ZuDfunck

The Youngest Candidate Trailer, A Jason Pollock Film

  

The Youngest Candidate is a feature length documentary film written and directed by Jason Pollock. It is produced by David Letterman's company, Worldwide Pants, in partnership with Oscar winner Lawrence Bender (producer of Pulp Fiction and An Inconvenient Truth, etc..) and Balance Vector Productions. The story follows 4 teens who run for public office in America. The film follows Raul De Jesus, who at 20 years old ran for Mayor of Hartford, CT -- Tiffany Tupper, who at 18 years old ran for School Board in Hampton Township, PA -- Ytit Chauhan, who at 19 years old ran for City Council in Atlantic City, NJ -- George Monger, who at 18 years old ran for City Council in Memphis, TN --

Death: Ann Arbor News, Birth: AnnArbor.com

This is too close for comfort:

Ann Arbor News to close, replaced by AnnArbor.com

The Ann Arbor News announced today that it will close in July and will be replaced by a new company and site, AnnArbor.com. (Disclosures: I have been advising the project and used to work for Advance, the parent company.) From the publisher’s letter:

This is a difficult day for all of us at The Ann Arbor News. I’ve announced to my colleagues here that we will publish our last edition in July, when a new company called AnnArbor.com LLC will begin sharing local news and information with the community.

I don’t have to tell you what a special and unique place Ann Arbor is; we get to embrace and experience our community’s vibrancy daily. Our company knows that, too, and has chosen our special city to use as a laboratory to create new ways to share local news and information. Our owners have decided to continue to invest significantly in our market, and will be starting a new online media company to better service our tech-savvy readers and advertisers.

In July, AnnArbor.com will be born as an incredible community resource online, in print and around town. Like Ann Arbor, it will be a special place for everyone in the community to learn about, participate in and share everything that’s going on in our area.

We have shared with you before in our pages the extreme challenges that our industry and our newspaper have faced over the last couple years. Out of those challenges has come a new opportunity. Our new strategy reflects shifting media consumption habits and advertising revenue in the newspaper business, and particularly in Michigan.

As we say hello to AnnArbor.com, we will say good-bye to The Ann Arbor News. . . .

We’ll be building our new product from ground up in Ann Arbor, and we’re excited to work with you to help shape the design and features that will best serve our community and advertisers.

While we are inviting current Ann Arbor News employees to apply for positions with the new company, it is with a heavy heart that I let you know that job losses will be unavoidable. We have an extremely talented staff at The Ann Arbor News and they have done a tremendous job through very difficult times. There is nothing they did or didn’t do that would have sustained our seven-day print business model. . . .

We hope you will embrace this change with us and help us along this journey to shape our new online media company.

They are holding community meetings starting in April to do that. I’ll talk more about the project as its proceeds. Source

On 09-09-09 Beatles Rock Band Debuts

Keeping you guys in the loop of what's hip is my job and this placemarker, that isn't the right word, for the Beatles Rock Band site is cool. The audio loop must be a little ditty they recorded, you'll hate this, some Forty Years Ago!

Hat Tip: hannahighpoint
 

Super News Slams Twitter

Apparently this is a show on Current. Who knew? They slam Twitter pretty good and most of all it's Funny:

Jon Stewart's Assertions 'Unfair and Absurd' says NBC Boss Jeff Zucker

I know there are a lot of Fanboys of Jon Stewart on Twitter and Facebook but it's time to get back to reality. CNBC did not contribute to our economic tsunami.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker fired back at comedian Jon Stewart on Wednesday, saying it was "unfair" and "absurd" for the funnyman to criticize CNBC and question its coverage of financial news.

"Everybody wants to find a scapegoat. That's human nature," Zucker said during a keynote address at a media industry conference. "But to suggest that the business media or CNBC was responsible for what is going on now is absurd."

"Just because someone who mocks authority says something doesn't make it so," Zucker said, describing the comedian's comments as "completely out of line."

Zucker's comments are the latest salvo in a war of words with Stewart, who hosts the mock news program "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" on the Comedy Central cable television network owned by

Viacom Inc.

Stewart has blasted CNBC's reporting of the financial market meltdown, saying the channel was too cozy with corporate chiefs and key government officials.

The comedian has lobbed particularly harsh criticism at CNBC commentator Jim Cramer, and last week invited him for an appearance on the comedy show, where he hammered the guest for his coverage of Wall Street.

"Listen, you knew what the banks were doing, yet were touting it for months and months," Stewart said during his March 12 show. "The entire network was. Now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst."

Zucker, speaking at the

McGraw-Hill

Media Summit in New York on Wednesday, said that CNBC's reporters and commentators had done a "terrific" job and the network remained a "go-to" place for financial news.

"It's unfair to CNBC and to the business media in general," Zucker said. "I don't think you can blame what happened here on the business media."  continued

Kenny Powers' Powerisms

Kenny Powers on HBO is funny, once you get passed all the cussing and such!

I am Sure Kenny will regret Torching his Sh*t. But that's how this show rolls!

Note to Jurors: No Internet Usage

Going to be on Jury Duty? Leave the PDA and Internet alone!

Mistrial by iPhone: Jurors’ Web Forays Are Upending Trials

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: March 17, 2009

Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock.

Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, wasting eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.

“We were stunned,” said the defense lawyer, Peter Raben, who was told by the jury that he was on the verge of winning the case. “It’s the first time modern technology struck us in that fashion, and it hit us right over the head.”

It might be called a Google mistrial. The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges.

Last week, a building products company asked an Arkansas court to overturn a $12.6 million judgment against it after a juror used Twitter to send updates during the civil trial.

And on Monday, defense lawyers in the federal corruption trial of a former Pennsylvania state senator, Vincent J. Fumo, demanded that the judge declare a mistrial after a juror posted updates on the case on Twitter and Facebook. The juror even told his readers that a “big announcement” was coming Monday. But the judge decided to let the trial continue, and the jury found Mr. Fumo guilty. His lawyers plan to use the Internet postings as grounds for appeal.

Jurors are not supposed to seek information outside of the courtroom. They are required to reach a verdict based only on the facts that the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial. But now, using their cellphones, they can look up the name of a defendant on the Web, or examine an intersection using Google Maps, violating the legal system’s complex rules of evidence. They can also tell their friends what is happening in the jury room, though they are supposed to keep their opinions and deliberations secret. Continued

Society Doesn't Need Newspapers, We Need Journalism

Maybe you have heard of this Dude: Clay Shirky. He wrote this killer post: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Quotable text was jumping out of his post and I encourage you to read it whole. I snippet the last few graphs to whet your appetite. Bottom line is don't fear the change the demise of newspapers brings, just join the revolution to seed it's replacement.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Hattip: Flap

Steven Johnson Describes 'News EcoSystem'

I like what this dude is putting down:

At SXSW '09, Steven Johnson sees thriving 'news ecosystem'

Steven Johnson and the growth of the news ecosystem. Credit: David Sarno / Los Angeles Times

When the going gets tough, get out the metaphors. That strategy was demonstrated nicely Friday at the South by Southwest conference by media and technology scholar Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson).  In addressing the paradigm shift that's clear-cutting old, tree-based media such as newspapers and magazines, and fertilizing the many digital news biomes, Johnson developed the picture of the news as a thriving, jungle-like ecosystem:

Today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years.

Johnson began his talk by observing that when he was a college student and Macintosh computer fanatic in 1987, he had only one regular outlet for news -- the monthly issue of MacWorld magazine: in essence, one static source containing stuff that had happened a month earlier. As time went on, more current Mac and Apple news became available, first through dial-up networking services like CompuServe, then on the incipient World Wide Web. Technology news sources, both Apple-related and otherwise, continued to proliferate and diversify as the Web grew:

We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make it to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt.

Because Tech news planted its online roots more than a decade ago, Johnson says, you can think of it as the news ecosystem's "old-growth forest," compared with ...

... other areas that have emerged only in the last few years. Johnson pointed to Web coverage of politics: Media-wise, the 2008 election was a world away from the pre-Web 1992 election, when news choices for consumers were shockingly limited from today's perspective: You had your daily newspaper, a few TV news shows and whatever magazines you had delivered. It was a news "desert" rather than a rain forest.

Continued

Steven Johnson and the growth of the news ecosystem. Credit: David Sarno / Los Angeles Times

When the going gets tough, get out the metaphors. That strategy was demonstrated nicely Friday at the South by Southwest conference by media and technology scholar Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson).  In addressing the paradigm shift that's clear-cutting old, tree-based media such as newspapers and magazines, and fertilizing the many digital news biomes, Johnson developed the picture of the news as a thriving, jungle-like ecosystem:

Today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years.

Johnson began his talk by observing that when he was a college student and Macintosh computer fanatic in 1987, he had only one regular outlet for news -- the monthly issue of MacWorld magazine: in essence, one static source containing stuff that had happened a month earlier. As time went on, more current Mac and Apple news became available, first through dial-up networking services like CompuServe, then on the incipient World Wide Web. Technology news sources, both Apple-related and otherwise, continued to proliferate and diversify as the Web grew:

We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make it to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt.

Because Tech news planted its online roots more than a decade ago, Johnson says, you can think of it as the news ecosystem's "old-growth forest," compared with ...

... other areas that have emerged only in the last few years. Johnson pointed to Web coverage of politics: Media-wise, the 2008 election was a world away from the pre-Web 1992 election, when news choices for consumers were shockingly limited from today's perspective: You had your daily newspaper, a few TV news shows and whatever magazines you had delivered. It was a news "desert" rather than a rain forest.

Steven Johnson and the growth of the news ecosystem. Credit: David Sarno / Los Angeles Times

When the going gets tough, get out the metaphors. That strategy was demonstrated nicely Friday at the South by Southwest conference by media and technology scholar Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson).  In addressing the paradigm shift that's clear-cutting old, tree-based media such as newspapers and magazines, and fertilizing the many digital news biomes, Johnson developed the picture of the news as a thriving, jungle-like ecosystem:

Today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years.

Johnson began his talk by observing that when he was a college student and Macintosh computer fanatic in 1987, he had only one regular outlet for news -- the monthly issue of MacWorld magazine: in essence, one static source containing stuff that had happened a month earlier. As time went on, more current Mac and Apple news became available, first through dial-up networking services like CompuServe, then on the incipient World Wide Web. Technology news sources, both Apple-related and otherwise, continued to proliferate and diversify as the Web grew:

We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make it to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt.

Because Tech news planted its online roots more than a decade ago, Johnson says, you can think of it as the news ecosystem's "old-growth forest," compared with ...

... other areas that have emerged only in the last few years. Johnson pointed to Web coverage of politics: Media-wise, the 2008 election was a world away from the pre-Web 1992 election, when news choices for consumers were shockingly limited from today's perspective: You had your daily newspaper, a few TV news shows and whatever magazines you had delivered. It was a news "desert" rather than a rain forest.

Minority Report Interface Is Here, Almost, And Cheap!

Nerd Alert! Nerd Alert! Hat tip Eric Rice

David Pouge's Rules For Twitter

Yes the Heavyweight of Tech Mr. Pouge weighs in on Twitter. I like his humor and wisdom:

If you asked me to write my own “Rules for Twitter” document — No. 927,001 on Google — it would look something like this:

DON’T KNOCK IT TILL YOU’VE TRIED IT Of course, this advice goes for anything in life. But listen: even my own masterful prose can’t capture what you’ll feel when you try Twitter. So try it.

If you don’t get any value from it, close the window and never come back; that’s fine. Despite all the press, Twitter is still largely a geek and early-adopter phenomenon at this point.

DON’T USE THE WEB SITE I couldn’t believe that six million Twitter users lumber off to a Web page every time they want to send or read tweets. Turns out they don’t. About 70 percent use sweet little free programs that sit at the edges of their screens (or run on their cellphones, especially iPhones) all day. They have names like TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, Twhirl and Twitterific.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ ALL THE TWEETS It’s common to check out someone’s Twitter profile and read, “Following: 900 people.” Baloney. Nobody has the time to read all the tweets from more than about 30 people — at least, nobody with a life.

Clearly, these high subscribers just read the most recent ones, or skim for good ones, or use search.twitter.com to find messages on certain subjects.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO ANSWER ALL THE REPLIES If you have a lot of followers, you get a lot of replies to your tweets. Fortunately, this isn’t e-mail; nobody expects you to answer everything.

IF YOU’RE CONFUSED ABOUT REPLYING, YOU’RE NOT ALONE If you reply to one of my tweets, I can write back in either of two ways. I can reply as another public tweet, but of course nobody but you will have any idea what I’m talking about. (“@puppydog: Maybe in Montana!!! LOL”).

Or I can send you a private Direct Message — but then our dialogue may end. You can’t reply to my Direct Message unless I’m also following you (it’s an antispam measure, according to Twitter). Get it? Me either. Twitter Inc. says it’s working on fixing this and a host of other confusing elements.

USE IT HOWEVER YOU LIKE I’ve finally harnessed Twitter’s power for my own nefarious ends. I pass on jokes. I share little thoughts that don’t merit a full blog or article post. I follow links and track buddies. I un-follow people who are boring or post 50 times a day.

And I query the multitudes. Last week, I was writing a script for a TV segment, and needed a great example of “an arty movie that a teenage baby sitter wouldn’t be caught dead watching.” My followers instantly shot back a huge assortment of hilarious responses. (“Gandhi.” “My Dinner with André.” “The Red Balloon.”)

Other people plug their blogs, or commiserate, or break news; the first report of the plane in the Hudson came from a Twitterer. It’s all good.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE RULES Including mine. Use Twitter the way you want to. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re doing it wrong.

Oh, and one more tip: when you’re trying to get real work done, it’s also O.K. to close Twitter. It may be powerful, useful, addictive and fascinating — but in the end, it’s still an Internet time drain.

Newspapers Demise: Because No One Buys

The only time I bought a paper in the past six months were the post election day newspapers I thought would make a good collectors item. Apparently I am not alone.

Behind the Incredibly Shrinking Media

Newspapers should focus on the needs of readers and become part of their routine. If they do this correctly, success should follow

By Paul Armstrong

In chronicling the media's contractions through @themediaisdying at Twitter, I've described these efforts as akin to watching Titanic and The Perfect Storm as if they were one movie. Ironically, it takes roughly 90 minutes each day to post and bear witness to the unprecedented implosion of the publishing industry. In doing this, two questions occur to me regularly: "How far through this movie are we?" and "Who's captaining this ship?"

Given the 1,600 layoffs newspaper publisher McClatchy (MNI) announced on Mar. 9 and the recent flurry of newspaper "deaths," mass firings, and additional uncertainty, from San Francisco to Philly, San Antonio to Denver and Milwaukee, it is clear that local papers are facing their demise. And when you realize that some of these papers have been around for more than a century, surviving multiple wars and economic upheavals, you know quickly that the current period is more than the economic crisis and loss of advertising confidence: Something is deeply "wrong" at the core.

In true Web 2.0 (crowdsourcing) style, I asked the 12,000-plus @themediaisdying network members to opine on the most influential reason for the current radical decline. Many of the usual suspects turned up: the Internet, technology, delayed reaction to change, fixed costs…the list goes on. All those continue to have an impact, of course, but they aren't, in my opinion, the fundamental reason.

It's Our Fault. We're Not Buying

If we're looking to affix blame, we should look no farther than to ourselves. At the most basic, we stopped "buying" it. Newer generations never grew up depending on newspapers—they'd consider it anachronistic to write the local paper a check for a subscription. At the same time, the "old media" still do not grasp the technological and sociological changes associated with this generational independence. There is a huge miscommunication between creator and consumer in terms of value propositions. Nothing has gone "wrong," per se, it is simply a changed balance of power. Creator and consumer are no longer tied to the other. The unchallenged power shift of the classified advertising section becoming Craigslist, Google (GOOG), et al., is a fascinating example of this. Publishers of a medium that is outdated by the time it hits the curb failed to act when these new entrants satisfied the consumer and stole the franchise.

Continued

Van Morrison Plays A NYC JukeBox

I love the New Yorker, my parents always subscribed, I admit the cartoons were my major focus. Van Morrison was in NYC last week and the New Yorker did a piece on him:

Drive-by Dept.

Listening Party

Van Morrison

Lakeside Lounge, on Avenue B, is known for many things: close quarters, cheap drinks, a photo booth, but most of all for its jukebox, which is full of raw R. & B., country, and early rock and roll. Last Monday afternoon, a short man in his sixties wearing oversized sunglasses and a black fedora cocked his ear toward the speaker overhead. “Joe Turner,” he said. “Big Joe.”

The song was “Honey Hush,” a No. 1 R. & B. hit in 1953 for the Kansas City blues shouter. The man was Van Morrison, the Irish singer and songwriter, who was in town to play a pair of shows that week at the WaMu Theatre, at Madison Square Garden. The concerts were recitals of an old record, the 1968 album “Astral Weeks.” But Morrison wanted to talk about even older records. “There was a place in Belfast called Atlantic Records,” he said, his accent strong, his speaking voice lighter than his singing voice. “They imported the stuff from here, actually: jazz records and blues records. I’d go with my father from when I was three.”

Joe Turner had stopped coming out of the jukebox. Now it was the founding fathers of rock and roll, in quick succession: Jerry Lee Lewis singing “Sixty Minute Man,” Chuck Berry with “Tulane,” Bo Diddley’s “Dearest Darling,” Little Richard on “Rip It Up.” Morrison acknowledged each song with a nod. He looked slimmer than he has in the past, and he had long red hair of a hue reminiscent of Sumner Redstone. He sipped tea from a mug, and his press agent brought him a bagel with tuna salad. “The first Little Richard song I heard was ‘Tutti Frutti,’ ” he said. “No, it was the one from the movie ‘The Girl Can’t Help It.’ Little Richard was doing rhythm and blues, but with horns,” Morrison went on. “It was different than Elvis Presley, and so I preferred it. Why would you like Elvis if you had the real stuff? I also preferred Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent. Vincent was different. He was rock and roll, dangerous.”

Morrison mentioned Wynonie Harris, the ribald singer of the late forties and early fifties known as Mr. Blues: “I heard one of his on the radio, on a daytime show. Someone probably played it by accident.” He held forth on Leadbelly: “He did everything from children’s songs to cowboy songs to show tunes.” He talked about the blind harpist Sonny Terry (the first record he ever bought was one of Terry’s), the powerhouse vocalist Bobby Bland, and the skiffle pioneer Lonnie Donegan. When someone grouped Donegan with other practitioners of “pre-Beatles rock and roll,” Morrison pulled up short.

“That’s a cliché,” he said, adjusting his sunglasses. “I don’t think ‘pre-Beatles’ means anything, because there was stuff before them. Over here, you have a different slant. You measure things in terms of the Beatles. We don’t think music started there. Rolling Stone magazine does, because it’s their mythology. The Beatles were peripheral. If you had more knowledge about music, it didn’t really mean anything. To me, it was meaningless.”

Continued

Jeff Jarvis versus David Carr: Newspaper's Death Match

Newspapers are failing, Jeff Jarvis author of 'What Would Google Do' throws bricks at NYTime's David Carr. I am not quite sure what got Mr. Jarvis all in Mr. Carr's grill but I quote him, after Mr. Carr's summation:

“It is time that newspapers are allowed to collude in the public interest,” said Mr. Mutter, who blogs at Reflections of a Newsosaur. “In order to keep as many feet in the street as possible regardless of how they are branded and preserve editorial voices, the new competitive environment has to be considered. The Chronicle competes against The Mercury News, but it also competes against Craigslist, Zillow and Auto Trader.”

Philip Meyer, who wrote “The Vanishing Newspaper,” concurs: “Technology has destroyed the monopolies that these laws were designed to regulate.”

Of course, advocates of the free, independent press are rightfully chary about wholesale deregulation, but John Morton, the eminent newspaper analyst, said that individual newspaper companies can’t solve this problem by working alone.

“Only newspapers are economically organized to cover a broad swath of events,” he said. “A lot of aggregators have been taking advantage of that, and pretty soon, there will be nothing to aggregate. But that can’t really be discussed among newspaper owners because of antitrust problems.”

What is under attack is the fundamental machinery of the Fourth Estate, not just the local newspapers that some love to hate and others, including many young consumers, are indifferent to.

Whatever the solution, the capacity to produce accountability reporting, investigative journalism and robust coverage of public officials is not sustainable under current revenue models. And that is not a business problem; it’s a civic one. Source

Jeff Jarvis Replies:

David Carr sounds like an oldies station as he replays the same old record about charging for content (hey, Carr, would you please walk down the hall and do some reporting in your own damned building - I’ll give you the phone number for the right person - and find out why your own friggin’ paper made its own good economic decisions to stop charging?!?); and kissing off the aggregators (hey, David, can you imagine what would happen to your P&L if The Times Company told Google to take a flying leap and not to aggregate and link to your paper and the only bright spot in your parent’s P&L, About.com?); and getting rid of ad networks (great timing; this is the moment when the paper should kiss off revenue); and get rid of newspaper regulation. At least on that last point, we agree. Except that newspapers are so far gone they could collude and conspire and consolidate and fornicate to their hearts’ desire and it won’t help them. It’s too late. Source

Blockbuster's Days Are Numbered

Not that pleased with Blockbuster anyway they charge early for unreturned items then credit back the money minus a dollar or so. This story in Wired indicates they may pay the ultimate price for their lack of customer sensitivity:

Video Killed the Video Store

The Blockbuster is dead, long live the blockbuster.

At least that's what the technology omens are saying.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Blockbuster Video, whose shares are trading below $1, is seeking advice on how to file for bankruptcy. Blockbuster counters it's only trying to get help to restructure its debt.

No matter. The days of tromping to the video store to find the night's entertainment are past. Now the question is only how long will it be until walking to the mailbox to get a DVD is considered antiquarian.

Driving or walking to the video store to bring home less than a gig of data — data that may or may not even be in stock — just doesn't make much sense anymore.

At least not when compared to Netflix's easy ordering system, its recommendation engine, lack of late fees, deeper inventory and clever use of the Postal Service to have movies delivered quickly.

Blockbuster tried to keep up, with an innovative mail rental plan that let people trade in movies at the store as well, but the plan turned out to be too complicated and too late.

But even the notion of even leaving the room to get a movie, doesn't make sense if you have a fat internet connection and the willingness to explore some legal and less-legal ways to download movies to a computer.

Note that also on Tuesday, cable provider Comcast announced that it was rolling out "wideband" in the San Francisco Bay Area (including a 50 Mbps downstream offering for $140 a month) and doubled the download speed of its current basic plus service to 12 Mbps down for free. That marks the 10th urban area in the United States that the cable operator is offering real broadband.

At least not when compared to Netflix's easy ordering system, its recommendation engine, lack of late fees, deeper inventory and clever use of the Postal Service to have movies delivered quickly.

Blockbuster tried to keep up, with an innovative mail rental plan that let people trade in movies at the store as well, but the plan turned out to be too complicated and too late.

But even the notion of even leaving the room to get a movie, doesn't make sense if you have a fat internet connection and the willingness to explore some legal and less-legal ways to download movies to a computer.

Note that also on Tuesday, cable provider Comcast announced that it was rolling out "wideband" in the San Francisco Bay Area (including a 50 Mbps downstream offering for $140 a month) and doubled the download speed of its current basic plus service to 12 Mbps down for free. That marks the 10th urban area in the United States that the cable operator is offering real broadband.

At least not when compared to Netflix's easy ordering system, its recommendation engine, lack of late fees, deeper inventory and clever use of the Postal Service to have movies delivered quickly.

Blockbuster tried to keep up, with an innovative mail rental plan that let people trade in movies at the store as well, but the plan turned out to be too complicated and too late.

But even the notion of even leaving the room to get a movie, doesn't make sense if you have a fat internet connection and the willingness to explore some legal and less-legal ways to download movies to a computer.

Note that also on Tuesday, cable provider Comcast announced that it was rolling out "wideband" in the San Francisco Bay Area (including a 50 Mbps downstream offering for $140 a month) and doubled the download speed of its current basic plus service to 12 Mbps down for free. That marks the 10th urban area in the United States that the cable operator is offering real broadband.

You Stream, I Stream, We All Scream For Our Stream

It's so reassuring when I do something and then I read about it in a fine Site like Cnet. It just makes one feel grounded, ya know? So it used to be Blogs, now it's Streams! Good Lord! Where does it End?

The future will be streamed. And streamed some more.

Earlier this week, Facebook unveiled a few notable product revamps: "fan pages" for brands that look and act more like regular member profiles, and a redesigned home page that emphasizes a real-time version of the site's iconic news feed. The keyword here is "streaming," encouraging an even more extensive flow of information with a status update prompt that asks, "What's on your mind?"

Needless to say, "What's on your mind"--which also allows the posting of links, videos, and other content to news feeds--bears quite a bit of resemblance to Twitter's "What are you doing?" prompt. So, especially in light of more rumors and reports about Facebook's spurned attempt to acquire Twitter, expect comparisons between the two services as means of ultra-customized media consumption to escalate.

When Facebook unveiled its redesign I predicted that we'd hear a lot more about the news feed as the new personal portal. That's sort of what many prolific Twitter users have turned the microblogging service into, too. Our Twitter feeds, after all, deliver a whole lot more than updates about what kind of beers our friends just ordered at happy hour: Depending on what you subscribe to, you can get ski reports, links to news headlines and blog feeds, mini-recipes, and celebrity-stalking intel.

Continued

Mac Dude is a Gay Porn Star

In it's run on Comcast's VOD I watched Zack and Miri make a Porno. I was floored by the Mac dudes appearance as a gay porn star. What would PC say! Holy moses! View it when you get a chance. I mean it's not a great movie but it can get through a rainy day.

Twitter Can Do What Google Can't

The potential for Twitter to do what Google doesn't, Real Time Snapshots, has us all in a tither:

Twitter: We Can Do What Google Can't Venture Capital Backer Says Search Is Reason It Walked Away From Facebook Deal

by Michael Learmonth Published: March 03, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Twitter sees lucrative opportunities in search, albeit a different kind of search than what Google offers, and, as co-founder Biz Stone told Ad Age recently, "we'll certainly be exploring those."

It's because of the potential it sees in search that the Twitter co-founders walked away from a $500 million offer from Facebook -- not just the terms of the deal, said Todd Chaffee, an Institutional Venture Partners general partner and a new Twitter backer. He said contrary to some reports, Facebook offered not just stock but substantial cash in the deal.

Twitter's search engine, purchased with the acquisition of Summize last summer, bills itself as a search of "what's happening -- right now," and in Twitter's small but growing world, it is.

While being a searchable database of what is being said at a particular time is unique, it doesn't take Twitter too far afield from Google, which is a catalog of the world's recorded knowledge. Google looks back at what documents have been produced and can be surfaced, while Twitter looks back at what was said on a given topic.

Certainly there's an AdWords-like business there, but, as Mr. Chaffee told us, Twitter has another "wild card."

In the future, searches won't only query what's being said at the moment, but will go out to the Twitter audience in the form of a question, like a faster and less-filtered Yahoo Answers or Wiki Answers. Users would be able to tap the collective knowledge of the 6 million or so members of the Twitterverse.

Continued

'Somethings Happening Here': Time Magazine's March '07 Article on Twitter,

This Time Magazine Article from 3/26/07 when Twitter had a mere 100,000 users. Good reference point to what is today almost two years hence:

If you ever fancied yourself a blogger but didn't have the time or energy to post thoughtful or silly missives at regular intervals, a new service called Twitter could set your inner blogger free. While some people call it microblogging or moblogging, I like to think of Twitter simply as blogging for regular people.

Maybe you're really busy. Maybe you don't have much to say. Or maybe you're just lazy. Not a problem. This free service works by letting you broadcast a group text message to your friends' mobile phones from either your own phone, an instant message or an online form at twitter.com. All your notes are then stored and displayed on your personal profile page on the site, which includes links to your friends' Twitter pages, a thumbnail picture of your choice, and a short bio. You can even send text updates directly to your MySpace page. Just remember to keep it short: posts are limited to 140 characters, and the topic is, invariably, "what are you doing?"

More often than not, it turns out, Twitter's 100,000 members — twice as many as it had just a month ago, according to Twitter business development director Biz Stone — are simply killing time. Even Presidential hopeful John Edwards is on it, although he seems to be the only one thinking about more than lunch. As I type this, caroline is mulling over some Girl Scout cookies, ian_hocking is "Waiting for Jessica to arrive so we can eat!" and hlantz is "having a nice cup of Soft Starmint tea." Scintillating.

The chatter about Twitter escalated into a virtual roar two weeks ago during the South by Southwest multimedia festival in Austin, Tex., when the barebones service owned by Blogger founder Evan Williams, 34, was named the best blogging tool and attendees used it to meet up at parties. Since then, the fawning attention to the seven-month-old service has come full-circle as reviewers have begun to realize how boring most people's lives really are. (As if YouTube's gallery of puppy and kitten videos hadn't already driven that point home.) Nonetheless, Twitter has been the top term on blog search engine Technorati for the past two weeks.

Plenty of people would happily have Twitter muzzled, rather than endure the beeping alert for yet another new text message. But I'm betting that Twitter will get a lot noisier before netizens move on to the next new thing. Why? Because Twitter targets the same crowd that digs MySpace and, frankly, that site is getting stale. We cyberjunkies need a new thrill, and what better than a service that combines social networking, blogging and texting? Dozens of other companies are trying to do the same thing with services like VelvetPuffin and Google's Dodgeball. But only Twitter has figured out how to make it easy.

I know, it's totally silly and shallow, but that's precisely why Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app. And if you don't like it, well, in the words of one Twit from San Francisco, "I'm so sick to death of Twitter-haters. If you don't like it, why waste your time writing, reading, or talking about it? Sheesh." Source

As Denver Bids Adieu To Theirs, Is Yours Next?

Another storied Newspaper ceases to exist. Publishing since the Civil War.
What are we to do?