I can’t quite decide if this is cool, or if it’s like the time I was riding in a car with my grandma, and she started singing the lyrics to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” If you’ve ever heard an 80-yr-old woman warble “Sleep with one eye open…” well then, you’re probably not reading this, since you’re still hospitalized with an icepick in your eardrums.

But I digress.

Here’s the breathless, oh-so-hip and daring intro to the piece:


TWENTY-THREE years after the birth of what became AOL, a decade after
Yahoo’s IPO, eight years after the dawn of Google, five years after the
Time-Warner/AOL merger, a year after the founding of YouTube, all but
the most calcified corners of the media world (what’s black and white
and read all over … ) awoke to the fact that the Internet was not just
at the doorstep, it had unpacked its bag, raided the liquor cabinet and
taken the family for a joyride down to Baja. This was the year wishful
thinking — that this Internet phenomenon might just go away —
evaporated, and those media companies still standing began to seek
anything that might see them through the deluge. And what a deluge it
was.

They start off with banging on the Snakes on a Plane phenom, and make sure that they’ve got a cleavage shot of Lonelygirl15

I detect a slightly wistful tone to the piece; normally I’d snark on how the LA Times site is revolving door for harebrained theories of audience aggregation (which adds up to a textbook case of audience alienation), but the site was almost interesting today.  Dunno if they’re tossing some coin at it in the hopes of spiffing up the joint for Geffen or what.

More posts on this site are likely in the near future, as I spent much of today finally hacking some of the glue out of my lungs.  This bronchitis just does not give up easily.