Living next to a prop house, every once in a while you glance over and do a spit-take. They had just chucked what looked like a limp woman’s body out of the back of a semi.
Wondering if the frustrated Evil Elves in the fabrication shop had finally snapped and gone Jeffrey Dahmer, I cautiously wandered [...] [...more]
Living next to a prop house, every once in a while you glance over and do a spit-take. They had just chucked what looked like a limp woman’s body out of the back of a semi.
Wondering if the frustrated Evil Elves in the fabrication shop had finally snapped and gone Jeffrey Dahmer, I cautiously wandered over to see what the hell was going on.
This thing is a lot heavier than you would think. It's pretty much the same weight as a real human. Which is more than a little creepy.
Turns out that some of the more enthusiastic sword-swinging extras on the set of “Thor” accidentally connected with some of the helpless “peasants” they were wading through. The prop guys said that they had already charged the production company $1900 for damaging this dummy. The damn things are meant to stand up to being thrown off buildings, overpasses, crashed in cars, etc.
I don’t know what kind of maniac was swinging the aircraft-grade aluminum “Hero Swords” the Evil Elves have come up with (and no, I can’t show them to you – the designs are super-cool, but the Marvel guys would impale me for leaking them to the Chinese toymakers, who are trying to gear up to flood the market with knock-offs of the Christmas tie-in toys), but they apparently work quite well.
We briefly considered taking the dummy into our house and giving it the poor woman (it is a woman – note the wasp waist) a decent home. But it was soaking wet. And it stunk.
Still, she had served her purpose well.
Ashes to ashes, dummy to dumpster.
She was hurled into the dumpster will full military honors.
The New Normal: Denial
Since the first utterance of the phrase “green shoots,” there have been attempts to gaze into the crystal ball, to predict what things are going to be like once we get out of the recession/depression-lite.
The most recent is a long Newsweek piece on how the psychological effects of being a young [...] [...more]
The New Normal: Denial
Since the first utterance of the phrase “green shoots,” there have been attempts to gaze into the crystal ball, to predict what things are going to be like once we get out of the recession/depression-lite.
On behalf of all us Upper Midwestern kids who came of age during the early 80s, when Reaganomics was strangling the industrial sector to death, and open war was being made upon union jobs that paid livable wages, may I say the following:
No duh, Sherlock.
The behavior changes that are listed: increased saving, cynicism about institutions, depression and alienation from communities — hey, didn’t I useta know you guys by the moniker Generation X?
The Economist has a slightly more intellectual and facts-based analysis, as you might expect. Back in October, they devoted an issue to analyzing whether it’s safe to come out of the bomb shelters yet. Basically, they still rely on the predictable free-market capitalist ideas of the government handing huge sums of cash over to supposedly wise business leaders, who will then generously use said piles o’ cash to create jobs and tax revenues.
Cash-strapped companies are skimping on research and development. Emerging economies are having to rethink their reliance on exports for growth. Both rich and poor governments will be tempted to intervene. They should avoid cosseting specific industries with subsidies or protection. Allowing market signals to work will do more to boost productivity than cack-handed industrial policy.
This rather flies in the face of the behaviors (I almost stuck the veddy British “u” into that last word) of the last 20 years or so, where the whole “Greed is Good” and “Masters of the Universe” memes combined to raise a generation of bankers & industrialists who felt that no luxury was too absurd. $30,000 shower curtains? Sure, hang ‘em up! Blowing $400 million of shareholder money to fund your lavish lifestyle? Why not. Running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme that impoverishes just about every decent charity in the Western Hemisphere? Done deal.
So forgive me if I don’t buy into the notion that the same profligate, arrogant pricks that got us into this mess, and who are even now right back at their ugly, reckless behavior — are suddenly going to transform themselves into righteous, community-minded slow&steady engines of economic growth.
Barrons jumped the gun last June, with an article that tried to impose some kind of formula on what a recovery is going to look like. They figured that the biggest threats were higher oil prices, driven by a showdown between Israel and Iran over nukes (still a strong contender), and too much consumer saving driving down demand (mixed on that one). But here’s the nut graf:
What troubles me the most is that people lost faith in things that they really should believe in. This was an unprecedented financial crisis, but it has pretty much calmed down, and now we have a very severe but precedented recession. What disturbs me is the phrase, “It is different this time.”
And there we come to it.
All this analysis, to me, is an outgrowth from our desperate need to believe that what we did in the last 10 years was just a momentary blip, that things are going to go back to some sense of normalcy some time soon. Unfortunately, the things that I saw when I was traveling all over the world in 2006-8, working with some very high level bankers, proved to me that there was, indeed, something different this time around.
This wasn’t just the Thai monetary meltdown of 1997, or the oil price spikes of the 70s.
The real-estate madness was global. Everywhere I went, I heard the same thing: “You think house prices are crazy where you are. Well, HERE they’re REALLY out of whack!” Mexico. Chile. Argentina. Russia. Netherlands. Spain. England.
Everywhere I went, the same thing.
I am coming to believe that the only normalcy that we are going to have (for as long as we are able to keep our petroleum-based house of cards aloft) is that there is going to be constant chaos and upheaval. The big, buried financial instrument of Mass Destruction that Po Bronson so prophetically wrote about a decade ago in “Bombardiers” are going to keep going off, like the deep-buried IEDs that keep killing US soldiers in Afghanistan.
Commercial real-estate. Peak oil. Lack of investment in electrical or transportation infrastructure. Unwillingness to deal with absurd public employee pensions. An unbreakable military-industrial complex that insists on wasting hundreds of billions on weapons systems we don’t need and will never use.
If we are very, very lucky, what this means is that we are finally going to deal with all these problems. Because there simply is no alternative.
Music purists who despise the pre-packaged “X-Factor” (British version of “American Idol”) songs always hitting #1 on the charts are buying Rage Against the Machine’s incendiary “Killing in the Name” as a form of protest
I’ve been wondering WTF is going on with Killing in the Name – a track that introduced me to Rage Against [...] [...more]
Music purists who despise the pre-packaged “X-Factor” (British version of “American Idol”) songs always hitting #1 on the charts are buying Rage Against the Machine’s incendiary “Killing in the Name” as a form of protest
I’ve been wondering WTF is going on with Killing in the Name – a track that introduced me to Rage Against the Machine, and which I still use to get the adrenaline flowing. It’s been showing up in Twitter trends for the last week or so, which is unusual for a 15-year old minor hit by a band that no longer even exists. I just figured that the protesters in Denmark were using it for their soundtrack – even though it’s aimed more at the LAPD police culture that got exposed in the wake of the Rodney King beating.
It started with Alterna-punks hating on the type of syrupy (treacly?) disposable pop that gets rammed down our throats by these music contest shows
To try to prevent the winner of “X-Factor” from dominating the charts, they’ve started buying multiple copies of RATM’s “Killing in the Name” – a song that is pretty much as anti-pop as you can get. A scream of pure fury against The Establishment. Perfect.
Buying Killing in the Name online is actually somewhat convenient, because you can buy as many copies as you like electronically, and it only costs .69euro (99cents)
But what this really boils down to is paying 99 cents to vote against something that millions of other people are voting for
FreakyTrigger sums it up thusly:
Plenty of people have pointed out that these are good times indeed for Sony, who make money off both tracks. But it’s also a fascinating case study for marketers, because it pits two of the big “social media marketing” ideas of the late 00s up against one another. On the one hand the crafted, immersive, interactive experience – on the other the power of the flashmob and the viral. Who’s gonna win?
Is there a business model for media here? Probably somewhere – in some kind of controversy, if you give people a frictionless way to express their anger and resentment, and make the price barrier low enough, you could hit on something. Check out MoveOn.org raising $1 million so far against Joe Lieberman, ever since he started threatening to filibuster any kind of decent health care reform.
I had thought that Madonna and Michael Jackson were about as sophisticated as you could get when it came to figuring out ways to build up a juicy public image, and then squeeze it until rivers of cash started running out. Not so. Lady GaGa has rightly recognized that selling CDs if for chumps; anyone can pirate them, and pretty much does. [...more]
Her “Bad Romance” music video features prominent product placement for stuff she designs & sells – and has garnered 38 million views.
The song itself is kinda beside the point – it’s bubblegum synth-disco-pop, about as bland and processed as the stuff the taxi drivers in Moscow used to subject me to on the way back & forth from my gig there. Which may be why it’s getting so many views – this is the kind of stuff that works internationally, since the thumping beat and lyric structure make it sound pretty much interchangeable with everything else on the radio.
Can't wait until she starts marketing the exploding bustier shown here; Madonna's Wannabees all wore their undies over their shirts. Wonder if GaGaEttes are going to be lighting their smokes off their flaming boobs.
But the real action here is in the video to the song. Blew my mind. Didn’t think that people had budgets like this anymore. Costumes that would make Gaultier sick with envy — white latex with “Where the Wild Things Are” shiny plastic crowns, some kinda homage to LeeLoo’s orange strappy outfit in The Fifth Element and a Eastern European mobster/white sex-slave buyer with a steampunk-ish articulated brass chin. Looked to my eye like about a week in production, probably about $500K in total costs of models, locations, crews, lighting, post-production.
The plot seems to be that Lady GaGa wakes from her sleep the way normal people do – by sticking her hand out of a gleaming white Tylenol-shaped coffin – getting forced to drink high-end vodka and the gyrate for & be sold to a bunch of strange pervy dudes.I half expected to see Liam Neeson kicking someone’s ass in the backdrop and telling her, “Here’s the scary part. You’re going to be taken…”
Nobody does these kinds of elaborate music videos anymore, because there is no way to recoup that kinda cash from the moribund music industry.- at least, not until now.As Dan Neil points out in the LA Times
the “Bad Romance” video, which features placements for no less than 10 products: a black iPod; Philippe Starck Parrot wireless speakers; Nemiroff vodka; Gaga-designed Heartbeats earphones (via Dr. Dre); Carrera sunglasses; Nintendo Wii handsets; Hewlett-Packard Envy computers; a Burberry coat; those crazy, hobbling Alexander McQueen hyper-heels; and enough La Perla lingerie to choke an ox.
This isn’t a music video so much as the QVC Channel you can dance to.
I had thought that Madonna and Michael Jackson were about as sophisticated as you could get when it came to figuring out ways to build up a juicy public image, and then squeeze it until rivers of cash started running out. Not so. Lady GaGa has rightly recognized that selling CDs if for chumps; anyone can pirate them, and pretty much does.
No, you need to sell things that people can’t copy – or at least, if they do, it kinda defeats the purpose. So Lady GaGa’s come up with the list of high-end commercial goods to do “Hero Shots” of in the video and obviously done revenue deals with them.
As a business model, I have to say hats off to the Lady. She’s adapted to the draining of value from the content (i.e. nobody actually buys music anymore – at least, not like they used to), and migrated over to where the money still lies.
When advertising no longer works, when information is a commodity in which we all drown for free, then the only things that are left that have any value are physical objects that we can wear, eat, drive or plug in, as well as what cultural anthropologists call “fetish objects” that bestow special status because they signify that we hae enough disposable income so as to be able to waste a couple grand on some gaudy sunglasses.
I’m not sure if this is the way that all news & entertainment is going to have to go in the future. All of it sponsored, with big shout-outs to the guys footing the bills worked into the info-stream every 10 seconds or so. I do know that if this works, we’re going to see a lot more of these “branded videos” online.
Leaf Boat, originally uploaded by Wordyeti.
The heavy rainstorms of this past weekend were much-needed, and therefore much-welcomed in Los Angeles.
The anticipated apocalyptic mudslides in the fire-ravaged areas never materialized, but that hasn’t stopped the local TV news crews from speculating on how horrible the damage would have been. If only Mother Nature had cooperated. [...] [...more]
The heavy rainstorms of this past weekend were much-needed, and therefore much-welcomed in Los Angeles.
The anticipated apocalyptic mudslides in the fire-ravaged areas never materialized, but that hasn’t stopped the local TV news crews from speculating on how horrible the damage would have been. If only Mother Nature had cooperated. Which it still might. So stay tuned.
Any little touch of fall-like weather always makes me somewhat homesick for the Upper Midwest in October. Even though it’s December in Los Angeles, and that means that the weather there is sub-Siberian.
The note sent out by Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg today showed why there is such a need for privacy control & reform on Facebook & other social networking sites.
Man, this was a real eye-opener for me. Like 350 million other users, I got the notice that Zuckerberg had sent out a mass message to [...] [...more]
Man, this was a real eye-opener for me. Like 350 million other users, I got the notice that Zuckerberg had sent out a mass message to us all, telling us of the reforms that Facebook is making to its service. Wondering if there was anything other than the removal of the long-obsolete regional groups (which had been leaked as a trial balloon weeks ago), I clicked through and read the missive.
Down at the bottom, I saw that there were about 32,000 comments. I figured that there must be some kind of flame war – predictable whenever anyone associated with Facebook changes anything. Or doesn’t change anything. Or participates. Or fails to participate.
But instead I found the comment thread completely overrun with spam.
[NB: The photo uploader for this blog is down, due to Dreamhost moving all our web properties to a new server. But go ahead and click through, and you'll see an amazing profusion of come-ons for free iPods, Macbooks, yada yada.]
It surprised me that even a message from Facebook’s founder is vulnerable to such crude spam. You’d think that Facebook would have monitors on duty to weed out the spammers.
This also calls into question the much-touted “350 million user” benchmark that Facebook announced this week. If there are this many brazen spammers trying to piggyback oin Zuckerberg’s message, how many other user accounts are just there to try to hock us all into clicking through onto some exploit site to turn our computers into part of a pr0n and v1@gr@ bot-net?
I think that the elimination of the regional groups is a step in the right direction. But now that so many of us are spending so much time on Facebook & other social networking sites, it is even more imperative that these sites start policing their userbase.
So this week, we’ve got a rising level of chatter about Murdoch’s media properties banning Google links in favor of getting paid by Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the BBC throws a wrench into paid content in England (and perhaps everywhere else), the idea of sprinkling porn onto newspaper websites to see what happens is floated, and what orcs and dwarves can teach newspapers. [...more]
In the spirit of the season, I hereby give thanks that there is such an open and vivid discussion about the core issue of monetizing online content. If we’d had this kind of focus on actually taking the utopian dreams of “all content, everywhere, all the time” and making it work back when I was in my Web 1.0/dot-bomb startup days, we might not have cratered so spectacularly.
So this week, we’ve got a rising level of chatter about Murdoch’s media properties banning Google links in favor of getting paid by Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the BBC throws a wrench into paid content in England (and perhaps everywhere else), the idea of sprinkling porn onto newspaper websites to see what happens is floated, and what orcs and dwarves can teach newspapers.
Murdoch’s bluffing about Google to try to extract money from Microsoft’s deep pockets
This somewhat NSFW (lots of cussing) take on Murdoch is by someone familiar with the way that Murdoch papers like The Sun always seem to pick the winner of an electoral campaign. Not because they’re so influential that the person they anoint goes on to win – but because Murdoch is canny at figuring out who the top dog in any fight is, and busies himself sucking up to them as soon as possible to maximize his profits. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/28/rupert-murdoch-google-nsfw/
By convincing Bing that there’s a chance he might drop Google – for the right price – Murdoch suddenly has a new partner falling over itself to give him prominence in their search results, on his terms. Sure enough, Microsoft has just agreed to help fund the next-generation search crawling protocol, ACAP, which gives content owners like News Corp more control over how their news is indexed.
(snip) And that’s where we see Murdoch’s real genius: he has managed to use his illusion of influence to get all of these benefits without having to commit himself to anything, or expose himself in any way. There is no way in hell that News Corp content will vanish from Google and yet with every headline asking whether Google should be worried or suggesting that other companies might follow Murdoch’s lead, his image as a kingmaker is strengthened.
McClatchy starts sending out notices, but still claims paywalls are not imminent
Talk about mixed signals. The terms of services for its websites are all being changed, but that change doesn’t actually mean anything is changing. Except, of course, if it does. If they eventually decided to charge for content, they will clearly notify the readers, but in the meantime, please make coming to the site a habit and would it kill ya to click on the ads now & again? http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004041770
A Perpetual Recession for Newspapers
Rick Edmonds, who writes The Biz Blog for Poynter, says that news organizations have lost $1.6 billion that was used to cover news, and that even when the economy recovers, newspapers won’t: http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/18/newspapers-advertising-rick-edmonds-poynter-business-media-edmonds.html So maybe we should all just learn from the porn industry – or maybe even start putting porn on our sites, to see if maybe that will get people to pay for our content.
The building of micropayment systems, like the one being developed by Steve Brill, is a hotly debated issue. Wouldn’t it be helpful for this kind of system to be established first with Web content that really drives users–say, pornography?
Sure, but that’s not an option for newspapers. There have been experiments with these kinds of systems in Denmark, where several companies tried it at the same time. The problem was that they couldn’t answer peoples’ security concerns. The experiments turned out to be a dud.
“Knock yourselves out,” Google yawns.
The head of newspaper industry bête noir Google News says in an interview that publishers are free to do whatever they want with their content. Google is apparently willing to work with publishers to do whatever the publishers demand with their content – list it, ignore it, work with it to implement a paywall, whatever. http://searchengineland.com/josh-cohen-of-google-news-on-paywalls-partnerships-working-with-publishers-29881 The easy confidence that is displayed here is the result of Google’s near-monopoly position in the market
Removing News Would Have Negligible Effect on Google
Financially, then, Google doesn’t depend on the publishers’ content. “In comparison, if you detracted Wikipedia from the results, 13 percent of the number-one results would be gone,” said Christoph Burseg, the CEO of TRG, the research company that ran the survey.
BBC: We won’t charge for online news
Now this has got to be raising Mr. Murdoch’s blood pressure a bit. Online news paywalls only work when the competition plays along too (see the case study I did on the disastrous experiment of El Tiempo in Spain, & how they lost their market share to a formerly laughable upstart).
However, Lyons also questioned the future of content created for online that is not directly related to specific BBC programmes, asking, “where should the boundary be drawn” between this and “the online expression or extension of BBC programming”?
Wall St. Journal’s price to go Bing-only: $15 million
There’s been an increasing amout of space devoted to what Murdoch is going to do to start moving all his content behind paywalls, and away from the hated Google “parasites.” Business Insider backwards-engineers the numbers that de-listing from Google would cost the WSJ, and comes up with $10-15 mill. http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-should-pay-up-for-exclusive-access-to-the-journal-2009-11
If Microsoft really wanted to induce Murdoch to ditch Google, it would therefore only cost $10 – $15 million. Maybe more if Murdoch wanted a premium. Considering Steve Ballmer said he’d spend $5.5 billion to $11 billion over the next five years on Bing, this is nothing.
More on the Murdoch-Google fight – seems the Denver Post and Dallas Morning News may follow in his footsteps
“Not a cat’s chance in hell” of successfully charging for online content
The CEO of the Future Publishing Group said that there is no hope for paywalls for general news because of the ubiquity of free models, particularly in the UK market. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/26/charging-mainstream-news-future-chief However, Future are experimenting with specialized and niche content to see what the market will bear.
The group has taken a bullish approach to pricing its print magazine titles, with an average cover price of £5, up from £4.70 this time last year.
She cited a promotion of the new album from former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, which is being exclusively attached to a special edition of Classic Rock magazine for £14.99.
Americans less willing to pay for online news
The New York Times finds that less than half the people in the U.S. are willing to pay for online news, and even at that, they will only shell out $3. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/media/16paywall.html?_r=2&ref=media Apparently, there’s some kind of fundamental disconnect going on at the NY Times, between top management hell-bent on charging for content, and the weary soldiers in the trenches, protesting that this will not work, has not worked, will never work, and producing article after article that seemingly is not read by their own bosses.
“Consumer willingness and intent to pay is related to the availability of a rich amount of free content,” said John Rose, a senior partner and head of the group’s global media practice. “There is more, better, richer free in the United States than anywhere else.”
If readers are willing to pay – they prefer micropayments and only pennies
James Myring, Head of Media at Continental Research says “The amounts may sound small, but it is better to get a lot of people making small one off payments, than virtually no-one paying a higher subscription. For a comparison, think of the mobile industry, profiting from lots of small payments for text messages.
London Times Editor says online paywalls are “fight of our lives”
Harding said the Times wanted to improve its relationship with its loyal customers through home delivery and through its recently launched Times+ membership programme.
He said: “Historically, newspapers have treated their best customers worst and their worst customers best.
“We give the paper away to people who could not care less and we pay little or no attention to people who love it and read it every day.”
What newspapers can learn from orcs and dwarves
This is actually something that I’ve felt for the last year or so – if we’re going to try to get young people to try & buy, then we’re going to have to emulate the things that they are already comfortable doing so with. http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-the-wow-paywall-what-newspapers-can-learn-from-orcs-and-dwarves/#comment_63034 Basically, the World of Warcraft guys are minting about a billion a year from online content – and there are a bunch of key points to their service that newspapers should study, if they actually want to make money, as opposed to just slamming down paywalls and pretending that the rest of the world will care (or even notice).
News as gaming: Could newspapers similarly harness the human need for interaction and stimulation and sell not just boring text news but access to a shared experience? Sure, there’s MySun, MyTelegraph and “tell us what you think in the comments below”, but that’s a marketing ploy to drive page impressions and encourage more content consumption. The lesson from gaming is that people won’t pay for content they can’t help shape themselves—or project their own personal narrative onto.
Online KP.org password sign-up confuses me with other people with the same name, asks for data on people I haven’t seen for years.
Against the advice of almost everyone I know, I recently switched from Anthem to Kaiser Permanente for our corporate health policy. I know that it’s not an especially good time to be [...] [...more]
Online KP.org password sign-up confuses me with other people with the same name, asks for data on people I haven’t seen for years.
Against the advice of almost everyone I know, I recently switched from Anthem to Kaiser Permanente for our corporate health policy. I know that it’s not an especially good time to be in the health insurance business, as all their spare profits being converted into fat wads of anonymous cash, being accidentally left under Washington, D.C. restaurant tables that congressmen just happen to be eating at … but I still buy into the conventional wisdom that “you gotta have health insurance.”
One of the features of Kaiser that induced me to make the switch was their supposed web-friendly way of managing your own health care records and doctor appointments. Well, that and the fact that they are (for California, at least) dirt-cheap. Anyway, since we here at Artesian Media like to think of ourselves as constantly connected internet smartypants, I figured Kaiser’s high-tech approach might actually be a better fit for our peripatetic lifestyle, plus I was more than a little curious to see what insurance companies consider to be “State of the Art web tools.”
I was impressed by the persistence of the doctors at Kaiser in pushing patients to use all these new web tools that have apparently been developed at great expense. This despite the fact that, as one worker at the big Kaiser mothership on Venice told me, “Without South-Central L.A., this place wouldn’t exist. Since ‘Killer King’ went down, we are the place to go if you are poor and live in Da Hood.”
Anyway – I decided to try to sign up at the KP.org site. I entered all my private information (the insurance company really seems to want to be able to figure out every single thing that could help them track you down should you welsh on a bill, but that’s understandable – if unsettling), and then clicked to get my password that would allow me to access my own medical records.
But before I could do that, I had to pass one final gantlet: a series of questions that KP.org says are “accumulated by an outside contractor, and that I should know the answers to.” A kind of “This is Your Life, David LaFontaine.”
Despite the Orwellian/Kafkaesque overtones, I figured that this was going to be a cinch of a test to pass. After all, if an outside contractor was culling information from the internet to ask me questions about myself, well, how hard could this be? I checked over my shoulder to make sure that nobody was looking, in case there were any queries prompted by my accidental (*cough cough*) clicking on certain websites during my wide-ranging research.
Unfortunately, this process shows how flawed it is to attempts to determine identity via robotic online spiders. The first question out of the gate showed me how much trouble I was in – it asked me which institution I had a connection with. Unfortunately, each one of these institutions was based in and around Boston, a city in which I have never lived, but where another David LaFontaine is quite active. The next question had to do with where my ex-wife was currently living – listing her under a name that she had never (to my knowledge) used.
Once again, a question that has nothing to do with any information that is relevant in my life. I supposed I could have Googled this, but I only had 75 seconds to answer each one of these questions.
The next screen that came up basically said: FAIL.
I have now sunk lower than Sarah Palin. I flunked a quiz about my own life.
KP.org insisted that there were no “make-up” exams, and that any kind of password would have to be delivered through snailmail. Which, considering that my issues of The Economist are arriving torn to shreds, checks sent to our vendors are getting pilfered, and we regularly receive mail addressed to people living in completely different cities — is not a comforting thought.
So before we all jump on the bandwagon of “cost savings through modernizing medical records,” by all means do some testing of what exactly it is that we’re migrating towards. If I’ve already entered enough personal information to make it dead easy for any script kiddie to steal my identity and go on a spending spree — why is it that this multimillion dollar site can’t even figure out which David LaFontaine I am, and ask questions that are relevant to me? And BTW – David LaFontaine is not exactly a common name, or one where I run into a lot of confusion. It’s pretty unique.
The overriding theme these days seems to be borrowed from the debate over the war in Afghanistan: dithering. Waffling. Hemming and hawing.
The newspaper industry is shifting from foot to foot, licking its lips, and generally acting like a 14-year-old boy at his first school dance, afraid to take the Big Leap. [...more]
Due to some intense consulting projects, multimedia presentations at national conferences, and BizDev meetings with like-minded New Media entrepreneurs, there has been quite a gap in my updates on the whole “Will they or won’t they” kerfuffle over paid content. This should get us up to about last Friday; tomorrow, I will post this week’s follies – and there have been a lot of them.
The overriding theme these days seems to be borrowed from the debate over the war in Afghanistan: dithering. Waffling. Hemming and hawing.
The newspaper industry is shifting from foot to foot, licking its lips, and generally acting like a 14-year-old boy at his first school dance, afraid to take the Big Leap.
This is the screen that pops up on Newsday.com, bugging you to subscribe.
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
Technorati Profile
RT @InputCWC: @centroknightut 1ra Presidenta de Costa Rica aceptó triunfo primer a medio digital, antes de dar discurso triunfal http:// ... 6 hours ago
I guess this is the end of all the "hell froze over-Saints won the Super Bowl" jokes 20 hours ago
FYI: zettabyte = 250 billion DVDs worth of IP traffic; current web carries 2/3 of that. 91% will be consumer video w/in 5 years. 2010/02/06
New word for the day: yottabyte = 250 trillion DVDs of info. Also: global IP traffic in 40 years. Most of it probably ads for V1@gr@, sadly. 2010/02/06
For my designer/techno-geek brethren: eye-candy wallpaper for dual-monitor setups http://bit.ly/DYpzF 2010/02/06
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