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photoshop album unlockAugust 29, 2006
rivers
Dave Winer makes mobile RSS reading a little cooler with "rivers". You need to try it on a mobile screen, ideally with a good pagedown feature like the Blackberry has, for the full effect, but here's The NY Times, here's BBC News. I like it. And I'm no Winer acolyte, either. I think I've read scripting news about three times, though I have heard of little things like RSS and videoblogging that he's apparently helped popularize.
And sorry I'm a little late to this party -- I haven't been able to keep up with news the past few days, walking around with just my mobile phone.
update: added some comments about what I'd love to see over on buzzmachine.
Posted by tshey at 12:56 AM
August 28, 2006
it's valid--nevermind
Hadn't seen this before: the Web 2.0 Validator. For a little recursive fun, try putting in its own URL. OK, already tired of this.
Posted by tshey at 04:51 PM
ogle-izer
One of the CNN Money blogs calls out Robert Scoble's apparent obsession with Amanda Congdon. But is this really news? Exhibit A: maybe people have forgotten this Rocketboom video from Feb 23, where Scoble stripped naked to be on the show, shouting, "we'll do anything for you, Amanda!"
Unfortunately for me, I hadn't.
[I kid, Robert, I kid.]
Posted by tshey at 04:28 PM
economist: newspapers now an endangered species
There was a good piece in the Economist's paper edition on the future of newspapers last week, which, appropriately, is also available online. I hate to see great papers shutting down, but at the same time, I'm all for less paper trees being cut down. I'd happily pay for my Times online -- which I more or less do now, getting the paper edition on Sundays, which gets me a free Times Select subscription the rest of the week, with access to more of the archives than I ever need to use. That said, with the Times' operations costing something like $700 million a year, and their online site bringing in $66 million at last count, it's still a bit scary to wonder where the twain shall meet.
The article's title is "Who killed the newspaper?" -- and while Craigslist, offered in the article, is an oft-mentioned suspect, the same could be said of the New York Times itself, which has been aggressively moving into national markets long supporting their own great papers.
Posted by tshey at 12:39 PM
August 22, 2006
such a mean old man
(On a bit of summer break this week - meanwhile, as a follow-on to Robb's "rotten at the core, unsalveageable" comments last week, the above video is from the indefensibly terrible 1978 film Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which featured The Bee Gees, Peter Frampton, Steve Martin and George Burns at the lowest points of their careers, and possibly the entertainment business, to date. Here's a trailer for the film on YouTube.)
Posted by tshey at 12:00 AM
August 14, 2006
the next new orleans
Here's a rude awakening this morning... Salon today features an interview with Mike Tidwell, who in a 2003 book predicted the flooding of New Orleans. In his new book, "The Ravaging Tide," he calls the Bush Administration's plan for people to return to New Orleans an act of "mass homicide," and warns of serious danger in the coming years for many coastal cities, including New York, which he calls "a geographical time bomb when it comes to potential hurricane catastrophe." [link]
Posted by tshey at 10:38 AM
August 12, 2006
party @ rocketship tonight, august 18
Stop on by Saturday night at 8 pm and join creators:
DANIJEL ZEZELJ, BECKY CLOONAN, FRANK TERAN, MICHAEL AVON OEMING, LELAND PURVIS, ANDY MACDONALD, VASILIS LOLOS, NEAL SHAFFER, NATE BELLEGARDE, KRISTYN FERRETTI, IVAN BRANDON, RICK SPEARS, ROB G and more!
Posted by tshey at 01:07 PM
we are the web
we are the web, fighting for net neutrality: leslie hall, tron guy, peter pan, and friends.
Posted by tshey at 12:28 PM
google's napoleonic complex
In this week's Economist: The alliance against Google: What today's internet firms can learn from 19th-century history.
Posted by tshey at 11:51 AM
August 11, 2006
Jobs talks up Apple cell phone
This is just cruel, Steve. Give us the damn iPhone already!
In the meantime, I'm running MacBerry as a sad little ongoing joke and trying to avoid temptations to do that Helio-MySpace no-contract deal just to have an iPod-white Kickflip. Desperation is never attractive, anyway.
Posted by tshey at 01:39 PM
robb monn: quality is a niche market
After yesterday's post, got this great email from good friend robb monn (you probably want to download his brilliant, creative commons-licensed album, hello mr. ohler), who has some thoughts about where Hollywood's going. I love some of the things in here, especially, "Quality is still after all this time a niche market," which is such a smart observation that it just kills me. Here's what robb sent in full:
Do you remember how in Life (Conway's Game of Life, that is) how the seeds grow and grow and then go black at the core and thenthe dead core expands too, catching the ring of vitality at some point and leaving only a few flitting bits oscillating?My thinking is that the Empire is dying and it is dying right now when it is bigger than ever. As the core of the patterns die in Conway's Life the circumference of the whole life-explosion is still growing and until pretty late in the death of the colony it is larger, by pixel-count than ever even as it dying more and more quickly.
Hollywood is spending Spiderman II's money to make Spiderman III. It is what, three production cycles of total failure away from being broke? While there is more money than ever (or maybe not even that) if the apex of profits has been reached, or when it is reached, the fall will either be expected and very controlled or it will be profound and rapid, but either way I think that it will be a fall.
I don't feel like they know how to fix the system. The problem is the same as it has always been: they know how to promote just about anything that is unchallenging so that it stands a certain chance on the P&E, but they don't know how to make quality something that they can sell to consumers. Quality is still after all this time a niche market.... and seemingly it is more niche now than ever. The Third Man was a blockbuster. My grandparents (poor, 100% blue collar military family) dressed up in suit and party dress to go see each Hitchcock film when it came out. My other grandparents occasionally mentioned the 12 Angry Men with Peter Fonda that was produced for TV decades after it aired. While there has always been trash produced for TV and Hollywood that has done very well I think that there hasn't been a time previous to today when high quality programming (which is often relatively cheap when compared to The Rock or Triple X, say) is always considered to have at best an outside chance of getting made much less being financially successful. If Hitch were making films today I think his getting Strangers on a Train on theater screens would be considered by his peers as equivalent to his winning the lottery.
I think blockbuster, all-pro-all-biz Hollywood is a decadent mode that like all decadence is rotten at the core, unsalvageable.
Posted by tshey at 12:18 AM
August 10, 2006
adario strange: the nothing special
Here's an enjoyable article about the whole online video stampede from Adario Strange: The 'Nothing' Special. Not a lot of new info, but a different, slightly more arch perspective than the many business articles coming out daily, and choice passages like this one:
When everyone, everywhere, has their own video show, can anyone’s video really be considered something special anymore?As the rising tide of reality shows and navel-gazing weblogs have proven, there is [a] large market for recursive ephemera.
Of course, how I feel about it is simple. Personal, grassroots video is great and fun, and I watch it on the YouTube, too, and will probably watch more of it. I'll watch more reality TV, too, if it's more like the stuff, say, A&E is doing and less like the dreck on the big 4 networks. But I can't believe, looking at what sells DVDs, rather than drives ephemeral TV ratings, that we aren't taking for granted the really good stuff, the comedy, the dramas, the action series, that can only be created using more money and more people. Cameras will get cheaper, bandwidth will get broader, hard drives will get bigger -- but for the foreseeable future it will still take the collaborative efforts of groups of specialized, talented people (resources that only get more expensive) to capture with those cheaper cameras the things we most want to download, purchase, watch, and more and more, participate in. (update: Even the Rocketboom $25 a day myth is just that -- a myth -- as the real costs of each episode were and continue to be considerably more. Those three minutes of video each day took, on average, a team of at least four people at least four hours each to make. Writing, shooting, editing, post-processing, posting on the web, reading e-mails and story suggestions, coordinating talent, locations, and shoots. Not to mention bandwidth bills to serve a couple hundred thousand video files a day. It only helped that many of the people involved didn't immediately need to get paid.)
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is: demand for the artistry needed to make big entertainments is not lagging, though it may be shifting for now from the multiplex to netflix, from the networks to the net. And we'll still need people with money to put up enough to pay the artists in advance until a profit can be made. It's the middle men -- the ones that own the infrastructure and marketing machines -- that are in trouble.
Posted by tshey at 12:19 AM
August 08, 2006
AOL Search Data Shows Users Planning to commit Murder.
http://research.aol.com released a list of 20 million + searches by 500,000 AOL users. Contained in this list are social security numbers, credit cards and other personal information. There are some truly scary things in this database.
There are hundreds of searches from people looking to kill themselves and even more scary are searches from users that seem to be looking to commit murder.
Check out the search history for user 17556639, most recent search is at the bottom of the list.. Does this look like the search history of a user wanting to do something bad?
Posted by tshey at 12:40 AM
Morrison was right: Manatee takes Manhattan!
[As a public service, we here at the The Beat are pledged to keep readers up to date on real-life events that prove that writer Grant Morrison is in possession of secret knowledge which he is slowly revealing to the world at large by spotlighting weird things that we imagine would be really cool if they appeared in Grant Morrison comics. We call this feature Morrison was Right! .]
A manatee has been seen in the Hudson River near Manhattan.
The gentle behemoth, estimated at 10 feet long and close to 1,000 pounds, is far from home. Most manatees live in Florida and sightings even in Virginia are considered rare.
Watchers tracked this one last month as it swam north first near Delaware, then Maryland, then New Jersey. Saturday, it was seen at 23rd Street in Manhattan, then later at 125th Street in Harlem.
Posted by tshey at 12:02 AM
August 07, 2006
Benkler on Calacanis
From Nicholas Garr's blog: Yochai Benkler on Calacanis's wallet.
Posted by tshey at 10:14 AM
August 06, 2006
news item: youtube's like any other place on the internet
From ABC News: an Al Gore satire supposedly posted by an amateur filmmaker on YouTube was actually created and posted by a GOP-affiliated PR firm.
At first blush, "An Inconvenient Spoof" seemed like a scrappy little homemade film poking fun at Gore and his anti-global warming crusade.In the movie, Gore is seen boring an army of penguins with his lecture and blaming global warming for everything, including Lindsay Lohan's thinness.
But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted this film — listed on YouTube as a 29-year-old — they found the movie didn't come from an amateur working out of his basement.
The film actually came from a slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client.
This must some kind of basic recursive loop we're stuck in with every new form of media.
10 PRINT "New media allows people to lie in slightly new ways"
20 PRINT "other media reveals, shockingly, that people are using the new media to lie"
30 PRINT "people learn, or fail to learn, to look critically at the new media, as, after all, it is created by people, who tend to lie"
40 PRINT "people invent new media"
50 GOTO 10
Posted by tshey at 01:39 PM