Sips from the Firehose
A blog that seeks to filter the internet into a refreshing, easily-gulped beverage
Jan 28
Posted: under Blogging, Blogs, Community, new media, Online Video, Viral Fame.
This is the Dark Side of internet fame. You can see it in the message boards, in the comments section on any YouTube video that reaches a certain level of popularity.
Back in 1989, one of the very first celebrity stories I had to cover in Los Angeles, remains one of the saddest & most disturbing stories. The murder of Rebecca Shaeffer, a lovely young actress by obsessed stalker Robert Bardo. I can see some clear parallels between that case, and the way that online attacks are escalating into offline violence. [...more]
I can’t decide if this is one of those “sign of the deteriorating times” type stories, wherein I get to pontificate about how the free-for-all, no insult too depraved, “culture” of the internet has led to yet another sad incident …
…or if it’s a function of the pressures being put on start-ups by the generally shitty global economy, which is starting to incite people into truly depraved acts of violence…
But either way, it was shocking & sad to read that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington announced today that he has been the victim of death threats, and now this:
Yesterday as I was leaving the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany someone walked up to me and quite deliberately spat in my face. Before I even understood what was happening, he veered off into the crowd, just another dark head in a dark suit. People around me stared, then looked away and continued their conversation.
(snip)
Something very few people know: last year over the summer an off balance individual threatened to kill me and my family … Seeing my parents fear for their lives and not understand how or why their son was in this position changed me, made me a much less forgiving person in general.
Around the blogosphere, this has shocked and appalled other bloggers, some of whom might now (justifiably) wonder if a post of theirs might inspire some violent borderline personality into staking out their house.
It starts small. Small, but nasty, nonetheless.
Meanwhile, in today’s LA Times, this article about the prevalence of what has come to be known as “snark” in online culture, in a review of a book by the same name by New Yorker film critic David Denby. His take on why this mode of communication (otherwise known as GD&R – for “Grin, Duck and Run”) has become so prevalent:
The Internet is the greatest revolution in democratic practice since popular suffrage. Everyone knows that, and I am just as dependent onthe Internet as anyone else. In the wake of a democratic revolution like that, there’s both an enormous explosion of information and expression, much of it useful or fun, and also an explosion of pent-up rage, social anguish, resentment, bilious, other-annihilating nastiness, prejudice and all the rest of the dark side. If that stuff is destroying conversation threads, screwing up people’s…
…reputations, spreading around unchecked rumor or just snark, it’s worth pointing to it and saying, “Stop lousing up my revolution.” The point of the book is to protect the best kind of humor by criticizing the worst.
…of course, the Times itself has been guilty of – well, shall we say – vivid off-the-cuff commentary itself.
Still, the larger point here is one that is important. In all my stops as a New Media consultant in the last few years, the one issue that animates the local reporters/editors the most is the attacks on them by anonymous internet trolls.
Arrington says that:
On any given day, when I care to look, dozens of highly negative comments are made about me, TechCrunch or one of our employees in our
comments, on Twitter, or on blogs or other sites. Some of these are appropriately critical comments on things we can be doing better. But
the majority of comments are among the more horrible things I can imagine a human being say.
Actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by an obsessed fan who tracked her down, showed up at her doorstep, and shot her in the heart.
Even a cursory search confirms that Arrington takes his shots. This is the Dark Side of internet fame. You can see it in the message boards, in the comments section on any YouTube video that reaches a certain level of popularity.
Back in 1989, one of the very first celebrity stories I had to cover in Los Angeles, remains one of the saddest & most disturbing stories. The murder of Rebecca Shaeffer, a lovely young actress by obsessed stalker Robert Bardo. I can see some clear parallels between that case, and the way that online attacks are escalating into offline violence.
This was a murder that really changed things in Los Angeles; the DMV rules were changed so that you could no longer get someone’s address by merely doing a search on DMV records to get the address off their driver’s license. And the Threat Assessment Department of the LAPD was formed, at least in part, in response to this murder.
One of the things that I learned from covering that case (other than that it sucks to be a reporter tasked to go to a funeral and try to get quotes from sobbing family members), is that wackos and obsessed fans follow an escalating behavior pattern. They start making threats, at first rather timidly. As the response to their threats fails to completely shut them down or punish them enough, they then begin to escalate their attack patterns.
The next stage – the one that Arrington is at, I fear – is what the LAPD shrinks called, “the humiliating encounter.” Basically, the stalker has an encounter with the person they are harassing that results in humiliation – either for the victim (they spit on their face) or the stalker (the studio security guards grab him, handcuff him, and frogmarch him off the lot).
In any case, this encounter then becomes the focus of whirling obsession for the next interval. The stalker sits and broods, going over the encounter in his head, over and over again, fantasizing about what he would have done differently, inventing a whole new encounter … only this next one will be far darker, far more violent.
There is going to have to be a fundamental shift in the way conversations are conducted on the internet. If a tech blogger – not someone in the political sphere, where the contentious nature is well-known – has to take a month off & flee to a beach to be able to deal, then clearly, the writing is on the wall.
This paragraph is probably going to become much more important in the years to come:
In California, under the stalking laws passed after this attach, a stalker is defined as “someone who willfully, maliciously and repeatedly follows or harasses another victim and who makes a credible threat with the intent to place the victim or victim’s immediate family in fear of their safety.” There must be at least two incidents to constitute the crime and show a “continuity of purpose” or credible threat.
UPDATE:
Paul Boutin, over at The Industry Standard, says that the hating has been growing for quite a while:
The most common accusation was that TechCrunch sold endorsements of startups, either in exchange for advertising buys on the site, or for outright cash payments.
This is important: None of these claims ever checked out. Sources would claim to know someone who knew something, but these mystery witnesses never showed up to tell their stories to a reporter. Arrington’s success, both as a blog-era publisher/writer and a startup businessman, inflames less successful entrepreneurs and journalists with off-the-scale envy. How does he do that?
Jan 05
Posted: under Community, Conspiracy Theories, new media.
I know that the Traditional Media Curmudgeons (should I just shorten that to TMCs?) will react with finger-pointing and howls of how you just can't trust all this newfangled crowdsourcy fancypants technology, that if the Preznit-elect's Twitter account has been hacked, then that means that you can never tell who's behind the information you're seeing on the screen.
Which is correct, as far as that goes.
But the larger point is one that was driven home to me recently - that the online check/balance system is pretty quick on the self-regulation; the account-hacking was pointed out, shut down & blogged about all before 10:44 a.m. And yeah, OK, in a fire, if some schiesskopf hacked a Fire Dep't account and put up Tweets directing families into, rather than out of, the onrushing Wall O' Flame we so often get in Southern Cal, that would indeed be A Bad Thing. [...more]
So the Tweetverse is predictably, uh … twittering? tittering? snickertwitting? someone hack together a “TomKat”-like neologism to describe this … over the hacking of several prominent Twitter accounts.
The updates say that the account hacking is not related to the weekend phishing outbreak.
The official Twitter blog says:
This morning we discovered 33 Twitter accounts had been “hacked” including prominent Twitter-ers like Rick Sanchez and Barack Obama
(who has not been Twittering since becoming the president elect due to transition issues). We immediately locked down the accounts and
investigated the issue. Rick, Barack, and others are now back in control of their accounts.
I know that the Traditional Media Curmudgeons (should I just shorten that to TMCs?) will react with finger-pointing and howls of how you just can’t trust all this newfangled crowdsourcy fancypants technology, that if the Preznit-elect’s Twitter account has been hacked, then that means that you can never tell who’s behind the information you’re seeing on the screen.
Which is correct, as far as that goes.
But the larger point is one that was driven home to me recently – that the online check/balance system is pretty quick on the self-regulation; the account-hacking was pointed out, shut down & blogged about all before 10:44 a.m. And yeah, OK, in a fire, if some schiesskopf hacked a Fire Dep’t account and put up Tweets directing families into, rather than out of, the onrushing Wall O’ Flame we so often get in Southern Cal, that would indeed be A Bad Thing.
So let me head this strawman off at the pass. Traditional Media are not immune to hackery. Examples: the reports that the Oklahoma City bombings were the work of Arab terrorists. The “Filipino Monkey” that almost touched off World War III (or IV or whatever arbitrary number you want to assign) by taunting US Navy ships into believing they were under attack by Iranians in the Strait of Hormuz a year ago. And we can go all the way back to the War of the Worlds hoax back in ’39 (a brilliant homage to this was created in ’08 on … wait for it … Twitter).
I’m not saying that the machine is perfect & reliable. Nothing is. But the crowdsourcing power of the web is useful, as long as you apply all the same fact-checking and verification procedures you do to any source(s).
One last thing: to the Script Kiddies that thought this would be a hoot. It was. And now you will be tracked down & harassed by the News Corp & Justice Department lawyers until your bones bleach in the sun. Thus the Circle of Life is completed.
UPDATE:
Fox News’ Twitter page still down:
Fox News Twitter Feed Still Offline
Nov 21
Posted: under Community, Digital Migration, journalism, new media, Politics & New Media.
I have hopes (perhaps naive & unwarranted) that there will be a disaggregated Newsroom of the Future, where reporters and The People Formerly Known As The Audience all work together to separate truth from spin. The Look&Feel of this Newsroom of the Future is being chiseled out of the raw WebChaos on sites like TPM, Firedoglake, ProPublica, Publish2, RedState, and even on Michelle Malkin (hey - she called the "B on the face" girl out as a fraud). [...more]
LA Times - No Shit, Sherlock?
This came in through the comment threads, and is thoughtful enough that it merits more attention:
It sounds like both media channels worked as I would expect them too. The mainstream media sticks with the low risk stories that are easy to substantiate and defend while New Media takes risks on radical story ideas, digest the story in the public forum, shares the discoveries with its readers and lets the readers decide when it is time to move on to other issues.
Very true, and a very good observation. However – my worry is that as the mainstream media increasingly dissolves, their filters grow ever weaker. Evidence of this can be seen in the big bounce in the amount of glaring errors in print editions – this last week, I noted big, bad spelling errors on the front page of the LA Times. The jump pages aren’t where they’re supposed to be. The same paragraph gets printed twice.
Apparently, the editorial guidlines have changed at the LA Times... or, to put it more colloquially, "the shit has loosened up."
Basically, the cuts in editorial positions have left the papers so stressed that they are vulnerable to the kinds of errors that would previously have been unthinkable. And if papers can screw up on something so simple as whether or not the word “Shit” should be put in a headline for a book review (as it was today), then a complex story that demands that reporters and editors pay close attention and follow a thread to its logical conclusion – well, that capability may not longer be in the traditional newsroom.
I have hopes (perhaps naive & unwarranted) that there will be a disaggregated Newsroom of the Future, where reporters and The People Formerly Known As The Audience all work together to separate truth from spin. The Look&Feel of this Newsroom of the Future is being chiseled out of the raw WebChaos on sites like TPM, Firedoglake, ProPublica, Publish2, RedState, and even on Michelle Malkin (hey – she called the “B on the face” girl out as a fraud).
It looks kinda like the same model that’s been in existence for hundreds (maybe even thousands) of years:
- The reporter/blogger/town crier/social media collective identifies a trend or event as significant, and communicates that to the people in their circle of influence (make up a term – audience, listeners, readers, lurkers, etc.)
- Those people take in that message and react. In the traditional media models, a positive reaction would be to buy more papers, tell their friends to tune in to the next newscast, and discuss it around the watercooler.
- Positive feedback means the originator keeps doing more – that is, follow-up stories, sidebars, looking for more stories like that.
- In the online world, positive feedback can mean that the audience self-deputizes and starts haring off on their own, trying to add their efforts to expand the narrative.
- Negative feedback – the audience not caring about or responding to the story – means that the reporter/blogger/town crier moves on to the next story
The only change is that the web makes all this happen much faster, and allows the audience to get much more involved than was possible before.
And yeah, I know, this kind of thinking is hardly original. But we’re seeing the dissolution of the traditional media happen much quicker than we had anticipated. And yeah, I’m aware that history is replete with examples of traditional media being used to perpetrate Big Lies & Big Mistakes – from the Spanish-American War of 1898, waged because newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst wanted a cause to boost circulation (where we get the famous quote “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”) to the yellowcake uranium and 18 words in the State of the Union address.
The point is, that as it is now easier for smaller & less powerful groups to take on the mantle of the MSM, it is also increasingly possible for smaller & less powerful groups to drill into the national narrative for their own purposes…
I’ll leave you with this, from the Hearst link above:
Hearst upped his circulation by producing a new kind of paper, one with mass- market appeal. His papers used lots of pictures and illustrations, large headlines, and the like. Reducing the cost of a paper to as little as a single cent a copy, Hearst made his newspapers accessible to nearly everyone. Because he controlled so much of the market for newspapers, a market that was rapidly growing because of his newspapers, Hearst could practically dictate what the country would think the next day.
The whole point of yellow journalism was to produce exciting, sensational stories, even if the truth had to be stretched or a story had to be made up. These stories would boost sales, something very important in this period, when newspapers and magazines were battling for circulation numbers. In regard to the situation in Cuba in the mid-1890s, yellow journalism sought to exploit the atrocities in Cuba to sell more magazines and newspapers.
The papers depicted Spanish behavior as exaggeratedly bad, and political cartoons depicted “Spain” as a nearly subhuman and brutal monster, while “Cuba” was usually depicted as a pretty white girl being pushed around by the Spanish monster. Once US opinions were inflamed over Cuba, Hearst in particular tried to do everything he could to whip the public into such a frenzy that a war would start. Once the country was at war, Hearst had little doubt his papers would have no end of interesting and sensational articles to publish.
Nov 19
Posted: under Blogging, Community, Digital Migration, new media, Politics & New Media, Viral Fame.
Nobody directly involved will admit it, but this is looking more and more like one of the more nasty, yet brilliant, scams of the last couple years. It may have been pulled off by the legendary Nigerian internet scammers, but it’s beginning to look like it may have been the work of a vast leftwing [...] [...more]
Nobody directly involved will admit it, but this is looking more and more like one of the more nasty, yet brilliant, scams of the last couple years. It may have been pulled off by the legendary Nigerian internet scammers, but it’s beginning to look like it may have been the work of a vast leftwing conspiracy with a twisted sense of humor.
It gets complicated, as these things often do, but the core appears to be:
1. A WordPress website claiming to be the creation of the African Press International, and NGO somehow associated with the Rainbow Foundation – OK, already I know this is a lot to process – claimed that they had a tape of Michelle Obama admitting that Barack Obama was not an U.S. citizen, and thus not eligible to be president.
2. Nobody seemed to notice that the API’s headquarters are in Norway.
3. In the weeks leading up to the election, as John McCain’s campaign was trailing smoke and in a steep vertical dive (to use an Air Force-appropriate metaphor), a ragtag bunch of deranged Obama-haters his desperate supporters seized on this story as a last-minute chance to save the U.S. from an Obama presidency, which they had come to believe would be some horrible combination of Stalinist Russia, the Taliban and a San Francisco gay bathhouse, circa 1978.
4. The overheated right-wing blog echo chamber started to scream and yell about the tapes, hoping to spark an uproar.
5. The API started getting erratic in its pronouncements about the tapes, on the one hand demanding money, on the other alleging mysterious dark conspiracies that were preventing the release of the tapes, conspiracies involving shadowy pro-Obama forces.
5. Still believing that these tapes existed, the right-wing blogs started collecting money from their readers to buy the tapes.
From the Ace of Spades website:
$20,000 $25,000 Reward for Obama/Ayers/Dohrn/Khalidi Tape
Dirty Harry suggests a benefactor can offer $100,000.
Well, I don’t know if one will step forward. I can guarantee, though,
that if the goods are delivered the blogosphere can contribute $20,000.
In a matter of hours.
Maybe more. More would depend on the tape.
This offer includes
is particularly directed towards Los Angeles Times employees. Maybe
ones that just got fired. Or will get fired in the next couple of weeks.
Guaranteed.
Anonymous.
That’s how we roll.
Pretty pathetic that we have to try to bribe “newsmen” to release newsworthy tapes.
If your conscience is troubled, They should have released it anyway.
6. The scam mutated into an allegation that the LA Times had some kind of tape that would once and for all, destroy the Obama campaign, but that it was withholding the tape because of the aforementioned vast left-wing conspiracy to hand the country over to Obama.
7. The bidding for the tape reached $150,000. In a move sure to be familiar to anyone who has studied the history of “The Spanish Prisoner,” the price for releasing the tape suddenly escalated to $2 million.
8. At this point, you’d think that the people who initially believed in the existence of this tape would start smelling a rat. You’d be wrong. A blogger named “Mountain Sage” started cataloging all the inconsistencies of this story, and if you’re really interested in all the ins & outs of this, please go there.
9. I’ll save you a whole bunch of mental consternation & possible suicidal impulses stemming from despair over the human condition, and cut to what I hope is the end of this story: the WordPress blog has been taken down, and the right-wing blogosphere has moved on (mostly) to its next alleged revelations of Obama conspiracies that will exterminate all mankind.
If your head is still spinning a little bit from all this, take a minute and look at some LOLcats or something.
Now then. How is all this relevant to the usual subject around here – New Media, newspapers, journalism? Well, as we debate migrating from the traditional media to a future where all our information comes at us over the Great Big Internet Pipe, I think it’s instructive to recognize that offloading some of the news-gathering & editing duties to the audience (i.e. crowdsourcing, Citizen Journalism, etc.), is not a process entirely free of risk.
Stories like this one were once confined to the utter fringes of our national conversation. Back when I first started working for newspapers, I learned that at least once a week, we’d get a long, somewhat smelly, letter from the local lunatic, ranting & raving about Zionist Occupation Government (“ZOG”) reading his mind with CIA laser beams. The single-spaced typewritten screeds were usually augmented by scrawling in red pen around the margins, in big circles. I’ve since learned that writing in big spirals is one of the warning signs of paranoid-schizophrenia, and in this case, of a person who has stopped taking their meds and is hearing the voices & acting on their instructions.
Unfortunately, as we open up the doors of the media to a more collaborative conversation between reader & journalist, fanatical factions are more easily able to hijack the national discourse, and divert us over into areas that are meaningless, pointless and an utter waste of time. Some would say that that has always been the case – that even in the traditional media’s heyday, we had stupid stories that for one reason or another, rose to the level where we were talking about them because everyone else was talking about them.
And yeah, I know that one of the benefits of the web is that the audience no longer just sits and passively accepts that the information being fed to them is true. That the Citizen Journalists are willing & able to step in to do research to expose fraudsters. That has certainly been the case here.
But this scam was, well, childish and poorly organized. A guy in Norway claiming to run an African news agency making wild claims? Already the red flags were waving.
However, if a much more well-funded and intelligent organization were to set out to concoct a Big Lie, and to use the low barriers to entry that the web offers to storylines, memes, etc., to deceive the public … how would we know? And if this organization were smart enough, and good enough at using SEO and other tools to bury and discredit its critics and their objections, what then?
Nov 07
Posted: under Community, new media.
Quick hit: from the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco (h/t Techcrunch): Huffington says flat out that if it wasn’t for the Internet, Obama would not be president. Trippi notes that Obama’s YouTube spots gathered an aggregate of 14.5 million viewing hours. The Internet was used by candidate previously, he said, noting the Howard Dean [...] [...more]
Quick hit: from the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco (h/t Techcrunch):
Huffington says flat out that if it wasn’t for the Internet, Obama
would not be president. Trippi notes that Obama’s YouTube spots
gathered an aggregate of 14.5 million viewing hours. The Internet was
used by candidate previously, he said, noting the Howard Dean campaign,
but Obama really leveraged it fully with online video, blogging, social
networking and fundraising.
The panelists also note how mainstream media tends to fail in
politics, simply reporting on what each candidate says without saying
who’s right or wrong. The blogosphere, they say (particularly Trippi
and Huffington), tends to call out factual inaccuracies better than
mainstream media.
Howard Dean showed that the Internet could be used to raise lots of
money online, say the panelists. But Newsome says social networking is
significantly more powerful and allows for the creation of much more
meaningful connections between the candidate and voters. “I’m addicted
to Facebook,” he said.
I really do hope that Obama appoints a CTO for the United States. If we are going to finally run this country like a business – and we should – then we need to pay attention to the fact that technology plays at least as important a role in our lives, our economy, and our future as Energy, Education and Labor (to name just a few cabinet-level posts).
Having someone high up who at least tries to get it, tries to coordinate & speak for the high-tech industry in the U.S., is going to be key to us being able to rebuild our shattered and outmoded economy.
Oct 16
Posted: under Community, investors, new media.
It’s still kind of a guessing game as to the motivations behind it, but Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey is out, and Evan Williams, the co-founder of the addictive microblogging service, has moved back to CEO from chairman. Suspects in the shakeup include: The generally shitty economy, where companies are making moves the same way investors [...] [...more]
It’s still kind of a guessing game as to the motivations behind it, but Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey is out, and Evan Williams, the co-founder of the addictive microblogging service, has moved back to CEO from chairman.
Suspects in the shakeup include:
- The generally shitty economy, where companies are making moves the same way investors are with the stock market – because they’re scared and figure they had best “do something”;
- FriendFeed has been slowly peeling away Twitter users;
- The persistent appearance of the FailWhale;
- The persistent NON-appearance of a business model.
On the Twitter blog, Williams says:
We’re entering a new phase now and there are new kinds of challenges ahead. Healthy companies acknowledge the need for change even during the best of times. As Twitter grows both internally and externally, we took a good look at our path forward and saw the need for a focused approach from a single leader.
Single leader, eh? Focused approach. Even during the best of times (which means that these have clearly not been those). Hmm.
…and then, as if from afar, we hear the echoes of shouting matches in the executive suites and the sounds of many Oreos being hurled at high velocities, shattering on the smeared whiteboards…
I like Twitter. I’m using it more & more to keep track of all the cool stuff my friends & contacts are dabbling in on the web. Hope they can figure out a way to extract the $$ from the traffic stream.
Technorati Tags: twitter ceo, business model, failwhale spouts, failing economy
Sep 11
Posted: under advertising, Community, Design, Digital Migration, google, Mobile advertising technology, monetizing mobile content, new media, Newspaper Deathwatch, Newspapers, Online Video, visual storytelling, Web Tech, Yahoo oneConnect.
Packing up for the trip back down to LA, but couldn’t let these little tidbits from the CTIA pass without at least acknowledging them. 1. Yahoo is trying to drum up some support for its Blueprint mobile platform. They claim that it’s going to allow users to achieve the Holy Grail of mobile/web content – [...] [...more]
Packing up for the trip back down to LA, but couldn’t let these little tidbits from the CTIA pass without at least acknowledging them.
1. Yahoo is trying to drum up some support for its Blueprint mobile platform. They claim that it’s going to allow users to achieve the Holy Grail of mobile/web content – tying together 
all our virtual identities with its oneConnect application. It’s been said, over and over (AND OVER) again that the first company to figure out how to provide the one-stop platform for social media interactivity over cellphones, is going to be the next Google (if Google itself doesn’t snarf up that space as well). The dream is that oneConnect (or whatever) becomes the way to keep up with what your friends on Facebook, Flickr, Bebo, MySpace, YouTube, etc. etc. are doing, and a way to post constant updates on where/what/why/with whom/teh awesum!1!/go away now/overload to all the places where you share your life’s experiences with the world.
Leaving aside for the moment the sneaking suspicion that aggregating all our identities through one company’s pipe may not turn out to be such a bright idea, the software is apparently generating the skepticism already.
Yahoo has been trying to hype this app since, oh, Barcelone in February, and to my knowledge, they really haven’t gotten that much traction with it, despite the best efforts of their developers.
I’d like to see Yahoo manage to pull this off; like many others, I’m starting to get more & more uneasy about Google’s unchallenged dominance, and I’d just as soon they not have complete control over what I do, see, say & hear, as well as knowing who I’m doing said communicating with/near/for/against.
Moving on.
2. Pointroll is wowing the attendees at the CTIA, offering easy(ier?) ways of taking rich media ads and porting them over to the mobile platform. Their demo of interactive ads on the iPhone, done through and with USA Today, has publishers and advertisers pondering if the time has actually come to start migrating the TV ad spending over to the phones that the 14-24s are actually using, paying attention to, and carrying with them everywhere.
The bad news for Yahoo is that PointRoll is hyping that using their platform will allow ads to run across the entire Google content network. Viz:
The Google content network encompasses hundreds of thousands of
websites, including premium publishers and long-tail niche sites.
Google and PointRoll worked together to ensure that the ads served to
the Google content network meet Google’s policies and specifications.
After completing Google’s certification process, PointRoll’s
sophisticated targeting technologies can now optimize the breadth of
Google’s sites and categories, matching advertisers’ messages to the
users who find them most relevant.
Again, nice hype. But in light of the struggles that Google has had with Android, I remain skeptical that they have managed to so quickly solve all the problems with serving mobile ads in anything like a timely manner. I just think that there’s still too much market fragmentation to be able to claim that this One Size Fits All app will reach a mass audience.
To backup my point, allow me to quote a piece in the paper today: one of the problems many sites are running into is that about 25% of web users are still limping along with Internet Explorer 6.0.
(Pause to allow veteran web developers to spit, vomit, scream, make the two-fingered “sign of the devil’s horns” to ward off evil.)
IE 6.0 is widely recognized as the shittiest web browser ever inflicted on the public. It was launched in 2001. Since then, Microsoft has bugged users to upgrade, remove, kill, quash, forget, shred, this browser. The fact that a quarte
r of users in the U.S. still view the web through its Funhouse Mirror interface shows that 1) A large proportion of the public continues to employ legacy technology no matter how Christawful it is, 2) these folks ignore new technology, no matter how much better it is, for fear that upgrading will somehow cause them a problem, and 3) any tech solution based on the assumption that people will be running the latest&greatest hardware and software is doomed to die like like a possum wandering onto the Indy 500 speedway.
3. Millennial Media is competing with PointRoll to serve multimedia ads to the mobile market. And we’re going to have to stop here, because it’s time to load up the Conestoga wagon and head back to LA.
Technorati Tags: monetizing mobile, google, yahoo oneconnect, PointRoll
May 27
Posted: under Community, Multimedia, Online Video, Viral Fame.
Weezr’s Pork and Beans video turns the whole “viral fame” process on its head, taking in the personalities made famous in the last year or so by YouTube, and biting off their fame. It’s funny, self-referential and the tune burns (Full disclosure: I used to have “Hashpipe” as a ringtone on my old Sanyo. I [...] [...more]
Weezr’s Pork and Beans video turns the whole “viral fame” process on its head, taking in the personalities made famous in the last year or so by YouTube, and biting off their fame. It’s funny, self-referential and the tune burns (Full disclosure: I used to have “Hashpipe” as a ringtone on my old Sanyo. I like their riffs. Sue me.)
I’m not sure if this represents the final nail in the “Everyone famous for 15 minutes” meme, since time is no longer a delimiter for fame. 15 million pageviews? 15,000 friend requests on MySpace? How do we now categorize and describe inconsequential, perhaps accidental, fame?
On an artistic front, I really dig the throughline of Weezr’s stuff – they started out with the “Buddy Holly” video, biting off “Happy Days,” using the set & beloved character – and now they’re using anti-nostalgia, i.e. the ultimate in ephemeral phenomena, as visuals for their music. Oh yeah – and they’ve got a dedicated channel on YouTube now. Look for remixes and parodies of this springing up in the next week or so. Update: Oh God, they’ve started already.
Wired has a good take on this, including this quote:
“It was mayhem making the video,” Weezer guiartist Brian Bell explained. “We were performing with all these amazing YouTube celebrites, and I felt like I had walked into my own computer.”
Technorati Tags: viral video, weezr, web celeb, community, blog, fame, music video
May 26
Posted: under Blogging, Blogs, Community, Design, Digital Migration, journalism, Multimedia, Newspapers, Online Video, Uncategorized, Web Tech.
I’ve been blogging for more than three years now on the Typepad platform, and have finally taken the leap to WordPress. It’s not because Typepad was bad – although it was a little clunky at first, and I haven’t ever really been happy with their recommendations on how to deal with video – but more [...] [...more]
I’ve been blogging for more than three years now on the Typepad platform, and have finally taken the leap to WordPress. It’s not because Typepad was bad – although it was a little clunky at first, and I haven’t ever really been happy with their recommendations on how to deal with video – but more a case of me wanting to start exerting more control over the design of the blog, and its location. Basically, I’ve outgrown Hard News, Inc. So, rather than try to make the old “brand” learn some new dance steps, I’ve decided to start afresh over here at Artesian Media.
I feel a little sad at leaving the Hard News blog behind – it was my first foray into blogging on my own, although by that point, I had been a web editor and publisher for 10 years. I remember feeling euphoric at first – I was able to publish on my own, any time I wanted, about anything I felt like, without having to spend hours on the phone to coders in Bangalore! When I wanted to move items in a list around, add or change photos, change the number, size and location of the text columns, I just clicked on a few radio buttons, and zammo! Hit F5 and everything’s changed.
Since that time, I’ve seen the blogosphere really start to codify and fall into predictable patterns. Flame wars have their own cartoon graphics explaining their life cycle. Everyone gripes the same about trackback spam and script kiddies haxxoring your database and putting “U R Pwned” up in place of all your precious bits of Joycean stream-of-consciousness wisdom.
I kinda want to take the best bits of Hard News and migrate them over here – not only because some of them are (at least in my opinion) damn good, but also to multitask. I’ve always adopted the Army ethos of “Never ask your men to do something you wouldn’t or couldn’t do yourself.” Well, now that a great deal of my professional life revolves around taking traditional print journalists (as I was for the greater part of my career) and guiding them on their first steps on the multimedia path, one of the things that I try to do is to look at the technologies and knowledge that content producers are going to have to master, and then to force myself into their shoes for a stroll.
So yeah, part of what I’m doing here is using myself as a guinea pig, to see how difficult it’s going to be to try to migrate over about 3 years’ worth of content from Typepad.
Stay tuned, watch this space, and thanks for checking in.
