Compare and contrast

: PaidContent tells us that Yahoo is testing a new home page.

What, they made it even messier?

Go look at Yahoo. Then go look at Google. Rococo vs. Reformation. Mess vs. not.

LINK | Comments (1)

. . .

DoubletTree sucks

: I'm imprisoned in a Doubletree "hotel" in Skokie right now in a sweltering room with an airconditioner that doesn't work and a front-desk "manager" who doesn't give a damn. Not that you should care. But some hapless traveler who may come upon this post someday stands warned. DoubleTree sucks.

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. . .

In-N-Out

: I thought people would give up anything for an In-N-Out burger, even - ahem -their virginity.

But, no, Avril Lavigne wouldn't topple for Fred Durst's everything with fries. Best Week Ever (again) reports Avril's account:

"I mentioned to Fred that I was hungry, like, 'I want an In-N-Out burger.' "He had someone go out and get me a whole box of them, with fries. I was like, 'Yeah!.' Then he took a private jet out to one of my shows, expecting me to bang him. He was disappointed that I wouldn't even go near him. He was a little pissed that I went to my room alone that night."

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. . .

A three-episode cruise

: Best Week Ever reports the perfect meeting of life and art: The Real Gilligan's Island:

That's right -- Gilligan's Island is coming back on TBS -- and this time, you can be a part of it!

The producers of "Gilligan's Island" are teaming with the producers of the "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" to bring you The Real Gilligan's Island.

This all-new version of the classic sitcom will feature real life versions of the original show's characters: a real-life skipper, first mate, millionaire couple, movie star, professor and Kansas farm girl. And one of them could be you!

Just like the original show, the castaways will work together to get off the island, and episodes will include situations drawn from the original series.

So if you're the perfect Gilligan, Skipper, Thurston or Lovey Howell, Ginger Grant, Mary Ann, or The Professor (just what was his name, anyway?), fill out the application and mail it in, along with a video of yourself telling us why you'd make a great castaway.

Who knows, it could be you who takes the fateful trip to that tropic island nest.

Go to the open casting call. Or nominate a favorite enemy...

Come to think about it, about a reality Beverly Hillbillies? Petticoat Junction (who wouldn't want to watch that casting call?)? Cheers (the drunken reality show)? Taxi (with translators)? M*A*S*H (in Iraq!)?

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. . .

Hired gun

: Hugh MacLeod advises how to use a blog to get a job:

3. Narrow the focus of your blog to just these 4-6 distinct parts. Create them as official categories, if you have to.
4. Blog like crazy about them.
5. If you're any good (I'm assuming you are) eventually somebody interesting will get a whiff of it, and invite you to scatter your pollen throughout their company in exchange for decent money, as opposed to doing it for free in the 'sphere.

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. . .

Another blog confob

: Mary Hodder together with Chris Shipley, Susan Mernit, and Ross Mayfield are running a blog conference in northern Cal in July. They've asked me to blather; trying to work out the schedule now.

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. . .

On my way to Northwestern for the hyperlocal project. Blogging from Skokie later. Oh, how I love catching an earlier flight....

LINK | Comments (1)

. . .

No Olympics, please

: The NY Times reports on a blog fighting against having the Olympics come to New York.

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. . .

RSS primer

: Bob Stepno has a pretty good RSS primer/comparison chart in PC World.

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. . .

Reverse publishing

: The San Diego Reader is republishing blogger Brian Dear's Brainstorms blog in the paper to show its readers what a blog is really like.

It's a good idea. But it doesn't need to be a one-time thing.

The wise print publisher would take, say, Gizmodo and syndicate it in print. [via Blogistan]

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. . .

Big Blog Company

: Jackie Danicki, whose au Currant blog I miss, is in the blog biz. She reports she's now an associate with the Big Blog Company, which "develops blogs for businesses and trains employees in how to blog (technical, writing guidelines, legal guidelines, etc). It's a blogger-run company and is already doing quite well." Good idea and good for her.

The Big Blog Company is hiring! Full job spec here. Preferably Londoners.

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. . .

And you know what happens to the fatted calf

: Johann Hari (one of the guys at Harry's place) gets past the insipid questions usually asked of the Dalia Lama in an interview in The Independent. And the holy man calls John fat.

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. . .

Bacteria blog

: David Weinberger reports that Stoneyfield Farms has five yogurt blogs. They're best when they don't just tell the company's story but, instead, look at the world through the prism of the Stoneyfield brand: When they link out to stories about healthy women and children and the environment, they tell us that that's what the company cares about. If they essentially underwrite good blogs about things people care about, that can be good. When they tell me about Stoneyfield's work, well, I don't much care.

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. . .

Convention assignment desk

: Do we know which bloggers have been credentialed to cover the Democratic National Convention?

I want to know so all of us can start assigning our pool bloggers.

: Meanwhile, I neglected to link to the Demo Convention blog with lots already from Matt Stoller.

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. . .

Helping the Monitor

: The Christian Science church is in financial trouble and so it is looking to end subsidies to the Christian Science Monitor:

"We have begun plans for adjustments to the Monitor," Mrs. Campbell said. The goal is to support "the vital role of the Monitor in bringing the highest quality journalism to humanity, while bringing expenses in line with revenue."

Monitor staff members will shortly be asked to "help us formulate the next steps," Campbell said. "This could result in a paper with fewer pages and feature sections, as well as a leaner staff."

The Trustees also said they plan to name a blue ribbon panel of experts from pertinent fields to submit ideas and recommendations aimed at moving the Monitor to profitability. The Trustees also invited comments from Monitor readers, which can be sent to ideas@csmonitor.com.

Well, they could kill the print edition. Online, the former paper's journalists can serve the world without the limitations of broad physical distribution and the expense of production. Advertising is growing online. However, I see hardly any advertising on the Monitor's site. Is that because they aren't trying or because advertisers aren't buying? [via Romenesko]

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. . .

Appled, piece by piece

: I can't wait to get the new Apple Airport Express. It took a few reads of the site to figure out all it can do for me:

I can be untethered in hotel rooms.
I can use multiple laptops in hotel rooms.
I can wirelessly play music from a computer on any stereo in the house.
I can extend my wireless network.

First, I got the iPod. Now this. Before long, I'll be an Apple customer again.

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. . .

Keys

: I didn't even know that Daily Pundit Bill Quick has a San Francisco real estate blog.

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. . .

Honest day's work

: I smell a trend: This weekend, I linked to a report that ex-VC Andrew Anker is now a corp dev exec at SixApart. Now The Times reports that Steve Harmon, an ex-VC, is joining LiveDeal as a corp dev exec.

So VCs are finally getting real jobs.

If you consider VP of corp dev a real job....

LINK | Comments (2)

. . .

Blog ads work!

: Jeff Sharlet, editor of the (just redesigned) Revealer, a blog about religion at NYU (under Jay Rose), writes to tell me about his experience with advertising. Moral of the story: Ads on blogs worked. Ads on "media" sites didn't. Now you could argue that's true in part because advertising blogs on blogs is a kind of commercial echo chamber. But no, the blogs blew away the competition. Jeff writes::

The Revealer spent 7 k on advertising in the last month or so (most of our budget). We decided to divide it, roughly, between conventional online media and blog ads. Blog ads blew the conventional media out of the water.

The conventional media we chose were Beliefnet, Columbia Journalism Review, and American Journalism Review. CJR and AJR are small, specialty sites, but Beliefnet claims a readership of 2 million. I don't know what Talking Points, Little Green Footballs, and Daily Kos claim, but I'd estimate that our small, second-level blog ads on those sites EACH outperformed Beliefnet by a factor of 10. At least. Other blogs, like Matthew Yglesias, Reason's Hit and Run, and the Washington Monthly did so probably by a factor of five. And even very small blogs, like Donald Sensing's, beat Beliefnet.

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. . .

The (Not Quite) Daily Stern

: WHERE'S THE BEEF? I was just thinking this weekend that there's now a good chance the indecent indecency legislation that was running through and is now hiding in Congress may not pass. The House passed its version. A Senate committee passed its. The Senate has not scheduled debate on the bill.

So perhaps naked Iraqis have displaced a naked tit in our legislators' priorities.

And sure enough, today the NY Times wrote that the legislation is stalled.

But for all the legislative posturing, the prospects for such a measure reaching President Bush's desk before the November election appear far less assured than they did a few months ago.

In the Senate, a measure approved by the Commerce Committee in March has yet to be scheduled for discussion by the full body. The delay in bringing the Senate bill to the floor is tied partly to the broader politics of the Senate, where Republicans, who hold a slim 51-seat majority, have had difficulty passing major bills. But for the senators themselves, there is also the peril of investing too much political capital in a divisive issue, which has pitted some social conservatives and child-advocacy groups against big broadcasters and civil rights advocates.

In addition, the Senate version contains other controversial provisions - including one that would seek to curb violent content on television, not just sex and swearing - that the House bill explicitly avoided.

"This looks like a cheap date to me,'' said Charles Cook, the editor of The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan political newsletter. "You come out for motherhood, apple pie and 'decency,' and you know it's not going anywhere.''

Thank goodness for Congressional inefficiency and the common sense that bubbles up as a result. I know that there are legislators who knew they were supporting something unconstitutional. They convinced themselves they had to: How could you be against decency, they cried. But next at least some of them had to ask themselves: How could you be against free speech?

: KERRY, CENSOR: Some commenters tried to make hay out of John Kerry saying last week that he was in favor of broadcast content regulation where children are involved.

He has said that before. I have disagreed before. So has Stern. I don't like Kerry for that. I don't like him for other things, including his stand on media deregulation. But I do like him for many stands. That's politics.

Kerry is against expanding content regulation to cable. Small favor.

: BADA BING: Adam Thierer of the Cato Institute [via Ernie Miller] wrote at NRO who his daughter would not be watching The Sopranos (I, too, shooed my kids off to bed by 9p) and why that's his job, not Michael Powell's:

While all parents face this same dilemma of figuring out what to let their children watch, the choice my wife and I make for our child may not be the same choice the couple across the street makes for their kids. But that's the nature of life in a free society. It's filled with tough choices, especially when it comes to raising kids.

There is another alternative, of course. Our government could decide for us which shows are best for our children, or perhaps just determine which hours of the day certain shows could be aired in an attempt to shield our children's eyes and ears from them. While there are some who would welcome such a move, I would hope that there are still some other parents like me out there who aren't comfortable with the idea of calling in Uncle Sam to play the role of surrogate parent. When government acts to restrict what our children can see or hear, those restrictions bind the rest of us as well, including the millions of Americans who have no children at all.

Even if lawmakers have the best interests of children in mind, I take great offense at the notion that government officials must do this job for me and every other American family. Censorship on an individual/parental level is a fundamental part of being a good parent. But censorship at a governmental level is an entirely different matter because it means a small handful of individuals get to decide what the whole nation is permitted to see, hear or think.

Right.

: SUCKING SUCKS: Kurt Andersen said in his Studio 360 commentary that his producers actually debated allowing his show to air "L.A. sucks" and that some public-radio affiliates bleeped that phrase. That's how far this has gone.

The problem facing TV and radio is that to some community somewhere, saying something innocuous is going to be considered patently offensive. That's in the nature of indiscriminate broadcast media.

Consider one contemporary slang phrase: "to suck," meaning "to be inferior." Now once upon a time, in the etymological mists of the 1960s and 70s, I guess this intransitive verb referred to the transitive verb -- that is, to a particular sexual activity.

But it simply doesn't anymore in the current usage. To every American child whom our "community standards" are supposedly protecting, to say that something "sucks" just mean that it's lousy, stupid, crummy, crappy.

Uh-oh: the word “crappy” has its origins in an excretory activity, doesn’t it? ...

But for the last few years and especially the last few months, the FCC has dramatically raised the fines for indecent speech. And the FCC is also defining indecency more broadly than ever - in other words starting to ignore the context.

And broadcasters are buckling under. On this program a couple of weeks ago, for instance, in a discussion of a series of paintings about California, we aired a light-hearted sound bite of somebody challenging the idea that, quote, “L.A. sucks.” My producers debated whether to cut the quote out altogether - and decided against, but did feel obliged to warn all our stations in advance. Some of whom bleeped it....

In other words, you can really feel the chilling effect. Which to me is itself chilling.

Because the serious question we face here as a culture is whether we’re going to let our most easily offended communities dictate the rules of what can or can’t be said over the public airwaves.

Because if it’s the word “sucks” today, what’s it going to be tomorrow?

Too far.

: F THE FCC: Declan McCullagh of CNET argues forcefully that the time has come to kill the FCC. He's against how they're regulating both technology and speech.

These signs warn of an agency that is overreaching. If the FCC had been in charge of overseeing the Internet, we'd likely be waiting for the Mosaic Web browser to receive preliminary approval from the Wireline Competition Bureau. Instead, the Internet has transformed from a research curiosity into a mainstay of the world's economy--in less time than it took the FCC to approve the first cell phone licenses.

Michael Powell and George Bush: If you're true deregulators, then deregulate the FCC out of existence.

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. . .

Rose-colored eyeshade

: I guess they get tired of train-wreck stories in India.

Editors Weblog quotes the head of the Times of India -- which, I didn't know, is the largest English-language paper in the world with 2.4 million circ -- on making the news sunny even under clouds:

Pradaeep Guha, publisher of The Times of India, the world's best-selling English newspaper, said that his paper's editorial policy is to emphasize good news - even in the midst of tragedy. For example, "Let's say that there has been a train accident. 100 people died; but five were rescued. We will publish this news with the following headline, 'Big Train Accident, 5 Rescued'. We include all the details, but emphasize the positive," Guha explained, adding that both readers and advertisers had responded positively to the upbeat tone.

I should start reading their coverage of Iraq.

: Neil McIntosh of Guardian Online adds that the same company is reportedly selling editorial coverage in "edvertorials." Mid Day had the full story. Neil quite properly laments:

Is there nothing this newspaper group will stoop to in order to please advertisers? Selling advertising disguised as editorial. Adjusting the news agenda to better suit the surrounding ads. What next?

And he wonders when readers will start deserting their titles. But when one title alone has 2.4 million subscribers, I guess you can afford to lose a few.

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. . .

Fame and fortune

: The NY Times covers Gawker's custom-publishing for Nike.

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. . .

Behind

: I'm going to the Trendwatching event this week but I'm appalled that they and the supposedly trendy Tribeca Grand don't have wi-fi. Untrendy!
I now will not stay in a hotel that doesn't have at least wired high-speed access. Amazing they'd pick a such a hotel for something called Trendwatching!

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. . .

Sopranos lines

: My favorite line from last night:

Adriana... She wouldn't do five f'ing years. I thought she loved me...

: Howard Stern's was the discussion over the painting: "You're the general, Ton'!" And my colleague's Peter Hauck's favorite line: "Event planning."
: Yours?

: Turns out Aint It Cool News had accurate spoilers ahead of time.

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. . .

The Male Antidefamation League protests

: During a Howard commercial break this morning, I came in on the middle of a Billy Crystal interview on NPR (there's nothing worse than a serious Crytal... it's not fun, it's not funny). The interview, Susan Stamberg, without a micron of apparent irony, what he plays on his "Walkperson."
Arrrrggghh!
OK, that's it. I'm fed up with "man" being a bad word. I protest. I accuse NPR of bias and bigotry against us.

: UPDATE: Stan in the comments says I'm out of it (not the first time) and that "Walkperson" is from an old Billy Crystal bit (which, for all I know, could have been in the start of this fawnfest, which I missed.... anybody hear the interview?). I find no Google guidance on the connection.

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. . .

Protest the evils of oil and polyester!

: The World Naked Bike Ride protests oil dependency. Who the hell knows what flesh has to do with fuel but, hey, anything for cheap peeps. [via Jimmiz]

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. . .

Unnews

: Ethan Zuckerman links to the U.N.'s list of most underreported stories and then lists five of his own. What are yours?

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. . .

Catching up in Iraq

: I'm catching up with my reading of Iraqi weblogs. Read this from Baghdadi, an Iraqi-American, on the new government, and tell me whether you saw any of this excitement in media coverage:

The beginning for the new Iraq has started and the people of Iraq finally got a government they should be proud of. I was so happy this morning watching the new Iraqi government and the names of those ministers and of course the new president. There was one moment during the whole ceremony that equated to the moment when they announced the capture of Saddam and that is when they announced the new president of Iraq, to me that was a dream comes true. I believe most of us young Iraqis when we hear the phrase president of Iraq, we think of Saddam and only Saddam. Well, history was made today Saddam and his clans have no chance of getting the power or any position in the new Iraq. Iraq is changing and I believe it is changing toward a free and democratic Iraq. I spoke with my family in Baghdad twice today and they are so excited about the new government, my brother was telling me that we all are praying for these guys and Inshallaha god will be with them. I think this is a new era for us and for the Middle East as a whole. Listening to all the names that were announced today, you can not, but think that this new government is the most educated individuals among all the governments in the Middle East. Most of them have a doctorate in their fields of expertise not to mention a lot of them have lived and gained there experience in the west. With the help of the US and the rest of the world, I believe these guys will definitely get Iraq out of this mess.

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. . .

A year in the life

: A picture a day for a year in one of my favorite cities, Berlin. [via Kunstspaziergänge]

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. . .

Good swarms

: Steven Johnson not only gives some link charity to Spirit of America, he also seems something bigger going on here -- good swarms:

But the site makes me wonder whether this isn't the beginning of a fascinating new chapter in the web's gift economy. Thanks to the passion of the bloggers themselves, and clustering technologies like Technorati and Blogdex, we've already mastered the art of locating and quickly swarming around the week's hot news item or thinkpiece. (You know the drill: Clay posts a provocative essay about power laws on Monday, and by Friday there are fifty in-depth responses, a dozen fact checks, ten suggestions for future research, and a handful of requests for the Lazy Web.) What Spirit Of America suggests is a version of that swarming directed towards Good Causes: someone halfway across the globe (or halfway across the country, or the county) puts out a call for help setting up a wi-fi network in an under-funded school, or repairing a sewage treatment facility, and within five days they're flooded with funds, spare parts, technical expertise, and good will. And when the network goes online, or the sewage starts getting processed again, we all get to see the results. (Maybe not so fun for sewage, but you get the idea.) And then we get to move on to the next cause.

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. . .

Say 'blog!'
: Scoble imagines the blogging camera:

Imagine a digital camera with Wifi built in, and with something like Radio UserLand built in. Now that'd be crazy, huh? Take a picture, have it automatically thrown up to a weblog whenever there's connectivity (which is quite often now -- even the San Francisco Giants' baseball stadium has WiFi).

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. . .

Ground Zero's future

: The NY Times celebrates disarray in cultural plans for the World Trade Center site and in a typically self-indulgent editorial act has its own critics blather on about what they'd do there (or, actually, blather on to try to show how cute they can be).

A.O. Scott, the movie critic, ends up absurdly but starts out ok:

We already have more than our share of monuments to polite culture — more than we can use, actually. Furthermore, the concentration of dance companies, museums, performance spaces and whatever else on newly developed acreage is a recipe for urban desolation. The last time such a thing was tried on a large scale, it produced the Lincoln Center complex, which has demanded respect for 40 years without inspiring much in the way of love. Why, on the site of our biggest civic catastrophe, would we want yet another middle-brow mausoleum?

Herbert Muschamp, as always, proves to be a self-centered blowhard

....I have recently become more sympathetic to the "cop-out" position, which would mean abandoning the flawed ground zero design process altogether in favor of reconstructing the twin towers more or less as they were. Certainly, I'm prepared to defend reconstruction as a cultural act. It would be an offering to Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, from whom all culture flows.

The reduction to essentials is a great New York tradition, evident in our engineering and in our art. It is the correct tradition to invoke here. And then, to insure its revival, I would propose a school, a center of unlearning as well as learning, a place for disembedding ourselves from the welter of fantasies that has enveloped the country in recent years.

This guy should spend his time writing in crayon in the ward. What an insufferable bunch of offensive jibberish.

: But Steve Cuozo in the NY Post remains the voice of sanity regarding the World Trade Center. On Thursday, I was down there shaking my head at a still-destroyed building bringing back such unpleasant memories on the north side of the site. On Friday, Cuozo wrote about it:

Nearly three years after 9/11, the blackened, 15-story, soot-caked ruin of Fiterman Hall continues to cast a pall on Downtown. The bleak relic not only darkens the north rim of Ground Zero, it threatens the economic viability of Larry Silverstein's new, $700 million 7 World Trade Center rising across the street from it. And everybody involved is passing the buck.

That the macabre eyesore remains in place is a civic disgrace. New Yorkers took deserved pride in the swift cleanup of Ground Zero. Yet this white-brick structure just north of there, on the block bounded by West Broadway, Barclay and Greenwich streets and Park Place, still looks much as it did on Sept. 12, 2001.

It's outrageous that such blight remains just weeks before the Freedom Tower — symbolic of Downtown's tremulous rebirth — breaks ground. And thanks to political gridlock, the eerie monstrosity may haunt the scene for a long time to come.

Exactly.

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. . .

Is a hero a hero only if you like the war?

: Cori Dauber reports this from Andy Rooney on Imus:

His complaint was with the practice of considering all the soldiers, airmen, Marines, sailors and Coastguardsmen serving in Iraq as heroes. Most soldiers in Iraq, he said, "they're not heroes, they're victims. They got trapped in the Army."

And what about the WW II analogy? There was "no question about the ethical, moral, righteousness of our war against the Nazis." Today's situation is "not at all the same." (Even if you don't think we should have gone to war in Iraq, I still don't understand how people can argue against the moral righteousness of the war as a humanitarian intervention. It's just beyond me.)

But Rooney continued: "They just don't have a righteous war to fight," and that's the only reason today's military forces aren't a Greatest Generation. "They don't have an occasion to rise to."

Fascism is fascism, and it is always a righteous cause to fight fascism with an appetite for global conquest.

I agre with Cori on all points and, as usual, disagree with Rooney.

These soldiers were not trapped in the Army; they volunteered.

Why is getting rid of murdering fascists in Germany different from getting rid of murdering fascists in Iraq?

And -- in the context this discussion comes from, it's Bush talking about the war on terrorism and not just the war in Iraq -- this generation most certainly does have the occasion to rise to: the defeat of terrorism and Islamic mass murderers.

: And by the way, how come when a man goes on a rampage destroying buildings throughout his own town and nearly killing his own neighbors, he's known as a "nut" while people who do that in Iraq are known as "insurgents?"

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. . .

Seven

: John Battelle reports that Andrew Anker -- ex-head of Wired Digital, ex-VC -- has joined SixApart, making of Movable Type, as exec vp of corporate development.

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. . .

We are all journalists?

: Seth Godin says we are all journalists:

So, there's now almost 3,000,000 bloggers tracked by some of the online services. That's 1% or so of the active online population, and since it seems as though the number is doubling every month or so, it's starting to get significant.

Remember how you used to curse journalists? Curse them for being lazy, or hyperbolic? ...

Now, everyone with a blog is a journalist. When you run a post accusing a politician of having no personality, for example, you're indulging the public's desire to elect a dinner partner, not a president. When you chime in on the day's talking points, you're a tool, not a new voice.

So, we come to the moment of truth. Now that anyone who wants to be a journalist CAN be a journalist, are the ethics going to get better... or worse?

I'm an optimist most of the time, but on this issue, I'm afraid I'm a realist.

Or we reinvent journalism.

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. . .

R.I.P.

: I won't have much to add to others' posts on the death of President Reagan. Here are lots of links at MaroonBlog.

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. . .

I saw that somewhere

: FeedDemon 1.1 is out and it includes my favorite feature: search of recent feeds. This is the perfect answer to the hmmm-I-saw-that-somewhere problem.

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. . .

Shucks, thanks

: Jessica makes a post to say:

I am sorry I called Jeff Jarvis Howard Stern's Hand Puppet.
There. I said it.

That's one of the nicest things anybody has ever said about me.

Which shows you what people say about me.

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. . .

A burger with a side of Hoobastank, and supersize my wi-fi

: Thanks to PaidContent's job listings, I see the McDonald's is hiring a consultant to make "digital customer services" a menu offering.

McDonald's Digital Re-Imaging team is tasked with the identification, testing and optimization of new digital customer services for McDonald's restaurants. These self-funding or for profit services will enhance the McDonald's in-restaurant customer experience by leveraging our existing high-speed network. Examples of these services include Wi-Fi internet access and a myriad of content and connection applications.

Why should Starbucks be the place to get online? McDonald's has a helluva lot more locations and cheaper drinks. And if Starbucks can go into the music business, why shouldn't McDonald's? It will sell to a younger, hipper (read: less jazzy, folksy) audience.

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. . .

No webflower, she

: Mary Hodder lists all the "social media in my pocket.'
And why did this sound vaguely like Mae West

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. . .

Michael and Me

: A filmmaker does a Michael Moore on Michael Moore, following him around trying futilely to get an interview -- and this guy had no problem getting distribution.

Twin Cities filmmaker Mike Wilson's upcoming "Michael Moore Hates America" details his unsuccessful attempts to interview Moore, the director who won an Oscar two years ago for "Bowling for Columbine." ...

At least three months before its release, the film has catapulted Wilson into national prominence. When an item about "Michael Moore Hates America" appeared on a showbiz Web site earlier this week, Wilson says, he was contacted by nine distributors who want to help book the documentary into theaters.

: Moore's new trailer is up here.

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. . .

What's a witch?

: Parents should be slapped for taking young, young children to Harry Potter. In front of us just now was a young boy, 4ish, who had no idea what was happening, of course, and also has not yet learned his inside voice. He's asking confused questions every few minutes. As young Harry tries his kid-actor best to show a look of terror, the kid in front of us asked/demanded/shouted, "Why's he scared?" Well, kid, if you want to read about a thousand pages...

: I thought the movie was better than the last two (and I didn't like the last two much): more plotting, more characterization, more maturity, less and-then-and-then-and-then narrative.
But my son liked the last one better. And my son's the one who's supposed to like it.

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. . .

This picture will destroy the plastic-surgery industry

: One look is all it takes.

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. . .

Explode your radio

: Doc Searls has a wonderful, brain-blasting post on the future of radio -- or what we all should imagine the future of radio to be.

He starts noting that Nokia wants to make phones the preferred device for listening to radio (amen to that; I wish I could listen on my phone or my iPod and not have to carry another device to stay live with the world). And so Nokia wants stations to send data with songs and enable phones for purchase and limited interactivity.

Doc sees that bet and ups it four four big ideas. He wants stations, starting with NPR et al, to send out RSS notifications with programs. I want to hear more about what that can do (which is my way of saying I'm too stupid to get the full potential). Second, wants big companies to partner with small developers and he links to some examples. Yup. Third, he wants to improve the software we use to play Internet radio. Amen. Fourth, and this is where the brain starts to blow, he said:

...we need to take this chance to break radio free from the notion that it's just a commercial utility controlled by government and exempt from constitutional as well as common sense protections of free speech. That means we start our own stations, on which we play, much as we now blog, what we please. But not on the old broadcast model. Instead, on the new RSS-fortified interactive model. The one with the civic gestures we call links.

Imagine a world in which all this comes together to take an old medium and explode and reinvent it:

: New means of transport bring richer data.
: New means of transport bring two-way communication.
: New means of transport bring new commerce and financial support.
: New high-speed, always-on-everywhere means of communication (3G cellular, wi-fi, and their successors) bring high-quality entertainment and communication to you wherever you go.
: New authoring tools allow anyone to create high-quality entertainment and distribute it to the world and even raise support for it.
: New tools yield new passion and new outlets for talent (see blogs)
: The result, as Doc says, is blog radio: an explosion of choice, talent, commerce, communication, interaction, entertainment.

Forget Howard Stern just going to satellite and reinventing radio. He should help create a whole new f'ing medium.

LINK | Comments (4)

. . .

Link love/Tough love

: This story makes me wonder why anyone would pay attention to reporters analyzing a story when they could hear instead from a pro who speaks from experience -- that is, a player who blogs.

I'll start near the beginning: Jason Calacanis, founder of WeblogsInc, sent me and VC Fred Wilson emails gently whining that we had not given his new Autoblog any link love.

Fred returned, instead, with some tough love. He gave Jason some very fine advice. Damning with faint praise, he said Autoblog was the best looking of WeblogInc's blogs thus far; he then went on to say the rest "feel very bland." Next, he said he doesn't care about cars, being a New Yorker. Next, he asked, "Where is the advertising?" And finally, he said:

I am not sure I get where Jason is going with Weblogs Inc. I thought it was a trade publishing model with a focus on tech and startups. But now he's got Engadget, AutoBlog, and BlogMaverick which are more consumer focused. It may be that he's putting up a lot and seeing what sticks. That's not a bad model early in a market. But I think he's eventually got to pick a target market and focus on it.

Bottom line - Autoblog is a nice blog. I bet it will build a good audience. I am rooting for Jason and everyone else who is trying to turn blogs into a business. Jason is smart, scrappy, hungry, bold, brave, and agressive. He'll figure it out.

I agree with Fred. Most startups begin wanting to do a half-dozen things and then finally figure out the one thing they should be doing. Jason did the opposite: He started with a clear focus on trade tech blogs and then expanded into a half-dozen things from consumer to celebrity to software. I'd advise Jason to focus on building a big business on what he has proven he knows well: Take trade content and build it into a content, advertising, data, report, and conference business under a strong brand -- but at less cost than in the old, print world and way ahead of any of those old, print competitors. A company needs to figure out its essence -- just as I advised SixApart that they should be doing -- and that's what I happen to think the essence of WeblogsInc. will (or should) be.

But that's not the point of telling the story. What impressed me about this little episode is that here's Fred Wilson, a top-of-the-heap VC who has raised and won (and, of course, lost) more money than most of us can count, giving free -- and public -- advice to Jason.

I happened to sit last week with Fred and his partner Brad Burnham (who ought to be the next blogging VC) as I introduced them to someone else and as we chatted about this company and that, I was impressed anew with a VC's ability to summarize the essence of companies and industries and opportunities and risks in just a sentence. Through experience, they take on the art of abstraction of poets. And that's what Fred is giving Jason in that post. And he's doing in public, so -- unlike any time before -- we get to watch and listen and learn. It benefits Jason. It benefits Fred or else he wouldn't do it; this is how he will make contact with people who will come into the relationship knowing what he thinks. It benefits our baby industry because, as Fred says, if Jason succeeds it's good for everyone else who wants to succeed in this space. And it benefits us, the VC voyeurs.

Finally, that's what makes me think there's no reason to listen to the analysis of a reporter who makes himself an instant expert on a company or an industry when we can go to a player's blog and learn from their expertise and experience.

Welcome to our new transparent world.

LINK | Comments (3)

. . .

Cookies in RSS

: I talked about this with Fred Wilson yesterday and Dave Morgan today -- and Fred beat me to blogging it:

We need to get RSS readers to take cookies if we are ever going to make RSS work as a successful medium.

Oh, I know that consumers will want to read RSS; I'm convinced. But unless publishers can make money off content transported that way, they will handicap feeds, giving readers only headlines and excerpts and working too hard to make them come to their sites when they should look at RSS as just another way to feed content to consumers.

Dave, head of Tacoda and one of the smartest people I know in this biz, agrees that setting cookies is essential for advertisers and thus for publisher revenue but he's not worried because he thinks that browsers will take on RSS functionality. I think he's right. But Dave also said it's going to take Microsoft time to add RSS into its next versions of IE and Outlook. In the meantime, there is an opportunity for others to blaze the trail.

So let's take this one step further...

It's time for some creative thinking about the creative potential of RSS and content and advertising. Look at what ESPN has done using RSS as a transport mechanism for video and video advertising (when you come to the ESPN home page, you'll find video already downloaded and ready to serve because it was sent you in the background as an RSS feed... and you won't even know you're using RSS).

RSS has the potential to serve better content and advertising. Reuters started using it to send a feed of video links. Hell, it could send the video clips, too (if Reuters weren't worried about just streaming). Content and ads with video and other rich media could be downloaded to your machine in the background and served up immediately. And if this comes in feeds to which you subscribe and if it doesn't slow down your machine and if the content is compelling then you won't object -- and the content and advertising will be more targeted as well.

Adam Curry has been playing around with RSS and audio. Ernie Miller is shouting the wonders of RSS + BitTorrent from every mountaintop.

OK, now it's time for content producers -- TV, online, print -- and marketers -- from big creative agencies -- to wake up and smell the potential of RSS. It's another way to deliver content; in many ways, it's a better way. So what all can it do? Now is the time to try.

: See also Staci Kramer's OJR story on RSS.

: UPDATE: Scott in the comments says advertising will break RSS as it broke email. My reply:

Scott:
I disagree. Advertising will support RSS, as it supports Web content. Advertising did indeed break email because you have no control over what is sent to you. In RSS, you do. Of course, a publisher could mess up the RSS feed with intrusive advertising but if it gets too bad people will unsubscribe to that publisher's feed. On the other hand, if the publisher can't make money from the RSS feed -- and if that feed cannibalizes its Web business -- then they won't put up RSS and THAT is what will break RSS. So I'd put it the other way: No having advertising is what will break RSS.

: UPDATE: Seyad in the comments quite properly corrects my slopping wording above: Of course, RSS supports cookies in that it can send out cookies just as HTML does. What I'm really asking for, of course, is that RSS aggregators and readers support cookies consistently. Thanks for the correction, Seyad. (I am, I'll remind everyone, the poster boy for the A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing Foundation.)

LINK | Comments (11)

. . .

Busted

: Henry Copeland busts the Boston Globe's Hiawatha Bray...

...who wrote in a March 2002 article for the Boston Globe that "blogging is an ephemeral fad, destined to burn itself out in a year or two." The original article has disappeared into the Globe's archives, but its trace is here. Isn't it time to revisit that prediction Hiawatha?

A reporter with balls would eat crow publicly.

: UPDATE: Henry adds in the comments:

Turns out I need to eat a little crow too. As Corvidophile Ken Layne noted in my blog's comments, Bray actually wrote on June 1 in the Globe: "Over the past two years, blogging has gone from an eccentric hobby to a powerful new form of journalism." Quite an about face. Sadly, no recognition by Bray or the Globe of the prior failed prediction, but at least Bray has now climbed aboard the bandwagon. Bad news for blogging?

LINK | Comments (19)

. . .

A friend is worth.... not much

: Kept thinking about Friendster's hiring of Scott Sassa as its new head and for me it comes down to this: Sassa didn't have a job and Friendster doesn't have a business.

LINK | Comments (2)

. . .

Huff and puff and blow that bubble up

: I want to nod my head and agree with everything in this quote until I remind myself that it comes from Mark Andreesen, with whom I would not invest my passbook account. But I did like the quote anyway:

The economics of the Internet have undergone something like a thousand-times swing. If you're going to launch an Internet site or an Internet business today, it's probably going to cost about a tenth of what it would have cost five years ago, but you're going to have 10 times more consumers you can address and probably 10 times the advertising revenue. There's a seriousness and commitment and dedication and effort and investment going into it now that is a lot more interesting and a lot more real than what was happening in the '90s.

Somebody have a pin?

LINK | Comments (2)

. . .

Rococo.com

: I'll bet no blog conference has ever been held in such a luxurious setting.

LINK | Comments (1)

. . .

One good link deserves another

: Jason Calacanis was upset with me. What, no link love for his new auto blog? I complained that he hadn't given any link love to Spirit of America. Well, he jumped up and linked generously. So now here's another link to Jason's auto blog. Looks good. Rides smooth.

LINK | Comments (1)

. . .

Howdy, neighbor

: The wonderful and talented Debra Galant has started a new hyperlocal blog -- Barista and Bloomfield Avenue -- and it's damned good. Here's another explan.
It takes time for hyperlocal to grow because (a) the blogs come from the passion and effort of neighbors so motivated and (b) the traffic has to grow organically, like a fine coffee bean. But grow, it will.
Congrats, Debra.
And I'll take a large decaf, no room for milk. And a blueberry scone, please.

LINK | Comments (0)

. . .

.IQ

: Iraq wants the .IQ domain. Great idea on so many levels: Iraq can and should build a robust and free presence on the Internet (shaming many a neighbor). And, hell, Iraq can sell use of .IQ to outsiders for a profitable price. Someday, domains could be more valuable than oil, eh?

LINK | Comments (4)

. . .

Baathist Broadcasting Company

: OK, it's hearsay but I can just hear them say it, can't you? Harry sends us this from the Observer's Nick Cohen in the New Statesman saying that the BBC wouldn't run stories critical of the "peace" movement:

Just before the war against Iraq I began to receive strange calls from BBC journalists. Would I like information on how the leadership of the anti-war movement had been taken over by the Socialist Workers Party? Maybe, I replied. It was depressing that a totalitarian party was in the saddle, but that's where the SWP always tries to get. Why get excited?

Oh there are lots of reasons, said the BBC hacks. The anti-war movement wasn't a simple repetition of the old story of the politically naive being led by the nose by sly operators. The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba'athist fascism as it dared and had formed a working alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain, which, along with the usual misogyny and homophobia of such organisations, also believed that Muslims who decided that there was no God deserved to die for the crime of free thought. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, would allow themselves to be organised by the opponents of democracy and modernity and would march through the streets of London without a flicker of self-doubt. Wasn't this a story?

It's a great story, I cried. But why don't you broadcast it?

We can't, said the bitter hacks. Our editors won't let us.

LINK | Comments (6)

. . .