Tag Archive for 'media'Page 3 of 7

RSS and the NY Times

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by
John
on 2/3/2006
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Just yesterday me and a friend were talking about how the NY Times’ RSS feeds are a weak, hacked-together, last-minute solution… it only shows something like 6 articles at a time, and a very very small (one line) excerpt of the article. Why not include the entire article, and also advertisements, right in the feed? Anyway, that is a philisophical debate for another day.

But what’s funny is I just came accross this blog post from Dave Winer that suggests that the NY Times’ adoptation of RSS was what contributed to it becoming popular in the first place. Excerpt:

The event that made the difference, that in hindsight was the tipping point for RSS, was the adoption of the format by the New York Times in 2002. The publishing industry, unlike the tech industry, didn’t feel threatened, apparently, by a thriving standard, so after the Times went first, they all just followed, compatibly, without reinventing, without gratuitous incompatiblity, without excuses, they just did it.

He concludes:

But we don’t need the tech industry, and it’s about time their attitude reflected that. They didn’t bring us the web, that came from a researcher in academia. And they didn’t bring us RSS, that came from the publishing industry.

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Douglas Rushkoff: Suicide Bombs as Viral Media

Published
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John
on 2/3/2006
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Douglas Rushkoff wrote a very interesting essay back in August of 2005, discussing how suidicide bombing is a media virus. The media virus concept is something he discussed in a book of the same name in 1994. It offers a very interesting model of how ideas/trends/behaviors spread through a culture through media.

The essay is a quick read. Here’s an excerpt:

Media viruses … depend on our newly complexified mediaspace to exist. Like biological viruses, they have two main components: a sticky outer shell, and genetic code inside. … The virus replicates if its code can successfully interpolate itself into the confused command structure of our cell’s own code. If the virus succeeds in doing this, it turns the cell into a virus factory — the cell commits suicide in the viruses[sic] name. Early Madonna successfully challenged our faulty, confused, and unarticulated notions about female sexuality. The Rodney King tape successfully challenged the unarticulated rage at the way white cops treat black inner-city men. The viral code replicates as long as we’re unable to talk about the underlying social agenda it provokes.

Suicide bombing is a media virus with very real effects. The sticky outer shell is the event itself — a suicide bombing gets covered on the news. It’s huge news, especially if it occurs in a white western nation. Currently, it’s the fastest spreading kind of news story there is.

The code, like that of any successful media virus, challenges the unarticulated confusion over the relationship of the west to oil, Arabs, Islam, and post-colonialism. Actually, the virus fuels itself on rage going back as far as the Crusades, or certainly since the imposition of CIA-sponsored dictatorships.

When issues remain closeted, culture-wide cognitive dissonance only increases. This makes everyone susceptible to the contagion of a virus whose code can nest within this highly charged gap. For a select few cells within the cultural organism, this means becoming a suicide bomber oneself. For others, it means seeing suicide bombers around every corner — as the accidental death of a Brazilian man in London, thought to be a suicide bomber, confirms.

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Nam June Paik

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John
on 1/31/2006
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1932 - 2006

Nam June Paik with a television on his shoulder

Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.

Nam June Paik, video art pioneer

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SXSW Interactive

Published
by
John
on 1/29/2006
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. 1 Comment

I’m going to be attending SXSW Interactive this year. Lyceum will have been released two or three weeks beforehand, and I’m hoping there will be a bit of Lyceum buzz among a certain geeky, bloggy crowd at the conference.

If any of my thousands of readers are going to be there, let me know.

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The Vatican starts charging for the right to reprint the works of the pope

Published
by
John
on 1/23/2006
in general
. 5 Comments

unreal

For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses” of €3,500.

Vittorio Messori, who has co-authored works with Pope Benedict and John Paul II, said that he was “perplexed and alarmed . . . This is wholly negative and absolutely disastrous for the Vatican’s image.” A pope’s words should be available to all free of charge, he said, and to “cash in in this way surrounds the clergy with the odour of money”.

Publishers will have to negotiate a levy of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent of the cover price of any book or publication “containing the Pope’s words”. Those who infringe the copyright face legal action and a higher levy of 15 per cent.

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Google Answers

Published
by
John
on 1/13/2006
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. 0 Comments

Google Answers is a service where a research request can be posted with a price, and then people on the web can do the research and submit the results. A while back I thought I would give Google Answers a try, mostly to see how the process went, but also because I was genuinely curious about this question:

Where is the “bottom” in the stock market? I realize that it is basically all driven by hype, psychology, etc now, but in theory, what is being traded? Why would/should a corporation’s performance theoretically affect the value of it’s [sic] share [sic]? is it something to do with what happens if the corporation dissolved [sic]?

You can see the entry and the responses it generated here.

When I got the first response, I had basically full confidence in what elids said. elids seemed reasonably knowledgable, and was certainly very confident and enthusastic. Then elwtee comes on the scene and shakes everything up with a completely different answer! elwtee seems just as knowledgable and self-assured as elids!

It makes me wonder about who these two people are, what their motivations are, and what they do with their time. Keep in mind that these were both left as comments to the question and not submitted as answers, so they aren’t in it for the money.

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The things Arianna Huffington wants to forget about 2005

Published
by
John
on 12/23/2005
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Arianna Huffington did a great piece at AlterNet: The Things I Want to Forget, an overview of everything evil and absurd in the United States in 2005. It may come off as negative but I think she succeeds in being more populist than partisan.

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Where did David Brooks go to grade school?

Published
by
John
on 12/19/2005
in general
. 1 Comment

A friend of mine on IM today:

::: “New York Times columnist David Brooks followed two days later with a condescending column lamenting Spielberg’s failure to portray the “evil” driving Palestinian terrorism. “Because he will not admit the existence of evil, as it really exists, Spielberg gets reality wrong,” Brooks wrote, continuing, “In Spielberg’s Middle East the only way to achieve peace is by renouncing violence. But in the real Middle East the only way to achieve peace is through military victory over the fanatics, accompanied by compromise between the reasonable elements on each side.”"
::: man
::: where did david brooks go to grade school
::: i continue to be amazed than someone can not see that terrorism and the response to terrorism is a cycle
::: killing 100,000 iraqi civilians with bombs will cause other iraqis to become terrorist fanatics. it’s incredibly simple.

Terrorism/occupation previously discussed here.

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Bad House, Good House

Published
by
John
on 12/15/2005
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Bad House!

The House voted 251 to 174 yesterday to renew the USA Patriot Act, setting up a confrontation over the revised anti-terrorism measure with a group of Democratic and Republican senators who say it would not go far enough to protect civil liberties.

The Patriot Act, approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, made it easier for the FBI to conduct secret searches, monitor telephone calls and e-mails, and obtain bank records and other personal documents in connection with terrorism investigations.

Civil liberties groups say the proposed renewal would do too little to let targeted people challenge national security letters and types of subpoenas that give the FBI substantial latitude in deciding what records — including those from libraries — should be surrendered.

Good House! (althought this one was a no-brainer)

In an unusual bipartisan rebuke to the Bush administration, the House on Wednesday overwhelmingly endorsed Senator John McCain’s measure to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world.

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Noam Chomskey on Bush’s grammatical errors

Published
by
John
on 12/14/2005
in general
. 12 Comments

Saw this on boingboing:

(Noam Chomsky speaking about Bush)

So therefore you have… George Bush… this pampered kid who came from a rich family and went to prep school and an elite university. And you have to present him as an ordinary guy who makes grammatical errors, which I’m sure he’s trained to make–he didn’t talk that way at Yale–and a fake Texas twang, and he’s off to his ranch to cut brush or something. It’s like a toothpaste ad. And I think a lot of people know it.

This is the kind of thing that annoys me about Chomsky. Most of the time he is so well researched, and then other times he is so anecdotal, making vague references to non-falsifiable conspiracy theories. Does he have any proof that George Bush makes grammatical errors on purpose? Furthermore, Chomsky has been hanging out at pretty fancy institutions his entire life, hasn’t he seen the rich and privileged barely-literate idiots that go in and out of those places?

Don’t get me wrong, there is certainly an elaborate plan to sell Bush as the President that you can relate to, the President who doesn’t talk too fancy.

If there is one thing Bush is great at, even when on the spot in public, it’s completely undermining the question that was asked and either not addressing anything, or steering the dialogue toward what he wants to talk about. He performs this pretty much flawlessly.

Which makes me see Chomsky’s point more. Hmmm.

I don’t know. I ask you, Dear Reader, is Bush’s idiocy an elaborate show?

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