Life Changes when Clooney options your new novel

Olen Steinhauer, Montenegro, 2005
Robin Hunt

I left off before with a cliffhanger: Me and my agent entering the Shoreham Hotel, penthouse level, door #6. What lay behind that door? Something cool, no doubt. Doubt not: It was cool. A slick moderned-up suite with windows everywhere, a flatscreen television showing off cover images of The Tourist, waiters with curious snacks, and a bartender serving up “The Tourist”–a cocktail they rustled up for the event, which includes:

Skyy Cherry vodka
White cranberry juice
Red cranberry juice
–and two sliced strawberries for garnish

Okay, looking at it now it looks a pretty sissy drink. Sam Tanenhaus said it tasted like a Shirley Temple. But the magic is all in the proportions, which is a state secret.

Olen Steinhauer in Contemporary Nomad

Burt Bacharach's answer to the credit crunch

And he sang it so beautifully tonight, made us think again about those words.
Thanks to Dana for spotting the tickets were on sale.





What's it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?




What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind?





And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
Then I guess it's wise to be cruel.





All pictures Burt & the Roundhouse, October 22, London
Robin Hunt

And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there's a heaven above, Alfie,
I know there's something much more,
Something even non-believers can believe in.
I believe in love, Alfie.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love youve missed you're nothing, Alfie.


Burt was 80 this year: way to go.

Blog Off!

If you quit now, you're in good company. Notorious chatterbox Jason Calacanis made millions from his Weblogs network. But he flat-out retired his own blog in July. "Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it," he wrote in his final post.

Impersonal is correct: Scroll down Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs and you'll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can't keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.

Thanks Wired.

Get Bailout, Buy More Lobbying?

"Federal dollars were not intended to be used for lobbying, and it would be unconscionable for these companies to misuse taxpayer dollars in this way," Feinstein said in a statement.

From ProPublica.

Trust Clusters and online Journalism

The Web is pervasive and can spread the word faster and more widely than information has ever moved before, and that might have made a difference in the way the Knight Ridder stories were received if they were supported by aggregators with proven integrity and stature. That is one of the goals of ProPublica, the new investigative on-line news organization underwritten by the philanthropists Herb and Marion Sandler.

Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, read on here.


I make that three "trust" and journalism websites.
- ProPublica
- NewsTrust
- NewsCred


What else is out there?

5000 Days old, Kevin Kelly on the next 5000 days

Worth a viewing.

Google aims to be "Google" of social networks, finally

Google is applying the same approach to social networks it has used to dominate the online search business. If this works, it may finally make ads on social networks relevant—and profitable.

Google declined to discuss its idea with BusinessWeek. But it is based on the same principle as PageRank, Google's algorithm for determining which Web sites appear in a list of search results. The new technology could track not just how many friends you have on Facebook but how many friends your friends have. Well-connected chums make you particularly influential. The tracking system also would follow how frequently people post things on each other's sites. It could even rate how successful somebody is in getting friends to read a news story or watch a video clip, according to people familiar with the patent filing.

From Business Week.

The scholarly community online by Harvard's Stephen Greenblatt

[Stephen] Greenblatt continued to say that last year Harvard passed a vote that faculty would be required if they wrote an article to allow access to a digital version for Harvard, so that all their scholarly work would be universally accessible digitally. "As a general principle, the idea that the work that we do should have value digitally and have universal access," is what Greenblatt says he had been calling for for years. In an article for the MLA, he said we must transform our understanding of what it means to appear on the web and how we can use that. We must make more broadly accessible our work. We must feel that work is significant; though the web must take into consideration the feeling of community that is subscription-based. You feel you are part of a community when you subscribe to a scholarly journal. But ultimately your work can reach a larger scholarly audience with the internet.

A great piece from the Future of the Book site.

Now that's what I call communication

The Girl Effect video.

Here's the business model: they need your privacy

Increasingly, privacy not pipes are the front line in the battle for broadband Britain. Put simply, we expect most of our online entertainment and information free. The music industry has discovered this to its cost, as illegal downloads proliferate. If content is to be delivered free, but with revenue to intellectual property owners, it must be supported by advertisements. Advertisers will do this only in exchange for knowledge of who is receiving their promotional message and when.

Peter Bazalgette in the FT.

Phew!

“We know there are concerns about exit polls,” said Kathy Frankovic, who directs CBS News polling unit. “Our goal is to do two things on election night: explain what’s going on and why, and to accurately project outcomes.”

From Politico.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy

And whereas socialism was borne of the belief that the "bourgeoisie" exploited the working class, digital socialism is largely borne of the belief that the owners of intellectual property use their rights to exploit the consuming class.

From e-consultancy.com. What goes around...

Gloomy

North Circular, London
October
Robin Hunt

As we are living in a world where Goldman Sachs has been part-nationalised by George Bush and Iceland went bankrupt in a weekend, I can't think why anyone would be particularly shocked by the idea that in a declining market of 19 national news titles, it would be unthinkable that a significant number might disappear, given the apparent scale of economic failure. It's not to be welcomed, or encouraged, but you cannot pretend that somehow it won't happen.

Emily Bell goes grim on newspapers.

Sipping on some news

Three years ago, if you had purchased $10,000 worth of beer and then got drunk each day ever since, the value of the deposits on the beer kegs would have given you a better Return on Investment than if you had investment that $10,000 in almost any U.S. newspaper company. Moreover, you'd have plenty of beer left and would have had a much better time!

From Vin Crosbie.


“When I drink, I think; and when I think, I drink.” – Francois Rabelais

Who Will Play Robert Peston in the Movie?

Members of the public, LSE staff and alumni can request one ticket via the online ticket request form which will be live on this weblisting from 10.00am on Friday 7 November.

Above: the instructions for getting (one, and one only) ticket for Robert Peston's "Who runs Britain?" lecture on Monday 17th of November at the LSE.

The Un-missing Link

If news orgs like the NYT, Washington Post, and hundreds of newspaper sites start linking to news and other content around the web in a big way, on their front pages (as the NYT plans) and across their sites, it will have a HUGE impact on the web’s link economy.

From Publishing 2.0

A Muslim orientated "Second Life"?

Muslim social network Muxlim.com, live since late 2006, is planning to launch a Muslim-oriented virtual world not unlike Second Life. The idea is that something tailored to the Muslim world would be allowed through the IP-blocks of countries like United Arab Emirates which currently stops access to virtual worlds and online games considered unsuitable or offensive to Muslim culture.

From Mike Butcher in Techcrunch

Money: the novel (originally)

Thanks to John R. MacArthur, who is the publisher of Harper's Magazine, for his following suggestion.

Finally, there are the great realist novelists, who often see more clearly than journalists. So far, my Google search has not picked up any excerpts from Zola’s novel Money being read on the nightly news. In this brilliant chronicle of a speculative stock bubble, launched by a character named Saccard in 1860s Paris, Zola cuts right to the heart of America’s boom-and-bust neurosis: “Wasn’t such great and rapid prosperity the result of the methods for which [Saccard] was now being blamed. All of this came together. If one accepted the success, one had to accept the risks. When you overheat a machine, it sometimes explodes.”

From In These Times.

Representing journalism: the Layer Cake theory 1

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.

Howard Beale (Network, 1976).

A real-time exercise in academic blogging

So, after a little prodding on William’s part, I began my reading. Here’s what I read on the day that I showed up with hardly any voice to lecture:

Dr. Stern really can't talk. She sounds like Haley Joel Osment saying, "I see dead people," in The Sixth Sense.
It was probably apt. He wished me well in the blog and I responded with thanks for the good wishes.

I eventually read all of the entries and responded to a few posts, too. Generally, William both encapsulated the classes and lent his own (often strong) opinion in a voice that was uniquely his own.

I often felt like I was under a microscope, my every movement exposed:

Dr. Stern walks in at 11:10 am. She has a habit of doing that.

Much more from both sides at the Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Lionel Barber, FT editor, on journalism

This piece is behind the registration wall of the FT now, and I cut and paste my extract a while ago.

Most damaging, the mainstream press lost touch with its audience at the very moment when technology, via the internet, was dramatically lowering the barriers to entry. Whether this was an unhappy coincidence or complacency is unclear. What is undeniable is that public trust in newspapers started to slip, to the point where a recent study by Sacred Heart University shows barely one in five say they can believe “all or most” media reporting (well below comparable British figures).

A google search finds the piece as someone's email here and I strongly recommend reading it, particularly as it addresses those "Practice of Everyday Life" issues such as celebrity journalists, and the robustly Hogarthian nature of British journalism (and the free DVDs). The piece also added richly to a very loose metaphor I'm developing of the layer cake when it comes to mapping journalist's motivations and their age. It is not surprisingly, for example, to find the 53 year old Lionel Barber writing about his time as a Laurence Stern Fellow at the Washington Post.

Entering the Post newsroom was like walking on to the set of All the President’s Men , the 1976 film starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the Post’s own Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, with its row upon row of reporters, each with their desk-top computers. (At the FT, we still bashed away on typewriters.) Bradlee’s glass office stood in the centre of the newsroom. Woodward’s investigative team was tucked away at the back. There was a swagger about the place that was irresistible.

I wonder how many journalists were inspired by All the President's Men? And what more recent inspirations are? At this weekend's "End of Journalism" conference I spoke to many practitioners and educators, and there was a sense that much of the inspiration today to enter the business was as much about the celebrity of being a journalist, as the form's ability to change, or right, things. More Redford than Woodward, as it were. Should the inspirations in the layer cake now include Jon Stewart? Jon Ronson or Ali G? Jeremy Paxman or Katie Couric? Arianna Huffington or Stephen Colbert? And who was the last great popular journalist in cinema?

There is a lot more in Barber's piece than this.

Seymour Hersh on David Remnick

'I never love editors,' he says. 'But David is smart and he has great judgement.' How often does he check in with Remnick? 'I'm sure he would tell you less often than I should. He gets pretty angry with me. Sometimes we have these rows where I won't take his calls. He says no to a lot of stuff - stuff I think the editor would die for! Admittedly, it is not the Seymour Hersh weekly. But sometimes he'll say: "We are not going to publish this kind of stuff 'cos it's frigging crazy."' It was Tina Brown, formerly of Tatler and Vanity Fair, who brought him to the New Yorker. 'What's-her-name... yeah, Tina. She gave me a lot of money, and she said: "Just go do it!" But she used to worry. She'd call me up and say, "I sat next to Colin Powell at dinner last night and he was railing about how awful you are." So I would say, "Well, that's good." And she'd say, "Is it?" And I'd tell her, "Yes, it is."'

From The Observer.

Moron I-Google 2

As it were. Having spent the best part of two years building up my I-google home page feeds I now cannot access them. My home page defaults to my Gmail account - sometimes. At other times I get a Google sorry message.

Others are angry too:

And Google won't let users switch their home pages back to the way they used to be, which has sparked a furious revolt, online activism, and even some homegrown fixes.

This from Ten Zen Monkeys...
There is this from Information Week:

"We're constantly thinking about how to improve our products for our users," said Jessica Ewing, iGoogle's senior product manager, in an e-mail. "Then we take our ideas, prototype them, and put them through a vigorous set of usability tests and experiments to make sure we are doing the right thing for users. The iGoogle features we launched yesterday [Oct. 16] went through this exact process, and we've made changes along the way based on feedback from users and developers."

Well, Jessica, all I would like to be able to do is access my home page...that doesn't sound so hard, does it?

Update: everything fine on igoogle.co.uk. Strange but true. How long do we have?

Scholars & Libraries & Blogs & Trust

While the library community appreciates institutional networks, academics feel closer to their own disciplinary networks. In my interviews, faculty members told me that at the heart of their reaction are concerns about quality (which is an essential criterion for scholarly outputs) and potential copyright infringements. Several faculty members I talked with during my study expressed the need to stay closer to their special communities through networking and information sharing both for professional development and for building reputation. Also, many of them expressed their preference for posting articles on their own Web sites rather than institutional repositories.

The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Sunday pictures

I-google changed!

"Google insists that its revised iGoogle personalized home page generates better 'happiness metrics' than the old design, but a vocal group of users isn't happy about the changes." The recent change introduces what Google refers to as "canvas view," which the Official Google Blog claims "... makes iGoogle a more useful homepage and a better platform for developers."

From Slashdot.


More to the point, I-google simply doesn't load any more: just defaults to gmail. It is slower, has some kind of useless left hand bar - and we were never asked about it. People tell me that Yahoo has done something similar. Now I can't even access my own homepage. Bad.

On the track to Luton: the end of journalism

Those Beastly Words

In recent elections, the Republican hate word has been “liberal,” or “Massachusetts,” or “Gore.” In this election, it has increasingly been “words.” Barack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words who has “authored” two books (to use Sarah Palin’s verb), and done little else. The leathery extremist Phyllis Schlafly had this to say, at the Republican Convention, about Palin: “I like her because she’s a woman who’s worked with her hands, which Barack Obama never did, he was just an élitist who worked with words.”

James Wood in the New Yorker.

Hanging on the telephone

“It is a disgusting form of negative campaigning,” Mr. Shoff said in an interview, “calling people randomly off a computerized list, during dinner time, and reciting a message that is misleading, as I knew it to be. Republicans should be talking about serious issues.”

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said the “Hollywood” robocall was based in fact. “I would argue that much of these calls are based on hardened facts that American voters should consider,” Mr. Bounds said.

From the NYT.

So not the new "The Queen" then?

Among the film’s most literally incredible moments are those that show President George H.W. Bush (Bush 41), played by James Cromwell without the slightest effort to resemble the man, being decisive, authoritative, forceful, and even manly, qualities he managed to keep under wraps during three decades in the public eye. Playing the title role, Josh Brolin misreads the president’s stiff, just got-off-a-horse body language as a reason to stay in motion at all times, notably during his initial encounter with Laura (Elizabeth Banks, who gives the only restrained performance) at a barbecue. Here and elsewhere W.’s body flits around as if he’s undergoing shock therapy; here and elsewhere, W. speaks, disgustingly, with his mouth open as if he just blew in from the trailer park instead of Skull and Bones.

Pajamasmedia kaels over. Where is Helen Mirren when you need her to play Barbara Bush?

Queen visits Google

As Paxman says the BBC can't get its tone right, here is CNN.



All the time I feel I must justify my existence.
Charles, Prince Of Wales

Joy in the Morning

Turning left?


A long night with Wolf and Obama and John and that absurd (but compelling) CNN popularity-o-meter and all those scowls and sneers and several coffees later I take Sunny the dog for a walk. The sun is out and this is the IPod Playlist:



Tell Me Something Good - Rufus
I'll Take You There - The Staple Singers
Whatever It Takes - Ron Sexsmith
Gospel with No Lord - Camille
Tell Me What It Is - Graham Central Station
I Feel It All - Feist
Body and Soul - Anita Baker
Wrestlers - Hot Chip
Offshore banking business - The Members
Duke's Place - Joya Sherill (but the link is Louis and Duke)
Wishing - A Flock of Seagulls
Paris - Friendly Fires
Devil May Care - Raul Midon
John, I'm only dancing - David Bowie
Something's Coming - Oscar Peterson (as close as I could get - sounds right)
Yes We Can - Will.i.am




What can I have been thinking about?





All pictures: Sunny, the dog. Oh happy day!

Ho! Mobility

Camden High Street
London, October
Robin Hunt


“Give it five years time, and I think people will choose to surf news on the mobile, because the mobile will have functionality [e.g GPS] that the internet doesn’t,” Fredrik Oscarson told Journalism.co.uk.


Five years?

Self portrait after Wembley

Wembley Park tube
London
Robin Hunt

Three basic stories about the Internet

Just as it's said that there are only a handful of basic plots in literature, the "internet and truth" topic seems to have only a very few things that are commonly written about it: first, there's a huge amount of material available; second, there's no good way to sort the true from the false; third, it would be great if there were some easy means to find reliable information.

Entire papers, conferences, consultancies and even startup businesses, can be spun out of those shibboleths. And similarly, some bad ideas are continually being reinvented and touted anew. One common problematic path is to think only in technological terms. I

Seth Finkelstein in The Guardian

Somers Town

Marx 2, Faust 0

Good grief, what next? A Three Day Week?

More surprising is the comment of Peer Steinbrück, the [German] finance minister, who has been in the thick of recent discussions to find a way out of the financial crisis. "Generally one has to admit that certain parts of Marx's theory are really not so bad," he reportedly told Der Spiegel.

From The Economist's Certain Ideas of Europe blog.

Meanwhile, Facebook replaces drunken fumble

A survey of 221 first year students conducted between April and June this year found that more than half (55 per cent) had joined Facebook to make new friends prior to entering university, while a further 43 per cent joined immediately after starting university. Nearly three quarters said Facebook had played an important part in helping them to settle in at university.

Over a third of respondents also said they used Facebook to discuss academic work with other students on a weekly basis, and more than half responded positively to the idea of using Facebook for more formal teaching and learning – although only 7 per cent had actually done so. Many suggested ways in which Facebook could be used, such as providing social support for students in departments and informing students about changing lecture times.

From Physorg.com

Mass illiteracy hits the web

...how many people can actually create interactive games, animations, or simulations? Not very many. So, in my mind, very few people are truly literate with new media. Would we consider someone literate with traditional media if they could only read but not write?

Mitchel Resnick at the Media Shift Idea lab.

Google is the new Guinness: good for you

"The bottom line is, when older people read a simulated book page, we see areas of the brain activated that you'd expect, the visual cortex, and areas that control language and reading," he said. "When they search on the Internet, they use the same areas, but there was much greater activation particularly in the front part, which controls decision-making and complex reasoning. But it was only for the people who had previous experience with the Internet."

CNN on search and the brain.

Blog Action Day, tomorrow

Tomorrow is Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty



There's radio too.

Welcome to web science

This new discipline will model the Web’s structure, articulate the architectural principles that have fueled its phenomenal growth, and discover how online human interactions are driven by and can change social conventions. It will elucidate the principles that can ensure that the network continues to grow productively and settle complex issues such as privacy protection and intellectual-property rights. To achieve these ends, Web science will draw on mathematics, physics, computer science, psychology, ecology, sociology, law, political science, economics, and more.

From Scientific American.

Discuss

Britain's journalists, unlike America's, were never as pompous and po-faced as their US counterparts.

Roy Greenslade in the Guardian.

Where the last swing votes are? Obama is on Xbox 360

Last week we noted unconfirmed sightings of an “Obama for President” billboard in the Xbox 360 racing game Burnout Paradise. Today we’re able to report that it is, in fact, an official advertisement placed by the senator’s campaign team.

Thanks to Gigaom.

Neither oversexed, nor over there

Fitzrovia, London
September
Robin Hunt

Only four American newspapers now have foreign desks. And for a network, it’s very expensive to base a correspondent in London or Tokyo, and so much easier to film two people yelling at each other in a studio.

An older piece, that I stumbled over.


Another kind of foreign correspondent.

Vanity Fairness?

Strong majorities of the public say the press has been fair to John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But fewer than four-in-ten (38%) say the press has been fair to Sarah Palin. Many more believe the press has been too tough on Palin (38%) than say it has been too easy (21%).

From Pew.

Squatters rights?

Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School and an advisor to McAfee, says there are as many as 80,000 domains "typo-squatting" on the United States' top 2,000 websites alone, including MySpace, FaceBook and Craigslist...

...Google is profiting from millions of typo-squatting websites that earn advertising from Google's Adsense advertising program, Harvard University professor Ben Edelman says.

From Wired.
Typosquatting, the definition.

Story by Post Code

Launched on the Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post (LDP) websites, the maps let readers search for news by postcode.

From Journalism.co.uk.
And the Merseyside maps.

North & Central London - before the Fall

Near the mayor's office, London
Sunday Morning
Robin Hunt



Backstage at the Moscow State Circus, London,
August 2008
Robin Hunt

When Woody was Funny, or Bananas Remixed for the 2008 Fall

Above from Vanity Fair.

When the original that this parodies came out - 1971 - we hadn't even had Watergate.

There was a sort of half-truth to what they said. But they would have been very much nearer the mark—and rather more ironic and revealing at their own expense—if they had completed the sentence and described the actual situation as what it is: “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest.”

I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this apt summary of a collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns, whereby the profits can be privatized and the debts conveniently socialized, but another term for the same system would be “banana republic.”

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair.


I found the Vanity Fair piece through this:



which I am now trying out. News Trust Net.

Trusted Out? Trust Net

With its oodles of information, the Internet is laden with falsehoods, but, in fact, these recent cases show how critical are amplifying sites like Drudge or Google News or Digg to getting reports from the backwoods before the public.

Says the NYT.

“There is almost a short-seller mentality in the blogosphere,” he said. “We allow anyone to submit on a level playing field. We allow the digital democracy to be the fact checkers. There is definitely some risk to that.”

While only 150 or so items make the Digg home page, Mr. Adelson said its tools for “syndicating” an interesting item to friends could help create a cascade, since the way young people “consume is through the push.”

So why not try News Trust Net?

Somewhere in here is the future

"Mobile internet devices represent a category of truly mobile consumer devices that enable the best internet experience in your pocket and allow users to communicate, entertain, access information and be productive. The MID category is comprised of mobile devices with a display size no larger than six inches and a simplified user interface. There are expected to be over 100 million units in the range over the next three to five years."

From TechRadar.

Turing minus not very much

In a series conversations with people, the winning robot, named Elbot, fooled 25% of its interlocutors into believing it was a genuine human being. A score of 30% would have been sufficient to pass Turing's criterion for a true artificial intelligence.

From Nicholas Carr


The University of Reading explains more.

As part of the 18th Loebner Prize, all of the artificial conversational entities (ACEs) competing to pass the Turing Test have managed to fool at least one of their human interrogators that they were in fact communicating with a human rather than a machine. One of the ACEs, the eventual winner of the 2008 Loebner Prize, got even closer to the 30% Turing Test threshold set by 20th-century British mathematician, Alan Turing in 1950, by fooling 25% of human interrogators.

Stories by Googlers

“If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.”

Groucho Marx

Citizen Journalism unplugged, or - indeed - naked

As PR people, we will have to be more agile in story creation and to be satisfied with smaller audiences around niche topics. Jessica's comment reinforces the requirement for all PR people to become content creators. We, in essence, must grasp opportunities to create broadcast packages, complete with video and robust storytelling. Use your HD cameras and your writing skills, and make it easy for these news professionals to say "yes." To achieve the same audience reach as a decade ago will require many more placements and more specificity of topics; this is the age of “narrow-casting.”

Richard Edelman on why PR people have to work a little harder - as journalists. And plenty more about old-school networks.

NYT goes, like, deep into advertising

“Maybe advertisers should start selling different stuff,” I said.

The moderator shot me a look of scorn. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said. And he turned to someone else.

I still think of this and cringe. Sell different stuff? Advertisers don’t make what they sell!

The always interesting Medium.

Evolutionary science helps explain Stevie Nicks

By using the tools of evolutionary theory and new approaches to mathematical modeling, researchers are drawing a clearer picture of how and why rumors spread. As they do, they are finding that far from being merely idle or malicious gossip, rumor is deeply entwined with our history as a species. It serves some basic social purposes and provides a valuable window on not just what people talk to each other about, but why.

From Boston.com.

Our behavior, McAndrew suggests, evolved in an environment in which information about others was crucially important. Back when humans lived in small groups, he theorizes, information about those higher than us on the totem pole - especially information about their weaknesses - would have been hugely valuable, and the only source we had for such information was other people. (McAndrew's work, much of which focuses on our obsession with celebrity culture, suggests our brains aren't terribly adept at distinguishing people who are "actually" important from people who simply receive a lot of attention.)

The Death of Privacy, part nine

When users sign up for an account, they are given a personal profile page that lists, stores, and displays what they've searched for and where. That information can be made public as well, so that friends can share the results and help refine the search. This could be particularly useful for group projects such as apartment hunting with roommates, for example.

Yotify, as explained in the Technology Review, and by itself.

Sitting on the new new media fence

Is that the kind of democracy we want – where anyone can determine the information that the public can access, regardless of their level of knowledge, expertise or agenda?

Donnacha Delong writes in The Journalist, the National Union of Journalists magazine. Article titled: Web 2.0 Is Rubbish.