internal

I have a book coming out at the end of this month! If you once enjoyed this blog, you will likely find The Encyclopedia of Misinformation a delight. It was influenced greatly by blog culture of early '00s.

internal

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

internal

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

tv

If you're looking for something new from me, I've started a new site called VIEWSOURCE, where I write about one piece of video every day.

tv

We're now two episodes into The Newsroom, HBO's newest entry in chatter-inducing Sunday programming. Reviews of the show have been brutal, but asking a media critic to judge this show is like asking a cannibal how his gallbladder tastes. Outside of media circles (amongst the vegans, to continue this overwrought metaphor), the show seems somewhat more widely appreciated.

This phenomena fascinates me. We seem to have some sort of uncanny valley relationship to art. If we are extremely close to it -- if the subject matter is about us -- then it is very likely that we find the similarity ugly, a disfigured clone of ourselves. The entertainment landscape is littered with examples of subcultures (professions, geographies, lifestyles) disagreeing with how they are portrayed by mainstream art.¹ It makes you wonder: When does a subculture actually ever like art about itself?²

The anxiety in appreciating art about oneself probably involves some deep Lacanian mirror stage shit. Or maybe it's dormroom pop psych: We are apprehensive about the shortcuts that art must take. We don't enjoy having our subcultures portrayed because it reduces ideas down to sketches, people down to characters. Local significance loses to storyline, depth loses to drama.

So duh, of course we media people hate The Newsroom. It's characters don't act like our colleagues, it's fantasies aren't our realities. So what? Part of me wants to say, fuck it, that's our problem, not Sorkin's. But other times, I'm like, wait, that's fucking bullshit.

I want to talk about the part that's bullshit.

I worked in newsrooms for over 10 years, most of the time at websites attached to TV stations or networks. I've seen, and usually participated in, the creation of news around executions in Texas, riots in Seattle, hurricanes in Florida, and psychotic killing sprees in Virginia.

What I offer here is not an artistic or moral assessment of The Newsroom. Despite having nuanced qualitative opinions about the show³, that's not what we'll be discussing here. Let's temporarily ignore the finer ethical and aesthetic points, which are usually finessed as blustery diatribes, and instead focus on what's believable.

What's bullshit, and what's not?

That eruption from Will McAvoy in the first scene. Yeah, this is kinda bullshit. It's easy to imagine an Olbermann-like figure doing this (actually, that's all he did), but it's pretty unimaginable for a Brian Williams or a Katie Couric. Or maybe our hero is supposed to be more like Dylan Rattigan or Rachel Maddow? Actually, who knows! The way this show blurs the monolithic network anchor with the opinionated cable host is precisely the kind of fake construction that feels like bullshit. Or as the greatest news anchor of our time would say, a great moment of truthiness.

Having a blog. Not bullshit. Olbermann had one, Maddow has one, Brian Williams has a couple, Tucker Carlson has a whole goddamn site.

Not knowing you have a blog. Complete bullshit. This portrait of social media ignorance would have been accurate 10 years ago, but television executives started to freak out about the internet a while ago. They've spent an immense amount of time catching up, so now they're better at Twitter than you.

Walking into a newsroom and yelling "Punjab" to the Southeast Asian character that you know isn't named Punjab. This would never happen, even if your name is Sean Hannity. Bullshit.

Calling out someone as a "sorority girl." Sensing we would deem this bullshit, Sorkin set out to prove it's not.

Dating people you work with. Not bullshit. The only professionals who fuck each other more are actors.

Arguing with people you date while you're working. Not bullshit. The only professionals who argue with each other more are politicians.

The speech from an Executive Producer about fearing Halliburton and the lawsuit it would bring. Bullshit. I don't know a reporter who wouldn't love to catch Halliburton, Scientology, or whatever big scary corporate entity you name. The mere fact that Time-Warner-owned HBO aired this scene seems to completely undermine any truth it is seeking to reveal.

Hiring a new Executive Producer without telling the anchor. I would say this is bullshit, but I've recently heard a story similar to this. Judgement: perhaps not bullshit.

Running to your agent when the President of News hires an Executive Producer over the top of you. Yeah, they're prima donnas, so this could happen. Not necessarily bullshit.

The ongoing debate between popularity and quality. This would never be said aloud. However, it subliminally infuses every newsroom decision. Pseudo-bullshit.

Forgetting the name of your hot blonde assistant. If this show is actually modelled on Olbermann, then this is bullshit. He'd never forget that.

Having a President of News who is drunk "most of the time" at work. Being a heavy drinker can still be romanticized within some media circles (especially if you hang out with bloggers), but being regularly drunk at work would simply not be permitted any more, at any level. Drink up, that's bullshit.

Quoting Don Quixote. Bullshit.

Quoting Man of La Mancha. Epic bullshit, fa la la la la.

Vacationing in Saint Lucia with Erin Andrews. Questionable bullshit.

Figuring out the oil spill that quickly. This is probably the single most annoying thing in the first episodes. If you remember the evolution of the oil spill story, it took weeks for scientists to figure out what our Happy Band of Googlers sleuthed out in a few hours. Complete media fantasy bullshit.

An executive producer threatening an anchor with a fake on-air graphic seconds before going live. Reminiscent of both Broadcast News and Network, this nifty dramatic effect was as much bullshit then as it is now.

Not knowing where your control room is. Crazy bullshit.

FOX News hiring someone with three Mohammeds in his name. Pass.

Sending an email that accidentally goes to 178,000 people. Yep, bullshit. Of course email groups like that exist, but they were introduced to corporations 10 years ago, not last year. So not only does everyone know how they work, but we all also know that not everyone has access to email all those lists. A reply-all snafu would have been less bullshitty.

A fluff newsreader with a PhD in Economics from Duke and an adjunct professor at Columbia. Sure, this is supposed to be Erin Burnett, but still bullshit! She's barely old enough to have a PhD.

The Three I's. That kind of bullshit would actually happen, so it's not bullshit.

Minutes after delivering the sanctimonious Three I's, commenting on a reporters legs. B-------.

The organization of this network. This is one of the more perplexing elements of the show. ACN is apparently a 24-hour cable news outlet, but this show gets the network treatment. Cable newsrooms are much more fluid than this show suggests, with more interaction of programming and personnel between shows.

Hiding under a bed while your date fucks his ex-girlfriend. I have less expertise on this matter, so I'll let you call this one.

So?

Correlating quality with verisimilitude is always a dicey proposition⁴. But when a show places itself into history with real news events, and within a professional industry whose mandate is exposing truth, The Newsroom must be aware that it has put itself under the lens of realism's scrutiny.

The Newsroom rubs so close to reality that it makes you wonder how Will McAvoy would feel about it. After a long walk, some nifty orchestration, and a verbose conclusion, he'd enter his closing judgement into the chryon: It's bullshit.

Footnotes

¹ For example, I lived in Fargo when the movie Fargo came out. To this day, the city has an extremely antagonistic relationship toward their portrayal as noble unsavages with snowboots.
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?

ads

I'm Being Followed: How Google -- and 104 Other Companies -- Are Tracking Me on the Web. Just read it. It's great.

film

This make-believe TED Talk from 2023, done in conjuncture with Ridley Scott's new film Prometheus, reminds me of EPIC.

More info.

online

Compare: Gawker's story about Horse_ebooks and Shortformblog's story about reply girls. Once again, spammers are ahead of the curve in predicting the future of the internets: The Pseudo-Algorithmic Human!

design

This is from a couple months ago, but I just found it now, and it's amazing:

Wilson Miner - When We Build

tv

In a recent episode of the WTF podcast, Bill Lawrence (the creator of Scrubs, Cougar Town, and Spin City) talks about how he hates the name of his show Cougar Town so much that he considered changing it this season. One of the main reasons he didn't is that DVRs aren't equipped to understand a name change, so the show would essentially lose any audience that had a season pass in TiVo.

Anyway, it got me thinking: Has there ever been a successful show that changed its name?

music

The weird personal thing for me about this clip of Chris Cornell performing "I Will Always Love You" is that I found it playing around with the YouTube app on my GoogleTV.

tshirts

Remember Valleyschwag, the site that sent you a monthly package of promotional material from hot startups? The idea is back with Startup Threads Monthly, which sends you a monthly t-shirt from a startup. So far, it has included Boxee, Twilio, Reddit, and BreadPig.

online

Rick says a bunch of interesting things in his new column about whether you need to a be highly networked individual to succeed online. I especially relish how he ties geography into the conversation, alluding to a midwestern startup.

And many, many more hyper-social New Yorkers and San Franciscans make successful startups than antisocial Midwesterners. Or even antisocial New Yorkers. These are things you can control. You can move to San Francisco. Better yet, you can move to New York. You can go to meetups. You can go to conferences. You can email investors. You can go to classes at General Assembly. It's in your control. Or, you can stay at home in the Midwest, reading TechCrunch and talking about how it's all rigged and an insiders game.

This will frustrate my friends in Minneapolis -- those dozens of startups trying to compete at CoCo and other places. They're trying to create their own scene right now. Creative acts are becoming increasingly dependent on groups of people. Being part of a "scene" in music was undeniably important in the '80s and '90s, but now it's become as true for fashion, technology, theater, and nearly all creative arts.

It's an interesting dilemma building a company in the midwest: Your success is as much a factor of your peers' success -- the community's success -- as it is the brilliance and execution of your idea.

tech

Most detailed code-driven infographic in the mainstream press ever?

games

Martin Amis wrote a guide to Space Invaders in the '80s.

film

A creepy sci-fi flick set in the past:

film

This is why they made the internet:

media

I don't think I've ever worked with anyone who understands their audience more than Tavi. Here's a new interview where she describes who Rookie is for:

I keep just describing it as a "website for teenage girls," because I like to think it's not too niche, and I don't want to alienate anyone by saying it's for alternative girls or artsy girls or anything. At the same time, I mean, we don't speak for every girl, but we try to encourage girls to speak for themselves. Mostly we just try to avoid being condescending or making anyone feel like there's something wrong with them that they should be worrying about if they're not already. Or like we're teaching anyone how to be cool. I want people to know that they're already cool. Whatever they're into, that is enough.

online

Opposing visions of the gamification of the web from this morning:

Joseph Puopolo on Techcrunch:

Gamification has become one of the hottest buzz words in the industry and is probably in the process of taking over a website or user experience near you.

David Jacobs on his blog:

I surveyed the community services I frequent -- Metafilter, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, Mlkshk, Mixel. These services do present goals to their users and they have crafted a user experience that nudges them towards those goals -- but they do it without points, ranks and the other mechanisms and patterns advertised in the Techcrunch post above.... At some point people are going to wake up to the fact that the gamification industry is a scam.

For sure, "visualizing success" is a major component of social sites, but there are still scant examples of successful sites with more game-like components like leaderboards and badges, despite the rampant startup growth.

msp

I was surprised to find out last night that Dan Wilson co-wrote Adele's "Someone Like You." If you're from the Upper Midwest, you immediately thought of Trip Shakespeare. Outside of that, the name might not sound familiar, though you definitely know "Closing Time," the 1998 omnipresent hit from his band Semisonic. According to a profile in today's Star-Tribune, Rick Rubin brought him in to write with Adele.

Wilson said the session commenced with Adele playing some YouTube clips of rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson, her latest favorite. "Then I went to the piano and she played guitar and we launched into writing. It was very natural and low-key.

"She told me she had this terrible big breakup and it was all she could think about. She had the first four or five lines [of lyrics] and a melody, and she sang the verse."

Wilson then played the song on piano, embellishing it with big, classical chords. "She said, 'That's way more inspiring.' Things started to move quickly, and by mid-afternoon, we started recording."

Take THAT, science.

sex

New research shows that online dating sites promising "matching algorithms" don't work: The Dubious Science of Online Dating. In other news, I just helped launch the new blog for How About We, a dating site that tosses out algorithms in favor of proposing date ideas.

media

More proof that psychedelics are making a come-back: NYT profile Hamilton Morris, the host of "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" on Vice.

Mr. Morris has a grinning, laid-back persona, with an approach not dissimilar to Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo journalism. In person Mr. Morris, son of the filmmaker Errol Morris, is bookish and intense, speaking with a fastidious attention to word choice.

online

From an interview on ReadWriteWeb with Dens, this bit about the future of Foursquare:

The challenge isn't really that dissimilar than some of the growing pains and hazing that Twitter went through. For a long time, Twitter was "oh, it's just people tweeting what they had for lunch, or that they're going to the movies." That wasn't interesting for a lot of people.

Then they hit a moment that was a little bit of critical mass and a little bit of clarity, where people started using it to break news and share headlines and spread information. And that's when it started clicking for a lot of people.

It is reminiscent of Fred Wilson's post from a couple months ago, Mocked and Misunderstood, where he posits that the most ridiculed services could be the most successful. It's an over-simplification (hello, ChatRoulette), but there's definitely something to this.

celeb

A reason to read the Stanford Law Review: Famous for Fifteen People. It involves a lawsuit against Facebook over whether broadcasting your Likes via Sponsored Stories is equivalent to a celebrity endorsement. The plaintiffs argue they are indeed famous to their friends. They lost, but the ruling has broad implications for the right to privacy, the legal notion of "newsworthiness," and what it means to be a public figure.

music

When you read things like Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker, which uses psychomusicology to explain the popularity of Adele, do you end up liking the artist more or less?

tech

I mean, how cute is it that Blodget didn't take the cellophane off his phone until today?

music

It seemed as though Die Antwoord would probably disappear after their last album, but they have mysteriously resurrected themselves in high fashion. In addition to that thrilling appearance on Letterman a couple nights ago, they've found their way into the Alexander Wang campaign:

More

media

For those of you who like their David Carr served with a dash of sentimentality (like a Replacements ballad!), here ya go:

You can follow someone on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, quote or be quoted by them in a newspaper article, but until you taste their bread, you don't really know them.

books

best whisky board on pinterest by greg clayman. Perhaps this is the answer to my rhetorical question on Twitter:

So which of you will be the first to publish their Pinterest as a book?

sports

Three Super Bowl records set: Most Tweets Per Second (12,233), Most-Watched Show in TV History (111.3 million), and Most-Watched Online Single-Game Sports Event (2.1 million).

politics

David Carr came out bullish on Buzzfeed, while Paul Carr rebuffs him. It's too early to tell what Buzzfeed will do, but I will say that Paul gets this part wrong:

[Peretti] is a career-long SEO guy whose entire news sense is based on what people are already searching for, or what they might be sharing on Facebook tomorrow tomorrow. The first half of that equation -- the SEO half -- is inherently opposed to breaking news. If something hasn't yet been reported, then no-one is searching for it.

That's not true, and the best example of which is Kottke's subtle parody of HuffPo on Superbowl Sunday.

music

Sasha thinks that MIA not should have apologized for flipping the bird. I guess, sure? But that seems a particularly red shade of herring. As someone wrote on my Facebook wall when I asked "What exactly was she trying to say by flipping you off?":

That at the last instant, after making the song, being in the video, going through gigantic rehearsals, meeting with execs from the NFL and NBC, and Madonna's handlers, she felt she had to do something, anything in reaction to the massive, moneyed, orchestrated alternate really bubble she'd already bought into a thousand times over leading up to that moment.

Or it's pure ego, and she wanted the attention.

media

Early last year, I told Elizabeth Spiers that Felix Salmon had made a bet with John Carney: she would be fired from The Observer within a year. It didn't happen; Felix lost the bet, in somewhat grumpy prose.

All the interesting hires, the chatter about new properties, the return of the old tagline, the blog launches, the print format switch -- for the first time in a long time, The Observer has been fun to watch. I choose that infinitive carefully, because this is what Felix overlooked in the media parlor game: watching beats reading any day.

media

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]

music

So, two questions:

1) Who exactly is MIA flipping off? It's you, right?

2) What exactly is she trying to say with this?

music

In addition to Weekend Edition subtly asking for some slack for Lana Del Rey, Liz Phair also whips up an op-ed for WSJ.

Lana Del Rey is exactly what I was hoping to inspire when I took on the male rock establishment almost twenty years ago with my debut record, Exile In Guyville.

In other SNL music act news, I think Bon Iver is the new Michael McDonald.

tech

Why L.A.'s Start-up Scene Beats All Others. The uber-argument in this one is that talent is easier to find, but there's also this bit:

There wasn't initially easy access to venture capital in L.A. and entrepreneurs had no choice but to build profitable business models from the start.

The exactly opposite could also be argued -- that for L.A. to succeed it needs greater access to venture capital. But there's the start to some ideas in there.

online

The Death of the Cyberflaneur argues that the web once seemed a place for the anonymously strolling (not trolling) flaneur:

Transcending its original playful identity, it's no longer a place for strolling -- it's a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone "surfs" the Web anymore. The popularity of the "app paradigm," whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflanerie less likely.

It then goes on to blame Facebook for much of this problem.

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Will Wright Is Back. Whah! “If we had that much situational awareness about you and at the same time we were building this very high-level map of the world, and I don’t just mean where Starbuck’s is, but all sorts of things like historical footnotes and people you might want to meet. I started thinking about games that we can build that would allow us to triangulate you in that space and build that deep situational awareness.” And maybe it includes a TV component! (His 2007 SXSW keynote is still my all-time favorite.)

2) Just.Me. Looks interesting, love the name.

3) Denton’s Memo. Okay, this commenting system (Pow-Wow) could be the real deal. However, I doubt that the product itself will be that revolutionary — I mean, how much can we do with comments? But the power will be in pairing it with an editorial agenda. Imagine if something like Reddit or Metafilter were more programmed, had the power of a media enterprise around it.

4) Newsright Launches. Sigh. These guys keep trying.

5) VYou 2.0. VYou comes out of Beta on Monday.

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) North Koreans weeping hysterically over the death of Kim Jong-il. THEY ALL DESERVE OSCARS. (This video will be a pervasive meme in 5… 4…)

2) WHERETHEFUCKSHOULDIGOFORDRINKS. (dot-com)

3) Distrust That Particular Flavor. William Gibson has a book of non-fiction coming out next month.

4) Rob Delaney’s new Comedy Central Show Using Twitter. Also, the design of those new FastCo pages!

5) Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works.

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) The Spielberg Face. Once you’ve seen it, you can never not see it.

2) The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists. Yes.

3) WhoSay Strikes Deal With AP. The future is celebrities owning and distributing their own gossip.

4) Ebert’s Best Films of 2011. Someone kept Drive on their list!

5) Jack Shafer: Are you reading the best magazine in America? I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that Bloomberg Businessweek is my favorite magazine right now. (Also, props to Reuters for hiring Shafer and letting him write so glowingly about their primary competitor.)

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) 25 Most Viral People. (On the internet.)

2) VCs Predict What Will Happen In 2012.

3) CNN: A Social Media Addict Tries to Disconnect. Day 1: “I land at Antigua’s airport, where I’m greeted by warm sunshine, a long customs line and a man playing Bob Marley’s ‘Three Little Birds’ on a tin drum. All of these observations are ones I ache to tweet.” Hrrrrm.

4) The Death of Television. From Evan Shapiro of IFC, who is probably the smartest tv exec I’ve ever worked with.

5) SAY Media. For most of 2011, Aol was the most interesting company on the digital media scene — every week was a new product launch, a new purchase, a new scandal, a new reorg. For 2012, SAY Media could take its place. For several years, people in the industry have heard various rumors of a “blog rollup.” It’s never happened because most of the time these companies stall after buying one or two properties. But SAY Media is really giving it a go. Sure, xoJane hasn’t performed that well, and the mishap with Rookie didn’t help, but by most accounts Dogster is doing well, and snagging Frommer with its purchase of Read Write Web is tantalizing. (And the reported $5M price tag indicates they’re being tactical and might not burn out.) Now there’s rumors of an IPO, plus some chatter about a revved up CMS. You never would have guessed that the merger of a blog platform and a video ad network would lead to anything, but prepare to hear endless stories about it in 2012.

online

1) VC Memes. Well. Done.

2) All the End Of Year Stuff At Pitchfork.

3) Biz Insider Launched an Advertising Vertical Last Week. Servicey.

4) Best New Blogs of 2011.

5) P.R. Stunts in a Digital Era. “A lot of brands are seeing the value in a P.R. rep who has an online persona that can be used to magnify the brand message.” Some boner actually said that.

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Klosterman on Tebow. The interesting thing here is that it seems to start as another analysis of hater culture, but then it does a few back-flips and turn-arounds and, oh christ, it's about faith!

2) WeedMaps Acquires Marijuana.com For $4.2 Million. You missed this breaking news over Thanksgiving.

3) The yearly Hood Internet dropped.

4) Pitchfork's Top Music Videos of 2011. Best year for the medium since the .90s? Sure, let's try out that idea.

5) Did You Read? This. Is. Amazing.

online

Fifteen things that intrigue me right now:

1) You Say You Want a Devolution? Here's an interesting thesis from Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair: While there have been massive technological changes in the past 20 years, everything looks the same. That is, he suggests, if you looked at a random snapshot from 1991, the people and buildings and cultural objects would mostly look the same as today. So? Well, that certainly isn't true if you looked at 1931 to 1951 or 1951 to 1971. This is one of the broad cultural essays that "seems right" though I'm not sure why.

2) The .xxx top-level domain went live yesterday. You will know it when you see it.

3) Who's Afraid Of Lana Del Rey? I'm glad someone wrote this, but isn't the artifice of "authenticity" itself the bugbear to be slayed?

4) Fast Co Design. Fast Company has a design blog that tries "to bridge the fuzzy border between design and business."

5) New Walker Website. Waaaay back in the day, The Walker was one of the earliest organizations (and for sure, the first museum) to take up blogging, but the effort seemed to only get partial internal support. Last week, a site redesign revisited the idea of museum as a locus for content generation (or "idea hub"). Congrats, Schmelzer, nice work. (See also: The Atlantic and Artlog discuss the redesign.)

6) The Bitter Email Exchange between David Denby and Scott Rudin over the Review Embargo of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Rudin missed such a great opportunity to use a scathing Subject line!

7) Aaron Sorkin's New Project: Newsroom. People who say they aren't excited for this are lying.

8) Bjork's Favorite Recordings.

9) The Utne Reader to Leave Minneapolis. Sad. I used to have an office across the street from these guys in Loring Park.

10) JimRomenesko.com. Hello there, old timer!

11) Barney Frank's Best Insults.

12) Richard Lawson in Atlantic Wire. How fast did this become the best writing online? In just weeks, we've received thought pieces like When Fans Attack and movie reviews that read like the best of the New Yorker (so: Anthony Lane not David Denby), while still satisfying us in that off-hand impulsive bloggy way. (See also, this post on Gawker that isn't at all about Lawson but somehow the commenters turned it into a rally cry.)

13) The Trailer to Shame.

14) @FAKEGRIMLOCK.

15) Paste's 50 Best Songs of 2011.

media

Five things that intrigue me right now, which may or may not be “the future of content”:

1) Willie Nelson covered Coldplay’s “The Scientist” for a Chipotle commercial. All those proper nouns in the same sentence!

2) Serious Business. That’s Alex Blagg’s new “intertainment firm.” (Oh how soon they become what they parody!) His partners include a former UTA agent. Their first video is Drive-Thru, an 84% funny parody of Drive that is an Arby’s commercial.

3) dumbdumb. Will Arnett & Jason Bateman made a viral video product placement company! Here’s the reel. Is FIAT Roadtrip and Denny’s: Always Open our future?

4) A supercut of all the product placements in Lady Gaga videos. It has only 946 views. Let’s make this famous!

5) The Greatest Movie Ever Sold box office totals. Remember that Morgan Spurlock movie from this summer? The amount of money it made wouldn’t even buy you a decent apartment in Manhattan. At the box office, at least — it made millions in product placements.

music

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) SPIN. For having the guts to do a Changing Face of Hip-Hop cover.

2) Azealia Banks Filthy Mouth.

3) Man or Muppet. The most fantastic moment in the new muppets movie.

4) The spooky video for M83s Midnight City. Also, the video for Vomit by Girls.

5) Rap Genius. Most people know about this already, but quickly: Its a wikipedia for hip-hop, but with the crowd supplying the meaning of lyrics. The interface is clever: line-by-line lyrics that you can click on and define. For instance, heres Kreayshawns Gucci Gucci which kindly explains that Chickenhead is old slang for a girl, sometimes an MC, who sleeps with a group of (usually popular/prolific) male rappers/emcees to get on their good side/get a boost up in their popularity and sales. See also: Rap Map.

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Minneapolis Is A Startup Powerhouse! Sure, why not?

2) Lets Not Party Like Its 1999. All party reporting should be like Ricks.

3) Marc Maron Podcast. I finally listened to this over Thanksgiving. So good.

4) Those Pics of DiCaprio as Gatsby Floating Around the Internet.

5) YouTube Innovation. For the first couple years after landing into Googles lap, YouTube had essentially zero new product innovation, perhaps because they were busy fighting off lawsuits. But in the past year, numerous interface, design, and product changes have made it a surprising place of innovation  perhaps the most innovative department in all of Google. One very small example: You can subscribe to feeds of videos that appear on your favorite websites, such as Hipster Runoff, Kottke, TMZ, and Cute Overload.

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Daughterly Nepotism. Oooooh, boy. Chelsea Clinton, Jenna Bush, and Meghan McCain now all work for work for NBC. This makes me miss the 30 Rock cafeteria!

2) The Bipolar Reactions that Lana Del Rey Elicits. Watch the video and then look at those comments!

3) Slaughterhouse 90210 Entries Like This One. She’s still got it.

4) After 17 years on the web, Kottke finds the craziest thing he’s ever seen.

5) Social Media Pillows. There ya go, the beginning and end of the Fimoculous Holiday Shopping Guide.

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) This Appealing Headline. “The Atlantic’s online ad revenue exceeds print”

2) This sentence in Vanessa’s profile of Arianna Huffington. “It’s a feat — Huffington’s characteristic gift — to aggregate childbirth, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tiger Moms, a cow, Nancy Reagan, and unconditional love into one surprisingly intimate, seamless skein, and it makes spending time with Huffington a pleasure, even if interviews with her can be stultifying.” (Also, this accompanying graphic.)

3) UC Davis Pepper Spraying from Multiple Angles. Like if Time Code were a documentary.

4) eBay buys Hunch. This one’s about as obvious as it comes. I know nothing of the back story, but I’m sure Amazon had a chance and passed because Bezos doesn’t overpay for anything. While I hope Hunch still seeks a consumer-facing solution, I’m pretty sure it will end up being integrated into eBay and slowly disappear.

5) Startup Angel Funding Rap. Check please!

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) This NYT Map of NYC Startups.

2) How I Ended Up Leaving Poynter. Jim’s highly-detailed account doesn’t make Poynter look worse, but they sure don’t look any better.

3) Betabeat’s Most Poachable Players in Tech. The best thing about this is not knowing most of these people.

4) Sylo. I love when people do creative things with their VYou accounts.

5) Gawker Redesign Second Thoughts. Appropos of nothing, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Denton had gone in a different design direction. If, as he said, he believed so much that the traditional reverse-chronological order of blogs was broken, why didn’t he go with a information-dense gridded design (like Vulture and The Verge) instead of the two-pane iPad-inspired layout? That also seemed to have been Steve Jobs’ feedback. (Btw, traffic across Gawker Media right now is even lower than when he lost the bet.)

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Reddit IAmA. Most people are pretty familiar with this amazing series on Reddit, but it’s interesting that content programming this precise and defined has emerged organically out of a user-generated platform.

2) Grantland’s YouTube Hall of Fame. On the opposite end of the spectrum is this highly programmed concept which is a goldmine of YouTube esoterica.

3) Video Beast. This will probably lose a million bucks per quarter, but it will be fun to watch while it lasts.

4) RecordSetter.com book. Can an open source version of record-making outseat the Guinness Book? I think so!

5) The Top 10 Reasons Lists Are Popular With Journalists. “There’s this form of nostalgia tied to them, but I actually think of them in terms of the future.” Someone said that.

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Match the DeLillo to The Cover. 10 for 10.

2) Kabletown. Ive heard NBC employees  including executives  actually refer to Comcast as Kabletown, even at work. Ill be surprised if this will be allowed to continue forever.

3) Sarah Silvermans 13 Breakup Songs. I made it into a Spotify list.

4) Felix Salmon: The Future of Adverising and Mark Suster: The Future of TV. These two pieces say an immense amount about two things I am currently obsessed with talking about.

5) The Verge. The Verge is the tighest merger of magazine thinking and blog culture that weve ever seen. Its also proof that even crowded spaces can be broken into with the right execution.

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) This Nick Denton Quote. "The problem is the boring people online -- they're incredibly difficult to get rid of, because theyre often really nice."

2) ThinkUp 1.0. Finally! (Sorry, Gina and Andy, but a lot of people are excited for ThinkUp, which allows you to back up all your personal/social data to a web server.)

3) Nymwars. Once it gets an official name, you know trouble is brewing.

4) ASOS iPad App. This is the end game of the merger of editorial and commerce. Amazing experience and content integrated almost perfectly into a purchase environment. (There are mens and womens issues.)

5) Uproxx. I suspect most of us wouldn't know about it if Cajun Boy weren't writing there, but Uproxx is the latest in the growing genre of web culture blogs. And judging from posts like Alison Bries GIF-Able Moments and Thirteen Movie Poster Cliches, it could be the best.

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) Jotly. So good. I almost dont want to tell you its a parody.

2) NYT on Reality Weekly. The amazing thing here is that no one thought of it before. It will be huge.

3) Don Draper at 84. I hope he looks more convincing than DiCaprio as J. Edgar.

4) Foursquare Badges Level Up. Smart. Its the little things.

5) Minneapolis, Mark Mallman. The amazing bit here is at 2:15 where Mark turns the city into a spaceship. (Also, Minneapolis people really like Minneapolis things, dont they? Its nearly as bad as Portland.)

(#Fun! I will try this for a week.)

online

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) The Atlantic Cities. Urban affairs microsite, yeah!

2) OKFocus. An agency-type-thing from Ryder Ripps. This is the other internet.

3) ScoutMob. The deals app that everyone suddenly seems to be using. Seriously, ask the person next to you  I bet theyre using it.

4) Pinterest. Everyone knows how fast this is growing, but its fun to wonder how Tumblr might react.

5) EW Viewer & TV Guide Watchlist. Sure, Umami and GetGlue have a head start, but it's good to see that the magazines arent just sitting around waiting for social tv to eat their lunch. Everyone seems to acknowledge this is going to eventually be a huge industry. My guess is that some futuristic AppleTV/Twitter integration takes the market, but maybe someone else can get a mindshare first.

(#Flashback! This is what blogging used to be. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's any better either.)

online

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.

online

While we are on the subject, here are some other blogs you may find worth reading:

• Scouting NY. A location scout writes about NY's overlooked places.
• Second Avenue Sagas. Some of the best analysis of NYC subway issues.
• Abu Aardvark. Thoughtful examination of internal and external politics of the Middle East.
• NYTPicker. Picks apart the NYT, sometimes taking it a bit too far.

media

Over at the NYT's "Ethicist" column, Randy Cohen is out, and Ariel Kaminer is in. But I don't think any ethical considerations are raised by a person taking over the writing of something that is so closely associated with someone else. [via romenesko]

film

Amy's Robot issues a cri de coeur to the Academy: Save Natalie from the Best Actress Curse!

...

Hm? Yes, I'm still plugging away over here on the old clickety-clackety. Stay tuned. It won't be long now.

media

The Daily? Is that like eWorld? No? Ok, more like Launch?

Oh wait -- false alarm -- it's open access after all. And I didn't even have to buy an iPad! Or subscribe! [via]

online

Blogging is dead, say bloggers, some of whom REPORTEDLY recently gave up their personal blogs for a Tumblr. Which is not like a blog at all.

online

Google engineers grew suspicious of Bing results and set up a sting operation, which shows that Bing has been stealing results from Google. And they didn't even provide a via link, which is what you should do when stealing links from someone.

misc

Foreign Policy photo feature: An exclusive look inside a booming multibillion-dollar, evangelical, global Thai cult. Lots and lots of meditators. [via]

music

http://vyou.com/reggiewatts

media

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.

books

NY Post says the anonymous author of the new political novel O is probably Mark Salter, the former aide to John McCain. NYT looks at the evidence. Maybe he should've tried harder to be anonymous: Kakutani hates the book, calling it "a thoroughly lackadaisical performance: trite, implausible and decidedly unfunny."

politics

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.

online

In this clip from the Today show in 1994, Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric attempt to explain the internet to their viewers while simultaneously asking what it is. They hadn't figured out the @ sign just yet.

politics

Airport bomber killed one of Russia's rising stars, a playwright named Anna Yablonskaya. PRI breaks your heart with the story. Terrorists break your heart with the bomb.

online

Regarding Photos of Bloggers, Alone, Illuminated by Computer Screens. But the link -- is it worth anything?

online

Facebook to allow HTTPS for all page views. This is to make it secure and private, like everyone wanted. Hm?

media

Naturally: Keller on Assange, at length. The purpose of a link blog is to link to links.

books

In 1945, Nabokov floated a theory about the evolution of butterflies that was not taken seriously at the time. But, he's just been proven correct.

film

What Oscar nomination day is like when your ex-girlfriend has slept with a nominee. [via Pop Loser]

media

NYT's new "Frugal Traveler," who should know better -- a lot better -- got scammed while trying to rent an apartment for his stay in London. Hint: If the email includes the word "wire," it's a scam.

nyc

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.

music

Video: Envisioning, and playing, the lines on an NYC subway map as a virtual string instrument. (The instrument is rendered in JavaScript/HTML5.)

film

Sacha Baron Cohen will (kinda sorta) be playing Saddam Hussein in a comic adaptation of Hussein's novel(!) Zabibah and the King.

media

Yesterday, Fortune revealed that Steve Jobs went to Switzerland for "unusual radiological treatment" last year. How did they know this? It turns out that an Apple board member told them -- off the record. But, says Fortune, that board member died, so the "off the record" arrangement no longer applies. This raises some questions -- is any journalist free to reveal everything you told them "off the record" once you die? And attribute it to you? Columbia Journalism Review explores the issue, and it's a thread on Quora. [via Romenesko]

art

For sale on eBay: The Identity of "Banksy." Probably a hoax, but maybe not? Well, Mashable believes it.

music

Gorillaz has a new member, Evangelist. Inspired by fan art, female, scary.

film

So you liked True Grit. Now what? The Coen Brothers list their favorite Westerns, including one they haven't seen all of yet. (Some uncommon choices in there.) NPR's Bob Mondello put together a starter kit of essential Westerns, which has more common selections. Which ones would you add?

online

Slavoj Zizek has a new piece in the London Review of Books comparing the Wikileaks situation to The Dark Knight: "In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin. It's a useful analogy: isn't Julian Assange, WikiLeaks' organiser, a real-life counterpart to the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight?" [summary on Biblioklept]

politics

Links to Boing Boing are infrequent on Fimoc, but here's a great little piece on Palin's strange use of "blood libel" in her video today.

Update: And a good link from commenter Bret, featuring previous uses of the term in political contexts: The Term Blood Libel: More Common Than You Might Think

media

A rumor I heard about Murdoch's new tablet app, The Daily. (Wish I understood the logic of when I post something on my Tumblr, and when it goes here, and when I cross link from one to the other. There is no logic!)

online

I was having one of those "alternate history" moments this morning. Like, what would have happened if Adobe had not purchased Macromedia? (Would Flash be dying or could it have been purchased and refined by Apple?) Or what if Microsoft and Yahoo had merged three years ago?

Vaguely related: Hacker News randomly brought up a Paul Graham post called Microsoft Is Dead to the homepage today. It was written three years ago.

online

"President Obama has signaled that he will give the United States Commerce Department the authority over a proposed national cybersecurity measure that would involve giving each American a unique online identity." Sounds scary, right? But don't worry: such a system "would enhance security and reduce the need for people to memorize dozens of passwords online." Feel better?

politics

Palin's camp says, "Those weren't crosshairs; they were surveyor's marks! And shame on you for suggesting otherwise!"

media

MG in TechCrunch: In The Age Of Realtime, Twitter Is Walter Cronkite. I have a quibble with this: I would like to take a poll and see -- how many people learned about the Arizona shooting through Twitter? My guess is a small percentage. I suspect that most people heard through breaking news alerts -- email, text, and apps. (After that, the second-most-common was probably word-of-mouth. And then probably tv and traditional news.)

Okay, you might say that alerts are part of the real-time web too, but that's Web 1.0. (Advice to all the new News 2.0 services: devise a strategy for notifications!) Twitter was full of hearsay (perhaps created by news orgs). However, Twitter was valuable in one regard: providing links to mainstream news outlets who were reporting on the story... in realtime.

music

NYT's profile of Girl Talk is a good read and has some fun anecdotes, but check out this online audio feature they put together to accompany it: musical mash-ups from the last 104 years. Mostly just excerpts, but you can find almost all of the full tracks on YouTube.

film

NYT finally files its obligatory piece on what ballerinas think of Black Swan. Despite the delay, the story is just what you'd expect.

games

Duke Nukem Forever, the Chinese Democracy of the video game world that has been in development since 1997, seems to have gotten a release date of May 31, 2011. Nonetheless, it seems some people will feel that this game isn't the "real" Duke Nukem Forever -- it's just something that was hacked together and rebranded as such (like Commodore/Amiga has been doing lately). [via Techdirt]

celeb

Michael Caine Impersonates Michael Caine

This is how I feel every day.

online

Battelle says, very simply, that the reason Facebook should go public is that it will end up being accountable about the issue of privacy. (Conversely, maybe that's the reason they never will hold an IPO?)

tv

Splitsider imagines what might have been if there were a Season Two of Apatow/Feig's brilliant-but-cancelled Freaks and Geeks. [via Pop Loser. Again.]

tv

Kids + Gossip Girl x Fiona Apple's "Criminal" = MTV's new show, Skins. It's controversial!

sex

Porn Her Face. Web 2.something-or-other.

online

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."

nyc

Frank Bruni on ephemeral/crowdsourced restaurants. The guy from Dovetail and other successful chefs can feel encumbered by their big places and out-sized expectations, so they go back to basics, with a twist or two (at least temporarily). Possibly related, but also more complicated: Grant Achatz of Alinea (America's best restaurant?) plans a new restaurant that will change every quarter, as part of his new year's resolution for 2011.

online

Doesn't it seem like you're hearing about Quora just as much as you were hearing about Twitter right before it exploded? There's a reason for that: interest in Quora is exploding, at least according to Dustin Curtis's inbox. He says in his post that the tipping point seems to have been December 26, when "something strange happened." He doesn't say what, but I think it may have been this widely linked-to TechCrunch post about why Flickr didn't build Instagram, which was sourced from a Quora thread. Related: Why did Yahoo/Google Answers and related efforts crash, but Formspring and Quora (and VYou?) start taking off? The "social" feel of them?

Update: A Quora engineer provides the explanation and describes the impact on its servers, which were not prepared for the 10x load. The TechCrunch post(s) mentioned above contributed.

online

A few months ago, a writer at Vanity Fair called me to say the editors had just seen The Social Network, and there was a problem. Now they wanted a story that was "just like that internal story of Facebook." I rubbed my head for a while, but I couldn't think of anything even remotely like that, so we talked for a while about other ideas that might work instead. Now, months later, it appears that those Vanity Fair editors found their story, because this story about two people suing Arianna Huffington over the origins of HuffPo just dropped from the sky.

film

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.

misc

Remember that assassination of the Hamas guy in Dubai last year? GQ has a huge investigative piece that reveals, among other things, that the same team tried to kill him a few months earlier (with poison), but failed. Later they were successful, but the Dubai police were meticulous in their investigation, exploited the hit team's mistakes, and revealed all. (If you don't want to read the whole thing, Threat Level summarizes.)

misc

Haiti, a year later: Great photo on the front page of the NYT today. She's a dancer.

books

Speaking of long sentences, how long would a sentence (or book) have to be to protect you from a bullet? Apparently longer than Freedom. (And even longer than The Instructions, believe it or not.) So, if you're in a bad neighborhood, leave the Kindle at home and maybe bring along Musil's two-volume The Man Without Qualities.

books

Writer and editor Ed Park, who is himself the author of a 16,000 word sentence, assembles (with the help of his readers) a list of other very long sentences, many of which are novel-length. Some whoppers there, sure, but it's a bit of wanking, isn't it?

film

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.

music

Mike Skinner explains why he is ending The Streets. [via Pop Loser, who should probably be writing this blog, too]

politics

January 1 was (and is every year) "Public Domain Day," the day that the copyright terms on works from given authors expire (according to year of death) and enter the public domain. Based on the copyright rules that were in place at the time they were created (and until 1978), these works should have entered the public domain on Saturday: Waiting for Godot, Lord of the Flies, The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, Horton Hears a Who!, the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, and the films On the Waterfront, Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, Seven Samurai and Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

BUT: the rules have changed over the years, and copyright on all those works has been extended. So here in the US, none of these have entered the public domain. In fact, no works at all will enter the public domain via expired copyright this year. Or for the next several years. Wait til Public Domain Day in 2019, though! [via Techdirt]

celeb

The WSJ asks a ton of famous and somewhat famous people for their new year's resolutions. The ones you (may) care about: Richard Meier, Ozzy Osbourne, Gary Shteyngart, Louis CK, David Chang, Cee Lo, Oprah, Slash, Murakami. Sean Lennon wants to finish Gravity's Rainbow. Billy Corgan takes a shot at Pavement and Sonic Youth for doing nostalgia shows. [via Grub Street, which extracts the chefs]

tech

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.

film

As part of its extensive coverage of the awards season, Manohla Dargis takes a microscope to Christian Bale's performance in The Fighter, specifically a scene early in the film in which his character -- a boxer-turned-crackhead -- relives the zenith of his career, a fight with Sugar Ray Leonard. The article makes liberal use of hyperlinks, including one to the NYT's original capsule review of "High on Crack Street," the 1995 HBO documentary on crack addicts in Lowell, Mass., which (in real life) featured Bale's character, Dicky Eklund.

music

A Visual History of Daft Punk's Helmets. Speaking of which, someone should recut Tron: Legacy with a different soundtrack and see if it's still possible to watch. [via pop loser]

media

Speakularity.

online

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

tv

There's a new trailer for the next season of Big Love (premiering Jan 16). For the first three seasons, the theme song was from The Beach Boys, but last season they switched to Interpol. This time, it's a shoe-gazing band called Engineers.

music

Spencer Tweedy (Jeff Tweedy's 14-year-old son who is apparently friends with Tavi) got a homework assignment.

A few weeks ago, my alge­bra class was assigned a project called "Math­e­matic Karaoke," for which were told to pick a song, make it about num­bers (and stuff), and record our­selves singing it.

He reworked Beyonce as "Sin­gle Dig­its (Put A Line On It)" and it's pretty great.

internal

Oh yeah, the Lists Of Lists: 2010 is up. But this year I decided to crowd-source it -- submit your links here.

celeb

How can this possibly be real? Or not real? Amy Winehouse's high school diary was found in the trash, so naturally The Sun published it. The money shot: What will she do when she gets famous? "Live like the bombshell I really am. Get teeth fixed."

art

A new book will feature Marco Anelli's photos of everyone who sat with Marina Abramovic during "The Artist is Present" at MoMA this year. So that'll be a little of Bjork, a little of Franco, and a lot of that annoying crying dude (and the much less annoying girl in disguises). [via Gothamist]

online

How much did it cost AOL to send discs to everybody, all the time, in the 90s? "A lot," says Steve Case (on Quora). Roughly $35 per customer, over time. But the gambit worked.

Update: AOL's former chief marketing officer has joined the Quora thread. Two tidbits: (1) She claims that at one point, 50% of all CDs produced in the world had AOL logos, and (2) for a while, the conversion rate on the direct mail campaign was 10%. Amazing.

online

That didn't take long. Less than a month after a London Ignite hyper-real presentation on an imaginary 4Chan-motivated flash mob gone fatally wrong, a man was falsely accused of murder on Facebook and returned home to find an angry mob there.

tech

A French photojournalist reports on his visit to a Foxconn factory in China where they make iPhones, etc. He didn't find what we consider to be child labor, but the working conditions in the factory/city don't sound too pleasant (13 hour shifts, 6-7 days per week). He has a pic of one girl who checks 28,000 printer cartridges per day (up 40% since last year). TUAW has a nice summary if you don't want to read the whole thing.

media

Here's the NYT's Stelter and Carter framing comparisons between Edward R. Murrow and Jon Stewart, based on Stewart's "activism" on behalf of the 9/11 healthcare bill. (Not surprisingly, the article draws on quote-machine Prof. Robert J. Thompson of Syracuse University to support its premise.)

media

Anyone else feel like Time's short intro essay to its "Person of the Year" gets more right about Zuck and Facebook than its (very long) profile/apologia does? Also, the top 5 list seems just right (in order): Zuckerberg, Tea Party, Assange, Hamid Karzai, Chilean Miners.

books

Biblioklept's Best Book Covers of 2010. Suitable for the List of Lists. See also this years' Penguin/RED project, which used snippets from the books' texts as design elements for the covers. T-shirts, please!

tech

Apple has added support for the Cherokee language to the iPhone. It's expected this will help Cherokee kids communicate in the language, which will prolong its life. Language is politics.

games

Violent, mostly compelling trailer for the forthcoming game Homefront, which looks like a playable cross between The Siege and Red Dawn. Which is appropriate, since the trailer credits the game to "the writer of Red Dawn," John Milius.

comedy

Did you catch Reggie Watts on Conan the other night? Characteristic genre-bending mix of storytelling, beatboxing, and comedy, wrapped up as a very special holiday message. He's not doing Andy Kaufman -- he's evolving him.

online

Google's Christmas doodle is "its most ambitious one yet." Backstory from WSJ. [via Engadget]

internal

We launched VYou.com today (a little background). Some press: TechCrunch | Gizmodo | The Awl | Vanity Fair | WaPo.

media

Recently noticed: if you click on a link on the nytimes.com that goes to a print-ready page (like this one) it redirects you to the non-print-ready page. But if you click "print" from there, it works (obviously looking at the referrer). Crafty, that.

tv

"BLOGS" as a category on Jeopardy. Sites mentioned included Gawker, Sartorialist, Treehugger, and Dilbert.

media

Village Voice: relevant again? Debate.

tv

STOP DOING THIS TO DRAPER.

misc

The definitive piece on quicksand, including an entire section on fetishes that I never would have considered.

music

Fuck. You.

food

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

media

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.

media

Kevin Kelly asked me "What is your favorite magazine story of all time?" for this awesome list. It is exactly the kind of question that I should have an answer to, but don't. What's missing?

media

Mark Coatney, of the much-beloved Newsweek Tumblr, is quitting to go work for... Tumblr.

media

On the state of big media and whether journalism is dying:

More of my blathering here.

online

I was thinking this morning about how I can remember exactly where I was the first time I saw Napster. (One of the IT guys at work showed it to me. It was mesmerizing.) This got me thinking about other online apps/phenomena that I can recall seeing for the first time with precise clarity. Here's my list of I Know Exactly Where I Was When I First Saw...

• Napster
• Google Maps
• Friendster
• Hot Or Not
• Wikipedia
• YouTube
• Dodgeball
• Foursquare
• Chatroulette
• 4chan
• Bro Icing
• Netscape browser
• The Paris Hilton Sex Video
• lonelygirl15
• Goatse.cx
• 2 Girls, 1 Cup

And for whatever reason, some things not on this list:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• eBay
• PayPal
• iPhone
• Gawker
• Digg
• AOL
• Flickr
• Firefox
• Chocolate Rain
• Rickrolling
• Any video with a cat

Yours?

internal

A couple interviews I've done recently: Business Insider interview about KSM and Eater interview about the restaurant we're launching.

celeb

Your favorite Twitter account for the next five minutes: @tobangscarjo. That is, Things I Would Do To Bang Scarlett Johansson. Funnier than it should be, including: "Mumblecore marathon" and "Name my kid Courtney Love."

design

Excuse the design wonkery, but msnbc.com's new story pages are amazingly ambitious.

music

This is a video of video being taken as Sleigh Bells performs at Vice's Creator's Project yesterday.

online

Login Is Not A Verb.... dot-com. Oh shutup.

tech

YouTube wins case against Viacom. Somewhat surprising.

online

Is Digg dying? I say maybe! (Not really.)

books

Brett Easton Ellis' sequel to Less Than Zero comes out today: Imperial Bedrooms.

tech

I don't know which part of this interview with Fred Wilson I like most (all of which is packed with accidents of success), but I'll pick this one:

How did you start blogging?
I was at a cocktail party at Nick Denton's house several years ago and the founders of Moveable Type were at the party. They convinced me to blog, so I went home, set up a blog and started blogging.

comedy

Whoa, Olivia Munn is the new Daily Show correspondent.

music

NYT posts correction on M.I.A. story.

media

Clay Shirky: What I Read. (Oh yeah, this happened. It's hanging in my living room.)

online

moot's TED talk. Previously: interview with moot.

music

CNN has a piece on DJ Rana, filmed at my birthday party last week.

books

Soft Skull is doing a series of books called Deep Focus, which is similar to the awesome 33 1/3 series, except about films instead of albums. Jonathan Lethem is writing about John Carpenter's They Live and Christopher Sorrentino is writing on Death Wish.

sports

We launched a new site today: SportsGrid. There's lots of data porn to ingest there, but imagine if you triangulated a player's performance metrics with their internet buzz with their salary. You could develop a new statistic -- their hype.

tech

At Techcrunch Disrupt (going on right now in NYC), Michael Arrington interviews Charlie Rose (you read that right!)

nyc

This is pretty much how I felt for the first 30 years of my life. Still somewhat now.

games

Kill Screen Magazine. Has anyone seen this? It's a video game magazine from prominent writers who have written for the New Yorker, the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and The Onion.

online

While millions of young, tech-savvy professionals already use services like Facebook and Twitter to keep in constant touch with friends, a new social networking platform called Foursquare has recently taken the oh, fucking hell, can't some other desperate news outlet cover this crap instead?

music

A statistical analysis of SPIN's 125 Best Albums of the Past 25 Years. They liked 1994 a lot.

music

M.I.A. wins the award for least Google-able new album.

media

If this were still a functioning blog, I'd be writing about the 48 HR magazine project, which, hahaha sigh, just got sued by CBS for trademark infringement.

music

Somehow their inside joke -- a bunch of Midwestern bros (members of Bon Iver, Solid Gold, Dosh, and Megafaun; rappers Dessa and P.O.S. from Doomtree) coming together to make fun of the idea of an "upper Midwestern indie rock supergroup" -- snowballed into something real. They actually started to get treated like an upper Midwestern indie rock supergroup. They were actually signed by an indie label, Jagjaguar.

And they say the mystery is dead.

tv

"Don't know who Taylor Momsen is? Neither do I, beyond that she is the mean one on Gossip Girl." Did no one catch that David Carr confused Taylor Momsen with Leighton Meester in his lede?

online

The Awl is the new Metafilter? ~700 comments, so let's try that theory for today.

online

BuzzFeed lands funding. $8 million is a lot of virality!

art

A follow-up to the Nic Rad show: Gawker TV at the closing and Meghan Keane in The Awl.

online

The Chatroulette kid gets the New Yorker treatment. He likes SF more than NYC; he met Ashton and Demi, and Fred Wilson; it was originally called Head-To-Head; the name Chatroulette was indeed inspired by The Deer Hunter. The end.

work

Ever feel like it's just one thing after another? Mountains of information to sort through and just do something with? Like it'll never end? Then want to just try to bury it all deep inside until it catches up with you?

So did Peter Ramsdal except he's a mail carrier so that shit was all super literal and now he's in jail on mail hording charges. Just like in Seinfeld. No word on if he was wearing a puffy shirt.

--SK

work

LinkedIn turned 7 today but it feels like 37. The service is a great place to stalk SVPs of mid-size companies in flyover states but any sense of newness or excitement faded long ago. Reference checks are done by looking at mutual facebook friends, tumblr/twitter/(even ew)wordpress are the real online resumes employers check. Happy Birthday LinkedIn, both you and your user base look pretty good for middle age.

online

Cool new thing: Twitter delivers Embeddable Tweets.

work

didn't think this little rant would be validated so soon. First they came for the teachers... sk

celeb

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

tech

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

internal

There will be no blogging for the next few days while I'm in Cambridge for ROFLcon. (Haha, like I really blog anymore anyway.)

media

I can't decide, does TimesCast make news interesting or boring?

ads

Errol Morris announces the greatest commercial of all time.

music

That NYT Mag profile of The National was one of the stranger things to pop up in recent years, but they are streaming the new album over there, so there's that.

tech

Fast Company: Most Influential Women in Technology.

music

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.

music

The new M.I.A. video that YouTube won't let you watch. (YouTube is the new MTV?)

media

For David Carr's media biz column, I wrote something about Gawker Media and the new iPhone.

ads

how did you celebrate the 25th anniversary of New Coke?

i drank a tab and reminisced with friends about ok cola.

and then felt smug because i guess such a foolish mistake would never happen now. -- FB

tech

woke up on top of my iphone this morning. i am not alone.

i sometimes wonder if my iPhone resents the constant partial attention i give it. [insert ADD joke about moving on to another topic here. -- FB

tech

"I want to be a human algorithm." -Mike Allen on Charlie Rose.

music

which side were you on the battle of britpop?

the correct answer is: blur.

so when the gorillaz started doing their thing, i was on board, and fascinated by how they would keep up the pretense. last night's stephen colbert reveals the answer - which is to say they keep it up in a half-hearted way - but i do dig the song.

meanwhile why can't i find a video showing me animated groupies at a gorillaz show?

until such a thing is discovered, i propose a battle between Jem & the Holograms and The Misfits. winner gets Murdoc Niccals. -- FB

design

need to kill time before friday cocktails?

here look at these!

or, how about these!

you. are. welcome. -- FB

politics

as a nod to our english brethren:

-- FB

tv

i have a whole thing about how HIMYM is the new SATC, but i haven't had enough coffee to explain it. however, i was at a party the other night and someone told me:

"It gets more right than Seinfeld, more right than Friends, more right than Sex & The City. It's awesome."

I could tell by the glint in his eye he was talking about Neil Patrick Harris.

but right now i just want to celebrate Jason Segal. he writes songs (probably the biggest reason girls crush on him). here's one for the Russell Brand character from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. which was a funnier movie than i expected it to be, but has left Kristen Bell, who i loved as Veronica Mars, making crap like this, when she'd probably rather be making a crappy reunion movie. (yes! a nearly breathless run-on sentence!) -- FB

tech

witness, content creation on an iPad!

so to the guy sitting behind me at PSFK who couldn't figure out the keyboard and regurgitated the 'consumption not creation' meme at me, i say neener-neener-neener. -- FB

music

i know so little about hip-hop and DJing, but nevertheless, i think you should join me inhaving a laugh at this, and envying this girl a little. -- FB

tv

real therapy is annoying enough (and i should know!). i can't quite put my finger on what specifically is making my head hurt about these webisodes, but it might be lisa kudrow's voice. -- FB

tv

yes, i've been under a rock, but i hear rumblings: south park is at it again.

and again.

this is what they have to say about it all. and it's summed up in the last couple of seconds, simply enough: "we're not punk anymore."

also, lost in the controversy was this. how very roger sterling. -- FB

tv

and yet, there were no death threats when south park took on facebook & farmville? -- FB

sex

for some reason, thinking about contraceptives as a prisoner's dilemma in which women disproportionately lose (HT @MZHemingway), makes me almost as depressed as experimenting with an iPad as a dude magnet and discovering it doesn't work.

ah well. onward. -- FB

art

performance art isn't new. what seems (and i am not plugged in enough to know) to be newish is that arts institutions/artists are getting more comfy with people interacting with that performance. turning it into a two-way street, an improvisational experience in which you actually become part of the art/performance. this is not only going on in art - it seems comments, liking, friending, tagging, trending, hacking, reblogging, etc. are behaviors that know no platform. which is both cool and chaotic.

but a year ago, MoMA wasn't cool with thehappycorpglobal getting Posterboy to mash up MoMA ads in the subways. i guess you could have your picture made while jumping in front of art, but you couldn't have a street artist cut & splice it. maybe it's just that they don't mind people interacting with or subverting the art when the art is inside their four walls...

because now people are talking to the art, staring at the art, mimicking the art, and making the art cry. -- FB

music

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

music

so, some people who made the important parts of MySpace are leaving. is this anything? -- FB

ads

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

tv

i am not a glee fan. i've seen one episode, enjoyed it, and then only think of it when i see ana marie cox tweeting about it, which pretty much means i'm always thinking about it.

but this might make me want to watch it - or at least last night's episode. i mean, madonna!

here comes the WSJ warning me away, but i think this warning, like so many others, may have to go unheeded. -- FB

misc

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

media

donny deutsch is the gift that keeps on giving. this makes me laugh almost as much as this.

-- FB

sex

so women still aren't welcome in tech start--up culture? dudes, consider the following:

smarter, more educated women drink more. check.

promiscuous women cause earthquakes. you betcha.

the navy is cool with adding chicks on submarines, and taking away smokes. aha.

now let me ask you, do you want to get laid or not? -- FB

tv

catching up on last night's LOST is on my schedule for tonight, but in the meantime, check out alex griendling's LOST inspired tarot cards.

-- FB

music

Thinking 'Bout Somethin'

HANSON | MySpace Music Videos

you are welcome. -- FB

tech

Introducing, the twettle. Twitter-powered tea. What won't the Brits think of? -- FB

tv

just in case you were trying to remember why you like to watch Mad Men, and what you'll be tuning into on July 25, this is a handy visual reminder:

you like this: >

you don't care for this at all:

(shudder) -- FB

tv

The date for the season premiere of Mad Men has been set: July 25.

tech

in related news, steve jobs says no, you can not build an iPad app for your porn collection. he doesn't care how 'artistic' it is. --FB

tech

"It's okay." -Bill Gates on the iPad.

celeb

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

media

New thing: MediaBugs, "a service for correcting errors and problems in media coverage in the San Francisco Bay Area."

media

so on the one hand, a shout-out to my alma mater, the University of Oregon, for actually thinking about making content for mobile devices. and on the other hand, while some are saying this is about making the iPad a content creation device, the story suggests that the content creation devices are the students, and that the content they make will still be merely consumed on an iPad. by the way, i see nothing wrong with that. mostly because that debate (create or consume - good or evil) makes me zzzzzzzz. -- FB

music

i said i wouldn't blog about robots, but i guess i lied.

AV Club disses it, but I lurve the laser keyboard. -- FB

media

you fill in the blanks. blah blah gizmodo blah blah 'lost' next-gen iphone blah blah nick denton blah blah letters from lawyers. -- FB

games

this was pretty HOTT last week in the advertising/planning/creative community that dominates my twitter feed.

According to the latest rankings...

Top 5 Awesomest:

1. Internet

2. Life

3. Music

4. Oxygen

5. Lasers

Ok, agree.

Bottom 5 Inadequatest:

1. Kevin Federline

2. Mitt Romney

3. Sanjaya Malakar

4. Robert Pattinson

5. The Hills (sorry, Rex)

Now go forth, and be more awesome. -- FB

tv

I love games. especially the dark & twisty, screwing with you just to screw with you, make you beg for mercy and wish you'd never been born, totally waste your time kind. I do! But GSN is totally harshing my vibe.

A new show hosted by Jerry Springer, called Baggage, in which contestants get to find out up front all about the baggage of self-proclaimed 'douchebags', 'ratties' and well... watch this:

Finding out up front takes all the fun out of it.

Oh also - I can't decide which version of Carnie Wilson to watch - fat Carnie Wilson on Carnie Wilson Unstapled, or thin Carnie Wilson on The Newlywed Game. So many choices. -- FB

music

50 Lady Gaga covers on YouTube. Feast.

music

something about this makes me think LCD Soundsystem is taunting Ok Go. [rex, how do i embed videos in this rickety contraption you've got here?] -- FB

film

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

ads

okey dokey. you get to watch me completely muck up rex's blog this week. let's begin. According to Ad Age, nicknames are The New Hot Thing in branding. Belevdere Vodka wants you to just call it "Belve". Because, y'know, you're such close pals. Arnell Group is behind this 'thinking' for Belve. If they are to be believed, having a nickname creates a sense of intimacy between consumers and brand. Alternatively, Arnell's planning process includes looking up client names in urbandictionary, googling some lyrics, and getting this video. Jay-Z? Belve & Cris? PURE MARKETING GOLD. By the way, not to be outdone, Keystone Light (whozawhatnow? Is that a real thing? Oh, it is.) wants all the bros to call it "Stones." As in, "He's got one helluva pair of Stones." By the way, their tagline is "Always Smooth. Even When You're Not." So I guess we already know how they feel about you. --FB

music

Songr.

nyc

The thing that everyone is going to talk about today so why even bother linking to anything else: Life is Tweet.

books

This new book is full of spectacular writers, and me. A few of us will be reading from it tonight and Thursday. More details.

online

Tweet-O-Meter.

tech

I don't have any idea how Google's tablet will compete with the iPad, but the mere introduction of it basically solidifies that this type of device will the new way we encounter computing for the next many years.

misc

The Notebook Blog is a strange, yet beguiling, charming thing. Put together by writer Claire Cameron, the site is composed of digital photographs of physical collages Claire has created.

It thus exists in a pleasingly liminal space between old and new, electronic and paper, sincere and wry. With titles like Page 35's "We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die", or Page 28's "I Believe Mustard To Be One Of The Most Amazing Condiments", it almost out-Tumblrs Tumblr for that mix of the heartfelt and sheer post-ironic oddness.

Yet, like Tumblr, it's the occasional juxtaposition that's most jarring - most likely to stop you dead in your tracks as you careen through your feeds - like the contrast in pictures and text that appear on "We're a Virus With Shoes, That's All We Are". -NA

misc

h+ magazine is an online publication that purports to talk about the scientific and cultural trends that will fundamentally change humanity - and occasionally feels like the imaginary lovechild of Donna Haraway and the guys at Snarkmarket.

Exemplary stories: this recent piece on explaining consciousness; how 'Gamification' is turning work into play (which Rex also presciently wrote about in 2007); Transhumanism and Superheroes; or Jonathan Lethem on Phillip K. Dick. -NA

tech

The fact that Joanne is saying smart things about the attention economy in this week's episode seems good enough reason to point you all to Spark, CBC's great techno-culture podcast hosted by the sultry-voiced Nora Young (Andy was also on it last year talking about Kind of Bloop and Kickstarter).

The show tends to veer toward the abstract side of the tech world, choosing to focus on people like Kevin Kelly, Bill Buxton or Jesse Schell rather than talking about the latest gadgets or geek-friendly pop culture. -NA

music

Did you spend most of your early twenties with a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, talking about Kafka and Nietzsche while Explosions in the Sky or Tortoise played in the background? If so, then you might be happy to learn that Godspeed You! Black Emperor are having a reunion tour of sorts. -NA

books

William Gibson has been using his blog recently for an extended Q&A. Yesterday's question was: "Do you think any influence from "The Wire" has leaked into your (this) writing? Would you necessarily [be] aware of it, if it had?". [via] -NA

film

Trailer for Best Worst Movie, which documents the belated reaction to Troll 2, which some have labeled the worst movie of all time. -NA

online

This internal Gawker memo in which Denton bestows advice on how to win at the internet is fun to read, largely because the note seems so surprisingly banal ("readers respond to drama") when compared to the often excellent work that appears on the media empire's sites. [via] -NA

nyc

Since I know many of you reading this are in New York, this London Review of Books event there includes a panel entitled "The Author in the Age of the Internet". -NA

film

The trailer for Italian film I Am Love makes me want to use words like 'sumptuous' and 'ravishing' even though I have no idea why. [via]

More to the point though, I just googled 'Fuck Yeah Tilda Swinton' and no Tumblrs popped up. Travesty! Somebody rectify this please. -NA

tech

I realise it may seem silly to link to an iPad review especially a few days on, but Gizmodo's is worth reading, and not just because of the weirdness that neither they nor Engadget got early review units.

No - it's the fact that Brian chose to write his review as a narrative of a day with an iPad that feels so refreshing and so bullshit- and hype-free. The fact that it's capped off with a video from Joel Johnson - who's arguably the best tech writer working today - is just icing on this surprising cake. -NA

music

Good interview with M.I.A. Discussed: the possibility of selling out in 2010; Gaga; Ke$ha; and Twilight. [via] -NA

music

Gaga Stigmata: a site dedicated to critical writing and art about Lady Gaga. [via] They are also accepting submissions and aim to eventually turn the site into a book. -NA

online

Though they aren't always the most current - this essay on 'A White Boy's Defense of Avatar' went up yesterday - there are at least a couple of reasons to enjoy Ryeberg (tagline: 'Curated Video'): not only is their mixture of embedded video and the essay a uniquely online form, they're also just delightfully odd.

Examples? Poet Lynn Crosbie's strange tribute to Michael Jackson; Mitu Sengupta on 'Bombs, Bombshells and Bollywood'; the ever-awesome Lisan Jutras giving Keyboard Cat the kind thoughtful of analysis I always thought it deserved; and Bert Archer on the quintessential songs of the 80s and 90s respectively.

Bonus link: Markus Kirschner on cyborgs and fetishising technology in an essay called "Fucking Machines". -NA

books

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic on J.G. Ballard. -NA

books

"The finalists for this year's best SF novel have one thing in common: mainstream invisibility". The Guardian on this year's Hugo nominees. -NA

games

You may remember Passage, the small yet surprisingly poignant lo-fi game that asked players to meditate on mortality. Now, Jason Rohrer has a new game coming out called Sleep is Death, and it looks promising. [via] -NA

online

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.

film

There are now two movies about the singularity: Transcendent Man, which debuted at Tribeca last year; and The Singularity is Near, which will show at the Sonoma Film Festival this month. Unfortunately, there's no trailer for the latter yet, but there is a description of it on IMDB. [via] -NA

misc

The interesting thing about this defense of shyness [via] is that it suggests that the more 'we live in public', the more diffidence is counter-cultural - i.e. it kinda' makes you unreadable in way that Facebook/Twitter et al obviously do not. -NA

sex

Women "with degrees are almost twice as likely to drink daily" sounds like fodder for all sorts of inappropriate joking, but I'd like to think it's about a willingness to abandon oneself to both pleasure and the moment. [via] -NA

film

I admit that "Australia's earliest film" may not be the most exciting title you've ever read, but beyond the historical interest - apparently this helps people piece together a line that leads up to Chaplin - there's just something fun about having a video from 104 years ago open in one tab and one uploaded to YouTube an hour ago in another.

Paniteur Grotesque "shows a bearded man, dressed in a top hat and smoking a cigar, rollerskating in a park before a circle of onlookers. He stops and lifts his jacket to reveal a white hand print on the bottom of his trousers in a cheeky gesture to the camera". Like ya' do.[via] -NA

music

When She & Him recently released a new album, lost in the shuffle of Tumblr-crushes on Zooey was the fact that Merge also released a disc by British band Let's Wrestle (streams here).

If it sounds like music written by 18-year-olds, it's because it is. It's a trashy Strokes-meets-Arctic Monkeys mix of moroseness and fuck-you swagger - and the drunker you get, the better it sounds. -NA

tv

You could probably sum up the anticipation for David Simon's Treme as equal parts "OMG! Can't Wait!" and "There's just no way it can live up to The Wire". Well, this Salon review is the first I've seen and calls the show "TV storytelling as its finest". Guess we'll see for ourselves on April 11th. -NA

film

The Big Lebowski Porn. Erm, you're welcome? -NA

tv

Just because 30 Rock sucks this season (oh shush, it does), doesn't mean we can't talk about self-reflexive sitcoms, postmodernism and those crazy millennials.

Also - not mentioned in the essay but worth discussing: NBC's Community is not only a better show than 30 Rock this year, it, along with Arrested Development, might be among the first 'post-postmodern' sitcoms. -NA

music

Among the many upsides to new Broken Social Scene disc Forgiveness Rock Record releasing on May 4th is that your torrid summer love affair/fling will now have a soundtrack. -NA

tech

We know how this goes now, right? Apple launches something, we all partake in - and quickly get sick of - the breathless conversation, and then the smart people we like use the buzz to say something altogether more interesting.

To wit: Hilobrow's Peggy Nelson wonders what happens when technology in general fulfills the promise of the iPad's interface and simply disappears.

What are we left with? "Virtual space junk orbiting around each of us, the shards of Friendster and old DOS-based BBS, YouTube videos sunning themselves in the periphery, email and blogs and Twitter streams in a state of continual update, all floating about in lazy ellipses." -NA

politics

Hate the surveillance state? Time to hit the Ben Nye counter! Preliminary makeup patterns to hide from face detection (via.)-JM

online

Regarding yesterday's discovery @WhatTimeIsItNow: it turns out there are more than a handful of Twitter clock bots out there to tell you what time is it. In the words of @big_ben_clock, Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! -JM

tech

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future.

film

Rainer Werner Fassbinder made an insane number of brilliant films before his death in 1982 at 37. Newly restored is World on a Wire his obscure sci-fi movie for German TV. Dennis Lim for NYT calls it, "Head-trip cinema about virtual-reality immersions, its an analog-age 'Avatar,' a movie that anticipates 'Blade Runner' in its meditation on artificial and human intelligence and 'The Matrix' in its conception of reality as a computer-generated illusion." (via.)-JM

online

WhatTimeIsItNow: hilarious? useful? Updated over 276,482 times*, which only ranks as #47 on the top 100 most noisy accounts on Twitter. (The most updated account has tweeted more than 1,560,818,) -JM *corrected via, not daily updated, but aggregate.

design

You know how architecture blogs always seem to have impossibly cool futuristic images? Most of those images are renders. They haven't been constructed yet and probably never will be. Also, renders are marketing material. These images portray a building in the best possibile circumstances, but due to weather and you know, gravity, a lot can happen between the sketch and completion of a building. More from Will Wiles on why we shouldn't yet make too much of Anish Kapoor's wtf ArcelorMittal Orbit render for the London Olympic village.-JM

tv

The 11th Doctor Who: Justin Bieber! No, not really, but the new Timelord Matt Smith is pretty young. The next season starts on BBC America on April 17. Steven Moffat, who wrote many fan favorite episodes, is replacing Russell T. Davies as the showrunner. -JM

media

Daniel Hernandez on the crowdfunded mess that is The Entryway. -JM

ads

Defaced, a new tumblr celebrating the defacement of subway advertising. (via.) -JM

film

Director Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain, El Topo) also made some really amazing comics (Check out The Metabarons.) Here's a collection of his weekly comic strips that ran in the late-60s. (via.) Also, Abel Cain/Sons of El Topo/Whatever the El Topo sequel is finally called: it's happening! -JM

online

Sausage Party "looks at your upcoming Facebook events and rigorously assesses their respective sausage ratings on a 0 to 5 sausage scale." (via.) -JM

books

Things you will learn in two recently published memoirs about Norman Mailer by his widow and former research assistant: he would eat teriyaki oatmeal and once insisted that cheating on his wife was research for his novel about the CIA. - JM

music

After 14 years, Roky Erickson has a new album coming out and Okkervil River is the backing band. Here's a single, as well as a new recording of "Goodbye Sweet Dreams" with the band. More on his website including some videos of Erickson in conversation with Will Sheff -JM

film

Trailer for Todd Solondz's latest film Life During Wartime, a semi-sequel to Happiness. Yeah, that's Paul Reubens you see in it. -JM

videos

After The Runaways, what music biopic comes next? Don Cheadle has signed on to play Miles Davis. Forest Whitaker will soon star as Louis Armstrong. Someday maybe the Janis Joplin and Jeff Buckley movies will be made. In the meantime, enjoy "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" - JM

music

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

film

Stills from the upcoming movie based on Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood. The movie features Babel's Rinko Kikuchi. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood is doing the score, following his terrific soundtrack for There Will Be Blood. More in the Atlantic (via.) - JM

music

Your moment of interactive zen: Data/Booty. (This is Rex, btw. Joanne wouldn't link to this trash!)

books

Sam Anderson goes behind the scenes of the theaterical adaptation of Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren playing this week at The Kitchen (via.) Director Jay Scheib says, "It took me roughly a year to read Dhalgren for the first time. I would read the same ten pages over and over and over again. You get the feeling that the story has been going on like a fugue for millennia. The second time you read it, its thrilling. The third time, it makes you high. After that its like reading philosophy." -JM

art

PS 1 director Klaus Biesenbach once argued with Lady Gaga over whether she's a "performance artist." That and more in a great big post from David Byrne on "recontextualizing work", art world economics, video installations, Tino Sehgal, Marina Abramovic, the Whitney Biennial, advertising, oh, just about everything happening in the art world today. -JM

art

The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet by Parker Ito. (Not Julia Allison) Found on artist Jon Rafman's Tumblr (Kool Aid Man in Second Life, The Nine Eyes of Google Street View) -JM

film

Scarface produced as a school play. Amazingly not fake.

music

In case you missed it, there's a new LCD Soundsystem song (which is reminiscent of early Blur, right?):

Album coming in May.

music

"Anthems for a 17-year-old Girl" by Broken Social Scene is one of my favorite songs of all time. In concert, you never get to hear Emily Haines sing it anymore though. Except at SXSW.

tshirts

Your favorite $1625 t-shirt for the next 5 minutes.

design

My friend Tamara makes these awesome wallets that you will covet.

ads

I doubt anyone really remembers how controversial the BMW Films project was in 2001. There was an immense amount of chatter about whether the future of filmmaking would be consumer brands paying filmmakers to produce movies. Beyond the occasional foray of an auteur into 30-second commercials, this dystopia hasn't happened at all. But here's something new from Spike Jonze, brought to you by Absolut: I'm Here.

media

New York Times Roulette

online

Tomorrow Museum asks: "When did curate stop meaning, as the OED says, 'to look after and preserve' and start describing the retweeting of bit.ly links and SEO optimization?" That and more...

music

A long Grigoriadis-penned profile in NY Mag of Lady Gaga that I haven't read yet.

design

I didn't see much chatter about this New Yorker profile of Polyvore last week, but parts of it were pretty interesting, especially the bits about it being founded by the creator of Yahoo Pipes (!) and his rather unsexy reason for creating Polyvore:

I felt that it would be great to work on something that has a visual component. If you look at all the different types of visual media, images are the ones your brain processes the fastest.

Anyway, the whole data-invasion-of-the-fashion-world theme is an interesting recurring idea out there right now... Update: Lindsay thought the profile was dumb (she's right about cringing at that "usability testing" bit).

tv

You may recall that PBS rebooted The Electric Company into a hip hop inspired take on the disco reading for kids version from the 1970s. If you are a fan of the show from way back when and haven't taken the time to check out the new version, you should- it's great, and they have a YouTube Channel! I wish I knew more 4-10? year olds so that I could be the hip aunty that turned them onto this awesome show. The music is great, the stories are cute, the cast is super talented, and I find myself singing along whenever I have time to play an episode from the tivo while I'm internetting or whatever. (Also notice how I'm all set with the educational TV ready to go in case any 4-10 year olds DO come over. You should see my nature videos! Anybody need a babysitter?) Here's one of my favorite clips from the new version of The Electric Company, with Chris "Shockwave" Sullivan and Lin-Manuel Miranda rappin about Hard and Soft G. :DS

media

This Big-Picture-style photo essay from the Denver Post follows Ian Fisher, his parents and friend as he graduates from high school, joins the army, and does his first tour of duty in Iraq. It's powerful stuff, all taken by the same photographer over the course of 27 months.

Props to the Denver Post props for using the scrollable-collection-of-browser-width images format perfected by Alan Taylor at The Boston Globe's The Big Picture. It's really true about a picture speaking 1000 words, and my favorite thing about digital news distribution is the ability to show more photos and video. I HATE the trend towards click through image galleries. Media People, Are you reading this??? Please!!! Stop with the making me click all the time through your photo gallery! Come up with ad units that aren't so obtrusive, and let me scroll past them, and I'll expand if I'm interested. Flipping past an ad in a magazine and having it catch my eye is often an enjoyable experience, but having to click like a rat at a feeder bar for the next photo or next page just so you can display the same three ads to me 16 times is absolutely maddening. You can do better than this!!! Let me scroll! Through of the pictures at once! I'll scroll past ads if i must! Do the right thing!!!

Oof. This is a media blog sometimes, right?

Anyhoo- This excellent and excellently-displayed imagery is photojournalism at its finest, and it is part of a much larger multimedia reporting project from the Denver Post about Ian Fisher's life as an infantryman- although it seems some of the files in the video section are missing or slow to load. :DS

Via StumbleUpon

videos

This is a truly special video link if you're into gay disco dancing, male nudity, and awesome songs. EXTREMELY NSFW

www.internetshouldbeillegal.com

oOoOoOooooooh! You touched my TraLaLaaaa! :DS via funlap

media

The Chinese Government's instructions to domestic news websites for reporting on Google's Withdrawal. :DS

media

CNN.com launched a new breaking news blog: This Just In.

film

The 2010 Acadamy Award winning animated short Logorama on Vimeo. 16 minutes. :DS

videos

Your favorite music video for the next 2 minutes: Sentimental by Onili.

Video By Onili & Boaz Aquino :DS

misc

But besides his mounting financial troubles, Mr. Goltstein also must contend with bubbles the size of small houses that have sprouted from the pool of manure at his Union Go Dairy Farm. :DS

online

Welcome to DotComArchive.org... If you created or worked at an internet technology company during the 1990s, we invite you to tell us about your experiences. :DS

nyc

Today marks the 99th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Cornell's Industrial and Labor Relations school has an extensive web archive of original documents and secondary sources related to the event. :DS

via dpstyles

tech

Breakthrough advance in water desalination announced this week by scientists at MIT :DS

film

Find, watch, and support documentary films online at SnagFilms :DS

music

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

film

I highly recommend this addition to your Netflix queue: Kenny, the delightful Australian comedy about a portaloo delivery man. It's been a worldwide sleeper hit since its release in 2006. The accents are a quite thick, so you might find it helpful to watch it with the subtitles on. :DS

games

Three gorgeous iPhone games that really make the most of the multi-touch surface:

Eliss came out last year -- it is unbelievably addictive and super challenging. It's been on everybody's best-of iphone lists, but if you haven't played it yet, get thee to the app store! In the words of the developer, Steph Thirion: "Warm up your hands, you're up for some serious finger gymnastics in the bizarro galaxy."

Colorbind by Daniel Lutz, is only about a month old, and it is just as much fun as Eliss- but in a much more relaxing way. You're weaving colored strips to connect the corresponding dots, and it's challenging, but pretty zen at the same time. As Mr. Lutz says, "Colorbind is easy to play, hard to master."

Bebot is not exactly a game, but he is pretty much the cutest synth robot best friend you will ever have. You can thank Russel Black at Normalware for this one.

Shoutoutout to my #1 homeslice JSTN for turning me on to all the best iPhone things. :DS

comedy

Feeling the need to let someone know you care? TajTunes is a singing telegram service from India that delivers your best wishes via telephone. You choose a song from their library and specify the receiver's name & number. The TajTune performers ring them up and sing the tune, and then they deliver a hilarious MP3 of the call back to the sender for just $6.99 (less if you're sending multiple tunes). TajTunes: Outsourcing Never Sounded So Good! :DS

media

This was NYT's their breaking news alert just now:

Mr. Obama affixed his curlicue signature, almost letter by letter, to the measure, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, surrounded by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and a raft of other lawmakers who spent the past year on a legislative roller-coaster ride trying to pass it. Aides said he would pass out the 20 pens he used as mementoes.

"affixed his curlicue signature"? Really? -RX

music

Why is there a PAUL WESTERBERG byline in the Sunday Times? Alex Chilton eulogy.

music

Back issues of Spin now on Google Books.

internal

I'm excited to see what this week's guest blogger, Danielle Strle, is going to come up with. She works at StumbleUpon, designs stuff, and will blow your socks off. (If for some twisted reason you are interested in what I've been doing, here's an interview with me about recent projects.)

internal

Another new launch today: Styleite. I'm really happy with how this turned out. Power Grid is back, bigger and prettier, and Style Sheets is the new Tumblettes. Verena is going to be a fantastic editor.

celeb

"Peaches Geldof seen smooching with new boyfriend Eli Roth" So we can add Eli Roth to heroin and Scientology. What a great trifecta. --DG

media

Not to double-dip, but it's really good to know that Sean Penn is back on his Madonna-dating, chain-smoking, crazy meds again after he freaked out at a reporter for asking him about his "critics die screaming of rectal cancer" statement. Then his PR team told the reporter to write a public apology to the Haitian ambassador before having her publicly escorted out of the gala (where reporters were allowed to ask Sean Penn one question, btw) by the police.

sex

Top secret Improv Everywhere thing today involving Stormtroopers, if that's your thing. My thing? Stormtrooper burlesque. -- DG

sex

The Zentai Project makes it sound like its some sort of hip, performance art-type thing to go around in a full body latex/lycra suit. I remember when we used to just call those people into masking gimps. -- DG

sex

if gender roles reversed, there would be no sexual harassment.

tv

I thought Barbie's new job was going to be some sort of computer engineer? No? Now she's secretary Joan Holloway? Well, not much of an advancement in feminism, but you have to admit, waaaay more sexy. -- DG

celeb

New York Press film critic Armond White went all pissy in The Post, claiming he was barred from Noah Baumbach's new Ben Stiller movie (huh?) because White once said mean things about The Squid And The Whale. But publicist Leslee Dart says Armond was nixed because he made personally insulting remarks about Baumbach, like "calling him a [bleep]hole and saying his mom should have had an abortion." Which is just so...I don't lololol-able? Not that I dislike Noah Baumbach, but it's funny to think of this little Wes Anderson protegee being told his mother should have had an abortion. Like the only thing that could make this funnier is if Christian Bale had said it. -- DG

online

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

film

Even though it looks terrible. --DG

tech

Hey if you want to steal Google Maps coding to turn in for your 2nd year C++ course at community college, the SA forums have a really good cheat-sheet for you to use. Mr. Baronsky totally won't notice the difference, since he's too busy getting drunk to forget about his impending divorce.

ads

American Apparel + Lookbook = an actual clothing catalogue? Crowdsourcing - the butts? -- DG

politics

So is Heidi Montag liberal now? Because during the election, she and Spencer were all about John McCain, but suddenly she's making these Ron Howard-directed videos for Funny or Die about creating a consumer agency to protect against big banks. So...she's against mindless corporate growth now? Heidi, get back to me. I need to know where you stand on the health care bill. Is it messed up to say she got hotter? --DG

internal

[Sorry, I'm sneaking back onto my blog for self-promotion!] I forgot to announce that we relaunched this over the weekend: TheWeek.com. If you know the magazine, you know The Week is in an interesting position, as basically the most internety thing in the entire print world. If you take some of the editorial principles -- aggregation, synthesis, simplicity, clarity -- and apply them to the internet, you could envision something immensely desirable. It's a fantastic staff, so I'm excited about applying our/their ideas over the next few months.... -RX

tv

Last night's House episode dealt with one of the show's key demographics: bloggers. Let's see what the show's writers thinks our profession looks like. Nailed it. --DG

media

NYC The Tumblr:

Well, when Rex Sorgatz was asked a while back, How bad do you anticipate Gould's book will be? Rex said he was still gathering his thoughts. In the meantime, Publishers Weekly have gathered theirs: "On the strength of an exposé she wrote for the New York Times Magazine two years ago about her experience working at Gawker.com, Gould, hailing from Silver Spring, Md., and now in her late 20s, delivers a series of 11 insipid essays about her uninspired youth and general lack of motivation or talent for various jobs she took after moving to New York City. The writing seems intentionally bland, as if Gould is attempting to be blasé."

Rex, have you gathered your thoughts yet? As someone from around the Silver Spring area myself, I can promise there is not much else to do besides listen to Liz Phair and then go to Kenyon (Oberlin). Also, haven't read the book, but based on what I've read of Gould's work, I don't think that being blasé is "intentional" as in something she's faking...shit is genetically imprinted. Not bland though: How can the person who made the Internet coin the term "overshare" be bland? --DG

videos

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

books

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

filmreview

Lights Camera Jackson is the only movie review site you should be reading. This 11-year old puts SexMan (who is now apparently Pruane2Forever?) to shame. Ex: He gave Alice in Wonderland, a movie ostensibly marketed to him (and Neil Gaiman fan-girls and 40-year old man-children who still think Burton puts out good work) a D+!

Yes, the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum are involved in the story, but not that much. However, the one thing that is missing completely from this version of "Alice" is fun. Burton has made a serious film, that, at times, is even a bit depressing. And the movie gets off to a dreadfully slow start, as the first 20-minutes: Alice's life prior to falling into the hole, are completely unnecessary.

A+ review from someone who has never seen another Tim Burton film before he redid Willy Wonka! Are you legal yet? Call me! -- DG

videos

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

online

It will be very interesting to see how NYC media absorbs this one: Mediagazer. It's a spin-off of Techmeme focusing on media news. -RX

online

Elizabeth Spiers' The Gloss, which Peter Feld reviews in GuestofaGuest today:

When Spiers described her earlier idea for an online "Maxim for women, Women's Wear Daily noted comparisons to Gawker Media women's site Jezebel (where that story's writer, Irin Carmon, now works). However, The Gloss feels quite different from Jezebel. It's female-positive, for sure, but without the overtly feminist voice often found in Jezebel. (Spiers' "Maxim" concept was intended to cater to the female id and the female ego.")

New York's okay if you like saxophones a women's site catering to your ego where the only dude is Michael Orell. --DG

film

It wasn't just the first time a woman has won Best Director (and then take Best Picture). It's the first time a woman has been able to shove that shit in her ex's face and go "See? I am better than you." Kathryn Bigelow is literally the best director of 2009. Fuck you and your little blue suicide-inducing Na'vi, James Cameron. --DG

online

Fred Wilson said he was going to reach out to the founder of Chatroulette to see if he'd visit America. Now it appears he's coming. -RX

media

Look at all the NYTimes jobs! [via] -RX

film

We Live In Public is now available on DVD. --RX

nyc

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

internal

It's been a fun week. I'll sign off now before I get tempted to overstay my welcome and live-blog the Oscars tomorrow night. ("WHAT?! Hurt Locker was SO contrived!!", etc.)

Thanks for reading, and thanks to Rex for the opportunity.

If you're interested in more of this kind of thing, you can follow my shared links and catch me on Twitter. In a couple months, I'll be launching Slow Machine (RSS), a site with occasional, longer pieces about -- what else? -- pop culture and politics. Hope to see you there. --ADM

online

A few hours ago, Conan O'Brien (@conanobrien) announced on Twitter that he had finally selected someone to follow -- a random person:

I've decided to follow someone at random. She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs. Sarah Killen, your life is about to change.

She had 3 followers. Now, as I post this, she has 9,200. It seems her life is already changing, at least a little bit. --ADM

Update: Here's an interview with her.

internal

Some people asked me for the slides from last night's Ignite talk. It completely lacks context without the audio, but here they are: Why The Hills Is The Greatest Show In The History Of Television -RX

online

The Wolfram|Alpha knowledge engine can now answer queries about the Academy Awards. So you can enter a query like "academy awards for The Godfather" and it will show you the Oscars it won. Note that the examples suggest querying with the phrase "Academy Awards" but using "Oscars" seems to work too. --ADM

music

Make Magazine is doing a Q&A with the guys who made the contraptions in the OK Go! video for "This Too Shall Pass" that was linked to everywhere the other day. --ADM

media

NYT's Lens Blog has first-hand account of the Marja battle from embedded photographer Tyler Hicks. Hicks and reporter CJ Chivers filed some outstanding work from the battle. Chivers (a former Marine) and Hicks were on the front lines throughout, and I wouldn't be surprised if they earn a Pulitzer for their efforts. --ADM

film

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland opens today. Here are some reviews:

• Manohla Dargis in the NY Times doesn't like it
• Kenneth Turan in the LA Times doesn't like it much either
• Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times likes it until the third act

Ebert notes that the 3D feels tacked on and adds nothing to the entertainment. --ADM

online

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

tech

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

games

Forget Wii Remote and Project Natal: It's now possible to play pinball with your mind. Here are some photos of the brain helmet you have to wear. --ADM

online

Rex's oft-repeated prediction about the Hipster Grifter is one step closer to reality: Ex-con Kari Ferrell will be answering readers' questions at Gawker. She'll be responding by video. Get in there, Rex! --ADM Update: Her response is up.

misc

Tim Rogers has lived in Japan for several years. He's sick of it -- very, very, very sick of it. So sick of it, he's written one of the longest* blog posts in the history of blog posts to explain all the ways he's sick of it. I didn't read the whole thing, but most of it seems to be because they put meat on everything and scream all the time.

*Errol Morris is probably his closest competitor. --ADM

tech

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

tv

On Thursday morning, ABC will air the first recent video of Jaycee Lee Dugard, the woman who spent 18 years living in the backyard of her abductor, Phillip Garrido. Here's the teaser. The video will appear on Thursday'sFriday's Good Morning America and on Nightline. --ADM

tech

Amtrak's Acela Express trains (which run at high speed along the northeast corridor from DC to Boston) will be getting free wifi. It's coming to some of the major stations, too. But the regular old trains will not be getting it any time soon, so you'll still have to make do talking to those Emerson College kids for 5 hours. --ADM

online

"A raid on suspected militants in the West Bank planned for Wednesday was called off by [Israel's] military because a soldier posted details of the operation on Facebook."

The offending message:

"On Wednesday we clean up Qatanah, and on Thursday, god willing, we come home."

He also gave up the name of his unit, the time of the operation, etc. Maybe we should just give Facebook to the guys at Guantanamo. --ADM

art

Noted NYC graffiti artist Lee Quinones has responded to readers' questions at NYTimes.com. His work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, he appears in Wild Style, and he painted Luis Guzman's truck in How to Make it in America. Even if you don't like graffiti, his responses are worth reading just for their musicality. --ADM

Update: Part 2 and Part 3 are posted. His use of the language is just as joyous. And, per request, here's some of his subway work. And the story of his crew, the Fabulous 5ive.

media

Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab examines an usual editorial relationship between the Huffington Post and a third-party fundraiser [link fixed]. The Lab says HuffPo outsources editorial control of the "Impact" section of the site to Causecast, a for-profit organization that raises money for non-profits:

In exchange for the content, HuffPo shares the advertising and sponsorship revenue the section generates with the outside company, Causecast. And Causecast gets a platform to promote its services and the nonprofits it chooses to highlight, some of which are its partner organizations.

The section on HuffPo is labeled "in partnership with Causecast," but the third-party authorship is not made explicit:

...despite having a bio and byline like other Huffington Post editors [an author of some Impact pieces] is not a HuffPo employee. He is paid by Causecast and works out of their Santa Monica offices. As part of the arrangement with the Huffington Post, Harris oversees two other writers, who are also Causecast employees, in producing the site's content, which includes short original stories and aggregation from around the web.

The Nieman Lab wonders about the ethical implications of this. Causecast says their clients cannot pay them to place a story on HuffPo. Are there other considerations? If you're reading something you think is authored by HuffPo and is actually authored by a third-party corporation, do you care? What if that third-party has undisclosed relationships with the organizations discussed in the article?

Anyone have additional insight into this relationship? --ADM [via Romenesko]

tv

Everyone involved in the making of this Japanese Kleenex commercial either died under mysterious circumstances or gave birth to a demon child. Or so I've heard. --ADM [via Kempa.com]

online

Google Blogoscoped takes a look at the current state of Google Knol, Google' almost-forgotten, and allegedly more "authoritative" response to Wikipedia. Knol launched with much fanfare in 2008, although plenty of skeptics at the time felt the walled garden approach would fail.

Since the last time you've heard anything about Knol was probably in 2008, it's probably safe to say that it is now a failure. Will it recover? Google Blogoscoped says the developers seem to be "taking a long term view" of the project, and notes they are still actively improving the service. But the post estimates that Knol only has about 163,000 articles on it, many of which appear to be spam or debates about Knol itself. (Wikipedia has 3.2 million articles in English alone.)

As a result, few people seem to be thinking about or looking for Knol. Some Google Search Trends charts included at the bottom of the article dramatically illustrate this point. (The blue line is Wikipedia, the red line is Knol.)

Have you used Knol? Contributed to it? Made any money from it? --ADM

tech

TiVo just launched its next-generation DVR, called TiVo Premiere. It's 1080p, eSata, 320GB, 802.11n, blah blah blah and looks like a TiVo from the year 2010. But check out this cool remote! It's a QWERTY slider! --ADM

Update: Here's the remote in action.

film

Gawker has compiled some great clips of Roger Ebert on Oprah. --ADM

media

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

online

Putting aside the brief hysteria that PleaseRobMe.com set off recently, will your use of social media sites have an impact on your insurance rates? For instance, if you post your vacation plans or pictures from a wild house party, will your insurer notice? According to Computerworld, Legal & General, a home insurer in the UK, is exploring the possibility. [via Techdirt]

This kind of thing sounds implausible to me, but there have been reported cases of health insurers reviewing the Facebook activity of those they cover, and taking adverse action as a result. --ADM

online

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

film

NYT's Natalie Angier has a very poetic piece on some new research showing that over the last 50 years, the pacing of movies has tended toward the natural rhythm of the brain (and the universe). It's hard to summarize in a sentence, so Angier explains at length:

The basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f’, or one over frequency -- or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it. Start with a picture of Penelope Cruz, say, or a flamingo on a lawn, and decompose the picture into a collection of sine waves of various humps, dives and frequencies. However distinctive the original images, if you look at the distribution of their underlying frequencies, said Jeremy M. Wolfe, a vision researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital, "they turn out to have a 'one over f' characteristic to them."

Researchers analyzed the length of shots in films and noticed the trend, which Angier suggests may explain why movies are so captivating even when they aren't that good. The researchers also seemed surprised that a montage from Rocky IV showing Rocky and Drago training separately featured matching shots of equal length for each boxer. As with the golden ratio, it seems like pink noise is the sort of thing that artists and audiences figure out before scientists do.

An accompanying graph shows how various films align (or not) with the 1/f ratio, objectively and as compared to the average for its year of release. Of all the films analyzed, Back to the Future matched 1/f’ most closely. Even so, researchers noted that there is no consistent correlation between a film's adherence to pink noise principle and its popularity with viewers. --ADM

food

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

books

Penguin Classics and AIDS-awareness marketeers (RED) have teamed up to re-issue 8 classics with some striking new designs. Each cover features a quotation from the book as the key design element. --ADM

politics

An arrest warrant has been issued in California for Ronald Reagan's grandson. Failure to appear for charges related to.... marijuana possession. Grandma is *not* going to be happy about this one. --ADM

tv

Max Headroom is finally coming to DVD. Try not to have a heart attack, contemporaries. --ADM [via BAR]

online

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

tech

Here's some developing tech that will let you turn your skin into a touchscreen. The first two questions for any new technology apply here: (1) How does this apply to me? (2) How does this apply to porn? --adm

books

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

online

The Foursquare Rap - Badges Like Us:

--RX

film

The Tribeca Film Festival opens on April 21 in NYC. Its stated mission is "assisting filmmakers to reach the broadest possible audience, enabling the international film community and general public to experience the power of cinema and promoting New York City as a major filmmaking center." So of course Shrek 4 is opening the festival this year. --ADM

online

Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppleman responds again to accusations (and the new lawsuit) that suggest the site extorts the subjects of its reviews. --ADM [via BAR]

film

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

media

Will Anderson Cooper replace Katie Couric as anchor of the CBS Evening News? Yes. Maybe? No. --ADM [via Romenesko]

online

George Soros has been buying massive quantities of Yahoo stock, increasing his holdings from 726,000 shares to 3.5 million. No one knows why. An analyst at Minyanville recommends being cautious about following Soros on this one. --ADM

film

This short video clip brings together two of your favorite things from the 1980s: the "Tears in Rain" scene from Blade Runner and Legos. (It may have gone around before, but the creator re-cut it recently.) --ADM [via Make]

nyc

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

tech

Apple has released its annual report [PDF] on the labor conditions in its factories overseas. Highlights:

• Underage workers: "Across the three facilities, our auditors found records of 11 workers who had been hired prior to reaching the legal age."
• More than half of the plants had employees working more than the permissible 60 hours per week.
• 45 of the 102 audited plants were docking employee pay as a means of punishment. Apple says this is legal according to local laws, but has stopped this practice.

What obligations do American companies have to go beyond local laws in ensuring fair working conditions for their employees (and sub-contractors) overseas? --ADM [via Consumerist]

media

The Pew Internet & American Life Project, in the news every few months for issuing reports on America's media consumption habits, has just released its latest survey, "Understanding the Participatory News Consumer." Key findings include:

• "37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter."
• "The internet has surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a news platform on a typical day and now ranks just behind TV." But over a third (38%) rely solely on offline sources, and...
• Local news is still the leading new source. "78% of Americans say they get news from a local TV station."

And finally:

• 75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites.

It's a good thing for that, too! How else would my mom know that our President is a socialist Muslim born in Kenya? --ADM [via Lost Remote]

internal

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.)

design

The illustrator Robert McCall has died. McCall was notable for his ambitious visions of space exploration. According to a note on MAKE, Isaac Asimov said he was the "nearest thing to an artist in residence from outer space." If you spent time as a kid reading a lot of theoretical magazine articles about space stations and manned missions to Mars, you probably ran across his work. (He also did the poster art and other materials for 2001: A Space Odyssey.) Here are a few scans from an April 1961 issue of Life magazine, published right after Yuri Gagarin's successful mission sent America into a panic and McCall's illustrations helped us feel like we actually had a plan. --ADM

film

Will Matt Damon be in another Bourne movie? His message has been consistent since about the time the last one came out. But people keep asking him about it, so here he is repeating it:

"If Paul Greengrass does it and we have something to say, definitely," said Damon. (Greengrass sounded less willing: "I'm out of it. I'm going to try other things.")

But this time Damon adds an unsettling twist:

"I think the way is to extend the franchise is to create a 'Bourne identity' that different actors can take on. I could pass the identity to Russell Crowe or Denzel Washington or Ryan Gosling."

Please don't talk like that, Matt Damon. --ADM

misc

The hit squad that killed the Hamas commander in Dubai apparently used a fast acting muscle relaxant to disable him before they smothered him. Earlier reports on the execution said the door was latched from the inside when the body was discovered. Anyone have any idea how they might have done that? --ADM

Update: Not sure what happened to the comment, but someone here posted a link to this video showing how to do it.

tech

The econ/finance site Minyanville analyzes a recent report from AdMob and notes that "roughly 73% of Android users are male." The iPhone's user base, by contrast, is gender-balanced. Why? Minyanville says it's because of -- surprise! -- marketing. For example, Droid ads include subtle messages like, "It's not a princess. It's a robot. A phone that trades hair-do for can-do." Apparently men, like robots, regularly fall for this kind of thing. --ADM

film

NYT talks to Paul Greengrass and Brian Helgeland about Green Zone, which opens on March 12. In their comments, they reference Judith Miller, David Simon, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and The French Connection. --ADM

misc

NYT has readers' photos of earthquake damage in Chile. As usual, the Boston Globe's Big Picture collects some of the most dramatic pictures from the mainstream media. --ADM

food

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]

art

The 2010 Whitney Biennial has opened. The Times says it is understated but sometimes provocative. New York magazine agrees. Note that the exhibit includes the unforgettable 'Marine Wedding' photos by Nina Berman. --ADM

misc

Why is Toyoda not spelled 'Toyota'? The Washington Post explains. Executive summary: His grandfather started the company, but they changed the name because "Toyota" has a luckier number of brush strokes (8). --ADM [via Consumerist]

music

So cute: Spoon's Britt Daniel talks to NPR's World Cafe about "found" lyrics and says that sometimes, when he hears something funny in a conversation, he'll text himself so he won't forget it. (Yep. That's all I've got on this most slow of snow days. But the link will take you to a live Spoon performance and that has to be worth something, right? It's only twenty minutes but they close with "I Summon You!") --FD

misc

Gay couples seeking surrogate mothers are the latest group looking to outsource to India through cheap "rent a womb" plans: "We feel we hit the jackpot because we got two healthy and beautiful twins for a fraction of what it would have cost in the U.S." --FD

film

The Guardian's Daniel Leigh thinks we should stop pretending that Tim Burton and Martin Scorsese are still making great movies. In anticipation (or not!) of Alice in Wonderland and Shutter Island, Leigh examines why he just can't muster up any enthusiasm for either. Here he is on Tim Burton's last six films [I disagree with his assessment of Big Fish, but he has a point--am I breathlessly awaiting Alice in Wonderland because I actually think it's going to be fantastic? Not really. As Leigh argues, we should know better.] --FD

Is the world really so hard up for set-dressed flights of Gorey-esque fancy that we're rewriting history to forget 2005's drably gleaming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory retread? Or that his very finest moments in recent years could best be described as satisfactory (Corpse Bride) or efficient (Sweeney Todd)? And bear in mind that after them we're into Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes and, oh God poke my eyes out with a fantastical curlicued kebab skewer if I ever have to witness it again, Big Fish.

celeb

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

music

If you like the Flaming Lips, you may feel like an amateur fan when you read this conversation between Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog and Mark Richardson of Pitchfork about their 90s-era music--but you'll enjoy it anyway. Richardson, who wrote the newish 33 1/3 book on The Flaming Lips' 1997 Zaireeka, discusses the importance of Wayne Coyne's age difference with Kurt Cobain, the band's early theatricals and their consequent influence on bands like Of Montreal, the contrast they set against 90s grunge grimness and much more. --FD

[Note: I originally wrote that Richardson discussed Coyne's "mild schizophrenia" but that was actually in reference to former guitarist Ronald Jones.]

celeb

"After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place." That's Cate Blanchett, making a case for the arts as both spiritually and economically necessary in a great speech she gave to the Australian Performing Arts Market this week. --FD

sex

Esquire asks Mary Louise Parker to give up sex for a month. She accepts. Then declines. Then writes about it. Sort of. Seems a bit staged but anything she does or doesn't do is completely forgivable.

See also: giving up the news ("I read novels during my daily commute. I straight-up ignored Chris Matthews. Bliss. Then things got weird") and drinking by Editor in Chief David Granger ("The other hardest thing about not drinking is eleven o'clock"). Smells like the first Esquire feature-turned-book I might even buy--giving up on things as a trend seems like a natural, compelling next step in our excessive "try everything" culture. --FD

misc

From "Destination: Haiti," an unsentimental yet illustrative account of Port-Au-Prince by a young freelancer based in Mexico City: --FD

As the bus pulled into Petionville, on the hills north of Port-au-Prince, some Texas evangelists I had met on the ride invited me to stay with them at the home of a Haitian pastor. We piled into the pastor's white Montero, driving carefully past people sleeping on the streets, too terrified of aftershocks to spend the night in their homes. That night Jose, a freelance photographer I had met on the bus, and I camped in the pastor's large garden. Getting more than one thing done a day in Haiti required an act of violence, the pastor's wife said.

sex

The cover for the upcoming "Sex" issue of Granta features a very pretty pink vagina purse. Subtle! --FD

media

Millennials! They're getting harder to ignore/understand by the day!

Yesterday, the President of MTV Networks said that he thinks this generation is "really about authentic reality and family" and that's why MTV programming no longer appeals to Generation X. The Oscars announced that Zac Efron and the Twilight crew will be presenting awards this year in hopes of drawing a tween audience (which won't work on them because it's not like anyone below 23 has seen The Hurt Locker, but will work on me because it's not like I haven't seen 17 Again, twice).

Today, PBS News Hour is livetweeting a Pew Research conference on Millennials with some fascinating figures (only 14% use Twitter) and some mystifying statements with unintentionally ironic airquotes ("What's surprising is how 'conventional' this generation is."). And finally, Pew has a "How Millennial Are You?" quiz, which you can take here. I got a 78, which is probably why I'm actually enjoying the new Ke$ha video that just leaked, but not enough to steal her album. --FD

[Update: the full Pew conference report: "The Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change."]

nyc

"If you're a white student and you arrive at the public elementary school building on 95th Street and Third Avenue, you'll probably walk through the front door. If you're a black student, you'll probably come in through the back." --FD

misc

A real actual question that I want the answer to. -RX

books

Zach Galifianakis interviews John Wray, author of the excellent Lowboy, now out in paperback. If you haven't read it yet, I bet this clip won't discourage you, unless you hate Brooklyn and/or laughter. [Here's John Wray's "The Making of Zach Galifianakis" in the Times magazine last year, and here's a Q&A with Wray by yours truly.] --FD

books

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

media

Great new issue of Wired this month, especially for old-schoolers who miss the early years. "10 Years After" looks back at the moment the Nasdaq peaked, the cover story is a roundup of the new digital currency options that even advances the ball, and Steven Levy's story on the Google algorithm is actually the story you've been wanting to read about the Google algorithm, not another warmed up wonk story on "Google culture." And Kevin Smith does his thing:

My dream is to never have to take a real job again. If my next movie bombs and nobody ever gives me another dollar to make more, I wouldn't care. I don't need to do it anymore. I was never convinced that the film thing would last anyway. It just made me interesting enough to have a Web site.

-RX

online

And there it is: "Verified Account" next to @DalaiLama. Is there anyone left? [via]

tv

I'm doing one of those pecha kucha things at Ignite NYC VIII next week. The title: "Why The Hills Is The Greatest Show In The History of Television." Prepare to be convinced. More info to come.... -RX

music

A sad musical, or the saddest musical? "The Last Goodbye," a rock version of "Romeo and Juliet" told through the songs of Jeff Buckley, is set to open in the 2010-2011 season. --FD

online

Videogum gets a redesign. To me, it doesn't really matter what it looks like as long as they keep Gabe Delahaye around, but still, go see it! --FD

online

This is a week old, and most likely old to a lot of people, but this post about becoming the mayor of the North Pole on FourSquare is interesting in the whole gaming the system / creating useful systems debate. -RX

misc

I think Zizek just fixed the internet: "I'm not human. I'm a monster, I claim." [via] --RX

online

Jennifer Egan nails it in the Times Book review with a poetic description of our online condition. --FD

I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I'm guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn't there.

music

Clem Snide, one of my favorite bands, has a new album coming out tomorrow. The Meat of Life, which you can listen to in its entirety here (until tomorrow only), has gotten largely positive early reviews as an album that's a focused and smooth--if maybe too smooth--return to excellence. --FD

music

Here's the trailer for the new Of Montreal tour documentary, Family Nouveau. --FD

media

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

sex

"Sure, you can carpe diem, but with the late-night text you're saying you're ready to carpe a.m." -- From the inaugural sex column on late-night texting in the newly-launched HuffPost College. --FD

music

Why Lady Gaga is the Ultimate Social [Media] Climber: an analysis of why Gaga has become one the most sought-after celebrity endorser by using social media and how that makes her type of endorsement different than others' ("It's not about her putting her name on something -- it's reinvigorating a brand"). I don't really get the appeal, but the people who made her MAC Viva Glam lipstick the biggest seller in the campaign's 16-year history sure seem to! --FD

celeb

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

media

Newsweek publishes its staff's internal e-mail thread debate over when and why it's appropriate to use the "Terrorist" label. --FD

film

Netflix alert: Fish Tank, which won Best British Film at the BAFTA awards last night, about a teen girl adjusting to her mother's new boyfriend. Fish Tank was in good company: it beat out An Education, In The Loop, and Moon. [Or, if you can't wait and you're super not-lazy, the movie is currently playing at IFC.] --FD

politics

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

online

User Labor Markup Language:

With User Labor, we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor, which is currently a monetized asset for the service provider but not for the user herself.

tv

This just in: our pals over at Geekosystem report that Shit my Dad Says got a CBS pilot and that Wiliam Shatner himself is going to play the Dad. This is going to be EPIC. --MM

art

The Upper Playground Gallery in Los Angeles has revealed "The Lost Art of Inglourious Basterds", a collection of fanmade artwork inspired by Quentin Tarantino's last movie. Each piece was numbered and signed by Tarantino himself. Check out the image gallery at Rope of Silicon. --MM

music

Wanna hear a death metal cover of the Lonely Island's "I'm On A Boat" by a band called Goatmill? Of course you do. --MM

online

Your favorite new Tumblr:"Museum of Modern Celebrity Tweets". --MM

tv

HBO has posted The Ricky Gervais Show pilot on YouTube and Arts Beat has an interview with Karl Pilkington, the third-wheel in this new project from Gervais and his partner in crime, Stephen Merchant. The show (due to premiere on HBO tonight) is a cartoon based on the popular podcast of the same name in which Gervais, Merchant and Pilkington sit around a table and talk. Wait, what?-- MM

film

Kris Tapley, of the weblog In Contention, has posted "Top 10 Shots", his annual list of best movie shots of the year. Tapley explains reasons for each choice and includes a brief commentary from the director of photography that captured the image. Check out numbers 6-10 here and the top 5 here. --MM

online

Early detection, prevention is key: Are You Raising a Douchebag? --MM

tv

Yay! Tina Fey returns to SNL this April. --MM

film

You know what's even better than the Roger Ebert Esquire interview? The response he posted on his blog today.

"I mentioned that it was sort of a relief to have that full-page photo of my face. Yes, I winced. What I hated most was that my hair was so neatly combed. Running it that big was good journalism. It made you want to read the article."

--MM

games

Jimi Hendrix's stepsister, Janie Hendrix, let it slip during an L.A. Times interview that a Hendrix edition of "Rock Band" video game will be coming before the end of the year. Any new Hendrix music in the Rock Band franchise will be part of a slate of new products being planned to coincide with the 40th anniversary of his death. --MM

online

Today in Tumblr stats: The Universal Record Database (URDB) reveals that the most "popular" post on Tumblr is a wedding proposal video created by some random dude. As of this morning, the post was liked/reblogged 12,844 times. --MM

ads

French Connection wants you to be a man and wear bunny ears. Check out the images/videos from their Spring 2010 campaign that was inspired by "the absurdity of french cinema." --MM

music

The Wall Street Journal has a great article on how difficult it is to get a good band name today because they are all taken. For example, Them Crooked Vultures were supposed to be called Caligula before Dave Grohl realized there are at least seven acts named after the decadent Roman emperor, including a defunct techno outfit from Australia. --MM

art

"Crash", the new exhibition at London's Gagosian gallery brings together works by artists who have been influenced by the JG Ballard, from his contemporaries such as Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton, to younger artists such as Tacita Dean, Jenny Saville, and Mike Nelson. Check out the photo gallery here. --MM

online

Oh no. I just found Hipster Wife Hunting , a website dedicated to the admiration and appreciation of the hipster female. And they have t-shirts.--MM

online

This is really a great way to waste your time: Thanks to the new collaboration between Google and Russian Railways, you can now take a virtual cross country trip across Russia! The Moscow- Vladivostok route is 9226 km long so in order to make your trip more pleasant Google included audio clips of Russian classic literature, brilliant images and fascinating stories about the most attractive sites on the route. --MM

books

My pal Thomas has a new book out today: The Decision Tree. I'm only through the first chapter so far, but it's fantastic. Mediaite has a 5QQ with him. -RX

online

I'm not sure how I ended up on Razorfish's site, but this is a well-done timeline: A Decade In Search. --RX

music

Huh, Kathleen Hannah and Thurston Moore have blogs. She praises Tavi, but still uses the word douchebag; he praises Iggy, but has annoying commenters. [via] --RX

tech

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

film

A guy walks into Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School. With a fake ID, of course.

"The school was what you'd expect. He got lock picking out of the way at the outset and quickly moved on to forgeries. He spoke of the World Trade Center antics of Phillipe Petit of Man on Wire fame, and recounted temporarily halting his shoot on the Peruvian Amazon only after getting shot at by a teenaged border guard."

--MM

videos

Hunter S. Thompson Calls Tech Support About His Home Entertainment System. --MM

online

Remember when Matt Haughey was on the cover of Brill's Content? No, of course you don't. But just like the good old days, here's an interview with him.

I have people constantly asking me to recreate Gmail, recreate Flickr, recreate Twitter, recreate Delicious. "Can't I just post a link instead of having to make a post about it?" "Can't I upload photos into posts?" Well Flickr already does photos so much better, so why don't you just go there and we'll figure out ways to bring them into our site.

--RX

art

For New Yorkers, this looks pretty awesome:

Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new -- be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine -- over the course of a single day.

politics

Wait, is that Liz Phair writing about a NASCAR race and an environmental conference in The Atlantic? Yep! (Bonus material: her driving playlist.)

music

Now that's a great find. The Daily Swarm posts a bunch of Prince rehearsal videos from 1984. --MM

online

For anyone who thinks ChatRoullete is meaningless.

tech

"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

online

Racked.com enlists Katie, a 5-year-old fashion blogger to cover New York Fashion Week:

"I met Carlota, the vice president of Hautelook, and I interviewed her about her job. I told her my favorite color is turquoise, like the flower on her necklace. Then I put on some glitter make-up and lip gloss, talked on my favorite pink phone, and checked my email."

Whatever. -- MM

media

Twitter List of the Day: @TheOnion/dying-competition. -- MM

film

The Guardian pays homage to the late J.D. Salinger by hypothesizing who should direct and star in the movie version of "Catcher in the Rye". The Coen brothers, Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze made it to the list, while they simply could not decide who should play the young Holden Caulfield. According to the Guardian: Joseph Gordon Levitt is too old, Anton Yelchin too Russian, Michael Cera too geeky, and Jessie Eisenberg "too Jew-fro" (?). Dakota Fanning maybe? She would kill it. --MM

online

A young lady of 18, wealthy, pretty and agreeable, wants a husband. Not finding any one of her acquaintance who suits her, she has concluded to take this method of discovering one. The happy gentleman must be wealthy, stylish, handsome and fascinating. None other need apply. Address within three days, giving name and full particulars, and enclosing carte de visite, Carrie Howard, Station D, New York.

--Craigslist, June 5, 1863 --MM

internal

Things are about to get a lot better around here.

While I bury my head in work the next month, I have a few guest editors coming on board. First up, my pal Marina is taking over link operations for the next week. Brief bio: Marina learned English by watching American television while bombs dropped around her Serbian home. Beat that, Tumblr! She has been given uncensored reign to create chaos. Welcome!

online

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.

books

P.S. I swear, Scott, this is shaping up to be the greatest novel ever written. Or at least the greatest novel I've ever written, anyhow.

That's Philip K. Dick. Which novel do you think he was talking about? The answer.

tv

Tina Fey shooting a Vogue cover, just cuz

online

A tidy link farm of people's diverse impressions of Google Buzz today: Dennis Crowley, Robert Scoble, Mat Honan, Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer, Tim O'Reilly, Kevin Rose, and MG Siegler. (Mine? It's as annoying as fuck. It will be huge.)

online

Clay Shirky, for instance, the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, is a man whose name is now uttered in technology circles with the kind of reverence with which left-wingers used to say, "Herbert Marcuse." "Web 3.0 is not an upgrade -- it's a revolution," says Shirky characteristically. Shirky, along with Jeff Jarvis, a Cotton Mather (or Billy Sunday) figure, who has turned his sky-is-falling lectures to old-media executives into a lucrative consulting practice to old-media businesses, Chris Anderson, Wired's editor in chief, and Jay Rosen, an N.Y.U. professor -- all dedicated bloggers and, in Internet parlance, "quote monkeys" -- have essentially morphed the anarchic, 60s-style, Whole Earth Catalog roots of the Internet into aggressive business theory.

Even when you don't want to like Michael Wolff, you have to love pshit like that.

online

What makes the NYT Most Emailed list? There's a study for that:

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.

online

ChatRoulette gets the NY Mag treatment.

Our most popular new online tools -- Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Digg -- were designed to help us tame the web's wildness, to tag its outer limits and set up user-friendly taxonomies. ChatRoulette is, in this sense, a blast from the Internet past. It's the anti-Facebook, pure social-media shuffle.

online

It's usually provoking when the academic press gets ahold of popular technology, because it tends to create new sociological, economic, or aesthetic perspectives. But this long New York Review of Books piece on Facebook reads more like an attempt to coalesce everything that has already been written about Facebook, without any attempt to say something unique. But I wonder: is this the fault of the academic press, or is popular publishing already doing a decent job of contextualizing Facebook?

online

Because there's nothing to see here lately, please check out these wonderful new things: Unhappy Hipsters, Star Wars Modern, Firmuhment. Already contenders for best blogs of 2010!

nyc

If I were into writing trend pieces, I'd be whipping up something about the migration that's about to happen from west coast bloggers to NYC: Scott Beale, Andy Baio, and Dave Winer should all be in duh big city this summer. What's interesting about this group is that they were all seminal Web 1.0 people who are even more relevant today.

internal

I don't know if you've noticed, but this site has kinda sucked lately. The last few months have been ridiculously busy, and the next couple will start to reveal why. I'll be launching several new projects in different spaces: a couple startups, a few blogs, a couple old/new media combos, and a large sports league. The categories range from user-generated fashion to virtual economies to data-focused blogs. Today is the launch of a small but cool one, Geekosystem, which should complement the category that includes BoingBoing/io9/Wired. The differentiating feature, the Power Grid, kicks off with a list of the 30 Greatest Geeks, which, rather appropriately and quite unlike other lists, is algorithmically determined. [Techcrunch story.]

books

Godel, Escher, Bach, Tumblr.

sex

The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures.

media

NYT announces pay model.

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper's print edition will receive full access to the site.

online

And the winner for "Best Google Streetview Discovery" goes to... Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne bathing nude in his backyard.

tv

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

tv

I kept hearing that Andy Warhol had a show on MTV in the late '80s called Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes, but I've never been able to find it (promo). Much younger versions of Jerry Hall, Grace Jones, Marc Jacobs, Judd Nelson, Courtney Love, and William Burroughs were supposedly on it. I finally found a site that has videos of three of the episodes, including interactions with John Waters, Simon Le Bon, Bo Didley, Frank Zappa, Kevin Dillon, Debbie Harry, Paulina Porizkova, and Pee-wee Herman. It's the most random collection of stuff that you've ever seen, and it's difficult to imagine it on MTV. (There's also something about this that reminds me of "the old internet," where not everything existed at a finger's touch, and you had to search FTP sites to find this kind of esoterica. Now if I could just find those NYC cable access shows he used to do.)

sports

According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.

--11 Minutes of Action, WSJ. Also, a Vikings fans' fandom is worth $530.65.

media

Everyone expects Apple to announce a tablet on January 27. And the New York Times is expected to announce a pay wall of some sort "in a matter of weeks." Mix those two up, and maybe they could do a joint announcement.

online

Foursqaure, on your desktop: FoursquareX. See also: Top Foursquare Users Index.

books

He was impervious to my flirtations until I grabbed his crotch and showed him my tramp stamp.

-- The Fucking Word of the Day, your new favorite site for the next five minutes.

music

The song is in D minor, but that chord first comes in at the 7th beat of the 16 bar progression. So when the song ends cold on the first note of that progression, it ends on Bb. This gives the listener a subtle feeling of an unfinished song, even though it ended on the 1st beat, which is typical of most songs. By not resolving the chord, the listener is more apt to hum the song and therefore more likely to need to listen to it again.

--Why Ke$ha went #1... and why it could've been bigger.... Also, chick looks like this:

tv

Conan puts The Tonight Show on Craigslist. [via]

books

The only problem with a sarcasm punctuation mark is that it would be only used sarcastically.

nyc

Dave Winer is moving to NYC to become an NYU visiting scholar.

media

Apple Sends Gawker Cease & Desist for putting a $100,000 "bounty" out on iTablet proof.

books

7 Books We Lost to History That Would Have Changed the World. This is interesting because it makes you wonder how things would have been different if the Library of Alexandria had survived. Also, I wonder why no one has jumped on this Gospel of Eve thing.

online

Like a lot of Gen Xers, I often wonder how college would have been different with Facebook (or for that matter, cell phones). Here's a small glimpse of what it might look like if Foursquare were: Foursquare at Harvard. [via]

tv

Trailer to David Simon's new HBO series, Treme. It's about jazz musicians, post-Katrina. [via]

online

Rumpus: You've previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.

Employee: I'm not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user's user ID, and then the password. I'm not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out 'Chuck Norris,' more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?

Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn't as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.

This and much more in Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee.

music

From Slate's culture blog: The Unbelievably Bad Metaphors in Esquire's Profile of Jay-Z. (Nwah-whah? -- Slate has a culture blog? I guess so. The post about The Weirdest Zip Codes on the New York Times Netflix Map is also good. And if you're into that kinda thing, GQ has a blog too.)

media

Tucker Carlson launched his new thing today: The Daily Caller. It's an exact mix of HuffPo and Drudge, and just as ugly as you'd expect that to be. (A ticker? Seriously, a ticker?) [via]

tv

Big Love fans likely noticed tonight that the the old opening sequence with The Beach Boys.... ...had been replaced with a new one with Interpol's "Untitled": Better? Worse?

design

Designers will enjoy this four-question survey from Pentagram: What Type Are You? The password to get in is character.

music

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

art

The essence of Warhol's genius was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would, to conventional ways of thinking, cease to be itself, and then to see what happened. He made movies of objects that never moved and used actors who could not act, and he made art that did not look like art. He wrote a novel without doing any writing. He had his mother sign his work, and he sent an actor, Allen Midgette, to impersonate him on the lecture tour (and, for a while, Midgette got away with it). He had other people make his paintings.

--The New Yorker, annoying abstracted online.

media

This is something to finally be optimistic about: one-third of The Atlantic's revenue's come from its website.

books

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":

misc

Breaking: having gorgeous girls try to sell you clothes may not be a great idea.

tech

"Google and Microsoft are paying roughly $.03 for every 1,000 tweets." Somebody overpaid!

music

The lyrics to Daft Punks "Around the World." [via]

internal

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.

online

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.]

30) Dustin Curtis
Woe, the personal blog. It's a small tragedy that the decade began with the medium being used primarily by single individuals to gather and share small insights, but ends with the impersonal likes of Mashable and HuffPo. In the age of more more more, it's remarkable to see someone dedicate so much time to a single post, making sure the pixels are aligned and the words are all just right. Dustin Curtis' personal site is one of the dying breed of personal bloggers who care about such things (similar to how Jason Santa Maria puts art direction into every one of his posts). Start with: The Incompetence of American Airlines & the Fate of Mr. X. (See also: Topherchris, We Love You So, A Continuous Lean, and Clients From Hell.)

29) NYT Pick
The bloggers behind NYTPicker had quite a year: they got Maureen Dowd to admit to plagiarism, they pointed out several errors in the Times obituary of Walter Cronkite, and Times contributor David Blum was revealed and then un-revealed as one of them. In the process, they showed that blogs can comment on the New York Times in a more substantial way than making fun of silly Sunday Styles trend pieces. If anyone really still thought blogs couldn't be the home of original reporting and research, NYTPicker proved them wrong. They watch the watchdogs! Just wait for an enterprising blogger to start NYTPickerPicker in 2010.

28) Gotcha Media
Every year it seems like a site should emerge to take the video aggregator trophy, but the space is still a hodgepodge of sporadically embedded YouTube clips. Gotcha Media was the closest to the quintessential destination for finding video events we remembered through the year, whether that be Kanye crying on Leno or Michele Bachmann leading a anti-health care prayercast. (See also: Gawker TV and Mag.ma.)

27) Animal
As Virginia Heffernan recently asked in a recent NYT essay, what exactly should a magazine look like in the digital age? Once a sporadic print title, Animal is now one of the last remaining examples of what an underground magazine could look like online. (See also: Black Book Tumblr and Scallywag & Vagabond.)

26) Shit My Dad Says
Several people tried to convince me to change this entire list to "Best Twitterers of the Year," a listicle that someone probably should compile but which exceeds my pain threshold. In the meantime: "Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn't invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that."

25) The Rumpus
As literary magazines go, The Rumpus is something of a mess. Created by Stephen Elliott, who spent most of the year jostling around the country in support of his novel, The Rumpus defined itself mostly in opposition to what it is not. But columns by Rick Moody and Jerry Stahl, along with a rambling assemblage of interviews, links, anecdotes, reviews, and whatever fits onto the screen, make it the best case going for a reinvented online literary scene. (See also: HTML Giant, The Millions, Electric Literature, and London Review of Books Blog.)

24) Best of Wikipedia
...Coprolalia, Foreign Accent Syndrome, Stendhal Syndrome, Dude, Mopery, Sokushinbutsu, Tyvek, Shm-reduplication, Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, Pica, Kayfabe... (See also: Double Tongued.)

23) WSJ Speakeasy
It didn't start off very well. In the backdrop of the Wall Street Journal announcing Speakeasy in June was the chatter about Rupert turning the internet into a clunky vending machine (put a quarter in, junk food drops out). And the coverage at this culture blog was spotty at first, but the gentility eventually morphed into a more conversational aesthetic. (See also: NYT Opinionator.)

22) Script Shadow
"I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process," said Tim Robbins' cocky producer character in The Player in 1992, and Hollywood seems to have listened. By reviewing movie scripts before they get made into movies, this site turns the focus back onto the written word. (See also: First Showing, Movie of the Day, and Go Into The Story.)

21) Newsweek Tumblr
It isn't enough that Newsweek is the only mainstream media organization dangling their toes in the rocky stream of Tumblrland; it also happens to be doing it better than most of the kids. (NYTimes.com has been threatening to do "something interesting" with the medium for a couple months, but there's still nothing to show for it.) It's tricky for an established old media company to find the right voice on a new platform, but the Newsweek Tumblr has figured out how to mix their own relevant stories with the reblog culture. (See also: Today Show Tumblr.)

20) Asian Poses
The Nyan Nyan. The Bang! The V-Sign. The Shush. These are just some of the poses Asian Poses introduced us to this year, illustrated by photos of cute Asian ladies. Is it offensive? Maybe, but many of the most interesting blogs straddle that offensive/not-offensive line. Also, based on the well-known "members of a group can make fun of that group and you can't" rule of comedy, this is not offensive since it is run by a Chinese guy. But maybe it objectifies women! Color me confused-pose. (See also: Stop Making That Duckface, This Is Why You're Fat, Really Cute Asians, and Awkward Family Photos.)

19) Look At This Fucking Hipster
If you thought the Internet had run out of ways to mock hipsters, Look At This Fucking Hipster and Hipster Runoff proved you wrong this year. Look At This Fucking Hipster took the more direct approach, simply asking you to look at photos of these fucking hipsters, complete with caustic one-line captions. It may come as no surprise that the author, Joe Mande, appears to be a self-loathing hipster, posing in black-rimmed glasses and a flannel shirt on his website. Literary-minded hipsters are surely jealous of LATFH's book deal.

18) Hipster Runoff
Hipster Runoff's Carles took a more satirical approach, blogging about pressing hipster issues such as the music meme economy and whether you should do blow off your iPhone in fractured, "ironic quote-heavy" txt-speak. Many people suspected that "Carles" was actually Tao Lin, since Carles' writing was so similar to Lin's affectless prose, but Lin denies this. Whoever Carles is, he is most certainly another self-loathing hipster. He knows far too much about Animal Collective to be a civilian.

17) Reddit
There's a long-standing joke on this annual list to mention Metafilter every single time. But this was the first year it seemed that more people were paying attention to what was going on in the conversation threads on Reddit. For the uninitiated: Reddit takes some of the features of Digg, mixes it with the aesthetic of Twitter, adds the editorial of Fark, and accentuates it with the comments of Metafilter. But better than that sounds.

16) Smart Football
If you had told me at the beginning of 2009 that Steve Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell would get into a heated debate about football esoterica, and that this debate would happen, in all places, within an internet comment thread, I would have said, "Yeah, and Brett Favre will have the best season of his life at 40." But every once in a while intellectuals wander into sports, and recently the NFL seemed the place where the Chronicle of Higher Ed crowd is hanging. So if you want to get smart about football, this is the place to do it. (See also: Deadspin and The Sports Section.)

15) Information Is Beautiful
Is it? Yes, but only in the hands of those who know its power. (See also: Infosthetics, Data Blog, and NYT Bits Blog.)

14) Snarkmarket
It looks like a conspiracy that Snarkmarket has made this list a few times now, but unlike most blogs that become sedentary in their success, it just keeps innovating. This year, Robin Sloan quit his job at Current TV to become (among other things) a fiction writer -- and one of the most fascinating ones on the scene in some time. Matt Thompson had been gigging at the Knight Foundation, but recently hopped to a new gig at NPR. With them being so busy, Tim Carmody settled in as the new scribe of ideas. If they let me give it a tagline, it would be "The BoingBoing it's okay to like." (See also: Hey, It's Noah and Waxy.)

13) Nieman Journalism Lab
Where were these guys when we needed them? Sure, it's another think tank, but Nieman Journalism Lab has been putting its not-for-profit money where its mouth is by also breaking news, such as the item about Google developing a micropayments sytem, the crack-ass idea from the Associated Press to game search, and little factoids like NYT's most frequently looked-up words. It also happens to be the only place still hiring journalists. (See also: Reflections of a Newsosaur and Newspaper Death Watch.)

12) Anil Dash
At some point during the year, I asked Anil for an explanation in the upsurge of blog posts on his site. He said it was merely recognizing an opening: there are so few people writing intelligently about technology today. True! Daring Fireball may have the links, and TechCrunch may have the coverage, but there are scant intellectuals left in the space. When it was announced last month that he was leaving Six Apart to work for a new government tech startup within the Obama administration, the techno-pragmatism all made sense. (See also: Obama Foodorama.)

11) Slaughterhouse 90210
Slaughterhouse 90210 combined lowbrow TV screencaps with highbrow literary quotes, making it kind of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups of Tumblr blogs. Another comparison: an intellectual I Can Has Cheezburger. Seeing a quote from, say, The Bell Jar underneath a Friends screencap is pleasantly shocking -- especially after you realize the quote fits the show perfectly -- and a reassurance that it's okay for smart people to like stupid things. Could be a good candidate for a book deal, if it weren't for those pesky copyright issues. (See also: The G Maniesto and Fuck Yeah Subtitles.)

10) Letters of Note
We've known for a while that the best blogs are dedicated to a precise nano-topic, but there is also a new thread emerging: the blog dedicated to disappearing technologies. The tagline of Letters of Note, "Correspondence deserving a wider audience," says it all. There's Hunter S. Thompson starting a screed "Okay you lazy bitch," there's Kurt Vonnegut writing his family from Slaughterhouse Five, there's the letter from Mick Jagger asking Andy Warhol to design album cover art, and there's J. D. Salinger's hand-written note aggressively yet delightfully shooting down a producer who wants to turn Catcher in the Rye into a movie. (See also: Significant Objects, Iconic Photos, and Unconsumption.)

9) Mediaite
Launching another media blog didn't sound like rearranging Titanic deck chairs; it sounded like booking a flight on Al Quada Airlines to Jerusalem. But not even six months after launching, Mediaite was already on the Technorati 100, eventually landing somewhere around #30 on a list of players who have been there for years. Sure, it can go a little bananas with the seo/pageview bait, but it's also one of the few entities in the whole bastardly New York Media Scene to actually have the will to take on Gawker (or its pseudo-sibling, The Awl). (See also: Web Newser and Politics Daily.)

8) Clay Shirky
There were only, what, a dozen or so essays on his blog this year? But one of them, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, caused such a little earthquake in the industry that tremors were still echoing months later. Shirky is the only guy in the whole space who doesn't sound like he has an agenda, who doesn't have a consulting agency on the side that he's pumping his half-baked theories into. (See also: Umair Haque and The Technium.)

7) OK Cupid: OK Trends
Even the breeders in the crowd will be fascinated by the data porn on display here. (See also: Music Machinery.)

6) Harper's Studio
The book industry is about to go through the same disruptive changes that the music industry set upon a decade ago -- this, it seems, almost everyone agrees upon. But just as with the previous natural cultural disaster, no one is sure how to prepare for the earthquake. The editors at the new Harper Studio are the most likely candidates for turning all the theory behind "the future of books" into actual functional products. An impressive list of inventive works on the horizon hints at their agenda, but the blog, which is something of a clearing house for discussing everything that has to do with the future of publishing, is like an R&D lab for print. (See also: Omnivoracious, The Second Pass, The Penguin Blog, and Tomorrow Museum.)

5) Eat Me Daily
As one competing food blogger put it to me, Eat Me Daily is the Kottke of food blogs. Which, if you want to follow that obtuse metaphor, makes Eater the genre's Gawker and Serious Eats its Engadget. And which, if you understand any of that at all, means that this blurb can end now. (See also: Eater and Serious Eats.)

4) Mad Men Footnotes
As I wrote earlier, Mad Men Footnotes revived the moribund genre known as tv recaps.

3) TV Tropes
If you don't know TV Tropes, it's too bad, because I probably just ruined your life. If you've ever recognized a hackneyed plot device on a tv show and thought "I wonder if anyone else has thought of this," the answer is: yes, a lot. I don't even know where to suggest starting in this labyrinth, but try entries like Butterfly of Doom or Chekhov's Gunman or Bitch In Sheep's Clothing -- or just hit the random item generator. My dream is to have Tarantino spend a month here and come out with his Twin Peaks. (See also: Television Without Pity and Urban Dictionary.)

2) The Awl
The Awl is too good to exist, or so goes much of the catty banter in the media business scene. There is seldom a conversation of The Awl lately that doesn't ask, "How the hell will they make money?" But let's set aside that gaudy little question for a second and instead ask, "Why has The Awl become an internet love object?" I've done the math, and I have a theory, involving at least two factors: 1) It winks at all the sad internet conventions while both debunking and adopting them at the same time (Listicles Without Commentary and those Tom Scoccha chats are the best example). And 2) it is willing to go to bat for the unexpected without sounding like one of those intentionally counter-intuitive Slate essays (Avatar and Garrison Keillor are two good recent examples). In short, it's just less dumb than everything else. Even Nick Denton joked about it at launch, and I don't know how they'll survive either, but The Awl already exists in an admirable pantheon that includes Spy and Suck. (See also: Kottke and Katie Bakes.)

1) 4chan
Go ahead, scoff. But I will tell you this: no site in the past year has better personified the internet in all its complex contradictions than 4chan. Blisteringly violent yet irrepressibly creative, vociferously political yet erratic in agenda, 4chan was the multi-headed monster that got you off, got you pissed off, and maybe got you knocked out. When I interviewed moot in February, I discovered a smart kid who had seen more by the age of 16 than someone who actually lived inside all six Saw movies. People tend to think of 4chan as pure id, but there are highly formalized rules (written and unwritten) within the community. Inside all the blustery fury of the /b/tards, there is more going on psychologically than we are equipped to understand yet. (See also: Uncyclopedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and Know Your Meme.)

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.

tv

Now here's a list I could debate for a while: The End of the 00s: Listicle Without Commentary: The 348 Best Reality Television Shows of the 00s, In Order, by Jon Caramanica.

music

Ten Albums that Defined the Dot Com Era: Part 1 and Part 2.

books

I've often wondered why NYTBR doesn't do more contemplative, thematic essays like this: The Naked and the Conflicted. It's about how "the Great Male Novelists of the last century" portray sex.

books

There are now 35 books in my Amazon list "My year as..." which collects all the books in which people do one thing for a year. THIS. TREND. WILL. NOT. DIE.

media

Well, it took less than 24 hours for @CKlosterman to have more followers than me.

internal

I wonder: what is the quality of 'viral' that makes it viral? Some would say it has something to do with the medium -- the way it gets passed around socially, without the aid of traditional outlets. In that sense, the 'viral hit' is somewhat like the 'sleeper hit' -- it starts slow, builds momentum. It doesn't seem much different.

But I wonder if that's not what people mean at all when they say 'viral.' I suspect they mean something much closer to a different phenom from a previous decade: the 'one-hit wonder.' In that sense, is Blind Melon really any different than Tay Zonday?

--Me, quoted in an essay that proposes the aughts were the first decade to be defined by their virality (memes), an interesting theory that I possibly tried to debunk.

misc

Some new things added to the 2009 List of Lists: Buzzmarketing Daily's 10 Most Important Tweets, The Week's 10 Most Compulsive Twitterers, The Frisky's 10 Worst Boyfriends And Husbands, Onion A/V's Year in Swag, Idolator's Worst Album Covers, Yale Book of Quotations' Most Notable Quotations, Business Insider's 10 Most Infamous Lawyers, Top Recording's Top 20 Albums, Ad Freak's 30 Freakiest Commercials, Wall Street Journal Top Art Sales, and Reality Blur's Top Reality TV Whores.

music

DJ Earworm - United State of Pop 2009 (Blame It on the Pop) - Mashup of Top 25 Billboard Hits: See also: Michaelangelo Matos' list, Top 125 Hot 100 Hits of the 2000s.

tv

After selling PVR Blog on eBay for $12K+, Matt Haughey posts his final item, 2000s: The Decade of DVR, which has dot-com celebs (Heather Armstrong, Chris Anderson, Nick Denton, Gina Trapani, Jeff Jarvis) reminiscing on how the DVR has changed their life. My favorite is Caterina Fake's:

A guy said to me once, "Wow! As a woman, you can get laid whenever you want!" and I said "Yeah and I can eat dirt whenever I want too!" For years there was a Blinkx advertisement on 101 between Silicon Valley and San Francisco with a tagline that said something like "Find something to watch," which I thought was one of the stupidest taglines I'd ever heard. It's not hard to find someone to sleep with, it's hard to find someone you'd WANT to sleep with. It's not hard to find something to watch, it's hard to find something GOOD to watch.

music

Instead of a list of the most played tracks, I'd rather see a list of all the tracks people don't want you to know they listened to: Most Unwanted Scrobbles.

nyc

If perhaps you thought for a second that Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" wasn't absolutely everywhere, then you didn't see the Sex and the City 2 trailer yet. Sorry, everyone's ruining it for you. (See also, vaguely related, an LES lament: Together for Years, but I Just Don't Know You Anymore. [via])

misc

The monstrous list of 2009 lists leaped up to nearly 700 entires over the weekend. Some new things include WSJ's Year in Photos, Billboard's Artists of the Year, YouTube's Most Watched and Searched For, AOL's Hot Searches, Jezebel's 10 Best Cover Lies, Glamour's 10 Best Dressed, Videogum's Best Viral Videos, and Babble's Best Mommy Bloggers.

internal

I did a 5QQ for Mediate in which I talk about The Hills, BNO News, and Megantereons. Snippet:

Isn't it interesting that Tumblr and FourSquare are NYC's major contributions to social software in the past couple years? I have a theory! They share this commonality: they're both semi-closed networks. To wit: Though wildly successful, both platforms still somehow feel clubby and insidery.

In the long run, it will be interesting to see if this distinct (dare I say New Yorky?) quality is a feature or a bug.

(Before I lived in NYC, I had a name for social software like FourSquare's predecessor, Dodgeball. I called it "NewYorkWare" because those apps seemed specifically made for the hyper-urban. Similarly, Tumblr seems made for the hyper-mediated.)

media

Pretty! Visualizations of traffic patterns in the form of movies from NYTimes.com.

online

I guess because this blog is sometimes concerned with online civility, I should link to this: The Warm-Fuzzy Web. Tumblr and The Awl exploded with comments, so you can find your side-taking there.

misc

Some new things recently added to the LIST OF 2009 LISTS: Roger Ebert's Best Films, Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums, Mediaite's 50 Innovators and Influencers, Cryptomundo's Top 10 Cryptozoology Stories, HuffPo's Funniest Protest Signs, The Big Pictures' Year In Photos, and Pitchfork's Top 100 Tracks.

misc

Some of the people speaking at TED this year include Sarah Silverman, Bill Gates, Jamie Oliver, David Byrne, Ze Frank, and moot.

tech

Actually, all of my Tweets are lessons in Keynesian economics.

online

Kinda interesting: online ad rate chart.

internal

I was on CBC's Spark (a really great show, btw!) talking about the lists of lists. (I'm on at about 35:00, but Caterina Fake's interview much earlier is way better, so listen to that instead.)

games

Sims version of Lady GaGa's "Bad Romance." [via]

internal

It's my responsibility to explain why list-making matters, probably by making up some ridiculous counterintuitive argument and using words like "paradigm," self-reflexive," and "counterintuitive." I suppose I could suggest that the acceleration of technology has changed the way humans organize their internal thoughts, or that the proliferation of media has made list-making a necessary extension of cultural engagement, or that the ability to place pre-existing items into an arbitrary sequence has replaced the desire to generate an authentic personality. But that would be predictable.

--Chuck Klosterman, intro to Inventory. (The 2009 List of Lists is up to 250 entries and should double by the end of the year.)

film

Yes! Trailer to The Runaways is out. Stars Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning.

online

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.

tech

Innovation! Facebook and Google both developing URL shorteners.

books

We interrupt the yearly listmaking to bring you io9's 20 Best Science Fiction Books Of The Decade.

media

Here's a smart Mediaite piece: Revisiting the New York Times' 2001 "Year In Ideas." It lists all the ideas from 8 years ago and declares their viability. Big surprise, "selling things yourself in cigarette vending machines" and "hypnotizing focus groups to get better results" aren't entrenched concepts today. (For media mavens, 2001 was during Adam Moss' editorial reign at the mag.)

sex

"I Am Locking the Wikipedia Article on Our Sex Life"

online

End game in the rush toward transparency and the death of privacy? Blippy, which lets you share your to make your credit card purchases public. [via]

design

If you're the kind of person who's intrigued by tv graphics and branding, then this explanation of the NBC color case study will interest you. (I've read the NBC design style guide several times, and one of the first rules is "Don't mutilate the peacock," which somehow these guys were able to do.)

internal

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.)

celeb

These two things from disparate parts of the Sunday Times (Week In Review and Styles) should be mashed up:

It "is one of the most symbolic documents of our age," the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote of [Celebrity Register]. "It is an index to the new categories of American society" -- the categories, he meant, that were formed by the media, which had degraded the hero into the mere celebrity. "The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark," Mr. Boorstin observed. "The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name."

-- Tiger Woods and the Perils of Modern Celebrity

A growing number of Web sites now play the role of middleman, connecting aspiring contestants with casting directors. And as the reality genre has thrived, so has the cottage industry of online talent scouts that serve it -- sites like RealityWanted, Talent6 and GotCast, where people can find casting calls for TV shows and submit their resumes, often for a monthly fee.

-- No Balloon? Point, Click, Get on TV

misc

Just in case it got lost in the shuffle of decade nostalgia, Alex Pareene's Encyclopedia of Counterintuitive Thought, which itemizes all the ways in which convention wisdom has been undermined, reveals what may have been the prevailing intellectual trick of the decade.

music

Cool video idea, bad song: Justice remix of Lenny Kravitz' "Let Love Rule."

music

Vevo, the new music video site with buy-in from Universal, Music, Sony and EMI (not to mention Google/YouTube), debuted last night with a big NYC party.

media

That "Hulu for magazines" thing (still unnamed) was announced this morning. Getting Conde, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp, and Time into a room together is worth something.

books

I maybe get a Kindle just so I can see how all these Choose Your Adventure titles for the Kindle work on it.

online

A couple new Google things to watch: Google Goggles and Living Stories. Very different, but both potentially big deals.

online

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!

misc

Kottke launched a list of all the decade lists. In the meantime, the 2009 list here has passed 100 entries, but should quintuple by the end of the month.

online

Meta-Enabling should be the word of the year. It's everything that's right and wrong about the internet right now.

msp

Lifter Puller reissues! Lifter Puller reissues!

media

As you may have seen, The Observer reported that the New York Times is likely going to close some of their blogs. (Gawker handicapped the carnage.) This makes me wonder what some of the other large media companies who have started blog networks will do. AOL and MTV immediately come to mind. I mean, you can chuckle at some of the obscure NYT titles, but MTV has a blog dedicated only to comic books turning into movies. Really!

internal

The 2009 List of Lists is progressing nicely. Some new things that have been added: Google's Zeitgeist, Yahoo's Year in Review, Pitchforks' Top Videos, and The Millions' Year in Reading. Please email me additions.

media

Eric Schmidt pens WSJ op-ed that begins "It's the year 2015."

online

A South Korean holding company has purchased Barbarian Group. If those dudes weren't my friends, I would compare this to the Mad Men takeover by McCann.

online

Square, the credit-card reading iPhone hardware add-on and micropayments system from Twitter alum Jack Dorsey, has launched.

media

So the best thing about David Carr at The Times is that The Times lets him get lyrical, amiright? I feel like this is the kind of stuff that would normally get cut from any non-op-ed piece; either that, or no one else can write in the same bouncy way:

For those of us who work in Manhattan media, it means that a life of occasional excess and prerogative has been replaced by a drum beat of goodbye speeches with sheet cakes and cheap sparkling wine. It's a wan reminder that all reigns are temporary, that the court of self-appointed media royalty was serving at the pleasure of an advertising economy that itself was built on inefficiency and excess. Google fixed that.

internal

So yeah, the End of the Year List of Lists is happening again. [Except this year, I have no time to manage it, so please email me if you'd like to either a) manage it for a small stipend, or b) sponsor it.] It's just starting out, but a few things already added: NYT's 100 Notable Books, Amazon's Best Books, Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction, S/FJ's Best Songs and Albums, Metacritic's Best Music, and Wired's Pop Culture Moments. Be sure to email me if you have more lists.

music

We're living in a stylistic tropics. There's a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don't have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It's all alive, all "now," in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it's old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

-Brian Eno, The Death of Uncool

sex

OK Cupid's trends blog is amazing. Graphs, graphs, graphs... and dating data!

internal

Will Foursquare be the one who turns your lifestream into a heat map?

books

NYTBR: Nicholson Baker on Google. I hope he's collecting these for a series of essays?

internal

The Black Friday sale that I recommend: 23andMe. Complete ancestry and health analysis for $300 if you order three or more. I'm getting it!

online

Like Twitter and Facebook, Foursquare taps into our inner exhibitionist self -- a malady of the post-Internet era. It allows everyone to be a Ruth Reichl, the legendary food critic -- an arbiter of taste. With a narcissistic quotient that is higher than a genius's IQ, it's only a matter of time before it's discovered by everyone from dithering fashion editors to pro athletes and pop stars. And when that happens, yet another tech pop phenomenon will be born.

--Om Malik

architect

Have you seen this crazy ass thing? It's a building going up in Bangkok called MahaNakhon that uses pixelation as its inspiration.

sex

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]

design

Whah! The new AOL logo(s)... they're not even trying!

tshirts

I'm in love with these Des Kiraz t-shirts that come packaged like collector's items in a box like a video game. From the artists Boros and Szikszai, they come in titles like The Battle of Yankee Stadium and Motorcade 9/11. I bought CVH-95 Coney Island which includes flying tigers, exploding ice cream trucks, and of course bad ass psychos on motorcycles.

misc

Random thing I noticed: both GQ and Wired featured this axe in their holiday shopping guides. Axes are hot Christmas gifts this year!

sports

This video of Brett Favre mic'd up during last week's Vikings game is pretty amazing:

I realize no one will interpret this the right way, but this reminds me of The Hills more than anything I've ever seen.

videos

Your favorite video for the next five minutes: Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck, "Heaven Can Wait." (The comments on Antville are getting better. I like: "This video looks too random, like the director spent too much time looking through his FFFFOUND folder.")

online

I missed this from a few days ago: Foursquare made its API public. Some new things include Last Nights' Check-ins and a Wordpress plugin.

comedy

The way that Galifianakis reacts is exactly how I react to Conan's humor.

tshirts

Your favorite new t-shirts for the next five minutes: Novel-T. I like Prynne and Poe.

nyc

If you're in NYC this weekend, you may want to know about Sasha Grey and others reading from Neuromancer at the New Museum. (In other incongruent news, did anyone see the strange thing on the newsstand this month? There's a Roger Ebert essay in Playboy about Kubrick's Lolita with pictures of Sasha.)

online

Good interview with David Karp in Vice.

politics

Finally announced: Anil's new digital democracy project. It will be called Expert Labs.

Expert Labs will borrow developers from the hallways of Google in Silicon Valley or start-ups like Foursquare and Kickstarter in New York to build government applications and social media tools in exchange for grants -- and the chance to connect with some of the most powerful people in the country.

Mr. Dash plans to lure participants with a periodic, competitive model, similar to the Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge. He'll ask government agencies about their policy initiatives (say, fighting childhood obesity) as well as operating issues (like expensive, licensed billing software) and then host competitions, asking developers to code social media platforms so specialists can provide innovative solutions.

Is this the change-dot-gov we're waiting for?

media

The NYT media desk might be the subject of a documentary. (Side anecdote: I was at a party a few days ago that contained a full video team following around NYC socialite Tinsley Mortimer for a possible reality show. I nudged Brian Stelter and said, "Why don't they make a reality show about you?" He smiled in a way that I didn't understand at the time.)

design

Bonnie Fuller has finally launched the first salvo in her attempt to cross over to new media: HollywoodLife.com. It is in the running for worst website design of the year.

music

Hype Williams directs a video with Beyonce and Lady Gaga singing about their video phone. That's all you need to know, but if you want more, The Awl dissects.

media

Arrington weighs in on this whole FoxCorp/Google de-indexing thing. I still think this is going to play out in some interesting way: I predict someone big will attempt to treat their spiderability as an asset in the coming year. Google won't pay at first, but once Bing takes a bid for exclusive rights, it's a whole new game. (And to that "value of traffic" argument from the previous post, I still can only say: 1 billion unmonetized pageviews versus 10 million actual dollars isn't a contest right now. Many companies will try to take that Bloomberg strategy of making their content exclusive in the coming year. I'm not saying it's necessarily the right strategy, but I'm sure it will happen.)

sex

Belle de Jour, the anonymous sex blogger from London, never really became a huge phenom in America. (Most people don't even know that Secret Diary of a Call Girl, the ITV2 show about her, gets replayed on Showtime in the States.) Anyway, she has finally revealed her identity and the best part is that not only is she a she -- but she's a scientist! Dr. Brooke Magnanti, welcome to geekboy adoration.

media

This month's Vanity Fair featured a rant against reality tv next to an appreciation of all-things-cute.

misc

Everyone should be forced to create resumes in the form D&D Character Sheets.

nyc

Daily Beast interviews the Hipster Grifter. I'm still convinced she will become a Gawker Media employee the minute she gets released.

online

Awesome Weird Al cameo in the new Know Your Meme on Auto-Tune.

tv

The last couple eps of Dollhouse were the best! But of course, it's being cancelled.

internal

I need help again! Last month I posted for an assistant, and it went well: I've hired that person full time. But now I need to find someone new. Same requirements as before. If you're interested, let me know.

books

Sweet. We Feel Fine is becoming a book.

tv

Already a book, Shit My Dad Says could also become a TV show.