April 2011
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Bill Simmons to launch Grantland, high-end sports... →
Gotta love the lineup of talent. This could become another example of the sorts of interesting, focused journalism sites that are starting to emerge, such as Politico or TheWrap, that have a shot at finding sustainability and engaged audiences. I certainly can hope, especially given that roster of writers.
parislemon:
As a big fan of Bill Simmons, I’m excited for his new site (in association...
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BREAKING NEWS! Married couple kisses after...
Oddly, unlike some portion of the populace, I didn’t really need my cell phone to alert me, at 5:29 AM PST, with the sun still some considerable time away from dawning, to the breaking AP news alert that, “Prince William, Kate Middleton exchange short kiss on Buckingham Palace balcony.”
C’mon, AP, this is news? Before dawn? Does this mean the vaunted editors at the...
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Robert W. Fogel Investigates Human Evolution -... →
Fascinating piece on an upcoming book by Nobel-winning economist Robert Fogel and his colleagues that tracks the transformation of the modern human body in the past three centuries, thanks to improvements in nutrition, public health initiatives, health care and more.
The book, “The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700,” is the result...
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Hacking of 77 million names will cost Sony much... →
The writer of this piece, my friend Alex Pham, is spot on about the potential impacts of this disastrous hack of Sony’s PlayStation Network. That 77 million names and other data were compromised, along with credit card information, is a really big number.
But more importantly, it’s a huge long-term problem for Sony’s credibility with gamers, who’ve been coming around to...
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“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us...”
– Ira Glass (via nefffy)
I love this quote because it’s so spot on. One of the great things about being a journalist is that it forced me to write on deadline, every day, a lot, for a couple of decades, and get paid for it, if not very much.
What Glass proposes is forcing yourself into the...
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Delicious lives on
Got an email last night from Yahoo telling me that Delicious, the once-beloved social bookmarking service they were going to kill last fall, now is owned by the founders of YouTube, whose new company is AVOS. It was time, they said, to transfer my bookmarks, etc. to AVOS or face the disappearance of the information come July.
(Here’s the link to Yahoo’s corporate blog on this:...
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REALITY BITES: 50 Percent of The Country Thinks... →
USA Today/Gallup poll says 50 percent of Americans, including 31 percent of Republicans, believe Donald Trump would make a “poor” or “terrible” president.
That’s a relief. Usually polls of American attitudes and beliefs and knowledge of the world around them only leave me depressed.
But this poll does beg one question: what’s up with the OTHER half of the...
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Are Horizontal Website Layouts the Design of the... →
This piece asks a question whose answer is, “God, I hope so.” Though I treasure many of the changes made possible by technology, I haven’t enjoyed the brutal approach to visual design that too many sites employ, seemingly forgetting what we’ve learned over the past few hundreds of years of post-Gutenberg graphic design.
The sainted Jakob Nielsen, who’s been doing...
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Some basic best practices for enterprises in... →
A very solid, if pretty basic checklist of stuff for big companies (in particular) to do when engaging in social media. One of the things I like about this piece in particular is the notion of monitoring what your own employees/associates are doing.
First you monitor what’s being said about you across the social media platforms, then you create a solid company policy for your own employees...
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The newsonomics of a single investigative story »... →
Nieman looks at the compelling group-sourced economics behind a terrific California Watch project that looked at thousands of schools across the state that don’t meet legal requirements for quake safety.
The project cost about $550,000 to create, mostly in staff time for all the participating news outlets. That’s a staggering price, but spread out as it was across numerous...
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How the iPad changes PC design - The Circuits Blog... →
Kind of a short piece, but spot on about how iPad technologies (flash memory use, integrated main processors, aesthetics) are transforming PCs.
But I think he misses some big ones though:
self-contained apps,
online-only apps marketplaces and
the transformative impact of a touch screen interface, especially for things such as art and photographic programs.
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“It was “a passion for mystery chiefly which explains the optimism of human...”
– British author and adventurer Freya Stark, quoted in a delightful recent New Yorker critical review of her travel books set in Arab lands and written in first half of the 20th Century.
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“Protests in Syria are getting intense. So has social media use by those seeking...”
– Behind The Mystery Of Spam Tweets Clogging Syrian Protesters’ Streams | Fast Company Just wrote about this for Fast Company. Story is fascinating. (via negevrockcity)
Interesting to watch how the move/countermove process is playing out in virtually real time in social media wars between protesters...
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Creepy company names from ad:tech SFO
Leftover, just-discovered note from last week’s ad:tech:
Company names on the exhibit floor that SO didn’t work for me:
Addroid: Sounds like either a) the anti-Preparation H site, b) where proctologists go to die or c) a real pain in the ass.
Status Stalker: We have enough trouble ignoring the uncomfortable realities of off-site ad targeting, Epsilon data breaches, iPhone secret...
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No booze and bars for you! →
Among the Apple-related tidbits MacWorld reports is tantalizing stuff about a “supercharged” iPhone with the same high-end A5 chip already in the latest iPads. Reportedly, the massive NDA required to get one of the devices bars recipients from taking it into a bar for the duration of the NDA. Given those wacky, hard-drinking engineers out there, and their history of misplacing hot...
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New song from "Superbrothers" soundtrack
Just downloaded a couple of days ago the “Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery” game on my iPad amid insane amounts of hoopla for the game, its wit, its 8-bit inspired visual design and its beautiful and wistful soundtrack by Jim Guthrie. I’m on the mailing list of Guthrie’s PR firm, which sent along the link below to a lovely song from the soundtrack, which was released...
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“News.me is a newsfeed that uses artificial intelligence to monitor what people...”
– News.Me, Social News Service, Debuts for iPad - NYTimes.com - Excellent, this uses Readability’s model for dolling out a share of revenue based on readership. Much fairer than the old way. I think I will actually subscribe and try this… (via interestingsnippets)
The ways new apps are packaging...
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Feeling a little disconnected today? →
Even Amazon’s mighty EC2 system can have a bad day. And because so many little online startups depend on it for their services’ backbones on the web, WE have a bad day. That includes “Engine Yard, Foursquare, Hootsuite, Heroku, Quora, and Reddit, to name a few,” as this story puts it. About half of those, and goodness knows how many others, are frequent...
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Time Machine
Today was famed lawyer Clarence Darrow’s 154th birthday. Darrow had a long and colorful life, which included the Scopes Trial in the 1920s, where he wanted my great-grandfather, a prominent zoologist at the University of Missouri, to testify about the scientific validity of evolution, on behalf of the teacher accused of breaking a Tennessee law forbidding such teaching.
Darrow and my...
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the wait.
redvelvetteacake:
It seemed like years before I picked a bouquet of kisses off her mouth and put them into a dawn-colored vase in my heart. But the wait was worth it. Because I was in love.
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Tools and strategies for integrating social,... →
This links to a presentation I put together in the past 24 hours, and gave to a introductory PR class at USC Annenberg School for Communication. It’s the fruits of a lot of personal experience and thinking, further clarified and crystallized by several presentations I’ve heard in the past week by some great thinkers on these issues, such as Brian Solis, Jeffrey Cole and Steve Rubel.
I...
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“Almost every new technology is an amplification of our body,” Wright said,...”
– Videogame pioneer Will Wright, speaking at a UC-Santa Cruz conference, about the future of games, and technology, and their impact on our culture and our sense of self. The rest of the story is here:...
Rick Santorum says he had 'nothing to do with'... →
This is rich. It’s a bit like Charles Barkley once saying he didn’t read his own autobiography, and shouldn’t be held responsible for what it says. And given Santorum’s extremely long-shot prospects, it means about as much as Barkley does in terms of who’ll be president after 2012’s election.
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“Bitter Herbs, Haggadah, Pestilence, Slaying of the First Born: Passover is a...”
– From Spin magazine’s monthly zeitgeist check, The Spin 20. Amusing, seasonal and yet, oh so true. I can’t wait for the mixtape.
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How writing for free for the Huffington Post, et... →
An excellent, if self-admittedly imperfect, metaphor. There IS an exchange of value, for BOTH sides, even if the opportunistic lawsuit against HuffPo chooses not to acknowledge it. What do you think of this take?
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A Guardian gamer's guide (this would be a 3G) to... →
A nice rundown of what will be a pretty compelling experience for hard-core gamers in coming months, 3D. It’s not even a big transition, given that so many high-end games are created in 3D and then forced to deal with the limitations of 2D screens for experiences that are striving to be as immersive as possible.
I had a client who talked about first trying a 3D game four years ago, while...
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It's not the tool, it's the tool user in Syrian... →
futurejournalismproject:
The Guardian reports how citizens are using video streaming to communicate with one another across Syria:
On the laptop screen is the pixelated image of a man holding an olive branch in one hand and a mobile phone in the other, which he is using as a video camera to stream, via the social media programme Qik, live images of tens of thousands of protesters in [the...
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“The interesting thing actually is how little traction these social issues are...”
– Barack Obama (via catthew)
This Obama comment tracks directly with work done by my clients Mike Hais and Morley Winograd (@mikeandmorley) on Millennial Generation attitudes toward a lot of the hot-button social issues. They’re MUCH more socially open-minded than older, more partisan...
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Notes from ad:tech SFO 2011
- The show appears very well attended, with a great deal of bustle and deal talk and perhaps 200 exhibitors on an annoyingly separated two floors of the Moscone Convention Center’s West Hall. There’s lots of money to be made and lots of companies trying to grab a slice of it i. Having just completed an in-depth review of the video ad-serving tech sector, I was surprised not to see any...
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The Grand Tour: Europe on 1,500 yuan a day →
Until recently, Chinese people had abundant reasons not to roam for pleasure. Travelling in ancient China was arduous. As a proverb put it, “You can be comfortable at home for a thousand days, or step out the door and run right into trouble.” Confucius threw guilt into the mix: “While your parents are alive, it is better not to travel far away.” Nevertheless, ancient Buddhist monks visited...
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Ad:tech SFO 2011: USC's Jeffrey Cole speaks on the...
I’ll post some goodies here from this week’s ad:tech San Francisco conference, where I was an advisory board member who helped choose 16 startups, just three panels of four finalists, for which were the best. I also was able to hit several interesting speaker sessions, including this one:
USC Professor Jeffrey Cole has been closely monitoring the rise of the Internet and the resulting...
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