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?
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!
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.
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.]
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
