March 2009
21 posts
Steven Berlin Johnson at SXSW
The first wave of blogs were tech-focused, and then for whatever reason, they turned to politics next. And so Web 2.0-style political coverage has had a decade to mature into its current state.
What’s happened with technology and politics is happening elsewhere too, just on a different timetable. Sports, business, reviews of movies, books,...
Last week (w/e 14/03/09) Twitter.com was the 54th most visited website in the UK, up from 66th the week before. One consequence of Twitter rapid rise up the rankings is that the micro-blogging service has now overtaken most of the UK newspapers online. … Last week Twitter received more UK Internet visits than the homepages of the Guardian, Times, Sun and Telegraph. It also over took...
WatchOn The O’Reilly Factor, discussing whether the Yiddish word Schvartzer, which comedian Jackie Mason used to describe US President Barack Obama, is an offensive term:
O’Reilly, playing the voice of balance, pointed out that his dictionary referred to it as, “often disparaging and offensive.”
Goldberg’s answer? “Forgive my arrogance. The dictionary is written by some liberal...
Remember that gift of classic American DVDs that US President Obama gave to Prime Minister Gordon Brown? They are all Region 1 discs They are unplayable here.
Clay Shirky on Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on...
The most important quote from yesterday’s link “Anyone in the content business knows that their product is not newspapers, or broadcasts, or magazines, or even news, or even content, or even information. No! It is readership. Your product is readership, which you sell to advertisers.”
Michael Wolf
To date, the PI site looks terrible. If possible, it looks worse than the newspaper has looked. It looks like the newspaper looked in about 1965—hemmed in by lots of type. It’s disorganized, unfocused, and agonizingly bland. Still, this isn’t, theoretically, what the new product will be. What’s on the site now still reflects what’s in the paper. And there won’t be a...
House Passes Bill to Tax Bailout Bonuses →
chuckmore:
soupsoup:
The House voted 328-93 to approve a bill imposing 90% taxes on employee bonuses from firms bailed out by taxpayers. The bill would tax bonuses paid by firms that received more than $5 billion from the TARP. The Senate is working on its own plan to try to recoup bonuses.
Half of me thinks this is great news, the other half thinks we’ve officially gone off the deep end.
...
Craig Stoltz says that social media will cease to exist in 2009.
Back in my callow youth, in 1996, I was reporting on an “online travel” technology conference for the Washington Post. It focused on the breathtaking development that the Internet would soon let people actually purchase airline tickets and hotel visits online, without a travel agent or even a phone call!
But I vividly...
This is old news but I missed it back in October.
The Copyright Board of Canada has made their ruling on payments for Internet radio, and, while it is not that great, it could have been far worse. Socan, the body that collects payments for broadcasting or performing most music in Canada had asked the board for ridiculously high fees. In the absence of a ruling, however, Internet broadcasters...
These newspapers have terms & conditions that bar you from linking to them: The Sun Daily Mirror Daily Mail Independent Financial Times The Times On the other hand, The Guardian and Telegraph have a clue.
Newspapers still talking about free vs paid news online Amil: The rest of the world mutters “n00bz” under their breath. And another opinion: If you are still thinking about charging for online news in 2009, you are dead already
Clark Humphrey has coined the term microbrew journalism, to describe the concept that ‘like the beer biz, the news biz needs to decentralize … And it needs to expand from bland, singular, everything-to-everybody products toward more compelling tastes that consumers will actively seek out and loyally support.’
It’s an apt analogy. Ten or fifteen years ago, beer – and coffee – were the...
Vanity Fair has the wacko story on how this tiny country scooped up the world’s top brands without any money or any particular expertise:
A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad. They were then re-lending this money to themselves and their friends to buy assets—the banks, soccer teams, etc. Since...
I have heard of ‘referencing’ before, where a restaurant has a high priced item on the menu so people feel better about the lower priced item they invariably choose, but these techniques are new to me:
Complex menus with lots of sub-sections will generally sell more of those items that come first or last in any section
Simple menus with just one list of main courses tend to...
Finally, a instruction manual on How To Be A Scene Kid
5. Go to shows. Shows are important, and if there is a show playing within a ten mile radius of you, you’re there. Always know when your favourite bands are playing, and go to a show at least once a week. Bring your other scene friends, and become familiar with the artist as a person. Talk to your friends about how you met them, and be very...
It’s a Boy (17 min) from Adam O. Thomas on Vimeo.
The Narcos have put some of the their funniest pieces online. This is my favourite.
Sometime you can’t get to the East End and you need to buy it pre-packaged. Jellied Eels available at Waitrose.