Tag: media

Scoble Spam

Why do you want to be connected to people you don’t know and alert them to stuff you’re doing? And then it hit me! He’s building his own broadcast network.

2007-08-10:

I can only guess at why FB has decided to ignore my wishes and fill my news feed with content I’ve explicitly rejected. Perhaps their algorithms think he is my most important “friend” because he has 1000s of people in his network? Perhaps they think his content will generate the most click throughs since they are usually videos? Either way, this is one instance where Facebook has failed to put the user in control.

Where would Jesus queue?

AT&T’s rivals, Verizon and Sprint, issued “talking points” to their salespeople, with helpful hints for impugning the iPhone’s divinity. They lost customers anyway. Executives at Motorola and other phonemakers were spotted in various stages of shock and awe at the cultural impact that the launch of a handset—a handset!—could have. Honchos in all sorts of industries have long studied keynote speeches by Steve Jobs, Apple’s boss, for ways to cast spells on audiences; now they also need to work out how he outsourced his product marketing to an entire nation of volunteers.

awes. channeling boing boing, calling it the jesusphone that it is.

Predictive vandalism

A Wikipedia vandal inadvertently set off a nationwide conspiracy craze when he edited the entry for Chris Benoit, a pro wrestler who murdered his family. The anonymous vandal coincidentally edited Benoit’s entry to say that Benoit had murdered his family several hours before the news became public, sparking speculation that the murder had been some kind of setup. Now the vandal has confessed, saying that he’d put the murder accusation in as an unfortunately timed joke

wikipedia is definitely mainstream now

No TV

Area resident Jonathan Green does not own a television, a fact he repeatedly points out to friends, family, and coworkers–as well as to his mailman, neighborhood convenience-store clerks, and the man who cleans the hallways in his apartment building.

heh, that could be me

Will they boycott reality?

The National Union of Journalists in the UK is planning a Europe-wide day of protest against cuts in journalism. One wonders whom they’ll picket: the internet? the economy? their readers? reality? Whom can they boycott this time (at least this isn’t Israel’s fault; that was the NUJ’s last grand political act). Protesting is so empty, so unproductive, ultimately so silly.

journalist union has no better idea than a protest. old think: stage a protest. new think: get busy solving the problem.

Televangelism

Watch Current.tv. On cable television or online. It’s like what The Daily Show would be if it were a 24-hour network and Jon Stewart didn’t always have to be funny. It’s like YouTube without the 99% crap. It’s like watching a Buddha Bar DJ surf the Web. It’s like MTV 20 years ago, but with more substance. I am a highly targeted TV watcher – I focus on movies and specific shows like Heroes, Lost, Frontline/World, and The Daily Show. I have never watched a channel as an entity, keeping it on to see what comes next. Until Current. It draws from the best, not the worst, qualities of our present (avoided the use of “current” there, yup) media era, and I can’t stop watching.

dream job? TV is very much dead to me, but this does sound intriguing.

What A Change in 35 Years

David Schonauer of American Photo has uncovered a rather stunning coincidence, the picture that’s been making the rounds of P.H. being hauled back to jail was taken by none other than Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut. Nick Ut, as you remember from Photo History 101, was the photographer who took one of the iconic pictures of the Vietnam war, the picture of Kim Phuc running naked down a country lane after suffering serious napalm burns. Ut’s photograph was arguably the apex of the notion of “The Concerned Photographer,” Cornell Capa’s phrase for the idea that photographs of injustices and atrocities could help correct the situations that led to them. And get this: the 2 pictures were taken exactly 35 years apart, to the day. Quite a coincidence.

ah the irony