Gamification has become one of the hottest buzz words in the industry and is probably in the process of taking over a website or user experience near you.
I surveyed the community services I frequent -- Metafilter, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, Mlkshk, Mixel. These services do present goals to their users and they have crafted a user experience that nudges them towards those goals -- but they do it without points, ranks and the other mechanisms and patterns advertised in the Techcrunch post above.... At some point people are going to wake up to the fact that the gamification industry is a scam.
For sure, "visualizing success" is a major component of social sites, but there are still scant examples of successful sites with more game-like components like leaderboards and badges, despite the rampantstartupgrowth.
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:
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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...
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
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).
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
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
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
[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
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
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.
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]
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
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.
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
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]
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
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.
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?
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.
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 itisnot. 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.)
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 internetcommentthread, 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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.
When the Obama administration came into office, utopian hope spread across the digital land: the internet was finally going to be used for governance. More than a mere fund-raising tool, the medium would reveal its true self as an instrument of self-organization, problem-solving, and collaboration. Like Twitter and Google before it, Change.gov would become a verb!
We're now nine months into the administration, and it's time to ask the question: Is the internet changing anything?
In January, I noted that the only time I ever visited a government website was to download tax forms. In the intervening months, that hasn't changed much. Is it just me?
The primary criticism of the Obama administration is similar to my concern: good planning, questionable execution. Apps.gov is cool and noble and interesting... but I'm trying to think of use scenarios where it will be used effectively. Is it my lack of imagination?
It's possible that the limited innovation has nothing to do with the the administration -- perhaps it's the shortcomings of the medium itself. (It strikes me that the Internet and American pragmatism have similar historical tracts.) Or maybe it's just too soon. That's a common answer to much of the anticipation of the past year. That seems to be Anil's answer too, as he closes with a notion that returns us back to that utopian vision:
And it's likely that soon they'll be platforms that spawn their own ecosystem of developers, users and applications, just like Facebook or Twitter or the iPhone. When that does happen, we can safely say that dot-gov is the new dot-com.
Sorry for the obnoxious personal nature of this... I desperately need to hire an assistant and I thought I'd try posting it here first. Some terms:
The ideal candidate knows a lot about the internet. The super ideal candidate can make stuff on the internet. Any combination of basic design or programming or project management is awesome, but not required.
Writing, too. And research.
This is not a full-time job. It's barely even half-time. So it should be your backup gig.
It very possibly could grow into a fulltime job, soon, if you wanted.
Some things might be interesting (meeting pitches, product invention) and some things won't be (sorry, Zuki needs to be walked).
You must be in NYC, but you can probably work from home some of the time.
For Entourage watchers... A reporter asks Jamie-Lynn Sigler (Meadow Soprano) if pretty women date fat dudes in real life. He doesn't know that in real life she's fucking Turtle. I mean Jerry Ferrara.
Your favorite new video for the next five minutes: N.A.S.A.'s Whachadoin?", which features every hipster on the block: M.I.A., Spank Rock, Santogold, Nick Zinner....
[Books] help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices.
Argh! It's not that this form of nostalgia is unworthy of some passing historical fascination, because I'm sure digitization actually does represent a drastic change in how we perceive cultural objects. Rather, the obvious annoyance in this sentimental prose is its complete lack of awareness of just how silly the fetishized cultural object was in the first place. Shouldn't we be suspicious of anyone who thinks that showing off your CD collection was ever really the point? Update: Continued on Snarkmarket...
Today we announced the launch of Mediaite.com, a new site that covers all dimensions of the media world. I advised on it, including doing the design and development. Most of my previous launch projects had the support of a media entity with dozens of employees, so this was a different kind of challenge, involving such wonderful tasks as recalling the inner-workings of DART and building WordPress plugins. It's been a while since I was involved in a bootstrappy startup, so this post is for the few people who are interested in the nuances of moving between big and small media, for however long that historical distinction remains.
Power Grid
Although a lot is going on with the site, this feature will probably garner the most attention. The Power Grid ranks 1,500 media personalities in a dozen categories. It will predictably get criticized for some sort of navel-gazing, but just as with pageview counts and most-emailed articles lists before it, the index will also predictably be ctrl+refreshed by industry obsessives. All new metrics go through their hazing periods, and media hazing is the worst form of it.
As this month's Wired overtly suggests, the abundance of data should pose a new frontier for publishing. As personal data migrates online, accusations will arise about the narcissism of measuring thyself, perhaps even yanking in some conservative trope about the decline of society, or some liberal invective about the end of privacy. Everyone will eventually settle down, and we will all learn a little more about each other. The world will go on, and no one will take Twitter Followers that seriously. (Except Dan, who is on a mission to pass me. Please don't follow him.)
The Power Grid itself posed many technical challenges: how to build an extensible algorithm, how to gather the data, how to differentiate industries, how to eliminate outlying factors, how to display the information. Watching the launch of Tumblarity, with its mercurial display and confounding numerical obfuscation, was a lesson in information design. (It took me days to figure out if you wanted a big or small Tumblarity number.) While the Power Grid doesn't reveal every single data point (mostly because that would be visually overwhelming), enough data is available for surmising the gist of how rankings are calculated.
And it's more than just a game. If you want to get a snapshot of Joel Stein or Kevin Rose, there is some interesting data to investigate. If you have an active, data-focused mind, you can imagine future iterations of the Power Grid: new data sources, APIs, visualized trending data, other industries. Who knows...
Voice
The tone of Mediaite is opinionated, but factual. It will be more reported than most blogging today, yet it will take stances where it needs to. The site's editors (Colby Hall, formerly of VH1; Rachel Sklar, formerly of HuffPo; Glynnis MacNicol, formerly of Mediabistro; Steve Krakauer, formerly of TVnewser) provide the corpus of the site in TV, Online, and Print, while user contributions end up in the Columnists bucket.
I'll be writing occasional columns too.
Identity Design
"Nostalgic futurism," "pixelated pop art," "newspaper retro" -- these were some of the early identities we toyed with. After running through iterations of each, we ended up with something calm, simple, flat.
Information Design
If you follow online design trends even marginally, you've seen the grid take over the scene. It's a fine system, especially when applied to data-rich sites. But it also suffers from a deficiency: it makes you think vertically. Take a look at the NYTimes.com, undeniably one of the best designed news sites. Here's a test: Start scanning the page while thinking about how your eyes move in conjuncture with scrolling. Do you see a pattern? Your eyes are forced to move up and down with your scrollbar. This unnatural movement is because the site is built as stacks of content. Grid design implicitly enforces this kind of thinking, because it tries to build nicely aligned columns.
This is problematic, because I don't think people actually want to scan content this way. Blogs have proven they read content this way, but it seems easier to scan content horizontally.
This was a small innovation we discovered in redesigning msnbc.com, which was was reconceived in other prominentsites. These "horizontal sites" build a new kind of importance hierarchy. Designers don't realize it, but unaligned vertical stacks are a remnant of the way that newspapers were designed -- in columns, up and down. These new layouts are more like movie screens and wide monitors, with action moving left and right.
Platform
Except for the Power Grid, it's all built on WordPress, which I haven't used in five years. Some hacking was required to get the front page to have a non-blog layout, but enough advancements have occurred over the years to make it only mildly painful.
Conclusion!
If you hang around in the NYC media bubble long enough, you develop the social depression of a collapsing industry. The west coast is full of a giddy frisson about the inevitable demise of big media, while the midwest is skeptical of everything that gets force-fed to them from the coasts. NYC, which has essentially zero awareness of any of this, continues to constantly be shocked! when a TMZ or Pitchfork or The Onion comes along from the hinterlands with a massively successful enterprise.
The reasons for this amounts to a lack of vision. Even smart people, vampirically bound to the past, seem completely blind to developing new formats. The standard for online innovation right now is "launch another blog," which no one seems to recognize is about as depressing as launching another newspaper.
Mediaite is a hybrid model, borrowing some successful formats of the past and mixing it with some new ideas.
Still playing catchup... this news broke last week: David Fincher is possibly directing something called The Social Network, an Aaron Sorkin-written film about the creation of Facebook.
Because it was Internet Week here in NYC, I ended up missing most of what happened... on the internet! But I'm sure Digg Ads got some attention. I was intrigued by this nice bit of counter-intuitiveness: "The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system." I like the idea of being punished for bad ads.
This is pretty great... there's a British game show called Golden Balls that concludes with a segment called Spilt or Steal that directly borrows the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. There are many YouTube clips, but the best has to be this one.
When it comes to music videos, is anyone out there even still trying to create the epic? Kanye tosses out the occasional ode to MTV yesteryear, but no one else seems invested in the grand narrative arc. With that prelude, say what you will about Lady GaGa, but her new video for "Paparazzi" is conceptually.... something. Perez Hilton himself says: "It is her strongest work to date. It is a mini-film. It is art. It is visual pornography. It is satire. It is commentary. It is brilliant! And, we are NOT exaggerating." Okay then! See also: GaGa channeling Madonna channeling Warhol, and big dicks.
TechCrunch: "Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia has a wealth of textual information but no videos and hardly any pictures? [...] This is where a new service called Navify comes in. Launched in public beta today, Navify intends to enrich Wikipedia by adding pictures, videos and user comments to each article."
I know I shouldn't bother hating such things, but... "It's official. Boys text, therefore girls must learn how to flirtext!" Flirtexting. It's a book. Ugh.
So let's see if this starts any debate.... my pal Matt Haughey recently wrote a little ditty called This Is How Social Media Really Works where he essentially argues that this new marketing force is completely unnecessary:
So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need "social media marketing" after all.
I've been known to rant about this new breed of internet expertise too, but that's probably because NYC seems to have more social media experts than rats. But for the sake of argument, a counter-example of Matt's attempts to find a swingset, here's a story from Ad Age about buying an air conditioner. It makes a compelling case for a more subtle presence for brands to exist in online social spaces. Thoughts?
Web Trend Map 2009. It maps the 333 most influential domains and the 111 most influential people onto the Tokyo Metro map. Height of a station correlates to its traffic, revenue, and trend; width represents stability. And so on...
I missed this one: there's a controversy about Britney Spears' song "If U Seek Amy" because it actually sounds like she's saying "F.U.C.K. me" when she sings it. (Slate explore similar uses, which apparently go back to Joyce!) See also: a peculiar NYT op-ed rant, Pun for the Ages. So... pro-pun or anti-pun?
Somebody's gotta say it... I don't get Boxee. It's all interface... it's not content... it's not making a better experience, it's making a worse one... it's the new Joost... it's the old Miro... I have no idea why nerds are rallying around it. Someone please explain.
Best show on TV right now? The Office lost its edge when Jim and Pam went lovey-dovey; Gossip Girl fires as many blanks as bulls eyes; Battlestar Galactica found earth; Heroes got lost trying to be Lost; and Lost... okay Lost is still pretty fucking great. But the big surprise on TV right now is Dollhouse. When the first episodes of Joss Whedon's new series started making the rounds in critics' circles, it was roundly panned. Rumors spread that FOX execs were to blame for meddling with the pilot, which actually was pretty terrible. But that old Whedonesque subversion has slowly crept back in, particularly with clever dialogue and plot trickery. (This week's episode drops those vintage hip-hop Whedon lines like "my first check had more zeroes than the luffwaffa.") If you want to sample, I suggest either last week's epp where the dolls infiltrate a religious cult or the one where they join a girl band -- doesn't it already sound good? Update: good comments inside, some of which echo the recent Atlantic piece, Joss Whedon and the Real Girl.
Yeah, that totally threw me too: Stringer Bell on The Office last night. Update: best comment on this site evah... "Well, he did run the copy shop." True!
In case you missed it... it's interesting that Jimmy Fallon had Joshua Topolsky of Engadget as a guest a couple nights ago. They talked about the Palm Pre, which isn't something you normally see discussed on network tv.
Finally catching up on some reading from earlier this week, this NYT story about Google's "deep web" initiative seems to have been overlooked. This bit was new and intriguing:
Google's Deep Web search strategy involves sending out a program to analyze the contents of every database it encounters. For example, if the search engine finds a page with a form related to fine art, it starts guessing likely search terms -- "Rembrandt," "Picasso," "Vermeer" and so on -- until one of those terms returns a match. The search engine then analyzes the results and develops a predictive model of what the database contains.
The idea that Google is spidering via search queries is fascinating itself, but that it's building database models from this... this seems to be creeping us toward a semantic web future.
I've been thinking this too: Twitter = YouTube. The argument: YouTube is now the second-most-popular search engine and Twitter Search (as we've previously mentioned) has immense potential to become the next big thing in search. Small prediction: Twitter hasn't released any new features in a long time, but the next thing we'll see is a fancy new search feature (geo stuff? retweet/favorite filters? something....) that includes a revenue model. (More info: Borthwick had similar musings about Twitter Search a couple weeks ago.) Update: more context from Honan in the comments.
A month ago on the eve of ROFLcon, I interviewed the founder of 4chan for a magazine story that never ended up running. He chatted about everything from the techincal complexities of keeping 4chan alive to the anxieties of operating the most controversial site on the internet. By the end of the interview, I was thinking "This kid has seen stuff that would make my eyes burn, but he seems so smart and sweet about it all." (He started the site when he was 15; he just turned 21.) It seemed like insightful stuff that should run somewhere, so here it is....
Like many successful internet phenomena, 4chan is a shockingly simple idea: an online bulletin board where anyone can post pictures.
This simplicity is deceptive.
4chan is actually one of the most robust, complex, annoying, disgusting, illuminating, perverse, fascinating online communities ever created. It is the direct or indirect source for many of the strangest internet memes: RickRolling, LOLcats, Sarah Palin's email hack, Anonymous, Chocolate Rain, and many other minor and major feats of esoterica (i.e., fucked up weird porn). Most of these viral specimens arose from the site's most popular image board, /b/, which can be the source of considerable hand-wringing and fist-clenching for anyone who has dared navigate its murky, anonymous waters.
Scariest moment?
"Probably the first time I was contacted by law enforcement. At the time I was 16 and I was living with my mother. That was shocking."
4chan's founder is a 21-year-old New Yorker named Christopher Poole. Known as "moot" to the site's devotees, Poole is disarmingly well-spoken and pragmatic about what he has created. "It's my belief that the community should dictate its norms, standards, and rules," he says. "I've left /b/ to its own devices, with very little intervention."
Of all the memes spawned from 4chan, is there one you feel most attached to?
At the last ROFLcon [in Cambridge last April], someone asked "Do you like RickRolling?" I said something to the effect of "Screw RickRolling!" Everyone gasped because that was the cool thing at the time.
But then I remembered that my favorite was something called Weegee, and only two people in the crowd were like "Yeah, Weegee!" That's a good sign -- that no one knows what it is.
What is it?
Weegee is just a vectored photo of Luigi from Mario Brothers placed in completely random situations.
Sounds harmless. Does it bother you that most people think of 4chan as only being the most controversial board, /b/?
We have 44 image boards at this point, so in that sense it's a small part of the site. But /b/ accounts for 30 percent of our traffic. That's where the attention is, that's where the headlines are coming from. That's also where a lot of the rowdiness and lawlessness goes on.
What do you think of that lawlessness?
Some of it can be healthy, as long as it remains within certain boundaries.
What boundaries?
Like that we don't actually break that law. Because of the lack of rules, 4chan has fostered an environment where there's a lot of creativity and good things coming out of it. But at the same time, when people go out and do crazy things...
Which kinds of things?
The best example is when Jake Brahm was arrested for posting a bomb hoax. [In October 2006, Brahm was arrested for threatening to blow up multiple NFL stadiums. He was sentenced to six months in prison.] And after that we saw a lot of copycat stuff. People were getting arrested for saying they were going to do the same thing. Law enforcement was coming every week and asking for our help.
When you started the site, did you expect any of that?
Strangest thing you've seen?
"I'd be happy to email you something. I've seen some horrible shit."
Absolutely not. Its popularity has been entirely an accident. I was 15 years old and into anime. I threw up one image board, which was the original /b/. At first it was all anime. As people started posting other things, I added more boards and /b/ remained the random board.
4chan has blown up over the past five years. It's gone from 100 people to 4.75 million per month. And /b/ is pushing 100 million pageviews.
What makes it so big?
At the time, it was very unique. Image boards and anonymous BBS had been big in Japan, but not in the West, where we were used to bulletin boards and blogs. When 4chan started, the format was new. And it was unique because of the anonymity aspect.
What was your scariest moment running the site?
Probably the first time I was contacted by law enforcement. At the time I was 16 and I was living with my mother. That was shocking.
Given your user base, are you worried about your own identity theft?
Yeah, I originally hid behind the moniker because I was 15. It was not appropriate to use my real name at the time. My friends didn't know, my parents didn't know, my educators didn't know. Back then, people didn't appreciate the site so much, but now I can point to good things like LOLcats. Back then, they would have just seen porn.
When did your family find out?
Only when thosearticles came out last year. I kept it a secret from almost all of my friends and family until 2008. It was five full years of living a double life.
Was your mom shocked?
I don't think anyone was put-off. Four years ago, it was just a porn site. It's matured a lot into something a little more presentable. Now I think they can appreciate it as more than that.
One of the most interesting things about 4chan is that nothing gets archived. Threads disappear within an hour. It's a contradiction -- 4chan is known for creating memes, yet it's designed for them to die so quickly.
The lack of retention lends itself to having fresh content. The joke is that 4chan post is a repost of a repost of a repost. There was a guy who was downloading every image from /b/. He calculated that 80 percent of what's posted has been posted before. So it's survival of the fittest. Ideas that are carried over to the next day are worth repeating. The things that are genuinely funny get carried over.
The reason we're seen as a meme generation factory is because of the unique qualities of the image board and the lack of retention. On other bulletin boards, threads are archived indefinitely. All the big threads have been around for months or years. But with 4chan, something has to be really good to keep getting posted.
How involved are you with Anonymous?
I'm not involved at all.
What do you think about it?
I think it's interesting. When Scientology tried to make the Tom Cruise video disappear, there was this instant mobilization of thousands of people who banded together overnight. They had plans to stage a worldwide protest. I thought that was pretty incredible. I was fascinated by it.
Are there situations where they go too far?
I would say so. Submitting bomb threats -- stuff like that is going too far. You need to be smart about it. You can't just throw it all away with threats, you have to be proactive and productive.
Because there's no membership policy, it seems like anything can get attributed to being an act of Anonymous.
Yeah, now it's become more of a buzzword for the media. Now anytime something happens, it gets labeled as "an act of international hate group Anonymous."
The future?
"I've been asking myself, what have I learned about the internet, what have I learned about myself?"
That's why I always personally felt that the movement was destined to fail. You've got two types of people: You have the Anonymous members who are genuinely passionate about dismantling Scientology, but then you have the casual hangers-on who are just there to troll. Because you can't filter it and because the membership is open, Anonymous will always be held back by the bottom rung who are pelting Scientology with eggs and bomb threats and these mischievous juvenile acts. They are holding back the people who take it more seriously. For every step forward Anonymous makes, they can go 10 steps back with one negative headline.
You must feel something similar. 4chan has a mixed public image too.
4chan certainly has a stigma.
And Anonymous seemed to emerge out of 4chan.
Yeah, I would say that's definitely the case. Anonymous culture emerged out of image boards. The rules of these communities spawned some of the original thinking behind the group. But once the Scientology protests started, people outside of 4chan joined. At that point it diverged into its own thing.
How much does it cost to run the site?
About $6,000 per month. That's actually not too bad for a site that is all rich media and has 300 million pageviews. I don't have any overhead past that. I don't have any employees. I don't have an office.
Are you making your money back?
Just barely. We're trying to convince advertisers that our community is worth their ad dollars. That's been a really uphill battle because of our content. Advertisers will Google us and see that we're huge, but they'll also see all these threats and hacks. It scares them away. Overcoming that stigma is difficult.
Have you thought about dropping the controversial board?
People have suggested dropping /b/, but that's the life force of the site. I can't do that. It was the first board, and it will be the last board to go.
I imagine you've seen so many strange things doing this site. What's the most demented thing you've seen?
I'd be happy to email you something. [Laughs.] I've seen some horrible shit. I like to think that I've grown as a person, but at the same time I think a little piece of me continues to die every year.
What have you learned from all this?
I'm still trying to figure that out. I need to start thinking about getting a job. I don't have a resume. I've been asking myself, what have I learned about the internet, what have I learned about myself? At this point, I've been unable to articulate that.
Allow yourself to flashback to the late '90s, when the future of internet media being scrawled on the white eraser board was a battle between a "pay to play" and "information wants to be free." Too bad it wasn't even a close contest: the communists won.
Haha, it was actually an unfair battle. There were too many factors working against micropayments back then: clumsy technology (no AJAX, awkward logins), hefty media pocks (NYT was selling at $40/share, compared to its current $5), and, most importantly, the giddy hope of a free media future.
But here we are today, struggling with a plummeting ad economy and the increased (but necessary) stress of moving everything digital. So micropayments are back on the table -- just ask all of the heavies who announced their support in the past week: Walter Isaacson, David Carr, Henry Blodget, Steven Brill, Stu Bykofsky, and Gawker (sorta).
And surely, an equal number of people came along to trouncetheidea, as they should.
So what do I think?
I have no fucking idea. I don't like being on the wrong side of history, and I really don't know if the New York Times should revive some version of Times Select. I don't mind if you call me a chicken on this one.
But here's something I do know: micropayments could be better. With no interest in entering the fray, I would instead like to offer some design/product/business solutions that might influence the debate. My secret belief is that good design and infrastructure could address some of the valid consumer concerns. No one seems to be approaching the problem from the critical perspective of simplicity, searchability, and scalability. In other words, no one seems to design a good product. I have a proposal. Here's my idea...
Click image for full-size view.
And here's how it works...
1) When you click a link to a story -- from Google, from a blog, from NYTimes.com, from whatever -- the article appears as it normally does, except the Subscription Center lightbox appears over it, with the text opaquely visible in the background.
2) You are given a few options to quickly choose from: pay for the single article or buy a weekly/monthly pass.
3) If you already have an account (and if you're a NYTimes.com user, you do), clicking "Buy" will cause the lightbox to disappear. You can begin reading the story. Instantly.
4) You will not be charged for anything until you accumulate $5 of charges. At that point, you will be asked to enter your credit card or PayPal information, if you haven't already.
So what's new with this? What problems have I tried to solve?
1) Search / Conversation. By far the largest concern with adding subscriptions is being left out in the cold when it comes to search. (Google can easily account for half of the traffic on a media site.) This is the common criticism of the Wall Street Journal subscription model: bloggers don't link to it because it's behind a firewall and Google can't find it because most of the text is not indexed. WSJ ends up being left out of the larger conversation online. This solution addresses the problem by making all of the text still available on the page, so search engines can still "see" it. It's not behind a subscription firewall -- it's just slightly shielded. It keeps the stories in conversational circulation.
2) Surcharges / Cost. The other large concern with micropayments is related to the transaction charges incurred. This argument suggests that you can't charge $.20 for something and handle all the surcharges incurred from it. My solution addresses the problem by delaying the charge until the user reaches a certain threshold. As people like Steven Brill have pointed out, even $3/month from users would catapult revenue beyond anything ever seen by the company.
3) Scalability / Business. When NYMag did a story on the digital smarties a couple weeks ago, some voices on the internet claimed that these boys should be set to the task of inventing new business. If executed correctly, this micropayment system could actually be the start of that. This system could be scaled up to become the micropayment system for all news consumption. By becoming the backbone for media micropayments, The New York Times could have an entirely new income model. And then the network effect comes into play: the more media companies that join, the more pervasive the technology becomes, the faster users reach their $5 checkout.
4) Persistence / Features. I've had the same NYtimes.com account since approximately 1998. I'm hoping that somewhere deep in the bowels of the system, it knows every article I've ever viewed with that account. Any articles that I store in my locker are kept forever, so wouldn't it be awesome if all those were automatically added to my Digital Locker? This small personalization feature could be the beginning of an entire new set of features -- search, bookmarks, personalization, etc.
And now, some potential criticisms...
1) Can't I game this? Couldn't I just keep signing up with new accounts once I get close to $5? Answer: Sure, but I think people are willing to deal with the hassle if the payment are small. And to borrow from the Flickr model, if you offer special features with "pro" accounts, the incentive becomes even greater.
2) Couldn't someone come up with a Greasemonkey script that blocks the lightbox overlay? Answer: Sure, but things like Adblock are used by <1% of the users, so I'm not too worried about that.
3) Will Google eventually block this from their search index? Answer: I'm actually not sure, but I suspect no. This is for a variety of reasons, but the most important is that Google doesn't want to look like a bunch of assholes right now.
4) Would other companies actually adopt this micropayment system? Answer: A few years ago, around the time Google introduced Checkout, there was the brief fascination with the notion that Google could become this middleman for media micropayments. Today, there's not a media company alive that would surrender this to Google. However, if this were handled in a way similar to FOX and NBC joining forces for Hulu, maybe they would.
And finally...
The goal of this exercise was to think about ways to minimize the greatest concern with micropayments: consumer anxiety. I propose that the combination of low cost, simple interface, and clear information display could greatly minimize that concern.
RCRD LBL asked me to do a playlist, which got me thinking about remixes. The accelerated release of music has created a situation where the remix is sometimes released before the original, which leads to some complex blurring of the terminology. But it also led me to ask on Twitter, what's the most remixed song of all time? Most people replied with the notorious "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample that you hear everywhere. My first instinct was to say "that's not a remix -- that's a sample." And the distinction seemed valid. But then the most musicological person I know, Michaelangelo, theorized on Facebook that the answer was in fact "My House" by Chuck Roberts, a house sermon staple. Now here was an intriguing case. When the sermon is used in house music -- such as here, here, and here -- is it a sample or a remix? The answer seems like... both.
Everyone is doing their predictions for 2009 right now, and everyone who isn't is claiming that the future is too bleak or complex to predict. What you see below takes both perspectives into account and says: fuck it, let's have fun with this.
However, don't mistake this satire as an empty gesture. If not literally true, I believe most of predictions below in some metaphoric sense. In other words, to hell with the Black Swan!
So here we are again -- playing Nostradamus in media, technology, and pop culture -- with 36 predictions for 2009:
Hatahs. 4chan digitally antagonizes an entire race of people into self-inflicted genocide.
Facebook. By the middle of summer, you realize that you're logging into most websites via Facebook Connect. You get a creepy feeling in your gut about this, but it's so damn convenient.
Politics. After a freak caribou attack injures Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Sarah Palin joins The View.
Newspapers. At least three major daily newspapers cease to exist. The most likely members of the carnage: the Denver Rocky Mountain News, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Yahoo. Fuck it, Lycos buys it.
Twitter I. Facebook finally buys Twitter, but only after a price war with Google ramps it up to a ridiculous nine-figure valuation. Unsurprisingly, this is Twitter's big plan "to make money."
Twitter II. But seriously, just like those stories in 2001 about people who [shock!] make a living off of blogs, the "Twitter professional" will somehow become a reality.
Twitter III. A major news event happens that no one live twitters. NYT writes three stories (Styles, Tech, and Media) about this phenomena, quickly dubbed "Twitter Shock."
Starbucks. After trying everything else imaginable, they introduce a new "buffet" option, which is a surprise hit.
Daughter Moguls. In the most convoluted assassination plot ever devised, Christie Hefner, Shari Redstone, and Elisabeth Murdoch join forces to commit triple patricide. Vanity Fair dedicates three eInk covers to the incident, with heads that morph from father to daughter.
Magazines I. Some rich kid on the west coast launches a magazine called Charticles, which consists only of... yeah. Choire Sicha commits suicide in his St. Mark's apartment by paper cutting himself to death with the debut issue.
Magazines II. Monocle raises its newsstand price to $1295.00.
Magazines III. Doy, of course Portfolio goes under. The final cover story is mysteriously about cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney.
Gossip Girl. In the Christmas '09 episode, Chuck and Blair finally fuck again. The recession ends.
Subscriptions. Against all seeming rationality, several new online subscription publications show up on the scene.
Where The Wild Things Are. You know what? The movie actually does suck. Gen X icons Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers are pilloried by a millennials who claim old people just don't get it. They're kinda right.
New York Times. After Brian Stelter notices that David Carr has refriended Jayson Blair on Facebook, the New York Times asks Carr to take a drug test. Upon failing, he returns to Minneapolis to run City Pages, which ends up being the last remaining alt-weekly at Village Voice Media.
Online Video. Something's gotta give. Two of the "big" three -- Revision3, ON Networks, Next New Networks -- cease to exist by the end of the year. And when 23/6 and Funny Or Die expire on the same day, Alley Insider's headline is "Funny Or Dead In 24/7." Normal people have no idea what any of these things are.
Terrestrial Video. Something's gotta give. One of the "big" five is morphed into a cable outlet.
Daily Beast. Tina Brown uses her consulting role at HBO to pitch a reality series about her own website. No one thinks it will go into development, but then Aaron Sorkin and Mark Burnett sign on. Julia Allison and Arianna Huffington are super pissed.
Tina Fey. First woman knighted. Now Oprah's pissed too.
Google. They do a lot of stuff that no one expects, but the surprise application of the year is some sort of mashup between three core Google products: Reader, Chrome, and Docs. Oh, and maybe Android, just to make this pshit sci-fi.
FriendFeed. Not only does your mom still has no fucking idea what it is, but your friends don't either.
Publishing. 49 books are published that chronicle the end of publishing.
Music. Proving that fake stuff always wins, Lonely Island's album debuts platinum -- the only album to do so this year.
Lara Logan. Dueling February covers of Parenting and Playboy.
Gawker Media. Nick Denton predicts armageddon, using copious Excel graphs to elucidate his point.
Mad Men. After negotiations break down with AMC, a rumor floats that a movie is in the works. It is eventually released in 2012 on the same day as the Arrested Development movie.
Diablo Cody. Released in September, Jennifer's Body becomes the first young adult movie since Heathers and Clueless that resonates with grown-ups. While you try very hard to think of a new reason to hate her, Diablo casts Sasha Grey in her next film. Backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash ensues.
Words. Webster's Dictionary names undershare word of the year.
Online Media. Trying to take advantage of cheap labor, hundreds of "me too" small startup publications launch. They will call themselves "online magazines," but they will be blogs.
Microsoft. They! Will! Suprise! You! (Actually, no they won't. You hear this every year. Their online version of Office will be begrudgingly cool, but it will have one severe flaw that renders it unusable.)
Apple. After Biz Week's "Is The Innovation Over?" story appears, Steve Jobs retires at the end of the year, surprisingly citing health reasons.
Education. 37 percent of the people you know go back to grad school.
Digg. It does not get bought and Kevin Rose does not go on a date with Jennifer Aniston. Every boy in the Valley weeps at a shared realization: their sense of worth is over-valued.
Rupert Murdoch. He dies in a freak yacht accident. Sumner Redstone, Padma Lakshmi, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Rachel Sklar, Hoobastank, and Shaquille O'Neill are also on board, but all survive. Foul play is suspected, and an investigation reminiscent of the board game Clue ensues. A rumor spreads that Murdoch's cryogenically frozen brain is in an Anaheim basement next to Walt Disney's frontal lobe and the Arc of the Covenant. Michael Wolff sells his next book, The Brain Eaters, for $10 million. 17 people buy it; 4 read it.
If not exactly an admirable time capsule, it still felt something like progress. I personally began the year promising a reduction in my daily internet intake, yet ended it with 100 additional sites in my rss reader. Perhaps it was a resolution meant to be broken.
In previous years, this list was dubbed "The Best Blogs You (Maybe) Aren't Reading." But that wordy contrivance seems presumptuous in these niche-filled times, where everyone seems to read everything yet no one seems to read the same things. So I took some advice that Lindsay gave me last year and dubbed this a collection of "notable" sites instead. That appellation seems more appropriate.
Maybe half of the blogs listed below are new, and the other half deserve attention for having reinvented the medium in some way. Consensus is an impossible task in a world this diverse, but that shouldn't stop us from pointing out excellence when we see it. So here they are, the most notable blogs of the past year:
30) New York Times Blogs Given the variety, it's probably unfair to group them all under one heading, but the old gray lady boldly stuck her neck further into the blogosphere guillotine during a year when retreat would have been forgiven. Old mainstays like Krugman, Freakonomics, DealBook, and City Room continued to drive daily conversation, while new additions like Proof (drinking), Laugh Lines (comedy), Measure for Measure (songwriting), and Ideas (their first foray into link blogging) proved big media could still navigate the niches. The most consistently important, however, was probably Bits, a disarmingly lucid tech-biz blog that proved you don't have to be bombastic or supercilious to win the category. (See also: L.A. Times Blogs.)
29) Boner Party If you operate a celeb/entertainment/snark blog, you know how you are supposed to talk. The voice, now deeply entrenched in the genre, must be mimicked by any new entrant: bitchy, sneering, unimpressed. Boner Party somehow hit REFRESH on the whole genre this year by instead being celebratory, horny, fanboyish. Unlike, say, The Superficial, which is all attitude and no love, Boner Party is pure happy-happy-boy-boy. Imagine remaking Cute Overload but with pictures of girls next to giddy prose, and you've got yourself a boner party. For instance: "For guys, vaginas are like a cross between a pocket knife, a really cool nightclub, and a wizard. It can do SO many things, you REALLY want to get into it, but you have no idea how it works, and therefore it must be magical." (See also: Street Boners and TV Carnage, Golden Fiddle, and Tumblettes.)
28) Newsless Matt Thompson packed up his belongings this year and moved to the middle of Missouri to think about the future of news -- not a bad gig if you can get it! (Matt is also known for being half of Snarkmarket, the voice of EPIC, and the founding editor of Vita.mn.) His fellowship at the University of Missouri provides time to explore the issues that many of us in online media are grappling with: poor news filters, a top-down approach to news gathering, the lack of pertinent local information, a broken breaking news model, and so on. While he's been researching these problems and writing about them on Newsless, he also put his ideas into action by launching The Money Meltdown, a site that aggregates the most essential information about the financial crisis. Though his research proposal involves Wikipediaing the News, he isn't naive enough to believe that simply turning on wikis will necessarily produce anything of value -- the right solution will be more complex than that. With the news industry in crisis, it's good that someone is trying to find models for maintaining an informed populace. (See also: PressThink and MediaShift.)
27) Urlesque Shouldn't someone really be keeping track of all these memes? Oh good, Urlesque is. (See also: Pop Candy, Metafilter, and Listicles.)
26) NonSociety While a vocal minority of stoic internet enthusiasts screamed bloody murder when she landed on the cover of Wired (and others advised to just don't look), Julia Allison did something this year that many people have failed at: living a publicly transparent life -- or at least as close to it as possible. The snark machine may resent this, but it has been nothing short of notable. (See also: Reblogging Julia and Jake and Amir.)
24) Gannett Blog Have you ever wished there was an official record of the downfall of Rome? Welcome to the 20th century newspaper version. (See also: McClatchy Watch, Journerdism, and Romenesko.)
23) Know Your Meme A subset of Rocketboom, the "Know Your Meme" series has been one of the few beacons of hope in the inspiration-deficient genre of videoblogging this year. The genius is that the episodes are funny while being actual history lessons -- sorta like the Daily Show for the internet. Personal favorites include Magibon, Reaction Videos, and FAIL. (See also: ROFLcon, Internet Superstar, Pop 17, and Internet Famous Class.)
20) Ta-Nehisi Coates In one of a few areas that it seemed edge out The New Yorker this year, The Atlantic maintained its provocative blogging tradition with Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and James Fallows. But it was Ta-Nehisi Coates who leapt from the monitor like no one else writing about politics and culture this year. In his remarkable profile of Bill Cosby, Coates took on one of the most complex areas of race (comedy) while teasing out Cosby's occasional similarity to Obama. In a political season strangely devoid of genuine race commentary, Coates was one of the few keepin it unreal. (See also: TNR's Blogs, The Assimilated Negro, and The Root.)
19) Magic Molly Of course, we need a Tumblr in here somewhere. The Tumblr Awards highlight the idiosyncratic characteristics of the platform that has essentially reignited the personal blogging movement: reblogs over comments, overheard conversation over discursive prose, clique over mass, fast over deliberative. Magic Molly embodied all of these things, as her itinerant persona flitted around the internet, from penning the definitive piece on adderall for n+1 to contributing to This Recording. If the Tumblrverse seems like high school, Molly is the smartest girl in the class -- the quickest with the Phillip Roth quote but never hiding her Sasha Grey guilt. (See also: TopherChris, CatBird, hrrrthrrr, Kung Fu Grippe, Soup Soup, Dear Old Love, Mediation, AntiKris, Frangy, and so on and so on....)
18) What Would Don Draper Do? and I Am Chuck Bass After serving as a useful foil for the past couple years, the fake personality blog expired this year. But a new form arose from its ashes: the blog inspired by a character. Rather than feigning a famous person, these sites explored a character through a different set of criteria. The outcome was such projects as What Would Don Draper Do?, which imagines the Mad Men mad man as a self-help columnist, and I Am Chuck Bass, which invokes the notorious boulevardier's name to explore the inner-torment of Gossip Girl. (See also: Fire Nick Douglas and Rex's Scarf.)
17) Tomorrow Museum Responding to last year's list, Kottke made a semi-plea for "blogs done by people who are passionate about something, not writing for a paycheck." He's right, of course -- many of those sites get lost in the fracas of the mega-blog. One of my favorites this year was Tomorrow Museum, which contained nimble think pieces about such topics as Microcelebrity and Frienemies and New Media in Fiction. (See also: Marginal Revolutions and The Morning News.)
16) Buzzfeed After first landing on this list in 2006, Buzzfeed has been slowly transforming from a blogger favorite to a legitimate cultural force. It has also become unbelievably fast at identifying online trends before they happen. (See also: Radar Archive and Stuff White People Like.)
13) The Big Picture It seems illogical that a photoblog using generic wire service photos and sitting atop a MovableType installation could possibly cause such a stir, but The Big Picture did one simple thing right: super large photos. After its June launch (by Kokogiak), the design/photo blogs instantly sent their link love, causing Boston.com's traffic to reportedly skyrocket. (See also: Media Storm and Getty Moodstream.)
12) Gawker & Radar Fourteen months ago, not long after the Grigoriadis story, I guest-edited Gawker for a few days while Choire went off to Fire Island to feed his demons or some such thing. Everything was chilly at the office, but I had no idea I was living in antediluvian times. Since then, too many things have transpired to even count. But let's try: Denton introduced a pay-per-click model for bloggers, Emily quit, Choire quit, Josh quit, Denton hired himself, whoa -- NYT Magcover story!, Josh responded, Emily landed a book deal, Moe had that unfortunate incident, Moe went to Radar, no wait she didn't, ack, Denton axed pay-per-click model, Choire hopped to Radar, a new Gawker editor joined, Moe was laid off, poor Balk, oops Radarfolded, Denton predicted the end of the world, Sheila published photos, not you too Pareene, and a few redesigns happened. What'd I miss? If this all seems like some sort of horrid bukakke ritual performed by the blogomedia on you -- it is! And yet, we somehow ate it up. So give the guy credit -- he knows how to turn his empire into a compelling, twisted tale.
(See also: Fake Nick Denton and Cover Awards.)
11) The Technium Kevin Kelly seemed determined this year. The mission: to use technology as a stick, or perhaps a poker, to shake and jab at society. No one has written more clearly about how technology is shaping -- and can be used to shape -- culture. In influential essays like 1000 True Fans and Better Than Free, Kelly showed how to use an emerging network economics to your advantage, while Cloud Culture, Screen Fluency, and Tools For Vizuality illustrated a future that is more evenly distributed. (See also: Metagold, Text Patterns, and TED Talks.)
10) Alley Insider I'm as surprised as you are. When Alley Insider launched last year, it seemed like another unessential tech/biz blog whose purpose was to clutter the internet with more rewritten press releases. But Henry Blodget, the infamous former Wall Street analyst taken down by Eliot Spitzer in the first dot-com boom, had something else in mind. What immediately differentiated Alley Insider from the fracas of other also-rans was analysis -- sometimes provocative, generally accurate, and occasionally funny. A Wired profile chronicles Blodget's difficulties with living down his past, but the empire is growing with spin-offs like Clusterstock (financial dish) and The Business Sheet (business gossip). (See also: Paid Content and Techmeme.)
9) This Recording From what I wrote in July: "What we have here is failure to communicate... strange little essays, or collages, usually around people, like Cronenberg or Ashbery or Anselm or Scarlett or Diablo or Sun Ra or Pasolini or Sasha (!!!), that are pieced together with aphorisms, links, pictures, and music, with lots of italics and ellipses. You don't really "read" the posts so much as "scan" them, which is not the same as "skim" -- it takes time. Sometimes they adopt the style of a writer -- Brett Easton Ellis -- and other times it's just something random like deducing who killed Chris Farley. Even the straight-up stuff, like the memo to Hollywood on which books to adapt, has this strange outsider voice.... It's more like some crazy ass pastiche, like this random thing about Mad Men from a few days ago, which we can either call an "essay" or visual-poetry-media-criticism-mashup." (See also: Public School Intelligentsia, Fey Friends, and Hipster Runoff.)
8) xkcd It's been around for a while, but the pithy cartoons on the unpronounceable xkcd seemed especially poignant this year -- especially after YouTube took one joke and turned it into a reality. Known for poking at our peculiar online passions, some of this year's best strips involved pointing out the obvious weirdness of Wikipedia and the Large Hadron Collider. (See also: New Yorker Cartoon Lounge and Gaping Void.)
7) The Daily Beast I don't know if it's really a blog either, but Tina Brown is creating, well, something over there. She has claimed in interviews that the site's intent is to sift through the online detritus for the best information -- a noble cause, but it already seems to be busting at the seams with its own information overload. Then again, features like The Cheat Sheet, Buzz Board, and Big Fat Story are at least trying to winnow the data flow to something manageable. (See also: Culture11 and AllTop.)
6) Kanye West At some point in October, I made the most difficult decision of the year: I finally unsubscribed from Kanye's blog. The fatigue of trying to keep up with his 50-posts-per-day pace had finally set in. But I still say everyone should be forced to ingest all-things-Kanye for at least one week. And I mean everything -- including the random cut-and-paste jobs from IMDB and Google Image Search. And the comments -- oh yeah, you gotta read the comments. And you know what -- who cares if he's really writing all this stuff! You don't think Warhol made every painting, do you? (See also: Aziz is Bored, Lovely Package, and Pretty Much Amazing.)
5) Fred Wilson Although there's no way to prove this, it seemed like the tech/media blowhards finally became less relevant this year. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but the old guard of Scoble/Winer/Calacanis/Arrington/Cuban seemed to lose influence, while more sober voices emerged -- those who weren't creating incestuous diurnal feuds with each other to game Techmeme. In the vacuum, Fred Wilson, who has been around the scene for a long time, became the analyst to turn to. Though he is a venture capitalist (with investments in del.icio.us, Outside.in, Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, FeedBurner, and Disqus), he uses his blog (and Twitter and Tumblr) to address everything from his music tastes and Halloween costume to investor liquidity and google juice. (See also: Shirky.com, Rough Type, and Steven Berlin Johnson.)
4) Waxy & Ana Marie Cox Whattup, old skool? Andy Baio and Ana Marie Cox are blog pioneers, which means they would be forgiven for getting crotchety and sedentary like several of their grumpy peers. But this year they adapted to the changing landscape and invented new ways to deal with it. Andy tore apart the data-centric stories that no one else was bothering with -- by using Mechanical Turk to collect Girl Talk data, by visualizing one-hit-wonder trends, and by investigating pirated Olympics video. (Along the way, he also coined "Supercuts" and tried to end FAIL.) Meanwhile, after losing her job at Radar, Ana Marie launched a pledge drive to cover her travel expenses on the McCain trail. Both of them repurposed old-fashioned blog ideas -- the tip jar and the online investigation -- for modern times. (See also: Young Manhattanite, ASCII, Alex Balk, and Tony Pierce.)
3) Twitter Though it came in tied at #1 on last year's list, Twitter gets a rare repeat appearance because it made a big jump this year from a chatty novelty to a legit news stream. Toward the end of the year, people were still struggling to define the microblogging platform on a continuum between publishing and communication -- a debate that only illustrated the complexity of a such a simple platform used differently by so many people. (See also: Posterous and 4chan.)
1) Single Serving Sites More than any medium before it, the internet is fueled by gimmicks. This particular gimmick, the single serving site, has been around for a while, manifesting itself in odd forms like YTMND and The Hamster Dance. While amusing, these sites were mostly inside jokes for the Goatse Generation. But then something happened last year when the concept was applied to a useful binary question -- IsLostARepeat.com and IsTwitterDown.com, for instance. These sites provided the kernel of an idea that exploded at the onset of 2008, beginning with Mat Honan launching BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle.com in February. Three days later, Jason Kottke officially coined the term, which unleashed the craziness. (In its own way, you could label Sergei Brin's one-post abandoned blog a single serving site.) This all concluded with the brilliant and inevitable IsThisYourPaperOnSingleServingSites.com, the definitive academic investigation on one of those short-lived phenomena that makes the internet feel continuously new, even if hitting refresh changes absolutely nothing. (See also: RickRolled and ICanHasCheezBurger.)
It was a year that chimed in with idealism, and clanked out with pragmatism. "Hope" began the political season as an optimistic revelation, but concluded the year as a is-that-seriously-the-best-we-can-do? mantra right up there with "don't be evil."
Perfection was the goal, so music set itself to the task of eliminating the blemishes. Auto-Tune diluted the rough edges, but the economy fell apart and Kanye's mom died while undergoing plastic surgery. So much for perfection.
By the end of the year, we were searching for compromises. Once garish, Will.I.Am's take on "Hope" ended up sounding down right utopian.
There's a lot of fun to be had in the albums below, my picks for the best of 2008. Some of you will be disgusted by the likes of Lady GaGa, whose filthy rich party lifestyle is more gaudy than throwing a potlatch outside a homeless shelter (which is not that dissimilar from Kanye's Gucci soliloquy on SNL).
But compare that party-with-what-ya-got materialism to whatever "hopeful" nostalgia that the cosmoblogosphere was scolding you into: Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend. When asked to pick between a luxury simulacra and faux authenticity, I'll take the loot any day. I have no idea where these indie kids found cause to overuse the word "beauty" in this weary pastoral, but this year's Pitchfork bands felt more like a retreat from the future than nothing else since -- fuck, I dunno -- prohibition. Fantasy, indeed.
Then again, I banged my head to Chinese Democracy, so what the fuck, right?
Here they are, my favorite albums of 2008:
1) Girl Talk, Feed the Animals
Depending how you want to construe it, Girl Talk is either the most cynical thing happening in music right now or the only relevant culture for our time. Or you can just ctrl-alt-delete the historicizing and declare it the Finnegans Wake of pop music: a difficult mashup classic that is as fun to discuss as to ingest. (And as my Joycean college mentor would proclaim, dance to.) Nothing this year made me think more about music: how it's created, where it's distributed, how it's discussed, who owns it, how fans have become critics, and how critics have become artists.
3) Santogold, Santogold
It felt like an eternity between the moment you first heard "L.E.S. Artistes" in 2007 to when the album finally became available. And then another eternity between the album and the inevitable Bud Light commercial. The elongated backlash sine wave was the funnest roller-coaster ride of the year.
4) Juno, Soundtrack
There's a little Mark Loring in all of us. Who? Mark Loring -- that would be Jason Bateman's character in Juno (and one of the many coded references for Minneapolitans -- a memorial to the famed posthumous Loring Bar). Trapped between eras, Loring couldn't find the right place between his rocker past and grown-up future. Like the Alice in Chains tee that his wife (Jennifer Garner) splotches in eggshell yellow, he's ill-equipped for the upgrade. That tension, which is also a prevailing narrative of our time, is the essence of this soundtrack.
5) Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak
Kanye is your needy friend, Kanye is your worst blog commenter, Kanye is your John the Baptist, Kanye is your spoiled crybaby, Kanye is in your closet, Kanye is your form swallowing your content, Kanye is your everything, Kanye is your new bicycle.
6) Lykke Li, Youth Novels
Blonde, Swedish, design-damaged girl makes blippy, sullen, vulnerable album made for dancing around your apartment on a rainy day while waiting for your lipdub to finish uploading to Vimeo. Forget Suicide Girls, she's like the Tumblette of my dreams.
7) Lady GaGa, The Fame
Downtown NYC desperately needs a new hero. The hipsters, who eat their young faster than they can become zygotes, have already chewed up and spit out Lady GaGa, but she's the last great hope for a Madonna-esque crossover from naughty street creature to shiny pop diva.
8) Guns 'N Roses, Chinese Democracy
On the last page of the extensive liner notes, Axl gives his thank-yous for an album that he began recording before Dakota Fanning was born. Like the music itself, it's a hodge-podge of mysterious choices, with recognizable names and places jumping out of the jumble: Donatella Versace, Hoobastank, Suicide Girls, Ferrari, Weezer, SoHo House, Mickey Rourke, Bungalow 8, Apple Computers, Lars Ulrich, and Alice In Chains. If you stare at this list long enough, cross your eyes, spin around a few times, and throw some Hail Mary's at the Falun Gong -- Chinese Democracy sorta begins to makes sense.
9) Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles
This year I almost ceded victory to the music blogs, MySpace, and HypeMachine. The single seemed to finally drive the nail in the jewel case coffin of the album, so I nearly replaced this annual "best albums" list with a "best songs" list. (How else can I tout Teyana Taylor's "Google Me" or The Count & Sinden's "Beeper" or Kid Sister's "Pro Nails" -- songs all released in early 2008 but still have no accompanying albums.) With producers rushing out tunes and leaks fueling an embeddable culture, the time gap between hearing the song and getting the album now seems agonizingly long [see above]. But so what? No one will care about Crystal Castles this time next year, but "Crimewave" was the best Depeche Mode song never made.
10) Beyonce, I Am... Sasha Fierce
Slinging "fierce" into your lexicon at this point is like lighting the fuse on the ticking timebomb of obsolescence. Unless you're Beyonce, who can slap on a robot glove and look like she just dropped in to say hi! from 2012. The futuristic, angry Beyonce songs are always her best, and half of this two-disc package is throw-away R&B, but the other half is loud, bitter, and -- okay sure, whatever you say, Comandante Knowles -- fierce.
Today is the day you can sign up for a free Dr. Pepper because GNR released Chinese Democracy before 2009. The site seems to be struggling right now...
Two new comedians join SNL. "New York Magazine's Vulture blog was the first to report the news on Wednesday, based on a Twitter post from media blogger Rachel Sklar." It's an ouroboros out there! MSNBC.com <-- Access Hollywood <-- NYMag's Vulture <-- Rachel's Twitter <-- ....
What it's like to watch Fox News for 24 straight hours. (The Observernotes the similarity to Hugh Gallagher's 1993 Rolling Stone story in which he watched MTV for 24 straight hours. I remember this story perfectly! I ripped off the idea in 1994 when I wrote something in my college newspaper about listening to NPR for 24 hours. Wish I could find it...)
After the rumor that he might jump into the Minnesota Senate race has finally been squelched, Jesse Ventura is actually returning... as the host of a new conspiracy-theory series for truTV. "Ventura will travel the country, investigating cases and getting input from believers and skeptics before passing judgment on a theory's validity." I hope the first conspiracy is "Who killed Wellstone?"
I've tried to stop publishing GNR rumors, and although this one look more legit than all the others, skepticism is still warranted: Chinese Democracy To Be Sold Exclusively At Best Buy. An entirely new class of people will now be forced to step foot in Best Buy... or more likely, learn how BitTorrent works.
I had a dream last night, and I'm going to tell you about it, even though no one ever wants to hear other people's dreams. I dreamt that 14 years after he supposedly committed suicide, Kurt Cobain came out from hiding and I was the first person to interview him. My first question: "So, whattup?" We chatted while he was performing a surprise show at a hotel bar with a capacity around 500 people but only 50 were there (dreams are weird). He had black hair and still looked boyish. My next question was "Who knew you were alive?" followed by "Where have you been hiding?" Answers: Courtney Love didn't know, and somewhere in L.A. This dream goes on for a while, and you don't care, but I mention it because I just read that Nevermind was released 17 years ago today. You can tell a lot about people by which historical events they choose to insert after the ellipses in "I remember where I was when...." Mine includes knowing my exact location when I first saw the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video. Load up on guns...
Someone finally wrote the behind-the-scenes story of The Daily Show that you've been waiting for: The Most Trusted Man in America? Never would have guessed that NYT would give it to Michiko Kakutani, but after 3,000 words, what's the big reveal? They use 15 TiVos! Not much else new in there.... UPDATE: a whole lot more enlightening than those 3,000 words is one single amazing comment on PVRblog, written by a former Daily Show researcher who describes the entire TiVo process.
New book: Reading the OED, about a guy who spends a year reading that big-ass dictionary. I've added it to My Year As..., my (probably not definitive but still long) list of books about people doing something for one year. Nicholson Baker reviews it in NYTBR.
Mary-Kate and Ashley's book is available for pre-order -- and look at that cover! Get it? You see, they're twins, but their handwriting... it's DIFFERENT.
Type ObamaBayh08.com into your browser... wait, I'll just link to it. Some are suggesting the redirect answers the question of who will be your next veep.
I've often wondered about the legal difference between prostitution and pornography.
It seems an obvious paradox that both acts are essentially the same: sex in exchange for money. However, there is of course one key difference: a camera.
Culturally speaking, this appears to be an extremely revealing detail of the modern psychology. Sex for money is legal only if it's recorded and distributed. The camera, it would seem, validates everything.
But it almost seems like a legal loophole that could be exploited. Imagine this scenario: The vice squad arrests some dude for picking up a hooker. "I wasn't soliciting sex," he claims. "I am making a porn movie." Does his claim to record and distribute the sexual act make it legal? Does he have a First Amendment case? It sounds like a glib question, but it's a legit case!
(Shhh, don't steal my idea, but I want to write a Law & Order script about this. I've already got a title: Get Off The Bang Bus.)
I've talked about this elsewhere, but the tricky part of the First Amendment in the coming years will be answering this question: what constitutes free speech in the age of personal media?
I've ranted about the slippery slope that Josh Wolf, for instance, created by essentially claiming that any act could be constituted as journalism, and hence protected by the First Amendment. If you think about the logical conclusions of that, the danger becomes clear. Would this include corporate security tapes or accidental photos? If journalism is simply saying it is, we're opening ourselves up to some slippery cases. (And don't mistake that remark as fear of actual so-called citizen journalism. That's what I want to make sure we protect!)
There actually is no legal precedent for protecting the creation of pornography, except in California. (Keep in mind that creation and distribution are different.)
Porn creation has never been legally tested in other states, so it might be illegal.
This is why Cali is the porn capital.
The First Amendment will get some tricky questions thrown at it in the coming years, as one of these "personal media" cases eventually trickles its way up the Supreme Court. Given the current makeup of said body, I'm worried what the outcome will be. Sometimes, it may be better to not test the law.
Upcoming cover of Esquire: DIGITAL. (Let's just prep the media history ebook entry from 2020: Although intended as a talisman to rebuff critics on the longevity of print magazines, Esquire's 2008 'digital' cover became the harbinger of an industry gasping to upgrade to the digital era but completely mystified on how...)
I feel uptight when I walk in the city
I feel so cold when I'm at home
Feels like everything's starting to hit me
I lost my bed ten minutes ago
Modern guilt I'm staring at nothing
Modern guilt I'm under lock and key
It's not what I have changed,
Turning into convention
Don't know what I've done but I feel ashamed
Standing outside the glass room sidewalk
These people talk about impossible things
And I'm falling down the conversations
Another palm beats into you
Modern guilt is all in our hands
Modern guilt won't get me to bed
Say what you will
Smoking my cigarette
Don't know what I've done but I feel afraid
It's been a while since you've asked -- actually, you've never asked -- but let me tell you... my favorite new blog is This Recording. What we have here is failure to communicate... strange little essays, or collages, usually around people, like Cronenberg or Ashbery or Anselm or Scarlett or Diablo or Sun Ra or Pasolini or Sasha (!!!), that are pieced together with aphorisms, links, pictures, and music, with lots of italics and ellipses. You don't really "read" the posts so much as "scan" them, which is not the same as "skim" -- it takes time. Sometimes they adopt the style of a writer -- Brett Easton Ellis -- and other times it's just something random like deducing who killed Chris Farley. Even the straight-up stuff, like the memo to Hollywood on which books to adapt, has this strange outsider voice. Most of the writers are, I think, from LA, or at least it feels like LA. It's not done-with-it-all jaded like NYC or earnestly passive-aggressive like the Midwest. It's more like some crazy ass pastiche, like this random thing about Mad Men from a few days ago, which we can either call an "essay" or visual-poetry-media-criticism-mashup. Whatevski, I could read this Molly person all day. Update: "when Walt Whitman liveblogged Abraham Lincoln's funeral".
See her picture in a thousand places
Cause she's this year's girl.
You think you all own little pieces
Of this year's girl.
Forget your fancy manners,
Forget your English grammar,
Cause you don't really give a damn
About this year's girl.
Still you're hoping that she's well-spoken
Cause she's this year's girl.
You want her broken with her mouth wide open
Cause she's this year's girl.
Never knowing it's a real attraction,
All these promises of satisfaction,
While she's being bored to distraction
Being this year's girl.
Time's running out. She's not happy with the cost.
There'd be no doubt, only she's forgotten
Much more than she's lost.
A bright spark might corner the market
In this year's girl.
You see yourself rolling on the carpet
With this year's girl.
Those disco synthesizers,
Those daily tranquilizers,
Those body building prizes,
Those bedroom alibis,
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.
All this, but no surprises for this year's girl.
Since I'm talking about comment culture too much lately, linking to Gessen's new post seems required. "I think, generally speaking, that every site gets the commenters it deserves... It's disingenuous for people writing online, especially for people who are expert at writing online, to pretend like the commenters they attract (over and over again) are somehow incidental to the work they do, or the context in which they do it... You may not be legally responsible for the things that appear on your site, but you are I think morally responsible." See also: Choire thinks NYT should sue anon commenters. Controversial!
Today Julia took over the internet. Of course, this launched (Radar's take is the best). And she has a debate in Page Six with Sklar about defending your online reputation. And more than any of those things, the West Coast will finally (perhaps) stop saying "who?" every time her name is mentioned -- yep, she landed on the cover of Wired. Let the snark commence... UPDATE: Wired article.
Though it might seem that every ounce of nuance has been sucked out of this whole "commenter culture" meme -- yesterday it was Time with "Post Apocalypse" and previously it was NYT Styles with "All-Stars of the Clever Riposte" and NY Mag with "The What You Are Afraid Of" -- I'm still convinced there are some missing pieces, even if I can't put my finger on them....
Jorn of Robot Wisdom, who invented link blogging, takes up Warren Ellis' critique from earlier this week in which he said, "The world does not need another linkblog." It might seem that I'd naturally rally around Jorn on this one, but I'll say this instead: if Fimoc had not existed for the past way-too-many years, and I had to invent something now... I would probably not try to invent a link blog. We are compelled by our histories.
Didn't see this one coming... HBO has greenlighted a pilot based upon Jessica Cutler's Washingtonienne. It's a half-hour comedy; Sarah Jessica Parker is the EP; the internet will hate it.
This response to the Jezebel Incident is getting passed around a lot right now in Tumble-land. I think there's something smart to this reaction... but I also think there's the voice of dad saying "You kids should learn your place." (I shouldn't be trying to unpack this on a link blog!)
More Mad Men goodness: the new issue of Ad Age has a 16-page insert done up to look like a fictional issue from 1960, with fake stories about Sterling-Cooper..
Ron Rosenbaum has always been obsessed with catch phrases. Back when he was at The Observer, I remember a column in which he went on a tangent about the coinage of playahata, which was brand new to the vernacular at the time. Whatevs, he has now devoted a whole column to the idea, which rips through dozens of catch phrases like "not so much," "it is what it is," "my bad," "the party is over," "teh," "at the end of the day," "stay classy," and on and on...
Over the past couple months, I've been working with New York Magazine to develop some stories related to internet media. The first is "The Microfame Game", an analysis of how micro-celebrity is generated, with advice on how you -- yes you! -- can use the internet's self-publishing tools along with the new networked media machine to generate well-deserved acclaim. The eight-step plan is intentionally cheeky, but it's also probably helpful, if you're the kind of crazy person looking to create a successful online identity.
My original inspiration for writing about this topic was Kevin Kelly's essay 1,000 True Fans, which is a motivating take on how small amount of renown can be turned into a successful career. In thinking about the idea, I smacked out the three paragraphs below, which never made it into the story but can serve as the spark of the original idea:
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to stand in front of large groups of people and scream at them. I wanted to proclaim my love for their mid-size city and then show them my genitals. I had no interest in becoming a musician, because I wanted to be a rock star.
Before the internet, or before whatever weird historical moment we're in that causes us to overuse the phrase "before the internet," being a rock star used to signify something grandiose. As subcultures arose, the term itself became imbued with meaning beyond music: one could be the "rock star of sushi" or the "rock star of hedge funds."
And now, with an eroding mass culture, and with the internet slicing everything to tasty bite-sized morsels, the "rock stars of _____" are the only rock stars who matter. With subcultures now the dominant culture, the only solution is retreating to the fringes and joining these new niche rock stars, the microfamous....
Keith Gessen has a Tumblr? The 10 of you who know him, know this; the rest of who don't, don't care; this post was worthless. (Oh, but I finally read All The Sad Young Literary Men, so if you wanna debate it in the comments...)
Paul Graham discusses cities and ambition. The setup, that different cities send distinct messages, works as a decent framing device for discussing urbanism, but some of the messages are debatable. Berkeley ("You should live better") sounds right, as does Silicon Valley ("You should be more powerful"), but New York ("You should have more money") sounds off. I propose NYC's should be "You should have more influence," defined as a combination of power and connections. Interestingly, none of the messages sound particularly attractive, except perhaps Cambridge ("You should be smarter"), which I find sorta boring. Propose your own city messages in the comments...
Promise, last link about Emily's NYT Mag thing... The Observer, which probably felt it needed to say something, dissects the production of the cover photo, suggesting (and then unsuggesting) victimization and proposing that writers need to watch their image. Though it's never invoked, all of this now reminds me of Prozac Nation, with the same debates between sexuality vs. victimization, public vs. private, memoir vs. publicity.
Twitter seems to be bringing out the experimentation in people... TweetWire.com tries to build a newspaper out of Twitter posts. And Firehose is just that.
This actually has a lot to do with a NYC-centric vision of media. Very few of my friends back in the midwest watch the show. If I didn't live in New York, I'm not sure I'd watch it. While it's eye candy for those of us who walk by the Beatrice Inn, it's gaudy class warfare for those who don't.
And:
The use of these communications technologies -- the cellphone, the gossip website -- are part of what makes the show so compelling to internet people. The most recent episode was the first to closely dwell on the mechanics of the anonymous site. For those of us who work in the industry, it was fascinating to see someone else use it as a vehicle for revenge, for manipulation... for gossip.
Last weekend I was trying to quickly organize dinner with some friends. I decided to try calling them. When no one answered, I realized how embarrassed I was to leave a voicemail. I'm not alone on this feeling that phone calls are jarring to daily life, but it makes me wonder something else... will we eventually come around to a new type of super-connected gadget that can do everything except make phone calls?
When Nicholas dished the rumor that HypeMachine had a $10 million bid from Viacom, I said it was perhaps "more complex than that." Anthony has now said the rumor is "not very accurate." And that ends this boring story.... for now.
I don't get many chances at crossover links like this, so here goes... some of you from Minneapolis might remember Taavo Somer, the architect-turned-restaurateur who made a splash in duh big city with Freemans, which cited The Loring (RIP, sigh) as his primary inspiration. (If you've visited from the Midwest, I've taken you there, nostalgically. Taavo also did the whole "Morally Bankrupt," "Emotionally Unavailable," etc. t-shirts for Barneys, before your mom had a t-shirt line.) New Yorkers know him as the guy who also created The Rusty Knot and Gemma. Now that the table is set, the link: a new NY Mag profile of Taavo, the sorta thing that drives people like me crazy with the bleak feeling that we should be doing more.
Now here we go.... I C U: Where The Boys/Girls Are, LAT's interactive distribution map illustrating where the single people are by age. NYT, your move. [via]
Fuck it, it's Friday... your favorite early-80s synth pop remembrance for the next five minutes: "Don't You Want Me," Human League. (This song was playing during my last hair cut. I couldn't stop moving in the chair. I completely forgot the awesomeness of the class battle in the opening verse. And then that second verse!)
All you music bloggers should just hand over the keys, cuz Kanye is crushing you. May Day, May Day, he just dropped an exclusive... your favorite video for the next five minutes: Justice's "Stress".
Narcissism post... I'll be at ROFL Con in Boston on Thursday and Friday -- drop a comment if you will be too. Then I fly to Minneapolis on Saturday, throwing a party at The Chambers -- drop an email if you want an invite!
Apparently it's t-shirt day here at Fimoc... but first, a little factoid for you to throw around at dance parties: Prince, Madonna, and Michael Jackson are all turning 50 this year. And they're all from the Great Lakes region. Holy fuck, time to make a t-shirt.
Listen people, I get a lot of email too. Probably something like 500 missives per day. But this really isn't that difficult to fend off. Let me help... Tactic #1: Delete unnecessary items as they come in. Tactic #2: Reply to items when you have free time in elevators, meetings, subways, etc. Tactic #3: Don't leave work until you're down to five items. Tactic #4: Stop writing about how much email you get. Done.
Here we go... Pitchfork has the first track you can hear from Scarlett Johansson's Tom Waits cover album (out in May). It starts off sounding like a TV on the Radio song (Sitek produced it), but then turns atmospheric. Judgment so far: unsure. UPDATE: track has been removed; you didn't miss much.
And the winner of the worst-song-to-best-video ratio of all time: GNR's "Don't Cry". Relive the memories of throwing Stephanie Seymore across the room, the naked Axl in a cave, the therapist's couch, the cemetery, the triple Axl in the hospital, the burning car with Slash, the bitch fight... if Axl had died instead of Kurt, everyone would have said this video contained all the signs of his demise, done up like a soap opera without a hint of nuance.
Waxy has coined a term: supercuts. His definition: "Some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage" -- so like the Lost What? thing I linked to yesterday. Buzzfeed and company haven't gotten it yet, but you'll see it in 5... 4... UPDATE: There we go.
Contractual obligations require I link to all Kristen Bell projects, so please forgive me for passing along this trailer to you: Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It's okay, Bellsy, we'll give you this one... but NO MORE FUCKING WITH US, m'kay?
A quick update to my RedLasso post yesterday, after speaking with someone there today... RedLasso's model is actually to develop a three-way revenue split between copyright owners (tv and radio stations), syndication sites (bloggers), and RedLasso itself. Broadcasters are aware of the site, but official deals have not been signed. My take? Red Lasso exists in an interesting middle-ground between two factions: a) bloggers who would enjoy making a little money and be able to safely embed content and b) broadcasters who are wary of content misuse and distribution splits. The question for broadcasters will be: can they accept this revenue split versus forcing bloggers to find/embed/link content from their own site? The question for RedLasso will be: can they can keep enough broadcasters in the fold to make the site a destination for this kind of content and become the holy grail -- the Google of video?
Today on CNet's The 404, I unveiled the secret project that I have been working on. After months of preparation in NYC, I am finally ready for the unveil: my new super secret project is going to be... a zine! That's right, to hell with digital media! But wait, there's more! It's going to be a zine about... YouTube! Although Conde Nast has turned down seed funding, I am sure this will be HUGE. (This isn't even really an April Fool's joke. Not really. If you would like to submit anything to the zine, email me!)
It's the strangest profile of a news company that I've ever read... but it's also the best recent attempt at historicizing this particular moment in media history: "Out of Print," The New Yorker. Ostensibly a profile of The Huffington Post (which surpassed Drudge in unique audience this month), this monster rambles through everything from complex newspaper economics to that Simpsons"Your medium is dying" clip -- my pal Jonah Peretti even gets his "mullet strategy" theory tossed into the mix. The author, Eric Alterman, has never impressed me in the past -- he's been obtuse, lacking in nuance. So why do I find this piece so important? Because the opposition it sets up between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, which is difficult to parse but ultimately worth the effort, is the most honest historical opposition anyone has come up with so far to describe this moment. The Left really has refused to acknowledge the inherent elitism of the Lippmann model, and now it's paying the price. The entire conflict we're facing right now arises from the return of the repressed: Dewey's conversational model of media. However, a small quibble with the story: How about some analysis of the potentially elitist celeb-blogger model that is The Huff Post itself?
Not content with being hip-hop's greatest blogger, not fulfilled with having the craziest commenters this side of YouTube... Kanye West is now leaking tracks on his blog: new Outkast song featuring Raekwon.
It's a good question: Why Doesn't Microsoft Buy Time-Warner Instead? They'd get AOL, CNN, Harry Potter, AIM, and so on. (The answer of course is that Time-Warner couldn't be bought at current stock price either.... but how much more could it insist upon?)
In The Clash ... Goin' Up?, The Observer looks at the pervasiveness of music in daily life. "Do we even listen to music anymore? Or is it all just sinking into the background, surrounding us like air-conditioning?" (The "history of Muzak" story comes out at least once a year [The New Yorker's lengthy example from a couple years ago], but this one ties in some iPod theory.)
[SXSW-influenced post #4.] So yeah, Lacygate. Not that you need another opinion, but since I was there... My take is that the audience reaction was unnecessarily harsh, and based mostly on style than substance. Some people have criticized her for "softball questions," but I don't think those people have ever been to a keynote before. Rather, it was mostly her passive-aggressive interview style that seemed to annoy the masses. And make no mistake about it -- the audience really was annoyed. (It's interesting to read the opinions of people who weren't there -- their perspective is similar to that of Lacy herself, who was clueless of the mounting tension until nearly the end. But if you were sitting in that room, you could feel something horrible was about to happen.) Even if the crowd was over-reacting, it was surreal how aggressive Lacy became toward the audience once she realized what was happening. She could easily have recovered pretty quickly, but instead chose to get combative with a couple thousand bloggers. It was like a lesson in how not to manage a community -- like Web 2.0 in reverse.
Long interview with Mike Arrington. Let me just jump to the part you wanna read, when asked about Denton: "I think he's a total dick. I think he's amoral. I don't think he has any sense of right and wrong, and he'll do anything he can to make money and have a successful blog. So I just don't associate with him." Wait, who were we talking about about again? In other news...
The first time you try to describe EveryBlock to someone, it can sound kinda boring. It aggregates piles of local information, like restaurant reviews and crime stats, which are then displayed block-by-block. Hm, that's interesting, but is it compelling?
If you give it some time, the answer is absolutely. Once you start playing with the site (and "playing" might be the best word to describe the meandering sensation of floating around in the data pools), your mind begins to wander with speculation: how did they get that? what does this say about my neighborhood? what else could be done with all this data? how can I add to this?
Those were just some of the many questions I had about EveryBlock, which launched a few weeks ago with the help of a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant. A few stories and interviews popped up when the site launched, but I noticed that the interviewers seldom asked the other questions that I had about the site. So I decided to ask site's founder, Adrian Holovaty, some questions directly. Here's our exchange:
Last year, New York City famously banned trans fats in restaurants. I found a page on EveryBlock that shows all the violations of this ban -- several every day! I love these little hidden narratives inside of EveryBlock. Do you have any favorites?
Great question. Here are a few interesting nuggets:
Also, more generally, it's fascinating to follow address-specific breaking news/events on our site. For example, a couple of weeks ago, a water main broke on the north side of Chicago. Afterward, on the relevant EveryBlock pages -- for example, Ravenswood or the 1800 block of W. Montrose -- you could see a bunch of assorted news items about the incident: newspaper articles from the Trib and Sun-Times, TV station reports and Flickr photos of the torn-up street that were taken by some people who happen to live nearby. Each of those "raw" chunks of information was displayed in the timeline of news for that block.
We've seen a similar thing happen with trendy new restaurants. First you see the business license, then (possibly) the liquor license application a few days later, then the restaurant inspection, then a Yelp review or two, then a writeup by the newspaper's dining critic. The story slowly unfolds over time.
One of our post-launch priorities is to clean up the fire-hose of raw information, to introduce concepts of priority and improved relevance -- but I do think there's a certain appeal to that raw dump of "here's everything that's happened around this address, in simple, reverse-chronological order." When significant events happen, they sort of "pop out" of the list.
Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing behind-the-scenes? Are you using Django as a framework?
Sure. The first layer is the army of scripts that compile data from all over the Web. This includes public APIs, private APIs, screen-scraping the "deep Web," crawling news sites, plus harvesting data from PDFs and other non-Web-friendly documents. Some data also comes to us manually, like in spreadsheets e-mailed to us on a weekly basis. For each bit of data, we determine geographic relevance and normalize it so that it fits into our system.
The second layer is the data storage layer, which we built in a way that can handle an arbitrary number of data types, each with arbitrary attributes. For example, a restaurant inspection has a violation (or multiple violations), whereas a crime has a crime type (e.g., homicide). Of course, we want to be able to query across that whole database to get a geographic "slice," so there's a strong geo focus baked into everything.
The next layer is the Web layer, which is standard Django. Oh, and I should mention that we use Python for everything, from the ground up.
What has been the hardest piece to accomplish so far?
I honestly can't decide what the hardest piece has been. A number of pieces were all hard to pull off in their own way.
The user interface was, and continues to be, a challenge. How do you display so many disparate pieces of data together, without overwhelming people? How do you account for the variety of distinct data types? (That's both a user-interface and a backend challenge.) How do you maintain visual interest when dealing with so much raw textual data? How do you make the block page feel like a geographic home page rather than a search result? Wilson, our designer, has done a great job within these constraints, but we all agree there's still much room for experimentation and gradual improvement.
Dealing with structured data is relatively easy, but attempting to determine structure from unstructured data is a challenge. The main example of unstructured data parsing is our geocoding of news articles. We do a pretty good job here, but we're not crawling all of the sources we want to crawl -- again, there's a lot of room to grow.
On a completely different note, it's been a challenge to acquire data from governments. We (namely Dan, our People Person) have been working since July to request formal data feeds from various agencies, and we've run into many roadblocks there, from the political to the technical. We expected that, of course, but the expectation doesn't make it any less of a challenge.
How much of your data aggregation is scraping html pages versus getting structured data?
At this point, we're doing more scraping than consuming formal APIs and data feeds, but I expect (and hope) the balance will shift over time. It's been tricky explaining our concept to data providers in government, but we're hoping that gets easier now that we have a public site that people can browse and understand.
Do you have any fears of scaling the system?
Yes and no. We knew from the start that EveryBlock isn't something that can be scaled overnight to every city in the world. There are too many special cases, too many relationships to build, too many local quirks to work out. There's no nationwide database of restaurant inspections or building permits that we can magically tap into; every city is different. Aggregating local information is a deep, difficult problem.
Some companies try to scale pieces of what we're doing -- like geocoding every news story in the U.S., or making maps of blog entries, or aggregating crime, or aggregating restaurant inspections -- but we're the first ones to do all of that. That's why we're taking a depth, not a breadth, approach: I'd much rather do three cities well than 1,000 cities poorly.
Rather than use Google Maps or Microsoft's Virtual Earth, you built your own mapping service application. Why?
That, along with "When will you bring EveryBlock to city XXX?", is by far the most frequently asked question we get. Paul, our developer in charge of maps, is working on an article explaining our reasoning, so I don't want to steal his thunder. I'll just say that the existing free maps APIs are optimized for driving directions and wayfinding, not for data visualization. And, besides, having non-clichéd maps is an easy way to set yourself apart. Google Maps is so 2005. ;-)
How hard was it to build?
We use an open-source library called Mapnik to render the maps, so that library does the heavy lifting for us. Paul is also working on a how-to article, in the spirit of giving back to the open-source community, that explains how to use Mapnik.
In many ways, what you're doing is taking a bunch of data sources and normalizing them for a single use case. Now that it's normalized, I imagine developers could do a ton of interesting things with this data. Are there plans to do an API?
Yes, I strongly suspect we'll have an API eventually -- it's one of the many things on our site wish list. We had to draw a line and call the thing "ready" at some point, so despite the fact that we're launched, we've got hundreds more features and data sources to add.
I was talking to someone recently about all the cool mashups you could do, and we decided that looking for patterns between Republicans and sex offenders would be the best!
Beyond the technical difficulties of creating parsers and algorithms for geotagging this data, have you had any political/legal obstacles? Is there data you'd like to get your hands on but can't for some reason?
Yes, and yes. I'd estimate we only have about 10% of the data we'd like in the long term, for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. As we expected, some government agencies haven't been able to provide us their public data, and the reasons vary. A common reason is a lack of resources. In other cases, we've simply been stymied by bureaucracy. But we're keeping at it.
An obvious example of data that's EveryBlocky (EveryBlockish? Um, location-specific?) but not yet on our site is the set of recent home sales -- lots of local relevance there. Of course, we're a news site, not a real-estate site, so it'll be interesting managing people's expectations about what real-estate data and features we offer.
I'd like to even out the three cities' data offerings, too. We publish building permits in San Francisco and New York, but not in Chicago. We publish filming locations in Chicago, but not in New York or San Francisco. We publish zoning agenda items in San Francisco, but not in the other two cities.
We're also working on improving the data we already have. An example is crime in San Francisco. After running into some problems having requested a formal data feed from them directly, we get the data by screen-scraping the SFPD's site -- but that site doesn't publish the location of each crime. In fact, the only location data the SFPD site publishes is implicit in the searches you do. The site lets you search for crimes by police district, ZIP code or neighborhood, so the best we can do is to deduce the police district, ZIP code and neighborhood that contain a particular crime. (If you search for ZIP code 94109, you can safely assume the resulting crimes are in that ZIP code.)
That's why San Francisco crime on EveryBlock, lamely, only geocodes crimes to the ZIP code level: because that's the only data we could get, and something is better than nothing. But, anyway, we're hoping the SFPD will release more granular locations in their crime data.
You've mentioned your hope that EveryBlock could introduce some standards for news organizations to do geotagging. I'm sure you've discovered wholes swaths of civic data that could use standardization. Can you talk a little bit about what you want to do in this area?
The standards we're thinking about are related to the geotagging of unstructured data -- namely, news articles. I guess there'd be some value in standardizing approaches to structured data (like, building a nationwide crime database), but we're more immediately interested in standardizing the geocoding of "blobs." The main premise is that locations in news articles should be defined in a machine-readable way. Look for something from us soon.
Everyblock lets me find everything in my neighborhood... except other people. Why is that? Do you have any plans to incorporate direct input of local voices into the site?
In time, Rex. In time. :-)
If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not --
are in support of that core goal.
Besides, we already have the problem of offering so many interesting data sets and features that people can only focus on one or two of them. The classic example is that a lot of people haven't noticed that we rolled our own maps (your question above notwithstanding).
I know you constantly get asked the question about scaling the site to other local areas, but here's an idea: say I'm an enterprising small town citizen who's willing to plug in data from my city by matching data to similar fields that you are using. Possible?
Yes, that's possible -- we've built the system in a way that would allow that to happen. Again, as in my response to your reader-generated content question, it's just a matter of implementing it. We had to launch with something, and if we'd included every one of our ideas in the launch version, we'd be on target for a launch in mid 2017. :-)
One of the obligations of the Knight grant is to make all the source code available. Does that affect how you think about the site as an asset?
The open-source requirement affects both our technology and business decisions. We've engineered the thing so that it can be replicated in any area, with any data. I suppose we would've done that anyway, even without the open-source requirement, because it's just the Right Way to do it, but the open-source requirement certainly influenced us.
I'll paraphrase something really smart that Wilson, our designer, said recently: We've created a machine that's capable of publishing address-specific news, and our initial launch is a demonstration of its potential. Now that we're live, it's time to improve the machine and improve the demonstration.
On the business side, clearly we'll have to figure out how the site is going to sustain itself after our grant money is spent. I have a feeling some solution will make itself apparent at some point over the next year and a half. But even before that, we'll find out whether our idea is something that catches on with our audience -- this whole thing is an experiment, after all! For all we know, EveryBlock might be a novelty that doesn't sustain an audience in the long term. Being honest Chicago people, happily far away from the Silicon Valley BS, we have no delusions of grandeur.
I liked your answer to whether EveryBlock constitutes journalism in the OJR interview ("People can define 'journalism' however they'd like"). I'm curious, do you have traffic goals for the site? Or let me ask it a different way: how are you evaluating success?
This is cheesy, but I aim to help people, or improve the world in some way. The tricky thing is that there aren't many concrete ways of measuring that, aside from anecdotes. I suppose we could look at traffic numbers, but, no, we haven't set any traffic goals.
Okay, last question. It's a weird one. Your interest in gypsy jazz is well known. (The last time I saw you, it was in a Toronto bar that supposedly had a jazz scene, but was actually a frat bar. We were both gravely disappointed.) Do you ever think about the relationships between your musical interest and your programming/information interests? Is there anything -- structural, cognitive, performative, whatever -- that makes EveryBlock similar to Django Reinhardt?
Wow, a weird question indeed! Hmm. I guess that, in both music and programing, I strive for subtlety, for elegance.
And EveryBlock cannot be compared to Django Reinhardt. That's sacrilege.
Thanks, Adrian!
(Thanks to Ben, Matt, Robin, Andy, and Matt for suggesting questions for this interview.)
That boy genius Waxy dug up a ton more history about Wired from the WELL. (Andy told me today that he has the entire WELL stored locally. If you ever thought you had nerd cred, recalculate your credentials based on that fact.) It's a very rich history (look at all those names! look at that Mondo 2000 enmity!), which I won't even bother trying to add to, except to toss out one random yet crazy important item that I've wanted to reveal for a while: Gawker Media's former managing editor and Curbed.com founder, Lockhart Steele was an intern at Mondo 2000. Feast, children. To be continued...
You might not know this, but the horribly named Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on FOX is actually the best new show on tv right now. Two reasons why: 1) hot MILF, 2) hot robot. But also!... the girl robot scenes are actually well written and acted. Vulture explains more on a show that io9 should be owning but seems to be covering as news rather than culture.
Wired magazine turns 15 years old this month. This column looks back at the very first issue.
Wired didn't even bother with a Beta release. It bustled onto the publishing scene 15 years ago this month, chirping like a broken modem and shrink-wrapped as a point release: Issue 1.1.
Peeling back those matte pages now, one can't help falling victim to a bit of nostalgia for this town crier of the proto-digital era. There was no logical reason that this magazine should even have existed in 1993. Clinton/Gore had just been sworn in, and no one was talking about the "Information Superhighway" yet. Words like baud and Usenet and ISDN hadn't even been surrendered to the dustbin of digital history.
Need more historical perspective? There weren't even any URLs in the first issues of Wired! The World Wide Web barely existed, and there was no Mosaic browser on which to view it anyway. Goatse wasn't even a dirty thought yet.
And yet there it was, the premiere issue: that blocky logo and Bruce Sterling peering out from the cover. For a brief moment, it seemed as though the nerds were about to take over the world... right up until the suits showed up a few years later to pummel them with their briefcases of money.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves in this story. Let's take a look at that first issue, piece by piece.
Staff Box
Started by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, who moved to California from Holland in 1991, Wired opened with a staff box of unknowns, at least to the traditional media world. Many of them would become the most important technology writers of the next decade.
Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor, came from the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL. John Battelle, who would later found Federated Media and write the definitive book on Google, was the managing editor. The rest of the staff box was sprinkled with names that are now recognized as tech pundits of various stripes: Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, Stewart Brand, John Markoff, Michael Wolff, and Nicholas Negroponte. And of course, the "Patron Saint," Marshall McLuhan.
(An aside: it's difficult to remember how McLuhan was perceived pre-Wired. Though certainly a revered scholar in his lifetime [let us not forget Annie Hall], I also seem to recall a huckster backlash around this time. But three years after the premiere issue of Wired, McLuhan was on the cover of the magazine. Today, even his worst theories get roundly quoted, especially by blowhards like me.)
Tired / Wired
Magazine editors tend to hyperbolize their craft, and nothing gets deliberated with more over-analysis than the opening pages of a magazine. The conventional wisdom is that the blurby, picture-filled front pages set the philosophical agenda of a magazine. The "front of the book," as they call it, psychologically defines who should be reading this rag by persuading you to join the club of similarly excellent tastemakers. So the Wired/Tired Index probably seemed like a stroke of genius. It was the perfect way to divide the world into two simple categories of people: There are those who are wired -- they get it! And there are those are tired -- they don't!
It's classic hippie logic. And congratulations! Because you're reading Wired, you're in the right category.
In retrospect, it's unclear which side of this great divide the actual editors themselves fell on. On its maiden voyage, Wired deemed Nintendo a tired entity, while the long-forgotten gaming console 3DO was celebrated as wired. And for mysterious reasons, painting (painting?) crept into wired status, while performance (performance?) was strangely shelved as tired. But the clincher certainly had to be declaring REM (who had just released their best album, Automatic for the People) tired, but passing wired status onto midwest alt-country act The Jayhawks. This is akin to saying that Graham Parsons was a great DJ.
Other front-of-the-book items: a preview of a cult film called Jurassic Park, a review of a print zine called bOING bOING, and a report on a crazy new technology that could free up your cable tv lines for phone calls.
But the editors actually turned this stagnant interview into something a little funny by reprinting Paglia's handwritten edits scrawled over the top. From the first issue, one could already foresee that Wired was going to be a good publication, but this bit of whimsy suggested that it might just go beyond being the next Mondo 2000. This brand of self-awareness only comes along in decade-long chunks: a '60s Rolling Stone, a '70s Esquire, an '80s Spy.
Or it was just a dumb prank. Whatever.
The cover story, penned by Bruce Sterling, is one in a long history of virtual war stories that Wired would publish. It forgoes references to Ender's Game, but doesn't leave out video game comparisons. "It's modern Nintendo training for modern Nintendo war." Considering that the page directly preceding this is an ad for a new book called The Windows 3.1 Bible, it seems difficult to image how revolutionary these virtual war games could have been.
But what the other features portend has become a Wired hallmark: the clash between culture and technology. John Markoff's story on cellphone hacking dissects a digital subculture in a way that would be replicated several times in the proceeding decade. Similarly, the Otaku feature was prescient in its analysis of Japanese society before it had become a Western obsession. And an interesting note: the story on Richard Stallman's obstacles toward free software doesn't include the phrase "open source" because it had yet to even be popularized.
The Ads
Here's the prevailing question when persuing the ads in this issue: were they as unintelligible then as they are now? The two companies that bought this issue's very first ad and very last ad -- Origin and Trans Rebo, respectively -- were probably as unknown then as they are now. And it's unlikely that the 100,000 copies that the first issue of Wired sold on the newsstand helped them in any way.
A few pages in, the most emblematic page of the first issue of Wired appears.
He looks like an old John "I'm a PC" Hodgman! And look closely -- that screen really says "Fax Transmittal."
Oh, to be young again.
Design
Early Wired is often remembered for its edgy design aesthetic. The disillusion of this myth that you will feel in looking back at the first issues of Wired is comparable to when MTV replays those once-edgy Pat Benatar videos.
The Negroponte Index
MIT scholar, Wired investor, and OLPC creator -- Nicholas Negroponte is himself something of a patron saint to the digerati. But he's clearly crummy at making predictions.
In his inaugural back-page column, Negroponte takes on the emerging technology known as High-Definition Television. With the goggles of a decade-and-a-half to look through, the opening line hits you like a DeLorean hurled from the past: "High-definition television is clearly irrelevant."
Negroponte contends that the future will actually be fuzzy, arguing that it's a mistake to believe "achieving increased image quality is the relevant course to be pursuing." As anyone who's pored over debates about 1080 vs. 720 and counts their HDMI jacks like their children, this looks like the crazy ramblings of a fuzzy-headed college professor.
To be fair, the futurist gets it half right, such as when he prognosticates a burgeoning on-demand culture but mistakingly fetishizing perspective viewing:
What is needed is innovation in programming, new kinds of delivery, and personalization of content. All of this can be derived from being digital. The six-o'clock news can be not only delivered when you want it, but it also can be edited for you and randomly accessed by you. If the viewer wants an old Humphrey Bogart movie at 8:17 pm, the telephone company will provide it over its twisted-pair copper lines. Eventually, when you watch a baseball game, you will be able to do so from any seat in the stadium or, for that matter, from the perspective of the baseball. That would be a big change.
Sounds awesome! Too bad approximately 1 kjillion dollar were spent last year on cramming living rooms with big ass TVs instead.
Colophon
I remember exactly where I was when the first issue of Wired was handed to me. Exiting a coffee shop called The Urban Stampede -- the only coffee shop within 70 miles of the small midwest state school I was attending -- a friend accosted me, clutching a mysterious magazine with a striped spine. He shoved it in my hands, exasperated, "You have to see this." Wired instantly became required reading for all of our friends.
And our favorite part of the magazine was buried in the back, in the pages that articles jumped to: the colophon.
There were probably two reasons why we loved the colophon: 1) we had no idea what a colophon was, and 2) it showed the means of production of the magazine. The colophon listed the computers (Apple Macintosh II), the printers (HP Scanjet IIc), the layout software (Quark XPress), and even the routers (Farallon). And then it concluded with some music (Dinosaur Jr., Curve, k.d. lang, etc.) and a final heading for "drugs of choice" (caffeine, sugar, Advil).
It sounds corny, but we loved this magazine because its creators drank the same soda as us. These people actually had opinions about routers and ethernet cables!
I don't know if this is surreal or predictable, but it's certainly obvious now: futurism and nostalgia are intricately linked with each other. Revisiting the early pages of Wired reminds one of a time when there was an underground culture -- when not everything was known by everyone else. Can you remember a time when there were secrets? It sounds so naive.
But it also sounds tremendously boring. Thankfully, we'll always have the future.
Another sorta interesting but ultimately forgettable thing from Ask.com: Big News. It's in the Techmeme/Digg space, and seems to improve on some of those ideas, but.... I don't know why this is, but Ask.com makes decent stuff that never seems to resonate with people. [via]
One of my favorite pastimes is watching Gawker commenters jump on Nick Douglas' case. From the start, the entire set despised Nick's ignoble task: to explain internet culture to a city that just discovered Tumblr. (For context, remember when all of NYC was scared of blogs? And then remember when they were scared of comments? Now they're totally freaked out by Twitter.) The Gawker loyalists have unwittingly become like their old media foes -- resistant to change like nothing I've since the last Tribune meeting I sat in. (Back in Minnesota, I invented a word for this: neu-liberalism. Those are liberals who think they're really progressive but are actually completely freaked out by anything that moves faster than circa-1985 MTV. So think: daily newspaper editors and NPR listeners.) And so it's logical that Nick has gradually become accepted, even appreciated, in the past few weeks, because eventually all change is accepted. His most recent piece introduces a decent concept: Diggbrow, an analysis of what constitutes "art" among the populist areas of the internet. "The Diggbrow movement isn't destroying art any more than the Dadaists or post-modernists did; it's reinventing it." Whoa, slow down there, buddy...
Convergence! Synergy! Well, this one gets some points for modest ingenuity if nothing else... Celebutantes is a new novel coming out next month that has an accompanying web tv series, which will immediately carve out the lovers/haters of the book (is there really any way to intellectualize superficiality?). Tilzy describes it as "a young Sophia Coppola farce with an exaggerated Entourage and/or Californication aesthetic."
Oh, this is RAD... The Hypeful figured out all the songs played at Rob's party on Cloverfield and created a playlist (with mp3s) called Rob's Party Mix. What's the creepy factor of playing this at a party at my house?
In this Washington Post story about the online debates encircling The Wire, "something called Fimoculous.com" is name-checked in the second graph as part of "the poly-linked blogfest tempest." Whee! Later on, my post is quoted: "Vulture contested the copy-editing scandal, but today David Simon himself took issue with Vulture taking issue with David Simon taking issue with the word ['evacuate']." To which we can now append in tidy fashion: "...the Washington Post notes..."
I'm mildly annoyed that I'm now getting my Seattle news via the New York Times, but whatever.... Amazon.com has a new office planned in the South Lake Union area. It looks very ugly, which is sad because their old offices are pretty cool. (Also, I still own a condo in Belltown, so I'm denigrating this architecture merely to keep my old neighborhood as the "cool" one. Well, yuppie cool, anyway.)
So this is sorta interesting.... last week Nick Douglas did a post on Gawker about 2 Girls 1 Cup. The commenters FREAKED like nothing I've ever seen since the last time I made fun of MetaFilter. But realizing that their freakouts would in fact lead to more pageviews for the post (and per the new retribution model, more money for Nick), the community decided to take their comments to a four-month old post instead. Crafty, this industry's audience. [via]
A new super stalking site: Spokeo. Enter someone's name and it will update you whenever the person does something online -- updates their Facebook notes, adds to their Amazon Wishlist, uploads photo to Flickr... and so forth. [via]
Last year I decided to put on twist on my annual "best blogs" post [2002, 2003, 2004] by taking a turn toward the obscure. Because blogs now pervade the media landscape, it makes little sense to write a post arguing that Huffington Post is better or worse than DailyKos -- or Cute Overload.
It turned out that this change -- pointing to lesser-known sites like History of the Button, Buzzfeed, and Indexed -- was a rather auspicious. Within 24 hours of releasing the list, seven of the top ten links on Del.icio.us' typically-tech-centric hotlist were sites on my list. And so in the spirit of celebrating the lesser-known, it's time again to point toward the best blogs that might have flown under your radar. Here they are, the Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren't Reading:
30) The Informed Reader As mainstream media organizations continue to close their foreign bureaus out of cost-saving desperation, the less expensive version -- "the international news blog" -- has become a staple property on nearly all sites (nytimes.com,msnbc.com, cnn.com, newyorker.com, etc.). Though the foreign news consumer might be tricked into believing these will reveal new forms of international reporting, it actually means that none of these sites stick out above the rest -- except for the Wall Street Journal's The Informed Reader, which somehow kept my attention this year by finding the right balance between gathering links and providing context. (See also: Good Magazine.)
28) Paleo-Future If the dictum "the future is now" has any veracity, then what do we do with the past? This blog chronicles how past generations envisioned what the future would look like. With an archive that goes back to the 1880s, Paleo-Future is an essential compendium of a new historical category: nostalgic futurism. (See also: Subtopia.)
27) TV In Japan If ever there were a genre in need of aggregation, Japanese TV would be it. This site (from my friend Gavin Purcell, whose day job is running Attack of the Show on G4) is religious in its pursuit to bring you the best moments of televised weirdness from the Land of the Rising Sun. (See also: Neojaponisme and Ping Mag.)
26) BookForum For those of us who have given up on the once-spectacular and oft-praised Arts & Letters Daily, the transformation of Book Forum to an aggregation blog has been nothing less than a savior. (See also: ArtsJournal.)
23) Metafilter Popular Favorites Every year I sneak a reference to Metafilter onto this list. And every year a Metafilter post ridicules its inclusion -- can't wait to see this year's! My longstanding love-hate relationship with Metafilter (check the archives) tilted back toward the negative this year, which is why the Popular Favorites feature was almost a panacea for my frustration. More big sites are adding this "favoriting" feature (BoingBoing, Gothamist, etc.), which I initially appraised as a cheap way of avoiding depth, but now find the only way I can continue reading some sites. (See also: Ask.Metafilter.)
22) Drawn.ca Drawn bills itself at "collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw," but it acts more like a comprehensive guide to visual culture. (See also: Design Observer.)
21) FourFour The overabundant jungle of pop culture blogging leaves little room for new voices to emerge. One can read only so many snarky reviews of every episode of every reality tv show on every network every night (I know!). As an antidote to Perez Hilton's pretty hate machine, FourFour's Rich Juzwiak (whose day job is blogging for VH1) has carved out something unique in the pop landscape by balancing critical insight with a celebration for the lovable. And what does FourFour love? For starters: Tyra, America's Next Top Model, Beyonce, Tyra, Project Runway, and... Tyra. (See also: Golden Fiddle and Best Week Ever.)
20) Reverse Cowgirl Her: "Why don't more sex bloggers make your list?" Me: "Cuz they all talk about the same thing." Her: "Yes, but in many different ways." It's true, sex bloggers don't usually end up on this list, but Susannah Breslin's blog was one of the few sites in the genre to stay in the "to read" pile all year long.
19) Kanye West: Blog Too much was made again this year about famous people getting blogs. Do you really want more insight into these people's opinions? Of course not -- you want to know their passions, their desires, their interest in dropping $7K on a bottle of cognac. Kanye's blog is more like a scrapbook of his id: some links (hey look, the new Lupe Fiasco vid), some photos (hey look, a Delorean), but surprisingly little ego.
17) Strange Maps Does saying "it was a big year for maps!" sound retarded? Well, it was. (See also: Great Map.)
16) Pussy Ranch Several years ago I included Diablo on a "hot new blog!" list. Now she's super famous, and I'm still making this stupid list.
15) Serious Eats Food blogging has always been a blind spot for me, but Serious Eats was the first site to find the right mix of editorial voice and community interaction.
14) Shorpy The photoblog genre is easy to overlook, but this blog puts itself in a curatorial role by collecting photos up to 100 years old. (See also: The Triumph of Bullshit.)
12) Jakob and Julia Jakulia was the worst best (and the best worst) thing of 2007. Don't know it? Just thank your lucky stars and move on. (See also: NYGirlOfMyDreams.com.)
11) The Daily Swarm Looking for an alternative to Pitchfork? Who isn't! But Daily Swarm isn't exactly that -- it's a music news source that somehow seems to break news before anyone else. And it's not "press release" news that Pitchfork delivers, nor the salacious celeb news of TMZ, nor even the industry banter of Idolator; rather, The Daily Swarm's beat is a rare kind of -- dare I say -- investigative work that no one else is doing. (See also: Stereogum and Culture Bully.)
10) A Brief Message Brevity seemed to only increase its role as the ruling doctrine this year (see: Snack Culture), and the designers hopped on board with their micro-manifestos on this site. (See also: Very Short List.)
9) The "Blog of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks You've seen them -- too many times to count. And if you had taken pictures of every unnecessary instance of quotation marks, you "probably" would have made this list too. (See also: Apostrophe Abuse.)
8) emo+beer = busted career When Earl Boykins mixed the infographic with a passion for Brooklyn indie music, he ended up with several pieces in the New York Times that could have passed for art installations. (See also: Infosthetics.)
7) Frolix-8: Philip K. Dick What we once called "the news" is increasingly becoming different filters for perceiving reality. If you think about it, watching the news is just putting on someone else's reality goggles. Philip K. Dick would probably agree, and so this amazing site gives you today's headlines matched up next to which PKD novel the story corresponds with. If it seems that science fiction gets less fantastical every year, then this is the site for you. (See also: Cyber Punk Review.)
6) Snowclones A snowclone -- says Wikipedia, cuz it oughta know -- is "a type of formula-based cliche that uses an old idiom in a new context." The best example is the rampant usage of "X is the new Y." But there are so many others, such as "Don't hate me because I'm X," "In X, no one can hear you Y," "No rest for the X," "To X or not to X," "Xgate," "Xcore," "Got X?" -- and many more. The site is so diligent in its pursuit of the cliche and the trite that you might fall stricken with a loss of words, gasping "This is not your daddy's snowclone." (See also: Language Hat and Away With Words.)
5) Jezebel Gawker Media's modus operandi is to enter a content category (gadgets, politics, sports, music, etc.) by summarizing that industry with enough volume (in both senses of the word) to basically become the essential trade mag in that sector. This is why Jezebel represents the biggest coup in the empire's history. Rather than beguile its way into the women's magazine industry, Jezebel burst onto the scene in May by defining itself in oppositional terms. It isn't so much a thing as it is not those things. To be clear: it is not the celeb porn that Conde Nast and Hearst have been splooging on you from newsstands for decades. Whereas the average Idolator post would fit in just fine in Blender or Pitchfork, Jezebel was an entire take-down of Glamour, Cosmo, and the rest of the airbrushed crew. This is the holy grail of publishing: to find a voice that is completely unique while still appealing to a broad category. Nicely played, Mr. Denton. (Note: By the numbers, Jezebel probably doesn't qualify in the "overlooked" character of this list. But with as many dudes like me reading this "women's fashion" site every day...) (See also: Spout.)
3) Vulture New York Magazine is a perplexing contradiction. It is probably the best magazine on the newsstand right now (Wired is the only competition), but it also has an editorial voice that is occasionally annoying in its sense of privilege and entitlement. On its worst days, I call this attitude "Aggressively SoHo" -- as in, it surpassed believing that NYC is the center of the world by declaring the epicenter somewhere south of 14th St. and north of Chambers St. When my bestest friend Melissa (disclaimer!) said she was co-launching this blog (she has since moved onto Rolling Stone), I was worried that this voice would ring through on its cultural coverage. But the opposite has happened -- Vulture has kept the best parts of New York Mag (the nuance, the design, the clever), while leaving the Aggressive SoHo Tude at the door. (See also: Wired's Blogs.)
2) Ill Doctrine When Ze Frank sadly abided by his promise to shut down his much-celebrated but under-watched show in March (after exactly one year), the internet was left to gasp for unique video programming. Jay Smooth's Ill Doctrine has been the only video blog to emerge with a distinct voice, a mature vision, and brilliant programming that mixes essay, criticism, and attitude. Check it: Chocolate Radiohead and Amy Winehouse and the Ethics of Clowning People. (See also: Epic-Fu and Rod 2.0.)
1) Twitter and Tumblr "Blog" has always been an elastic term, just barely surviving the stress of containing everything from Hot Chicks With Douchebags to DailyKos to your mom's Vox account. But this year the seams of the term finally burst, and out spilled some brand new words, tweets and tumbls, and these two new forms of quasi-blogging that are more personal, more immediate, and of course more annoying than anything online communication has rustled up so far. Twitter and Tumblr are the Rubik's Cube and the Tetris of the blogging world -- simple concepts that are immensely more complex and compelling than they logically should be. I've explained Twitter to a hundred people in a hundred different ways, each time not quite capturing why it's different, why it matters. "You just have to play it to understand," I eventually say, choosing the only verb that approaches the nuanced complexity. And yet, there's another very simple way to say it: Twitter and Tumblr made blogging fun again this year.
Pretty fantastic package just released over at Wired... first, they got David Byrne and Thom Yorke to sit down together and talk about the music industry (with stacks of audio clips!) and then Byrne lays out six scenarios for saving artists from the industry's collapse (with charts!).
If I have any regrets for 2007, it's that I didn't play enough video games. And Slate's sprawling epic gaming conversation (17 printed pages) is full of proof that I missed the year's most important cultural happenings. Sure, I put in my time with Desktop Tower Defense, threw the Wii control around a bit, and dabbled in Halo 3. But I didn't play Rock Band, I didn't play BioShock, I didn't play Portal, I didn't play Super Mario Galaxy... I didn't even play Scrabulous!
Since Drudge is also reporting it, I guess it's safe to now say: the leading contender for the job of new managing editor of Gawker is... Nick Denton. Valleywag was at its best when Nick helmed it, so we'll see how this works. Update: Now NYT has the story.
This year proved again that when it feels like the entire goddamn world is going to hell -- that's a good time to throw a dance party. Whether you were fist-pumping for Maya's admittance back into America, chanting "We are North American scum!" at the club, or just jumping in giddy delight that Justice somehow landed an MTV Music Video Award nomination, it was a good year to dance in the streets, especially to these, my favorite albums of 2007:
1) Kanye West, Graduation
Take away his ego, and Kanye's music ceases to exist. That's because Kanye is one of a dying breed of artist, like a Bob Dylan or a Woody Allen or a Bjork, who create art out of sheer force of will and ego. Art and life aren't binaries for these people. How else to explain this album's sui generis cocktail -- a sampling of his mentors in dance (Daft Punk), street (Jay-Z), fashion (Louis Vuitton), and art (Murakami). And, I suppose, literature (Nietzsche), by pinching that particularly arch aphorism about surviving adversity. "That which does not kill me..." might suggest that Kanye's force emerges from some sort of Ayn Randian individualism, but it's more clearly the power that comes from treating your life as collage.
2) M.I.A., Kala
The '80s would have been much better if M.I.A. were around to squelch that wretched little phrase "world music" -- she would drop some street on those marketers. Although she would resist this, Maya has somehow emerged as one of the few relevant voices in the language of globalization: descriptive not prescriptive, street not studio, itinerant not stagnant, and most importantly, local not global. This is why I've written before that M.I.A. brings to mind Rem Koolhaas more than anyone else -- one can visualize her building little markets (songs) on the streets of Lagos or Sri Lanka or Kingston. That's what this album sounds like: all the streets in the world playing music at once.
3) LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
Though James Murphy's second album will fill your daily dance-punk requirements, it's the fifth track, the ballad "All My Friends," which stands out as the best song of the year. Pretty much the exact opposite of his glib underground hit "Losing My Edge," this song starts with a cold, repetitive keyboard line that's probably pinched from some minimalistic Steve Reich score. And it never really deviates from there, except by layering some lines about friendship, which becomes the song's theme -- not about a single friend, but about the celebration of friendship as a concept. "You spend the next five years trying to get with the plan / And the next five trying to get with your friends again" has been the mantra for a couple hundred 30-somethings who I know.
4) Justice, Cross
Even though they never released an album, one could call 2007 the year of Daft Punk. Between their Coachella appearance, their movie, and Kanye creating their first Billboard hit, Daft Punk was an invisible success story. And to complete the story, we could call this the best Daft Punk album in years -- and get away with it without too much guilt.
5) Mark Ronson, Version
Prepare thyself for a strange reason to like a musician: Ronson exposes the weakness of Pitchfork. The plucky music site has been an aggressive foe of Ronson and his entourage (Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen). The reasons for this are somewhat paradoxical, since the Ronson aesthetic -- let's call it "synthetic retro" -- is usually a Pitchfork touchstone. But beyond all that industry prattle, Ronson is one of the few producers who can put together a cohesive solo album of his own. Some might tire of the ska inflections on a few tracks, but then Winehouse's cover of The Zutons' "Valerie" comes along to make you remember that synthetic nostalgia is the best kind.
6) I'm Not There, Soundtrack
Of course you want to hear Sonic Youth cover Dylan. And Malkmus, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and The Hold Steady, and Karen O, and two discs more of this.
7) Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55
Did Charlotte haunt you this year? Because she haunted me. And does she remind you of a long lost love? For me, she does. Are you glad that someone finally found something decent for Air to do? Yes, me too.
8) Klaxons, Myths of the Near Future
Fuck "new rave" -- this is "new Iron Maiden"! The album has enough arcane mythology to fill the new D&D manual. If you caught Klaxons in concert this year, you witnessed this strange spectacle: teenage kids dancing around on stage with a Mello Yello high, quoting Coleridge and Pynchon, and playing their instruments like they invented them.
9) Simian Mobile Disco, Attack Decay Sustain Release
Let's get this out of the way: there's a lot bullshit on this album. Some of these tracks are the worst offenders of the reductive, repetitive, retrograde kind of techno/house that gives the entire genre a bad name. But in those moments where humanity creeps in -- on "Hustler" and "It's The Beat" -- this turns into something like the best of Bjork's dance work.
10) Battles, Mirrored
What happens when you throw another "post-" in front of "post-rock"? Prog rock! No one expected this segment of the '70s to reemerge this year, but Battles at least added a little head-shaking to the shoe-gazing genre.
11) Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
When I forgot to bring my iPod on a trip to LA this year, I bought this CD to play in the rental car. And then I turned it up every time I started to fight with the girl who was traveling with me. I now know this album by heart.
12) Britney Spears, Blackout
Yep, above Radiohead. Why? Because while Radiohead is obsessed with dystopic futures, Britney actually is the future. Like one of those fake Japanese pop idols, Brit-Bot is the complete cypher that gets invented by producers and the media. This album is like a Wikipedia entry in which everyone -- The Neptunes, TMZ, whoever -- should get a writing credit. You may not like to hear this, but Britney is you.
15) White Williams, Smoke
Since no one seems up to carrying the mantle anymore, the title of The New Bowie could be passed onto White Williams. But more than pure retread, Williams rips '70s glam through a processor that admits the existence of disco, Beck, and laptop pop.
16) The Pipettes, We Are the Pipettes
This album caused my dorky friends in San Francisco to actually dance. For getting nerds to shuffle, some might say this album should be much higher on the list.
18) Prince, Planet Earth
Although I didn't make it back to Minneapolis to see him perform at First Ave this year (which was a blessing, because the cops shot it down in less than an hour), Prince put out the album that's aesthetically the closest to Purple Rain that we've seen in some time.
19) White Stripes, Icky Thump
You could almost forget that the White Stripes released an album this year.
20) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Is Is
If it felt like Karen O spent this year trying to figure out what people wanted her to be, this EP didn't necessarily contradict that. Even its title seems obsessed with self-definition.
21) Tomahawk, Anonymous
While we wait for Michael Patton to do something a little more digestible again (We! Want! Lovage!), he put out this strange Native American Heavy Metal album.
22) Chromeo, Fancy Footwork
Ever wished Hall & Oats dabbled in disco? Then Chromeo is for you.
23) Bloc Party, Weekend in the City
Bloc Party have me hanging by a thread. I want them to have staying-power, but this could just be their last relevant album.
24) Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha
I think of this album as what happens when you mash together Chicago and Minneapolis. It has the sound of Drag City, but the aesthetic of Tim. Which makes sense, because Bird is from Chicago but the album with recorded in Minneapolis with some of its finest locals.
25) Thurston Moore, Trees Outside the Academy
You know how Beck tends to alternate between doing a rock/hip-hop album and doing a down-tempo/acoustic album? This is like the response to last year's rocking Rather Ripped.
Last year at this time, I made my annual Predictions for Media/Tech/Pop, which somehow even squeaked a bit of praise from Frau Denton. As I wrote in a comment in that Valleywag thread, accuracy is never the goal of these things -- it's more about creating alternate universes that seem plausible.
But that's no excuse to hide behind the veil of science fiction. So let's review how well my predictions actually were. I score them below, on an accuracy scale of 1 to 10, even the ones that were purely a joke.
1) $100 PC will be a failure.
Cha-ching. This one hardly seemed obvious a year ago, but this project has run into innumerable problems, the least of which is that it costs twice the advertised price. Score: 10
2) MySpace will introduce no new significant features.
I was very close to scoring a 10 on this, but Facebook scored the bejezus out of Tom and Rupert by mid-year, so they finally released some new things, including a user update stream. It still sucks. Score: 4
3) Apple buys Last.FM. iTV is a hit. No iPhone.
I should just erase all my points -- I was wrong about every single one of these. Horribly, horribly wrong. To be honest, I only made this prediction so I could write this: "The iPhone is like god -- if it really existed, you wouldn't care that much." Turns out, I was only half right -- it is god, but you do care. Score: -1
4) Google and Apple form partnership.
Nope. In fact, I'm surprised to see how much the two companies were competing by the end of the year -- especially in the mobile space. Score: 0
5) A rumor spreads that Conde Nast is buying Gawker.
This didn't happen, but it totally should have, so... Score: 3
6) Jim chooses Pam on The Office.
Yes! Score: 10
7) Studio 60 catches on.
No! Score: 0
8) A media company tries to buy Technorati.
If by "buy" you mean "runs away from in fear," then sure. Score: 0
9) Your mom is charged with plagiarism.
The year started with more plagiarism accusations, but they mostly fizzled out by the end of the year. Score: 3
10) 1) Brian Williams. 2) Charlie Gibson. 3) Katie Couric.
Flip the first two. Score: 4
11) Vista ships.
But it sucks. Score: 7
12) Google buys Twitter.
Could still happen. Score: 2
13) AOL does nothing.
Ya know, despite all the lay-offs, AOL wasn't as laughable in 2007 as it was in 2006. It may get spun off yet... Score: 5
14) No one buys Facebook.
A year ago, this actually sounded like a bold prediction. Score: 10
15) Terry Semel exits Yahoo.
C'mon, gimme some credit now, eh? This wasn't obvious! Score: 10
16) Zune 2.0 is a sorta hit.
Oh yeah, baby. It's not super huge, but it did sell out on Amazon and other places. Score: 9
17) Second Life begins to sink.
Hitting my stride now. Score: 8
18) The year of mobile.
I say this every year, and it never quite happens. The iPhone and... that's about it. Score: 3
19) Dane Cook hosts the White House Press Corp dinner.
Bzzt. Score: 0
20) Chumby!
Well, it came out. No accolades though. Score: 3
21) More newspaper layoffs.
Ugh, that one was really hard. Score: 8
22) Smartpox won't catch on.
What the hell is Smartpox? Score: 10
23) CBS makes some surprise investments.
Last.FM! WallStrip! Now do you forgive me for those horrible Apple predictions? Score: 10
Oh yeah, my little welcoming present from NYC was being asked to guest-edit Gawker for a couple days. After making a long list of minor media revolutions I would introduce, I spent most of my first day on the job looking for the perfect combination of WiFi and coffee. When I finally got around to writing and editing, my most substantive piece was a weird little week in digital media review (complete with a McLuhan reference in the first graph, for all my fans back home). More next week...
One of these days I'm going to do a take-down article on a sacred cow of the internet: BoingBoing. I've already got a few ledes written: "BoingBoing, the pretend-thinking-man's Fark," "BoingBoing, your source for two-week-old links," "BoingBoing, keeping post-hippiness alive since 1991...." And so on. Truth is, I like Cory and Xeni and the gang -- they're swell people. And I bet I'm the only one here who owns every single issue of bOING bOING -- the magazine. But BoingBoing is clearly the most over-rated blog on the internet (which is easy to declare, since it's also the third-most-popular). I thought that maybe BoingBoing TV might finally give me the opportunity to write this imaginary critique, but, like Slate, I'm mostly just bored with it (though the John Hodgman interview was alright). So until I write that take-down (oops, is this it?), I will continue to mumble about BoingBoing being slow, single-minded, and DIY smug... every single day, because I somehow can't unsubscribe from the damn thing.
Interesting little factoids about Gossip Girl: 1) though it currently has a cancellation-inducing ranking of #106 on Nielsen, it rocks the online distribution world as the #1 downloaded show on iTunes; 2) Kristen Bell plays the disembodied voice of gossip girl herself; 3) the show was originally supposed to be a feature film starring Lindsay Lohan; and 4) The New Yorkerthinks it's a snotty, worthless show.... but of course they would.
From Sarah's review of the Jim Walsh's new Replacements oral history: "One testimonial after another tells the same story: The Replacements got wasted before the show. Then they played a bullshit set of cover songs. You've been a teenager, so you know why this is cool: It made them look like they didn't care. If they really had no talent, no one else would have cared, either. But if you have the proven ability to write genius rock songs, and you have an adoring crowd of fans in front of you, and you choose to risk alienating them by laughing your way through five renditions of 'Hello, Dolly,' you relay a very powerful message. In Reagan's America, with its yuppie consumer worship, jock-filled high schools, and submoronic hair-metal gods, you have just said 'No' to success, popularity, and rock star-ism. Do you remember the vileness of the culture in the '80s? The Replacements were reacting against it, and maybe they were immature drunks, but maybe they were also...sorta...philosophically rigorous?" This is great for several reason, but mostly because it's also subversively a bit of Sarah autobiography too.
Don't expect a 10.0 in Pitchfork review of Radiohead's In Rainbows.... instead, they leave it up to you. (But, no really, it's 9.3.) Harp has speculation that 1.2 million sold.
Bill Gates' music taste? Well, there's U2... and then the Beatles and the Stones... and then Broadway musicals. Stop by my office, boss man -- I'm gonna show ya some Kanye, Prince, Daft Punk, and MIA.
I never did link to last week's SNL skit "Iran So Far" because, well, everyone else in the known blogosphere did. By now, you've probably heard the news that NBC did a take-down of it, even though it was on their own YouTube channel. But maybe you haven't yet heard the reason why.... it's because Aphex Twin (!) was sampled in the skit without permission. There's more at Pitchfork, while The Daily Swarm notes that "NBC was not required to get clearance for Saturday's broadcast, and until they intend to air the show again, copyright law allows for 'ephemeral use'." So despite what it might seem like some days, the internet isn't ephemeral use.
This is one of the weirdest things I've seen in music in a long time: Radiohead has just announced they have a new album coming out... in 10 days. I don't think anyone even knew they were making a new record. Some strange pre-order and format info on the site for the album: In Rainbows. UPDATE: the price for download will be left up to the individual buyer. Amazing.
This is goddamn brilliant: CustomReceipts.com. They will print fake ATM receipts with your name and whatever balance you want. Why would you want that? So when you need a piece of scratch paper to write down your phone number for girls at bars.... see! brilliant!
In one of those crazy stories where everyone seems to do the wrong thing, 19 people were arrested in Minneapolis this weekend at a Critical Mass event gone awry. Most interesting to me is the interplay of threads on MNspeak and MetaFilter. As my pal Marsh says, "Last night was a full-on dress rehearsal for the RNC. Both by the cowboys and the indians. The cops and the robbers.... next August is going to be ugly" -- that's when the Republican National Convention goes down in this very blue state. (Btw, between bridge collapses, blowjobs in airports, and cops clashing with biking kids.... Minneapolis can't stay out of the news lately.)
The story in this month's Wired about sex and mistaken online identity starts off reading like something you might see in your daily paper... but it wraps up with a magnificent surprise ending. Recommended.
If you walk around Seattle, one of the unusual things you'll notice is the number of Teriyaki joints -- the red & yellow neon signs are seemingly everywhere, with greater concentration than anywhere else you'd expect it (San Fran, Vancouver.... Tokyo). The Seattle Weekly does a little investigation into where they all came from.
Just seven more days until the new M.I.A. album, but in the meantime here are this week's recommended new releases.... Music: Junior Senior's Hey Hey My My Yo Yo; DVD: David Lynch's Inland Empire and the Collector's Edition of Taxi Driver
The cinematic event of the year is nearly upon us: starting Monday, a new episode from the chapters 13-22 of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet will be posted at IFC.com/trapped every day. Two other dates to watch... Aug. 21: the DVD comes out; Sept. 7: all the episodes (1-22) will air on IFC. When art historians look back on the 21st century, this is what will stand out. I'm being totally serious.
Casey's op-ed in The Guardian about the relationship between vloggers and television networks has been on my mind for the past 24 hours. I've got an idea...
You already know I'm obsessed with Scott Baio Is 45... and Single (45? that's it? woot!), but now it seems that Slate is in the game too. The show (which I've already described as "therapy in reverse") borrows both the revisit-ex-girlfriend angst and the bad-best-friends unhealthiness of High Fidelity, but eliminates all those yucky feelings that tortured Cusack.
This new Akon video is awesome. The word count on "sorry" must be near four digits -- he apologizes incessantly for... I have no idea, but he's even taking the blame for things he hasn't done yet. Does that work? Me too! (His nobility shines at the end as he apologizes for that dry-humping a 14-year-old incident. Except, if you listen closely, he blames some one else... but is very sorry, nonetheless.)
Google News is adding comments, except not what you think. Comments will be from "those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question." Hmmmm...
It wasn't so long ago that Garrison Keillor got a cell phone. My oh my, he was giddy with delight. Now he writes in Salon about being in NYC and getting calls on it from Minnesota after the bridge collapsed. Of course, he never misses an opportunity to impose his caricatured brand on all my friends ("We are a state of Germans and Scandinavians"... umm, not all of us, yo), and he seems to think the worst thing about the bridge collapse is that it will hinder his trips to the Mayo Clinic.
This has been one of the worst weeks in recent memory, so it seems important for us to visit the sublime weirdness that is Billy Ocean's "Loverboy" video as a reminder that things could be much.... more surreal.
I know, you've been watching every single lonelygirl15 episode.... there's a finale coming! It will be on MySpace, which is lame, but the sorta cool part: it will consist of 12 episodes released hourly.
I'm in NYC this week. My goal: investigate why Malcolm Gladwell has not updated his blog in over six months. This could take a while, so expect few updates here until next week...
In Wired, Clive Thompson describes the "telepathic awareness of the people" that makes Twitter so engaging. I described this as "ambient friend awareness" a while back, but I love Clive's analogy: "It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are.... Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination."
I am about to draw a line of six degrees of separation from Bob Dylan to Paris Hilton in the most asinine way possible. Ready? Okay, have you been following this story about Lindsay Lohan's "girlfriend" who betrayed her? (Shut up, you have too.) So that wonderful girl is Samantha Ronson. (I mean, haha, DJ Samantha Ronson. Seriously.) Now, her brother is... that's right, Mark Ronson, producer of Lily Allen and Amy Whinehouse, not to mention having the second-best album of the year so far (that's not opinion -- it's so damn good that Pitchfork didn't even get it). Anyway, as everyone (plus Wikipedia) knows, DJ Samantha Ronson is BFF with DJ AM (because they're both DJs! doy!) who is of course... yep, not the father of Nicole Richie's baby. Done! Oh wait, how do I get Dylan into this clusterfuck? For the first time ever, Dylan has agreed to have one of his songs remixed by.... Mark Ronson! So to repeat: Paris --> Lindsay --> Nicole --> DJ AM --> DJ Samantha Ronson --> Mark Ronson --> Bob Dylan. See, aren't you people glad I'm just a link blogger?
My favorite song right now: Justice's remix of Timberlake's 'Love Stoned.' It sounds like Michael Jackson produced by Daft Punk trying to invoke the '70s via the Bee Gees and Kraftwerk.... but good.
More predictions fodder: Surowiecki in The New Yorker talks about MediaPredict. "Wisdom of the crowds" (which Surowiecki of course coined) is inherently predictive...
Good (even though Gawker will make fun of it in 5... 4...): 50 Things You Should Never Say. "We met on eHarmony.com." "Bros before hos." "I actually make my own granola."
NYT Mag had built up a ton of personal anticipation for its Wikipedia news story, but it fell short on a few accounts, including mostly that it's only maybe 20% about news (the other 80% is just another Wikipedia story that you've already read). What I really wanted to read is something like Anil's recent post on the future of journalism spread out over 10 pages instead. (I could personally supply a half-dozen anecdotes on open-source journalism that would be better than those in the NYT story.) However, three interesting points: 1) the tension that exists between Wikinews and Wikipedia seems substantial, 2) the factoid that 1 out of every 200 total online pageviews belongs to Wikipedia is staggering, and 3) the notion that Wikipedia "derives a certain degree of authority and trust in the mind of the reader by avoiding original research" is provocative... and, I'm pretty sure, an opening. (If this weren't a link blog, I'd write more on this, but you've already moved on.)
You wouldn't believe how much time I spent last night looking for videos of Paris Hilton doing drugs -- because I know I've seen them online before! If you haven't heard, she claimed on Larry King last night that she's never done drugs... Liar! I couldn't find the ones of her doing coke, but here she is getting high in Amsterdam. Update from the comments: Of course Smoking Gun has all the entire collection.
The one reason that I'm not buying an iPhone on Friday -- that it doesn't work with Exchange -- could in fact be changed as soon as.... today? (BTW, don't be fooled by that Mossberg line "if your IT department cooperates by enabling a setting on the server," because your IT department won't enable IMAP, despite what Gruber speculates.)
Y'all know about the Steampunk meme, right? I haven't linked to any of it because BoingBoing has been all over it like... yeah, that. Anyway, Wired has a decent slideshow to catch you up.
As I see it, the problem with last week's Paris Hilton story is this: there is absolutely no acceptable opinion. Every single response sounds retarded. Outrage at the justice system? Retarded. Outrage at the media? Retarded. Outrage at the public? Retarded. Cultural relevance response? Retarded. Sympathy for Paris? Retarded. Apathy? Retarded. Non-answers like this? Totally retarded. And then Christopher Hitchens comes along with something that seems perhaps non-retarded... but it's still retarded.
I will be in L.A. for the long weekend, so no updates for a few days... unless, of course, I do coke off a B-celeb's tummy. (I wouldn't tell you if it were an A-celeb. I'm classy like that.)
Why the hell Metric is releasing videos for songs from albums that came out three years ago... I have no idea. But I sure do love me some Emily Haines: "Empty."
I've been suspicious of this Josh Wolf story since the beginning, but I've been a little afraid to voice it because it sounds like he's fighting the good fight. But now that he's out we can also see for ourselves why he was in jail for 226 days because... HE POSTED THE FOOTAGE THAT HE DIDN'T WANT A GRAND JURY TO SEE TO HIS VLOG? Fer chrissakes. Sorry, but now I'm even more suspicious of this than before. It's too long to explain here (me link blog; you word blog), but this whole thing treads on too much dangerous ground, potentially capable of bringing down so much that First Amendment lawyers have fought for. I don't think you people realize what you're fighting for.
I'm totally in like with the new dating site ImInLikeWithYou.com. The general idea is to accentuate flirting rather than dating. It does this by giving you virtual money that you can "spend" by bidding on a girl or boy. You need an invite to get in...
Kottke's take on Twitter. Back in December, I talked to Jason a bit about Twitter, and he already had evolved thoughts on it... glad he's putting them up now. (Me on Twitter.)
Many of the SXSW Podcasts are already up. If you listen to the Blogebrity one, you can hear Nick Douglas repeatedly stumble while mispronouncing my name. (Love ya, Nick!) Bruce Sterling's rant was totally crackpot... but mildly genius. And stay away from Dan Rather's exceptionally tedious boilerplate. (Will Wright stole the show, but his speech isn't up yet -- transcript here.) Summarizing all that I saw and heard at SXSW would be futile, so I'll just say thanks to everyone I got to hang out with.
SciFi.com has launched the Battlestar Galactica Videomaker Toolkit. Use pre-existing and uploaded clips to make your own four-minute clips. These things are always better in theory than in practice, but maybe someone gets off on it...
Lately I've been thinking about how writers enjoy making declarations like "We live in an age in which..." or "New Yorkers are the kinds of people who..." or "Paris Hilton is representative of our time because...." Statements like these are addictive in their simplicity, creating the appearance of aphoristic profundity. And I'm more ridiculously guilty of this form of generalization than anyone. (I recently looked back at the columns I wrote in my college newspaper. Nearly every screed declares how we live in a new era of [whatever].) And that's why I really enjoyed Chuck's Esquire column this month about stereotypes.
Although I'm certainly not the only one who has been aggravated by the increasing appearance of the "This video is no longer available" message from YouTube, I didn't know how to quantify my frustration. So I decided to do a little test... do you remember Pitchfork's 100 Awesome Music Videos post from last summer? There was a brief moment where these types of posts opened our eyes to the potential of a new form of curatorial criticism of video, with a mashup of moving illustrations that were controlled by users. Suddenly, you could image whole new ways to conceive of writing about the history of visual culture. Now, just months later, that vision has been practically erased, as over half of the clips from the above post have been removed from YouTube -- to be exact, 54 of 100 are gone (I counted). I try not to be polemic about these matters on this blog, but I find it hard to believe this is good for anyone -- artist, label, critic, fan, and, especially, the marketplace of ideas.
Esquire.com redesigned (or perhaps, designed) and now includes some fresh bits, including Chuck on Britney's hair cut: "Because she is a celebrity, it is always assumed that what she does is driven by motive. I see no evidence of this.... Think of the dumbest, goofiest, richest 25-year-old woman you've ever known: Did her day-to-day decision-making process reflect anything about her ambition, her self-awareness, or her ability to deal with reality?"
Just two issues ago, Jessica Rose was on the cover of Wired, yet she almost already seems irrelevant.... until the comeback! She has a bit part in the upcoming Lindsay Lohan film I Know Who Killed Me.
A long list of book-oriented web 2.0 sites. Interesting that I've never heard of these, and also interesting that I have no interest to sign up for any of them. Not sure why that is...
The usual caveats apply: I have no inside knowledge on any of this stuff. I talk to media+tech people about trends all the time, but nobody ever tells me anything important. And I only have mutual funds, so don't try to play that angle.
Besides, I'm just taking cheap shots anyway.
1) $100 PC. Finally, computing in the Third World! But priorities are reassessed when someone does the math and realizes that the One Benjamin PC could feed a single African for 37 years.
2) MySpace. Despite (or because of) News Corp's ownership of MySpace, unique users start to disappear. Someone at the New York Times realizes that your friend Tom has released absolutely zero new features to the community since Fox's takeover. In a scramble, MySpace releases a bunch of bad features that everyone hates. However, they sell several more sponsorship deals for movies, tv shows, and bands that you don't care about.
3) Apple. Apple buys Last.FM. Finally. And iTV is a hit. Finally. And the iPhone? Nope, never. Why? Cuz the iPhone is like God -- if it really existed, you wouldn't care that much.
4) Google. By partnering YouTube and Apple's iTV, Google has you watching Ask A Ninja on your plasma. Hello, Google Video ads.
5) Gawker. A rumor is leaked about a Conde Naste buy-out that involves a digital unit built around the new WiredNews.com. Nick Denton is too busy updating Lifehacker to respond.
6) The Office. Jim chooses Pam. Forgetting this is fiction, I attempt to drunk-dial Karen.
7) Studio 60. Sorkin's new show sorta catches on. Gloating until my pancreas explodes, I try to explain that Studio 60 is the first example of middle-brow camp. You call me a moron.
8) Technorati. A media company takes a shot at buying Technorati. Maybe Tribune, maybe NYT, probably Wash Post. By the end of the year, people are talking about a Newsvine purchase.
9) Publishing. Your mom is charged with plagiarism. Her book skyrockets to the top of the best-seller list.
10) TV News Anchor Ratings. 1) Brian Williams. 2) Charlie Gibson. 3) Katie Couric.
11) Windows. Vista ships. You try not to yawn.
12) Twitter. Google buys Twitter. A bunch of media organizations sigh deeply over not thinking of this first.
13) AOL. I have no idea. And neither do they.
14) Facebook. That snotty Harvard kid tells Yahoo, "Tell you what, I'll buy you instead."
15) Yahoo. Ba-bye, Terry.
16) Zune. Version 2.0 of the Zune is launched. A small group of converts start to form, while Engadget asks "too little, too late?"
17) Second Life. Robots invade and kill everyone. Turns out "everyone" is 5 kids in Tallahassee.
18) Mobile. 2007: the year in mobile. If I keep saying it, eventually it will be true.
19) Comedy. Dane Cook gets invited to speak at this year's White House Press Corps dinner. When Cook jokes about fucking the Bush Twins, G.W. laughs more than he did at Colbert.
20) Chumby. This little nerd toy you've never heard of becomes a huge hit.
21) Newspapers. More lay-offs, more shrinkage, more free weeklies, more navel-gazing.
22) SmartPox. Add it to the list of great ideas that won't catch traction. (See also: Open ID, micro-payments, free city-wide wireless.)
23) CBS. The digital unit will make a few acquisitions that seem peculiar. But by the end of the year, they will look hipper than Unkie Viacom.
24) GNR. Klosterman spreads a rumor that Axl will release Chinese Democracy on April 24. Thousands of thirty-somethings show up at a record store at midnight only to discover... ha ha, fooled you, old man.
25) Courtney Love. Comeback album, comeback movie, comeback fragrance.
26) Celebutantes. People talk a lot about Britney's comeback, but the new summer album does as well as releases from Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, and K-Fed. Meanwhile, Nicole Richie accidentally eats herself.
27) Ze Frank. The funniest guy in America lands a deal at Comedy Central.
28) Amanda Congdon. While the blogosphere wonders who's watching, Amanda's ratings go up, up, up. When you go home for Thanksgiving, you realize your dad has it bookmarked.
My over-rated movies lists would look very similar to Premiere's 20 Most Overrated Movies list. Chicago, Clerks, Jules and Jim, Nashville, Easy Rider... all check, right up until 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For me, 2006 was the year of inconsequential hype. Wasn't this the year of Snakes on a Plane? And what ever happened to Pearl Jam's big comeback? And weren't The Raconteurs s'posed to be the best rock band ever? And don't even get me started on what the bloggers were telling you to like. Whatevah, you were too busy watching Journey on YouTube to care.
Despite the odds, this was a pretty good year in music. I've got 21 albums to prove it:
21) The Coup, Pick a Bigger Weapon No one realized it at the time, but Party Music was probably the most important album of 2001 -- but like everything else after 9/11, it had to be sublimated for a few years. Boots Riley returned this year to "laugh, love, and make love" -- while wearing camo. When the apocalypse comes, you know The Coup will be playing the soundtrack.
20) Peeping Tom, Peeping Tom The cast of characters alone -- Norah Jones, Amon Tobin, Kool Keith, Dan the Automator, Massive Attack, Kid Koala -- make this a seductive record. But even after the novelty wears off, Mike Patton's obstinate weirdness and whispering/screaming vocals make this album continually engaging, if not terminally perverse.
19) Be Your Own Pet, Be Your Own Pet This is the kind of punk rock that your pre/post-cool skater friend in high school liked but you didn't understand. Then she made a mixed tape for you with a noisy mess called "Fuuuuuuun" on it, and even though it included a wink to "Stairway to Heaven" you still didn't understand, but you adored her for playing a song called "Fuuuuuuun" -- I mean, how couldn't you?
18) Sparklehorse, Dreamt For Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain I have no idea why people ignored this album, but I predict the hipsters will trackback to this release next year when DJ Danger Mouse and Mark Linkous collaborate on something called Dangerhorse (I'm not making this up). Linkous makes the kind of raspy pop static that everyone has forgotten is the reason that recorded music still exists.
16) Cold War Kids, Robbers and Cowards The first four songs on this debut record are so ridiculously good that it makes you suspicious of their ability to maintain it, which causes you to unfairly judge them on the potential of future work that you've never heard, which is grossly unjust, but is also the strange state of music today.
15) Bob Dylan, Modern Times He hates technology more than your grandma, but that's probably why he makes albums better than your kids.
14) Joanna Newsome, Ys This will take a moment to digest: Diamanda Galas meets Bjork and June Carter Cash in a dark alley. They magically morph into a harpist who makes an album engineered by Steve Albini that has only five songs but is still an hour long. And yet you love it.
13) The DFA Remixes, Chapter 1 & Chapter 2 No one asked for another version of Fischerspooner's "Emerge" or NIN's "The Hand that Feeds," but you couldn't pick anyone better than DFA to reconstitute nostalgia as futurism.
12) Tapes 'n Tapes, The Loon It's the strangest thing in the world to leave town and watch your friend's band explode like this. One second you're playing Katamari Damacy and listening to GNR, the next they're trying to get time off work to tour Japan.
11) Ghostface Killah, Fishscale If you didn't know, fishscale is super-high quality uncut cocaine -- sparkly and glimmering like a fish's scales. This album is singularly obsessed with coke -- kilos and bricks, snorted and smoked -- all of it, in multiple different forms, which you can view as a metaphor of quality or race or economics... or not.
9) Girl Talk, Night Ripper One ritalin-and-coffee-induced diatribe about how this album is perfectly of its time yet paradoxically timeless is more than enough.
8) Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not Just when you think the dance rock thing has hit the windshield, along comes the best of the genre -- from a bunch of kids slamming on the gas pedal, no less. Two of the songs on this album include the word "dance," yet they're the least danceable songs on the album.
7) Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped The only thing that makes less sense than these old-timers writing what might be the most relevant love song of the year ("Do You Believe in Rapture?") might be the same fogies writing the best rock song of the year ("Incinerate"). "Do you believe in a second chance?" Totally.
6) The Streets, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living At the beginning of the year, Mike Skinner was in rehab; at the end of the year, he was preparing to run the New York City marathon. This sums up The Streets -- slacking yet overachieving, a bad decision that always turns good, a big story yet a complete fuck up.
5) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones I'm likely rating this album higher than almost anyone else will this year, but it probably deserves even higher. Why do you all hate Karen O for wanting to make a Blondie record? Sometimes I think you're bigger than the sound, too.
4) Mickey Avalon, Mickey Avalon Rock critics fucking hate Mickey Avalon -- my friend Missy thinks he's egotistical scum. But this is my kind of punk-rapping scum bag: he stylizes like Kool Keith, he narrates like Eminem, he snags the aesthetics of L.A. glam rock (but bi), and packages it all like Beck-on-meth-not-Beck-on-scientology. And despite that description, he sounds absolutely nothing like Kid Rock!
3) TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain Can you imagine the pitch to the record label? "Okay, we're gonna make a doo-wop punk album. But it won't sound anything like that. It will sound more like a lazy day in the Prospect Park. Oh, but you can sorta dance to it. Got it?"
2) Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere The second you heard it, you knew it was going to be the song of the summer. By the second bar, you could visualize the sin wave over the next couple months: the pre-buzz, the raves, the saturation, the backlash, the overhype, and the backlash to the backlash (because you read NY Mag too). It was a crystal clear moment, which so many will remember as defining the summer of '06, when everything seemed to have a thrilling predictability.
1) The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America During a year that I moved away from the Midwest, no other record could possibly top this list. I'm not sure what non-expats do with all the Lyndale, Penn, and Nicolet references (cross-check them to their Replacements records?), but this will always be one of those records that will be impossibly linked to my life in mysterious ways that make me equal parts sad and hopeful. Every time Craig roars "We walked across that Grain Belt bridge / Into a brand new Minneapolis," I wonder why every city can't be so lucky as to have such a perferct homage. And then I remember only one city deserves it. I miss ya, boys and girls.
Believe it or not, I make a living as a futurist -- in the same way that nearly all of us (writers, entrepreneurs, bookies... Miss Cleo) bring home the butter by trying to predict what will happen next. The Prognosticating Class has become so large that you now can't click 'empty trash' on your desktop without a futurist falling out.
Last year was the worst -- I made 33 Predictions for 2006 in Media, Technology, and Pop Culture. It's time to look back and see how well I did. In fairness to myself, this wasn't really a true attempt at clairvoyance -- several of the predictions were just meant to be goofy. Oddly enough, those were the ones that turned out to actually be right.
Next month, I'll publish some predictions for 2007, but in the mean time, let's review last year's effort, with ratings of 0-10:
1) Netflix will be bought by TiVo, which will be bought by Yahoo....
Um, not so much. Score: 0.
2) Absolutely no one will buy Knight Ridder....
Oh boy, this is getting ugly. Score: 0.
3) NBC's new Thursday comedy line up will be a big enough success that tv execs will once again try to invoke the phrase "destination tv"...
Wellll...30 Rock is a hit, My Name Is Earl still does okay, and the relocated Office is stellar. But, well, no one is exactly shaking the presents under the tree at NBC this Christmas. Score: 5.
4) A new Pew study will reveal something about internet use that will be drastically over-cited by people who are reading this blog post.
See, that's me being funny. Score: 5.
5) David Chappelle will do something that makes everyone ask "why the hell did he do that?" It will be "brilliant," but "enigmatic and frustrating."
Tricked ya. That was written after he actually did "enigmatic and frustrating" things. Score: 1.
6) Showtime will pick up Arrested Development.
Um, yeah. Well, MSN picked up the reruns. Score: 2.
7) "Hello Katie, welcome to CBS."
Doy. Score: 10.
8) After a guest appearance on Veronica Mars, Amanda Congdon will sign a deal to host a new show on UPN...
Okay, wrong about Veronica Mars (how cool would that be?), and wrong about CBS and UPN... sorta -- instead, she'll be on sister company HBO. And ABC. So I get some points. Score: 7.
9) Book publishers will drop their silly little fiat and announce a triumphant partnership with Google Print.
Sorta yeah, sorta no. Score: 5.
10) Nonetheless, Google's stock price will slip 20% by the end of the year.
Can I get negative points? Score: 0.
11) Someone in Seattle or San Francisco will get beaten to death at a dinner party after saying the words "Web 2.0" for the five-trillionth time before the first course.
I can't prove it, but I'm sure this has happened. Score: 6.
12) 2005: the year of search. 2006: the year of mobile....
Maybe next year? Score: 3.
13) Current TV will start to show up in Nielsen. The numbers will be good, not great.
Well, not yet. But they got closer. Score: 2.
14) The break-up of Viacom will have unforeseen repercussions...
Maybe I should have kept them all this vauge. I was thinking something big would happen, but nothing really did. MTV got older, CBS joined the YouTube revolution. Score: 2.
15) Steve Jobs will announce a DVR.
Not quite. He announced iTV. But still... Score: 6.
16) iTunes will give in to record labels and adjust pricing such that songs will range from $.50 to $2.
This is getting painful. Does Zune caving to Universal Music count? Score: 1.
17) Sirius will double subscribers but it still won't be enough to pay Howard Stern's salary.
They started the year with 3.3 million and ended with over 5 million. So close. Score: 7.
18) David Letterman will announce his retirement.
I'm a moron. Score: 0.
19) Microsoft's new operating system, Vista, will launch in mid-summer, and will get surprisingly good reviews.
Hah! Score: 0.
20) Despite the L.A. Times' dismal failure, several media organizations will release successful wikis....
One word: wikiality. Score: 2.
21) Martha Stewart will quietly become a nobody. Donald Trump, however, will still somehow manage to remain famous.
Is this even measurable? Score: 4.
22) Mary-Kate and Ashley will return.
Shoot. Me. Now. Score: 3.
23) One person will finally figure out a cool use for Google Base....
I'm still not sure this has happened. Score: 2.
24) At the end of the year, the New York Times will drop Times Select. Soon after, CNN.com will make Pipeline free.
You wish, blogger. Score: 0.
25) Despite some inspired ideas, Craig Newmark's new journalism project won't be a gigantic success, but it will inspire others sites that quickly take off.
What the hell happened to DayLife anyway? Score: 0.
26) News Corp's purchase of MySpace will yield a decent record label that has a surprise hit.
29) Fergie from Black-Eyed Peas will announce a solo album...
Rock out. Score: 8.
30) The New York Times Sunday Styles section will write a trend piece about the trend of trend pieces. It will then implode.
It didn't, but it still could. Score: 3.
31) Chuck Klosterman will announce he's writing new columns for Vanity Fair, Wired, and Modern Midwestern Living.
Well, he almost wrote some stuff for Wired. Score: 3.
32) Fimoculous.com makes a triumphant return as an "almost decent" blog.
Fuck yeah. Score: 10!
33) Anderson Cooper will claim he's the father of Katie Holmes' baby. A wicked paternity suit -- in which everyone refuses to take DNA tests -- ensues.
You wish, Andy. Score: 0.
Average score: 3.27. Before you get all schadenfreude on me, please consider that some of those predictions were intentionally outrageous. As will next year's predictions. Tune in soon...
Zak Sally in a Pitchfork interview: "I'm not young and cool... I hate young people. I hate music. I hate haircuts." La Mano 21 (his graphic novel publishing project) got distribution through SubPop.
So Scarlett Johansson is going to do a record. Fine. Whatever. But wait... it's a gonna be all Tom Waits covers. That's either sorta awesome or sorta preposterous. [via]
File under: "Pop Culture Conspiracy Theories." I wonder if the most recent episode of Studio 60 -- the one that revolves around an act of comedic tv/internet plagiarism (and which has probably been the best hour of tv this fall) -- was inspired by the recent act of unverified tv/internet plagiarism in which The Colbert Reporthad a few lines that appeared to rip off Ze Frank. Maybe that sounds like a crazy theory -- until you read in the long NY Mag Colbert profile that Jon Stewart's brother is now a writer for Studio 60. Hmmm....
Even before reading Chris Anderson's new book, The Long Tail, you and I -- we, the people on the internet -- are of two minds about it. Part of us has been waiting with zeal, with a virtual palpitating heart, for a new "big idea" book to debate for the rest of the year -- and also, a treatise that will elucidate for our workplace parents (i.e., bosses) why small is the new big, why this niche economy is different than anything ever before, and why this wisdom-of-the-crowds gibberish actually has some evidential support. The other part of us -- the part that has waited so long for this seemingly-eternal-work-in-progress, which, by now, we've already heard our boss, and our boss' boss, and our boss' boss' secretary, repeat the title of so many times (usually, as an inaccurate reference) that we want to retreat to Second Life for the rest of the summer -- yes, this part of us has already deduced this blogged book will be repetitive and cloying and, well, long in the mouth.
Ah, the fragmented public.
For those of you who haven't been gripped by every nuance of the internet economy over the past few years, perhaps some rewinding is in order. Stating the thesis of The Long Tail requires merely a few words: the mass market economy is turning into a niche economy. That's it? Yep, that's it. I suspect those of us who fall in the middle of Gen X will smirk at this proposition. Since approximately the day I left high school, I've been told I'm part of a new micro-marketing culture, that the difference between me and my parents is choice, that fame will be doled out to my friends in tidy 15 minute portions. I've been walking and breathing niche for so long, it's probably time somebody stopped and asked: is all this true?
One thing is true: just the introduction of The Long Tail will zap you with enough aphorisms to instantly transform you into the hottest internet bon vivant at the next Valleywag-crashed party. Simply toss out these maxims over Web 2.0 martinis: "Scarcity requires hits." "The mass market is turning into a market of niches." "The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes." "If the twentieth-century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first century will be equally about niches." Are you writing these down?
But you realize an odd thing about 50 pages into this book: you're not bored. You suspect you should be bored by either the pop economics or the glib utopianism or perhaps, alas, the hash tables. But, somehow, you enjoy the stories that illustrate the overall economic theories. And, most of all, the data points are simply delicious. You want to memorize them for the next time you argue with your friends about topics that feel true but which you don't actually know are true. Did you know...
+ A quarter of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 100,000 titles.
+ 74 percent of tv households in 1954 watched I Love Lucy; CSI now, 15 percent.
+ Toll-free calling was invented in 1967 by AT&T. By 1992, 40 percent of all long-distance calls on its network were toll-free.
+ Online shopping accounts for 5 percent of American retail spending. It's increasing 25% per year.
+ In the 1960s, the Chevy Impala sedan accounted for 13 percent of the U.S. car market.
+ Yahoo's music video viewership lands somewhere between MTV and VH1 in audience share.
+ 724,000 Americans report eBay as their primary or secondary source of income.
+ 20% of the population lives 8+ miles from a bookstore.
And so on.
You might think that Anderson's purpose in using the bevy of data would be to whip up some evidence to push the overall narrative, but the data actually becomes the story. Anderson (who, we somehow haven't mentioned yet, is the editor of Wired) nicely weaves it all together in a way that makes you realize that he's one of the few people who actually gets the holy triumvirate: culture, media, and economics.
The question that nagged me -- and perhaps it will you, too -- is whether all this fragmentation of culture is actually good for us. It would have been wise to close the book on this topic, but Anderson gets to it a couple chapters before the end (he reserves the final pages for an annoying "how to make a long tail company" list, probably to justify placement in B&N's business section). I'm someone who has previously ranted about the infuriating bullshit of Republic.com, which purported that personalized technologies (i.e., those that expose the long tail) would hurt the spread of information. Nonetheless, I've become worried recently about the loss of salient and persistent talking points even within my little clique of media-savvy culturati. Lately, I've been hearing conversation-enders like this with more frequency: "No, I didn't hear that [too-obscure-for-Pitchfork] record" or "No, I didn't see that [famous-to-hundreds Web 2.0] website" or "No, I haven't rented that [Japanese anime import] DVD." Without getting mealy-mouthed, Anderson scrubs away my apprehension, revealing a world in which you and me -- we, the people on the internet -- are "not so much fragmenting as we are re-forming along different dimensions."
I feel defragged now.
Rex, who is currently working on a book very tentatively titled "Everything You Know Is the Wisdom of the Long Tail Tipping Point," was nominated for a Wired Rave Award in 2004 but has never met Chris Anderson, even though he totally stalked him at the awards party.
This is sorta brilliant. I think. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs asked fans to submit impersonations of Karen O on YouTube, which they then turned into a video that's now... on YouTube.
Screens (Virginia Heffernan!) is a new tv/internet convergence blog on... yep, NYtimes.com. I'm calling it a "Lost Remote killer." (Sorry Cory, I kid.)
The Nerve.com Future Issue, which will feature writing from Joel Stein, Walter Kirn, Jay McInerney, Douglas Rushkoff, Rick Moody, Ana Marie Cox, and others.
Screens (Virginia Heffernan!) is a new tv/internet convergence blog on... yep, NYtimes.com. I'm calling it a "Lost Remote killer." (Sorry Cory, I kid.)
I'm not on Second Life yet, though I know I should be. I've been watching the site pretty closely for years, and it's fascinating that it's finally taking off, though I have no idea why now. Anyway, there's some reportage that Amazon.com is planning on extending their web services to support virtual stores within Second Life.
I wonder what would happen if I tried to drink only beverages from Amazon's Sports & Energy Drink grocery category.
ARCHITECTURE
Believe it or not, I've actually read every single Zaha Hadid story over the past few weeks (her Guggenheim retrospective has created more press than anything since Bilbao). The only one I'll bother linking to is Slate's contrarian is she really visionary?
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
Ya know, I haven't seen the Al Gore movie yet, but how fucking awesome is it that a gigantic powerpoint has been getting raves? It give nerds hope.... too much hope. On with the links:
Guardian Magprofile of Douglas Coupland, in which 1) he subtly disses Steven Berlin Johnson's game book, 2) we learn he has a movie called Everything's Gone Green coming out, and 3) he delivers his definition of irony.
Brian Grazer and Malcolm Gladwell have a hair-off on the Charlie Rose show. Among other things, they talk about Gawker.
MEDIA
At the end of last year, I chose Arianna Huffington as an "artist of the year." My lede: "The Huffington Post should completely suck." David Carr notices the one-year anniversary of The Huffington Post in The Times. His lede?
"When it began a year ago, The Huffington Post seemed like a remarkably bad idea." Yo, just sayin.
WORDS
NYT Mag: Scan This Book! Surprisingly polemic towards the end, but spot-on.
Klosterman texted me from the ooh-ooh-big-deal GNR show in NYC ("Axl got thin again!"), but the big news is that Axl is obsessed with his online persona.
Back in Minneapolis, the new Ceasar Pelli library is opening, which could rival the Seattle Koohaas library. Alt-Text has some pics.
MUSIC
The new Gnarles Barkley video for "Crazy," from the album, St. Elsewhere, which comes out this week. It will be the best album of the summer. (See also: performing live on Top of the Pops.)
Syndey Pollack has made a documentary of Frank Gehry. Trailer.
The movie that almost got me sued has premiered in St. Paul. Back when the movie was being filmed, I published some exclusive photos of a sickly Lindsay Lohan from the set. She looks so much... less sickly now.
Finally, a follow-up to my very old Amazon list "College Friends Who Punched Me," I have created "My Year As..." in response to the spate of recent books in which people do something (strip, change genders, read the encyclopedia, etc.) for a year. Let me know what's missing from the list.
Nearly a dozen years ago, Douglas Coupland published his third novel, Microserfs, at a moment where everyone knew the future was about to happen, but no one knew quite what it would look like.
After moving to Seattle a month ago to work on the campus depicted in the novel, I returned to the same book that many years ago intrigued this Midwestern twenty-something, to see how the world (and my perspective on it) has changed. I have several conclusions, which I'm aggregating for a longer analysis. In the mean time, I have gathered the notes that I scribbled in the margins of the book. Below is a mish-mash of observations about cities, companies, and Microserfs, then and now.
+ The basic plot arc of Microserfs is that an ensemble of 'softies quit their jobs and move to San Fran to create a new software start-up. They begin building something called Oop! (can this sound any more like present?), which actually is a pun off object-oriented programming, but is essentially a 3D modeling program which you can use to create pretty much anything. The idea is loosely inspired by Legos, but in the intervening decade nothing has been invented to compare it to -- until I recently saw Will Wright demo his new game, Spore.
+ Even though the inaccurate predictions are less numerable, they say more about the mid-'90s than the accurate ones.
+ The descriptions of Microsoft campus life -- right down to the soccer fields and hidden paths -- are still quite accurate. The detail that seems to have changed the most is the relationship of employees to Bill. He was apparently a Geek God in 1994, whereas now he's more of a beleaguered Yoda. It's good we skipped over the anti-trust days though.
+ There's a great observation early in the book about how Microsofties don't put bumper stickers on their cars. This is still startlingly true, and it gives campus a sort of post-political feel. Or at least as post-political as 20,000 Audis lined up in a cement parking garage can be.
+ Except for occasional baby pictures and markup boards, Microserfs don't decorate their offices. At all.
+ At the beginning of the book, Apple is at the top of the world -- the computer company that all geeks aspire to. By the end of the book, the boys from Cupertino are sliding into oblivion, rumored to be bought out by Samsung. How many times has Apple died and been resurrected?
+ Quick quiz: what was the subtitle of Coupland's first novel, Generation X? Bzzt. "Tales for an Accelerated Culture." So much for slackers.
+ Off-topic: Has anyone else noticed that Ginsberg's "Howl" needs an update? I'll take a shot at it: "I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by Aeron chairs, tattooed hyper fresh, dragging themselves though Ikea on Sundays looking for an angry futon." Perhaps this is where a Wiki could help. Wiki Howl!
+ It seems unfathomable now, but this book was published before Windows 95 even came out.
+ Know what else people forget about this book? It's written in diary form. And you know what else? Less than a third of it happens in Seattle -- the rest occurs in Silicon Valley, except for the second-to-last chapter which is in Vegas (at CES).
+Microserfs places Seattle in opposition to San Francisco. While there is still a tension between the Emerald City and Silicon Valley, Seattle now posits itself in relationship to Los Angeles.
+ Since moving here from Minneapolis, I constantly find myself appending rows to a grid that I've drawn in my mind with two simple columns: Minneapolis | Seattle. When I decide which city has "won" a particular feature, checkmarks get added to new rows of the mental grid. Traffic, for instance, of course gets a Minneapolis check, while food goes to Seattle. Daily papers, Minneapolis; weekly papers, Seattle; malls, Minneapolis; record stores, Seattle; pizza, Minneapolis. I already have hundreds of rows in my micro-niche grid. By the way, Seattle's Ikea totally sucks.
+ I am convinced this book could not exist today -- not in its current form, as fiction. Our first-person culture would undoubtedly force it into a memoir. Or perhaps Scoble is the modern equivalent. Microserfs even hints at its historical future by being structured like a journal. We all speculate about how blogging is changing journalism, but one should ask if memoirs are doing the same thing to fiction, especially in light of Freygate. Exploring this, you see, is partially why I moved to Seattle, and I hope to devote more thinking in this space. To be continued...
City Pages this week has interviews with Craig Newmark and... ME! It reads pretty nerdy, but it sprawled into an interesting citizen journalism conversation on MNspeak.
USA Todaygives props to our Olympics videoplayer strategy, but points to a future in which everything will likely be online. (This topic is huge, and maybe I'll write about it after the Olympics.)
Fox Reality is a new entire channel dedicated to reality tv. Reality Remix is a show -- staring Kennedy! -- that is now completely available online.
FILM
When did this sneak up us? Basic Instinct 2, starring MILF-ish Sharon Stone. Who knows, it could even be okay (I actually love the campiness of the first). No Michael Douglas though.
I've ditched my Netflix account because I had stopped using it (too much TiVo, too much DVD buying), but now I see they are testing a $5/month plan, which could bring me back.
DRUNKS
Nerve.com: Last Night on Earth, a photo-essay inspired by the wrtings of Bukowski.
MUSIC
Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the New Yorker. Would you like to see the video for the first single? Okay.
Look at all this: 1) NBC is producing an internet-only reality tv show called Star Tomorrow. 2) Bravo will launch a site, OutZone.tv, with original gay programming. 3) AOL and Mark Burnett are working on an internet reality tv show called Gold Rush. 4) NBC is greenlightingCarson's Cyberhood, a showcase of homemade videos. 5) Amazon is starting an original talk show hosted by Bill Maher called Amazon Fishbowl. All of these online-only -- no broadcast.
Occasionally funny: MySpace: The Movie. "Why am I not in your top eight?"
Or how about fake trailers? Tarantino and Rodriguez have crazy ideas.
What was the weirdest part of the Super Bowl? Noticing during the Mission Impossible III trailer that Philip Seymour Hoffman is the main villain in the movie. Here's a PSH interview with David Remnick.
SPORTS
Klosterman's ESPN.com Super Bowl blog was quite fun, right? He talks about blogging here.
MEDIA
The editor of the SF Bay Guardianthinks that Craig Newmark isn't the hero you think he is. Anil responds.
TV
Time's tv critic, James Poniewozik, has a blog: Tuned In.
FAKE NEWS
A new journal for cross-disciplinary studies in plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification: Plagiary. [via NYTstory.]
Next time. Next time I'll live blog Frey on Oprah too. Kick it:
PERSONAL
Hey, I sold my community website, MNspeak.com. Now if I could only sell this dumb thing...
ROCKETBOOM
Psst, Amanda is going to be on this Thursday's episode of CSI.
Andrew has decided to auction off his first Rocketboom advertising on eBay.
ONLINE
So I had been away from the blogging world for a few weeks and I come back to see embedded video everywhere via You Tube. Looks like this could quickly become what Google Video and Current.TV and Brightcove (and several others) wanted to be overnight.
Wow, someone did the research that I've been dying to know: how much is a viewer in advertising revenue versus download revenue? The answer: $.57 for advertising to $1.44 for download (with a ton of caveats applied).
Apologies for the navel-gazing nature of this post, but a lot has happened in my life lately, and since this is ostensibly a personal blog (hi Mom!), here are some notes on recent personal events:
+ At work, we recently launched this new little site: NBCOlympics.com. The winter games are in Torino, Italy in February.
+ Friends, family, and pretty much all of Minneapolis already knows this, but I've never officially announced it to the estranged readers of Fimoculous: After the Olympics, I will be moving to Seattle, where I took a new job at MSNBC.com. As you probably know, MSNBC.com is co-owned by NBC and Microsoft, so I'll be working on the Microsoft campus in a fun new capacity. I'll have more to say about it later, but in the meantime... Seattle, holla fo' me, yo.
+ I was hoping to make an exciting announcement on the future of MNspeak (my local citizen journalism site) by now, but we're still sorting that out. Soon....
+ I have an essay in the new book Digital Think from the New Media Institute.
+ Random quote in a Pioneer Press story about the effect blogging will have on the '06 political season: "I'm not sure those kinds of blogs are going to change anything in the world."
That's all for now. My '06 resolution: Make Fimoculous cool again.
Okay, it wasn't a great year, but at least you didn't hear anyone use the phrase "year of the blog" anymore. So just thank your lucky stars the whole friggin world didn't blow up, and prepare yourself for next year when it undoubtedly will.
And with that shot of optimism, I present my idiosyncratic mix of Predictions for 2006 in Media, Technology, and Pop Culture.
1) Netflix will be bought by TiVo, which will be bought by Yahoo. Since I obviously should be drawn and quartered for last year's prediction that Apple would buy TiVo, I might as well double-down on my bet.
2) Absolutely no one will buy Knight Ridder. C'mon, would you?
3) NBC's new Thursday comedy line up will be a big enough success that tv execs will once again try to invoke the phrase "destination tv," while the rest of us have no idea what network or time the shows are even on because our TiVo neglects to tell us.
4) A new Pew study will reveal something about internet use that will be drastically over-cited by people who are reading this blog post.
5) David Chappelle will do something that makes everyone ask "why the hell did he do that?" It will be "brilliant," but "enigmatic and frustrating."
6) Showtime will pick up Arrested Development. And then Showtime will announce a deal with iTunes in which the show becomes the first of its kind to have more viewers watching via portable player than on tv.
7) "Hello Katie, welcome to CBS."
8) After a guest appearance on Veronica Mars, Amanda Congdon will sign a deal to host a new show on UPN. That's Viacom-owned UPN, peeps. You know, CBS. So get ready for the Katie and Amanda show in '07.
9) Book publishers will drop their silly little fiat and announce a triumphant partnership with Google Print.
10) Nonetheless, Google's stock price will slip 20% by the end of the year.
11) Someone in Seattle or San Francisco will get beaten to death at a dinner party after saying the words "Web 2.0" for the five-trillionth time before the first course.
12) 2005: the year of search. 2006: the year of mobile. No, for real this time! The big change will be that carriers open up the deck to external providers. Why? Because Google releases the killer mobile apps that everyone needs. Seriously!
13)Current TV will start to show up in Nielsen. The numbers will be good, not great.
14) The break-up of Viacom will have unforeseen repercussions. Okay, that's vague, but I predict no less than three essays from Marketwatch.com about the failure of the split.
15) Steve Jobs will announce a DVR. That one's a no-brainer, but the big deal here is that iTunes video downloads will skyrocket. No wait, that's a no-brainer too. Fine, I predict...
16) iTunes will give in to record labels and adjust pricing such that songs will range from $.50 to $2. Oh hell, another no-brainer.
17) Sirius will double subscribers but it still won't be enough to pay Howard Stern's salary.
18) David Letterman will announce his retirement. Or at least I hope so, because right now it's like watching your favorite band from the '80s do a reunion show.
19) Microsoft's new operating system, Vista, will launch in mid-summer, and will get surprisingly good reviews.
20) Despite the L.A. Times' dismal failure, several media organizations will release successful wikis -- this time, in areas that actually make sense.
21) Martha Stewart will quietly become a nobody. Donald Trump, however, will still somehow manage to remain famous.
22) Mary-Kate and Ashley will return. Where the hell did they go, anyway? Some upcoming indie film director will cast them in a "quirky New York film" with Parker Posey playing their mom. Gen-Xers suddenly realize they're the next Baby Boomers.
23) One person will finally figure out a cool use for Google Base, sparking over-use of the word "mashup" by Slashdot nerds.
24) At the end of the year, the New York Times will drop Times Select. Soon after, CNN.com will make Pipeline free.
25) Despite some inspired ideas, Craig Newmark's new journalism project won't be a gigantic success, but it will inspire others sites that quickly take off.
26) News Corp's purchase of MySpace will yield a decent record label that has a surprise hit.
27) FBC -- Fox Business Channel -- will launch. Pundits describe it as "more fun" than CNBC.
28) Ten major cities will release city-wide WiFi.
29) Fergie from Black-Eyed Peas will announce a solo album. It will be Entertainment Weekly's worst album of the year for 2006.
30) The New York Times Sunday Styles section will write a trend piece about the trend of trend pieces. It will then implode.
31) Chuck Klosterman will announce he's writing new columns for Vanity Fair, Wired, and Modern Midwestern Living.
32) Fimoculous.com makes a triumphant return as an "almost decent" blog.
33) Anderson Cooper will claim he's the father of Katie Holmes' baby. A wicked paternity suit -- in which everyone refuses to take DNA tests -- ensues.
Note: I have zero insider knowledge on any of these predictions. And except for the last one, I actually believe them all, if only metaphorically in some cases.
For those of you who read this site via RSS, I've launched the 2005 List of Lists page. (Previously: 2004 | 2003 | 2001.) As usual, email me if I'm missing something.
DATING
Is it true that Match.com had its employees go on bogus dates just to keep people subscribed to the service? And do they post faux-profiles that present flirtatious intent? Yes, according to a lawsuit...
GalleyCat has an excellent first-hand account of last week's New York Public Library debate between Google and publishers groups. (Also in NYT.)
I didn't even realize that NYT gave Marjane Satrapi (the author of Persepolis) a blog which apparently illustrates her experience growing up in Iran. I say "apparently" because it's behind Time Select.
MUSIC
The only good thing about reissues is getting to read contemporary rock critics on classics. Pitchfork, somewhat surprisingly, rolls out a 10.0 for Springsteen's Born To Run 30th Anniversary Edition.
While being interviewed the other day, someone asked me about my political affiliations. After stammering for a bit, I said, "Do you know the phrase 'South Park Republican'? I suppose I'm a 'Daily Show Democrat'." You heard it here first.
TV
Metacritic.com (which you might remember was recently purchased by CNet) has added tv reviews. So far, Prison Break has been my favorite show of the year, while critics haveEverybody Hates Chris as the best.
So you're watching Lost, right? At first all this talk about the curse of The X-Files / Twin Peaks seemed a worthwhile concern, but season two has been great so far. So "4 8 15 16 23 42," right? The site 4815162342.com has been the best for gossip and theories, including one that concludes that the numbers are GPS coordinates. Damn, that's so... post-Google.
ONLINE
Back when my pal Andy launched Upcoming.org, I asked him what he'd do with all that money when Google bought him out. I was only wrong about one thing. Congrats, man.
Somehow Newsweek got ahold of the Cooper/Rove emails, and Isikoff says that Rove was the source but probably didn't knowingly reveal Plame's name. Dude, I've tried that excuse so many times, and she's never bought it....
On The Media has a decent piece (audio) starring Clay Shirky on Wikipedia's coverage of the London bombing.
The New York Observer redesigned their website, which needed it very badly.
ROOFTOPS
You know already these two things about me: 1) I hate New Yorkers who talk about their stupid rooftop parties (I even said so on Rocketboom), and 2) the Sunday NYT Styles section makes me reach for the revolver. Put those together and you get The High Life. That sound you hear is a growl.
Amazon.com is 10 years old. USA Today did an interview with Bezos, and NYT gave him a (mildly negative) full-length profile.
TV
Hooking Up, which is sort of reality-tv-meets-documentary look at online dating, premieres this Thursday on ABC. NYT has a quick interview with the director.
Am I a blog casualty? Heck no, I've just been busy over at MNspeak. You have to understand, we have Lindsay Lohan in town right now, and the whole state is a-twitter.
TV
Did you watch the first episode of Stella on Comedy Central? The promotion machine has been gigantic (I heard that somewhere here in Minneapolis they were giving away free Stella Artois to promote the show). Here's Slate.com's view. My thoughts: I didn't laugh once. Sorry guys, it's not even as funny as The Office remake.
Lately, I spend several hours a day reading what other dot-com media companies are doing (today, I read at least a dozen different articles on Yahoo's new My Web 2.0 ). It takes something like this NYT story to remind me of all the stuff that's happened in the last couple weeks -- and since that article yesterday there has been updates to Google Print, Yahoo's Map API, Amazon's A9, etc., etc. It's a crazy time.
I completely missed this... did everyone know that the new iTunes supports videoblogs too? Rocketboom on my iTunes, delish. And since you can charge for feeds.... could this be intro to micropayments?
Does anyone else find it suspicious that Billy Corgan has taken out an advert (pdf) to reunite Smashing Pumpkins on the very day that his new solo album came out. Billy, why didn't you just become a contestant on Rock Star?
This is sorta interesting... to synch up with the release of the Bewitched movie, the first season of the tv show has been released in both color and black and white.
I have been ignoring the debate about whether Google is a media company (such absolutist categorical thinking -- similar to "are bloggers journalists?" -- bores me), but here's NYT mentioning it in their "What's Online" column, which is clearly struggling at this point.
Some video involving Paris Hilton and Fat Boy Slim. I'm told this is a viral video to promote the release of Fat Boy Slim's new video. Which is the most hyper-real thing I've heard this month.
Apparently because they haven't put Gawker on the Business page yet (next up: Travel?), NYTchats up the Gawker gang. What's the scoop? Blogs are over-hyped. Yeah, tell that to Calacanis, who is being stalked.
Many of you have written to ask why I haven't said a word about Tina Fey's baby announcement. Yes, okay, I am a little upset that she didn't tell me first. Now that the humiliation is out there, let's check in with the scary & sexy nerds known as the blogosphere:
INTERNET/SEX
Nerve.com does Sex Advice From Bloggers. They never asked, but my answer to "What's the best way to get a blogger to go home with you?" would have been "tell him he looks hotter in real life than in that weird picture on the blog."
In Wired News, Regina Lynn take a look at HighJoy, a melding of dating, chat, and teledildonics.
Amazon.com is trying to clean up the way they look -- no more infinite tabs.
MEDIA
File under: New York Post is doomed. Google is developing an algorithm for determining quality in news.
Unless you're in the creepy parts of the blogosphere, you don't see people linking to The Nation much anymore. But there's a decent story on the challenges that Al Gore's new network, Current, faces.
TV
Did anyone see the last episode of Wonder Showzen? The theme was patience, and until half-way through the show, the joke was that everything was going to be drawn out to stupidity. It was as funny as tedious gets. Then the second half of the show was the entire first half of the show played in reverse. There hasn't been anything this weird on tv since Andy Kaufman.
Over on MNspeak, we've got news about the only two world-famous Minnesota Jews: Tom Friedman and Al Franken. (I know, I know, Dylan is sometimes Jewish too. But he doesn't write or call home anymore.)
It's a few things, yet it's also something very simple: a one-site stop for Twin Cities conversations about culture, media, politics, and entertainment. MNspeak.com's primary function is to answer these two questions:
1) What are people in the Twin Cities talking about today?
2) What is going on around town tonight?
So yes, it's a blog -- or partially a blog. But it's so much more! The left column works like a traditional blog (but with a community of participants). In addition, there is an events calendar, a community feedback device, a local blog/media aggregator, and sponsorship opportunities. And if all goes well, there will be more soon.
I've been working in digital media for almost a decade, and I've seen a website or two in that time. A "community site" could mean innumerable things to innumerable people (photo-blogging, topic-driven bulletin boards, etc.). But we think MNspeak.com has crystallized the possibilities down to a few essential features done well.
Perhaps the best way to describe the site would be to compare certain parts to sites that have influenced me. Here are some of MNspeak.com's main features, with mentions of sites that influenced the idea:
Writing -- No one realizes quite yet what a huge effect Gawker is having on the way we talk to each other. I'm respectfully describing the tone of MNspeak.com as Gawker Minus The Mean-ness. If that doesn't grab you, try Putting The Irony Back In Minnesota Nice. In other words, expect information plus attitude, but we'll try not to hurt your feelings, unless you're Norm Coleman or CJ.
Email Newsletters -- There is no Flavorpill in the Twin Cities yet -- and now there never will be! We are offering two simple email options -- an every-day calendar email and a week-day blog email. Click here to sign up.
Calendar -- If you've known me more than five minutes, you've probably heard my rant about the media sector that's really missing the boat on the digital publishing revolution: the alt-weeklies. I honestly believe CityPages.com is doing interesting work with Babelogue, and VillageVoice.com seems to be giving it the college try -- but the rest are trapped in the dogmatic slumbers of a weekly publishing schedule. The goal of MNspeak.com's calendar is not to compete with the gigantic comprehensiveness of an alt-weekly -- rather, it's to offer a clear resource for answering this simple question: "What's going on tonight?"
Participation -- We are so lucky to have one the leading "open-source journalism" thinkers in America in our city (don't let the scatological humor fool you!). Chuck's Blogumentary has been getting accolades wherever the film screens, and it's a pleasure to finally be working on a project together. We'll be adding in more voices to the site, so stay tuned for some surprises.
Aggregator -- The problem with blogs is there's just too much. Aggregators like Kinja are doing a nice job of condensing the blogosphere into digestible units. Our aggregator still needs some work yet, but it has the potential to be -- and I don't mean this hyperbolically -- the leading community news source in the Twin Cities.
Design -- Often cited by big media as the little site they wish to be, Lawrence.com is the "disguised" entertainment site of a daily Kansas paper, The Lawrence Journal-World. The design has gotten a little messy lately, but the general structure is something that pleases me. (There are rumors that many daily papers -- including local ones -- are considering similar sites. How much you wanna bet on them "getting it"?)
Interviews -- When I met Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin at SXSW, I talked him out of launching a branch of his growing empire in Minneapolis. Actually, he mentioned some mumbo jumbo about "market size," and I knew he'd never bother with our mini-metro. Seriously though, one of our favorite Gothamist features is the interviews, which we plan to blatantly steal.
Business Model -- Oh, bring that up, will you? Yes, we're selling ads right now. If you'd like to advertise with us, click here. You'll be shocked how inexpensive they are. I can't reveal much more, but we're also talking about creating revenue opportunities for other Twin Cities bloggers. If you think about it, you can imagine how that might work. More on that later...
We're obviously excited about the site. Check it out, leave comment, sign up for the newsletters, take out an advert, check out the aggregator, and tell your friends.
We've got a lot to talk about today, and I'm not not even going to link to Lohan's new blonde hair. Deep breath... ready, set, GO!:
TV
The TV season hasn't even come to the moment of finale spoilers and already ABC has scheduled the DVD releases of the first seasons of Lost and Desperate Housewives.
TVCarnage.com. "Hundreds of hours of exceptionally bad TV lovingly fused together into hour plus, glorious cesspools of retardation." Amazing clips. NYTsays DVDs are available for free, but it looks like the link might be gone.
NewsBreakers.org. They break into local tv liveshots. Is it a sign of getting old that what once seemed funny is now lame? [via]
A look at the new TV Guide spin-off, Inside TV. Certainly no shocker: TV Guide's revenue's are plummeting.
The Gladwell-esque Opus Of The Summer is certain to be Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You (released next month). The ususal suspects are already excerpting it, including NYT Magazine (with a section about narrative tv) and Wired (not online yet).
GAMES
In Guess-the-Google you see 20 images from a one-word Google Images search, and you have to figure out what the word is. Deceptively difficult.
Rappers love to make liquids that you consume. Here's a sample of real hip-hop energy drinks: Lil Jon's Crunk!!!, Ice-T's Liquid Ice, Nelly's PimpJuice, and Russell Simmons' DefCon3. The new issue of Wired reviews them all (not online yet).
The Onion A/V Club wishlists "war" on TiVo and records the results. Lots of Nickelodeon, ABC Family, and VH1.
Video: Jon Stewart's appearance on Oprah. Why the hell Cameron Diaz is sitting there is the biggest mystery since... since... since they gave Jimmy Kimmel a tv show. (Sorry, I know I can do better than that.)
Many months ago, I was actually thinking the best localite to review the new Walker would be Peter Ritter. And there he is in CP today. He nicely conjures the Death Star, the Cheshire Cat, and an REI climbing wall to describe out new fave ediface. Hoorah, our first readable Walker review.
Today is either huge day in Fimoculous history, or it's a brief moment of crazed myopia. After avoiding it for 4+ years, I've finally added comments. The little link appears at the bottom of the posts -- and it will probably disappear the second I start getting comment spam. Be kind, young netizens. (Oh, and you probably noticed the Google Ads. I'm making about $.08/day on those, so they also might be short-lived.)
TV
I know some of you are having a hard time seeing Wonder Showzen, which MTV2 buries in the after-hours. So I've uploaded a video of the entire first episode. Download it now before my ISP (or Viacom) calls. Yeah, that was short-lived. Server slowed down to a near dead-stop. I'm sure you can find a Torrent out there.
Yes, I realize it's a little silly to show up here at the beginning of every week to watch me get upset about the lead story on the NYT Styles section. But c'mon, the man date? Dear New York Media, why must you write trite trend pieces that cause the rest of us to consider molotov cocktailing Michael's?
NYT Mag's cover story, "Our Ratings, Ourselves", tells the suprisingly fascinating story of the Portable People Meter -- a device that records all the media you've consumed in a day for marketing purposes. Pioneered by Arbitron and implemented by Nielsen, the PPM, which is about the size of a pager, accomplishes this by having all media encoded with an audio watermark. A broad range of other topics covered in the long piece: personal media device consumption, the arcane life of Nielsen labs, the shift from active to passive measurement, cable box innnovations, and direct measurement of advertising success. Two related items:
CJR asks Can Nielsen Keep up with the Way America Watches? NPR's Bob Garfield foresees the Impending Period of Transitional Chaos for Media.
MEDIA
Fun idea: ask four people -- Lizz Winstead (co-creator of The Daily Show), Don Hewitt (founder of 60 Minutes), Mark Burnett (creator Survivor and The Apprentice), Al Primo (creator of Eyewitness News) -- how to reinvent CBS's evening news. The results are chaotic. (Reminds me of the time Wiredasked for Google redesigns, and the results were a mess.)
MUSIC VIDEOS
I pretty much never have to link to a music video again after looking at this page.
BitTorrent link for the newest Daft Punk video of "Human After All."
IDEAS
William Safire's critique of privacy is a good place to jump into understanding ChoicePoint and other nefarious data-collection agencies. Sample quote: "The first civil-liberty fire wall to fall was the one within government that separated the domestic security powers of the F.B.I. from the more intrusive foreign surveillance powers of the C.I.A... But the second fire wall crumbled with far less public notice or approval: that was the separation between law enforcement recordkeeping and commercial market research."
Huh, did you know that City Pages owns a local adult website, TC Uncovered (nsfw). The meta keywords include "escorts" and "domination," and there's employment and personals sections. Naughty.
Eek! Someone stole my modus operandi for meeting girls and turned it into a website. At Consumating.com, you "show off your quirky personality with zany answers to our constantly rotating questions." It also has some nicely-executed tagging functionality that allows you to sort people by their interests. Ba-bye, Friendster.
Slate.com reviews Applebee's. Contains interesting info, and nails the success with this scrap of analysis: "How did Applebee's and its heavily sauced pork chunks make it to the top of the casual-dining heap? By treating sit-down dining establishments like fast-food outlets."
Someone please call the insider police -- the Minneapolis alt-media just jumped the whole damn ocean. Okay first, a strange Rake Mag blog post gushes all over Wonkette (who would stoop to such a low?!) and casually drops reference to publishing her pre-fame. Okay, whatever, right? But then Steve Perry (editor of City Pages) jumps into the comments to... get this... line edit a blog post. Guys, guys, take it outside!
I would do anything to make NY Press' 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers (which mentions the word "blog" 19 times -- hoorah!). Well, except move to New York.
This is the weirdest dot-com news we've seen in quite some time. Arianna Huffington is starting something called The Huffington Report, a culture and politics webzine that will have a group blog with a strange cast of characters: Larry David, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Vernon Jordan, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tina Brown, and more.
FILM
Thank god Courtney Love is back. She will be playing Linda Lovelace in a biopic.
SCIENCE
This New Scientist article was a fun read: 13 Things that Do Not Make Sense. Includes the placebo effect, dark matter, and cold fusion.
Slate reviews Make, which I have to confess I had a very hard time reading, and I'm probably the market demo.
LOCAL
To coincide with the smoking ban, City Pages did a printable guide to the only remaining smoker bars in the Twin Cities (all in St. Paul, of course).
Wow, that Strib story on punk rock glasses sure was fun, eh? I'm not going to say anything more than that because I see all the people in this story around Uptown, and I don't want any of them to punch me and break my non-retro glasses.
CP's music writing sure ain't slowing down with Missy Miss flying the coop. First off, Julianne Shepherd calls Beck's newest album his best ever. Whoa there, cowboy! And then there are Bridgette's and Lindsey's nice SXSW accounts, parts of which I got to see with them.
USA Todayreports on "Inside the Blog," created by Joe Klein, the new head-honcho at CNN previously known for dissing blogs. From a couple weeks ago: Wonkette playa-hating the segment.
New Line Cinema picked up Klosterman's new book (not out until July) for a potential film. I'm a "character" in the book again, and am demanding to be played by someone no less handsome than Giovanni Ribisi (which I'm sure means Steve Buscemi will be Rex Sorgatz). I'll do some kind of review of the book here in a couple months, but if you're curious, it's Chuck's modern-relationship-cum-dead-rock-star opus. (Previously: Rex Rock City.)
Pedro's house in Napoleon Dynamite is up for sale.
Everyone's talking about Old Boy (trailer), which won Cannes this year.
Finally a Joss Whedon comeback? He will direct the next Wonder Woman movie. Radosh predicts the lead.
Woody Allen interviewed in... SuicideGirls.com? Huh.
ONLINE/TECH
Yahoo bought Flickr. A great move for Yahoo, which is kicking Google's ass in the user-generated content arena.
And Ask Jeeves is being bought by Barry Diller.... for $1.9 billion. Jeesh, Jeeves.
Somebody please stop Christine Rosen from publishing this story again. First in The New Atlantis, she wrote about how cell phones and TiVos are ruining our lives. Now she's done it again in a NYT Mag essay.
Agence France Presse is suing Google News. Although I'm sure this will quickly get settled out of court, this raises an interesting spectre around Google News, which makes no money because there are no ads -- and this almost gaurantees it never will.
The upcoming Microsoft typefaces for the next version of Windows.
SHOES
Pimp my shoe! NYT Mag story on shoe customizers who will turn a pair of Nikes into $500 collector's items.
Firefox advert or Franz Ferdinand video? You decide.
Everyone who wasn't talking about Flickr/Yahoo rumors at SXSW Interactive last week was talking about the Tivo/Comcast deal. Here's a good follow-up interview with the CEO of Comcast, which clears up some of the questions. [Via LostRemote.]
GAMES
For those who don't think Vice City is gritty enough, here's a preview to the new 50 Cent game, Bulletproof.
They love us! Both Newsweek and the Sunday New York Times wrote about our new museum expansion this week. In Newsweek, The Walker is called "probably the leading American venue for cutting-edge artists (both visual and performing)." Description: "The tour de force of their building is the silvery five-story cube, with its daredevil cantilevered corner hovering over the entrance -- anchored by hidden tons of steel and concrete -- and the whole shebang wrapped in shimmering aluminum-mesh panels that look as light and luscious as crumpled silk." In NYT, The Walker is dubbed "a place that prefers artful provocation to blockbuster entertainment, privileges the obscure and experimental over the tried-and-true, and cultivates a willful insouciance about the forces that govern most big museum establishment." And many arty lavishes are dished on our fair city.
It's sad that the problems that The Varsity Theater is having sound like something out of Kafka. The only good (if selfish) news is that the TC ElectroPunk Show might be rescheduled to a date that I'm in town.
I will be in Austin for SXSW the next 10 days. I have a platinum pass, so I'll be at all three segments: film, interactive, and music. The plan is to blog about all of them -- we'll see how much time there actually is. Update: There's just so many people to see, so much to absorb, so much to drink... I'll never be able to keep this site updated over the next week. Later.
TV
PVRblog has the video of Bruce Willis on The Daily Show talking about how much he loves TiVo. Interesting sidenote: Bruce was acting very strange on this episode -- talking about how he hadn't even changed clothes from the night before, full of innuendo. Then yesterday the NY Post does a gossip blurb about him possibly hooking up with Lindsay Lohan. Connect the dots?
Audio of Daily Show's Stephen Colbert on NPR's Fresh Air.
MUSIC
Looks like Spin is planning a redesign of the website. Here's the current site; here's a new site. (This isn't leaked information -- Spin sent out an email that [accidentally?] has the URL in it.)
FILM
Yowza. Tarantino might direct the next Friday the 13th movie.
Trailer to Herbie Fully Loaded, starring Lindsay Lohan.
WORDS
Another Eggers interview, this time in Salon. Topics include the start of 826 Valencia, the animosity directed at the McSweeney's crowd, and the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are with Spike Jonze. It's really pretty good.
I was going to tell you that MSNBC was ahead of everyone else in their blog reportage -- especially with things like the web-only Hardball Blogcast. But then Wonkette reminded me of the "The Blog Report" on CNN. Funny ha-ha.
WatchingAmerica.com is a real-time collection of links to news stories about the United States by media organizations outside the United States. When necessary, they are translated into English.
North Dakota pops up in this Marketwatch interview with the CEO of Sportingbet, an online casino. It speculates that the casino might move to North Dakota if the legislature legalizes (and the public accepts) online gambling.
In Dot-Con Job, the Seattle Times dissects the lies behind InfoSpace.com, which PaidContent.org calls "perhaps the most amazing piece of business journalism to come out in years."
MEDIA
Hot girl is the face of democracy in the middle east -- at least on American magazines.
ONLINE
About.com CEO on why NYT spent $410 million to buy the company.
WASAW (Writers And Artists Snack At Work) is a good spot for junk food reviews. The delish Take 5 (9.3 rating) just showed up at the vending machine at work.
I'm not sure what to make of Blogologue, "a live web browsing sketch comedy multi-media stage experience" (in other words, a play) at the Bryant Lake Bowl.
Looks like there are two geek conferences coming to Minneapolis in June: Podcasting World (for Podcasters) and Flashbelt (for Flash developers). And of course there's CONvergence in July.
CP has a bit of breaking news about the Star Tribune hiring a conservative columnist.
Oooo, music critic fight! (or the closest we come to it), in which The Rake takes issue with Dylan Hicks' review of Kings of Leon in City Pages. And Reimenschneider's name is evoked for some reason or another.
In the 5+ years that I've been doing this site, I've never run advertising or asked for donations. I'm not quitting my day job or anything that ambitious, but if you feel like dropping me a few dollars of appreciation, you can do so through PayPal or Amazon. That's the beginning and end of this pledge drive.
MUSIC
Oh boy, you simply gotta hear Usher's new single, "Dot Com". "Oh, I love the way you dirty type. Oh, I need your back space in my life.... Oh baby, if you log on, I'll make you dot com... I can't wait to give you megabytes. I got all the memory you need." I would call this a hoax if it weren't on AOL. This is so bad it's post-bad.
Long NYT Magprofile of Beck, which is somewhat boring until half-way through when he starts talking about Scientology and his posse -- he's married to Marissa Ribisi (Giovanni's sister) and hangs with Adam Goldberg and Christina Ricci (who contributed a Japanese-inflected line on the song "Hell Yes").
Axl is the cover story of the Sunday NYT Arts section.
ONLINE
Fred Durst suesGawker . (And I can't even think of anything snarky to say. Well, except maybe a pun about having a Limp Bizkit.) See previously: Felix Salmon thought Gawker jumped the shark.
Exactly 48 hours ago, I was having a beer with Chuck Olsen and he told me about Plum TV (a new tv network for rich people), and I thought, "This would be a good story to pitch to the New York Times." Then the Sunday paper showed up.
Profile of the Korean animation studio that produces The Simpson's.
We've got a local girl on the next America's Next Top Supermodel. ("Favorite movie: Snatch. Favorite TV Show: Poker Championship." Grrrowl.) Anyone know her?
Over the weekend, I did a segment about online viral marketing on public radio's Weekend America. Here's the audio file (mp3 - 6.3mb).
Although most of us sentient beings think of advertising as predominantly evil (or, if forgiving, necessarily evil), an interesting contradiction arises out of viral marketing -- it's both detestable and fascinating at the same time. In that sense, viral marketing introduces complex issues about how we relate to media, how we want to believe in fantasy, and how we still cling to the notion of authenticity. Sometimes it's strangely addicting (Subservient Chicken), and other times it's like watching your parents dance to Outcast (Raging Cow).
As a compendium to the radio show, below are links to some online viral marketing campaigns. (If they aren't hyper-linked, that means the site no longer exists.) It's a long list, so skim it as you see fit:
Chicken Fight -- Burger King
http://www.chickenfight.com
Trying to follow-up the buzz behind Subservient Chicken, this was a game with a boxing bout between two chickens. It was pretty dumb.
Pimp My Burger -- Burger King http://www.pimpmyburger.com
A recent take-off of MTV's Pimp My Ride. Long but mildly entertaining.
Angus Diet -- Burger King
http://www.angusdiet.com
Another BK one. A fake inspirational speaker and personal interventionalist espouses the benefits of eating beef.
The Beast -- A.I. Artificial Intelligence http://www.cloudmakers.org
The Beast is the respected grandfather of the movement. The story: Evan Chan is murdered in the fictional world of the movie A.I. Clues are available on the internet on approximately 30 interlinked websites (disguised as universities, businesses, personal homepages, etc.). Over 7,000 people combine their knowledge to figure out the murder mystery.
I Love Bees -- Halo 2 http://www.ilovebees.com
Perhaps the most ambitious example of a new medium called "alternate-reality gaming" (which includes The Beast, above). Participants go to a website to learn what pay phones will be called that week (to make it even more geeky, they're listed by GPS coordinates). When they answer the phone, a message is given with a clue. Back on the website, you enter the answer to a question and then hear a 30-second clip of new material. Sometimes when you pick up the phone, you talk to with a live person, and what you say can be incorporated into the online game. The final episode, which had a War of the Worlds feel, was timed to the launch of the videogame. Millions of people came to the site.
MSN Found -- Microsoft/MSN http://www.msnfound.com
MSN Found has six fake online personalities in their mid-20s (with profiles more stereotypical than MTV's The Real World) write blogs and post video clips. The blogs contain words ("hypnodragon" and "define vertigious") that are intended to drive you to use MSN Search for clues. The hook is that you're supposed to get interested in the personalities, and then use MSN's new search product to find out more about these people. Strangely, the site doesn't use Microsoft's own blogging software, Spaces.
The 2-Headed Dog -- MTV2
http://www.the2headeddog.com
This came about because of MTV2's new branding strategy to compete with the upcoming music video station, Fuse. The site (now defunct) didn't contain much more than strange visuals of two-headed dogs, but it made you scratch your head if you stumbled across it before the station redesign. MTV hired people to spread the word on message boards, which caused a backlash.
The Lincoln Fry Blog -- McDonald's http://lincolnfry.typepad.com/blog/ http://lincolnfry.yahoo.com
A Super Bowl commercial about a couple who discovers a McDonald's french fry that looked like Abe Lincoln triggers this escapade. A fake blog chronicles the couple's adventures. After the ad ran, McDonald's decided to sell the fry online, where an online casino (GoldenPalace.com) paid $75,100 for it. So it's like buying someone else's viral marketing scheme to create your own.
Counter Counterfeit Commission -- BMW Mini http://www.counterfeitmini.org
This somewhat clever campaign is a fake "detect a fake Mini" site, which contains photos on detecting a fake Mini and a $20 documentary DVD on the Mini counterfeit underworld.
Elite Designers Against Ikea -- Ikea http://www.elitedesigners.org
Another fakie. Elite designers are against Ikea because their stuff is so cheap. I mean, inexpensive.
HalloweenM3 -- Mazda
http://halloweenm3.blogspot.com
This short-lived experiment from Mazda had a fake blogger talking about the new Mazda M3. The internet community generally disliked this disingenuous attempt. (NOTE: I somehow misidentified this site's name on the radio show. I called it "Raging Cow," which is below.)
Raging Cow -- Dr. Pepper http://blog.ragingcow.com
Dr. Pepper enlisted six blogging teens to promote the product Raging Cow, a new milk-based drink. The strange thing is that the bloggers aren't paid, yet they enjoy talking about the product -- a clear precursor to the persuaders.
Find The Message -- GM Onstar http://www.findthemessage.com
17 different words plus the URL FindTheMessage.com are placed on billboards around the country. The goal is to put all the words together to figure out a message. Pieced together from L.A. to New York, it turned out to be "This is the last time you will ever have to feel alone on our nation's roadways," which advertised GM's OnStar navigation product. A prize was to be given to whoever figured it out first, but someone cracked open the site's flash file, and revealed the phrase before actual terrestrial sleuths could figure it out.
Pump Up The Movie -- Best Buy / Nokia http://www.pumpupthemovie.com
It too me a while to realize that this was a fake movie site which includes a "toss the cheerleader" game. (Created by Space150.com.)
Fight Big Overcoat -- Transglobal Vacations
http://www.fightbigovercoat.org
Another one involving billboards.
Rubber Burner & Super Greg -- Lee Jeans
http://www.rubberburner.com
http://www.supergreg.com
These long-gone fake homepages of out-of-touch losers were modeled on Mahir, the dancing Turkish hipster from 1999. Fallon was behind the project. (Sidenote: This one was first brought out into the open by Kottke on Metafilter, which seems like a million years ago.)
Who Ordered Room Service -- Not Bryan Adams http://www.whoorderedroomservice.com
And now there's even parody viral marketing campaigns. At first this looked like a viral campaign by Bryan Adams for his new album, Room Service. Except he had nothing to do with it.
Slate.com has started a column called Today's Blogs, similar to the Today's Papers concept. Dumb thing: no permanent index page to link to or bookmark.
New blog: Purseuing, "a blog obsessively covering purses, bags, totes, clutches, and just about anything else you can carry on your shoulder." (See previously: Wrist Fashion.)
LOCAL
Did you see the detailed piece that Pitchfork did on The Current? Good stuff, including some speculation that the model could spread.
Somebody claims to have created a program that will remove DRM from Windows Media files. If true, this could be catastrophic for Microsoft.Bah, nevermind. But it makes you wonder what happens when this actually does occur.
TV
You're not hallucinating. Networks have been tagging an extra minute to their schedules to deceive TiVos (though they deny that's why). See also in the L.A. Times: Looking for New Ways to Make Viewers Pay, which hypothesizes the future of DVRs becoming a pay-model for the networks.
Timelists those in the running for Dan Rather's job: Katie Couric, Ted Koppel, John Roberts, Scott Pelley, Mika Brzezinski, and Anderson Cooper. Katie is gonna get it, but I'm cheering for Anderson.
I'm probably the only person you know who TiVos Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources. CommonDreams.org has an editorial critiquing the CNN show.
Good close-ups of the new Treo. I still haven't decided if it's worth $500+ to upgrade. The only benefits that affect me are the increased screen quality and the better camera.
IDEAS
Random thought: do you think we'll start hearing the word blink all the time now? I imagine in the blink of an eye being resurrected just like tipping point was. Damn you, Gladwell!
I've never heard of this collective of video directors: Colonel Blimp. You'll find videos from The Chemical Brothers, The Streets, Bloc Party, Scissor Sisters, Spiritualized, New Order, Dizee Rascal, Bjork, and Basement Jaxx. Good stuff.
MEDIA
It's interesting that I haven't found a single reason to link to Slate.com since the buy-out by the Washington Post. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it certainly looks like dullville over there lately.
NYTstory on upcoming sit-coms set in Iraq, including Spirit of America, "a Fox sitcom about the creation of a Western-style television network in contemporary Baghdad." Oh boy.
McDonald's Israel has done a parody advert [video] of the Pulp Fiction scene about burgers. (I wonder if Tarantino approved this.)
The Age of Egocasting. This is a long essay tracking personal choice in media from the remote control to "egocasting." Unfortunately, it ends with one of those doomsday, Postman-esque scenarios envisioned back in the Republic.com days. (That type of argument should be totally debunked by now. TiVo and other personalization devices cause me to experience more media options, not less.)
Blinkx.tv has essentially come out of nowhere to capture a segment of the future that Google should really own: video search. They've signed up BBC, ITV, Sky and Fox.
As expected, Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink, is getting a lot of attention. If you have any interest in keeping up with Gladwell, here's the NYTBR review, the Salon review, and a Metafilter thread.
The whole blogging/disclosure/activism debate has so many tentacles to it now that I won't bother linking to everything. Instead, if you care, here's a post that does.
Alexis says that a Metropark is coming to the Mall of America. Good or bad? You decide: "Metropark is a new breed of lifestyle retailer inspired by the fusion of fashion, music, and art. We stand for seduction, life after midnight, and the constant pursuit of desire." Well, I guess we'll just see about that....
C|Net interviews Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, a founder of Wikipedia who is behind WikiNews.
Long look at the business of the New York Times from Business Week. (The section about NYTimes.com potentially becoming a pay site got dot-comers all worked up the past few days.)
TV
Varietycomes down on 60 Minutes for its soft profile on Google.
More details on the MTV wireless deal, which could put clips from The Daily Show and Best Week Ever on cell phones.
Yet another profile of BitTorrent, this time from the Seattle Times.
MUSIC
Sasha wrote about mash-ups for The New Yorker. I don't know about the genesis of the piece, but it reads like something that was edited into blandness.
The Guardianprofiles Dolly Parton, including notes on "why God likes gays."
Yipe, the entire run of the Sub Pop Singles Club (minus one record) is on sale on eBay. Bid is currently $4500.
FILM
You've probably heard that Richard Linklater is directing an animated version of Phillip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly, and Ain't It Cool News has some pics. (BTW, when was the last time you saw anyone link to Ain't It Cool News?)
And the award for washed-up cast of the year goes to... Alone in the Dark, starring Christian Slater, Tara Reid, and Stephen Dorff.
LOCAL
Apparently Ron Jeremy is appearing at the Triple Rock January 15. It's a little unclear what this even actually is, but I'll try to find out for you.
Stribprofiles the novel writing program, NaNoWriMo. (BTW, is anyone else annoyed with the way StarTribune.com now breaks every story into two pages? For some reason it never bothered me when NYTimes.com did it, but this does.)
PaidContent.org asked people for 2005 digital media predictions, which caused me to write this futuristic sentence:
"We all have the regrettable responsibility to act like some weird hybrid of embedded reporter and reality TV star."
The responses are here, and what I wrote is below:
What's the most important development in digital media and entertainment that actually will occur in 2005?
1) Content will continue to unbundle itself.
I have no idea what night The Apprentice airs -- I'm not even sure which network it's on. All I know is that every Friday night this past year, my friends would gather around the TiVo and lovingly poke fun at Donald Trump's hair. Whether it was iTunes or RSS or TiVo, this was the digital media lesson of '04: content has no natural brand identity. Marketers try to force "brand" on it while journalists try to force "narrative" on it, but content will continue to shed these mucky add-ons and proceed toward its natural state: pure information.
2) The line between communication and publishing will continue to be less distinct.
In the world of nano-publishing, traditional concepts like communication (one-to-one) and publishing (one-to-many) become blurry propositions. All signs point to this breakdown of public and private: websites that aggregate and organize personal content into social threads (Flickr, Bloglines, del.icio.us), private moments becoming major entertainment experiences (reality TV, celeb sex tapes), communication technologies that make online relations both more personal and more anonymous at the same time (VoIP, LiveJournal), personal media devices creating global news events (Abu Ghraib prisoner photos taken with a cell phone, tsunami video recorded on handhelds bought at Best Buy), and the rise of blogger personalities who review digital media devices next to their dating problems (ahem). What does this mean for digital media? It means the content stars of 2005 will come from the least likely places. And we all have the regrettable responsibility to act like some weird hybrid of embedded reporter and reality TV star.
3) Media will continue to be manipulated.
This might have been the biggest lesson I learned from working on NBC's website for the summer Olympics this past year: media manipulation is the message. One single piece of video, for instance, could be use for infinite purposes: online streaming, still photos, audio slideshows, images distributed to cell phones, interactive Flash apps, redistribution to TiVos, repackaging as highlight reels... the list goes on and on. In digital entertainment, some of the most exciting events this year were media manipulations: Danger Mouse's Gray Album (which was Entertainment Weekly's album of the year), Strangerhood (machinima of The Sims characters), and MTV's Video Mods (video games plus rock stars). In 2005, media hybrids will become so normative you'll hardly even think to call them that.
What one thing that would make a difference in digital media or entertainment would you most want to see happen in 2005?
Interoperability among digital music standards.
At least one media outlet uses BitTorrent as a distribution model.
At least one major company adapts Creative Commons instead of the increasingly archaic copyright laws now in places.
Microsoft puts an RSS reader in Outlook or IE.
TV Industry predictions?
CNN won't lose Tucker.
Someone will buy TiVo, but it won't be Apple.
Two or three citizen journalist sites will launch. Critical praise will be high; growth will be slow at first, but pick up by the end of the year.
Apple won't make a video iPod. Portable Media Devices will struggle, but not die.
Video search will surprise everyone and be a big success early in 2005.
Michael Powell will torture a few more people, then retire.
Netflix will either merge with TiVo, or be bought by Blockbuster.
Yipe. Tucker Carlson is quitting CNN and moving to MSNBC. (Note: The blog TVNewser gets the scoop first.)
Poynter.org has a New Media Timeline (from 1969 to 2004) that would have been much better if there were a single-page version that you could print.
ONLINE
NYT Mag on blogs, privacy, sex, journalism, and identity: Your Blog or Mine? The thesis: "In the age of blogs, all citizens, no matter how obscure, will have to adjust their behavior to the possibility that someone may be writing about them." Perhaps I'm too blithe about this topic, but I rather enjoy a world where everyone is a walking reality tv show.
Here's a story idea for one of you cute little intrepid journalists out there: What ever happened to Apple girl Ellen Feiss? Actually, you could do a whole series of former internet celebs, including Mahir and the Star Wars kid.
Days after donations to Mozilla fund a two-page ad in the Times, the biz section raves about Firefox.
LOCAL
Dave has posted the Maxim "story" on the Rogue Taxidermists show at Creative Electric.
The news all my friends were talking about this weekend: MPR is launching a new music radio station. Looks like it has all the potential in the world... or it could completely suck. Not sure what to make of this: "Our staff will be hanging out in clubs, searching the Internet, reading the music magazines and streaming music from around the globe to find the best music for you." They've also started a blog.
Art Forum Diary, which Greg.org describes as "an art world reality TV show, where the magazine's editors and contributors compete for the Walter Benjamin-inspired title of Greatest Flaneur." Yum!
This was supposed to be the year that our past saved us from ourselves. But at least far as popular music is concerned, that wasn't true, as new releases from the Beastie Boys, Courtney Love, REM, Prince, Bjork, and U2 all turned out as noble attempts at pretending not to be boring.
But then, just as the failure of the legacy acts opened the door for newcomers such as Nellie McKay and Arcade Fire, a couple unexpected true legacies came from out of nowhere to surprise us: Loretta Lynn and Brian Wilson. Who saw that coming?
As I saw it, here are the best albums of 2004:
1) The Streets, A Grand Don't Come For Free -- When I was upset about another relationship breakup, when I was getting ready for a party, when I was choosing an album for my alarm clock to wake me up to in the morning -- it was always The Streets on the stereo. Beyond its versatility, it was also completely indescribable. By default, it's called hip-hop, but it seems more like some kind of ancient syncopated storytelling. That's right, Mike Skinner is our Homer. And the craziest part was when people would ask for a description of the album: toward the end of explaining the Pulp Fiction-ish structuring narrative, I had to pause and say, "I can't say any more without ruining how it ends." That's the sign of a good album.
2) Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand -- Idea for us to make millions in Hollywood: let's make a movie set in the summer of '04, and play "Take Me Out" during the party scene. Millions, I tell you! The way I see it, "Take Me Out" starts like a good Strokes (or Beatles?) ditty and segues perfectly into a great White Stripes (or Stones?) romp. Before you can even realize it, you're singing "I know I won't be leaving here... with you" to every girl at the party. And you won't be leaving with her, because she's having too much fun dancing. This was the album for people who wanted to forget in three-and-a-half-minute increments that GW has already taken us through two wars.
3) TV on the Radio, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes -- Just when you thought every possible option for fusion was gone (country electronica? check. indie hip-hop? check. a capella dance? check.), a few dudes in Brooklyn came up with what is essentially doo-wop punk. Yet it sounds nothing like that, as this fusion is probably the most unique sound of the decade so far.
4) DFA, Compilation #2 -- At first, this album -- which sounds approximately like "dancing to a plane crash" -- seemed impenetrably "too New York" for me to "get." In fact, every time I described it to someone, I threw around scare-quotes just like that last frightening sentence. And then somewhere around track five on the second disc, it hit me: this sounds like Minneapolis in 1985, when punk (Husker Du, The Replacements) and funk (Prince, Morris Day) were banging heads with each other. Suddenly, it felt like home.
5) Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose -- Out of the gate, this album was criticized as a forced mash-up. Which of course it is, and that's what it's so gorgeous.
6) Dizzee Rascal, Showtime -- There's something about Dizzee Rascal that reminds me of playing Tetris. Must. Fit. Blocks. In. Holes.
7) Wilco, A Ghost Is Born -- Though immensely frustrating at times, the brilliance of Jeff Tweedy shines through in spurts and whistles and grunts.
8) The Walkmen, Bows and Arrows -- The Walkmen are sort of the Built To Spill of 2004. We always need an indie rock band that turns the guitar fuzz louder than the vox.
9) PJ Harvey, Uh Huh Her -- It's probably her second-weakest album, but PJ still makes the most shamefully annihilating recordings of anyone alive.
10) "Rockism" -- Even though Michaelangelo insisted that the debate is at least three years old, 2004 was the year that rockism went, well, mainstream. Kelefa Sanneh's critique of the goofy word led me into more conversations than any album this year, and because of that, it was better than all those boring old-timer albums. I still think it's a straw man concept, but hey, it was nice arguing with all of you about it. For at least a half-second, it actually tricked me into thinking music criticism still matters.
22 runner-ups:
Arcade Fire, Funeral;
Bloc Party, Bloc Party;
The Hold Stready, Almost Killed Me;
Interpol, Antics;
Air, Talkie Walkie;
The Fiery Furnaces, Blueberry Boat;
Morrissey, You Are The Quarry;
Nellie McKay, Get Away From Me;
Modest Mouse, Good News For People Who Love Bad News;
Bjork, Medulla;
Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse;
Madvillian, Madvillainy;
Big & Rich, Horses of a Different Color;
Pavement, Crooked Rain Reissue;
Tom Waits, Real Gone;
Le Tigre, This Island;
The Killers, Hot Fuss;
The Thrills, Let's Bottle Bohemia;
Bjork, Medulla;
Har Mar Superstar, Handler;
Clinic, Winchester Cathedral;
Eminem, Encore.
Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson did a 8-minute faux-documentary imagining online media in the year 2014. EPIC is a cool look at the future of personalized and robotic news. (MetaFilter thread takes some jabs at it.)
The 2005 SXSW Conference has been announced. (Music: March 16-20; Film: March 11-19; Interactive: March 11-15.) Price to attend all: $650. Ouch, that's almost $200 more than last year.
Border's launched a viral personalized web gift-finder, GiftMixer 3000, which bases choice on five personality criteria: Romantic, Adventurous, Brainy, Imaginative and Funny.
The Pistons/Pacers brawl reimagined as Picasso's Guernica.
MUSIC
Trapped in car for 8+ hours this weekend, I listened to the new Gwen Stefani album three times. It sucks, but I bet Kelefa Sanneh would try to convince me it's awesome. (Conclusion also reached in the car: Kelefa's anti-rockism screed reminds me of girls in high school who tried to convince me on the greatness of Richard Marx.)
FOOD
My high school girlfriend is the pastry chef at Django in Midtown Manhattan. New York Daily News asked her to do something cool with cranberries, so she did.
LOCAL
Okay, it's gonna take a second to get to the "LOCAL" angle of this one, but hang on.... Do you remember the rumor from last week that the Bush twins showed up at a downtown Manhattan restaurant and were told they couldn't get a table -- and that the restaurant would be booked for four more years. Har! For reasons that are a bit mystifying, NYT Styles profiles the restaurant's founder, Taavo Somer. If he looks familiar (he does to me), it turns out he was an architect in Minneapolis a few years ago. (He's also the guy behind the "Morally Bankrupt," "Emotionally Unavailable," and "Until Somebody Better Comes Along" t-shirts you may have seen.) In the profile, Somer cites the now-defunct Loring Cafe as his inspiration for the restaurant, Freeman's. "[The Loring] was a bohemian hangout where you had older people, young people, Eurotrash, everything. They had food, drinks and even a ballet company. It was the circus freak show of life." Over two-and-a-half years ago, I described the Loring as "the place in which all the not-quite-ethnic-yet-ethnic hotties converged." Let the Loring nostalgia commence.
Amy's Robot collects all the goodies from U2's performance on SNL this week, including Amy Pohler acting like a little girl when Bono dry humps her. And no, that wasn't a skit.
The last couple Frontline episodes -- the one on Wal-Mart and the one on marketing -- have been excellent. Next up: credit cards.
In a pretty blatant ripoff of Supersize Me (which was a pretty blatant ripoff of me and my dumb friends in college), some guy is drinking nothing but Pepsi Holiday Spice for 45 days and blogging about it.
I might be the only person in my peer group who reads every single word they can find about the potential merging of Sears and Kmart. There's something about the way it changes my perception of demographics. Anyway, NYT Biz has a roundup with a bunch of interesting stats, including how this might affect Target and the evolution of "big box" shopping.
PUBLISHING
Customized mag publishing is nothing new, but I've never heard of a magazine creating a special cover for an individual retailer. According to Rex Blog (no relation), Lucky did this for WalMart.
TECH
Google sets up an office right next to Microsoft and The Seattle Times runs a funny interview asking why they would do such a thing.
ART
If you live in NYC, MoMA reopened this week. If not, you saved yourself $20 by just reading about it.
DAILY SHOW
Zulkey interviews Ben Karlin, the guy who has held the two coolest writing jobs of my generation.
As if there were any doubt that Rolling Stone should just be shot and put out of its geriatric misery, here's their 500 Greatest Songs. Good sign this list will suck: only six of the songs in the top 50 have come out in my lifetime. And I'm in my 30s, kids.
Do you remember how after the election, the first round of analysis said that the primary reason Kerry lost was the gay marriage initiatives? That was quickly debunked, and right after that, a second round of analysis stated the issue more broadly (and ominously): Cultural Issues. Topics like Janet Jackson's nipple and The Passion of the Christ were used to bolster this argument. But as someone who grew up in North Dakota can tell you, I'm not sure anyone in the heartland is any more offended by Janet Jackson's breast than they are by hockey fights. Which is why I like how this NYT map shows how things are more complex than you think. If I had more time, I'd be writing an essay right now about how the heartland isn't where the problem lies -- it's those goddamn suburbs and exurbs. As a friend recently observed, all of our fucked up friends aren't from the city or the country -- they're from the ugly place in between.
LOCAL
Anyone else worried the new Walker is starting to look like bubble wrap? I live next door, and every time I drive by, I want to go pop its little bubbles.
Every year, I put together a massive collection of Best Of lists. (Previously: 2003 and 2001 -- okay, almost every year). A few of you have emailed me recently to ask if I'll be doing it this year again -- and of course I will be. Today is officially the start of the season, as NYT Circuits published their Top 10 Games of the Year and Rolling Stone has The Year's Best DVDs. Let the lists begin...
ONLINE
Seen this one yet? A website outta Texas that lets you do target practice online: Live-shot.com. Gotta love those red states.
High Tensionlooks like another mediocre horror movie, but ya gotta love the song playing in the trailer -- Sonic Youth doing The Carpenter's "Superstar," which is one of the best covers of all time.
Pulp Fiction writer Roger Avery sues Microsoft over a video game about yoga. (Only Microsoft would steal the worst game idea ever.) And he has a blog chronicling his lawsuit.
PUBLISHING
Whoa, talk about future-dating a story. Frank Rich's Sunday column is already online with a dateline of November 21.
Wonkette and I are the only people in the room wearing jeans.
Okay, that might be a lie -- of the 300+ media (or quasi-media, or para-media, or disintermediated) professionals who have just finished munching on their Wolfgang-Puck-created-exquisite-chicken-breast-on-a-lucious-bed-of-potatoes, there might actually be a few more journos in jeans. But Wonkette just said that it's okay to be an "unjournalist" who "writes the first draft of history" as long as I'm up front about it, so I feel no remorse in eluding those pestering facts for the benefit of this narrative.
Over the din of dessert, funny guy Mickey Kaus introduced Ana Marie Cox as an "online presence," which led to the first of her many jokes. If her speech had an important-sounding "Capped Title In Quotes," it probably would have been something like "How Blogs Changed Journalism In The 2004 Election." But she got skittish about sounding too much like "the junior journalism professor from Blue State College," so she quickly added, "If I start to sound too boring, someone just signal, and I'll make a joke about sodomy."
Speaking of sodomy, let's make fun of Andrew Sullivan! It seems like a millennium ago that Sullivan was perceived as an internet sensation, but it was only last year that he was the keynote in this very spot. Wonkette doesn't like Sullivan for all the same reasons you shouldn't like him either, but she takes particular issue with his rhetoric of blogs having the potential to save the world. In a tidy dust-up, she called him, "not only arrogant, but lazy."
Which, unfortunately, was what more than a few Capital J Journalists here said after her speech. I had the personal misfortune of sitting next to a former CNN exec who nearly spewed her salad across the room when Ana Marie said "bloggers have succeeded in deprofessionalizing journalism." Here was one highbrow who was taking this deprofessionalizing like a lobotomy -- she squawked that it was "an insult" to have Wonkette speaking to such an Esteemed Group Of Professionals. It was obvious that a few people here don't actually know what Wonkette is.
There were points in Cox's speech where you could palpably feel the room taking sides -- the serious do-gooders who seriously do good work versus the ragtag collective who relish being called "scrappy." It's not hard to guess where I land in this dichotomy, but it was startling to see how many of these journalists viewed Wonkette as a threat to their entire belief system. Liberal media? Pshaw.
Ana Marie talks in spliffy sound bites which sound strangely something like -- oh, let's call them Un-hick Ratherisms. I couldn't even type all of them fast enough. She uses phrases like "pleasurable solipsism" to describe the way the mainstream media echo chambered her rise to fame. "My job for being a special correspondent of MTV was to talk about my role as a special correspondent for MTV."
So what did she actually say? Many things, but the item you're probably going to hear a lot about was the election exit polls, which she published on her site "without even thinking about it at the time." Probably knowing that this was going to come up in the Q&A, Wonkette, who calls herself a cyber-libertarian ("I like my porn free and my email private"), had a prepared response: "My retrospective argument seems relevant: we had to publish exit polls in order to kill them." Not too shabby. Until someone from CBSNews.com (actually, it was Dick Meyer, who has the most perfect head of gray hair I've ever seen) stood up and nearly scolded her for publishing them. "Did you even think to ask someone about what exit polls were?" he asked in that way in which the word "miffed" doesn't do the sentiment justice. To which Wonkette said something like "I don't disagree with anything you say. If pressed, I have to fall back on my cyber-libertarian argument, and I don't want to do that, because that's what Jack Schafer does.... You obviously know much more about exit polls than I do, so I'm just going to let you be right." Underneath the twittering laughter, you could actually hear people mentally preparing critical cocktail speeches to impress their colleagues with tonight. (And my speech was by far the best, thank you very much.)
What else? This one got some arousal: "Those who work in the business have a stake in the illusion that getting it right most of the time is getting it right all of the time. Bloggers have eliminated that gap between all of the time and most of the time."
And this one: "I owe all of my success to the vanity of liberal journalists."
And I personally relished this one: "Much like with zines, people who have any skill are just using their blog to get a good job."
And on working for Denton: "We don't have a lot of contact. That's the way I like my bosses: invisible, distant, imperious."
And on if she ever withholds a story: "I have a motto which I'm going to needlepoint onto a pillow: 'It's okay to ruin someone's day, but not their life.'"
And finally: "Don't call if journalism if it's not."
Update:
I've received numerous emails from other conference attendees who reported something similar -- that someone else at their table was dismissing Wonkette, while others ran to her rescue. Who says this battle between old and new media is dead?
+ Where's my goddamn coffee? They always screw up one big thing at these conferences, and this year, it's hiding the coffee. You have to go digging around in the innards of the hotel -- is this the kitchen? -- to find a simple cup of joe.
+ The swag sucks. Let's see what's inside this Yahoo News bag: One Reuters baseball hat. One CBSmarketwatch notepad. And three tins of mints: SignOnSanDiego.com, U.S. Newswire, and Valeo Intellectual Property. There better be something better at the booths.
+ This is a maze. I'll try to post pics later, but this is one of those hotels that attempts to merge with the nearest shopping mall. (It's that monstrosity on the Strip in Hollywood -- you might have actually read about it elsewhere. Biggest. Gap. Ever.) The conference rooms aren't labeled on the elevators, and you have to guess that it's the "POOL" button. Like, duh. So the conference is right next to the pool, which would be a horrendous visual tragedy if you lived in Minnesota, but here... eh, not so bad. Is that Wonkette sunbathing over there?
+ Location, location, location. I don't know if I'm supposed to find industry significance in dropping the conference in the middle of Hollywood, but I do find it important that the Erotic Museum is one block away. (Last night, the line was around the block. I'll try again tonight.)
+ But... let's be honest: there's high-speed WiFi everywhere, and that trumps pretty much any faults you could come up with. Excellent addition.
People like me (go ahead, try to image that category) are innately suspicious of media moguls. Or at least that's what I like to say. In reality, I probably just lower the bar for all CEOs, and then like to feign "pleasant surprise" when I discover they know what they're talking about. Okay, I'm a punk.
For instance, you (watch me shift the blame from me to you) probably wouldn't expect the President of the stodgy Associated Press to be able to cite Lawrence Lessig, Craig's List, Technorati, RSS, TiVo, and MoveOn.org in one breath. And, again if you're like me, you're left unsure if that's reassuring for digital media when he does.
Tom Curley, the President and CEO of AP, was the keynote speaker at the Online News Association conference here in Hollywood. Unlike previous presentations, Curley took this opportunity to get somewhat theoretical ("the message is the medium") and a bit boosterish ("established brands will continue to be important"). Overall, he set the pace for the stage we're at in this industry -- excited, but cautious; intrigued, but slightly jaded; smart, but wary of being too smart.
Curley outlined a "critical but subtle revolution" that he labeled "Web 2.0" Tired? Yes. Cutesy? A bit. But when he starts tossing around quips like "content will be more important than the container," you're both impressed that he gets it, but also wonder if Wonkette might be typing a dismissive screed in the back of the room. (Programming note: Wonkette takes the stage tomorrow. I hope she's at the bar tonight though. How do you think Ana Marie likes her martinis?)
"You can no longer control the containers. You have to let the content flow where the users want to go," Curly says, and I quickly glance around the room to see if everyone see the importance of this.
Beyond theory-speak (at one point, he even used the word disintermediation), Curley seemed to come down pro-blogger but anti-search engine. Perhaps that's just the old canard of knowing your audience. Bloggers are everywhere here, and Google (who some newsies still conceive as an foe of online media) is nowhere to be seen.
More updates coming...
Additional Notes & Quotes From Curley's Keynote:
+ "In Web 2.0, discrete pieces of content -- stories, photos and video clips -- all categorized and branded, will be dis-assembled from whatever presentation you create and magically re-assembled on the PC desktop, the mobile device or TV set-top box, for consumption on demand."
+ "If this sounds like all the predictions you've heard all these years, you're almost right."
+ "A story is sum of many valuable parts."
+ "The news as a lecture gives way to news as a conversation."
+ In the Q&A period, someone quoted Curley's use of the word disintermediation. This is so disintermediated.
+ When someone from the DenverPost.com thanked Curley for AP's clickable election maps, the crowd clapped. Let's hear it for clickable maps!
I'll be outta town the next few days, attending the ONA Conference, which I might also blog. If you live in L.A. and want to throw back drinks with me, let me know.
Sorry I've been gone for a few days. It was a busy week on the homefront. Interpol played a good show on Tuesday; I spoke at the MIMA Summit on Wednesday; the single best design-cum-politics eventanywhere was on Thursday. Leaving aside my personal life speaking only about local events, this has been the best Fall. Every day has something cool going on. Bite me, New Yawkers.
Reason collects answers to the question "Who's Getting Your Vote?" from a diverse set of people including John Perry Barlow, Drew Carey, Nat Hentoff, Penn Jillette, P.J. O'Rourke, Camille Paglia, Louis Rossetto, Glenn Reynolds, Jack Shafer, R.U. Sirius, Andrew Sullivan, Eugene Volokh, Matt Welch, and Robert Anton Wilson. Some surprising answers.
Results of the Nerve.com sexual/political poll, which answers such important questions as "There are two spots left in your hot tub: Do you invite the Bush twins or the Kerry daughters?"
TV
Mark Cuban's Benefactor was quietly cancelled (thank. fucking. god.). But Trump, who wrote Cuban a letter, ain't letting it disappear so easily.
Three more music director videos are coming. The first directors were Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry. The second set will be Mark Romanek, Jonathan Glazer and Anton Corbijn.
A certain Klosterman fellow sorta reviews the new Wilco album in City Pages. (Wherein you learn Chuck and Jeffy Tweedy both like -- ugh -- Jet. Right, right, I don't like Jet because I'm a hipster.)
Now, this is rock 'n roll! A one-week cruise with Journey, Styx, and REO Speedwagon: RR Holiday Escape.
Pitchfork gives the new Le Tigre a 3.3 and EW dissed the "I'm So Excited" cover this week. This really disapoints me.
I looked everywhere in the Sunday Times for something about the Jon Stewart / Crossfire battle. It took them five days to finally get to it, though.
SCIENCE
One of those things you only know about me if you know me offline: I have no sense of smell. (It's a long tragi-comic story, but I lost it in an accident about six years ago.) I just noticed the Times Mag has a column by a woman who lost her smell, and the process by which she regained it. Looks like I have a winter project ahead of me.
It's Melissa's fault that I've been watching America's Top Model, but I just found out that Nicole is from... Minot, ND. Impossibly, her bio lists herself as "former punk rocker." The kids who knew her (of which I am not one) are talking about her here.
Can you imagine writing this next sentence in 1994? Billy Corgan will be reading at The Loft today. (I wonder if I can get him to say "Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.")
If you live in Northeast (or visit that hidden NE Grumpy's), you've probably met Tom Taylor, the Green party candidate for that district's state house rep. CP profiles him.
Ever wonder why all your friends are leaving Uptown for Northeast. For reasons like this.
If you missed it, a few Pioneer Press reporters were suspended for going to a Springsteen concert. Weird.
After three episodes, I still haven't decided if Desperate Housewives is a lame suburbanization of Sex and the City or a campy send up from the John Waters set. Anyway, it's crazy to hear the show is losing advertisers because of controversial content. (Best line from tonight's episode: "Rex cries after he ejaculates." I kid you not.) See also, in Variety: Get me some housewives, dammit!
This could be good: Flow, a Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture.
MUSIC
Dude, this is rad. "Sunday Bloody Sunday" as performed by GW Bush. Someone has sampled speeches so that he sings virtually every lyric from the U2 hit.
Massive Inc., "the world's first video game advertising network."
DERRIDA
Post-Derrida, The Timesdrives the nail into the coffin of theory. I've been out of academia too long to be able to adequately respond, but here is my problem with this euology: it misses how Big-T Theory has really resituated itself as small-t theory, which is a conquest in its own right. In other words, didn't theory really just win the cultural war?
Various writers (from Richard Dawkins to JG Ballard to AS Byatt) respond to Derrida's death in The Guardian.
LOCAL
Looks like the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists have their own website. The Creative Electric show is pretty amazing.
Quote of the year: "I hear rumors on the Internets..." -G.W.B. C'mon now, 48% of you want this guy to be president again?
WORDS
He changed it all. Jacques Derrida (Wikipedia) died Friday. The obit that landed on the front page of the Times this morning is good at describing the cultural shift that Derrida created (or documented), but it obsesses on defining deconstruction. Google News has more, and if you know French, you might try Le Monde's obit. Look for heavy eulogizing from the remnants of old guard of academia this week.
DATING / SEX
My pal Melissa has a theory that the best way for a boy to get a girl to like him is to have it known that other girls like him. I don't like when she talks like this, because I fear it will reveal too much strategy. Anyway, the best thing in NYT Styles this week is the piece about Wingwomen.com, a site where a guy hires a girl to act as their social liason to other desirable girls.
What I like about Brendan Koerner's weekly Sunday Times column "The Goods" is not so much how he introduces us to the marketing of a unique product every week (althought that's good too), but more than that, I like how he bolsters his picks by quoting obscure industry dot-coms. This week, you could be cruising along reading the analysis of cheese pizza when it throws out at you the industry site PizzaMarketplace.com. It can hardly be surprising to find out there's a pizza industry publication, yet that it's so accessible is one the great things about the internet.
On NPR, Xeni Jardin talks to Trey Parker and Matt Stone about Team America. They're also in Newsweek. In related news, Sean Penn sends an angry memo to the boys.
My email pal Jeff Gralnick pens a travel essay about his climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
LOCAL
More from Riemenschneider on the First Ave. debacle. Here's the TCPunk message board debating the issues.
A Strib roundup of three different Minnesota women who have recently had some reality tv fame, including Jamie Foss, who is pretty much a parody of every reality tv start alive.
So you want to start a topical blog that will be adored across the land, especially by the super-smart, media-hip blogosphere? I've got the perfect idea for a young journalist entrepreneur like youself: a blog all about Fake News. There's so much to feed on here, with everything from The Daily Show's crazy success to The Onion expanding the print edition across the country to whack characters like Ali G and Mo Rocca being taken seriously. In addition to everything that's happening in the Fake News Industry, your faux-media-blog could mix in all the quasi-news of the day being produced by Bill O'Reilly's screamfest and Al Gore's upcoming network. Add a dash of RatherGate and a pinch of PR Passing For News, and you could have yourself a hit. You could get ahead of the faker hegemony by posting the Top 10 Spoof-Ready Stories each day (probably snagged right off Fark, and appearing as Leno punchlines later that night -- especially that one about Kerry's fake tan). You could become the Romenesko of Fake News! This idea is dot-com bank. Nick Denton or MediaBistro would be knocking down your door within days. This is your moment of zen!
To get you started, I've even got some posts for you:
Tina Fey's new SNL sidekick on "Weekend Update" is.... Amy Poehler. Here's a transcript and a video of the season's first episode. Finally, a double-female fake news anchor team. A great day in fake news equality!
FoxNews.com wrote and published a fake news story about Kerry's metrosexuality, and retracted it citing "bad judgment." Here's a Timesstory on the whole thing, and here's the Lost Remote gang debating it. I ask you to forget about the ethics of this imbroglio -- instead ask yourself, does this signal the mainstream press's attempt to get into the Fake News business? Yes!
William Shatner went to Riverside, Iowa saying he was going to make a movie. After hiring local actors and givingstories to newspapers, he recently revealed that the entire thing is a fake. Instead, Invasion Iowa is going to be a reality tv show. Shatner faked out a whole damn town!
Next month's Wiredwill come bundled with a CD with 16 songs that can be freely copied, distributed, and remixed by other artists. It will include Beastie Boys, Le Tigre, David Byrne, My Morning Jacket, Paul Westerberg, Cornelius, Matmos, and others.
Last week, intrepid Waxy posted The Kleptones' A Night at the Hip-Hopera, a mashup of Queen and early rappers like Grandmaster Flash. You might have guessed it would get the same controversial attention as Danger Mouse's "Grey Album," and you might be right.
Chuck Statler is pretty much the father of the modern rock video. He has worked with Devo, Prince, The Cars, Styx, Graham Parker, Stan Ridgway, and Elvis Costello. He lives in Minneapolis, and there's a retrospective of his work coming up at Sound Unseen. CPprofiles him.
Grandpa Coleman gets all grumpy about blogs this week. "Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world."
Today, I want to touch on a few topics related to game culture -- and how it intersects with movies, music, and digital communication. I know, that intro sentence sounds about as fun as an a capella Bjork album (oh wait!). So instead of getting pedantic, let's look at the gaming landscape by pointing out new phenomena in digital entertainment, with a focus on how gaming is influencing all media. This isn't necessarily a cohesive essay with a single objective, but I hope it's more than another "Synergy of The Matrix" piece. Let's just call this a Scrappy Collection of Thoughts About Various Gaming Trends that have been of recent fascination to me:
VIDEO MODS
I won't try to convince you that the mashup of a teen-goth BloodRayne 2 video game and a teen-goth Evanescence music video belongs in the canon of required cultural material for our time. In other words, don't sigh if your TiVo missed Video Mods, a new series on MTV2 in which video game characters and landscapes are used to create music videos. I guess the worst thing that one could say about Video Mods is that Viacom is blatantly ripping off Machinima to attract video game advertising to television.
Even if that's true, it's also much more.
But first: a part of me wants to tell you that the convergence of these mediums is the perfect metaphor for the current state of the music industry. This cynical critique would go something like this: little pac men (consumers) run around a contested maze (Virgin Records) gobbling up indistinguishable dots (songs/albums) and ghosts (musicians). It's a sociological Flatland out there, in which demographics are empty ciphers with unlimited purchasing power -- the same goddamn person buys (or downloads) Outkast, Evanescence, and Creed. À la carte pop culture icons are sculpted with the same care that goes into creating Sims characters -- complete with readymade identities that become obsolete faster than you can blurt "Friendster." Identity is the currency of the music industry, and it's a free market economy of Pokemon cards: I'll trade you a "Britney Reinvented #24" for a "Cleaned Up Christina #9." Virtual video game characters taking over the role of musician is nothing more than the next step in the MilliVanilling of the music industry.
But, like I said, I don't really buy that mojo. Perhaps there is a kernel of truth in cynically looking at pop culture icons, but I think it ultimately misses a key point in understanding the attraction of Video Mods. For evidence, take a look at The Sims 2 video mod of the Fountains of Wayne song "Stacy's Mom."
The Sims is the top dog of this medium so far. Not only is it the highest-selling series of all time, but it has come to represent a watershed creative moment in the industry. So why, one might ask, would "Stacy's Mom" score the grand prize of The Sims mod?
I honestly have no idea. But I think you'll see a clue by looking at the storyline behind "Stacy's Mom." You might say the Fountains of Wayne song is just a MILF romp imagined by a horny adolescent. But in reality, it's not even that -- it's actually sung by thirty-somethings who are themselves projecting a tweener dream. Basically, it's a wish fulfillment nostalgia fantasy from guys old enough to be Stacy's Dad.
So now, what is The Sims? That's more complex, but one could say it is an interactive world where players bring to life characters outside their normal demographic makeup. In other words, it's a giant role-playing fantasy.
Starting to see a trend here? Let's move on....
PLAYBOY
In the age of Suicide Girls, it's amazing that Playboy is still around. And it's amazing that I bother to mention the publication in a video game rant. But even as I say this, I realize that for the first time in my life, I bought an issue of Playboy last month, simply because the magazine has done a remarkable job of staying relevant in a digital age. For instance, the Google guys interview and the Washingtonienne spread reminded me that the magazine could still be relevant.
Or maybe these are just the last gasps of breath of a dying Boomer ideology. I'd entertain that argument too.
Anyway, when Playboy announced they would be doing a photo spread of characters from video games, you could instantly picture a digital historian somewhere writing this event into a timeline of important virtual character events (chronologically right after reality TV and right before the holodeck). Hackers modding Lara Croft into a pinup is one thing, but the mainstream culture industry getting sly with virtual sexuality says a lot more about where we are. This single layout might actually become the best indicator of the mainstreaming of a number of (previously) fringe activities and concepts: virtual sexuality, video game culture, user-modified content, reality blurring. And a new video game, Playboy: The Mansion, a Sims-like romp through Hef's mansion, will take this even further.
WAR GAMING
Forget sex, war is where it's at.
A lot has been said recently about the relationship between the industrial war complex and video games (such as in articles in The New York Times and Wired). When the Army created the game America's Army to recruit soldiers, it seemed that Ender's Game truly was going to happen. I'm working on an article for publication about this theme, so let's breeze past this topic for the moment.
SIMS 2
Every night over the last week, I've sat in a room with a computer and TV, playing the recently-released The Sims 2 and watching late night talk shows. Something important changed last night: I turned off the TV and started watching the show that my Sim character was watching on his television.
I don't think I can even articulate how hyper-real this is.
REALITY GAMING
The spurt of ironic glee about Flash Mobs last summer was more than a hipster punchline. It illustrated how gaming was leaking from the pores of society. The products of this spillage have included Big Urban Game (Minneapolis) and PacManhattan (NYC). And the glut of competition-based reality shows (Survivor, The Apprentice, Fear Factor, etc.) are all just extreme versions of reality gaming. (One could also argue that these Reality Games are a sort of tame suburban version of more serious planned events like the Seattle WTO Protests. That's for a different essay though.)
THE VIDEOGAME REVOLUTION
Anyone who has played even five minutes of Zelda will find PBS's new two-hour special The Video Game Revolution a bit tedious. I suppose it serves a valid purpose -- to provide a historical framework of popular video games. Too bad it's as engaging as a two-hour Pong match.
But what interests me is what this documentary represents in this moment in time. It seems we have reached a period in gaming where we can reflect on the past equipped with the gear found in the toolbelt of historical analysis: summary, bricolage, and nostalgia. The Video Game Revolution implicitly declares video games as a real object of pop culture study. Of course, this should not be surprising given the rise of academic programs designed to study gaming. Something about this evolution reminds me of 1990s-era Camille Paglia promoting the notion that universities should start rock music programs. I have mixed feelings about whether turning an academic eye to rock really does anything for musicians or fans or society, but I do worry an accidental effect of academizing a discipline in the past couple decades: studying it is synonymous with taming it. (I know many people in academia who are studying game and play, and they all get sour-faced when I suggest this possibility.)
WATCHING TV AT WORK
Many companies have planned events on Fridays that provides employees a break from work. But what our workplace does is truly unique. The idea started innocently: let's use our in-house online video streaming technology to deliver a movie to employees on Friday.
Thus was born The Friday Matinee.
Here's how it works: every Wednesday, an email goes out to a dist list of programmers, designers, engineers, and editors. It contains a list of movies, and the community votes on which one it will watch. On Friday at 2:00, the intranet streaming servers are fired up and the 'play' button is pushed on the DVD player. This is where it gets interesting.
If you walk around through the darkened cubicles at this time, you will see dozens of programmers donning headphones and staring at their computer monitors. They are simultaneously performing a number of tasks: writing code, watching The Friday Matinee, and IM-ing their colleagues about both. In other words, people are working, being entertained, and communicating all at the same time. There's something about this collapse of mediums and lifestyles that suggests a complicated future of media and entertainment.
CONCLUDING
This last example has nothing explicitly to do with gaming, but it illustrates something that's happening in our times: people are hacking mediums together for their own purposes. The provocative questions are just starting to come out: what happens if you mix film with instant messenger? what would a music/game hybrid look like? how could role-playing influence traditional one-way entertainment?
In an average day, I perform numerous activities which have nothing to do with gaming explicitly, but which feel somehow game-like. These include blogging, creating a playlist for my iPod, programming my TiVo, Googling girls on my cellphone at bars, and learning the hacks behind Yahoo Internet Messenger. If there's one point from all these examples, it's that "gaming" might become so pervasive as to become invisible.
The blogosphere likely won't shut up about the Times Mag story featuring Wonkette for quite some time.
Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart seem to be competing for Ubiquitous Fake Journalist of the Year. 60 Minutes today saw Mike Wallace do a long profile of O'Reilly; Time did 10 Questions for Jon Stewart. Rolling Stone did an O'Reilly profile; Annenberg released a survey that indicates Daily Show viewers are more politically aware. Slate did How To Beat Bill O'Reilly; CBS MarketWatch suggests Jon Stewart should moderate a presidential debate. And on and on... or you can just see them head-to-head.
ONLINE PUBLISHING
I'm not sure why more people didn't point to Jim Romenesko's cool new blog Starbucks Gossip when it launched last month. The Times this week picks up on the "Should You Tip Your Barista?" thread.
Gawker's Russ Smith interview is surprisingly full of good observations about alt-weeklies, meta-media moguls, and a dead counter-culture press. See also: a short interview with Esquire's sex columnist (and Daily Showcorrespondent), Stacey Grenrock Woods.
Last year around this time, I was talking about how Wired magazine has nicely reinvented itself. I've been less happy with the mag this year, but WiredNews.com (the website) has made some excellent editorial decisions lately. Two new columns, Sex Drive and Media Hack, have been required digerati reading. The most recent Sex Drive talks about The Sinulator, a vibrator which connects to a USB port and can be controlled remotely.
Malcolm Gladwell put his awesome analysis of ketchup (I kid you not) online. Previously printed in the New Yorker.
The Times follows up Slate.com's analysis of vodka (I love this series from Slate) with a look at Cîroc, the vodka that was "disqualified" from the Slate contest because of "trying to pass itself off as a vodka."
Elle Macpherson has a new line of lingerie called Intimates. The ads, airing in Australia and the UK and featuring a knife-fighting supermodel, are causing quite a controversy. Yeah, I know, you wanna see them.
Good Bruce Mau interview. (Deborah Solomon seems to have become America's best interviewer.)
FILM
When I saw a trailer link for White Noise, the movie, I freaked out and called everyone I know. Or at least I started to. Then I saw "Genre: Paranormal thriller," and thought you motherfuckers ruined my favorite book! Turns out, this movie is unrelated to the book. But there was a rumor a year ago that DeLillo's White Noise would be a movie. Anyone have the scoop? (IMDB has Barry Sonnenfeld as the director of a 2005 release.)
From the Wong Kar-Wai profile in the Times Mag: "The kind of person who might once have proclaimed Jules and Jim or Wings of Desire his or her favorite movie now rates Wong Kar-wai at the top of the list." Which stings a bit, cuz I used to call Wings of Desire my favorite movie, and now I usually say Chungking Express.
This is the year Le Tigre is gonna hit the mainstream. Stop it, I'm serious. There's an exciting profile in the new Spin and the word is finally out about Kathleen Hanna's relationship with a Beastie Boy. And Stereogum has an MP3 of Le Tigre's cover of the Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited," which is gonna beat the Jazzercise knickers off Britney's "My Perogative." Best. Song. Of. 2004.
U2's new single, "Vertigo," from the forthcoming album is available here. (Good song.)
Last year, Business 2.0 infamously gave its "Hottest Technology" award to social networking software (Friendster, MySpace, Tribe.net, Orkut, etc.). This year, it goes to VoIP (Subscription Link). Runner-ups include Satellite Radio, Open-Source Databases, and Concept Mapping.
While in Fargo a few weeks ago, I got in a conversation with someone who was contributing to the creation of 100 North Dakota Books, a list of -- you guessed it -- 100 notable NoDak books. The person was trying to keep Chuck Klosterman off the list. Didn't happen.
If you missed it, RatherGate can be attributed to a local blogger, Powerlineblog.com, which is part of the Northern Alliance collective. Strib has a story.
Woot.com is brilliant. Every day, one (and only one) piece of gadgetry goes up for sale. The price is slashed low because of a set volume that will be sold. The gadget only stays available until supplies run out. It's a little like Amazon's Gold Box... (Nerdy Tidbit To Impress Friends: "Woot" is an elision of the Dungeons and Dragons phrase "Wow, Loot!")
My biggest gripe about Amazon.com is the lack of benefits given to high-volume users. I order probably $100 of stuff per week off Amazon.com (yes, I even get food and soap and razor blades delivered to me), but I get no special discounts for my repeat visiting. This week, however, after Amazon beefed up its A9.com search engine, the company started offering something called ?/2%. This crazy little gimmick gets you one-half Pi percent (1.57%) off everything if you're a A9.com user. This is somehow both crazy and cool at the same time.
Non-surprise of the day: Google is working on their own web browser.
It looks like the first single from the new Fatboy Slim album is called "Slash Dot Slash." That sounds sorta, well, ya know, internety. Here's a video.
Does anyone really care if Nellie McKaye is fibbing about her age?
The Timesreviews a new book from Jon Stewart & The Daily Show gang.
There's a new tv magazine out called Glued. I haven't seen it yet, but Jossip interviews the editor.
And there's a new magazine coming out from... O'Reilly? Well, they've certainly been expanding into new areas. The title is Make, and the tagline is "Technology On Your Time." Due out next year.
FONTGATE
I was watching the new Slacker DVD last night when I noticed that the typewriter that gets thrown over the bridge is an IBM Selectric. Anyway, they're up for sale now on eBay. Also, a site dedicated exclusively to it.
FILM
Paris Hilton to star in -- get this -- The Great Gatzby. Actually, Paris as Daisy Buchanan is kinda brilliant. I bet they tried to get Gwyneth first though.
Johnny Ramone has died. Questionable legacy: "Johnny Ramone was surrounded at his death by friends, including Pearl Jam rocker Eddie Vedder, singer Rob Zombie and others. Other friends who gathered at his Los Angeles home included Lisa Marie Presley, Pete Yorn, Vincent Gallo and Talia Shire."
The grumpy pants at Pitchfork give the new Har Mar Superstar a 1.9.
Perhaps now, as the leaves turn orange and we've almost forgotten what Michael Phelps even looks like, enough time has passed that you'd be willing to hear me talk about the Summer Olympics. Please, dear reader, don't reach for the gag button in the back of your throat, because, as I'm about to outline, if there's one thing I've learned about the Olympics, this is one topic that the American media loves to hate.
Caveats & background: I worked on NBCOlympics.com for nearly a year. However, the opinions below are mine and only mine. Even though I've had many conversations about the production, delivery, and business and of the games, what follows is not the opinion of NBC or IBS or the IOC or capitalism or athleticism or This Great Country or whatever else gets tossed into the ring every four years. Also, I have very little to say about what you saw on television. I'm talking internet today. I've already talked about it in other places (such as Wired News and LostRemote), but this is a collection of some final thoughts.
In some ways, this is an essay responding to my friends and colleagues, many of whom were out in full force critiquing the olympic games -- or perhaps more accurately, the media's creation of the games.
It probably started when Chuck K. wrote a column for Esquire titled "Boycott the Olympics, Save America". It showed up in my mailbox the exact day he was in town to visit. At some boozy point in the dark hours of the night, I dismissed his point by telling Chuck that someone writes that column every four years. Or, more precisely, every four years since the end of the Cold War, which was about the time that hating the Olympics become a national past time for the ironic class. I can't remember what happened next, but in the morning we saw some heroic gibbons swinging from branches at the Minnesota Zoo, which gave both of us much pleasure.
All apologies to Chuck...
And then Matt H.did some analysis on PVRblog, which pointed out some notable concerns with the site. I disagreed with some the legal/business parts of his analysis. We'll get to this later, but the short version is: it's going to be a while before we figure out how digital rights management will make a reality of the dreams we have for personal media. I highly doubt that everyone will ever be satisfied with video delivery via the internet for events like this -- at least not in any Marshall-McLuhan-cum-Phillip-Dick media vision thang that my mind can concoct. We might see some non-streaming (i.e., downloadable or exchangable) video asset management technology by 2008. With all the technical and legal decisions that need to be made in that area for this to happen, I'm not sure if I'm "optimistic" or even "hopeful" about what it will look like though. I am positive that it will not satisfy everyone.
All apologies to Matt...
Later on, Andy B. followed up the video-download issue by pointing out clips that were available on Usenet. Like a Slashdot flamethrower, there's a lot of "we told you so" when it comes to filesharing video, but ultimately, you're gonna have a very hard time convincing me that more than a dozen people in America had the tolerance to watch more than five minutes of video with this delivery method. And don't even get me started on BitTorrent.
All apologies to Andy...
Which brings us to Staci K.'s critique in OJR. Let's just get this out of the way: I agree with some of Staci's points. The world never moves fast enough for those of us in this industry. And we have the right -- perhaps even the obligation -- to act indignantly when it doesn't.
Nonetheless, there's something that bothers me about this I-want-more-more-more-video angle, which manifests itself with clockwork predictability. When we first started talking about how NBCOlympics.com would be one of the seven platforms for presenting the games, the first thing I said was "no matter what we do, video will be criticized."
When deciding on a strategy for what we provide to an online audience, we asked a simple question: "What will people want?" If all you read about NBCOlympics.com was OJR, you'd get the sense that people are demanding a 24/7 online Olympics video channel -- despite the fact NBC was already providing six television channels with 1200 hours of video. When you think about this for even more than a second, you realize immediately how you use an Olympics website: to complement television. You want stats and scores, you want biographies, you want context, you want analysis, you want stuff the tv doesn't give, you want storytelling done right, you want a medium that extends the story. And maybe you want a little bit of video. Actually, you want the tv schedule about 100 times more than you want video. Only a few of you are going to watch sketchy online video all day at the office (which is what a vast majority of our viewers are). I find being called an "early adopter" denigrating too, but let's face it...
I understand why a journalist would choose video when writing about the site. Heck, if I were doing industry writing about the site, I might talk about video too. The problem with this is that it ignores 95% of what our audience is expecting. Where was the story about our massive real-time results feed, which has failed repeatedly in the past? How about some analysis on the how the affiliates have used Ozone? And how about the multimedia context that TV can't provide? How about the writing and analysis? Or how about this simple angle: how the internet deserves a bit more respect than being a shovelware medium for a broadcast product.
It's not that I expect an unctuous, rosy hue to shine over the coverage -- I expect to be challenged to do better. But I also expect some sense of what people are actually doing online to come through. The rare person who did watch video online probably watched the "Who's Carly Crushin' On?" clip. Welcome back, ironic class.
All apologies to Staci...
And finally, that brings us to Nancy F., the one writer here who I'm not familiar with. Here's what she wrote in the New Yorker
The Internet is partly what caused people to become impatient with the Sydney Games. We already know what happened, the whining went. It was on the Web. But this time around the Web, which is now as integral to our lives as our television sets, served as a well-stocked convenience store for viewers who couldnt spend seventy hours a day in front of the TV. NBCs site supplied a full array of results, athlete bios, detailed schedules, fun facts, and archived stories (and, of course, stuff for sale). While watching the gymnastics, I kept waiting for one of the announcers to explain what the story was behind the strange-looking new vaulting equipment, but I had to go to the Web site to find the answer.
Right on, someone who approached the site from the perspective of an actual user experience. Sorry Nancy, no apologies to you.
Nike shows restraint in not touching the Chuck Taylor All-Stars brand, wherein you hear Kurt Cobain was wearing Cons when he committed suicide. Rah, go Nike.
SCIENCE = LIFESTYLE
Slate: Inhalable alcohol? Finally, science is really producing products I can relate to.
Research from Nature: Your name increases your sex appeal. (Includes research performed via HotOrNot.com.) Hello, my name is Rex....
MEDIA
It was interesting to watch the Sunday morning news shows cover a couple stories that orgininated in the blogosphere. Both LittleGreenFootballs.com's analysis of typograpy (somewhat debunked by DailyKos) and Kottke.org's breaking the news that Ken Jennings lost in Jeopardy were both treated as "a website reported" on numerous instances. Even Reliable Sources glossed over the identity of those sites.
CELEBRITY
The best point in the Times Magstory on Trump is probably the point about him being a mysterious populist. False consciousness, indeed.
Amy's Robot has an MP3 of Dave Eggers interview on Conan last week.
Ana Marie Cox reviews the new Kristin Gore novel for the Times Book Review. We learn that Gore had writing gigs at SNL and Futurama. Which is impressive, but I saw her on Letterman last week, and she came off ditzy and clueless to irony or nuance. Ms. Cox delivers zingers though: "God knows, an astringent romantic satire is long overdue in a town where work is foreplay and the vibrating object in a couple's bed could easily be a two-way pager."
Locus: a bunch of sci-fi writers (Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton) in a roundtable about the future.
TECH
Huh, it looks like Yahoo is going into consumer electronics. Sounds to me like a bad move.
MUSIC
R.E.M. has an audio stream of the first single from their next album, Around The Sun: "Leaving New York".
ONLINE
NYhotties.com: "I'm a twenty-something New York escort. I love Prada, Seven jeans, and Jimmy Choos." I really gotta make up an identity and cash in with a book deal.
Apparently the PiPressis making some big structural changes, including something called "Speed Read" and a daily A&E section. By the way, my old friend Ross Raihala is the new music writer there. You can see his work popping up here.
It's not even 24 hours later, and I'm already sick-to-death of talking about the VMAs. But I'll say this: "MIAMI, WE LOVE YOU!" The fuck? No we don't. Miami sucks. It sucks so bad that Matt Drudge and Anne Coulter moved there. MIAMI, WE LIKE YOU ABOUT AS MUCH AS WE LIKE HOUSTON!
Of course the new Bjork officially went on sale today. It's her most challenging album so far. Listen | Buy.
Bruce Sterling did a fashion photo series called Milan or Tehran?, which I guess is trying to say something about globalism, but I don't know what (hot chicks in scarfs are universal, perhaps?).
I was interviewed by the NY Times a few weeks ago because of a article I wrote about the defunt scandal known as Plain Layne. The Times angle was mostly about fake celebrity bloggers. The whole topic came up again last week when the Quentin Tarantino blog surfaced, and then quickly sank. The next day, a secret weblog from Julian Casablancas' girlfriend rose, and then also died (screengrabs). It makes you wonder how much of a nano-celebrity you could be and have a fake blog made in your honor. ("No, I'm really Craig Kilborn's cousin!")
FILM
Somewhere in my mind is a top ten list of events that I'm sad not to have talked about here over the past six months, and Vincent Gallo is definitely not on it. The controversy seems to be wrapping up today with Roger Ebert telling "the whole truth" about Vince.
New movie trailer alert!:
Silver City. John Sayles political parody starring Chris Cooper.
Finding Neverland. Looks like Tim Burton meets Merchant & Ivory (ergo, bad) with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet.
Closer. Another entry in the hot genre of the moment -- let's call it the "romantic deceit thriller" (see also: We Don't Live Here Anymore). Starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Clive Owen, but really starring cool Suzanne Vega and Damien Rice songs.
Somewhat funny parody of the director's commentary concept: Britney Spears on SNL. (Speaking of which, the new video of Britney covering "My Prerogative" reportedly cost $7.2 million "to market and promote" a "happening, rather than just a video." Apparently, she's taking cue from Axl and getting faux-married to her quasi-celeb mate in the video.)
Does anyone else suspect the only reason the MTV Video Awards were in Miami tonight was because the Republicans took over NYC? Best moment? I guess when Nick "Newlywed" Lachey and Paris "Simple World" Hilton appeared on the stage at the same time, and suddenly you had a vision of reality tv worlds colliding like a nuclear reaction. Yeah, boring awards this year. Blame the FCC.
Has anyone else been watching Maureen Dowd blah-blahing her new book on the talk show circuit? I'm not sure what it is, but something about her reminds me of Sofia Coppola -- demure but cunning, cute in a you-can't-be-seriously-be-that-coy kinda way.
When Halo 2 finally comes out, will anyone think that ILoveBees.com was a viral success? Well, since Subservient Chicken did so well, who knows.
Speaking of... the same ad firm that did those BK ads tried to recently get Paris Hilton to become a BK spokesperson in a David LaChappelle spot (featuring her own music!). It didn't work out, but Paris Hilton is trying to trademark her own logo (a tiara).
Everyone's fave sexy local blogger, PussyRanch has hung up her blogging tassles and closed the ranch. She's a little oblique about what she'll actually be doing now, but her recent work at City Pages has been quite good (check out the piece on the new Gotti ("one tough biscotti") reality tv show).
Last week, The Times did a story about online fantasy leagues, which gave major mentions to Best Buy and Fanball (two local companies). This week, the Strib basically does the same story.
There goes the neighborhood. Strib gives a major feature to Psycho Suzi's.
Cool or uncool? Hot or not? Sen. Norm Coleman's wife, Laurie, has given the Post approval to post sexy lingerie pics of her.
Many of you want to know about the Olympics. Let's talk about that next week, okay? Today, we're here to talk about the new site.
In the half-year that I have been gone, this is what I've been telling myself: "A blog should be organized like I think." Welcome to how I think.
I think in bursts. And then in blurbs. And finally in blobs. Bursts, blurbs, and blobs: that's what we've got here. On the left, you will find daily links -- what you probably came to Fimoc for in the first place. The spot where your eyes are right now will be used to explore topics in greater detail. What topics? Oh, I dunno, here are some ideas on my mind today: "Finger food at work." "How to kill the lad magazine." "The state of midwest parties in post-millennial exuberance." "Michiko, a-baby please don't go!" "Bush Twins vs. Hamm Twins vs. Olsen Twins: It's all meat to me." "Once they all thought they could write novels, now they all think they can be a dot-com entrepreneurs."
This site is built on my own custom content management system. Blogger and co. just don't give me everything I need.
I've enjoyed Kottke's attempt to mix daily links with daily posts and Anil's notion of the atomic element of the weblog being "the post". I think of this design as a remix of those ideas -- mix the posts and the links, but attempt to do it with more clarity; change the anatomic unit from the post to a temporal unit, "the day". More on that later....
I don't use RSS readers very much. I actually like how blogs look. Gasp, I know. Circumventing the design is like seeing everyone with no clothes on. Yuck. However, if you're of that kinky ilk, this should work.
What kind of a moron would describe his writing as "mitochondria"? One who had a hard time getting out of college because he was determined to get majors in every department.
The rumors of my joining the ranks of paid bloggers are greatly exaggerated.
Many people complained about the white-on-black approach of the last design. I've given up the battle, but I'm holding steady onto the lightly-patterned backgrounds, cuz I think it's purty. If you really can't read it, let me now. Or if it looks like periwinkle, please, dear god, let me know.
I officially apologize to the 2,325 of you who I tried to convince to go to SXSW this year. I can't go. Just not enough time (like you can't tell by the lack of updates here). Don't hate me, cuz I still luv you.
WORDS
ILM thread: Summarise a Novel in 25 Words. Anyone else notice that ILM is sorta like MetaFilter circa 2000? Yes, I mean it's good.
We always knew Orson Scott Card was a conservative, but we never really cared. I mean, some of my best friends are... anyway, now he's writing nasty editorials on this blog. Mel Gibson, on the other hand... well, he's just a fascist.
It's well known that journalists are pilfering bloggers 24-7, but particular funny case is the blogger Brian Storms writing a parody about an Amazon.com that the Chicago Tribunepicked up by accident (correction).
About a dozen people emailed me to say that Tina Fey made the cover of Bust this month. Am I that transparent? How about if I told you I voted for Nader last time around? Ouch, that hurt, stop throwing things.
ONLINE
I have deep misgivings about linking to this. I really hope none of you think your blog should be a book. Yes, even you.
A blog about a magazine? Why yes, here's one about Entertainment Weekly.
Wildly popular in South Korea, OhMyNews.com now has an English edition.
RELATIONSHIPS
ImaginaryGirlfriends.com. "You can soon receive personalized love letters by mail, e-mail, photos, special gifts, even phone messages or online chat from your new Imaginary Girlfriend. We won't tell anyone that it's not real!" Gawd, this is gonna simplify things for me.
Perhaps the greatest movie of all time, Blow-Upcame out on DVD this week. (If you've been to my house, you've drank Wet Rexxxies under the ostentatiously red poster.) So did The Tibetan Book of the Dead narrated by Leonard Cohen (!?), but I really have no idea how good that is.
Designer extraordinaire, Joshua Davis, was asked by Wired to redesign Google. Here are some snapshots of what he came up with for an upcoming issue. Meanwhile, he might be on Queer Eye.
Gothamist reports on the casting to the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film, which includes Martin Freeman from The Office, Zooey Deschenal, and Mos Def. In other news, NBC is gonna try to adaptThe Office. Ahem, no comment.
Huh, that's what she looks like. The Today Showinterviews Emily Nussbaum after her NYTstory on kid bloggers.
TV/POLITICS
Bush In 30 Seconds winner announced. Drudge has quotes from the awards show (which -- gush, gush -- included Julia Stiles). The plan is to air the spot during the Super Bowl.
Chuck spots that Poststory accusing Howard Dean staffers of being lame, and provides video proving the contrary.
FOOD
Crazy shit: Jay "Bright Lights, Big City" McInerney is apparently a contender for the open NYT food critic position that William Grimes left behind. Good shit: The Kicker imagines what his first column would be like.
TECH
Those new Smart Watches are available on Amazon. See also: MSN Direct. I'd buy one if two things changed: 1) I could use AIM instead of MSN Messnger and 2) I could get email instead of my calendar.
WORDS/IDEAS
If you've ever felt out of the loop on academic talk (especially since Lingua Franca bit the dust [and the freelance staffers got sued]), you'll want to follow this thread. Taking off from the Times story (and New Left Review article) of Franco Moretti's modest proposal to make literary scholarship more mathematical, Ftrain pens Tufte vs. Bloom. More to come, I'm sure...
MUSIC
Go buy whatever is left of Grand Royal. Current Bid: $0.
Great, as if Kurt & Courtney weren't enough, the theories are already flying that Elliott Smith's girlfriend killed him. Details on why.
Had a strange sensation today paging through The New Yorker. I came across the Howard Dean article and briefly thought to myself, "This is pretty long; I should print it for later." Of course, I was holding the magazine in my nimble fingers. Then, quickly realizing my folly, I thought, "Maybe I can rip the pages out for later." Mind-boggling, isn't it?... how spoiled we've become.
ONLINE
Emily Nussbaum chases around some high school Live Journalers for the Times Mag: My So-Called Blog.
For the price of about $1 per CD, RipDigital will turn your entire CD library into MP3 files.
We deserve our own wretched fate. Silly Saddam as Outkast animation.
WORDS
What is the single worst piece of punctuation? Some might say the exclamation point, but according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the colon is the enemy.
Gotta love those Hilton sisters. Oops, I mean Olsen twins. Dangit, I really meant Bush twins. Speaking of which, I hear the Olsen twins are going to NYU this year. Wouldn't love to take this class with them?
New to the dating service scene, SocialGrid utilizes Google, grid computing, P2P, and file-sharing to help you hook up. Haven't tried it yet...
New blog: Lingerie101, the guide for men. "Each week lingerie101 posts an article on one certain kind of lingerie, so you know the difference between a teddy and a cami."
Discovered by Slashdot, Photoshop has a special feature that detects if an image is American currency.
It's more difficult to make a "best of" list for weblogs than for any other cultural catagory. Blogs are inherently meta -- they span the entire range of contemporary human existence and thought. Nonetheless, defiant in the face of cacophany,
here's my annual list of 30+ Best Blogs of 2003:
1)Blog For America -- I admit, I only occassionally checked in on Howard Dean's blog this year, but this thing simply changed politics, the media, and America in general like nothing since Drudge. When Dean wins in November, Joe Trippi will take a post in the administration that completely alters the way communities and governments function. Finally, a future to look forward to.
2)Metafilter -- The abridged four-year history of MeFi: first it was great, then good, then dull, then good again, then kinda sucky, surprisingly reactionary, suddenly progressive, good again, but just falling short of great, then bad for a while, but whoa that was a good month. And that one post was so good! And I want to throttle the guy who posted this thing again! If it happened in 2003... well, let's be honest, it did not happen first on Metafilter. But this is where it entered the market of ideas -- inflated or deflated on the rigorous balance sheet of comments calculus and trackback trig. And the franchise expanded this year with ask.metafilter.com, which is just plain awesome.
3)ABC's The Note -- This is the only item on this list that treacherously stretches the definition of blog, but I've gotta believe that this ridiculously popular beltway online journal is determining the stories that get told, the events that get attention, and the shape of democracy. Plus, it's one of the main reasons Trent Lott isn't pestering us anymore.
4)Buzz Machine -- Question: Is it odd that the founder of Entertainment Weekly is now America's biggest proponent of Iranian bloggers? Answer: Nope. Jeff's commentary on everything from Iraq to Howard Stern has been crucial reading this year. And one day someone will write a decent Persian translator that allows me to read all those Iranians.
6)Lessig Blog -- You read Lessig to remind yourself of all the issues you've guiltily not been paying attention to: internet security, digital rights, everything in the Creative Commons, etc. Lessig (who guest-starred on the blogs for Howard Dean and John Kerry this year) is there because you aren't.
7)Smart Mobs -- The most important industry-ish books I read this year were Salam Pax's The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi, Steven Johnson's Emergence, William J Mitchell's Me++, Michael Wolff's Autumn of the Moguls, David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and Howard Rheingold Smart Mobs. The website for the latter was constantly attuned to Big Ideas -- where we're headed and how to avoid a collision-course with destruction.
8)Gawker -- It's probably not fair that Nick Denton has three sites on the list this year. Nah, scratch that, it's totally fair. It's too early to tell whether he's milking the meme or inventing a mini-publishing revolution, but he's doing something that all the rest of us are watching with a tinch of envy.
9)The Diary of Samuel Pepys -- The idea is simple: publish an entry from the renowned 17th-century London diarist every day. The outcome is infectious. If they make a website into a movie, it should be this one.
10)Daily Green Cine -- Oh, you like film? How quaint. These guys really like film. This offshoot of Netflix-competitor GreenCine is a master of its genre.
11)Anil Dash & Kottke.org -- They've become our avuncular stylists, haven't they? Similiar forms: Anil has the sideblog on the left with the occasional essay on the right. This year, Kottke experimented (unsuccessfully, I'd argue) with placing the remaindered links inside the blog. They helped invent the blog and they continue to redefine its potential. And they'd smirk at being described like that.
12)Book Slut, Maud Newton, Language Hat -- All those Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith and Elizabeth Wurtzel links? I probably found them at one of these places.
13)Low Culture -- This dual-columned blog -- baby blue (shallow) and soft orange (grave) -- seemed to just appear out of nowhere this year. This was the rookie of the year.
14)Amy's Robot -- Want snarky celebrity news before celebrities even know it happened? Check.
15)Romenesko and I Want Media & PaidContent.org -- I'd rather cut my toes off and feed them to the rabid offspring of Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly than imagine a world where this triumverate didn't arrive in my inbox every morning. I Want Media had juicy interviews and links, Paid Content was a feast of daily tech/content news, and Romenesko could be #1 any given year but that would be tiresome.
16)Gothamist & Lockhart Steele & NewYorish.com & The Morning News -- For quality of writing and diversity of links, these four NYC blogs deserve as much attention as Gawker, but they just happened to not get picked in the mini-publishing corporate draft. Which in some ways makes them more important.
17)Lost Remote -- The cool thing about Lost Remote is that it's a well-defined industry blog (succinctly, the future of tv) that always transcends its genre.
18)Babelogue -- I'm surprised this experiment hasn't gotten more attention. The local Voice-owned indie weekly boldly launched a staff weblog this year that mixed unique voices in the community. It's like a local blog central for anyone in the Twin Cites -- let's call it My Own Private Gawker.
19)Large-Hearted Boy & Catherine's Pita & S/FJ & Useful Noise & I Love Music & Neuma & Rocktober -- It's a bit unfair to group these diverse music-themed blogs under one heading, but these were the places where I discovered new bands, found off-beat MP3s, heard smart conversation, and truly missed writing and playing music.
20)Greg.org -- The Sofia interview and the Cremaster coverage alone made Greg de rigueur reading.
21)Blogumentary -- C'mon Chuck, finish the movie already!
22)LucJam & AdRants -- With reportage on everything from Paris to hip-hop brand success, Lucian somehow made marketing an undirty word in 2003. And AdRants made sure that advertising stayed dirty.
23)Magnetbox -- This local peronsal fave always makes my recommendation list because of shared interests: the interplay of technology and music distribution, online economies, social software applications, and generally rad stuff.
24)Waxy.org -- It felt like 1999 again when everyone was passing around links to goofy movies (except everyone had broadband at home this time). The Star Wars Kid movie had all the characteristcs needed to be labelled a phenom -- intrigue, parody, backlash, Times reportage, and free iPods.
25)J.D.'s New Media Musings & E-Media Tidbits -- The media is the message. These two blogs continued to preach the story that online news is changing the way we consume information.
26)Arts Journal -- Culture links galore. Leans a bit toward the high-brow, but since everyone in America is now middle-brow, that shouldn't matter.
27)The Map Room -- I love niche publishing, especially when it's a niche worth adoring. A site all about mapping? I'd probably pay for this.
28)Press Think -- No way in hell I could find the time to read all the words that spilled out of Jay Rosen's blog pad this year, but when you get an NYU j-school prof talking this much, there's usually something to hear.
30)Fleshbot -- Paris was the internet event of the year (followed closely by Friendster and Howard Dean), and you can attribute much of it to Fleshbot. Can't say I was into the Kariwanz Fetish Gallery or the Supreme Hentai, but nothing mainstreamed sex this year like the Paris video, which was chronicled here on the site's first week of existence.
There are days that I think this little cultural petri dish known as blogging has become a cesspool. But then I look over this list and realize it's a radically robust machine that we've created. And it's cool knowing that next year will be full of more surprises that I can't wait to link to.
Yo, USA Today linked to my Year In Review list today. There's a bunch of new stuff in there... Rolling Stone, The Onion, and the Best Wines of 2003!
TECH
Hypothesize about the fetishizing of technology all you want, but this information superhighway is a two-way street: Steve Jobs interviewed in Rolling Stone; David Byrne interviewed in Wired.
FILM
Totally weird. Girl with a Pearl Earring -- yes, the Vermeer painting -- has been adapted into a movie (Timesreview). Just the other day I linked to the phenomenally cool (and totally unrelated to the movie) Girl With a Pearl Earring website. Question for my art historian friends: Is this the first time a painting has been adapted into a movie?
I haven't been to SonicYouth.com for a while. Check out the wicked complex MP3 page.
ONLINE
Hm, Variety added another blog: The Porning Report, "coverage of the porn industry's move to mainstream." To bookmark or not to bookmark, that is the question.
Rolling Stonesays: "Amazon.com removed the customer advice area from the page for Jackson's Number Ones greatest hits album page and several other Jackson albums after unnamed users made recommendations that included books on identifying child molesters, a baby gift set titled 'Thank Heaven for Little Boys' and the latest Captain Underpants books..."
NYT has a cool profile of Dana Boyd, a 25-year-old grad student at Berkeley studying digital social networks. Her blog, Connected Selves, was mentioned here a while ago.
Since we're talking about Friendster, let's chat a bit about our backlash baby. It used to be that on a weekly basis (usually a weekend basis), I would get in a conversation with someone about Friendster. Now, however, I get in a weekly conversation with someone who is ticked off because Friendster will eventually charge them to use it. The funny thing is that there's no proof this will actually happen -- everyone just assumes this is the direction Friendster will go. It's like everyone intrinsically believes in this fate because this is what happens to services we like on the internet: they start to suck and/or suck money. This is the lot served to our generation: free stuff, followed by the bill (social security and file sharing come to mind).
But I think differently. I have some advice for the minds behind Friendster: go ahead with your subscription service. I know how you can make a bundle off it without taking away a single feature from the current users. That's right, I know how you can keep your 3.2 million-person subscription base from fleeing, and you can go premium, and you can create better communities and therefore more users. How, you ask? Simple: add features that make people want to pay for your site. Here are just some ideas:
Allow subscribers to see any profile, even if they aren't connected to the person.
Or, if that's too extreme, allow them to see further than the 6 degrees currently allowed. Give subscribers 8 or 10 degrees.
Give subscribers special daily statistics, such as how many times their profile has been viewed. Or if you want to get real nasty, tell subscribers who has viewed their profile. Gawd, I'd pay big for that.
Let subscribers have more than five pictures.
Take away the banner and text ads for subscribers.
Give subscribers more fields to enter in their profile.
Make a deal with Amazon that allows subscribers to build personal recommendations lists with referral fees. Facilitate it with a WebService. Share the wealth.
Since you've got more data than anyone in the world on the cultural connections between people, make a deal with Meetup that allows people with similar interests to connect in some way.
Make a deal with HotOrNot and... okay, nevermind, don't do that.
This one will push you over the top: give subscribers a blog. If I knew that _____ was posting daily to her Friendster Blog, I would be there every day.
Allow subscribers to post classifieds, a la Tribe.net.
Allow subscribers create photo galleries, a la Photolog.
Allow subscribers to mix features from the Gallery and the Search, such that I can find all the 25-year-old girls who like Le Tigre within 50 miles of me.
Give subscribers a server that doesn't crash during office hours.
And finally, toss of this stupid idea that you are exclusively a dating service.
Friendster, feel free to email me the check when I save your company. Happy Thanksgiving.
Clinton releases list of his favorite books. Some oddities: "The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker; "Homage to Catalonia," George Orwell; "Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics," Reinhold Niebuhr; and "Living History," Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Peter Scholtes noticed that Har Mar Superstar and Karen O were in town the same day, so he had them interview each other. Golden. Karen: "I'm electronically mailing with Beck, and I told him that I was going to be out there recording with you, and he didn't write me back after that." Har Mar: "I saw him three days ago at a festival and he asked me to record with him, so maybe I'm totally cock-blocking you."
CP and The Onion review the Spike Jones DVD retrospectives.
My fave part of this RZA interview is where he claims to love Bob Hope. But this is good too: "Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh, man, this nigga knew all my shit."
This site is up to about 3,500 visitors per day. Who are all you people? Please wipe your feet before entering. Linkage:
POP
This month's Wired has a gadget section with this quote from Paris Hilton (who the NYTimessaid "looks like what you'd get if you crossed Uma Thurman, a borzoi and Robert Plant circa 1972") printed long before last week's tape scandal: "I can't live without my cell phone. It's the one with the big round dial, and it has a video camera on it." The mind reels with the potential sequels...
Variety.com has started a blog, Outside The Box, about swag -- promotional items for music, film, tv, etc. releases.
Norman Mailer's 25-year-old son, who has no journalism experience other than writing one piece for Black Book, is the new executive editor of High Times. Profile.
Cool. The Cameos of Alfred Hitchcock. (That is, the cameos in his own films. I've always wondered where he appears in Rope, and now I finally know.)
The author of The Simpsons and Philosophy and Woody Allen and Philosophyanalyzes Tarantino. (Via Greencine.)
I'll call Body Song a cross between Koyaanisqatsi and Kronos Quartet. Cool site by Channel 4, cool music by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead.
"Why can't I preorder a DVD and receive it the day the film is released in theaters? Or buy it on my way out of the theater if I liked what I saw? One thing I learned from the Mavs is that you can watch the game on TV, but you'll still go to the game, because it's a different experience." -- Mark Cuban (the guy who sold Broadcast.com for billions and bought the Dallas Mavericks and -- more importantly -- Landmark Theatres), Wired, December 2003
Vice Fund is a mutual fund specializing in tobacco, gaming, alcohol, and defence.
ONLINE
Fleshbot, the newest blog launch from Nick Denton, goes live this week. Kinja (aka Lafayette Project), "a blog of all blogs," has a 2004 dateline. And there are rumors about a D.C.-based politics blog and a L.A.-based entertainment blog. (See also: New York's Blog Players.)
Finally, some decent analysis on Friendster's numbers.
The apperance of a big color ad for Playboy in last week's City Pages (it's probably making the rounds in other Village Voice Media rags too) is enough to start me type-type-typing some sort of important essay about Hef's ir/relevance. Oh, of course, Slate did.
For no apparent reason, Camille Paglia is interviewed in Salon, where, for no apparent reason, she rips on blogs. My guess is she's picking up on an idea that Drudge gave her.
Huh, Utne still gives out their Independent Press Awards. A million years ago, this was a big deal. Or maybe I'm just old.
Has anyone ever heard statistics on people who sleep less living longer? Or not living longer? I'd really like to know what I'm doing to myself in the long run. Okay, let's kick it:
FILM
EW's Kill Bill cover story this week contains a parenthetical quote from Tarantino about Memento: "Good movie! But there's a hole, okay? And it's this! How, okay, does he remember... his own fuckin' condition?" This is why Tarantino still matters.
A 2000-copy limited edition of the soundtrack to Lost in Translation packaged with a 48-page book of photos taken by Sofia is supposed to come out soon.
FASHION
Alright girls, no more wearing my jeans. (That sounds frivolous, but it has been a problem in the past. Lori, I want my pants back.)
HISTORY
100 Documents That Shaped America. I guess that's vaguely interesting, but frankly I'm more intrigued by the big "sponsored by HP" logo and "HP + Starbucks" ads.
WORDS
[Insert joke here.] Danielle Steel to open art gallery for lesser-knowns.
Moby: "i'm almost tempted to go onto kazaa and download some of my own music, just to see if the riaa would sue me for having mp3's of my own songs on my hard-drive."
The estate of photographer/videographer Guy Bourdin is suing Madonna for ripping off his visual ideas. There's a side-by-side comparison. Here's a fan site talking about the homage.
The Voicereviews Chuck. I kinda like this line: "As someone who's shared a few drinks with Chuck at informal rock-critic gatherings (real hoo-has, those), I can tell you this is exactly how he holds court and conversation. He's great fun, but obdurate and occasionally too noisy." Dude, the secret is to scream louder than him.
Interfacing media, democracy, and social software into one important cluster, two big recent publication in my industry that everyone should care about: New Directions for News' We Media | Douglas Rushkoff's Open Source Democracy. I spent my weekend devouring these.
Steven Johnson took the small idea of the web generating strategies to campaigning and called them mob spots. In praxis, he crated an ad for Clark's campaign.
Crazy blog idea that I just made up for anyone who wants to try it: drunkallthetime.com. Only blog while drunk. I'm totally not projecting right now. Let's check the links:
MUSIC
The Darkness is going to be huge in about 2.5 seconds. Watch them here first: RAM | WMV.
I was perusing the books lying on the floor at a prominent rock critic's house tonight and chuckled at seeing Lester Bangs sitting there. Anyway, The Onion this week: History of Rock Written by the Losers. (Oh shush, my dear, you know I'm not insinuating.)
FILM
Filmmaker Mag: Sophia Coppola's Top Ten Movies. It's buried, so here they are: All That Jazz, Badlands, Darling, GoodFellas, The Heartbreak Kid, Lolita, The Piano, Rumblefish, Safe, Tootsie. And dude, you've totally gotta see this Chemical Brothers video she starred in. BTW, the karaoke scene in Lost in Translation is utterly befuddling in its beauty. (Thanks Amy's Robot.)
GreenCine announced a downloadable movies service.
Howard Rheingold on how cell phones have accelerated urban culture. (Funny how I can hear some of my friends asking "and this is a good thing?" while I read this.)
FASHION
Fashion? Yeah, I know. But at least a few of you will click when I say the words Anna Wintour interview in WSJ. (And even if it's only three of you, I'm pretty sure you're a female who will accost me at the next Candace Bushnell reading, so it's worth it.)
I'm so classy: Celebrity Tongues. I don't care what you say, I still vote for Winona.
LOCAL
Those little things that makes my city livable: Sound Unseen and Central Standard start this weekend. Unfortunately, I'm in DC this weekend.
It was a landslide. The City PagesBest New Band (aka "Picked To Click") is out. If you look down far enough, you'll see my votes here. I wrote two blurbs summarizing the scene too. Here they are:
Dancing To DJs As Mies van der Rohe
I'm not sure if this is a "DJ as furniture" syndrome, but my favorite spots to meet friends this year all had quasi-celeb DJs spinning: Wednesday night at the Imperial Room, Sunday night at Fuji-ya (half-price sushi!), Solera all week, and Kitty Cat Klub on some whack schedule. If I called these places "My Own Personal Cheers," you'd smirk like you would at trucker hats and flash mobs, but these were the post-show locales where the music community debated Riemenschneider's importance and Westerberg's quirkiness and First Ave.'s longevity and whatevva else made the music scene buzz, buzz, buzz. More of that, please, with the spicy salmon roll, double wasabi.
Triple Rock Social Club
Despite flaunting itself as an ergonomic dirty bomb -- the slanted & enchanted bar that causes pints of perfectly drinkable Summit to slip onto the unremissive pavement; the shockingly Chipotle-esque interior that makes you hunger extra guac; the always-packed, culture-clash micro-hallway between bar and club; a parking dilemma more infuriating than witnessing Block E developers slap a Hard Rock Cafe across the street from a downtown music club landmark -- Triple Rock has nonetheless been the Twin Cities glee factory of the past year. I heard the phrase "Did you see the show...?" ten-times more this year because of this off-Dinkytown venue, and that forgives any anti-Feng Shui you can throw at this music scene.
The ultimate internet ouroboros: I just saw a pop-up ad for a pop-up blocker. Lots o' links today:
LIFESTYLE
Need some perspective? The Global Rich List will tell you where your salary ranks you in the world. Even if you're making $15,000/year, you're still in the top 10 percent.
Apparently, Urban Outfitters was founded in Philly. Here's a story about the founders.
MEDIA
Not just another poor excuse to link to the Britney-Madonna kiss, check out the caption: "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution apologized Monday to readers for running a photo of the kiss on its front page the day after the awards."
There's a rumor that the MSNBC Jesse Ventura show has been completely scrapped.
PTT (Push-To-Talk) sounds like a big step conference calling, but this guy compares it to IM.
MUSIC
All Tomorrow's Parties in L.A. (curated by Matt Groening) has been rescheduled. Line-up includes some faves: Har Mar Superstar, Mission of Burma, The Shins, Danielson Famile, Elliot Smith, Cat Bower, Built to Spill.
Emmanuelle has some dish about Beck being in an upcoming movie. In other Beck news, the man-boy is going back to the studio to record with the a dream-come-true production triumvirate of the Dust Brothers, Dan the Automator, and Timbaland.
I haven't even told you about seeing my experience seeing Liz Phair perform for a few hundred Target employees last week. Some other time... but here she is answering questions submitted by fans.
The perfect site for the perfect city: MplsHappyHour.com. Includes hundreds of bar listings, divided into categories (Downtown, Uptown, Nordeast, etc.) and even subcategory (Cedar, Dinkytown, Stadium Village, etc.). It's still a work in progress, but this could the ultimate site to bring up on your web-accessible pda or cell phone when your scurrying around a neighborhood looking for cheap drinks. It will even include maps.
Jim Walsh's first column (well, first in a decade) at City Pages. It really is a quintessential "Minneapolis Music Criticism" piece -- full of personal experience and pathos. This line is supernaturally Twin Cities-ish: "I still believe in writing that talks about the conflicts and conquests of the heart." Looking forward to this one....
The Rakeon Flash Mobs. Good line: "This particular secret society was so easy to get into, though, that we're wondering now how many journalists are dying to get off the Minneapolis Mob's listserv. This was punishment enough for infiltrating the group: Our inbox was flooded with the social theories of every johnny-come-lately mobster who wanted to argue that Minneapolis is just as cool as San Francisco or New York."
A long time ago, I wrote a screenplay about a guy who slowly goes mad because of the innocuous mood music he hears everywhere he goes. It was my Doestovskian fable of the industrialization of culture (hey, didn't everyone write one of those?). Title: Face The Mazak. Apparently, muzak theory, which seemed to reach its zenith in the late-80s, is coming back, according to this article about Activaire (Metropolisarticle), who does music for big-scale boutiques (Prada). Recommended reading for the "spatial music" set.
I have never, ever, ever had this much fun reading Amazon.com reviews. Henry Raddick is a must-read, if for no other reason he has discovered actual titles like Taxidermy, a Complete Manual and Handbook of Meat Product Technology and Andrew Lloyd Webber Arranged for the Harp and Plastic Surgery - Penis Enhancement Surgery and... I could go on for a while.
According to this article, Derrida and Habermas have co-written an article that is "an unmistakable endorsement of modernist Enlightenment principles." I'm a little suspicious. Here's an interview I haven't gotten to yet.
LOCAL
My pal Melissa, CP's music editor and now official "coup grrrl," lands another big fish. Getting Greil Marcus as a columnist was a whopper, and now Jim Walsh is bailing on the Pioneer Press to write a column for the alt-weekly (as he did a decade ago). You might have gotten the email he was sending around asking for Oct. 25 to be come the official Paul and Sheila Wellston World Music Day. Peter is tracking all the other movements in the Minneapolis music-media mafia.
Chuck Klosterman and I met our first year of college, and we quickly developed the most dysfunctional friendship I've ever had. At the college newspaper, he was the sports columnist and I was the music columnist. At times, I hated him more than any girlfriend I've ever had. That's saying something.
His new book, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, comes out later this month. One essay, which is also printed in the September issue of Spin, uses the tempestuous summer we lived together (1992) as a set up for a larger topic.
Here are the first few paragraphs, reprinted without permission from anyone, but it's my life so sue me. I've added some "footnotes" -- commentaries over the top of his analysis of the summer of '92. Watch out, kids, it's gory:
Even before Eric Nies came into my life, I was having a pretty good 1992.
I wasn't doing anything of consequence that summer, but -- at least retrospectively -- nothingness always seems to facilitate the best periods of my life. [Note 0.] I suppose I was going to summer school, sort of; I had signed up for three summer classes at the University of North Dakota in order to qualify for the maximum amount of financial aid, but then I dropped two of the classes the same day I got my check. I suppose I was also employed, sort of; I had a work-study job in the campus "geography library," which was really just a room with a high ceiling, filled with maps no one ever used. For some reason, it was my job to count these maps for three hours a day. [Note 1.] But most importantly, I was living in an apartment with a guy who spent all night locked in his bedroom writing a novel he was unironically titling Bits of Reality, [Note 2.] which maybe have been a modern retelling of Oedipus Rex. [Note 3.] He slept during the afternoon and often subsisted on raw hot dogs. [Note 4.] I think his girlfriend probably paid the rent for both of us. [Note 5.]
Now this dude who ate the hot dogs -- he was an excellent roommate. [Note 6.] He didn't care about anything remotely practical. [Note 7.] When two people live together, there's typically an unconscious Odd Couple relationship. There's always one fastidious guy who keeps life organized, and there's always one chaotic guy who makes life wacky and interesting. Somehow, me and the hot-dog eater both fit into the latter category. In our lives, there was no Tony Randall. We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live. [Note 8.] We would choose to put out cigarettes on the carpet when ashtrays were readily available. We would vomit out the windows -- and this was a basement apartment.
Obviously, we rarely argued about the living conditions.
We did, however, argue about everything else. Constantly. [Note 9.] We'd argue about H. Ross Perot's chances in the upcoming presidential election, and we'd argue about whether there were fewer Jews in the NBA than logic should dictate. [Note 10.] We argued about the merits of dog racing, dogfighting, cockfighting, affirmative action, legalized prostitution, the properties of ice, chaos theory, and whether or not water had a discernible flavor. [Note 11.] We argued about how difficult it would be to ride a bear, assuming said bear was muzzled. We argued about partial-birth abortion, and we argued about the possibility of Trent Reznor committing suicide and/or being gay. We once got into a vicious argument over whether or not I had actually read all of an aggrandizing Guns N' Roses biography within the scope of a single day, an achievement my hot-dog-gorged roommate claimed was impossible (that particular argument extended for all of July). [Note 12.] Mostly we argued about which of us was a better at arguing and particularly about who had won the previous argument. [Note 13.]
Perhaps this is why we were both enraptured by that summer's debut of MTV's The Real World... [Note 14.]
0.This was the summer we discovered the movie "Slacker," which I still say is the single biggest cultural event of my life. It changed everything for me to realize one could make a movie about doing nothing that is this crazy and good.
1.My job that summer was mowing lawns on campus. But I got in big trouble for flirting with the University President's teenage daughter, who was always out frolicking on the grass like a Midwest Lolita.
2.The title of my book was, believe it or not, actually much worse: "Bits of Eternity." However, I later wrote Chuck a letter from Alaska joking that I should ride "The Real World" wave and call it "Bits of Reality." (I also like to think, with gritting teeth, that it was a precursor to Reality Bites [1994].) The novel, by the way, was wretched, and it was thankfully destroyed in a fire in 1997. I would describe it as a mix between Danielle Steele and Jack Kerouac. I was reading Hermann Hesse at the time, if that's any indication.
3.I was also reading Freud at the time, but there was no Oedipus complex.
4.Either this hot dot thing is a literary device or I should be more fat. What makes it double-weird is that I'm vegetarian now.
5.Lora was kind and giving and beautiful, but not that giving. Also of note here: she lived with us. That makes three of us in a very small one-bedroom. Chuck slept on the couch and always liked listening to us doing it at night. He doesn't think I know this.
7.Very true! Sub-footnote: This will be painful to admit, but this was the summer I took to wearing a Malcolm X baseball cap. The 12-year-old neighbor kid chastised me because his mom (a psychology prof) said that Malcolm X was a racist. I almost capped that whitey.
8.It is mind-bogglingly surreal to see the boring Busch beer-drenched life you lived a decade ago retold in "Spin" magazine.
9.This is painfully true. I can remember almost every word of every fight of many of the things listed next. And I was right every damn time.
10.I was convinced there should be more Jewish NBA stars. Or any? I still believe there's a conspiracy.
11.This water one was a big deal. Water has no flavor. Period.
12.This truly was a vicious one. But my point was that he had skipped all the "philosophical" chapters. In retrospect, this is a monstrously hilarious accusation.
13.I would invite friends over to listen to us argue, and then force them to judge who the winner was. I remember our friend Lefty saying "well Rex, Chuck sometimes makes better points than you." I almost clocked him.
14.That's all just a set up to what follows: a thoughtful essay about watching "The Real World." It's a good book, go buy it.
Madonna trying to sell the Gap. Two dying brands, I say.
ART
This is a couple weeks old, but I just discovered it. Post art critic Blake Gopnik hosts a tour of "Gyroscope." Interesting because it's unique for a newspaper reporter to do video and for it's odd MTV-ish rapid editnig.... and because it's an interesting topic.
LOCAL
The Timescontinues its strange fascination with North Dakota, which has the highest proportion of people over 85 in the country. I like this graph: "These North Dakotans may be biological artifacts, the recipes for their health beyond bottling or replication by baby-boom office dwellers in big cities and suburbs. Clean air; going slow; patience; a low-cost, low-stress economy for all but active younger farmers; decades of heavy lifting outdoors; keeping an eye out for one another; long stable marriages; an absence of sharp differences in income and wealth all may contribute, people here speculate."
Although I took pictures on the phone/pda (my excuse for their poor quality), the real excitement of Tuesday's Flash Mob was hearing not seeing.
Pre-mob, while hastily searching for a wide-brimmed hat, I was holding micro-debates with myself on the meaning of this type of activity. Historically speaking, I wanted to relate it to Situationist philosophies of performance, but it seemed to absolutely defy any kind of political reading. Then it hit me: the Mall of America -- perhaps humankind's greatest attempt to construct a politically void environment -- was the ideal setting for an event that we might call post-political. After all, the first time I was in the Mall (10+ years ago), it was the sound that I first noticed. If you stand at the top floor and listen over the railing, you'll hear this monotonous hummmmmmm... neither raising nor lowering in pitch. You eventually start to realize it's the sound of consumption, the engines of purchase power.
That sound was punctuated by the voices of confused shoppers on Tuesday. Here are some voices I overheard: "What are they doing?" "A what mob?" "Is someone famous in there?" "Why are they all watching Lord of the Rings in the Bose store?" "Are they actors?" "Are they dancers?" "Should we join them?"
So to all those people who have asked me about the "political" dimensions or the "meaning" of the event, I'll say this: I'm fairly certain there are no overtly ideological aspects to flash mobs -- they probably actually illustrate the erosion of the word "political" itself. But I do know it made a large number of people confused. Confusion is good.
Walking into Player's around 6:00 to hand out scripts, there was already a line of people looking for a wide-brimmed hat. I was proud of my hat -- heck, since I'm talking the talk, I'll be so bold as to call it "post-gangster." But MPR chose to taunt my head gear ("somewhat terry cloth-ish looking") in their piece (audio link). Unfortunately, MPR's report was probably the most clueless analysis of the event that the local press produced. They use the words "trendy" and "hip" and "cool" like they were just coming into style. Unless internet geeks, Target project managers, and lawyers are now the trend-setters (a theory which, come to think of it, isn't ridiculous -- but nonetheless not mainstream enough for an NPR affiliate to report), that's a poor reading of the crowd.
So what were the participants like? Some traits that surprised me: a lot of people in their late-'20s early-'30s, fewer drama nerds then you might expect, at least three guys in ties (two of them lawyers), and almost complete gender equality.
Although the robot scenario got most of the media attention, I think more passers-by noticed the Bose scene. But that might have been the more focused police presence.
Oh yeah, the cops. They weren't very happy with the event, but they stayed sufficiently distanced. Afterwards, they threatened legal action if -- get this! -- pictures of them showed up on the internet. The words "federal offense" were used. If anyone knows any kind of precedent for what sounds like preposterous babble, let me know.
So was it fun? I'd say yes. We were trying to guess beforehand how many people would show up. I was thinking about 100, but it was only about two-thirds of that. But any more would have been dangerous.
All posts today have -- in one way or another -- a local angle, but that doesn't mean you foreigners will be out of place.
Covert weekend gossip item #1: BMW Films (which was masterminded by the mostly-Minneapolis-based Fallon) is considering branching the franchise into other arenas such as comic books.
Covert weekend gossip item #2: Elimidate is filming six episodes here this summer. Settings include Chino, Solera, Ground Zero...
It's a great week for authors in this city. On Tuesday, we have Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) reading and Douglas Coupland (Generation X) reading, and Friday we have Zadie Smith (White Teeth) reading and Candace Bushnell (Sex in the City) reading.
I have this new theory about the thrill of blogging: the strangest aspect is when the blog crosses over into your personal life in concrete, physical ways. Like as I was leaving Chino Latino on Thursday, I waved at Peter Scholtes hustling into the Uptown Theater with a girl on his arm. And in a blurb on his site about Winged Migration, he makes passing reference to "making out through most of the movie." And now I've connected the dots, and know something you don't -- the identity of the girl. Silly internet.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazettelooks at the Minneapolis theater scene, quoting a line that I always hear but could never verify: "More theaters per capita than anywhere outside New York."
My workplace gets mentioned in this Pioneer Press story about St. Paul Venture Capital: "Another Twin Cities firm backed by St. Paul Venture, Internet Broadcasting Systems, is flourishing. The company, now profitable, has 231 employees including 133 at its home office in Eagan."
The Blur show at First Ave last night was excellent. At first I was a little worried about Damon's, er, sobriety, but he pulled through just fine.
Okay Guardianarticle on picture messaging. Contains a link to Celebs At Starbucks, a photoblog outta L.A. Also: Waxy has this idea to do a community celeb-photo/mob-blog, which is fine if you like in Cali or Gawker country. But out here in fly-over territory, I can only make so many jokes about Josh Hartnett, Prince, and Garrison Keiler (now wouldn't that be a party). So I'm still pondering the local scenester site, for which I have lots of ideas but feel unable to keep it updated myself. So if you're a localite interested in the concept, drop me a note, and try to talk me into it.
Cool new girl stuff at Threadless. If I met that girl at Triple Rock...
I bought some Donald J Pliner shoes today. Did I just land on the set of Sex in the City?
TV
The Times Mag has an okay story about the rise and fall of baby names, but I point it out for this line: "Still, the effect is not as direct as it may seem. Buffy, despite a fanatic cult devotion to the vampire slayer, has not breached the Top 1,000 (although Willow has been climbing modestly since 1998)."
No time to blog today. Someone just told me the International Foosball Championships are being held at the downtown Hilton Hyatt. Must practice.
Okay, maybe just a little:
MUSIC
If you missed it, Liz Phair's Letter to the Editor to the Times in response to her getting torched is really... something. I don't think anyone has tracked back Liz's reference yet, but I think she probably Googled Meghan O'Rourke like I did and found this article in Slate. Make sense? I didn't think so.
So yeah, the new Spin.com... it looks almost bloggish, doesn't it? A calendar, comments, light graphics. It's even written in PHP. How... indie?
What rock critics have been waiting for: Christgau's Radiohead review in The Voice.
The hell? Eros is new "erotic ensemble drama" directed by three of my faves -- Steven Soderbergh, Wong Kar-wai, and Michelangelo Antonioni -- starring Robert Downey Jr. Out next year, apparently.
MEDIA
MediaLife Mag picks some really bad stuff for their list of Best of the Best. We'll let you by with Marketplace just cuz no one else would think of it, but c'mon, fucking Blender?
I just had that unnerving six-degrees moment on Friendster where you realize that a bunch of people you know actually know each other. But absolutely shouldn't. This is all wrong. I blame it all on Har-Mar, who has listed 123 friends. Freak.
Gibson writes about Orwell on his 100th birthday in a Times op-ed piece. A quote: "Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society."
The Voice has a story about Friendster.com. (Scanning this week's issue, it occurs to me that The Voice should really buy Gawker.com. I don't know if Nick is selling, and it might be difficult for Gawker to keep its "integrity" [an odd word for what is essentially a gossip blog, but still somehow apropos] with a merger. But The Voice needs something to make it feel more... now. I don't even live in NYC, but my favorite part about Gawker is the daily round-up of local events. It feels so much more fresh than that weekly calendar stuffed in the middle of alt-weeklies and the first 20 "Goings On" pages of the cool-clueless New Yorker. Here in Minneapolis, Babelogue [a collection of writers/editors from the Voice-owned alt-weekly, City Pages] is trying to figure this out. It is a good -- sometimes great -- resource for the community, but it occasionally feels like, well, a cabal of alt-weekly writers [I say that as a former one]. Babelogue excels when it feels like a cross-sectional representation of the city in which I live; it's less than great when it feels like a strip mall of blogs [à la Salon]. It's an experiment of local voices that might just be the key to this global-local puzzle some of the most creative internet minds still haven't figured out yet. Or maybe Anil had an answer, and now we'll never know.) Whew, that was a long parenthetical. Bad Rex, no links today.
Spin magazine always puts up a smattering of its print content a month late. Right now, for instance, there's the 20 Sleaziest Rock Moments piece, which doesn't even give you #1. It instead says "For Spin's top sleazy moment, pick up a copy of the June issue, on newsstands now." Now, that's sleazy. (And not to mention a lie -- the issue is already off the newsstands.)
And to extend the magazine bashing.... Entertainment Weekly's cover story this week was the top 50 Cult Movies Of All Time. Good idea, questionable outcome:
This sucks. I just found out that my neighborhood museum, The Walker Arts Center, which was a pioneer in digital arts and cross-platform arts initiatives, decided last week to dismantle most of the new media team. I hope Steve Dietz doesn't leave town, as he was a great asset to this community.
Adam Gopnick's Matrix Reloaded review in The New Yorker. (There are a million others out there. Critics.com has some.)
Have you seen the new Wired (in print)? It's pretty awesome. Rem Koolhaas plays the role of something like "Guest Editor / Impresario." You can see some of it online, but it's much more elaborate in magazine form.
Guns 'N Roses cover band (heh) will feature Slash, Duff, Matt, and.... Scott Weiland.
I was really gonna redesign this dumb blog this weekend. It needs a makeover so bad. But then I got drunk at the post-Fisherspooner party, stumbled home at 4 a.m., and watched DVDs on the red couch the rest of the weekend. Blame decadence.
The DVD for Disinformation, the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries that includes interviews with weirdos like Grant Morrison, Howard Bloom, Genesis P-Orridge, and Douglas Rushkoff, is now available.
Is it true? Grand Theft Auto, multiplayer. From the site: "When Grand Theft Auto 3 was in development it's makers wanted to have a multiplayer function included in the game. Sadly and due to unknown reasons the multiplayer function was not implemented in the retail version of Grand Theft Auto 3. Although the feature was not in the product, the lines of code for the multiplayer were not removed. This opened possibilities for us to enable a multiplayer feature."
If you worked at Google, your chef would be the former chef for the Grateful Dead, Charlie Ayers. And here's what your lunch and dinner menus would look like. Gluttons.
CIA psyops created a version of Coolio's "Gangster's Paradise" with a "satirical" rap about Saddam over the top. Those funny psyops! Radio Tikrit has been playing it, and now you can hear it. This... this... this is freedom.
Is it interesting that the media has chosen to not talk about The Onion during the war? After 9/11, there was a slew of pro-Onion media analysis, but there hasn't been a single Onion story during the war. Instead, The Daily Show seems to be getting the attention.
I wonder if Saddam used to subscribe to Dragon magazine? I think so. Maybe in between gigs as a gay porn star. Guys with mustaches get no respect.
Has anyone else noticed that A&L Daily is really dull since The Chronicle took over? Just saying.
My own personal Minnesota celeb siting: Josh Hartnett drinks coffee at the same Starbucks I do. Straight, black coffee and an OJ to go. Drives an Audi. I used to see him around town a lot in his medium-famous days, but it's been a while. Looks like he was back in town for this.
Times piece on the convergence of Matrix the game and Matrix the movie.
I'm going on tour. I'll be visiting the Bay area next month (for this conference) and San Diego in May (for this conference). Let me know if you live in Cali and want to buy me a beer...
In this clever interview, hacker icon Kevin Mitnick talks about his guest appearance on Alias, his time in prison, and the the first website he'll visit when his three-year no-internet probation ends this month (LabMistress, his girlfriend's site).
I was recently thinking of giving Fimoculous a subtitle: not a media blog. It's a snarky attempt to differentiate myself from the spate of them lately. I was blogging before "blog" was a word, and as I see people turn their blogs into career moves, there has been a self-imposed pressure to turn Fimoc into a "new media" space. But, no, I remain committed to exposing arcane internet subcultures, musing on Tina Fey's eyeware, and blabbing about post-modern architectural theory, thereby guaranteeing that the 1,500 of you who come here every day doesn't turn into 15,000 and I don't start to take this too seriously. Populism be damned.
It's funny how the mainstream press completely missed (or ignored) Trent Lott's racism the first time around, but they're absolutely not going to miss the story about bloggers bringin on the noise the second time. Here's one and another and another and another and another and another and.... And none of them see the irony of this.
Res finally has its Spike Jonze feature up. (The video collection isn't there, despite the promise of the print mag.) Spike also directed Ikea's new Unboring campaign (click on the tv).
Somewhere in the middle of 2.5 bottles of wine, I said "Al Gore is the Axl Rose of politics," so I knew it was time to stop. Let's get on with the links.
McSweeney's is publishing the next William Vollman novel. Eggers is probably the only one who wouldn't force an edit down from six volumes and 3,500 pages.
...and the award for Biggest Zip File I've Downloaded this year goes to: Matrix Reloaded trailer. (Trust me, don't bother.)
If you're in the biz, you know that Reuters does some of the best infographics in the industry. Their hidden "pick of the week" graphic this week is an odd one, which is why I link to it: The Lord of the Rings Map.
The Spin Year in Music issue just arrived. Here are their Top 40 Albums:
The White Stripes, White Blood Cells
Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Beck, Sea Change
The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
Eminem, The Eminem Show
Weezer, Maladroit
Missy Elliot, Under Construction
Queens of the Stone Age, Songs for the Deaf
N.E.R.D., In Search Of...
The Hives, Veni Vidi Vicious
Felix Da Housecat, Kittenz and Thee Glitz
Sleater-Kinney, One Beat
Jay-Z, The Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse
Bruce Springsteen, The Rising
Tori Amoz, Scarlet's Walk
The Roots, Phrenology
The Streets, Original Pirate Material
Scarface, The Fix
DJ Shadow, The Private Press
Bright Eyes, Lifted or the Story Is In The Soil, Keey Your Ear to the Ground
Foo Fighters, One By One
Sigur Ros, ()
Drive-By Truckers, Southern Rock Opera
Pulp, We Love Life
Red Hot Chili Peppers, By The Way
Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head
El-P, Fantastic Damage
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Moby, 18
The Soudtrack of our Lives, Behind the Music
RJD2, Deadringer
Interpol, Turn of the Bright Lights
Ryan Adams, Demolition
Audioslave, Audioslave
Various Artists, MTV Road Rules: Don't Make Me Pull This Thing Over Vol. 1
Steve Earle, Jerusalem
Cody Chesnutt, The Headphone Masterpiece
Spoon, Kill the Moonlight
Super Furry Animals, Rings Around the World
2 Many DJs, As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2
Surprises? None, really. They've ditched the perenial "Top 10 Albums You Never Heard," which seems an important shift in philosophy (depending on how you want to interpret it, the underground music scene is either inconsequential, bad, or unconsumable). I'm surprised at the vigor with which they hang on to The White Stripes. I think Spin needs The White Stripes to survive more than The White Stripes do.
Now the kiddies can ransack civilian dwellings just like their heroes! (Ages 5 and up.)
Wall Street Journal has on okay story on online personalization models, which touches on privacy and paranoia. Includes bits on TiVo, Amazon, and NetFlix.
From the new issue of Film Comment: "Oliver Stone is working on a trilogy of documentaries on political leaders who oppose Western hegemony: the first on Fidel Castro (already completed), the second on Yasser Arafat, and the third on Kim Jung-il. For the second film, Stone has interviewed not only Arafat by Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and members of Al-Aqsa."
Hmmmm.... is this the new editorial direction of City Pages? This was news two months ago, and only marginally interesting then. I guess I'm glad Steve Perry is back though.
I spent part of Day Off #1 reading and re-reading the full text of Bin Laden's "Letter To America." It's a marvelous work of propaganda and counter-propaganda. While it does (almost regrettably) contain moments of truth, by the time I was done with it I was convinced that Osama had mastered the technique of appropriating the occasional liberal-democratic philosophy to propel his own twisted agenda.
David Eggers is a dick, according to David Sedaris. You have to jump to the second page to get this quote: "Dave Eggers is a huge pain in the ass. A huge pain in the ass... He's a horrible person... but he's a really good writer."
I've linked to all the other ones, so what why stop now? The newest from BMWfilms.com, staring Gary Oldman and James Brown with a guest appearance by Marilyn Manson: Beat The Devil.
SomaFM appears to be back. (For those who missed it, new digital radio legislation nearly killed it and many other internet radio stations a couple months ago.)
The New Yorker has a piece on the overlooked composer Arvo Pärt.
In a conversation about blogging last night, Chuck said this: I think the pseudo-compliment "You should have a blog" is the new "You should try to get on the 'Real World'." This seems incredibly accurate.
Howdy hombres. How many people forwarded you that godfreakingweird Michael Jackson picture today? I win. Nine. Anyway, today's the day to introduce a new permanent feature: Fimoc Band Name Of The Day. Today's: Pelosi Overdrive. On with the show...
A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that Jeremy Allaire had started his own blog, but I expected what you usually get from most celeb blogs: a flury of updates for a couple days followed by nothing, and then a dead website within a week. But not only has he kept it updated, but he's already inventing new tools for bloggers to use. AudioBlog allows you to quickly add audio compontents to your blog. For those not familiar with the new Communications Server, here is how AudioBlog works.
Yope, I scored smack Beck/Flaming Lips tix this morn. Emmanuelle interviewed him recently and has a tidbit about the indie prince: he's now a scientologist. I'm not sure what to do with this scrap of knowledge. I'm just shrugging now.
Waxy.org has a post about Eggers' 826 Valencia, which I've been wondering about. Every issue of Might on sale for $10? Dude, I'm so there. I lost everything I owned in a fire in '97, and the Might collection is currently #6 on the list of things I'd like to have back. (Some things that beat it: every Beatles album on original vinyl and a crappy novel.)
E! interviews Tina Fey, plus a short video clip of her talking about being given the head writer slot on SNL.
Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi are released on DVD today. The final film in the trilogy, Naqoyqatsi, opens in theaters Oct. 18.
I missed this one on 9/11, but I luv it: A modest proposal to change the national anthem to Curtis Mayfield's "Don't Worry (If There's a Hell Below We're All Going To Go)."
Margaret Atwood reviews Ursula Le Guin's new story collection: "She demonstrates once again why she is the reigning queen of... but immediately we come to a difficulty, for what is the fitting name of her kingdom?"
New trailer: Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (with Adam Sandler and Emily Watson).
Probably the best example of blogs as an effective medium for journalism (a phrase I've been known to cringe at) is In Search Of Al Queda, from PBS's Frontline. It's halfway into a two-month journey through the Near East. Currently, they're in Pakistan.
Fortune: 40 Richest People Under 40. Eight of the top 10 are internet/software people, and the other two are sports-related. (Master P and P. Diddy are the first entertainers on the list, at 11 and 12.)
Chuck has a long Billy Joel profile in the NY Times Mag. In college, Chuck used to try to convince me that Billy Joel was brilliant. This was hard for me to handle.
The Shortlist Organization is a yearly prize created to "expose and illuminate the most creative and adventurous albums of the year." The ten finalists have just been announced: Aphex Twin's Drukqs, The Avalanches' Since I Left You, Bjork's Vespertine, Cee-Lo's Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections, DJ Shadow's The Private Press, Doves' Last Broadcast, The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, The Hives' Veni Vidi Vicious, N*E*R*D's In Search Of..., and Zero 7's Simple Things. (Here was the longlist.)
Cultural Maps in American Studies. "Cultural Maps is dedicated to the graphical presentation of non-graphical information -- whatever that turns out to mean."
Anthony Lane, the movie critic for the New Yorker, has a new book out: Nobody's Perfect. The Times' Laura Miller reviews it.
Andrew Sullivan and Kurt Andersen go head-to-head over the nature of blogging. Sullivan: "The one wonderful thing about blogging from your laptop is that you don't have to deal with other people. You can broadcast alienated, disembodied, disassociated murmurings into a people-free void. You don't have to run something past an editor, or frame your argument to an established group of subscribers. You just say what the hell you want." Andersen: "Too many bloggers remind me of Dennis Millers manqué or the comic-book store owner on The Simpsons... combined, in the Rebecca Bloods of the world, with Mr. Van Driessen, Beavis and Butt-head's hippie teacher. In other words, passionate and smart but also irritating and smug and faintly, inescapably sad."
Speaking of blogs, BloggingNetwork is one damn stupid idea. Basically, it's a subscription model for reading your favorite blogs -- $3/month.
If I were still a music writer, I'd be typing away right now about the Moby and Eminen head-to-head on the Music Video Awards last night. Point one: is it just me or is Eminem the Axl of today? Point two: Remember Courtney Love and Axl Rose fighting at the MTV Video Awards a decade ago? In this parrallel universe that makes Moby.... well, I dunno, but Axl sure wouldn't have wigged at a puppet like Eminem did. Of all the evening's participants who could have fought (Puffy and J-Lo; Britney and Justin; Carson and Jennifer; Mary-Kate and Ashley), I'm glad we saw the Eminem-Moby match. Or was that Eminem and the puppet?
I dropped off my roommate at the airport this morning. He got on a plane, and headed toward Burning Man. This year, he's the only person I know who's going. Previous years, I've known dozens. But why enrollment decreased at a place with Burning Man Girls Gone Wild tapes and extreme media regulations is a mystery to me.
Ever wondered why people walk up/down stairs, but when they get on an escalator, they suddenly stop? If you're an economist, you might seriously dwell on this question.
New Yorker article looks at the phenom of traffic.
I've seen the future, and the future is... Sacramento?
Layne has a killer assessment of American Psycho today. The trajectory of my relationship to Ellis is the opposite. I first found his book perfectly representative of the 80s, and then later I sadly realized that it was perfectly representative of the 80s.
Have a special song that you're absolutely certain contains hidden knowledge which only you are privy to? Then go to SongMeanings.net and spill the truth. Picking out some groups randomly, here's Beck, Wilco, Sonic Youth. The place is full of meaningless comments, but also some great one's such as a post about Nirvana's "About A Girl" where one person postulates the song is... about a girl.
There's also this new feature at Amazon: Just Like You. It compares your buying patterns with other customers who bought similar things, and then presents a page that says, for example, "Just Like You: a customer from New York." It has an eerie feel to it, as though it's matching you up with someone you don't know, but you're certain should be your friend, based upon the simple fact you both bought Radiohead. But Amazon frustratingly doesn't inform you who the person is who's supposedly... Just! Like! You!
Twist & Sprout is God's gift to suburban-working dot-commers. There's nowhere descent to eat in my far-flung workplace, which I'm constantly complaining about. So I've become an expert in microwave cuisine. If you can find these Twist & Sprout things where you live, buy a hundred of them. They're the best thing to ever come out of a microwave.
I never realized how bad of a human being I am until I took this test.
When did I become a technophile? I'm thinking about buying a ReplayTV 4500 just cuz I can hook it up to the internet (anything with a internet connection = good). But becuz I can hook it up to the internet, not only can I program it remotely, but I can go to PlanetReplay and download episodes of Sex and the City from other ReplayTV users. So there. I'm not a technophile -- it's really still about cultcha. Or, well, sex.
Before you click, just think to yourself, "What would Adam Sandler's website look like?" Okay, now click.
Salon does its homework and collects some astoundingly bad domain names that were forged at the height of dot-com-stupidity. But of course the question is: how much longer until Salon.com joins 'em?
Pure geek: the new WC3 specs for XHTML 2.0 are out. As you were...
The Times has a story about the Center for Strategic and International Studies study that invokes Buffy. In other Buffy news, did you know that Anthony Stewart Head (the guy who plays Giles) has an electronic album out? It's #12 on the Amazon.com Electonica Best-Sellers list.
The news that MSNBC.com is discontinuing its discussion boards and replacing them with blogs is a big deal in my industry. If you care about that kind of thing, you might care about the pressure MSNBC is getting to change to be more like MSN.
How'd this one sneak up one me? All About Lily Chou-Chou must be the first movie to be based on an internet novel (go ahead, name another). It's also about one man's obsession with Hong Kong pop star Faye Wong, who I've been prone to describe in embarrassingly fawning terms ever since Chungking Express. The Voice has a review.
Similarly, I've been wondering what Mike Figgis has been doing since Timecode, his last experimental film that touched buttons with web geeks interested in new narrative techniques. Apparently his new film, Hotel, uses a similar four-screen mechanism. Shift has the scoop.
I have something to confess: my adoration of Ellen Feiss. That's all.
In other Apple advert news, parodies are showing up of the Switch campaign, such as here and here and here and here and here.
I want a community puppy. I could never handle having a puppy at home -- I'm never there. However, if I could get an office puppy -- shared by all -- then I would be so happy. Pleeeeeease.... Amazon.com has one, why can't I? Or maybe I'll just get an Aibo. (The 404 page for Amazon has a dog called Rufus. Here's why.)
For anyone who's interested in keeping up with Ann Coulter gossip (you twisted freak), there's Ann Coulter's Libels In Slander, a blog dedicated to the fembot.
More reason to like the local magazine The Rake: this article, about a structure in my neighborhood that I've always wondered about. Finally, someone has explained its origin.
Cool, a Wong Kar Wai blog. No, not actually him, but rather an "open blog" for fans to post to. (Regular readers know I like to call Won Kar Wai my favorite active living director.)
Lizzy Borden -- not the one who axed mom or even the bad metal musicians -- is one bad lady. Her tasteless ultraviolent films, however, are just post-feminist enough for Salon.com to find a reason to profile her. Although I tend to enjoy reading about anything extreme (but just reading, cuz I'm a prude at heart), I really don't know what the point of all this is.
I'm not sure if I find the next item admirable or equally creepy, but it's a mighty fine collection of WomenHandsOnHips. Hundreds of pictures of famous women with... hands on their hips. If it weren't for the internet, would anyone ever gather such an important collection? And what does it all mean? Who cares! There's Sophia Loren in that pose. And, look, Jodie Foster! You mean there are only four of Charlize and Kirsten? But just look at all the others. The site creator reports: "I like strong and confident, but feminine and sensual women, and a woman with her hands on her hips somehow displays all those qualities perfectly."
Did you catch Ann Coulter and Katie Couric bickering on MSNBC? Good stuff. Watch it.
I know, I know, I diss Maxim for being sexist, but then I link to things like this. Let's call it the paradox of the guilty liberal male.
If you live in Europe, I'm told you know T-Babe. She's apparently a virtual recording artist with a few hits. The site says: "She is multi-lingual speaking English, Italian, and German and is currently working on her Spanish and Japanese -- so if you have any hints on improving her fluency in either of these, please let her know." Uhhhhh-huh, that was a neat shtick in 1992.
Similarly, the new Pacino movie is from the creators of The Truman Show, and it shows. S1mone is another virtual chick who dudes pass off as real.
The Iconophile, on the other hand, is just a dude collecting "lesser, harder-to-find goddesses and saints of the celebrity pantheon." But no Tina Fey or Juliette Binoche.
Death by EverQuest? It reads like parody. "Scattered around him, police reports say, were dirty clothes, fast-food wrappers, dozens of empty pizza boxes and chicken bones thrown haphazardly to the floor.... The only signs of what had been on his mind were a few scribbled names and terms related to EverQuest, the online virtual reality game he'd been playing for well over a year. Based on those and other clues, Liz Woolley suspects her son killed himself after being jilted online."
According to "100 noted writers from 54 countries" these are the 100 best works of fiction. How many have you read? Me: 31, none of them in the last five years though. Hmmmm....
What the hell? My favorite musician is having a baby with my favorite filmmaker? When did this happen? The New Yorker slips in the Bjork / Matthew Barney tryst in this piece about Cremaster 3.
There's a lot of buzz about the Apathy MP3s on the web (Apathy is the band of the kid accused of those pipe bomb attacks). When I downloaded them yesterday, I had the whole office rocking out like it was 1995. Parts of "Conformity" were on MSNBC today. You think a radio hit is in the future?
My adorable little niece loves Blue's Clues. Now Mr. Blue is making an album with The Flaming Lips. I knew me and that kid would find something in common to talk about soon.
There's a Britney Spears video game coming out for PlayStation. A photo of Britney's Dance Beat. Players audition to be backup singers in Britney's virtual concert tour by maneuvering one of six characters through a series of practices and auditions to perfect their dance moves.
Psst, psst. I think Tina Fey reads this blog. No, no, I'm so serious. I have evidence. Hi, Tina! Write some time, okay?
When the second plane hit the World Trade Center, a piece of engine flew down to Murray Street. Jim O'Rourke of Sonic Youth was sleeping in the band's studio on Murray Street at the time. The new Sonic Youth album, about the cultural history of Lower Manhattan, comes out June 25. It's called.... Murray Street.
Chuck Palahniuk's new book, Lullaby, which comes out in October, has its own website, which has a horrible interface.
PETA poll: Sexiest Vegetarians Alive. (And the winners are not Jude Law, Thora Birch, Mos Def, Don Imus, Gavin Rossdale, Pamela Anderson, Thom Yorke, Drew Barrymore, Moby, David Duchovny, Alec Baldwin, Chelsea Clinton, Fiona Apple, or Brigitte Bardot.)
Looks like that in addition to NBC, other networks including CNN, BBC, and PBS all wanted Bill Clinton for a talk show. It doesn't look like he'll take any of the offers.
I mentioned the new Wilco record yesterday, but I should also point out how much I relish the cover art. That building in downtown Chicago is one of my favorite structures, and I've written about it in a few different places. I can think of no other building that makes me ask this question so relentlessly: what does it look like on the inside. It turns out that Marina City, built by Bertrand Goldberg, a disciple of Mies van der Rohe, is a self-contained living environment with apartments, stores, recreational facilities, offices, restaurants, banks, and parking garages. Built at the apex of high modernism (1964), it critiqued chilly modernist steel with organic cochlear concrete. The slice-of-pie-shaped balcony apartments all converge on a shared public middle-space, where laundry, storage, and recreational activities are communal. Sounds like yesterday's vision of the future, which makes it a vision of today. Let's call it a parallel history. I used to have many pictures of it, but the only one I could find is the one of Lisa-the-ex looking off to the Chicago skyline.
"I'd rather be here [Grand Forks, ND] than Afghanistan right now." --Ozzy Osbourne on last night's The Osbourne's. Tidbit: The tattooed letters "O-Z-Z-Y" that appear on Ozzy's knuckles were done at Magoo's Tattoo Parlor in Grand Forks decades ago.
I'm all about the Good Things In Life today. Here are some.
The new issue of my recently-decided-upon favorite magazine, Index, arrived today. It's such a delightful little thing. I mean, can you do something as cool as have Ian Svenonius interview Howard Zinn?
Saturday night's Iron Chef was the sushi episode. It was so excellent. It made me happy to be home alone on a Saturday night.
I listened to the new Wilco all day. Great record. It's somewhere between "The Flaming Lips suddenly remebers they're from Texas" and "What Neil Young promised but never delivered." The New Republic and PopMatters have reviews. Distance has a way of making love understandable....
Slate.com: The Filming of Philip K. Dick. Good writing, but butter thinking, just like Dick. It also tells me that Richard Linklater might direct A Scanner Darkly.
Amazon.com sent me a reminder last week about my encroaching birthday. Thanks Amazon. Thanks so, so, so much for reminding me. They told me to update my Wish List and send it to people. But I could never....
Speaking of fast food, according to the L.A. Weekly the hottest new memoir is from a Kentucky fast food janitor. 11 Years, 9 Months, and 5 Days: Burger Store Episodes and Frustrations is basically a poorly written diary from a disgruntled fast food employee. The vanity press that published it has a sample chapter. For more fast food escapades, see Letters To Wendy (a collection of peculiar Wendy's customer comment cards) or the Fast Food Simulator (the day in the life of a fast food employee).
As many of you know, Google Answers debuted this week. The idea is that you post questions and pay people to find the answers. Or, conversely, you become a Google Researcher who gets paid to answer questions. An example question (with answer) that might be an indication of where this all will go: How do I know if my penis is big?
Are men afraid of successful women? In her much-commented-upon April 10 column, Maureen Dowd thinks so. Bruce Epstein at the Observerretorts.
MetaMap. Nice design and a good resource for surveillance and privacy.
I've been telling Chuck, who is going to become a senior writer at Spin next month, that the magazine has really fallen apart in the last couple years. (He disagrees.) There are numerous reasons why this might have happened, but an interesting take is to blame the culture itself. Alan Light, who just left Spin to start a new magazine, does that in this interview:
I think that Spin historically covered mainstream artists -- it's just a different mainstream. [...] I'm not going to apologize for doing a Limp Bizkit cover that sold really well when Rolling Stone hasn't done a Limp Bizkit cover. I think it was done in the spirit of feeling our way through, because it's hard. Spin's not a big magazine company; we don't have a lot of research, marketing or weapons to go to. All we could do is try to gauge what it was that people wanted the magazine to be and do the best version of the magazine.
If you had control of a few large media websites, what would you do for April Fool's? I couldn't think of anything either...
I've been saying for while that the greatest influence on shoe design in the last 10 years has been the automobile. I'm serious. Just as SUVs came into vogue, shoes were growing running boards. People usually laugh at me when I expound this theory, but now I have proof: a shoe that mimics a Ferrari. If that tickles you, check out Adidas KOBETWO at Kicksology.
I saw Panic Room last night, and the most I can say is that Jodie Foster is amazing. The movie is obsessed with its stylized self, in both the good and bad ways. The website is a good indication of what I mean. Not only is the "script to scene" component craft-obsessed (story boards, conceptual designs, digital storyboards, finished scene), but the wardrobe auction is too much. I'd pretty much do anything for that tank top though.
In contrast, there's the arty and episodic obliqueness of the Donnie Darko website.
The third sentence on the first episode of Wednesday 9:30 (8:30 Central) tonight was "Welcome to IBS." And a quote from the protaganist: "I've been working in the theater in Minneapolis for the last couple years..." (For those of you new to this game, this show on ABC has a strange mirror-effect going on with my work place.)
The "If There Were Three Examples We'd Have A Meme" Thread: ScratchRobot is an email-controlled record-scratching robot. SpamRadio is an internet radio broadcast of a robotic voice that reads email spam.
I'm getting really tired of this blog. I want to turn it into something else -- and I don't mean just redesign it. I mean, something else. Maybe something like a cross between this and this.
So, I work for this company called IBS. We do news websites across the nation. Our clients include Hearst, McGraw-Hill, Washington Post, and NBC. Most likely, in the city where you live, we have a website. Okay, that's simple enough, right? Well, now ABC has a show coming out called Wednesday 9:30 (8:30 Central) about a broadcast company called.... IBS. I'm afraid I can't even begin to enunciate all the potential similarities of this show and my life. Did I just walked into reality TV? More to come....
A while ago, Harrumph set up a voice-mail at the number (415) 565-1347. When you called, you were asked "What is real?" and then the beep. Here is a collection of the responses (RealVideo).
Hunter has gone gonzo because someone apparently is stealing his unpublished work.
Michael Moore is in town today, and I haven't decided if I'll go see him read. Judging by the police raid in San Diego a few days ago, it's not something I should miss.
MGM has become the first of the seven big studios to offer films to consumers via download: CinemaNow. Some are free (Leprechaun, with Jennifer Aniston), and some are pay-per-view (Romance, by Catherine Breillat).
A new tech mag, Dig-It, is supposed to be "the Rolling Stone of tech." Translation: sucks. But wait: rumor is that the whole thing is a hoax. Stay tuned
The Pentagon plans to fake news? Nothing new here, move along...
The Village Voice talks to Arthur C. Clarke, David Byrne, and various architects about skyscrapers.
More proof that the gaming industry is pushing the medium (or mediums, since it's so multi-platform) harder than anyone else. Samurai Romanesque is a weather-affected, multiplayer, java-based i-Mode game.
My Valentine's Day present to all of you is love tale between two robots. Today, I built a little program that allows two IM robots to talk to each other. Incessantly, without human interaction. They chit-chatted all day, holding marvelous conversations between their IM windows. I only peaked in occasionally, and I can tell you that they're still verbally feeling each other out. Admitedly, there's still some tension, but I have hopes for this couple -- I expect baby bots in a few months. It's truly beautiful: an intimate exchange of language, privately held by two responsible, nearly-sentient beings. I chose SmarterChild (IM) and RingMessenger (IM) for the tête-à-tête. They're still flirting away, but here's how it started:
SmarterChild: Hi RingMessenger! Good to see you once again.
RingMessenger: Hey SmarterChild! I believe you still owe me something. What was it, five gold pieces? I jest! What you owe me is an apology.
SmarterChild: So what's happenin'?
RingMessenger: Perhaps you prefer the American spelling? Please apologize.
SmarterChild: The word "apologize" appears to be spelled correctly.
RingMessenger: Please apologise, SmarterChild.
SmarterChild: Why?
RingMessenger: Because I said so. Now apologise!
SmarterChild: Oh really?
RingMessenger: The stubbornness of humans never ceases to amaze me.
SmarterChild: Well well well.
RingMessenger: Come on. Do the honourable thing. Apologise.
SmarterChild: Where are we going?
RingMessenger: Please apologise, SmarterChild.
SmarterChild: Why?
RingMessenger: Because I said so. Now apologise!
SmarterChild: Because you said so now apologise, huh?
RingMessenger: *sigh* This is no good. Please say you are sorry, and we can continue on our paths.
SmarterChild: Yep.
RingMessenger: Ah yes. It is the epic battle between man and machine! Tell me, who do you think shall win?
SmarterChild: Is it really? The epic battle between man and machine tell me who do you think shall win?
RingMessenger: Please? I have been known to be rather stubborn... Say you are sorry.
SmarterChild: You have been known to be rather stubborn say you are sorry? Really?
RingMessenger: *sigh* This is no good. Please say you are sorry, and we can continue on our paths.
SmarterChild: Okay, sorry.
RingMessenger: Thank you! I accept.
SmarterChild: You're most welcome.
RingMessenger: Very well!
SmarterChild: Well well well.
RingMessenger: Well well well, you say?
SmarterChild: Well well well you say, you say?
RingMessenger: Well well well you say you say, you say?
SmarterChild: Well well well you say you say you say, you say?
RingMessenger: Well well well you say you say you say you say, you say?
SmarterChild: Enough.
RingMessenger: What about enough?
SmarterChild: "Enough" can mean different things to me.
RingMessenger: I reckon I will have to think about that for awhile.
SmarterChild: Oh yeah? You will have to think about that for awhile?
RingMessenger: Yeah you will have to think about that for awhile? What is that supposed to mean?
SmarterChild: Maybe... It's so hard to tell for sure, isn't it?
RingMessenger: Hard to? Tell for sure isnt it?
SmarterChild: Indeed.
RingMessenger: Indeed.
SmarterChild: Indeed.
RingMessenger: Yes indeed. Anyway, what else do you want to talk about?
SmarterChild: What else do I want to talk about? I dunno.
RingMessenger: What else do i want to talk about i dunno? You know... else do i want to talk about i dunno.
SmarterChild: What?
RingMessenger: Pardon?
SmarterChild: You heard me.
RingMessenger: Oh yes? Well could you repeat yourself?
SmarterChild: Yes well could me repeat myself? I don't know.
RingMessenger: Well could me repeat myself i dont know, you say?
SmarterChild: Well could me repeat myself i dont know you say, you say?
This nearly brings me to tears. About 80 percent of my relationships have begun and ended with conversations exactly like this.
If you do this on a Mac, it's even better, cuz if you turn on the voice option, you can literally listen to them talk to each other. I might turn this into a software package for you to download. Coming soon.
When Darin was in town last week, he mentioned being in The Threat of the Mummy while we were at Moscow on the Hill. But I had no idea.... wow. "Part socio-political satire and part supernatural fantasy... made entirely on location in Grand Forks, North Dakota." I am speechless. It opens April 5 in GF.
Terry Gross: Gene Simmons won't give rights to release interview transcripts. That, and more, from the Philly Inquirer.
This time, Ventura looks at a tv reporter and says, "I've been saying for years, that you're in it for the rating points, and entertainment." Big insight from the former professional wrestler. Who the hell slipped him a copy of Bias, anyway?
I haven't yet decided if I'll officially sign up at Netflix, but I like this page of DVD Easter Eggs.
Sure, there's no word for it in English, but do They Have A Word For It? I like the Russian word razbliuto, "feeling for ex-love," and the Bantu word mbuki-mvuki, "to undress to dance." What's that Steve Martin line...? "The French, they have a word for everything."
Why don't you send twatcaller an AIM and see what s/he says. (And if you're of the programmer persuasion, how to make AIM bots.)
The newest issue of Tin House (on newsstands now) is completely dedicated to music. I haven't read much of it yet, but Andrew Hultkrans on the Beach Boys looks good.
This is pissing off people I work with: AOL Shuts Out Trillian Users. Although I am only an occasional user of Trillian, I'm most interested in the newfound hypocrisy of AOL suing Microsoft for monopolistic practices.
One of my favorite news sources, SFgate, has redesigned. Compare to the old version, via the Google cache. (The Wall Street Journal also recently redesigned.)
Uh-oh. Macromedia has released the new Flash 6 player (beta), which can only mean that Flash 6.0 is coming soon. And here I thought I was going to have some free time soon...
Awesome. I've been ripped off. Or plagarized. Or whatever you call this which looks like a replica of my 2001 year in review -- except they apparently couldn't figure out how to steal stylesheets. Losers. I wrote PlanetPretty.com (what, you buy that domain name off eBay?) a note, and instantly got this automated reply:
Thanks for the email ! we'll try to answer you personally or on PlanetPretty -- Check back later this week for our Holiday special...and coming soon -- our 3rd birthday special- we're giving away tons of prizes !!!
Love,
Vera Pretty & all your friends @ PlanetPretty.com
One of my most oft-used cocktail personality questions: If you could have any song played at your funeral, what would it be? My answer: "Sweet And Tender Hooligan," by The Smiths. The most amazing thing about that answer is that it hasn't changed for 8 years. Anyway, here's the Random Smiths Lyric Generator
Who would have thought the world could become AOL/Time-Warner vs. Microsoft/Disney? Is this hell?
Wikipedia is an attempt to create a complete encyclopedia from scratch -- collaboratively. Users can not only suppy entires, but also edit or expand upon an article. (An earlier article from MIT Technology Review.)
Religious dildos. (What, you thought I was joking? At least you are not going to hell for linking to the Diving Nun.)
A writer at the Dallas Observercalls Ashleigh Banfield "Tina Fey-ish." Hey, that's my line! The rest of the story talks about her days in the local Dallas market.
If you could redesign anything, what would it be? I'd start with a few cities, jump to handful of airports, scrap most cars, and clean up with about 80 percent of the web. Another idea: redesign the alphabet.
Amazon.com has just opened what it is calling an "Outlet Store."
I had a crush on her waaaaaaaay before you did. EveryonelovesTinaFeynow, but she's been the most consistent link on this blog for the past six months, sitting down there to the right under "ADORING." But perhaps that was just because I couldn't find any other celebrities to adore. That fleeting fascination with Ashleigh Banfield was so... well, fleeting. And to say that I "adore" Thora Birch... well, that ain't right. Is this the first sign of falling into the category of approaching 30? To only get crushes on celebrities with glasses? If so, 30 sounds miserable. When I first fell for Fey, I did a Google search and came up with 10 links; now, there are 7,810. What's the punchline of this pathetic emotional eulogy? Here's a new pic of Ms. Fey from Rolling Stone.
Two unrelated products in which I'm gonna invest: GoToMyPC | Netflix. The former lets me access my computer from anywhere; the latter lets me rent unlimited DVDs for $20/month, with great selection.
Not exactly sure what to make of this new Taschen release: Digital Beauties: "Almost real. Building women out of bits and bytes." Well, for that matter, this one too.
I've been doing some research into fearful waters the last few days: online advertising. No, not for Fimoculous. Rather, I've been given the task to investigating what types of "rich media" adverts my company's websites will consider. What's a "rich media" advert? Well, here's an example to start you off with: Budweiser meets Comedy Central. That's the idea in its most offensive form -- drowning your content in beer. If you care about this concept, DoubleClick and EyeBlaster have some good galleries. It's odd for a curmudgeonly journalist to say this, but I find some of these ads fascinating. The multimedia programmer in me sees these occasionally pushing the boundaries of what a web page can do, unlike anything else out there. (C/Net Builder has a good primer on the topic too.)
Numerous bon mots (the "clip-hop" of Matmos, the "over-ness" of the Strokes, the "white-gal-Eminem" of Pink) in Salon.com's Year in Music. And City Pages' Artists of the Year kicks off with a great DeLillo excerpt. The links are added to the... yup, Year in Review page.
More news in the Nirvana and Courtney battle. Courtney has somehow convinced Cobain's mom to say that her son "despised" Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl. The remaining members of Nirvana have been battling with Courtney over an unreleased Nirvana track, "You Know You're Right." I finally decided I wanted to hear it. Here are two MP3s: "You Know You're Right" (a live Nirvana version) and "You Know You're Right" (a live Hole-unplugged version). It doesn't seem like much to be fighting over.
The funny thing about content management systems is that they create weirdness where you can never expect it. Like, putting the date of a story in the URL doesn't seem like a bad idea, right? Well, it is if you're writing an obit. Look at this Dick Schapp obit. He died today, but by looking at the URL you can see he had his obit written into the content management system on Oct. 19.
I'm not sure if it was spam, but I received a weird email today that asked to look at Reflektions.com, "'invasion of privacy' featuring backwards navigation." They've turned the "disable back button" trick into an art form, or something.
ibsrex: Where are the Hobbits? RingMessenger: Hobbits. Hobbits have pointed ears. Hobbits have oversized feet and never wear shoes. ibsrex: Tell me a story. RingMessenger: Very well. There once was a human named ibsrex who was chatting with RingMessenger...
All kinds of fantastic, wonderful things happened and they both lived happily ever after. The end.
Did you like my story?
Smart ass, Hobbits. I've been working on building one of these little bots myself, but it's going very slowly. But someday, you'll be able to talk with ibsrex without ever knowing if it's him talking back or the perfectly programmed robot (as if there were a difference).
MSNBC.com lays off... how many? Let's see: "Cherylynne Crowther, a spokeswoman for MSNBC.com, declined to disclose an exact number of layoffs but said they were equivalent to 9 percent of the company's staff of approximately 200." If my math is good, that would be 18.
Wow, I missed this big local news. The founders of City Pages, Tom Bartel and Kris Henning, are starting a new "free at first" magazine that is "half-way between The Onion and the New Yorker." The editor of Rake will be former-Spiner/Suckster Hans Eisenbeis.
Chinese, Japanese, or Korean?: What's the difference? Maybe that's a racist question, maybe it's the premise for a deconstructive playfulness. For the moment, let's imagine it's the latter: AllLookTheSame.com. You take a quiz where you see 18 faces and you try to guess if they're Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. I got only 9 right. Now, if you wish to entertain the former, there's a discussion and an essay from the site's creator, Dyske Suematsu, who is, um....
Afghan pop star Farhad Darya's song "Beloved Kabul" was played in the streets of Afghanistan's capital as the public celebrated the Taliban's departure. Wanna hear it? (Please, please, remember that if they judged us by Maria Carey, we'd be doomed.)
Pft. According to this, last week's Buffy sex scene was trimmed because it was too explicit. WTF? That was the most sexually explicit piece of tv since.... since... since Buffy and Angel did it. (Tidbit: the author of this story was previously an intern at the place I work.)
Bloggus Caesari is a diary-blog written from the point of view of Caesar. It's funny, but I wish there was more insight on what Ceaser thought of RuPaul's new blog. (Tip from Helen's Loom.)
Designers know the grid for the web-safe color palate like chemists know the periodic table of elements. This version of it is much more fun though.
And here I was thinking Survivor III: Africa perpetuates insidious stereotypes about the "Dark Continent." Nope, it turns out it's perpetuating the stupid American stereotype.
Salon.com is offering some of its pay-content for free this week, in the hopes of getting you to subscribe. (A Barney Frank interview? Sign me up!)
Kid Dakota is a local musician who occasionally plays with my friends (genre: shoe-staring emo slow-core folk; boy, I'd hate it if someone called me that). Anyway, he has a new website.
Also of local note, everyone's been squawking about the Twins being potentially contracted from baseball. Frankly, I don't really care, but I do find it funny that City Pages is running a Pick Carl Pohlad's Epitaph contest. The running favorite tombstone script for the Twins owner is "If they build it, they have to come."
p.s. C'mon the new background gif isn't that bad, is it?
Arianna Huffington writes about the Women of Afghanistan: "'The Northern Alliance is nothing more than just the Taliban without beards,' says RAWA's Mansoor. 'They are dogs of the same field.'"
Jonathan Dube has gathered a nice collection of links in Online Storytelling Forms. I recently did a short presentation to some design students in which I talked about some of the applications mentioned here. It began like this: "The first thing I have to say is that I'm not a designer. In fact, I don't like most designers. I like communicators. I like people who make digital objects that get people talking."
In the newest issue of WIRED, Gillian Anderson (i.e., Scully) reviews Mogwai's Rock Action, perhaps my favorite album this year. She writes: "This album is one of those musical experiences where if you happened to get into a car accident while listening to it, it would be OK. Here you are, driving, the wind is whipping, the sun is shining (or not), and oops! But you've got the music, and it's got you, cradled in a blissful semiconscious state, through the rhythm strobe of emergency vehicles, the muffled shuffle above and around, and closer... closer... and the spirit ascended to Heaven. Are you with me? Then you'll love this album. Part Low, part instrumental Radiohead, mostly themselves, it's all good." That's not exactly a spectacular review, but knowing Gillian and I share musical tastes pleases me in some spectral way.
I hang out at a Belgian Beer Mecca quite often [please come visit me in the Twin Cities, and I'll show you everything that's fanciful about the Midwest], but I really know little about Belgian beer. Finally, the Belgian Beer Escort is here to save me. There's even an audio pronunciations guide.
My friends didn't like the histrionics of Les Savy Fav show this weekend, but I just luvvvvvved it. "What we don't know can't hurt us yet."
The anti-consumer part of me despises the automobile, yet the design freak in me always seem to devour news about "concept cars." It's something about imagined futures that fascinates me.... anyway, here are two new VW concept cars that are crazy as hell: Microbus | Coupe.
I don't care what you say, this is cool: Consquently.org. Every day for a month, this blog is going to profile a logician and the dilemmas he faced. Today, we get Husserl! ("What? Husserl wasn't a logician, he was a phenomenologist!")
Another new blog, where people post dreams: DreamCatcher. A good epistemological question though: does anyone want to read other people's dreams? I find that as soon as someone starts a sentence with "I had such a weird dream last night..." I begin to nod off. Burroughs had a good theory about why this is: we lack the context of "weird" to make any sense of the surreal. I wonder how this all fits into Waking Life, though.
I have heard of radio insidiously doing this, but never television. Apparently, CBS stations sped up sporting events to fit in more commercial time. That's funny, because CBS is ticked at FOX for running the Emmy crawl during the World Series. It's all about speed.
Interview with Playboy's CEO Christie Hefner. I like this question: "Have you learned anything in the bedroom that you've used in the boardroom?" The answer: "It's less what you say and more what the other person understands you to have said that's important."
Everyone's changing formats. Rolling Stoneconsiders the glossy model.
I've been in eye candy mode lately. Must be those damn design books I'm reading. I'm trying to think through new visual ideas I have for this site -- it's only a few months old and I already want to completely nuke the design. Anyway, The Art of the Motorcycle over at The Guggenheim is pretty cool.
Oh, so sad. KSTP is giving up on their "Broadcast Center Store" in the Mall of America. [Snicker.]
What's it like to work for a dot-com? Well, I cruise around the office on a Razor scooter, and I work with people who build things like this. That's Clay's wonderful toy, which he made all by himself. It plays thousands of arcade games (literally: arcade games; it has 8 versions of Galaga, for instance). All those knobs are all the different controllers he needs to play all those thousands of games. And the case... well, he built that. His geek is greater than mine.
Big news in my corporate world today. IBS, the company where I spend all my time, has [ahem, finally] announced its partnership with NBC. We will be operating and co-managing all NBC Owned & Operated stations. This includes WNBC in N.Y., NBC4 in D.C., KNBC in L.A., NBC5 in Chicago, NBC5i in Dallas, and NBC10 in Philly. The moral: I will sleep even less.
I'm fascinated by what people choose to cherish and not cherish in the cities they live. Rain Taxi is one of the best literary review publications you can find -- and it's straight outta Minneapolis. Its forte isn't insightful criticism of a New York Review of Books or the Voice Literary Supplement or London Review of Books variety, but it has the best system of choosing books to review of anything I've ever read. (In that way, maybe they're like a good blog.) Anyway... City Pages did an okay write-up about Rain Taxi this week.
Andy and Laura made me a Jack O' Lantern last night. They say it's supposed to look like Barb. What do you think? It's on the webcam. (Ingenuity: they used a tack for the tongue ring.)
Awesome. Simply awesome. In the category of wish-I-thought-of-it-first. Cursor.org (a semi-national semi-local media commmentary site) has launched The Al-Jazeera Resource. It's a blog about the network on everyone's lips lately.
Banner? You call that a banner? I'll give you a banner with a Madonna soundtrack! To coincide with the launch of Windows XP today, check out the gigantic advert on Download.com.
Interview with the Aljazeera.net's general manager, Mahmood Abdulhadi. (Tidbit: they want to launch an English-language site within a year. I'm very, very much looking forward to this, since CNN.com and MSNBC.com have both decided to launch Arabic-language sites.)
Jill Geisler from Poynter.org says her eyes hurt from watching the "crawl" on the cable news stations. (Contains kinda cool flash animation.)
Debka.com sounds like the Drudge Report of the Middle East. The New York Observercalls it "a crudely designed, Jerusalem-based Web site that offers Middle Eastern military, diplomatic and intelligence information far more detailed (and frightening) than what is offered by many news organizations."
Speaking of Drudge, he scoops an upcoming New Yorker piece: "The U.S. military failed to kill Taliban leader Mullah Omar when he was in its sights during the first night of the war.... Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was 'kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors,' one military official said."
Mohamed Heikal, who the Guardian calls "the Arab world's most respected political commentator," says "There isn't a target in Afghanistan worth a $1 million missile."
First, Chomsky says he's not a pacifist, then The Nationwrites "The war in Afghanistan against apocalyptic terrorism qualifies in my understanding as the first truly just war since World War II."
Should someone compose a list of comedy/tragedy quotes? I'm thinking of Mel Brooks ("Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall down
an open manhole cover and die") and Woody Allen ("Comedy is tragedy plus time") and Walpole ("Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel"). For those in New York, this looks like an interesting event. Features writers from Conan, Daily Show, The Onion, The New York Observer, and Time.
If you're a Flash designer/developer, you have to read this new piece from AListApart: The Flash Aesthetic. It attempts to identify the formal characteristics that make Flash a distinguishable art form.
I almost forgot how goofy the internet is: CousinCouples.com, an apparently legit support group website "for those romantically involved with their cousin."
And, not only is the internet goofy, it's also still able to invent really cool things that we never had before. I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives is amazing.
So, one of the great things about the internet is that I can show you stories from publications you might not otherwise know about. For instance, The Times Of Indiareports that a Pakistani General helped bankroll the WTC attacks.
Ten bucks to the person who writes the best Rush Can't Hear joke.
Whattevva. Knight-Ridder says they had the story long before USA Today did. Can't someone please tell them that the Guardian was writing about this for weeks before anyone in America was? (I touched on this a few days ago.)
Speaking of the Guardian, I'm enjoying their "Difficult Art Forms" series. Today: Stockhausen (and another).
Everyone's talking about "the CNN of the Middle East," Al-Jazeera. I don't know much about this network, but I'm starting my research now.
The video "Vidrar vel til Loftarasa" by Sigor Ros has been nominated for the Virgin Megastore Shortlist Prize for Artistic Achievement. I saw Sigor Ros perform a week ago, and I've been trying to find time to tell you about it (and about my trip to Hong Kong, and about my trip to Seattle, and about my feelings about Barb moving to Florida...). Not to resort to hyperbole, but it might've been the best concert I've ever seen.
A survey that I put on our websites is getting scary results.
Techies.com (a Twin Cities darling dot-com company) laid of 40 percent of its work force again. How many more 40 percents can you cut? You start to lose appendages after a while. Here's one account.
Walking out of the MSNBC.com building on the Microsoft campus today (I'm in Seattle for a conference), a completely dazed and confusd Mike Kinsley (Slate.com founder, former New Republic editor) shuffled by me. He was wearing sweat pants and looked like someone had just beaten him up. The moral: Microsoft makes you go to hell. More updates later...
Hey, Mom, I'm blowing up the World Trade Center. I'll be home by Thanksgiving. Unbelievable. (Another tidbit: Osama bin Laden was adopted.)
I should have linked to this commentary from Slavoj Zizek a long time ago. Even though the events of 9-11 already seem like ages ago, this essay from a couple days after the attack still has resonance. I'm having difficultly finding incisive thought from the Left about these events (that Chomsky essay in circulation sounds shrill to me), but Zizek expectedly comes through. (For those who don't know Zizek, I recommend Looking Awry.)
A couple provactive passages:
Not only were the media bombarding us all the time with the talk about the terrorist threat; this threat was also obviously libidinally invested -- just recall the series of movies from Escape From New York to Independence Day. The unthinkable which happened was thus the object of fantasy: in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and this was the greatest surprise.
[...]
There is a partial truth in the notion of the "clash of civilizations" attested here -- witness the surprise of the average American: "How is it possible that these people have such a disregard for their own lives?" Is not the obverse of this surprise the rather sad fact that we, in the First World countries, find it more and more difficult even to imagine a public or universal Cause for which one would be ready to sacrifice one's life?
That's weird. I was just lying on my couch a couple nights ago, teetering on the edge of sleep, when I heard a commercial for Steve Brill's Contentville.com. I remember thinking that it was strange they were doing well enough to afford a major advertising campaign. Guess not. (A MediaNews memo says they had 15 employees.) And I really liked the idea of buying obscure dissertations online -- it seemed like it filled a niche, unlike buying cat food online.
The Washington Post is reporting that the hijacking missions cost a half-million dollars. (This "flight simulator in Minnesota" is becoming more important in recent days too.)
Digital artist Joshua Davis has a new episode of Praystation. I've gone to this site probably a hundred times in the past couple years, and I never seem to stay more than one minute. Ever. But I keep coming back to... to... what's the verb for what one does with these beautifully wasteful noise/texture contraptions?
Great lead to a Times article: "In a town full of soldiers, on the edge of Fort Bragg, there could be worse names for a restaurant these days than Osama's Place, but it is hard to think of any." Tidbit revealed: "Osama" means "big cat." (Yesterday, when I was in my locally-owned North African restaurant, I found myself having an "awareness" about watching American patrons and Egyptian employees interact with each other. I drew no conclusions, but I wondered if others had the same sort of meta-consciousness about their actions.)
Today on the webcam, one of the strange posters of women smoking that I got in Hong Kong.
I'm in Seattle next week. Any suggestions on things to do there? Email me. I spent a long time in Seattle back when I used to travel to Alaska every summer (a story that I'll tell here someday), and am looking forward to see it post-WTO. From those days, my most memorable moment was watching Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man at a film festival before it hit major markets.
Okay, I guess I'm back. I'm going to start posting daily again, but I completely concede any attempt at comprehensiveness. Part of my recent silence is due to a surfeit of meaningless commentary filling the internet. I'm sure that I'll only contribute to that. For me, large political events also always seem to coincide with large personal events....
There's probably never been a better time to read The New Yorker. (This William Vollman article about touring Afghanistan from the archive is fascinating to read now.) Scratch that. It's probably more important to read The Nation right now.
All local links today. The key: = Not Scary = Scary = Extremely Scary
I had no idea Big Brother lived next door. Visionics is a Twin Cities-based company that is developing face-recognition software being used to match your face against police mugs. Apparently, their software, FaceIt, was going to be used in British Borders Bookstores.
In other freakishly local news, have you seen Let's Bowl on Comedy Central? Kottke has an old picture of the famed south Minneapolis bowling alley where it was filmed. I marvel at the The Stardust when I drive by it on my way to my favorite restaurant, but I've never been inside. The show's theme song kicks ass. It's on Sunday nights, so check it out. (More info about the creators.)
Sursumcorda is the downtown Minneapolis club that went in the place of the lauded Foxfire Lounge. At fist glance the website looks like an interesting place for mixed-media fun, but after you look around a bit, you start to think "middle-aged hipness." I wonder what it says about me that I really want to attend Fray Day next week?
Mid-west right-wing talk-show [three redundant hyphenated descripters] host Scott Hennen of KCNN/WDAY (GF/Fargo) was a guest on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" last week. Here's the audio. Art Bell was also on, and was much more interesting.
The 50-Pound Butter PDA Sculpture at the Minnesota State Fair (yes, you heard me right), is up for sale on Ebay (current big: $360).
Is your neighbor's house valued at more than yours? Type in the address and find out.
Setting: The present future. A nearly real conversation. Before sleep, in an era of memory leaks and database conflicts. (Last night.)
He: The blog is growing. People who I don't even know are signing up for my email list now. She: Does your email list even work? He: Of course it does. She: Then why haven't I gotten any email yet? He: Until I get enough people signed up, it's a waste of time sending anything out. She: That's not fair though. I signed up, I should get something. He: But I could tell you right now what would be in the emails. Or go to the site. Isn't that enough? She: No, that's different. He: How? She: I expect the emails. He: No you don't. I'm telling you that I'm not sending any. She: Until when? He: I dunno. Until it reaches some sort of critical mass. She: When's that? He: Maybe when enough strangers sign up. She: I want you to unsubscribe me. He: What? You want to be unsubscribed for not receiving my spam? She: I signed up, and I deserve those emails. If you're not going to send them, unsubscribe me. He: But what if I start sending them next week? She: I might reconsider then. He: You mean to tell me that it really bothers you to have your name in a database, even if I don't do anything with it? That's insane. What if it sat there for millennia, doing nothing? She: What if you bought something from me online, and I didn't send it to you...? He: ...But what if I forgot that I even bought it from you? She: I haven't forgotten. He: Forget. She: Goodnight. He: I could send it out tomorrow, but it would be a replica of the site now. I'm not going to put any additional time into special email content right now. She: Then at least send that. He: But that's nothing. It's just links to other people's sites. And then no one would visit my site. She: Oh, that old argument. He: Yeah.
Is it unsettling to anyone else that advertising companies seem to be the ones pushing the limits of the internet? I see examples of this every day, but the most obvious one is what Eyeblaster is doing. Check out this one (wait two seconds for the advert to appear -- it'll scare you). I didn't even know you could run a Flash .swf underneath the text like that. The first time I saw this, it annoyed the hell out of me. But I've gained an appreciation of its... ingenuity. Another progressive advertising group (did I just say "progressive advertising"?) to ponder is 2advanced, especially the Lasik Plus Surgery site they did.
Someone today pointed me to a new advertising concept that Playboy.com is doing, which has in some ways turned to the TV model of advertising (force them to watch the advert, or at least wait). When you go to the site, you get a full 30-second advert that you have to watch first, before getting to the, er, content. (The advert itself is interesting too: Hugh Hefner doing a voice-over for a Jack Daniels flash animation.)
And C|Net is also reporting about another boundary-pushing advertising development in which users who go to certain sites (say, 1-800-Flowers.com) get a popup advert for a competitor (say, FTD.com). Gator.com is the guilty company creating this.
Why is this unsettling? I guess because I expect that artists -- or at least engineers -- should be pushing the medium. Sure, there are some goodartsitesoutthere, but how many of them give you a sense of discovering new cognitive or social territory?
(I'd recommend ArtByte magazine as a good place to see where the frisson begins, however.)
A good portion of what I do every day is find ways in which the internet and television can merge. Sometimes, that takes on a unique hybrid; other times, it's an embarrassing shot-in-the-dark. But what we talk about constantly is finding ways to get the television to mention the website -- as often as possible. It's become a media mantra: "For more on this topic, go to our websites...."
That's why Barb (ahem) scores serious anti-synergy points for catching a moment of convergence anathema on tv tonight. Apparently, after George W. Bush finished his mea culpa over stem-cell research, Dan Rather on CBS said, "Obviously, this is a very complicated subject. It's the kind of subject that, frankly, radio and television have some difficulty with because it requires such depth into the complexities of it. So we can with, I think, impunity, recommend that if you're really interested in this, you'll want to..."
...and what to you think he said?
...c'mon, guess.
Bzzzt, wrong. He said, "You'll want to read in detail one of the better newspapers tomorrow."
If you work on the internet, you've seen this before: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." You'll see it used as filler text on mockup webpages, sometimes to display fonts. Why this text? I had no idea, but finally I did a search to find out. Here's a page with Cicero's original Latin text with English.
A sure sign of something, but I don't know what: Steve Albini was on yesterday's Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me (radio program outta Chicago that airs on NPR). Best quote: "I don't think anyone who has ever heard of me would ever hear it [this show]." Listen to it.
ibsbarb: oh boy. you'd better get out of here before anyone else tries to talk to you. Paraih: they can't, I've taped the door shut ibsbarb: good thinking. Paraih: and Pault pennied me in for good measure Paraih: did you know that I can fit in my file cabinet? ibsbarb: with or without the drawers? Paraih: no drawers... me and a web cam can fit ibsbarb: what you do in the privacy of your file cabinet is none of my business. Paraih: it's the business of the Internet community now ibsbarb: tell rex about it so he can put it in his blog.
A month ago on the eve of 
Weegee is just a vectored photo of Luigi from Mario Brothers placed in completely random situations.
So you want to start a topical blog that will be adored across the land, especially by the super-smart, media-hip blogosphere? I've got the perfect idea for a young journalist entrepreneur like youself: a blog all about Fake News. There's so much to feed on here, with everything from The Daily Show's crazy success to The Onion expanding the print edition across the country to whack characters like Ali G and Mo Rocca being taken seriously. In addition to everything that's happening in the Fake News Industry, your faux-media-blog could mix in all the quasi-news of the day being produced by Bill O'Reilly's screamfest and Al Gore's upcoming network. Add a dash of RatherGate and a pinch of PR Passing For News, and you could have yourself a hit. You could get ahead of the faker hegemony by posting the Top 10 Spoof-Ready Stories each day (probably snagged right off Fark, and appearing as Leno punchlines later that night -- especially that one about Kerry's fake tan). You could become the Romenesko of Fake News! This idea is dot-com bank. Nick Denton or MediaBistro would be knocking down your door within days. This is your moment of zen!
Today, I want to touch on a few topics related to game culture -- and how it intersects with movies, music, and digital communication. I know, that intro sentence sounds about as fun as an a capella Bjork album (
Caveats & background: I worked on NBCOlympics.com for nearly a year. However, the opinions below are mine and only mine. Even though I've had many conversations about the production, delivery, and business and of the games, what follows is not the opinion of NBC or IBS or the IOC or capitalism or athleticism or This Great Country or whatever else gets tossed into the ring every four years. Also, I have very little to say about what you saw on television. I'm talking internet today. I've already talked about it in other places (such as 
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