a couple minutes, but sadly forgettable seconds thereafter. Though not a bad first album, one wonders what this second act could look like. I vote for Leonard Cohen songs produced by Steve Albini. B- (Actual reviews: Pitchfork | Radar | NY Mag | Onion A/V | Rolling Stone.)

friday

8 comments

ScarJo performing Tom Waits' "Falling Down" live, with a bunch of scruffy hipsters accompanying.

wednesday

0 comments

Last time Knight announced their News Challenge grants, it was basically a cross-section of friends that I instantly became jealous of. This year's winners -- just announced -- seem lesser-known. (And, at first glance, less compelling, though some are definitely interesting.)

tuesday

0 comments

After I lost my iPhone over the weekend, I twittered about how a cabbie returned it -- and how this will now become my "nice new yorkers" story. Then today this Nice New Yorkers story popped up, and everyone blogged it. I dunno.

monday

0 comments

"If the presidential race comes down to John McCain versus Barack Obama, it will be the first time the presidential nominees were not born in the continental United States." Also, did you know that McCain's eligibility to be president has been questioned in two lawsuits?

monday

3 comments

Just a reminder: Bill O'Reilly is a dick. UPDATE: YouTube link down, but Gawker picked it up.

thursday

0 comments

LostRemote: Announcing my own industry move.

monday

0 comments

NBC.com: the org chart from Thursday's The Office. [via]

sunday

0 comments

NY Post: The Minneapolis Star Tribune is on the brink of bankruptcy. Yipe. I think everyone expected it would eventually be a one-paper town, but not that one paper. [via]

sunday

5 comments

Fittingly, NYT drops its Grand Theft Auto IV coverage in the City section of the paper today. (The other appropriate section might have been Travel.) It's a long tour of the game's version of NYC, told from the perspective of a New Yorker (Dave Itzkoff, also known for covering sci-fi for the NYT Book Review) who wants the neighborhoods to resemble his version of the city. The conclusion is effectively a topographic take of the Uncanny Valley conundrum:

If I truly believed in Liberty City as a functioning community, how could I open fire on my fellow simulated citizens (even if they shot at me first)? How could I tread all over the social contract in a ripped-off truck full of bootleg prescription medication?

And then:

It's not the game's fault that it can't perfectly replicate the infinite variety of New York. But it sometimes comes so close to pulling off the illusion that it invites you to look for the imperfections.

I just bought the game and have only played a little. But the descriptions here and elsewhere sound like NYC run through the mosaic filter on Photoshop. This geographically-confused, post-catastrophe setting resembles Cloverfield more than anything else. (You know, that scene where they get in the subway at Spring St. and end up at 59th St.) Let's compare these two for a second: look how each toys with class, violence, geography, simulation, reproduction, terrorism, sex, and urban geography. This should be the only bar conversation we have for the next couple months.

But back to this desire to adhere to verisimilitude in game play. It's peculiar, especially given the history of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, notorious for its propagation of violence as the narrative of gaming. Yes, peculiar, but also understandable for anyone familiar with the city's grid. The question seems to be, how close of a representation do we actually want? There it is again, the Uncanny Valley, which even popped up on a recent episode of 30 Rock, in the form of Tracy Jordan (himself a refracted mirror of Tracy Morgan) trying to make the first successful porn video game.

Desire and play. I suspect this is what gets lost in the muddled debate about the interplay of reality and fiction in the super-simulation canon. The new cultural critics are "deciders," sprung from both the left (social realists) and the right (values pundits), both trying to impose "this is fiction" and "this is real" logic onto games and movies. But it's not just them -- it is we who, in various ways, all participate in this debate about reality and non-reality, seeking an answer to whether something is either too unrealistic or too realistic.

All this makes me wonder if the question of realism has been overplayed, or if in fact it is the only question, now and forever. All I really want to know is: what makes playing the game so much fun? And how much does "reality" have to do with the answer?

saturday

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Your favorite song for the next five minutes: Santogold's "Your Voice", a reggae-tinged (as if punk, electro, hip-hop, and dancehall weren't enough) extra track not found on the album. (Psst, watch RCRD LBL for more upcoming Santogold tracks.)

thursday

5 comments

Price markdown on the "Nobody Reads My Blog" t-shirt.

wednesday

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More proof of my Lost in Translation theory regarding that new Scarlett video: that freaking old guy canoodling with her is Salman Rushdie!

tuesday

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It appears that Scarlett Johansson yanked out the blooper reel from Lost in Translation for the video for "Falling Down." But seriously, isn't a Sofia reprise in order?

monday

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Interview with Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette. He shrugs of the copyright question. (Legally, there's no doubt he's screwed if the labels want to take him down. The only question is whether they think he's a threat or a help. I'll give it 50-50.)

wednesday

5 comments

It's leaked: Julia's show had been green-lighted by Bravo. Nick's take:

It would be easy to dismiss IT Girls as final proof of a culture gone spongy in the brain, in the final stages not so much of Alzheimers as syphilis. But let's be honest: the concept, three girls are followed by the cameras as they set up an online chat show, a younger version of The View, is positively gripping compared with some of the other reality projects being touted."

But there is an interesting story here that no one's getting to yet, which is how the website and the tv series can/might/should/but-probably-won't interact.

The question of audience crossover is the rub. Some people will interact with Julia's website (a new take on The View) but will hate Bravo's show (a new take on The Hills), and vice versa.

This dichotomy stems partially from the dual life that Julia herself leads -- attempting to persuade the Valley nerds that she's legit while still chit-chatting about Britney on FOX News. Can you imagine trying to look cool to both crowds? Much of the former crowd likes to brag about how they don't own a tv (you'll inevitably see from this post's comments which people these are), while the latter is the entire reason that TMZ is now a successful cable franchise. Demographically, this will be nearly impossible to capture. But perhaps this is one of those rare moments where demographics gets thrown out the window because it catches the zeitgeist.

How? Easy: Whatever you might think about Julia (or, for that matter, Bravo), this should be the place where an interesting experiment happens. This is, if you think about it, like the hyperbolic reality/fiction vision portrayed in NY Mag's Gossip Girl cover story, but times a thousand.

But more than that, this should be where a legit battle between television and the internet is finally staged. Which will be more compelling: the online talkshow or the reality tv series? And when it comes down to choosing the winner, the real question will be: is a draw compelling?

tuesday

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BizWeek story on Pitchfork, which says they pull down $5 million/yr in revenue.

monday

7 comments

OMFG. See this? It's a new icon on CNN.com. It appears next to headlines in the "Latest News" module. It is an invitation to buy a t-shirt with that headline on it. This is the end of everything.

Update#1: Andy noticed you can hack the url to make your own. Update #2: Store and FAQ. Update #3: I wrote about t-shirts as media in Wired a year ago, so maybe I'm to blame. Update #4: Gawker is doing an offensive headline writing contest.

sunday

8 comments

Listen people, I get a lot of email too. Probably something like 500 missives per day. But this really isn't that difficult to fend off. Let me help... Tactic #1: Delete unnecessary items as they come in. Tactic #2: Reply to items when you have free time in elevators, meetings, subways, etc. Tactic #3: Don't leave work until you're down to five items. Tactic #4: Stop writing about how much email you get. Done.

saturday

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Heffernan's NYT Mag column is crackling this week. "Broadcast Spoofs" examines the Onion News Network, noting the distinctly midwestern flavor:

By contrast, fancy, coastal visual comedy -- 30 Rock, The Sarah Silverman Program, Curb Your Enthusiasm -- has a strongly aspirational element to it, with protagonists mired in what Joni Mitchell once called rich people's problems (real estate, restaurants, relationships). They comparison-shop values like consumerism and thinness, glamour and goodness, Obama and Clinton.

The Onion shrugs at these choices. Indifferent and impassive before overblown moral showdowns, The Onion offers only contempt, impotence and blank depression.

Ouch! It's a tepid rave, which is why it's pretty interesting.

thursday

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A while back (or, in "Talk of the Town" language, the other day), the New Yorker handed over the animation rights to their cartoons to something named Ring Tales, for purposes of redistribution on iTunes. Eventually, of course, those cartoons made their way onto YouTube (e.g., "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog," animated). Tilzy elaborates from there.

tuesday

4 comments

Here we go... Pitchfork has the first track you can hear from Scarlett Johansson's Tom Waits cover album (out in May). It starts off sounding like a TV on the Radio song (Sitek produced it), but then turns atmospheric. Judgment so far: unsure. UPDATE: track has been removed; you didn't miss much.

tuesday

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A bunch of random domains that I own, which, when clicked on, redirect back to this site, for now: viewsource.tv, azineaboutyoutube.com, seattlespeak.com, fimicolous.com, ficklecorp.com, remoter.tv, saltychewy.tv, voyeuse.tv, rexsorgatz.com, watchingparis.com, realfakereal.com. It's like a history of forgotten and future projects. Fess up, what are your weird domains?

sunday

0 comments

Your favorite song for the next five minutes: The Carps' "Veronica Belmont." Whoa, wha? V. explains. (Update: RCRD LBL has it available for download.)

sunday

7 comments

It's hard to imagine a city having a better year than Minneapolis did in 1984, when it witnessed the release of Purple Rain from Prince, Let it Be from the Replacements, and Zen Arcade from Husker Du. That kind of legacy is double-edged: it provides your community with respect and clout, but it also hangs like a heavy nostalgic fog to be lived up to. It can take a long time to recover from the burden of reputation, but this month could be Minneapolis' moment again as three big releases hit the street from Tapes 'n Tapes, Atmosphere, and Cloud Cult. My friend Ross sat down with all three to discuss their new albums, track by track. The music industry is indescribably different than it was in 1984 -- more fickle, more forgetful. Even though these three acts are releasing the best albums of their careers, they are in the uncomfortable position of hoping their audience has not moved onto the newest shiny thing. It's a paradox: once you have finally lived up to your community's past, you become it. I hope their audience remembers. (My pals Tapes 'n Tapes -- oh yeah, good band profile from Marsh too -- are in NYC this week for their record release party and a Conan appearance. More updates later.)

friday

1 comment

A quick update to my RedLasso post yesterday, after speaking with someone there today... RedLasso's model is actually to develop a three-way revenue split between copyright owners (tv and radio stations), syndication sites (bloggers), and RedLasso itself. Broadcasters are aware of the site, but official deals have not been signed. My take? Red Lasso exists in an interesting middle-ground between two factions: a) bloggers who would enjoy making a little money and be able to safely embed content and b) broadcasters who are wary of content misuse and distribution splits. The question for broadcasters will be: can they accept this revenue split versus forcing bloggers to find/embed/link content from their own site? The question for RedLasso will be: can they can keep enough broadcasters in the fold to make the site a destination for this kind of content and become the holy grail -- the Google of video?

wednesday

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Barry Diller and Tina Brown to join forces on a news aggregation site. (Because, ya know, Michael Wolff's Newser has been such a big success. Update: Denton linked to Newser metrics on Compete -- actually, not that bad.)

wednesday

6 comments

Today on CNet's The 404, I unveiled the secret project that I have been working on. After months of preparation in NYC, I am finally ready for the unveil: my new super secret project is going to be... a zine! That's right, to hell with digital media! But wait, there's more! It's going to be a zine about... YouTube! Although Conde Nast has turned down seed funding, I am sure this will be HUGE. (This isn't even really an April Fool's joke. Not really. If you would like to submit anything to the zine, email me!)

friday

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China is literally trying to modify the weather for the upcoming Beijing Olympics. (Btw, a few people have asked if Fimoc is shutting down for the Olympics again. [I produced NBC's site for the last two Olympics.] I'm happy to say that I have absolutely nothing to do with it this time around -- no more memorizing the nuances of Modern Pentathlon for me!)

tuesday

3 comments

NYT yesterday: "[Rick Astley] has not spoken publicly about the meme and efforts to reach him through his agent were unsuccessful." Maybe no one has tried hard enough, because LAT tracked him down for his comments on the most important meme of our time. (Also, Rick Astley looks ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like Rick Astley.)

tuesday

1 comment

Adam Sternbergh in The New Republic on Why White People Like 'Stuff White People Like' -- a seven-layer cake of meta that goes down rough.

tuesday

0 comments

Some new releases that come out today.... Music: The Teenagers' Reality Check, Be Your Own Pet's Get Awkward, and The Kills' Midnight Boom. DVD: Southland Tales, Season Three of Battlestar Galactica, and the Criterion of The Ice Storm.

tuesday

2 comments

Spielberg is starting a social networking site for "users who've had or who are interested in sharing paranormal and extraterrestrial experiences." Zoinks.

friday

1 comment

New TED Talk: Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope. This is what made Scoble cry. It's not available for download yet, but there's a website.

thursday

1 comment

Your favorite cheesy dance song for the next five minutes: Little Boots' "Stuck on Repeat."

tuesday

5 comments

A minor moment in meta-blog genius: a Gawker commenter by the name of IndianSlipper has taken over a random Gawker post and declared it her his blog. Update: dude even has his own t-shirt!

tuesday

1 comment

Roll your own single-serving site: rex.isyournewbicycle.com.

monday

0 comments

Gaming The System, an essay that I recently wrote for Wired, initially began as a presentation that I gave a few places around the country. Tomorrow (Tuesday) night, I'm giving the truncated version in NYC at Hall & Partners in SoHo (72 Spring Street, 11th Floor) as part of Fresh Meet, an event that uses the short-form presentation style known as Pecha Kucha -- each presenter delivers 20 slides at 20-second interval. That's less than 7 minutes! It starts 7 p.m. -- you're invited!

friday

2 comments

Super Deluxe takes down Diablo Cody. [via]

friday

1 comment

Even though it won't be in bookstores for seven months, Chuck's new book, Downtown Owl (cover), is now available for pre-order on Amazon. His first novel, it is set in North Dakota in 1983, a time and place I know quite well!

wednesday

7 comments

Even if no one else in America agrees with my stated mission to keep Tay Zonday relevant, at least Lily Allen is fighting the good fight across the pond. (Who knew that BBC Three gave Lily Allen her own talk show?)

wednesday

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If you read the EveryBlock interview, you might recall Adrian mentioning that they would later explain why they decided to eschew Google Maps and instead build their own mapping application. The explanation has been posted.

thursday

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RCRD LBL scored remixes of tracks from Moby's new album (new video here!). [via]

thursday

8 comments

An Interview with Adrian Holovaty

The first time you try to describe EveryBlock to someone, it can sound kinda boring. It aggregates piles of local information, like restaurant reviews and crime stats, which are then displayed block-by-block. Hm, that's interesting, but is it compelling?

If you give it some time, the answer is absolutely. Once you start playing with the site (and "playing" might be the best word to describe the meandering sensation of floating around in the data pools), your mind begins to wander with speculation: how did they get that? what does this say about my neighborhood? what else could be done with all this data? how can I add to this?

Those were just some of the many questions I had about EveryBlock, which launched a few weeks ago with the help of a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant. A few stories and interviews popped up when the site launched, but I noticed that the interviewers seldom asked the other questions that I had about the site. So I decided to ask site's founder, Adrian Holovaty, some questions directly. Here's our exchange:

Last year, New York City famously banned trans fats in restaurants. I found a page on EveryBlock that shows all the violations of this ban -- several every day! I love these little hidden narratives inside of EveryBlock. Do you have any favorites?

Great question. Here are a few interesting nuggets:

• San Francisco public housing listings by accessibility status. Just over 90% of the public housing listings posted to the San Francisco city site are not accessible.
• Chicago has a special business license type of "Wrigley Field," which applies to the famous rooftop decks across the street from the park.
• Many elevator violations are reported in New York -- more than any other type of building violation that we tabulate.
• Building permits for bath houses in San Francisco. You know, just because.

Also, more generally, it's fascinating to follow address-specific breaking news/events on our site. For example, a couple of weeks ago, a water main broke on the north side of Chicago. Afterward, on the relevant EveryBlock pages -- for example, Ravenswood or the 1800 block of W. Montrose -- you could see a bunch of assorted news items about the incident: newspaper articles from the Trib and Sun-Times, TV station reports and Flickr photos of the torn-up street that were taken by some people who happen to live nearby. Each of those "raw" chunks of information was displayed in the timeline of news for that block.

We've seen a similar thing happen with trendy new restaurants. First you see the business license, then (possibly) the liquor license application a few days later, then the restaurant inspection, then a Yelp review or two, then a writeup by the newspaper's dining critic. The story slowly unfolds over time.

One of our post-launch priorities is to clean up the fire-hose of raw information, to introduce concepts of priority and improved relevance -- but I do think there's a certain appeal to that raw dump of "here's everything that's happened around this address, in simple, reverse-chronological order." When significant events happen, they sort of "pop out" of the list.

Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing behind-the-scenes? Are you using Django as a framework?

Sure. The first layer is the army of scripts that compile data from all over the Web. This includes public APIs, private APIs, screen-scraping the "deep Web," crawling news sites, plus harvesting data from PDFs and other non-Web-friendly documents. Some data also comes to us manually, like in spreadsheets e-mailed to us on a weekly basis. For each bit of data, we determine geographic relevance and normalize it so that it fits into our system.

The second layer is the data storage layer, which we built in a way that can handle an arbitrary number of data types, each with arbitrary attributes. For example, a restaurant inspection has a violation (or multiple violations), whereas a crime has a crime type (e.g., homicide). Of course, we want to be able to query across that whole database to get a geographic "slice," so there's a strong geo focus baked into everything.

The next layer is the Web layer, which is standard Django. Oh, and I should mention that we use Python for everything, from the ground up.

What has been the hardest piece to accomplish so far?

I honestly can't decide what the hardest piece has been. A number of pieces were all hard to pull off in their own way.

The user interface was, and continues to be, a challenge. How do you display so many disparate pieces of data together, without overwhelming people? How do you account for the variety of distinct data types? (That's both a user-interface and a backend challenge.) How do you maintain visual interest when dealing with so much raw textual data? How do you make the block page feel like a geographic home page rather than a search result? Wilson, our designer, has done a great job within these constraints, but we all agree there's still much room for experimentation and gradual improvement.

Dealing with structured data is relatively easy, but attempting to determine structure from unstructured data is a challenge. The main example of unstructured data parsing is our geocoding of news articles. We do a pretty good job here, but we're not crawling all of the sources we want to crawl -- again, there's a lot of room to grow.

On a completely different note, it's been a challenge to acquire data from governments. We (namely Dan, our People Person) have been working since July to request formal data feeds from various agencies, and we've run into many roadblocks there, from the political to the technical. We expected that, of course, but the expectation doesn't make it any less of a challenge.

How much of your data aggregation is scraping html pages versus getting structured data?

At this point, we're doing more scraping than consuming formal APIs and data feeds, but I expect (and hope) the balance will shift over time. It's been tricky explaining our concept to data providers in government, but we're hoping that gets easier now that we have a public site that people can browse and understand.

Do you have any fears of scaling the system?

Yes and no. We knew from the start that EveryBlock isn't something that can be scaled overnight to every city in the world. There are too many special cases, too many relationships to build, too many local quirks to work out. There's no nationwide database of restaurant inspections or building permits that we can magically tap into; every city is different. Aggregating local information is a deep, difficult problem.

Some companies try to scale pieces of what we're doing -- like geocoding every news story in the U.S., or making maps of blog entries, or aggregating crime, or aggregating restaurant inspections -- but we're the first ones to do all of that. That's why we're taking a depth, not a breadth, approach: I'd much rather do three cities well than 1,000 cities poorly.

Rather than use Google Maps or Microsoft's Virtual Earth, you built your own mapping service application. Why?

That, along with "When will you bring EveryBlock to city XXX?", is by far the most frequently asked question we get. Paul, our developer in charge of maps, is working on an article explaining our reasoning, so I don't want to steal his thunder. I'll just say that the existing free maps APIs are optimized for driving directions and wayfinding, not for data visualization. And, besides, having non-clichéd maps is an easy way to set yourself apart. Google Maps is so 2005. ;-)

How hard was it to build?

We use an open-source library called Mapnik to render the maps, so that library does the heavy lifting for us. Paul is also working on a how-to article, in the spirit of giving back to the open-source community, that explains how to use Mapnik.

In many ways, what you're doing is taking a bunch of data sources and normalizing them for a single use case. Now that it's normalized, I imagine developers could do a ton of interesting things with this data. Are there plans to do an API?

Yes, I strongly suspect we'll have an API eventually -- it's one of the many things on our site wish list. We had to draw a line and call the thing "ready" at some point, so despite the fact that we're launched, we've got hundreds more features and data sources to add.

I was talking to someone recently about all the cool mashups you could do, and we decided that looking for patterns between Republicans and sex offenders would be the best!

Beyond the technical difficulties of creating parsers and algorithms for geotagging this data, have you had any political/legal obstacles? Is there data you'd like to get your hands on but can't for some reason?

Yes, and yes. I'd estimate we only have about 10% of the data we'd like in the long term, for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. As we expected, some government agencies haven't been able to provide us their public data, and the reasons vary. A common reason is a lack of resources. In other cases, we've simply been stymied by bureaucracy. But we're keeping at it.

An obvious example of data that's EveryBlocky (EveryBlockish? Um, location-specific?) but not yet on our site is the set of recent home sales -- lots of local relevance there. Of course, we're a news site, not a real-estate site, so it'll be interesting managing people's expectations about what real-estate data and features we offer.

I'd like to even out the three cities' data offerings, too. We publish building permits in San Francisco and New York, but not in Chicago. We publish filming locations in Chicago, but not in New York or San Francisco. We publish zoning agenda items in San Francisco, but not in the other two cities.

We're also working on improving the data we already have. An example is crime in San Francisco. After running into some problems having requested a formal data feed from them directly, we get the data by screen-scraping the SFPD's site -- but that site doesn't publish the location of each crime. In fact, the only location data the SFPD site publishes is implicit in the searches you do. The site lets you search for crimes by police district, ZIP code or neighborhood, so the best we can do is to deduce the police district, ZIP code and neighborhood that contain a particular crime. (If you search for ZIP code 94109, you can safely assume the resulting crimes are in that ZIP code.)

That's why San Francisco crime on EveryBlock, lamely, only geocodes crimes to the ZIP code level: because that's the only data we could get, and something is better than nothing. But, anyway, we're hoping the SFPD will release more granular locations in their crime data.

You've mentioned your hope that EveryBlock could introduce some standards for news organizations to do geotagging. I'm sure you've discovered wholes swaths of civic data that could use standardization. Can you talk a little bit about what you want to do in this area?

The standards we're thinking about are related to the geotagging of unstructured data -- namely, news articles. I guess there'd be some value in standardizing approaches to structured data (like, building a nationwide crime database), but we're more immediately interested in standardizing the geocoding of "blobs." The main premise is that locations in news articles should be defined in a machine-readable way. Look for something from us soon.

Everyblock lets me find everything in my neighborhood... except other people. Why is that? Do you have any plans to incorporate direct input of local voices into the site?

In time, Rex. In time. :-)

If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not -- are in support of that core goal.

Besides, we already have the problem of offering so many interesting data sets and features that people can only focus on one or two of them. The classic example is that a lot of people haven't noticed that we rolled our own maps (your question above notwithstanding).

I know you constantly get asked the question about scaling the site to other local areas, but here's an idea: say I'm an enterprising small town citizen who's willing to plug in data from my city by matching data to similar fields that you are using. Possible?

Yes, that's possible -- we've built the system in a way that would allow that to happen. Again, as in my response to your reader-generated content question, it's just a matter of implementing it. We had to launch with something, and if we'd included every one of our ideas in the launch version, we'd be on target for a launch in mid 2017. :-)

One of the obligations of the Knight grant is to make all the source code available. Does that affect how you think about the site as an asset?

The open-source requirement affects both our technology and business decisions. We've engineered the thing so that it can be replicated in any area, with any data. I suppose we would've done that anyway, even without the open-source requirement, because it's just the Right Way to do it, but the open-source requirement certainly influenced us.

I'll paraphrase something really smart that Wilson, our designer, said recently: We've created a machine that's capable of publishing address-specific news, and our initial launch is a demonstration of its potential. Now that we're live, it's time to improve the machine and improve the demonstration.

On the business side, clearly we'll have to figure out how the site is going to sustain itself after our grant money is spent. I have a feeling some solution will make itself apparent at some point over the next year and a half. But even before that, we'll find out whether our idea is something that catches on with our audience -- this whole thing is an experiment, after all! For all we know, EveryBlock might be a novelty that doesn't sustain an audience in the long term. Being honest Chicago people, happily far away from the Silicon Valley BS, we have no delusions of grandeur.

I liked your answer to whether EveryBlock constitutes journalism in the OJR interview ("People can define 'journalism' however they'd like"). I'm curious, do you have traffic goals for the site? Or let me ask it a different way: how are you evaluating success?

This is cheesy, but I aim to help people, or improve the world in some way. The tricky thing is that there aren't many concrete ways of measuring that, aside from anecdotes. I suppose we could look at traffic numbers, but, no, we haven't set any traffic goals.

Okay, last question. It's a weird one. Your interest in gypsy jazz is well known. (The last time I saw you, it was in a Toronto bar that supposedly had a jazz scene, but was actually a frat bar. We were both gravely disappointed.) Do you ever think about the relationships between your musical interest and your programming/information interests? Is there anything -- structural, cognitive, performative, whatever -- that makes EveryBlock similar to Django Reinhardt?

Wow, a weird question indeed! Hmm. I guess that, in both music and programing, I strive for subtlety, for elegance.

And EveryBlock cannot be compared to Django Reinhardt. That's sacrilege.

Thanks, Adrian!

(Thanks to Ben, Matt, Robin, Andy, and Matt for suggesting questions for this interview.)

wednesday

0 comments

If you ever want to befriend someone who works in online media, I suggest you just say these words: "I hate my content management system." You will become instant friends, quickly sharing tales of cached pages, ridiculous workflow, outrageous downtimes, and reprehensible slowness. Which is why I love that there's an upcoming NYC media event entitled I Hate My Content Management System. Go there, meet your soul mate!

tuesday

4 comments

You might not know this, but the horribly named Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on FOX is actually the best new show on tv right now. Two reasons why: 1) hot MILF, 2) hot robot. But also!... the girl robot scenes are actually well written and acted. Vulture explains more on a show that io9 should be owning but seems to be covering as news rather than culture.

monday

7 comments

When I revisited the first issue of Wired last week, it was obvious that I had unfortunately glossed over several areas (the design, in particular, got an unfair treatment). But as Valleywag ruefully noted, it was already 1,600 words long.

So I was thrilled when the founding editor, Louis Rossetto, emailed me a lengthy response, which serves as a great Round 2 of the first issue. With his approval, the email is printed below.

Rex,

Liked your piece on Wired 1.1.

A few things:

1. There was a beta. Actually two. Back in April 1992, John, Barb, Jane, and I created a "Manifesto" in a three day-and-night charette in the studio of photographer Neil Selkirk in Chelsea that stated what Wired was about, and set out the design philosophy. Barlow was on the cover, swiped from the New York Times Magazine, if I remember correctly. It had a proposed table of contents, proposed masthead (we still hadn't contacted any writers except for Markoff and Michael Schrage), an ad or two, the opening spread of a story. Six months later, I created a second prototype on my own. Learned how to use Quark, Photoshop, and Illustrator in the same month -- and juggle too. Eugene Mosier, who was later to join us as head of production, called in sick to his day job and helped put it together (making him employee number zero since we couldn't pay him anything but cookies). Jane sweet-talked equipment out of Radius (a name from the past) and others, since we not only didn't have money to pay people like Eugene but to buy equipment either. This beta was a full-on 120 page prototype, with actual stories re-purposed from other places, actual art, actual ads (someone quipped that it was the ultimate editor's wet dream to be able to pick their own ads), and then all the sections and pacing that was to go into the actual magazine. The cover was lifted from McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage; it was the startling black and white image of a guy's head with a big ear where his eyes should have been. The whole thing got printed and laminated in a copy shop in Berkeley that had just got a new Kodak color copier and rip. Jane, Eugene, and I went in when the shop closed on Friday evening and worked round the clock through the weekend. Took 45 minutes to print out one color page! We emerged Monday morning with the prototype, which we had spiral-bound in a shop in South San Francisco, before we boarded a plane for Amsterdam to present it to Origin's founder and CEO Eckart Wintzen, to see if he would approve the concept, agree to advertise in the magazine, and then give us the advance we crucially needed to keep the project alive. He did, hence Origin's ads in our early issues.

2. Nicholas's statement about HD was not inaccurate. Resolution is not the big deal -- delivery and access is. YouTube is a bigger revolution than HD by a mile, regardless of how many big flat panels are in people's homes.

3. True, Nicholas's email address was laughably wrong, but I'm not sure even now I know why. It's certainly not because we were shy about printing email addresses. Addresses of writers appear throughout the issue -- a first for any magazine, as far as I know. My email address appeared under my editorial -- got hundreds of replies, each of which I answered. I think there was some kind of screw up in the handling of the text, perhaps someone slugged something in waiting for his real address, and then, in the insane rush to get out the first issue, it ended up being published as is. Nicholas himself was perhaps the most chagrined. It was corrected by the second issue, and yes, that address reached him.

4. I think you radically underestimate John and Barb's design work. As they often said, their job was to imagine what the future looked like, and do it on a medium out of the past. They brought amazing design smarts to the process of putting out the magazine, as well as incredible production chops, which were reflected in Wired from the first issue. That opening multi-page spread illuminating the McLuhan quote which launched the issue, that incredible graphic indulgence which continued for the entire time I was editor, and which is conspicuously absent from the current, was true modern graphic art -- in the case of the first one, a collaboration between John and Erik Adigard (Erik's work would appear regularly in the mag, and, for a while, he worked at HotWired/Wired Digital helping Barb create it's graphic sensibility). John and Barb were the ones who landed us our printer, a company back East in Connecticut John had worked with on slick annual reports. They had just taken delivery of a brand spanking new Heidelberg six color (CMYK plus two spot colors -- ah, that's how it was done!) press as big as a couple of box cars. We were the first clients on the press. The first issue was on press over Xmas 1992, and John, Barb, Eugene, and I were on press check. The pressmen were grizzled 30-year pros. They set up the press, they put on the VW size rolls of our special matte paper, they poured in the gallons and gallons of our eye-burning fluorescent ink, they started the press, they adjusted the print flow, they ripped off the first pages and put it under the calibrated lights to check color, they looked at it through a loop to check the dot gain, they did this half a dozen time, then they pronounced it perfect -- calibration was absolutely nominal. I can still remember how John took one look and said: put more ink on the page. The pressmen were aghast. It was perfect as is, just the way it was supposed to be. John insisted. They ultimately relented. He looked at the new sample. He told them he wanted still more ink. They protested again. They finally relented again. John looked at the new sheet. This time he told them: I want you to turn the ink up until it smears, and then dial back to where it's only just not smearing; and that's how I want the entire job done. The pressmen were appalled, outraged, embarrassed. But ultimately, they did what John told them. That's why the magazine looked and felt the way it did, because it literally carried more and brighter inks than a normal magazine -- they leaped off the matte paper. Later, as the magazine started to get recognition, the Wired job became the one the pressmen all wanted to work on. Under John's direction.

P.S. We collected the opening spreads of the first few years of Wired when we started our book company Hardwired. Called it Mind Grenades. Each of those introductions reflected my trolling through an issue and finding a quote somewhere that seemed portentous enough to be chiseled onto the side of a public building. Funny thing was, taken all together and in sequence, those randomly picked quotes made a coherent argument. As well as a mindblowing visual statement. Eugene did the press check, in Singapore. That book reprinted the original colors used in the intro spreads, which meant, I believe, something like 26 spot colors. Not many printed objects with 26 spot colors.

5. The baby pissing ad got us some shit. We were glad.

6. Wired/Tired was an afterthought, John Plunkett's idea, I think. On the last day of production, we would shout stuff around the office as we were working, and I'd write it down. Utterly subjective. Except, for about the first two years, we made sure that Manhattan was always in the Tired column in some way, trying to stick to the know-it-alls in what they parochially thought was the center of the universe. It was either Clay Felker or Jann Wenner who said that it's not only important for a magazine to have heros, but also pick the right enemies. Course, NY got its revenge at the time of the IPO, but that's another story.

7. The dotcom stock market bubble occurred after I already left the magazine, so I will decline to comment on whether Wired abetted it or not. But while I was there, we frequently indulged our cynicism, as with Chip Bayers' story in our April 1996 issue, "The Great Web Wipeout."

8. The colophon was fun. I wanted to list the stuff we used to make the magazine, because I wanted people to see that it didn't require a huge operation to make a great magazine -- in other words, that you didn't need Hearst or TimeLife or IDG overhead to produce a magazine that looked better than theirs. I think it was Eugene who added the drugs, with some notable exceptions, given that we were figuratively and literally at the epicenter of the SF rave culture. For that first issue, I might have also added adrenaline and optimism.

Thanks for taking the time. Hope your archaeology didn't screw up your issue too much. If so, let me know, maybe I can scrounge up a replacement.

Best,

Louis Rossetto

Thanks Louis!

For anyone who is really into this history, I also recommend Gary Wolf's book, Wired: A Romance, which is basically a biography of the magazine.

saturday

0 comments

Matos tracks down nearly all the Academy Award winners for Cartoon/Short Subjects, year by year, on YouTube.

friday

41 comments

Wired magazine turns 15 years old this month. This column looks back at the very first issue.

Wired didn't even bother with a Beta release. It bustled onto the publishing scene 15 years ago this month, chirping like a broken modem and shrink-wrapped as a point release: Issue 1.1.

Peeling back those matte pages now, one can't help falling victim to a bit of nostalgia for this town crier of the proto-digital era. There was no logical reason that this magazine should even have existed in 1993. Clinton/Gore had just been sworn in, and no one was talking about the "Information Superhighway" yet. Words like baud and Usenet and ISDN hadn't even been surrendered to the dustbin of digital history.

Need more historical perspective? There weren't even any URLs in the first issues of Wired! The World Wide Web barely existed, and there was no Mosaic browser on which to view it anyway. Goatse wasn't even a dirty thought yet.

And yet there it was, the premiere issue: that blocky logo and Bruce Sterling peering out from the cover. For a brief moment, it seemed as though the nerds were about to take over the world... right up until the suits showed up a few years later to pummel them with their briefcases of money.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves in this story. Let's take a look at that first issue, piece by piece.

Staff Box

Started by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, who moved to California from Holland in 1991, Wired opened with a staff box of unknowns, at least to the traditional media world. Many of them would become the most important technology writers of the next decade.

Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor, came from the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL. John Battelle, who would later found Federated Media and write the definitive book on Google, was the managing editor. The rest of the staff box was sprinkled with names that are now recognized as tech pundits of various stripes: Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, Stewart Brand, John Markoff, Michael Wolff, and Nicholas Negroponte. And of course, the "Patron Saint," Marshall McLuhan.

(An aside: it's difficult to remember how McLuhan was perceived pre-Wired. Though certainly a revered scholar in his lifetime [let us not forget Annie Hall], I also seem to recall a huckster backlash around this time. But three years after the premiere issue of Wired, McLuhan was on the cover of the magazine. Today, even his worst theories get roundly quoted, especially by blowhards like me.)

Tired / Wired

Magazine editors tend to hyperbolize their craft, and nothing gets deliberated with more over-analysis than the opening pages of a magazine. The conventional wisdom is that the blurby, picture-filled front pages set the philosophical agenda of a magazine. The "front of the book," as they call it, psychologically defines who should be reading this rag by persuading you to join the club of similarly excellent tastemakers. So the Wired/Tired Index probably seemed like a stroke of genius. It was the perfect way to divide the world into two simple categories of people: There are those who are wired -- they get it! And there are those are tired -- they don't!

It's classic hippie logic. And congratulations! Because you're reading Wired, you're in the right category.

In retrospect, it's unclear which side of this great divide the actual editors themselves fell on. On its maiden voyage, Wired deemed Nintendo a tired entity, while the long-forgotten gaming console 3DO was celebrated as wired. And for mysterious reasons, painting (painting?) crept into wired status, while performance (performance?) was strangely shelved as tired. But the clincher certainly had to be declaring REM (who had just released their best album, Automatic for the People) tired, but passing wired status onto midwest alt-country act The Jayhawks. This is akin to saying that Graham Parsons was a great DJ.

Other front-of-the-book items: a preview of a cult film called Jurassic Park, a review of a print zine called bOING bOING, and a report on a crazy new technology that could free up your cable tv lines for phone calls.

Features

For all the peculiar editorial choices in the early issues of Wired, the strangest must certainly be giving Camille Paglia license to talk about Marshall McLuhan.

But the editors actually turned this stagnant interview into something a little funny by reprinting Paglia's handwritten edits scrawled over the top. From the first issue, one could already foresee that Wired was going to be a good publication, but this bit of whimsy suggested that it might just go beyond being the next Mondo 2000. This brand of self-awareness only comes along in decade-long chunks: a '60s Rolling Stone, a '70s Esquire, an '80s Spy.

Or it was just a dumb prank. Whatever.

The cover story, penned by Bruce Sterling, is one in a long history of virtual war stories that Wired would publish. It forgoes references to Ender's Game, but doesn't leave out video game comparisons. "It's modern Nintendo training for modern Nintendo war." Considering that the page directly preceding this is an ad for a new book called The Windows 3.1 Bible, it seems difficult to image how revolutionary these virtual war games could have been.

But what the other features portend has become a Wired hallmark: the clash between culture and technology. John Markoff's story on cellphone hacking dissects a digital subculture in a way that would be replicated several times in the proceeding decade. Similarly, the Otaku feature was prescient in its analysis of Japanese society before it had become a Western obsession. And an interesting note: the story on Richard Stallman's obstacles toward free software doesn't include the phrase "open source" because it had yet to even be popularized.

The Ads

Here's the prevailing question when persuing the ads in this issue: were they as unintelligible then as they are now? The two companies that bought this issue's very first ad and very last ad -- Origin and Trans Rebo, respectively -- were probably as unknown then as they are now. And it's unlikely that the 100,000 copies that the first issue of Wired sold on the newsstand helped them in any way.

A few pages in, the most emblematic page of the first issue of Wired appears.

He looks like an old John "I'm a PC" Hodgman! And look closely -- that screen really says "Fax Transmittal."

Oh, to be young again.

Design

Early Wired is often remembered for its edgy design aesthetic. The disillusion of this myth that you will feel in looking back at the first issues of Wired is comparable to when MTV replays those once-edgy Pat Benatar videos.

The Negroponte Index

MIT scholar, Wired investor, and OLPC creator -- Nicholas Negroponte is himself something of a patron saint to the digerati. But he's clearly crummy at making predictions.

In his inaugural back-page column, Negroponte takes on the emerging technology known as High-Definition Television. With the goggles of a decade-and-a-half to look through, the opening line hits you like a DeLorean hurled from the past: "High-definition television is clearly irrelevant."

Negroponte contends that the future will actually be fuzzy, arguing that it's a mistake to believe "achieving increased image quality is the relevant course to be pursuing." As anyone who's pored over debates about 1080 vs. 720 and counts their HDMI jacks like their children, this looks like the crazy ramblings of a fuzzy-headed college professor.

To be fair, the futurist gets it half right, such as when he prognosticates a burgeoning on-demand culture but mistakingly fetishizing perspective viewing:

What is needed is innovation in programming, new kinds of delivery, and personalization of content. All of this can be derived from being digital. The six-o'clock news can be not only delivered when you want it, but it also can be edited for you and randomly accessed by you. If the viewer wants an old Humphrey Bogart movie at 8:17 pm, the telephone company will provide it over its twisted-pair copper lines. Eventually, when you watch a baseball game, you will be able to do so from any seat in the stadium or, for that matter, from the perspective of the baseball. That would be a big change.

Sounds awesome! Too bad approximately 1 kjillion dollar were spent last year on cramming living rooms with big ass TVs instead.

Colophon

I remember exactly where I was when the first issue of Wired was handed to me. Exiting a coffee shop called The Urban Stampede -- the only coffee shop within 70 miles of the small midwest state school I was attending -- a friend accosted me, clutching a mysterious magazine with a striped spine. He shoved it in my hands, exasperated, "You have to see this." Wired instantly became required reading for all of our friends.

And our favorite part of the magazine was buried in the back, in the pages that articles jumped to: the colophon.

There were probably two reasons why we loved the colophon: 1) we had no idea what a colophon was, and 2) it showed the means of production of the magazine. The colophon listed the computers (Apple Macintosh II), the printers (HP Scanjet IIc), the layout software (Quark XPress), and even the routers (Farallon). And then it concluded with some music (Dinosaur Jr., Curve, k.d. lang, etc.) and a final heading for "drugs of choice" (caffeine, sugar, Advil).

It sounds corny, but we loved this magazine because its creators drank the same soda as us. These people actually had opinions about routers and ethernet cables!

I don't know if this is surreal or predictable, but it's certainly obvious now: futurism and nostalgia are intricately linked with each other. Revisiting the early pages of Wired reminds one of a time when there was an underground culture -- when not everything was known by everyone else. Can you remember a time when there were secrets? It sounds so naive.

But it also sounds tremendously boring. Thankfully, we'll always have the future.

tuesday

6 comments

One of my favorite pastimes is watching Gawker commenters jump on Nick Douglas' case. From the start, the entire set despised Nick's ignoble task: to explain internet culture to a city that just discovered Tumblr. (For context, remember when all of NYC was scared of blogs? And then remember when they were scared of comments? Now they're totally freaked out by Twitter.) The Gawker loyalists have unwittingly become like their old media foes -- resistant to change like nothing I've since the last Tribune meeting I sat in. (Back in Minnesota, I invented a word for this: neu-liberalism. Those are liberals who think they're really progressive but are actually completely freaked out by anything that moves faster than circa-1985 MTV. So think: daily newspaper editors and NPR listeners.) And so it's logical that Nick has gradually become accepted, even appreciated, in the past few weeks, because eventually all change is accepted. His most recent piece introduces a decent concept: Diggbrow, an analysis of what constitutes "art" among the populist areas of the internet. "The Diggbrow movement isn't destroying art any more than the Dadaists or post-modernists did; it's reinventing it." Whoa, slow down there, buddy...

wednesday

1 comment

I have been ridiculously anxious ever since Andy told me that Waxy.org was going to make a triumphant return. Waxy performs a distinct kind of journalism -- part investigative research, part database mining, part cultural hacking. The types of stories that interest Andy aren't topics anyone else would think to cover. And since firing up the blog this week, he's poured out three posts: an investigation into a strange viral animation, an uncovering of an early Dave Winer internet geek, and, most recently and best of all, a probing of The Times UK's social spam media campaign. Like I said, great stories that no one else had -- all in one week. Remember when we used to talk about a future in which everyone became their own micro-journalist?

wednesday

3 comments

Michel Gondry sweded the trailer to his own trailer for Be Kind Rewind.

monday

3 comments

You will be downloading in five... four... three... NEW GNARLS BARKLEY TRACK.

monday

0 comments

An interview with Monica Peters, who wrote the book Build Your Own Army of Web Bots Within 24 Hours and has started the site AIlegacy.org which offers support for those looking to create text bots.

sunday

2 comments

Remember the video for Radiohead's "Just"? (It's the one where the business man lays down on the middle of the sidewalk.) Mark Ronson covered the song on his debut album and he just released a video for it that deals with the aftermath of the Radiohead video. It's kinda dumb and I don't like the song, but it's Sunday and there's nothing else to talk about.

friday

2 comments

Download from Facebook the ten most popular books at every college, and then cross-reference that with the average SAT score for students attending those colleges. The results are Books That Make You Dumb. Finally a brilliant use of Facebook! [via]

wednesday

0 comments

Ghostface Killah chastizes you for downloading his album. 115,000 friends on MySpace, but 35,000 in albums sales.

thursday

0 comments

So the internet throws a party and everyone is invited...

wednesday

3 comments

Gawker got their take-down notice from the Scientologists. Anyone wanna take bets on whether this goes anywhere?

wednesday

2 comments

The Observer has a profile of Tumblr founder David Karp. Because NYC is a media town, it's a little slow to everything -- but after years of making fun of Tumblr and Twitter (because they didn't get it), several media types across town are starting to get on board.

friday

1 comment

I'm mildly annoyed that I'm now getting my Seattle news via the New York Times, but whatever.... Amazon.com has a new office planned in the South Lake Union area. It looks very ugly, which is sad because their old offices are pretty cool. (Also, I still own a condo in Belltown, so I'm denigrating this architecture merely to keep my old neighborhood as the "cool" one. Well, yuppie cool, anyway.)

tuesday

2 comments

Doing research on a project, I accidentally just stumbled across Suck.com's NETMOGULS, a project I remember so well yet completely forgot! Scroll down the names on the left (frameset!) for a flashback to who was hot online in 1997.

monday

3 comments

Awesome. The English language has always needed a gender-neutral pronoun, but prescribed words like hir reek of east-coast liberal elitism. So I'm down with flipping this inner-city and going with yo.

wednesday

0 comments

Interesting USA Today story on how government subsidies keep small-town airports alive. Marginal Revolution makes a chart out of it, illustrating a shocking passenger-per-flight ratio.

thursday

0 comments

The two previous tees from The T-Shirt Project (which you might recall creates shirts around current events) were about Myanmar and the NYC midtown steam explosion. The third one is about the falling American dollar.

wednesday

4 comments

I bought myself these hot metallic silver kicks for xmas. When I look down at my feet, I can see a reflection of myself. And because ANYTHING that is even vaguely self-referential gets labeled a product of the Facebook zeitgeist, I'm now calling these my "Facebook Shoes."

thursday

27 comments

Last year I decided to put on twist on my annual "best blogs" post [2002, 2003, 2004] by taking a turn toward the obscure. Because blogs now pervade the media landscape, it makes little sense to write a post arguing that Huffington Post is better or worse than DailyKos -- or Cute Overload.

It turned out that this change -- pointing to lesser-known sites like History of the Button, Buzzfeed, and Indexed -- was a rather auspicious. Within 24 hours of releasing the list, seven of the top ten links on Del.icio.us' typically-tech-centric hotlist were sites on my list. And so in the spirit of celebrating the lesser-known, it's time again to point toward the best blogs that might have flown under your radar. Here they are, the Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren't Reading:

And finally, thanks to Taylor, Ben, Robin, Lindsay, Melissa, Scott, Alisa, Gavin, Jason, Peter, Matt, Choire, and Anil for their tips on this project. See ya next year.

wednesday

0 comments

FWIW, Portfolio gave FunnyOrDie.com the full feature treatment. Still not sure if I'm thumbs-up or thumbs-down on this one in 2008.

wednesday

0 comments

Pretty fantastic package just released over at Wired... first, they got David Byrne and Thom Yorke to sit down together and talk about the music industry (with stacks of audio clips!) and then Byrne lays out six scenarios for saving artists from the industry's collapse (with charts!).

tuesday

3 comments

Whoa, the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle (which I lived a few blocks from, just a couple months ago) has suddenly closed. (The Croc was owned by Peter Buck's ex-wife.) More at, of course, The Stranger.

wednesday

2 comments

Infosthetics' 20 most wanted Christmas gifts for the info-addicted. (I already own nearly a third of these, which totally weirds me out.)

wednesday

1 comment

If you haven't been paying attention, the temp editor at Kottke.org this week has been lonelysandwich15 -- haha, I mean lonelysandwich -- better known around these parts as the-jerk-who-is-trying-to-be-a-better-Twitterer-than-me (and winning). The best thing so far has been the bit on fictional products becoming real (also covered by Buzzfeed and Karina). Anyway, I'm secretly writing a book about fake things (which I'll probably never finish, so it's ultimately fake too), so I love this little meme and now find it everywhere -- like today when I saw Gothamist report that the fictional grilled fontina cheese sandwich with truffle oil that Serena van der Woodsen eats in Gossip Girl has become real. (Editor's note: If this post had tags, they would be kottke, twitter, defiction, gossipgirl, lonelysandwich, and cheesesandwich. I win.)

wednesday

17 comments

This year proved again that when it feels like the entire goddamn world is going to hell -- that's a good time to throw a dance party. Whether you were fist-pumping for Maya's admittance back into America, chanting "We are North American scum!" at the club, or just jumping in giddy delight that Justice somehow landed an MTV Music Video Award nomination, it was a good year to dance in the streets, especially to these, my favorite albums of 2007:

And finally, here are some albums that I tried to like this year, but it just never happened: Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew - Spirit If..., Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's Some Loud Thunder, The Good, the Bad & the Queen's The Good, the Bad & the Queen, Air's Pocket Symphony, Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero, Timbaland's Timbaland Presents Shock Value, T.I.'s T.I. vs. T.I.P., 50 Cent's Curtis, Arctic Monkeys's Favourite Worst Nightmare, Amon Tobin's Foley Room, The Shins' Wincing the Night Away, The National's The Boxer, Wilco's Sky Blue Sky, Bjork's Volta, Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, Low's Drums and Guns, PJ Harvey's White Chalk, Jose Gonzalez' In Our Nature, Bruce Springsteen's Magic, Feist's The Reminder, and Les Savvy Fav's Let's Stay Friends.

Previous Yearly Music Roundups: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006.

sunday

1 comment

Diablo in the Sunday Times, written by David Carr. It includes some mention of the bullshit criticism that's occurring back in Minneapolis in The Rake (from Rob Nelson, who I otherwise love, but I get the sense that maybe The Rake put in an order for a take-down piece). If you're following the story, the MNspeak thread where Diablo jumps in is fantastic.

friday

5 comments

I dunno if you're watching Kid Nation (you should be -- fuck these writers and their scripted tv!), but Lindsay dubbing super character Taylor as "a world-class media whore, reality television's first true child prodigy" is darn near perfect.

friday

8 comments

While guest-editing Gawker last week, it was pretty easy to tell that something was wrong: IM conversations were quirky, people reacted in strange ways to innocuous comments, and, well, Choire said so. And so, it's no surprise that Emily and Choire are leaving (sorta brilliantly buried in that post), but the job posting (which contains Gawker's first acknowledgment of the NY Mag article by linking it with an "existential crisis" -- errr) does strike a peculiar note: "It's no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories. And the new managing editor will need to hire and manage reporters, as well as bloggers. Gawker.com receives more than 10m pageviews per month. Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site." New York is weird.

wednesday

2 comments

Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney reviews Rock Band for Slate, which is a nice counterpoint to Rob Walker's bit in last weekend's NYT about the fame aspiration in these games.

sunday

2 comments

This week's NYT Mag interview: Umberto Eco. On Da Vinci Code: "I was obliged to read it because everybody was asking me about it. My answer is that Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel, Foucault's Pendulum."

tuesday

2 comments

NYT reviews its own new HQ. (I've been in it. The dining room -- "cafeteria" just doesn't work -- is pretty fantastic.)

tuesday

20 comments

One of these days I'm going to do a take-down article on a sacred cow of the internet: BoingBoing. I've already got a few ledes written: "BoingBoing, the pretend-thinking-man's Fark," "BoingBoing, your source for two-week-old links," "BoingBoing, keeping post-hippiness alive since 1991...." And so on. Truth is, I like Cory and Xeni and the gang -- they're swell people. And I bet I'm the only one here who owns every single issue of bOING bOING -- the magazine. But BoingBoing is clearly the most over-rated blog on the internet (which is easy to declare, since it's also the third-most-popular). I thought that maybe BoingBoing TV might finally give me the opportunity to write this imaginary critique, but, like Slate, I'm mostly just bored with it (though the John Hodgman interview was alright). So until I write that take-down (oops, is this it?), I will continue to mumble about BoingBoing being slow, single-minded, and DIY smug... every single day, because I somehow can't unsubscribe from the damn thing.

tuesday

4 comments

Interesting little factoids about Gossip Girl: 1) though it currently has a cancellation-inducing ranking of #106 on Nielsen, it rocks the online distribution world as the #1 downloaded show on iTunes; 2) Kristen Bell plays the disembodied voice of gossip girl herself; 3) the show was originally supposed to be a feature film starring Lindsay Lohan; and 4) The New Yorker thinks it's a snotty, worthless show.... but of course they would.

friday

8 comments

An hour after the weekend has started, I finally got around to watching this week's internet sensation: quarterlife. If you haven't been paying attention, it's a video series appearing on MySpace (profiles!) that users will supposedly be able to control the outcome of. Though it's from the creators of My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething, it reminds me more of Reality Bites than anything else (right down to the misuse of the word irony). NY Mag interviewed the lead actress (say it with me: Bitsie Tulloch -- you're gonna hear it all the time now). Karina gave the first episode a thumbs down, but rumors are still circulating that NBC might pick it up. My opinion? It kinda sucks and I love it -- both at the same time. UPDATE: In the comments, Colin links to an amazing MTV promo for something called "The Spot" from 1995. And whaddya know, NBC actually bought quarterlife in the few hours since I wrote this post.

friday

0 comments

Peter has launched his new web site / record label / download paradise RCRD LBL. (I'm still jealous.) First track: Justice feat. Spank Rock and Mos Def - "D.A.N.C.E. (Benny Blanco remix)". That's like five things I love in one song!

friday

3 comments

Hot! These Are Powerful Hours creates "Power Hour Mixes for the Discriminating Binge Drinker." (If you don't know what a power hour is, you didn't grow up in the midwest.) These are essentially mix tapes with 60 seconds of 60 songs -- drink! -- from a given artist or genre. There are power hours (a playlist plus download or stream) for Prince, French House, Ghostface Killah, Hyphy, Hall & Oats, and more.

monday

0 comments

Bill Wasik (who you might remember as the Harper's editor who invented flash mobs) writes about how hype builds in the music industry. It's chock full of indie rock things that I write about here all the time: KEXP, Tapes 'n Tapes, SXSW, etc. (This link is dedicated to Matt, my hype-backlash ninja.) Update: Taylor questions Minneapolis' third-place ranking in the musical urban archipelago. He's wrong, but he's right about MSP getting its own big music festival (like, I imagine, Bumbershoot, Siren, CMJ, or Pitchfork).

monday

4 comments

I'm moving across the country again soon, so last night I made a list of all the magazines I subscribe to. (Which reminds me: someone needs to make address-changing an easier process.) The tally of subscriptions was 27 mags -- and that's slimmed down over the past couple years. So I am naturally intrigued by the new site Brijit, which creates 100-word abstracts of articles from 50+ magazines. It's a little like a digital Reader's Digest, but adds in features like user ratings. WaPo has a profile with the founder.

sunday

4 comments

I always thought 30 Rock invented the word vajayjay -- turns out it was Grey's Anatomy. And Oprah pretty much owns it. This and other scintillating details about the origin of the word in today's NYT Styles. (UPDATE: In the comments, at least one previous use of the world. I hope the OED references this post.)

friday

12 comments

I can finally mention this publicly: I'm moving to NYC next month, working on some new projects. Hush-hush, shh-shh, see ya there. (In the comments, kottke turns this into a Valleywag post. Feel free to write your own press releases inside.)

friday

0 comments

I knew that a lot of media companies were creating their own venture funds, but I didn't realize how many until I read this story. Very curious to see where this goes.

monday

4 comments

NY Mag's take-down of Gawker: Everybody Sucks. And Denton's response: The Long and Illustrious History of Bile. Follow-ups from: Anil and Rachel and Neal.

sunday

9 comments

For those who haven't heard the news: we announced our purchase of Newsvine today. (Mike Davidson's post | msnbc.com story.)

Despite working on this deal for several months now, the exhilaration that one feels when turning the corner to see the future has not dissipated. But the thrill has transformed into a new kind of obsession: thinking about how news deserves to be a better experience -- better to create, better to share, better to participate in.

You can read elsewhere about the details of the deal, but the gist is this: we plan to leave Newsvine alone -- learn from it, integrate little pieces of it, watch it grow. The site will continue to run independently with Mike at the helm; meanwhile, we will incrementally find sensible ways to integrate the "social thinking" of Newsvine into the "big media thinking" of MSNBC.com.

I'm convinced that Newsvine represents a different way of thinking about traditional media -- as merger of gathering, interacting, and consuming. By positing news as an ecosystem rather than a hierarchy, the philosophy of Newsvine is actually an old one. News has always been conversational, but only recently have we begun to rediscover the tools to bring it back to its networked mode. Mike and his team have built an amazing site, and we are excited to turn some of our large audience onto it.

For me personally, it's a moment I have been anticipating for years: seeing how a big news outlet can interact with its audience, how it can learn from its audience, how it can cede control to its audience. And ultimately, how "audience" isn't even the right word anymore.

I've been working for big media for over a dozen years now. And to be honest, I am always close to giving up. While all my nouveau riche Silicon Valley friends cash in their start-ups, I've been preparing the epitaph on my days working in this industry: "Mainstream media is hard."

Very hard.

This is certainly not breaking news, but the media industry is hemorrhaging. As the differences between "big" and "small" media continue to crumble, I cling to the corny, nostalgic philosophy that mainstream news is still a crucial part of democracy, binding us together in ineffable ways. If you've ever worked for a big media company, you know this is not an easy philosophy to maintain. You get bitter, you get depressed, you drink a lot, you have an infinite string of two-month relationships (ahem).

Because big media is hard. And no matter what you do, no matter how much you try to fix it, the media industry still moves slowly. Why? Because the media world has lost its faith, abandoned its roots, absconded the throne. And proving that an empire is its own worst enemy, media companies seem determined to kill themselves, slowly and painfully, pointing fingers at non-existent enemies as they go down.

Which is why it needs fixing, now more than ever. And fixing it is about finding its roots -- news as conversation, as a network, as a platform. By reconstituting media as participation, Newsvine suddenly makes news fun and engaging again.

For the first time in a long time, I'm actually optimistic about the prospects. Maybe media doesn't need to be so hard after all.

Rex Sorgatz is the Executive Producer of MSNBC.com. This blog has, like, nothing to do with that.

thursday

4 comments

New trailer to the new Michel Gondry: Be Kind Rewind. Mos Def and Jack Black are two videostore clerks who decide to film their own versions of quasi-classic flicks.

tuesday

1 comment

I never did link to last week's SNL skit "Iran So Far" because, well, everyone else in the known blogosphere did. By now, you've probably heard the news that NBC did a take-down of it, even though it was on their own YouTube channel. But maybe you haven't yet heard the reason why.... it's because Aphex Twin (!) was sampled in the skit without permission. There's more at Pitchfork, while The Daily Swarm notes that "NBC was not required to get clearance for Saturday's broadcast, and until they intend to air the show again, copyright law allows for 'ephemeral use'." So despite what it might seem like some days, the internet isn't ephemeral use.

sunday

6 comments

This is one of the weirdest things I've seen in music in a long time: Radiohead has just announced they have a new album coming out... in 10 days. I don't think anyone even knew they were making a new record. Some strange pre-order and format info on the site for the album: In Rainbows. UPDATE: the price for download will be left up to the individual buyer. Amazing.

thursday

0 comments

Christine Rosen -- who you might remember as the crypto-techno-conservative author of The Age of Egocasting -- is back with another tirade in The New Atlantis: Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. Actually, it's one of those foreboding pieces that you will want to dismiss, but it's also fun to read -- so you'll probably make it through all 12 printed pages only frowning (and grinning) a few times. [via]

thursday

0 comments

Just noticed that NYT gave the TV Newser guy his own blog: TV Decoder.

thursday

3 comments

This is goddamn brilliant: CustomReceipts.com. They will print fake ATM receipts with your name and whatever balance you want. Why would you want that? So when you need a piece of scratch paper to write down your phone number for girls at bars.... see! brilliant!

wednesday

0 comments

I've been avoiding the mix that Diplo did for Pitchfork, but the moment that it mashes M.I.A., Akon, and Battles will convert you. Also, the track-by-track interview seems a completely modern phenom.

tuesday

1 comment

"We're drowning in quirk. It is the ruling sensibility of today's Gen-X indie culture, defined territorially by the gentle ministrations of public radio's This American Life; the strenuously odd (and now canceled) TV sitcom Arrested Development; the movies of Wes Anderson; Dave Eggers's McSweeney's Web site; the performance art, music, and writing of Miranda July; and the just-too-wacky-to-be-fully-believable memoirs of Augusten Burroughs." --The Atlantic.

tuesday

2 comments

"Music, a mode of creative expression consisting of sound and silence expressed through time, was given a 6.8 out of 10 rating in an review published Monday on Pitchfork Media, a well-known music-criticism website." --The Onion.

thursday

1 comment

Whoa, missed this one. Cinematical a couple days ago reported that Wachowski brothers are no more -- that is, now one's a girl. Citing a post on Rated-M, the man formerly known as Larry Wachowski had apparently completed a full sex change -- and Larry was now Lana. But a Fox News story has the brothers disputing this. [via]

monday

1 comment

In one of those crazy stories where everyone seems to do the wrong thing, 19 people were arrested in Minneapolis this weekend at a Critical Mass event gone awry. Most interesting to me is the interplay of threads on MNspeak and MetaFilter. As my pal Marsh says, "Last night was a full-on dress rehearsal for the RNC. Both by the cowboys and the indians. The cops and the robbers.... next August is going to be ugly" -- that's when the Republican National Convention goes down in this very blue state. (Btw, between bridge collapses, blowjobs in airports, and cops clashing with biking kids.... Minneapolis can't stay out of the news lately.)

monday

2 comments

Last night while watching the still-Ebert-less Ebert & Roeper, I discover that they are no longer doing thumbs up and thumbs down on the show. Why? Ebert is using it as a negotiation tactic to sign a new contract with the show's distributor. Update: Ebert's response.

thursday

8 comments

Because I don't have time to write a legit record review, here are some quick notes on listening to Kala:

8) First, the politics. Maya's critics seem to present her songs as equivocally advocating various causes. This seems foolish. I suspect what MIA is actually doing is more like acting. And I don't mean just conveniently sampling subversive agitprop (she seems to legitimately understand the cultural issues). Rather, Maya uses songwriting to play out the roles of various third-world revolutionary characters. So when you hear her talking about the Tamil Tigers or Palestine, it's not exactly "her opinions" as much as the voice of people she's encountered. Critics insist on imposing autobiography on this album, but it seems more like contemporary historical fiction.

7) Someone could write an entire review of Kala's aggressive stance against being danceable.

6) It's difficult to come up with musical comparison points with MIA -- The Clash is probably the best lazy comparison right now. But do you know who Maya should really be compared to? Star architects. I'm totally serious -- they fly around the world, observe a society, pick up pieces local culture, and adapt it to their own style. MIA is a starchitect. She's more like Rem Koolhaas than Gwen Stefani.

5) Most confusing culture reference on the new album: "Price of living in a shanty town just seems very high / But we still like T.I."

4) Second place: "So I woke up with my Holy Koran / And found out I like Cadillac."

3) And yet: "Sex is cheap / I get it at the KFC."

2) The best song on the album is "Paper Planes," which also happens to be produced by the somewhat estranged Diplo. As Margaret said to the me the other day, there's never been a better song in which sound effects replace words. But beyond all that, the production of the song is so strange -- it has a reggae-light beat, but the sounds underneath are totally like nothing else.

1) This is the only album I can think of in which the remixes will likely be better than the album. And it's not because the songs are bad, but rather because there's something sorta raw about the tracks. It's like an album of source-material.

wednesday

0 comments

Take dance lessons from James Brown. For real.

tuesday

0 comments

Pretty awesome: Top 10 Incredible Recordings. Includes the highest sung note of all time, a Russian exorcism, the last 30 minutes of Jonestown, and much more. [via via]

saturday

3 comments

If I were in college right now, every term paper would somehow contain references to Trapped in the Closet and every night would be spent arguing with Chuck about some nuance of R. Kelly's masterpiece. Thankfully, I've grown up, and now my stupid blog is obsessed with the 22-chapter series while Klosterman writes about R. Kelly in The Guardian. (It's pretty great -- go read it. After you've watched the magnum opus.)

wednesday

2 comments

If you walk around Seattle, one of the unusual things you'll notice is the number of Teriyaki joints -- the red & yellow neon signs are seemingly everywhere, with greater concentration than anywhere else you'd expect it (San Fran, Vancouver.... Tokyo). The Seattle Weekly does a little investigation into where they all came from.

tuesday

1 comment

If there was any doubt that the market is flooded with social web apps, Techcrunch reviews 34 sites that allow you to create your own social networks.

sunday

0 comments

Remember when every major magazine started doing "design issues" several years ago? That's so 2000 -- now we're onto fonts. For instance, NYT Mag's story (and slideshow) on the new highway roadsign font, Clearview, is so fawning in its praise that non-designers will likely chuckle their way through. However, it will no doubt have its own movie someday.

friday

0 comments

Who Owns What (Web 2.0 Version).

thursday

0 comments

Oh great, Seattle is becoming NYC. 300-sq. foot condos in my hood? Seriously?

thursday

3 comments

Good (even though Gawker will make fun of it in 5... 4...): 50 Things You Should Never Say. "We met on eHarmony.com." "Bros before hos." "I actually make my own granola."

friday

0 comments

Let the Facebook backlash (1, 2, 3) begin! Update: and backlash to the blacklash (1, 2)! Oy.

thursday

2 comments

This is one of the strangest stories I've seen in a while. Did you see the story about the professional wrestler (Chris Benoit) who killed his wife, son, and himself earlier this week? Apparently, he may have been involved in editing his own Wikipedia entry right after doing it. Best part is that the entry seems to have revealed his wife was dead before anyone actually knew this. Update: the comments and this Newsvine post have more on this. Update #2: Dude who edited it says it was a "terrible coincidence."

wednesday

2 comments

Dude has an idea: distill an entire film down to a single image. How does he do it? By snapping an 8 x 6 pixel image every second. Outcome? Sorta brilliant -- I want the poster version now.

monday

0 comments

New Amy Winehouse vid: "Tears Dry on Their Own", directed by David La Chapelle.

wednesday

0 comments

New MySpace product: Minisodes. Episodes from classic tv shows reduced down to a couple minutes.

thursday

1 comment

Jessica Cutler (Washingtonienne) files for bankruptcy. Let that be a lesson to you aspiring online celebutantes: not even a Playboy appearance and a book deal can save you if you get sued.

thursday

2 comments

I've mentioned in several places my suspicion of rallying around Josh Wolf as a First Amendment hero. I hope his appearance on The Colbert Report makes it a little more clear why.

monday

0 comments

Rojas is such a tease! At SXSW, he told me he was working on a new music-related venture, but then later downplayed it. He's starting an internet record label. Domain: RCRDLBL.com. I'm jealous.

friday

0 comments

Because of a previous project, I own the domain watchingparis.com. This should have been the week I tried to sell it.

wednesday

1 comment

HuffintonPost launched its own Digg-ish thing: HuffIt.

wednesday

0 comments

Remember when it was rumored that Amazon was going to start its own version of Netflix? When asked about it, Bezos was so damn coy, so it seemed inevitable. Of course, we've forgotten those days -- and finally the rumor is out that Amazon might just buy Netflix.

monday

5 comments

In case you missed, Paris Hilton showed up at last night's MTV Movie Awards -- the night before checking into jail (mug shot). In the most embarrassing moment I've ever seen on tv, Sarah Silverman does a major take-down. The reaction shot is so painful. Could a backlash to the backlash ensue? Yeah, probably not.

tuesday

0 comments

Techcrunch: Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right About Now.

wednesday

0 comments

A Rothko painting sold for $73 million. Yipe. NYmag's Vulture tries to track down who bought it.

wednesday

1 comment

Amazon is throwing a sale on selected Criterion titles. Kicking & Screaming, The 400 Blows, or Hoop Dreams for less that $20; Slacker or My Own Private Idaho for $26; Seven Samurai or The Complete Mr. Arkadin for $33.

friday

0 comments

Slow update alert! I'm back in Minneapolis for a couple days (going to Geek Prom with Lux, who apparently now has billboards around town for her column -- christ, how fast things change in a year).

monday

3 comments

Entertainment Weekly: The Sci-Fi 25, which counts down the top 25 moments in science fiction over the past 25 years.

tuesday

1 comment

After taking a lot of flack over the last few months, MTV.com has redesigned again. The criticism waged against the previous incarnation was its use of Flash, but the real problem was simply its slowness (and there's no reason these should be connected). Also: MTV has a labs site. I love me some lab sites! Update: Newsvine also relaunched today. And we did a subtle upgrade too.

tuesday

2 comments

Why of course Rolling Stone created a list like 40 Songs That Changed The World. (I might just create my own list: 40 Songs That Didn't.)

monday

0 comments

My three favorite music vids right now: Tokyo Police Club, Battles, and DJ Mehdi. All awesome in their own way.

thursday

4 comments

The news is trickling out that much of Cho Seung-Hui's imagery for his weirdo multimedia presentation of himself (vlog champion Chuck Olsen notes: don't call it a video blog) was borrowed form the film Old Boy. I actually own this film on DVD and wonder if it's now suddenly eBay-worthy. [Update: Karina has a good post about this.]

thursday

1 comment

Wait, Hal Hartley is releasing a sequel to Henry Fool, staring Parker Posey as a mom? (Trailer.) How come no one told me?! (Update: NY Observer does a little ditty about how Parker Posey -- along with Claire Danes and Chloe Sevigny -- is all grown up now.)

thursday

0 comments

Man, the media scene in Minneapolis (my old hometown) is fucked up. Today, the Pioneer Press sued the Star-Tribune (that's right, two metro dailies -- remember those days?) because the publisher (Par Ridder -- as in the son of Tony, of the ersatz Knight-Ridder empire) left the former to become the publisher of the latter (which is pretty fucked up, though possibly not illegal). Within a year, the Strib has changed owners from McClatchy to some fishy media holdings company, while the PiPress has gone from being part of the Knight-Ridder war machine to being a McClatchy paper to being a MediaNews publication. (Oh, and a bunch of lay-offs and buy-outs in between.) Meanwhile, a major disruption at the very successful alt-weekly (hah! remember those?) caused the editor to leave. Add in the fact that there are four major monthly magazines (WTF?), four alt-weekly papers (that's counting The Onion), and the radio juggernaut known as American Public Media (MPR) -- does any city in America have this much media per capita? [via -- a Minneapolis media website I started!]

monday

0 comments

Download Squad: Atten.TV feeds your inner voyeur.

monday

0 comments

Eyeteeth: Who Owns the J-Word?

sunday

1 comment

On the list of articles that I want to pitch but haven't gotten around to is something called "The Rise of Hatah Culture." (Think: Simon Cowell, Gawker, Pitchfork, etc.) Although not exactly my story, NYT Styles (dammit! trite idea!) has something today on "The Rise of the Takedown."

saturday

4 comments

I've become vaguely confused by what's going on at Gawker lately. The ostensible logic of the chair rearrangement a while back seemed to suggest that The Big G was moving away from insider media reportage (save that noise for the New York Observer!) and shifting toward entertainment coverage (TMZ must be denied!). But this week we've seen long pieces on David Remnick's / Tina Brown's New Yorker and some wacky meta-meta coverage of the NYT Mag Consumed column. As I suggested on Twitter the other day (ugh), Gawker has become almost impossible to read, so I should probably welcome whatever they're doing to mix it up.

thursday

0 comments

Gawker: David Remnick's 'New Yorker' Is Tina Brown's.

tuesday

2 comments

I've been suspicious of this Josh Wolf story since the beginning, but I've been a little afraid to voice it because it sounds like he's fighting the good fight. But now that he's out we can also see for ourselves why he was in jail for 226 days because... HE POSTED THE FOOTAGE THAT HE DIDN'T WANT A GRAND JURY TO SEE TO HIS VLOG? Fer chrissakes. Sorry, but now I'm even more suspicious of this than before. It's too long to explain here (me link blog; you word blog), but this whole thing treads on too much dangerous ground, potentially capable of bringing down so much that First Amendment lawyers have fought for. I don't think you people realize what you're fighting for.

thursday

9 comments

I was live (live! on tv!) on G4's Attack of the Show today, propagandizing about Twitter.

It was a big mock battle: me versus anti-Twitterite Natali Del Conte (who is a former TechCrunch writer and is now at Podshow). The gist of the show was asking if Twitter is a fad, but I didn't even get around to making my most salient point on this matter: who cares!

I've already blabbed about Twitter more than enough in many different places, but I want to address this idea of "fads" in social web applications. Some people may eschew the comparison but I'm not afraid to admit it: Twitter actually does remind me of Friendster.

When Friendster burst on the scene in the summer of 2003, it seemed like so many things at once: 1) a giddy little experiment in the radical conflation of communication and publishing, 2) a disorienting visualization of your friend and your friends' friends, 3) yet another chink in the armor of privacy in her battle against transparency, and 4) something that would probably get you in deep trouble when you noticed that girl was one-degree of separation from that other girl.

And yet, during the entire Summer of Friendster, everyone seemed to sorta agree: "This is ridiculously fun, but I probably won't be doing it next month."

Surprise, surprise: you weren't.

The truth is, even though I predicted last year (#12) that Google would buy Twitter, I have no idea if Twitter is the next MySpace. Fuck, I don't really even think MySpace is the next MySpace. The thrill of Twitter is actually that you feel like you could quit using it at any moment. (I've heard a rumor that some people also say this about crack. But I don't trust rumors.)

I think we've entered a stage where web apps might just be like tv shows -- exhilarating for a while, but gone tomorrow. And you know what? I'm totally cool with that. Why do we resist it? In other words, I contend that Twitter is basically like the first season of Lost.

And finally, a note on production: it looks like I'm giving Natali suspicious looks during the interview, but in reality I can't see her. I'm in a small room staring at a camera, with a strange backdrop of the Space Needle behind me. I have no idea what any of the people on the show even look like. Truth be told, if I had known what Natali looked like, I would have flirted more.

Bonus points: I use the phrase "death by croutons" in the segment. Score!

monday

0 comments

Tee: Go [Heart] Your Own City.

monday

0 comments

More proof that everyone wants a piece of the video pie: The Onion is investing $1 million and hiring 15 staff writers to create a video service known as the Onion News Network. Preview.

monday

0 comments

Borders is dropping Amazon as its e-commerce solution in favor of doing their own site.

thursday

0 comments

GodTube. Exactly what it sounds like. Check out Baby Got Bible. Seriously, this is what Cuban should be flooding with porn. [via]

thursday

0 comments

NPR: Who Owns Your Image on the Internet?

tuesday

0 comments

SciFi.com has launched the Battlestar Galactica Videomaker Toolkit. Use pre-existing and uploaded clips to make your own four-minute clips. These things are always better in theory than in practice, but maybe someone gets off on it...

tuesday

0 comments

Nicholas Carr's lucid argument, In Praise of The Parasitic Blogger, reads something like the manifesto that I never wrote when I launched this blog eight years ago. Except his analogy is to bacteria, whereas a Fimoculous creates and consumes its own waste.

friday

1 comment

Just write your own joke on this one: Rick Santorum is joining Fox News.

tuesday

1 comment

The cover story on the new issue of Wired is Snack Attack!, a mini-manifesto on the notion that culture is becoming more bite-sized. I wrote three short pieces for the compilation -- on t-shirts, lists, and link blogs. These happen to be three things I'm ridiculously qualified to prattle on about.

Snack Culture is a notion that, once stated aloud, seems almost obvious: society is speeding up, so of course culture reflects that acceleration by providing smaller, easier-to-consume bits. Just think about ringtones and texting, iTunes and Twitter, online profiles and speed dating -- nuh doy, right? Aren't FlashMobs just really nano-protests? Isn't H&M just fashion in fast-forward? How about the mashup -- couldn't we argue that it is simply a way to consume two songs in the time it takes to listen to one? (I remember an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation in which Data was listening to five Mozart symphonies at once. This seemed like utopia to this attention-deficient teenage mind.)

Steven Berlin Johnson's decent counterpoint, Snacklash, makes a compelling argument that miniaturization is actually an illusion created by surplus. But his points about movies and music (old media) seem to crumble with recent inventions (new media): games, startups, webisodes, memoirs, gossip, widgets, highlight reels, and all the rest -- just let your mind wander and you'll think of some.

Some bite-sized notes on the items I wrote:

T-Shirts
I've had this theory for a while: the t-shirt is becoming its own legitimate form of media. Whereas t-shirts used to be a retroactive way to classify yourself in a social group, now t-shirts seem to broadcast news. From Wii tees to Dick in the Box halter-tops, the t-shirt is the nano-ist of nano-publishing.

Lists
It's strange to be known as the list guy. Since at least Nick Hornby (or Letterman?), it's become easy to be cynical about cultural lists. But lists are like malls -- we may hate them, but they can never perish in the age of micro-niche. Lists have a mathematical elegance, an efficiency. Lists are ways to editorialize, to predict. Lists are nostalgia and futurism at the same time.

Link Blogs
Stacks of links, neatly organized, precise and discrete: you have your version of beauty, I have mine.