April 2012
77 posts
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Fabulous documentary about racing, and I don't...
On a whim, spurred by a couple of good reviews, I watched “Senna” tonight on Netflix, about the extraordinary Brazilian F-1 driver Ayrton Senna, who won three world championships and became a hero redeeming his troubled home country before dying in a crash at the age of 34.
The doc is a remarkable piece of work, stitched together almost completely from video taken during his life. I...
March 2012
85 posts
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Free museums on Saturday across L.A.
With Pacific Standard Time coming to a close after a glorious run, 19 Southern California museums from Santa Barbara to Palm Springs will be waiving admission fees on Saturday, March 31.
Take advantage of the opportunity to check out at least one museum or more, especially ones you haven’t visited before. Here’s the flyer from PST listing all the participating institutions.
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FBI: US networks undergunned in hacker wars →
Oh, it’s always comforting to hear from, say, the senior cybercrime leader at the FBI, as he’s stepping down from his position to take a job in the private sector, that he doesn’t know of a single non-classified computer network in the country that’s adequately safeguarded from hacker intrusions by criminals and spies.
Now, it’s possible he’s just ensuring he...
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Best Coast - "The Only Place" free download on... →
Love Best Coast’s sunny sound, and they double down on this jangly, joyous track about the pleasures of California, available here for free download on RCRD LBL. As Jason Bentley said on KCRW this morning, the California Chamber of Commerce and tourism board should be hustling to license this track for their next 500 videos promoting the state.
To get the download, you’ll be taken to...
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Inside Forbes: The 9 Key Steps We've Taken to... →
Forbes, more than all but a handful of traditional publishers, has substantially overhauled its journalism operations for the online world. Here, Lewis DVorkin outlines the company’s really remarkable strategy.
Some of it is way more ambitious than many publications are ready to do, but there’s so much good meat here that it should be required reading for anyone trying to transition...
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Second Life's Former Embedded Journalist, on Why... →
James Wagner Au spent three years with Second Life early in its existence, covering the stories of that virtual community’s members as a journalist would. He credits that work to giving more nuance and understanding beyond Second Life of what was happening there. More social-media sites these days should consider doing the same, he argues.
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LAT: Xbox now used more for online entertainment... →
Fascinating shift as game console now finally attains its goal of being an entertainment console. I use mine to watch ESPN 3 and Xbox as much as I do to play games, so not completely a surprise, but fascinating nonetheless.
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Lou Grant regaling the LA Daily News staff - LA... →
Blast from the past, courtesy of Kevin Roderick at LA Observed: Ed Asner, then playing the editor of a fictional LA newspaper, visits the one-time Van Nuys HQ of my former employer, the Daily News.
Lots of LADN alums are reconnecting through a Facebook page, and planning a real-world reunion in early June. Should be MOST entertaining.
oldenough2burmom asked: Do you write for the Guardian? I love that newspaper.
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End | 30 Best Apps for Apple’s New iPad | Techland... →
If you’ve just picked up a new New iPad, Time has a nice rundown of 30 excellent apps that will take advantage of that snazzy Retina screen and all the rest. Lots of social media apps, some games and creation tools for art, photos and music in this list.
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If you have news, it will be aggregated and/or... →
If you’re an online news site, chances are that more than two-thirds of your traffic isn’t coming to you directly, because people just love your site and all it stands for. No, more likely they’re coming because of a link on a news aggregator of some sort.
This has a lot of implications: paywalls that reduce the ability of aggregators to share your connections make less and...
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How the Guardian's US move added 4m readers -... →
The Guardian moved its online operation to the US, jumped on coverage of the Occupy movement before just about anyone else, and rode that savvy journalistic decision to a huge increase in readership.
Now comes the hard part, continuing the momentum and growing a stronger US brand than it had even in England before. This interview with the Guardian’s editor here suggests a few lessons. Now...
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New Over 100 Incredible Infographic Tools and... →
This is almost ridiculously comprehensive, but if you want to make or see infographics, there’s a resource here.
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Hey, I'm cited in an MIT research paper! →
This is amusing. My friend Nick DeMartino sent along this link to a lengthy research paper from Geoffrey Long of MIT’s C3 consortium, calling for more, better, “higher” critical studies of transmedia.
In it, he cites a opinion piece I wrote two years ago for TheWrap.com, regarding, well, the need to figure out how we evaluate what transmedia is and who is qualified to judge it....
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A History of the English Language, in 10 brisk and... →
Droll, fast-moving animated history of the development of the English language. Interesting little factoid about the splintering of the language as it is spoken in dialects in countries such as Chinese as a second, third or whatever language, and as the Internet explosion increases the velocity of creation and distribution of new words of all kinds.
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Tankian, Egoyan to Speak at Hammer Museum on April... →
This looks interesting: two noted Armenian creative minds together at the Hammer in Westwood two days before Armenian Genocide Day in April. Serj Tankian and System of a Down put together a documentary on the genocide issues a couple of years back that my former boss (herself Armenian) helped publicize. And Atom Egoyan’s many interesting films include some that deal with the Turkish...
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The case against Google, or why it's doing all... →
This Gizmodo piece where Google is going wrong with its efforts to consolidate all its services and social media into One Big Thing got a LOT of attention in tech circles this week, and it should.
The piece is dead-on in its appraisal of several things:
The decline of search as the dominant way we access the Internet and its many uses and distractions;
The strategic missteps that put Google...
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National Day Of Unplugging: A Digital Detox →
Amusing to see the founder of the Webby Awards militating for getting OFF the Internet, even if only for 24 hours, beginning tonight. Check it out, and if you feel like it, check out too.
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Wolfram|Alpha Blog : Wolfram|Alpha Gets a Green... →
Just in time for spring gardening, Wolfram Alpha adds USDA data on plants. Here’s the blog page talking about what’s new. Wolfram Alpha is such a crazy cool info resource. Love that site for certain things.
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If TV Stations Won’t Post Their Data on Political... →
Great initiative by ProPublica to publish online the paper-only records of politics ads that all TV stations have to keep (and for which they are fighting FCC proposal to electronically publish).
I particularly love that ProPublica enlisted journalism school students in this work. It should be an assignment for students at every J-school in the country (nudge, nudge, USC Annenberg and Mizzou)....
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WashPo: Adobe releases Photoshop CS6 →
Hmm, downloading the Mac beta version of the newest Photoshop now. Will see how my experience stacks up against what WashPo and other reviewers are seeing with CS6.
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It’s a Nick Cave moment, first with this...
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Traffic Whoring and the Newsroom →
Actually, this “traffic whoring” strategy by Gawker sounds a lot like what the Wall Street Journal (and to a lesser extent, Bloomberg) have done in old-school fashion for a long time, though just not necessarily online. Reporters long cycled on and off breaking-news duty on a several-week basis. When they were on call, they’d jump on whatever was hitting. When they were off, they...
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Will Kindle's Free Samples Change the Structures... →
One of the curious things about SEO optimization is that it works by altering webpages so that they market themselves: that is, instead of creating ads external to the thing advertised, you re-shape the thing itself so that it’s easier to find and more interesting and attractive to link-clickers. And if we can do it with webpages, why not with, say, books? Why shouldn’t books undergo whatever...
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Chocolate as health food. The world is a good...
Mmmm, some of the better diet news of recent years has been that chocolate is actually good for you, though it needs to be more cacao/cocoa and less of the milk and sugar that too many Americans eat. The Wall Street Journal has a great piece on the issues here.
All this is just fine by me. I LOVE dark chocolate. So, grab a dark chocolate bar with at least 70-percent cacao and snap off a couple of...
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WSJ: OWS Protesters See Tweets Used Against Them →
Another useful, if somewhat painful, example of the double-edged nature of social media use in social organizing. “The Man” can invert these tools to their own purposes, as Occupy Wall Street protesters are finding out with prosecutors subpoenaing their Twitter records.
Remember: Every sword has two edges. Both can cut.
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Louis C. K. and Other Stand-Up Comedians Cut Out... →
Who needs a network, at least after you’ve made it semi-big in stand-up. Louis C.K.’s December experiment has unleashed the Dogs of Comedy, a rabble who’ll be recording their own performances and selling them directly to fans.
This is, actually, what’s been happening in the music business (and increasingly, the book business) with established (or “legacy”)...
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Lamill Coffee Among New Figat7th Tenants -... →
Delighted to see Lamill expand. They’re one of the great places in Silver Lake, and love the owners too.
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What do wo(men) want? Tech analysis suggests an... →
Cookies, pancakes, ice cream, pizza and cake. After that, more food, cars and phones. This is what we want, a new analysis of billions of online conversations suggests. Where’s Maslow when you need him?
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Easily manage all your social network settings →
BlissControl looks like a nifty little tool to let you quickly change settings like your photo, email, connected accounts, etc. on more than a dozen social-media sites.
And if you’re getting overwhelmed by social media, there’s even a “Delete account” option, for that truly blissful moment when you don’t have ANY social media anymore (like that’ll last).
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Hunger Games soundtrack hits iTunes
I’m fairly indifferent about “The Hunger Games” movie but check out the soundtrack, which just hit iTunes. T-Bone Burnett put together an amazing group of artists. Heard one of the tunes today (I think it was Arcade Fire) on KCRW. Exquisite.
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“Data from Localytics…reveals that people spend far more time with news...”
– From the Pew Center comes this:
Mobile Devices and News Consumption: Some Good Signs for Journalism | State of the Media
As the article points out later, nearly half of Americans own a smart phone now, and nearly one in five have a tablet (and probably more than that after last weekend’s...
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The Dos and Don’ts of Photography, by Charles...
BrainPickings.org’s Maria Popova found this great list of suggestions by Charles H. Traub, chair of the graduate MFA program in photography at the School of Visual Arts and former director of New York’s renowned Light Gallery, for his 2006 book, “The Education of a Photographer”
She writes that it’s “a fantastic anthology, co-authored by living legend Steven Heller,...
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How One Very Smart Man Broke the Bank at Three... →
Great piece about blackjack whiz Don Johnson, who won multi-million-dollar pots against three Atlantic City casinos in a month, taking advantage of the casinos’ competitiveness in a bad market to whittle the house odds down to nearly even, then winning about $15 million total from them.
I love that at one point the guy acknowledges that he is “not naive” about math. Uh, yeah....
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Time: How Top Chef's online ventures are ushering... →
I’m no fan of reality TV but love what “Top Chef” is doing with a companion web series called “Last Chance Kitchen” that allows one booted contestant another shot at getting back on the show in its late stages. About a quarter of the TV show’s audience went to the online series, and the results of the online series helped transform the outcome of the TV show....
