Maybe it’s just me, but this doesn’t seem to be a very comfortable way to watch a football game.
Charlie!
Soup | Anthony De Rosa
President Barack Obama on 60 Minutes: December 13, 2009
The Real Jersey Shore: A continuing series.
Click to play Where In the World Is Carmen San Diego online for free
God, this brings back memories of wasting away Sundays on my old black & white DOS-only PC. (via atencio)
A short course on surviving the web:
by Merlin Mann
Thing is: the internet’s made of IP addresses, opinions, and assholes. It’s what’s there. That’s the basic equipment.
- Everything’s amplified. Except subtlety.
- Say things you believe are true.
- No one understands; no one cares.
- Never explain yourself.
- Apologize less; think more.
- Avatars aren’t people; people aren’t avatars; “friends” aren’t friends.
- Everyone thinks you’re talking to them. Seriously.
- Distinguish attacks against people from attacks against one person.
- Assume everyone is alone, drunk, and a little heavier than they’d like.
- Never argue in public. Fucking never.
- When in doubt, take it offline.
- Filter, filter.
- Embrace “hypocrisy.” It drives critics crazy.
- Remember who your (real) friends are.
- Remember who you are.
- Remember you can always stop. Anything. Any time.
- Never make lists of rules.
Why News Won't Work Like Murdoch Want's It To
There is a great deal of information worth paying for, but for the most part, it’s hard to understand why anyone would be incentivized to pay for the news for news is as free as the freedom of speech.
Consider this article from The Wall Street Journal, Google to Start Selling Own Phone Next Year. The article starts off “Google Inc. has designed a cellphone it plans to sell directly to consumers as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter.” But to continue reading, you must subscribe.
Shucks, are you going to subscribe to get this news? If you don’t want to subscribe but would like to get some additional information, you can likely find another trusted brand of your choice writing about the same exact news. I found well over 100 articles just from looking on Techmeme alone:
Word gets around quite easily these days, you know? And when it comes to commentary, there will never be any shortage of outrageous personalities to choose from with equal and often greater standards of integrity and speed.
To that end, brands like the WSJ and the NYTimes will suffer when it comes to breaking news because they are no longer unique or valuable in today’s news gathering cycle (as seen for example in today’s news about the Google Phone). The only hope that these companies have is that they have a few journalists on their payroll currently who are popular personalities, like David Pogue and Walt Mossberg, for example. I think Peter Rojas and Ryan Block can be just as influential and I just love their writing style. And even if you put them all behind a pay wall, I’ll likely read the news on their work because whatever they say about the news is itself news.
CNN probably has the biggest problem of all because most of their articles online do not come from personalities, they come from robots (sometimes called staff writers) Aside from Anderson Cooper, can you name any journalist at CNN that you know of? Wolf Blitzer? What if one of these two guys leaves? Is Katie Couric at ABC or CBS and does it matter? Without the personalities who have opinions and put themselves out there and work hard to build up their own personal prominence, news organizations will no longer be able to maintain their own prominence online. It’s the people, people.
Neighborhoodr in today’s New York Daily News
Special thanks to the writer Alexander Hotz and Thomas Monaster who shot us at Billy’s Antiques and Props in the Lower East Side.
“I guess it’s kind of ironic that I’ve been all over the world but I probably know Singapore better than the outer boroughs of my city.”
— Anthony Bourdain
This is a mock-up for a news site that I think should exist: explainthis.org
Users go to the site and find a prompt similar to Twitter’s “what’s happening?” of Facebook’s “what’s on your mind?” But instead of updating their status they type in a question they have for a team of journalists who are “standing by.”
What I have in mind is not search. It’s not Yahoo Answers or AskReddit, either. This is for questions that cannot really be answered by a simple, or even a sophisticated search. Or by the amateur expert who’s been reading Popular Mechanics since 1964. The kind of questions explainthis.org would handle have these features:
- 1. Lots of people have this question and want a good answer. (Which argues for a Digg-style system to vote questions up. It also means we can ask those people for help as the investigation gets underway)
- 2. The answer is not easily obtained through search or by “looking it up.”
- 3. It takes journalism—investigative, explanatory, seriously enterprising journalism—to answer the question well.
I’ve been talking about this idea on Twitter. In reply Jim Marko sent me a sample question: why are we still subsidizing corn? That works! I think a lot of people probably have this question. It cannot be easily answered with a Google search or by looking it up in the Almanac of American Politics. And to understand why we’re subsidizing corn, a good deal of investigation and explanation are required. Which is why we need journalists “standing by.” (Not that there aren’t good places to start; there are.)
So that’s explainthis.org, which is so far just a concept sketch. Now tell me what you think of it in the comments.
Notes
Inspiration for explainthis.org came from myreporter.com (for more on that site, go here) and my ex-student Cody Brown, who did the mock up, borrowing from his own idea for a start-up, Kommons.com. It employs a similar box (for more, see this.)
15 reasons why Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is actually a pretty crappy reporter ➔
“The piece is a factual mess, a conspiracy theorist’s dream, doesn’t even indict Obama for his real failures … and of course invokes the cold hands of Bob Rubin like a bogeyman at every turn.
This is pernicious for a lot of journalistic reasons, but politically it’s bad for progressives because conspiracy theories stand in the way of good policy analysis and good activism, replacing them with apathy and fear …… when you try and tell that story with a lot of lies and innuendo, and misunderstand the basic policies that these people are producing, you don’t hurt them. Now anyone who criticizes the Administration will just be lumped in with Taibbi’s meandering conspiracy.”I’m fine with attack dogs. We need more on the left. But you all are giving props for his journalism, which is suspect.
The comparison to Hunter S. Thompson is valid insofar as Thompson was bored by journalism, and thus fairly bad at it.
Google Phone is coming! Google confirms that they’re testing a device internally (or “dogfooding” as they refer to it):
We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.And then TechCrunch adds all sorts of fun details from a supposedly solid source:
There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.Perhaps most importantly, they say they’ll sell it as an unlocked phone, meaning you SHOULD be able to use it with any carrier. But rest assured every carrier (well, AT&T and Verizon at least) will not welcome Google’s unlocked device with open arms.
Orson Welles talks about Harry Cohn on The Dick Cavett Show
