Rojo

Top Stories for the Week of May 12 - 16, 2008

It's hard to resist linking to the latest video outtake that's been being embedded all over town, showing Bill O'Reilly losing his cool at the anchor desk of an early-90s Inside Edition show (warning: adult language). "I love the way his anger is released like a genie from a bottle, then pulled back in when he's on air," writes Carole Borges. Laughing Squid was one of the many that had Stephen Colbert's immediate parody of the TV flip-out. O'Reilly nemesis Keith Olbermann had a hearty laugh about it, too, as evidenced by this clip at Radar Online. Radar also posted O'Reilly's good-natured response to the blooper reel. O'Reilly "jokes that he's contractually obligated to lose his mind several times a year for the amusement of his staff."

In tech it was mashup week. HP bought EDS (via Ars Technica), Comcast bought Plaxo (via Venture Beat), and CBS is buying CNet Networks for $1.8 billion or so (via News.com, of course). CNet getting bought is no surprise, says PaidContent.org. Buyout rumors have been uttered so often, "it's the equivalent of yelling Freebird at a rock concert." What does CBS get? "Built-in tech coverage they can integrate with their own news reporting organization is an obvious benefit, as well as the coveted news.com domain name," blogs Profy. HipMojo says it's a smart move, arguing that TV-based media companies like CBS "need to buy and buy big time, otherwise the future looks awfully like print’s past: downwards and smaller."

In another type of politics, John Edwards has endorsed Barack Obama. TalkLeft asks why, then answers: "John Edwards has been on TV for two weeks saying there was no reason for him to endorse either candidate. What changed? In two words: West Virginia. In four words: West Virginia and Kentucky." Ben Smith at Politico.com concurs, saying Obama needs the help "appealing to the working-class white voters" whose support Hillary Clinton says makes her more electable. Citizen Haines wonders: Is Edwards trying to get picked as a running mate? And adds: "It is unclear if John Edwards would be a good choice for Vice President at this point given the fact that he already failed in that attempt in 2004."   

Finally, American artist and giant Robert Rauschenberg died at age 82, and memorials pointing to mainstream obits were posted at Yikes! and Clingfire and 3 Quarks Daily and other blogs. Gawker recalls that Rauschenberg "started out making art out of junk he found on the streets of lower Manhattan." Boing Boing calls him "a pioneer of multimedia art in the truest sense of the phrase." Green Cine Daily says RR "helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life."  Sippey posts a clip of the artiste talking about his work Erased de Kooning Drawing. And Gothamist wraps it up with a Rauschenberg quote that only an artist could utter: “I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.” Ouch.

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While Microsoft and Yahoo! were busy not merging, Google apparently kept itself occupied adding features that will make them both cry. Lifehacker and Google Maps Mania point out that Google Maps now contains geotagged photos and articles from Wikipedia.  And Google's own LatLongBlog shows off new street-level photography of New York City for Google Street View. 

Also new in Street View is super-privacy-protecting Face Blur technology that smears images of people's heads so you don't know who was out there doing stuff on the streets. This advance surely is bumming out voyeurs (Google Blogoscoped last year highlighted the kind of private-space invading candid shots Street View was revealing). But it's probably making people with cats less paranoid notes Boing Boing. Marketing Pilgrim trumpets the good news: "Now you, too, can be part of the faceless masses." The UK-based TechNotes blog calls the blurry faces good news for people on that side of the pond who were watching warily for Street View's arrival. Big G also is rolling out Google FriendConnect, an API that allows you to make any web site social. Local Advertising Journal compares it with Facebook Connect and says Facebook's privacy will be better (time for more blurring?).

Meanwhile, Search Engine Watch has noticed: Google AdWords isn't supposed to be selling hard liquor, but suddenly ad matches for the keyword vodka are coming up in Google searches! "One hopes this was an oversight," Search Engine Watch says. Maybe selling vodka was an early attempt at making everyone's faces look blurry.

The latest boast from the Twitterati is about how quickly they got news of the deadly earthquake in central China early this morning. The techie self-congratulation seems odd as bodies are still being pulled from rubble, but it's clear that news travels faster than ever these days. Tweeters in China reported first-hand, before mainstream media were onto the event.  Rory-Cellan Jones at the BBC News dot.life blog says today he went from considering Twitter just another fad "for people who want to share too much of their dull lives" to a tool that may come of age as "a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media." Alec Saunders writes: "I think this may be another of those defining moments for Twitter."

As the quake rippled, so did the Tweetsphere. Kaiser Kuo Twittered from Beijing: Anyone else in Beijing just feel that earthquake? Pretty scary!"  Others Twitted in Chinese.  A Dutch native living in China using the Twitter handle casperodj interrupted his normal postings with a sudden message: "jesus! serious earthquake here in Chengdu!" His postings that followed included: "complete mayhem in the city but so far I don't see any direct damage" and "Unbelievable amounts of people in the streets. Complete buildings still seem to be evacuated." Five hours after the original Twitter post, he reported: "hihi again... Wall Street Journal just contacted me." Global Voices Online, meanwhile, posted maps and user videos that Twits linked to.

Robert Scoble seemed to take the lead in pulling it all together—transferring news from his 23,200 followers to the 21,185 people following him [as VentureBeat put it]. Scoble claimed that Twitter broke the quake news even before the United States Geological Survey. Online Journalism Blog called it all crowdsourcing without the editorial management.  Of course, some Twits referred to early, inaccurate news reports, showing that wrong news can travel fast too.

Top Stories for the Week of May 5 - 9, 2008

Blogs have been dishing out postmortems all week on the crashed Microsoft-Yahoo deal. Now analysis has circled inward. Is there too much news about the same stuff pasted into blogs? Are we simply repeating ourselves? And: are we simply repeating ourselves? Scott Karp has a post at Publishing 2.0 titled "The Declining Value of Redundant News Content on the Web."  Karp also has a new post at Seeking Alpha titled "The Declining Value of Redundant News Content on the Web." Right. 

Karp writes that Google News "is currently tracking about 2,000 versions of [the Microsoft-Yahoo] story," many of them quite similar. In "Microhoo: A Study in Web Content Pollution" at IP Democracy, Cynthia Brumfield writes: "I couldn't agree more and I hesitate to even write this post because I don't want to add to the growing level of news noise." Broadstuff looks at which blogs get cited most on Techmeme and says: "there are simply too many A and B List blogs competing for attention with the same stuff to be sustainable, there has to be a shakeout."   

If you give a hoot, how do you not pollute?  Online Media Cultist recommends "content aggregators and smart people networks to help individuals filter out what is the most important." Mashable as usual is ready with the latest meta-search aggregation tools that may save the world, or destroy it, here and here.

Hillary in Black and White: Hillary Clinton is staying in the primary race and tells USA Today that she has more support than Barack Obama among "hard-working Americans, white Americans..." Well, there it is. Pam Spaulding at Pam's House Blend takes justifiable issue with implication that hard-working and white people are not part of Obama's base and says the remark "manages to top any dog-whistle race-baiting that her husband put out on the campaign trail." Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish writes "If a Republican said this about a black opponent, his career would be in jeopardy for racism."

Michael Crowley at The New Republic blog The Stump says the potential for racial prejudice among some voters is an uncomfortable topic but that "everyone in politics and media has been having this conversation for more than a year now."

Throwing Spitballs: Sports bloggers are still howling about a recent episode of HBO's "Costas Now" show. In a live panel about sports and media, Buzz Bissinger—author (Friday Night Lights) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist— came out throwing uppercuts at fellow panelist Will Leitch of Deadspin. Buzz opened with: "I think that blogs are dedicated to cruelty. They're dedicated to journalistic dishonesty." And it got worse from there. [Full video here. Warning: anti-blog crude language]. Leitch did his best to say blogs are just something different from newspapers and you don't need a journalism degree to have an opinion about the ballgame. But it got ugly.

Sports bloggers fired back. Top Shelf wrote: "Buzz Bissinger is an Angry, Closed-Minded Jackass." Juiced Sports Blog posted: "Buzz Bitchinger: Why He Didn't Major in Economics." Nice Guys Finish Third was just a bit kinder in suggesting "Buzz Bissinger is Gene Simmons." Bissinger cooled down and gave The Big Lead a more level-headed take on his thoughts, apologizing for his cussin'.

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Winners of the 12th Annual Webby Awards were announced yesterday, and if this cool-looking clicky-square gallery is accurate, there were 594 nominees and winners. And 594 press releases went out trumpeting the honors. Or, as Valleywag puts it: "another round of nominees who paid up to $475 to be considered for a Webby have been awarded their publicity prizes." According to Jack Schofield's less snarky tally on the British newspaper Guardian's tech blog , multiple award winners this year were NYTimes.com (8); The Onion (7); PostSecret (4); National Geographic (4); Apple.com (4); Hometown Baghdad (3); " You Sujck at Photoshop " (3), Flickr (3); FactCheck.org (3); BBC (3); TED.com (3); ESPN.com (3); and CondeNet (3). "Conspicuously absent from the list," notes Mashable : " Business centric old-schoolers like LinkedIn and Plaxo and Facebook predecessors Friendster and MySpace..."

Stephen Colbert was named Web Person of the Year, and Nerd Core Online celebrates: " Gone is the time when techie dorks and uber smart geeks were named the Webby Award’s best man." Among the blogs honored were the Financial Times ' Alphaville , its name borrowed from the French new-wave Jean-Luc Godard movie (and from the financial term for a mutual fund's risk). This biz blog provides " instant market insight ." PostSecret —which has been explained as "a community art project in which people write their secrets on postcards and mail in to be posted online "—was the Judged and People's Voice winner for personal blog. Huffington Post swept the political blog category, but nominee Why Tuesday? (the only non-mainstream-media blog nominated in politics) is worth a look.

The good news for everyone: now all your favorite sites can stop imploring you to vote for them .

After 3 months of discussions, the possibility of a Microsoft-Yahoo mashup finally collapsed. Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer walked away from the acquisition, as some clairvoyant pundits had predicted (via Yahoo TechTicker) or advised (via Valleywag) earlier.

A New York Times report on the weekend break-up said Yahoo executives were high-fiving each other for defeating Microsoft’s takeover bid. But Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang immediately fired up the the blog-o-tron to deny such fiving. In his corporate blog Yodel Anecdotal, in a posting called "OK, so now what?" he writes: "No one is celebrating about the outcome of these past three months." All's well that end's well, he figures, and now "we’ll be better able to focus our energy on growing our industry leadership and maximizing value for stockholders." Isn't that what Yahoo was trying when they got into this mess? Search Engine Watch says "Yahoo has some innovative plans for improving search results but no plans for increasing market share."

Boomtown figures Yahoo execs will really be getting ripped today by employees whose stock options are now in a precarious position. By midday today Yoohoo shares were off about 15 percent by from Friday's close (not quite as disastrous a hit as the 40-point stock drop that Stark Industries suffered recently when Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) announced his company will no longer make weapons). 

"The only question is whether this is really the bottom" for the stock, says Tech Trader Daily. TechCrunch says: "If [Yahoo] shares don’t drop much further, that could mean Wall Street is still pricing in another takeover attempt from Microsoft or someone else, or perhaps a Google advertising deal."  A survey of analysts at Paid Content includes a forecast that deals with AOL and Google are still possible.  And In case you thought only Yahoo's future is up for discussion, Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch asks if Ballmer needs to start looking for a new job.

Top Stories for the Week of April 28 -May 2, 2008

15 Glorious Years of HTTP: The Web was born 15 years ago this week, according to a special report at BBC News. So the Web is almost legally old enough to get a job. Finally! Bloggers (many of whom also are 15) immediately commenced a one-upsmanship to see who remembered the earliest details and who gave Tim Berners-Lee the whole Web idea in the first place. 

Ivan at the Snipperoo blog says he named his magazine World Wide Web (at right) in way back in 1993. Alan Patrick at Broadstuff fondly recalls early network software like Archie, Veronica and Gopher that the Web rendered irrelevant. John McCrea at The Real McCrea says he "led the effort to develop the first turnkey web server and the first WYSIWYG HTML editor, under the first 'web' brand anywhere, WebFORCE." Bill Thompson at The Billblog presents a scan of what he says is the actual original document that established the Web. The Magna Carta of Web 1.0!

Repression of the Recession: Many charts (see: here, here and here) bloomed this week as fanboys of economic data pondered whether America is in a recession. The Big Picture says, yes, ma'am, we are in a recession. Mashable says no way. At Econbrowser, you'll have to figure out for yourself what the heck is happening, but it doesn't sound good.

At least that's one societal problem you can't blame on the Grand Theft Auto series. Take-Two Interactive's GTA IV, just out, may be the best selling video game ever. Daniel Terdiman at Geek Gestalt points out that game-king EA was in the process of trying to take over Take-Two Interactive, GTA's publisher. Now, he writes: one has to wonder what the thinking is over at EA and whether it will have to modify its $2 billion bid for Take-Two.

There are the usual objections to the game's violence and sex. The game is set in Liberty City, a replicant of New York, and Gothamist rounds up complaints from real-life New York officials and crime victims who understandably aren't happy at all. But some undaunted people are trying to have fun with the game. At Ed Levine's New York Eats, Ed reviews the restaurants in Liberty City.

Speaking of Turning 15: The shock and awe continues over the Annie Leibowitz photos of teen singer/actress Miley Cyrus (aka Hannah Montana) in the new issue of Vanity Fair. The media called the shots topless, but backless is more honest. Gawker has a compilation of fake reactions to the photos. In a great essay at The Huffington Post, blogger/actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who has had her own topless moments, writes: "I woke up this morning concerned about the world food shortage and Korean defectors attempting self immolation in protest of Beijing and was astonished at the amount of attention a young woman named Miley Cyrus was getting..." At Comment is Free, Zoe Williams writes that the cheesy exploitation of young stars is sadly routine: "Never mind what a ludicrous system this is that chooses young women for their sex appeal and then expects them to act as role models for the chastity of the rest of the population." Hey, at least this is one set of photos of questionable appropriateness that you can't blame on the good old World Wide Web.

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The latest figures on U.S. newspaper circulation show things just getting grimmer for the pulpy old media in the age of Digg and Reddit. Newspaper circulation is down 3.6 percent across the nation, but that's just part of the story. This year could reach the lowest circ level since 1946, says Newsosaur which calculates that newspaper use generally is about half of what it used to be back when Humphrey Bogart was a superstar. As Venture Chronicles points out, newspaper’s aging print audience is literally dying off. The 90-year-old Madison (Wisc.) Capital Times recently killed its own print audience, shifting to online-only, and Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine says "every newspaper in America should be delighted this is happening and watching it closely." Meanwhile, at the Daily Nightly, TV news anchor Brian Williams blogs that he can't find much that's great to read in the Sunday New York Times.

Newspaper reporters still generate much of the, uh, actual news that ends up online. But papers' own web sites have not been popular with advertisers. As Advertising Age points out: NYTimes.com gets more unique visitors than any other paper's site, but print revenue still made up 90 percent of last year's advertising total. Henry Blodgett at Silicon Alley Insider says it's just going to get worse as the economics of printing and trucking tons of paper around town get worse. But he figures the decline of print leaves $42 billion in advertising to go elsewhere. He gives newspaper web sites $5 billion of that stash and $25 billion of it to "Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, job sites, blogs, mobile ads, video ads, etc." 

The Web 2.0 Expo wrapped up in San Francisco last week, leaving behind a clear impression that the future is murky. As Caroline McCarthy describes it at The Social, the conference had a weird mix of bubble-licious revelry and recessionary caution.  Venture money for start-ups still flows, but "the economic attitude of the Web 2.0 Expo hangs in an awkward limbo," she writes. Adds an equally ambivalent posting at The Real McCrea: "Are we on the cusp of the open Social Web or the brink of a nuclear winter — or both?" (Keynote speaker Marc Andreessen used the term 'nuclear winter' to describe one possible future for Web 2.0 funds.)

Marketing Shift points out that even amid cautious optimism, the old media recognizes that Web 2.0 technologies are the future, so there's that. And even with the Microsoft/Yahoo! face-off unresolved and now past a supposed deadline for action (via Silicon Alley Insider), it's worth noting that Twitter seems to have raised another $15 or $20 million and it's not surprising that they did, says Sarah Lacy.

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, which makes money mostly from hardware, told the Web 2.0 Expo crowd that (free) blogs and (free) open source software are just dandy, and he said "at some point the word 'blogging' will be anachronistic."  Meaning what, exactly?   "If his point is that blogging will become ubiquitous ...then I totally agree," the Waggener Edstrom blog Glass House says.  "Somehow though, I don't think that was what he was saying...." 

Meanwhile, Charlie Cooper at Coop's Corner says Web 2.0 should be so over, too—as a catchphrase.

Top stories for the week of April 21 -25, 2008

Given time to digest the results of Pennsylvania's Tuesday Democratic presidential primary, pundits are doing some aftermath math.  Let's see: Clinton beat Obama by ten percent but still trails in delegates. At the Huffington Post, contributor Lanny Davis says the ten points that really add up are the ones in his Top Ten List of Undisputed Facts Showing Barack Obama's Weakness in the General Election Against John McCain. The Moderate Voice wonders Why Obama Can’t Close the Deal. Real Clear Politics gives points for persistence: "Like her or not, you have to be impressed by Hillary Clinton's resilience as a candidate."  This equation has no solution yet.

In tech, Apple and Amazon impressed with their earnings. Apple reported record second quarter results - up 43% year over year. "It needed its Mac business to drive growth during the March quarter, and it came through," says Silicon Alley Insider. But the recession and gas prices are taking a toll elsewhere. UPS CEO Scott Davis said its first quarter results "illustrate the dramatic slowing  in the U.S. economy (via Infectious Greed). And: "blaming consumers in hard-hit housing markets of California and Florida," Starbucks slashed its quarterly and 2008 profit forecast writes Huffington Post.

The spelling bee world was abuzz with the announcement that this year's televised Scripps National Spelling Bee on ESPN and ABC in May will feature sexy "sideline reporter" Erin Andrews (via Deadspin). Also this week, a number of sports teams made trendy attempts to go green for Earth Day (thanks UniWatch Blog).

And in entertainment, The New York Times ran an article about the delayed release of Valkyrie, a film in which Tom Cruise plays a Nazi officer with a plan to kill Hitler. The article focused more on bloggers' reactions to the delays than on news or inside sources. Maybe that was because the blog Defamer did the story first. Now bloggers are reacting - to the Times article. "I just want to make clear that while this blog is mentioned in the New York Times story on Valkyrie, I have nothing to do with Defamer's...take that UA [Cruise's United Artists studio] is dead because of this film," writes The Hot Blog. Adds Spout Blog: "The timing of the [Times] piece just seems bizarre. It’s been ages (in internet time, at least) since Valkyrie’s release date was pushed back to February 2009."

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