Wikileaks has posted a confidential document from the Church of Latter-day Saints called the Church Handbook of Instructions, which is a guide for the church's lay leadership and is not available either to parishioners or to the public. The LDS, following in the questionable steps of the Church of Scientology, has now issued multiple copyrightinfringement notices in an effort to get the information taken down. As we know, this strategy is unlikely to do anything but win the Mormons a share of the online community's unsympathetic attention, a quantity that until now Scientology has been enjoying alone.
It's well-known by now that Scientology's secret documents contain many indecipherable dictates and fantastical histories, like the following passage from the L. Run Hubbard-authored document describing the "Gorilla Goals":
This same pattern, but given in an amusement park with a single tunnel, a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel, was used between about 319 trillion years ago to about 256 trillion trillion years ago, a long span.
The Regeneration Tour is holding a poll to see which '80s and '90s pop artists should be in their 2009 career-rejuvenation concert, and Rick Astley is one of them. Astley is now leading the race with more than 2,500 votes; Tears for Fears and the Thompson Twins each have about 1,000 votes. Less successful so far are such Gen X ex-stars as Echo and the Bunnymen, the Bangles and Level 42, while that period's one-hit wonders (aside from Astley) are getting dusted. Wang Chung, the Psychedlic Furs and Men Without Hats have but 1,300 votes combined.
If Astley continues to dominate, just think of it -- hundreds of thousands of Americans could be RickRolled -- live. Think of all the piggy banks that would break, and cash flowing into local economies. It would be its own Astley-esque economic stimulus. I voted for him unreservedly (and Echo, and Wang Chung). So should you!
This year's Regeneration Tour has a slightly less ambitious grouping, headlined by former Go-Go Belinda Carlisle, ABC and Flock of Seagulls. The nationwide tour gets underway in August.
The line appeared on Google’s aptly named Hot Trends list, a utility offered by the company that offers a glimpse of what the online nation is most furiously searching for at any given moment. Hot Trends is Google’s answer to the “most viewed” pages that have become a fixture on so many news and entertainment websites. Popularity is the web’s basic unit of currency now, a dynamic that works about as well as it did in high school. Chances are you know the names of the head-turning, eye-candy types—and have been unable to avoid the loud-mouthed troublemakers. As for the rest of us, sorry guys, if you’re not in the in crowd, you’re just...in the crowd.
So imagine my surprise when something as bookish, stuffy and uncool as a line from Modernist poetry popped up on Hot Trends in one concentrated burst. It was more than surprise, actually—it was bafflement: what could explain a hike large enough to beat a field of popular searches that included “bikini-wearing teacher,” and “hulk hogan’s son?”
I searched for the Eliot phrase in hopes of finding the answer, but ironically, Google was of little help. All it turned up were a few links to the text of the poem, and a long list of news stories from April that had invoked the month’s legendarily clichéd cruelty to describe gas prices, General Motors’ stock performance, taxes, and Seattle Mariner Richie Sexon’s batting average. But this was May 9th, and the most recent of those stories was over a week old—whatever inspired people to start googling the phrase, it had had to have happened within the last few hours.
How many online videos did you watch in March? According to comScore, the U.S. collectively took in 11.5 billion, meaning an average of 38 videos for every man, woman and child from California to the New York Island. So unless you swallowed all of your 38, some other poor, overworked netizen was pulling your weight for you.
The average online video viewer, comScore said, watched 235 minutes over the month -- almost four hours. For many of us, I suspect, that means we spend more time watching online video than we do in the movie theater. Raising the next $100M question: When are we going to see the first high-budget Web-only movie? I think Iron Man II would do just fine online. ...
Let's take an informal poll: Have you spent more time in the last month watching online video than you have in a movie theater?
Digging further into the surprisingly diverse world of video game-based Web series, I found Jon Graham's "Arby 'n' the Chief," a highly amusing blend of machinima and live action whose two main characters are plastic action figurines from the "Halo" game series. (Can't link because there's cursing, etc.)
In a Toy Story-slash-Garfield sort of way, Arby and Master Chief come alive when their human owner Jon leaves for the day. The toys are bound by their passion for video games; Arby, the more mature and cerebral of the two, enjoys playing a variety of titles and prizes strategy and analysis over wanton violence. Chief just likes to blow dudes up. In the show's funniest touch, the voices of both characters come from the '80s-era voice simulator built in to early versions of Microsoft Windows. Whereas Arby speaks in well-formed, thoughtful sentences, Chief speaks in 'l33t' -- the orthographic shorthand gamers use to type hasty messages while playing. So when Chief surprises a terrified in-game opponent who screams, "What are you?!" Chief replies triumphantly, "i r guy who gon t33ch u less0n."
What the show gets at best is the way live, multiplayer games like Halo bring together disparate demographics, uniting pre-teens and 40-year-old bachelors in an uneasy alliance of mindless fun.
As with a lot of other YouTube content, this works best for the very niche it tries to capture, which in this case is males who play video games. "Arby 'n' the Chief" has consistently pulled in over 1.5 million views over its 11 episodes -- more evidence that the gaming subculture might be graduating from "sub"-hood as we sp33k.
At Tuesday's L.A. County Board of Supervisors meeting [PDF], the board added an ordinance to the county code's Title 13, which deals with public peace, morals and welfare, that makes piracy a legal nuisance. That means it's now subject to being "restrained, enjoined, abated and prevented" by county authorities. People hawking bootleg DVDs or other merchandise on the street can now be swept away and/or penalized.
If you read through the minutes of this meeting, you'll see that when the ordinance was called up for discussion, the only two speakers in attendance were representatives of the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the Motion Picture Assn. of America. Each says a brief piece, invoking the usual statistics about how worldwide piracy costs the L.A. area billions of dollars a year. The reps thank the supervisors for their attention, and the supervisors thank the reps for coming. Thank you sir -- no, thank you sir.
Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky then preaches the gospel of anti-piracy: piracy is a "really outrageous problem" involving an activity that is "just plain morally wrong." Yaroslavsky invokes the now ancient-school swashbuckle of comparing piracy to other types of theft in which copying is not involved: "It's no different than if you walk into a store and steal a bag of potato chips or rob a bank." (I like how bank robbery takes second billing to chip-lifting).
Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.
But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.
The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)
Microsoft is the latest entrant in the video contest parade, but they've actually come up with a fun slant. It's a so-called video relay, a video version of the exquisite corpse, a la Google's excellent Gmail movie. But Gmail asked makers to submit three-second clips, while Microsoft is asking for short film-length script submissions, where your film has to pick up right where the previous segment left off, and end with a suggestion meaty enough for the next wave to run with.
In the first entry, called "The Cube," an office drone gets a strange cube in the mail, and is asked to deliver it to a specific address or face dire consequences. There's an obvious "Matrix" + "Office Space" vibe--not a lot of what you would call story-story, but it definitely keeps moving.
There are so many video contests these days you've got to wonder how many people out there aren't making movies. It's probably a smart strategy to build an audience that consists entirely of contest entrants. That way they're sure to buy a ticket to the premiere.
In a move that makes the Washington Post seem younger than 130 years old, the WaPo website has begun hosting stories from TechCrunch, a major source of technology sector news and one of the Web's most popular blogs. This is another instance of the rise of Web syndication, the philosophy that says, basically, get your content posted in as many places as possible, and the bigger the better (the philosophy does not as yet include ways to make money). So the Post wins by adding a pulsing vein of instant tech news, and TechCrunch earns a place on a high-profile East Coast news platform. No doubt we'll be seeing more partnerships like this one.
Wikileaks has posted a confidential document from the Church of Latter-day Saints called the Church Handbook of Instructions, which is a guide for the church's lay leadership and is not available either to parishioners or to the public. The LDS, following in the questionable steps of the Church of Scientology, has now issued multiple copyright infringement notices in an effort to get the information taken down. As we know, this strategy is unlikely to do anything but win the Mormons a share of the online community's unsympathetic attention, a quantity that until now Scientology has been enjoying alone.
The Regeneration Tour
Hot Trends is just such a popularity contest. As I write this, a few of the top ten phrases are “
How many online videos did you watch in March? 
Digging further into the surprisingly diverse world of 
What the show gets at best is the way live, multiplayer games like Halo bring together disparate demographics, uniting pre-teens and 40-year-old bachelors in an uneasy alliance of mindless fun. 
In a move that makes the Washington Post seem younger than 130 years old, the WaPo website has 
