Throw a rock at a reality TV show, and it's likely to smash through the window of a mansion full of well-dressed models. Now: Run!
Yeah, if you're getting bored of the same old reality, then what about Discovery Channel's "The Alaska Experiment"? Through a Web casting call, the show is seeking a group of rugged individuals who are willing to wander off the beaten path:
"The challenge — if you dare to accept it — is to join a band of fellow explorers and journey through some of the harshest climates and roughest terrains in the world: the Alaskan wilderness."
Get your ice ax and parka ready, because only eight days remain in the second-season casting call for "The Alaska Experiment." Prospective participants ages 21 to 100 — sadly, my 101-year-old great-aunt just missed the cutoff — must digitally submit a written statement and photos from past adventures, and can also submit a video about why they should be picked.
Few contestants included videos on their profile submissions, but I did find one: Chad Israel, an actor who uploaded some very strange clips that don't exactly scream "I'm an Arctic climber." Site visitors can vote on the entrants they like, but Discovery doesn't say whether the most popular folks will be picked for the adventure.
Leading the pack are Joana Velez and Emily Levine, with 205 and 175 votes respectively. They are self-proclaimed actors whose bikini-photo-rich profiles seem to suggest they might not be cut out for the tundra. But Velez wants to undress those stereotypes: "people who don't know me would never guess how much of an adventurer I am... just for the looks! you see I have the steriotype of a girly-plastic-materialistic-girl which is why people call me Barbie! but trust me, Im nothing like that! ;)"
Congratulations, Barbie Jo. That statement just netted you another vote.
— Mark Milian
Photo credit: Dave / Your Scene, Los Angeles Times
Find a good story down there, fella? (Photo credit: Waldo Jaquith / Flickr user )
Here, Digger!
According to the L.A Times' nifty new Doggy Database, it turns out that 50 pooches in the area go by that very name.
Raising the question: How long would it take 50 dogs named "Digger"
at 50 computers to submit the exact same set of stories that Digg users
have already submitted?
Also receiving an honorable mention is the guy who went a step further and named his pup "Digger dawg."
But, as often happens in discussions of Digg, "Buzz" is getting unfairly left out. There are actually 124 L.A. dogs named Buzz. I was shocked to find that no local owners named their dogs "Delicious," even though dogs abound with names like "Dr. Ruff" and "Betti Spaghetti."
Four local canines are named "Google," making it, according to the database, the 9,100th most common L.A. dog name.
If you find any funny Web 2.0-related dogs, please send along and I'll add to the post.
Having read about the Republican National Committee's new "Barack Obama Audacity Watch" campaign, a web page where the RNC tracks less-than-glowing stories about Obama -- I went to Google to find out more.
Under the motto, "Exposing Barack Obama and the Radical Left," the site -- Audacitywatch.com --consists mostly of opinion-heavy, fact-light criticism of the Illinois Senator. One representative post is entitled, "Marxists Support Obama??!!" and another asks "Does Barack Obama Have Narcissistic Personality Disorder?" In the latter case, after offering an excerpt of the Mayo Clinic's definition of NPD, the post concludes thus:
Barack Obama says, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Are we sure that the “we” he means isn’t the Royal “We” (Pluralis Majestatis) – as in the Queen of England saying, “WE” – meaning “God and I” – ”are not amused?”
Perhaps someone should give Obama’s medical records — especially the mental health sections — a thorough re-examination.
Well, I knew the RNC was not Obama's No. 1 fan, but this didn't sound like the kind of insinuation they'd make, especially if all they had was the Queen of England argument. Where had I taken a wrong turn?
After a bit of step-retracing, I figured out my error. Instead of Googling "audacity watch" (with a space), I'd searched for "audacitywatch." The former yielded the RNC page, and the latter this other site, by an anonymous but non-RNC-affiliated person from Washington state.
Hmm. I couldn't help but wonder why the RNC would develop a feature that shared a name and basic theme with a website that already existed. The URL Audacitywatch.com was created on April 30th, three months to the day before the RNC's "Audacity Watch" page went live. Given the name overlap, and the way a lot of people search for sites just by typing the name directly into the address bar -- didn't the RNC anticipate any reader confusion?
I contacted them to ask. First of all, did they know about the other Audacity Watch when they were planning their own?
"We did not," wrote Amber Wilkerson, the RNC's Deputy Press Secretary, in an e-mail to me. She also noted that there was "no link at all" between the two sites. "I actually haven't seen it."
You tell me: Does the RNC deserve a demerit for failing to find the other Audacity Watch before it went ahead and launched its own? Or are we savvy Web surfers smart enough to tell the difference?
Lizz Winstead is the creator of "Shoot the Messenger," a live show that focuses on the media. (Photo credit: Mindy Tucker)
Earlier this month, Lizz Winstead invited two bloggers from the women's blog Jezebel to her weekly live show, Thinking and Drinking, in downtown Manhattan. A few days later she posted on her Huffington Post blog a scathing assessment of her guests, Maureen “Moe” Tkacik and Tracie “Slut Machine” Egan, complete with video bits in which Egan theorized about why she had never been raped: “I think it has to do with the fact that I am, like, smart," and Tkacik said she had been date-raped but "I always felt very, like, safe around this guy, even after he date-raped me.” She did not report him because she “had better things to do, like drinking more.”
For her part, Winstead, the co-creator of "The Daily Show," hectored her guests for not acknowledging that they are role models while also telling don't-try-this-at-home stories of her own.
Winstead's post linked back to the complete hour-long footage (sorry, can't link to it here--too many bad words). I recommend it to anyone who (like me) gets perverse pleasure watching generation gaps in action, or to anyone wondering about where feminism is going.
I emailed the editor of Jezebel, Anna Holmes (who is an acquaintance) to see if she and Moe Tcacik and Tracie Egan would talk about what happened now that some time has passed. Anna had written a post ruminating on what went wrong that night, calling the whole thing a "shame." But she declined to talk about it further, saying that they had all "moved on."
Winstead, though, agreed to an interview....
--Maria Russo
At first it seemed as if your Huffington Post piece was going to set off a huge discussion about sexual freedom, date rape, the feminist generation gap... Some blogsweighed in (and Tracie and Moe defended themselves in one college student's blog's comments) but now it seems to have faded from view. Did that surprise you, that the discussion you were trying to start sort of went nowhere?
I guess it faded from view –- well, for now, sure, yeah. But what I want to do in the next six months, I really want to participate in a panel of young feminists and older feminists. I don’t want to moderate it. I want to be on it -– to talk about how women do feminism, how older women and younger ones do it. When I had the Jezebel women on the show that was my intent, but there was clearly a disconnect between myself and these women. I probably sensed that there would be a little bit of that, just generationally. But I don’t understand the profundity of just how disconnected we were on issues of sexual freedom...
I read their blog, so I knew they were very open about their sexuality. I just didn’t expect a complete lack of talking about protection, and what it means to meet strange men and go out in the world to do that, live that way. I was hoping we’d get to: "Do you have any great new ways of putting on a condom?" But we never got there, because I think there were certain parts of the interview that stopped me right in my tracks.
What was it that threw you?
I think what happened was — they got drunk. And I’m hearing reactions from people who are saying, "But the show is called 'Thinking and Drinking'!" Well, I’ve had 50 people on my show who chose not to get drunk and who talked to me, and who actually watched the interviews I’ve done beforehand and understood what they were coming into.... Which is, if Stephen Colbert were to do "The Colbert Report," then he took off his outfit and interviewed the guests as himself. That’s what we do. The first part is comedy, a fake morning news show. The second part of my show is, I sit down with people in the media for pretty serious conversations. We’ve talked to Phil Dray, who has written marvelous books on racism, Rachel Maddow ...when you look at the list of people I interview it’s clearly not, "Well, let’s get drunk with Craig Unger." We sent the women the links, and everyone knew what we were going to be talking about.
I’m a pretty controversial character in my own right — people can question anything I say and challenge me. But with some of their responses, I was just like, "What the ...? I’m not sure what that means?"
Looking at the video, it seems at times that they were just trying for comedy.
The thing about doing edgy humor is you either get to succeed, or you get to fail. If the humor isn’t working so much so that I -– as someone who does that kind of material –- doesn’t even follow you... I mean, I made a joke about abortion that got a huge laugh. I don’t equate abortion as a moral issue. It’s something that only affects me. But if you’re going out to have sex without a condom with strange men –- that’s a moral issue.
Why, exactly, are the two so different?
I think anyone who is writing about sex and their sexual lives -– I referred to them as role models in the piece. I referred to them that way not because I believed they were but because as I read the comments, it was other women defining them that way. The bottom line is, if you are out there and you are talking about your life, you have a column, you are putting it out there –- you sort of don’t get to choose whether someone looks up to you. That’s the good and the bad thing. I don’t think anyone chooses to be a role model –- if your behavior is listened to and followed, people are going to emulate you.
Otherwise just write at home –- don’t put it out there. Doesn’t it mean you want people to see it? To have a dialogue about it and think about it? I know people do think about what I say and I take it to heart.... When you mess up, people call you out on that too. Which is why I put it on the Huffington post, including the things I said that I’m not proud of -– and I didn’t want to expunge comments.
Here's a spreadsheet where I've tabulated the articles that people sent me and when, noting which show up in the Knol results, and which don't. If you have written any that aren't appearing in the Knol search, send them along and I'll add them to the list.
When I asked Google why it was taking so long for the articles to appear, a spokesperson wrote back the following: "There may be a delay until knols appear in the search results at knol.google.com. This delay varies from one knol to another and is based on numerous factors."
Pretty vague, but the takeaway is clear: Unlike Wikipedia, Knol's articles are being put through some kind of quality control process before they're indexed, whether it's to suss out spam, copyrighted information, porn or maybe just poorly written prose. Since Google won't elaborate, we're left to guess. Thing is, if you look at the articles on my spreadsheet, none of them are spammy, porny or badly written. So why, for instance, does this entry on Cambodia not show up in Knol's results, even though it was written last Thursday?
Google's reluctance to be transparent, while never surprising, is at least puzzling in this instance. This product has been positioned as a public information resource, created by public users. It would seem that both readers and contributors should have a basic sense of how their content is being treated.
Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont, hosts of "Tekzilla." (Photo credit: Dave Getzschman / For the Los Angeles Times.)
I've a feeling we’re not in Hollywood anymore.
But you might like it here too, Toto. This is Dogpatch, the bayside sliver of east San Francisco that’s home to the Internet TV start-up Revision3. Through the doors of this old brick warehouse and up the stairs, there’s a roomful of people who make a point of ignoring the old rules of the television business. Starting with the TV part. Revision3 is home to 19 original shows, 10 of which are filmed weekly in its on-site studio. But you won’t find any of them by flipping channels.
You see, here in Dogpatch, they’re setting television free — releasing the concept from its poison prison of glass and metal, so it can return to its native meaning: watching from anywhere.
And so far, people are. Revision3 was started in 2005 by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, the guys behind Digg.com, the popular site where users vote on the best news stories of the day. Rose co-hosts the show “Diggnation,” a weekly rundown of the site’s top stories, which Revision3 beams out to about 200,000 viewers per 40-minute episode. He has become a model for the kind of smart celebrity the technology scene loves — people who are entertaining while the camera’s rolling, and enterprising when it isn’t.
“What’s working are these host-driven shows,” said Revision3 Chief Executive Jim Louderback. “The ones where you’ve got an engaging host with a proven ability to aggregate social networks around them online, and who are great at talking about their passions.”
Revision3 owes that approach to another pioneering enterprise of which it’s a genetic descendant. The now-defunct cable network TechTV built a loyal audience earlier in the decade and minted many of the technology world’s best-known stars. A half-dozen TechTV alumni, including Rose and Louderback, currently fill Revision3’s roster.
But even with the overlap and the similar programming philosophy, it’s a lot different this time, said Patrick Norton, who got his television start at TechTV and now co-hosts Revision3’s popular techno-variety show “Tekzilla.”
“It’s incredibly expensive to launch a new cable channel,” Norton said. “Even if you do spend an enormous amount of money these days, you’re probably going to end up in the nosebleed sections of digital cable.
“Our studio cost nothing by comparison,” Norton said of Revision3’s state-of-the-art, high-definition setup. “And by being online, we can target anyone with a broadband connection, which gives us huge potential audience all across the United States without having to sign a single distribution deal.”
But Revision3’s biggest asset is its stable of Web personalities who — even if they’re not familiar to the general public — are ubiquitous in tech circles. Louderback points to a website called Twitterholic, which tracks the 100 most popular users on the messaging service Twitter.
Joss Whedon's hit web musical "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" has come out of its week-long hibernation. The show, originally available only on Dr.Horrible.com and iTunes, will now appear on a number of web sites, including Hulu.com, MySpace, and eventually Yahoo!, AOL and others. (There's a version on AOL with Spanish subtitles but I don't think it's licensed.)
According to a press release from Hulu, this 'Horrible' run will last four months, after which the fate of the good doctor is uncertain. We know there will eventually be a DVD release of this first installment, and then, probably, a sequel.
Some of us also think that, because the full three-episode cycle clocks in at about 42 minutes -- just the length necessary for an hour-long television slot minus commercials -- we might actually see the show hit the old fashioned airwaves. Maybe as a holiday special or something.
In a blog entry on the Hulu site, Whedon entreats viewers to watch the newly revived show: "HULU hosted Dr. Horrible for free for a week, which we, the mushortio*-makers,
are forever grateful for, and now you can stream it for free on their site. How
awesome is that? I know, you're humbled. Stop groveling. Just remember: the more
you watch it, the more you will understand about life and the universe and
hydroponics."
Also, the more cash Whedon and company will make -- this run may be free but it ain't commercial free. If you choose to watch the full version, you'll get a preview of what it might look like on the boob tube: Hulu has plugged up Dr. H's gaps with a set of shiny new advertisements.
And I for one say, it's about time. All that hippie free-ness was making me nervous.
An image of "Revok" from a graffiti video on YouTube, and the Riverside County booking photo of Jason Williams.
"Revok" is a prolific graffiti artist who also has a heavy presence on YouTube (see video below). As it turns out, the two might not go so well together. As KNBC reported here, Indio police arrested Jason Williams in Los Angeles last week on vandalism charges after they traced fingerprints from various tags and street art back to the L.A-based Williams. Most of the tagging in question apparently took place during the Coachella music festival.
Revok is not a small-timer. He appears in a number of online videos about graffiti, including at least one where he spraypaints a wall himself -- and others where he is interviewed and profiled as a well-known Southland graffiti artist. In this video interview, Revok says, "More than half my life now has been spent doing graffiti. I've gone to jail I don't know how many times, had people trying to kill me. There's really no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for that."
The graffiti in many of the YouTube videos is ornate and expertly rendered. Revok is clearly a talented artist. But ...
"No matter what you call it," an Indio police spokesman told KNBC, "it's defacing public and private property.''
For repeat offenders, felony vandalism (for damage greater than $400) is punishable by a jail term of up to one year, a fine of up to $5,000, or both. Not what you would call a pot of gold.
In 1969, 14-year-old Jerry Levitan sneaked into John Lennon's hotel room with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and the idiosyncratic music titan was gracious enough to agree to a short interview.
This film, "I Met the Walrus," is the audio of that interview set stunningly to animation by Josh Raskin. The film was nominated for an Academy Award last year and is now being featured at YouTube's Screening Room section, where it has garnered 650,000 views. Top marks...
GaryVee says: "It's just a matter of time." (Photo by David Sarno)
Gary Vaynerchuk, star of the popular online tasting show Wine Library TV, and a self-styled internet businessman, blogger and web celebrity, sat down with me in Westwood last week to talk about how you get big on the Internet, and where it's all going to lead.
Why does personal branding seem to be so well-suited to the Internet, whereas it may not have been in the era of big media?
It's become a democracy. Me, Gary Vaynerchuck--80,000 viewers a day--I would've had to come to L.A., work at a bar and be a wine guy, get lucky, bump into somebody, and go audition. But now the cost of entry to build your personal brand is zero. That's what's changed. I don't think the fundamentals of what gets you to watch this or me to watch that has changed.
I always tell people: it's the Conan O' Brien rule. I've been on Conan. Had I been on Johnny Carson 20 years ago, I'd probably be a bigger brand. Had I been on Ed Sullivan 30 years earlier than that, I'd be a phenomenon. Because back then there were less places for the eyeballs to go.
But getting 500,000 or a million views on an Internet show--that's going to be there. And those are going to be the players.
You use a lot of social technologies to advertise your content and yourself. Can you win a mainstream audience with that stuff?
99% of the people on the earth have no idea what Twitter is. You start getting even more nerdy than that, getting into places like Seesmic--places to build your brand--I know I'm sitting on a huge knowledge base that most people don't understand. I'm going to ride that. That's why everybody's interested in what I'm doing.
But most mainstreamers don't understand this technology...
I don't care. Because it's not about today. I'm in a different place. I've built a successful multimillion dollar business. I don't have to make $40,000 a year right now, or $200,000. To me, it's this: [he taps his watch and smiles]. I just keep hitting my watch. That's all I do. I spend hours a day just tapping my watch--it's my move. It's just a matter of time. Period, end of story, game over.
You've said you want to own the New York Jets eventually -- but what does that have to do with wine?
Wine's a vehicle. But it's a massive passion--I love it, and it'll never go away. I want to create a world where you're not branded one way. I want to be a social media expert, and a marketing guru, and a big time wine guy, and a jets fan, and a family guy, and a sensitive guy, and a wrestling maniac. That's who I am. I want to create a new package that hasn't been seen before. America has always wanted to pigeonhole people. Your network and your managers and your producers have wanted you to stay focused 'on brand.' I want my brand to be my DNA.
You taught yourself to be a wine taster starting before you were old enough to drink--by eating dirt and cigars and other strange stuff. But really, all that enthusiasm and you never tried the real thing?
I didn't. You'd meet my mom and you'd understand. Never.
I'd love to say I did. It's sexier. It'd be a great marketing thing, right? Like the 16-year-old drinking wine? I didn't. I wasn't a curious kid. I've never done a single drug. I've only been drunk three times in my life. And I'm in the wine profession.
I like being in control. It's probably the whole content and business thing--it all ties into the same genetics. Plus I come from a heritage of a lot of people being drunk all the time. Russians and stuff, so I'm turned off by that kind of thing.
Do you mind? I'm blogging here.. (Photo courtesy flickr user rpongsaj.)
Brian Stelter of the NYT has an interesting article about a new form of netroots customer service.
Companies like Comcast are monitoring blogs and other other social media channels for product-related complaints. So when a 20-year-old kid posted a blog entry about a concern he had with his cable system, he was surprised to get back a helpful message from a Comcast rep.
"It feels like nobody ever really reads my blog,” the blogger said. “Nobody has left a comment in months."
Some people are screaming Big Brother about Comcast's shady practice of listening to their concerns. And I know where they're coming from. Just because you publish your thoughts on the Web, it doesn't give Comcast the right to violate your privacy by actually reading them.
In the spirit of adapting every digital medium (text, image, video) to every possible length format, and putting it on every device at every possible time, we now we have the latest entry: 12Seconds.
It's a "video status platform" where, instead of sending out micro-blogs a la Twitter, you now update your friends micro video blogs.
Here are my two dueling takes:
Skeptical:
-- There are already an uncountable number of video sites that allow users to upload not just-12 second videos, but videos of all lengths. Why is narrowing the video universe to 12 seconds a feature?
Because anything longer is boring.
The scientists here at the 12seconds dodecaplex have conducted
countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it
takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video
viewing.
-- This service doesn't appear to have implemented Twitter's best feature***, which is the leader/follower structure, where everything you write gets beamed to all your friends and fans. 12Seconds doesn't have followers. So how is everyone going to know you just posted a video update? Unless...Twitter?
-- Text is better for updates because you can scan lots of entries in a short time. Videos--even 12 seconds ones--are not scannable. Encouraging:
-- But, of course, video can do a lot that text can't. Instead of telling your friends you just bought Spiderman #1 on eBay for $2,500 -- you can actually hold the comic up and show them. Nerd power!
-- The creators are right that in the info-overloaded world, shorter is better. By architecturally enforcing shortness, they may actually be able to create a new micro-medium, like Twitter did. It's not true that "anything longer is boring," of course, but if the video you're watching is only 12 seconds, the downside is pretty minimal, even when it is boring.
-- May not actually need to re-invent the Twitter follow-wheel. This service functions well as a Twitter enhancer.
***UPDATE: David Speiser, one of the co-founders, writes in: We do have a leader/follower structure exactly like Twitter's. You must be a registered user and logged in to use that feature.
One of the knocks on Wikipedia, the sprawling, 2.4-million article behemoth of an encyclopedia, is that all the good stuff's already been written about. In order to make a new and substantial contribution, you have to tackle some Extreme Arcana, such as this new article about the SS Königin Luise, or this one reprising an episode of "30 Rock" or this one paying homage to a defunct soft drink called Grapico.
So you'd think that there'd be a land rush to grab the big broad topics on Google's new Wikipedia competitor, Knol. Not just for the pride of being the first to write about, say, George Washington or water --but for the money. Authors of Knol articles (or 'knols' -- for units of knowledge) have the option of "monetizing" their entries, meaning you can have Google place ads on the page, and partake in the revenue generated therefrom.
But if you clicked on G.W. or water, you will have seen that nobody's staked a claim in those famous (and potentially lucrative) topics, nor is there yet an article on air, Barack Obama, John McCain, Google, dog (although there is an iffy one on Dog Genetics), Tom Cruise, 4chan, "Dark Knight", or even "Star Wars". Where's the Internet's famous entrepreneurial spirit, here? If Knol hits it big and ends up replacing Wikipedia, think of all the money that could be made simply by owning a few major articles. Michael Jackson anyone? Queen Elizabeth? Jesus Christ!
To get the ball rolling, I've just written a mediocre Knol about the freezie machine in our cafeteria. Anyone who wants to know about the frozen beverage options downstairs at the L.A. Times building will find themselves partly informed about their choices. The good news is, if you know more, you're free to help make the article better.
Creating an article is fairly intuitive -- you don't have to be the master of reams of obscure design shorthand like you do on Wikipedia. What's not as clear is how long it would take Google's new project to catch up to the largest, most widely read encyclopedia in the known universe. For starters, it helps to know who you're competing against.
If anyone decides to give article writing a try, post your links here so we can enjoy your handiwork.
UPDATE 2 (3:51 p.m.): I'm starting to think there's something off about Knol's search mechanism. It's tough to get almost anything to show up in the search results, even articles that we know are already in there.
UPDATE 3: A Google spokesperson wrote to me: "There is no problem with Knol's search function, it just takes some time for
knols to become searchable." Hmm...it's not a problem that it can three days for an article to appear?
The "Dr. Horrible" creators sent me some data about the number of views/streams for the three acts of "Dr. Horrible." Apparently, there is some lag in the way the Hulu streams are tabulated (the show streamed through the Hulu player), so these may not reflect the final totals. The show was taken down Sunday night after a one-week run. The creators are deciding how and when to re-post the show. Numbers:
*This total would probably be quite a bit higher if DrHorrible.com hadn't crashed for most of a day last week. The above totals also exclude iTunes downloads; the "Dr. Horrible" episodes have been among iTunes' most downloaded TV shows since they premiered.
Two and a quarter million streams in five days -- or about 450,000 streams a day -- is a significant number, especially for clips that are 15 minutes long. To compare, this week's most-viewed videos on YouTube:
So that's a total of about 1.95 million views for the top three over five days, while Dr. Horrible scored closer to 2.2 million. This is not an exact comparison because the YouTube clips were not linked by a brand (though two of them were associated with movie advertising campaigns, one of which was among the biggest ever). Still, the viewership numbers paint a reasonable picture of how many views the Internet's most-watched videos can generate in an average week.
Conclusion: "Dr. Horrible" was able to get YouTube-topping numbers without spending a dollar on paid promotion. It would've been nice to see how many more views the show could've racked up if it had stayed live, but the producers should be able to leverage the initial success to get some advertising for the second run.
In the hands of magician and hypnotist Derren Brown, the mind can seem like a blank slate.
This is the British “mentalist” who once visited a series of stores in New York City and tried to pay for his purchases with scraps of blank paper.
The trick didn’t always work — although he was able to buy a $4,500 diamond ring from a serious looking jeweler, the fellow minding the hot dog cart angrily refused the phony cash.
There’s a whole library of Brown’s mind needles buried in the YouTube haystack. (Though many of the clips have been on YouTube for nearly two years, few appear to be authorized copies).
In another great video, Brown teaches a man at the greyhound track how to get a payout from a losing ticket: Simply insist to the person behind the window that your worthless stub is a winner: "This is the dog you're looking for."
One after another, confused tellers find themselves pushing piles of cash through the window like automatons.
And in this astonishing video, some advertising consultants are taught a lesson about how subliminal messages work. It worked on me: I haven't been able to get this one out of my head since I first saw it.
It’s hard to decide if Brown himself is an illusion — an actor who hires other actors to participate in his unbelievable scenarios.
But the more Brown you watch, the more you start to believe what you already know: There’s nothing magic at all about the human mind’s susceptibility to distraction and manipulation.
TechCrunch's rendering of an open source web tablet. (Adapted from original)
Yesterday, Michael Arrington of the popular technology blog TechCrunch issued a challenge to his circuit-savvy readership: “I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web.” In other words, a computer that consists of nothing but a thin, flat, touch-sensitive screen that can sit in your lap. No device like that exists yet, Arrington wrote. “So,” he said. “let’s design it.”
Apple’s iPhone has proven how much a computer can do without a keyboard, mouse, or the need to be anchored to a particular location. With the exception of a few complicated kinds of applications — games and moviemaking software, mostly — almost all of what we do with our computers can now be done online. (Can you remember the last time you sat down at your PC and didn’t open a browser?)
Personal computers, actually, are not really about computing anymore, at least not in the traditional sense. What they’ve become are windows onto the online landscape: tools to seek, find and share the world’s information.
One implication for newspapers is that tablets could become a kind of midpoint between office computers and printed media. You’ll be able to sit with your screen at the kitchen table and read your favorite publications while you sip your morning coffee. But because the device is online, you’ll be able to read brand new news, not just the day old stuff you get from the bag on your front porch. That might help go a bit further in separating newspapers’ biggest strength — news — from their biggest weakness: paper.
There aren’t many people around with the influence to recruit all the people you’d need to build a sophisticated new product from scratch — and without being paid for it. But Arrington is off to a good start. He posted his call to action Monday afternoon, and by Tuesday, thousands of people had written saying they’d like to contribute to the project.
“We can access the best of the best,” Nik Cubrilovic, the co-editor of TechCrunchIT, the business-tech arm of TechCrunch, wrote in an e-mail. “The people who have contacted us *are* the people who have previously worked for the companies the open source products compete with.”
A bit of idealism is required to believe that a group of hobbyists will be able to create a product that Apple, Google, and Microsoft couldn’t. But it sounds good on paper.
World champ Steven Purugganan. (Screen grab from YouTube)
Have you seen the new sports fad where kids stack cups into pyramids at blinding speed? Check the clip at bottom, from Steven Purugganan, whiz kid of speed stacking.
Apparently this pastime has been around a little while and has grown into a competitive sport with a governing body and everything. What's fun is the subculture of it that involves kids videotaping themselves doing timed practice runs, and posting the results on YouTube.
At first it looks like the films are speeded up, but after watching a bunch of them, it's clear that the kids really are that fast, and that stacking demands a level of dexterity and speed that could only be possible in this Xbox-centered universe.
The 10-year-old Purugganan holds the overall world records in all three of the sport's stacking categories, including the Cycle, where the competitor must create three different arrangements of the 12 cups as fast as he can. Purugganan has done it with an official time of 6.21 seconds.
Can anyone think of any other sports where a 10-year-old dominates all age groups?
-- Twitturly, the site that tracks what people are most frequently linking to on Twitter (and an excellent resource for story-starved web journalists), "is slowly dying," according to a banner on its site. As LouisGray.com explains, this is the result of a policy change by Twitter that limits the number of unauthenticated API requests to 100 per IP per hour. So to services like Twitturly -- the ones that depend on asking Twitter a lot of questions -- the faucet is being shut off. Hopefully they'll be able to find a way around it or else, see you in Twitter Heaven (with the Fail Whale).
**CORRECTION: Originally I wrote that Xeni was apologizing "for the Violet Blue post flush." But as has been pointed out to me, her apology was not for the act of removing the posts, but rather for Boing Boing's imperfect handling of the resulting blog storm.
As this ZDNet article tells it, the British government is considering proposals to broaden the privacy protection powers of the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), an independent watchdog whose purpose is to "promote access to official information and to protect personal information."
A proposal for beefing up the ICO, reported ZDNet, recommended that the group be given the power to raid companies or entities they suspect of committing a "data breach."
How great is this? A privacy task force strike team? At the slightest hint that a SSN might be sitting on an unprotected laptop somewhere, these guys (and women) helicopter in, secure the premises, handcuff the privacy slobs and gingerly rescue the laptop, perhaps carrying it out in a baby blanket, as triumphant orchestra music plays.
Or, even better, how about this scene:
A little old lady is talking to a telemarketer.
Telemarketer: "Your social security number, please?"
Lady: "Do I have to?"
Telemarketer: "Yes, I'm afraid so."
Lady: "All right, then. It's 553--wha??"
Suddenly, a masked crusader glides in, grabs the phone, and--SLAM!--swiftly hangs it up.
Lady: "Oh, thank you, mister! I wasn't sure how to get off the line."
ICO: "All in a day's work, ma'am."
Lady: "But, who are you?"
ICO: "Just call me Privacy Man. And remember, just because it's a Social Security Number, doesn't mean your friends should know it."
And with that, Privacy Man disappears into the bright night.
Starting with the stare. That 10 to 20 second stare from Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) was acting genius. And that melded seamlessly into the catchy, and might I add well-sung, "On the Rise"* harmony between Penny (Felicia Day) and Dr. Horrible. Technically, a great illustration of character development through song ... a hummable ditty!
Who knew Doogie was this good? Well, anyone who has seen him on stage and in anything he's ever been in -- but still, this is a bit surprising. A way-more-than-decent actor, but occasionally not in the greatest material. I guess "sometimes there's a third, even deeper level and that one is the same as the surface level." The individual stand-up scenes, the coin wash face-to-face talks with Penny, and the quick but hilarious repartee with his evil sidekick Moist ("At my most bad ass I make people feel like they want to take a shower,") illustrate why NPH got an Emmy nom this morning for "How I Met Your Mother."
Oh, and I really hope we get to meet Bad Horse (the Thoroughbred of Sin) and some other members of the Evil League of Evil.
Capt. Hammer (Nathan Fillion) is showing signs of Caleb (the demonic preacher from "Buffy"). That was pretty evil of him to bring Penny into his personal spat with Dr. Horrible. Evil of him? Do I feel a plot twist coming on ... nah! Couldn't be -- could it? Am I questioning myself? Let's stop this.
The songs. I hope Joss puts out a greatest hits album (yes, I really said album). Act I and its tunes were a bit more fun, but "On the Rise," "Seeds You're Sowing" and "Brand New Day" were excellent. With Dr. Horrible (PhD in Horribleness) embracing his dark side, I can't wait to see the climactic third act.
Daniel Craig, who plays Bond, and Bond girl Olga Kurylenko. (Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / EPA)
"Quantum of Solace," as a title, has a modicum of dullness. But from the trailer that's now circulating online, the new James Bond movie looks like it might follow on the heels of its dark, Daniel Craig-led predecessor in reviving a franchise that had descended into schmaltz, explosions, and formula.
If you haven't seen the trailer, check it out by clicking on the above link (caution: doesn't seem to work on a Mac). The player, by a company called Vividas, will instantly seize your computer and begin playing the trailer at full screen size.
But the vividness and resolution is impressive--it almost looks like you're watching a DVD. (For a kick, compare the streaming quality to the same trailer on YouTube.)
Also like the protected parts of a DVD, you can't fast-forward, pause, or rewind either--an irritating and un-webby feature. The software didn't let me take a screen shot either, so I'm thinking there's all kinds of anti-piracy software built into the Vividas player (their web site offers a pledge to deliver content owners "ultimate security through advanced Digital Rights Management.") Not sure what that means, since we all know how long those promises last.
Still, the player is pretty darned hi-fi, and it's a good example of how online video technology is continuing to evolve. Pretty soon DVDs, along with old vacuum parts and boxes of polaroids, will be among the funny things kids find in the back of the hallway closet.
The blog entry was a comment on a rule reportedly being drafted by the Bush administration's Department of Health and Human Services. The rule would threaten to cut funding to medical care providers which refused to hire personnel who preferred not to perform abortions for religious or moral reasons.
Commentators have noted that the proposal's definition of abortion is so broad that it could include, as the Times' Countdown to Crawford blog wrote, "multiple forms of contraception, including some birth control pills, IUDs and emergency 'morning after' contraception." (C2C also posted about this situation).
If the Administration goes through with this draft proposal, it will launch a dangerous assault on womens' health.
The majority of Americans oppose this out of touch position that redefines contraception as abortion and represents a sustained pattern of the Bush Administration to reject medical and sound science in favor of a misguided ideology that has no place in our government.
Digg can send thousands of visitors to a website at a time, a level of traffic concentration that can bring down even large and relatively well-established sites. It's probable that the Speaker.gov site rarely gets spikes of this size, and so -- like many websites that get Dugg, Drudged, Slashdotted or even Yahoo! Buzzed -- they'll have to learn the hard way that there's no such thing as too much bandwidth.
When I called Pelosi's office, the spokesperson I talked to did not know there was a problem with the site. When he tried to load it himself, it did not come up. He said he'd look into it and call back.
UPDATE (12:19 p.m.): The site appears to be back up and running.
In a stipulation issued by the court, the two parties agreed that all data from YouTube user logs would be anonymized -- that is, the IP addresses and user names would be removed from all viewing data and substituted with placeholder values. Translation: Now, no Viacom employees or outside legal experts will know it was me who watched Miss USA fall down 300 times in a row last night.
But the real subtext of this controversy has taken a few days to bubble to the surface. Google may have narrowly maneuvered out of the potential PR disaster, but who's to say there won't be another company suing them for their logs next week? In 2006, the Justice Department subpoenaed Google for two months' worth of search data. Google fought, and won, like they did this time. But the streak has to end sometime.
Neither Google's search engine nor YouTube ever ask users to explicitly, clearly agree to having their behavior permanently logged. After all, if they did, a lot of people might say no. And though YouTube has a page called, "How do I clear my Viewing History," this is, at best, misleading. Clearing your history in this manner appears only to remove the videos that you've watched sinceyour browser window has been open -- and not the endless perma-log YouTube stores of all the videos you've ever watched. The help page above barely makes this distinction. I asked YouTube about this yesterday, and am still waiting for an answer.
JibJab, a distributor of electronic greeting cards, is back in the saddle with its first video co-starring Barack Obama and John McCain. The terms "Jib Jab" and "jibjab.com" held spots at No. 2 and 7 on Google Hot Trends this morning -- so people are hearing about it.
The "Time for Some Campaignin'" eCard opens with President Bush, outfitted in flannel and cowboy boots with a banjo in hand, being carried out of the White House. It goes on to poke fun at McCain's age, Obama's lofty promises and both candidates' high-volume campaign spending. There's even a cameo by a Hillary Clinton (who recently asked donors to contribute to her next presidential bid in 2012). Clinton sings, "I'll be back in four years, heck it ain't all that far! Oh it's time for some campaignin'!"
The spoof of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" might spark a bit of déjà vu. JibJab was in the spotlight during the last election for its "This Land" video, a 2 1/2-minute clip that spread like wildfire four years ago, back when "viral" was just a wee little concept. That cartoon, set to the Woodie Guthrie classic "This Land is Your Land," depicts Bush drawing on a map with crayons, while "liberal wiener" John Kerry dances around in a hot dog costume.
"Dr. Horrible," which is now the No. 1 TV show (and TV season) on iTunes, is off to a roaring start.
Roaring so hard, in fact, that the DrHorrible.com site was down most of the day Tuesday because it couldn't handle all the incoming requests.
The show creators said at peak, the site was getting 200,000 hits per hour. In fact, a representative from their web hosting company, Vireo Verio.com, called to tell them the site had crashed when, at one point, 1,000 people tried to access it in one second.
According to "Dr. Horrible" writer Maurissa Tancharoen, the representative told the creators that the traffic to DrHorrible.com had been "insanely huge."
Though the creators had anticipated being able to handle the traffic loads with a large bandwidth plan, Tancharoen said they upgraded to the largest "monster" plan their provider offered, which comes with a backup server in case the primary fails.
In addition, the Hulu player that originally wasn't allowing international viewers to watch has been tweaked so the episode is now available everywhere.
Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)
Dr. Horrible is good!
And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.
Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?
Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.
So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.
Throw a rock at a reality TV show, and it's likely to smash through the window of a mansion full of well-dressed models. Now: Run!
In the spirit of adapting every digital medium (text, image, video) to every possible length format, and putting it on every device at every possible time, we now we have the latest entry: 
"
