randomwalks/dj

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Take part in the first Viral Marketing "science experiment" inside of Google Reader! ;-) Let's answer the quesiton, "Can it be done??"

(This experiment originally inspired by Scoble, who linked to me and said, "How did I find it? My friends on Google Reader shared it with me. You can add me on Google Reader too")

Blogs can now easily jump from user-to-user with just one click, whereas before it was hard to "infect" another user virally. More on the viral marketing topic here. After this experiment runs its course, I'll post a longer analysis and explanation, depending on how successful it is.

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Originally posted by Andrew Chen from Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen

Originally posted by David Jacobs from randomwalks/dj, on December 22, 2007 7:19 PM

Sick of watching reruns? Nervous you'll only get 8 episodes of Lost next season? Well, The NY Times reports on the first break in the writers' strike.

David Letterman is pursuing a deal with the Writers Guild of America that would allow his late-night show on CBS to return to the air in early January with the usual complement of material from his writers, even if the strike is still continuing.

Executives from Mr. Letterman's company said Saturday that they are hopeful they will have an interim agreement in place with the guild as early as this week. That could potentially put Mr. Letterman at an enormous advantage over most of his late-night colleagues.This seems like a good compromise -- allowing the crew to get back to work, Letterman to edge out Leno, and of course the late night couch potatoes would be happy with some new episodes. Will anyone follow suit?

Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "Daily Show" has also been urging an interim agreement and would begin working toward getting one in place the first thing Monday morning, according to a representative. But Mr. Letterman is in a stronger position because, unlike Mr. Stewart, his show is not owned by a network but by Mr. Letterman's independent production company, World Wide Pants. (So is the show that follows it on CBS, "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson," which would return with writers under the proposed interim agreement.)

Meanwhile, tomorrow the writers plan to demand (within their legal rights) that the "studios and network production companies bargain with the guild individually rather than as a group." This would of course create an even bigger headache for the producers alliance (which does the bargaining for all companies involved). A letter to WGA members on Friday, that we received a copy of, stated: "We nonetheless continue to hope that the AMPTP will return in good faith to negotiate a fair contract with writers, as two television seasons and numerous feature projects are currently at great risk."

The late night writers haven't yet mentioned the possibility of a return on their blog. We wonder how other WGA members feel about this. Just last week we received a letter stating "the WGA filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against the AMPTP for its refusal to bargain in good faith with the WGA. It is a clear violation of federal law for the AMPTP to issue an ultimatum and break off negotiations if we fail to cave to their illegal demands."

Photo via myserenity1's flickr.

Originally posted by Jen Carlson from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on December 22, 2007 4:42 PM

A cartogram showing the world's oil reserves: the larger the country, the more oil it has. Via Kottke....

Originally posted by Jonathan Crowe from The Map Room, on December 22, 2007 4:21 PM

As the owner of a fast-growing software business, my thoughts are turning increasingly to the question of whether I should hire help, and if so, how can I locate the right help. So many factors come into play. Personality. Ability. Style. And most important of all, passion for the products I’d be asking this person to work on.

Fortunately, the Mac software business mimics every other aspect of life, in the sense that unless you’re already the best at something, there’s always value in listening to others with more experience. In this instance, Wil Shipley comes through with what is quite possibly the best “Help Wanted” ad I’ve ever read.

If you wanna work for me, laddy
There's a price you pay
I'm a stickler for design
You gotta write code the right way
If you want an ADA
I can make your wish come true
You gotta make a big impression
I gotta like what you do

I couldn’t have put it any better myself. Instant classic.

Originally posted by Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater Blog, on December 22, 2007 4:20 PM

How to Stop Receiving Phone Books and Yellow Pages — thanks Dru!

Originally posted by Adam from randomWalks, on December 22, 2007 3:31 PM

Calling all Google Reader users...
Are you reading this in Google Reader? If so, I need your help on a science experiment.

Click the SHARE button and share this blog post out to your friends, like this:

Why do this?
This may be your first time reading my blog, and you might be asking "Why would I want to do that?" I'm guessing that when Google built this feature, they didn't think people would use it to propagate chain letter-like things, like this post ;-)

Take part in the first Viral Marketing "science experiment" inside of Google Reader! ;-) Let's answer the quesiton, "Can it be done??"

(This experiment originally inspired by Scoble, who linked to me and said, "How did I find it? My friends on Google Reader shared it with me. You can add me on Google Reader too")

Blogs can now easily jump from user-to-user with just one click, whereas before it was hard to "infect" another user virally. More on the viral marketing topic here. After this experiment runs its course, I'll post a longer analysis and explanation, depending on how successful it is.

In the meantime, don't forget to click on the SHARE button below! (Click here to go to Google Reader)

Originally posted by Andrew Chen from Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen
Originally posted by David Jacobs from randomwalks/dj

Originally posted by David Jacobs from randomwalks/dj, on December 22, 2007 2:19 PM

Traveling for the holidays? It’s always disturbed me that U.S. hotel rooms always seem stock a Holy Bible. Nevermind any other tradition, or say... the Englightenment. This year, I’m packing something of my own to leave behind: atheism cards! Each of these cards has a quote I think might sow a few seeds of dissent, or perhaps start a long distance discourse. Click the image below to download a printable PDF. Or make your own. There are plenty choice quotes here and elsewhere.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on December 22, 2007 1:32 PM

Examiner column for December 24.

   

    It may not be a parent’s worst nightmare, but it was a bad moment. My son was applying to colleges and not consulting his English-teacher mother before mailing off his essays.

    When he did show me one just before it was due—too late for any revisions--I was horrified. It had typos and was spindled and mutilated in ways I was sure destined him for rejection.

    “What’s a mother to do?” crossed my mind, but he snatched the forms away from me and hurried out to make the postmark deadline. I only saw the typos; in my mind the fact that his idiosyncratic, irrepressible spirit shone through, despite errors, was secondary.

    College admission committees must have children of their own. How else to explain that he was admitted to most of the schools that received his far-from-perfect applications? Then and there I vowed that, as a teacher, I would try to give students an impartial, quick, editorial glance before they lick the stamp and mail their essays.

    And so my 24-hour folder was born. It sits on my desk, and whatever students put in the folder is returned, edited, within 24 hours. Students can put in an essay January 14 that needs to be postmarked the 15th and be certain no typos or other errors will remain.

    I never rewrite the essays; it’s important that a student’s own voice shines through—whether boring or scintillating. All I guarantee is that they won’t embarrass themselves by mailing off something sloppy.

    Thousands of essays have passed through the 24-hour folder. Some students submit 6 essays three times each, and others agonize over seven versions of a single essay. My vow is to give them my honest opinion and a few editorial suggestions.

    When parents hear about this service, they are so grateful their child has someone competent to proofread those important applications. They know for certain—just as I did—that few children want to share these essays with their parents.

    Students always tell other students about the 24-hour folder and strangers sometimes poke their heads into my class to ask if I can look at their essays. All English teachers are happy to read student essays, but no one else guarantees “Overnight Delivery.” It’s just FedEx and me.

    The only casualty is that during the fall I rarely get papers corrected during the day. Every time I look, five or ten new college essays appear.

    Mostly I am happy to be useful, but occasionally I am rewarded with a transcendent submission. Katie Goins’ essay appeared last week and begins:

    “I have always loved words. I love the ways they can be arranged in a poem, stacked tight or spread out. They can be spoken, or sung, or simply sit silently on a page.”

    She concludes: “I sit behind my computer screen, praying that the words I have long depended on don’t fail me now. I hope they find favor with some far away reader who loves words as much as I do. I hit spell check one last time, and imagine what my future will bring. After all, words can do anything.”

    I didn’t change a thing.

Originally posted by Erica Jacobs from TeacherTalk, on December 22, 2007 12:34 PM

"they have never heard of New Jack Swing, and think Living Colour was an R&B group. Now I can understand why they flamed the shit out of me for suggesting the site should have a white background. It would have been too redundant."

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by yatta to funny - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/yatta, on December 22, 2007 9:38 AM

Before Maui rides, I’ll eat light, ride to a banana bread stand, and fuel up. Riding back from Hana, I went a little too far, and was bonking — I ate 1/2 a loaf in about two bites and that satisfied the hunger.

Getting that hungry reminded me of various bonks and eating whatever was in sight — that includes a burger once and I don’t eat beef. What’s your worst bonk? How do you satisfy the hunger after a long ride?

Originally posted by DL Byron from Bike Hugger, on December 22, 2007 9:37 AM

Alberto Simões posted up an interesting benchmark illustrating that ~~, the new smart match operator in 5.10, outperforms both grep and List::Util::first() in the "is X in this list" role. Here are my results:

Read more of this story at use Perl.

Originally posted by schwern (posted by brian_d_foy) from use Perl, on December 22, 2007 9:09 AM

Beautiful movie poster for Taxi to the Dark Side, banned by the MPAA because it features a U.S. Army detainee in a hood. Which is something that actually happened and happens.

Someone needs to stand up and decry the MPAA for what it is: a censorship board. There’d be mass outrage in the mainstream media if there were an equivalent of the MPAA for books — imagine a book cover needing the approval of some mysterious board of conservative prudes, as movie posters do.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on December 22, 2007 7:51 AM

"If you were to design the ultimate system, you would have mass transit be free and charge an enormous amount for cars."

So said Mayor Michael Bloomberg last April, right about the time he unveiled his plan to charge motorists a fee to drive into Manhattan's central business district. Eight months later, as the mayor's original proposal mutates for better or worse, the MTA is hours away from raising transit fares. Neither idea has exactly caught fire with the public, and the fare hikes could actually end up a foil for congestion pricing -- a plan originally intended as a sustained financial boost for the transit system.

And then there's Theodore "Ted" Kheel. The environmentalist, philanthropist, and renowned labor attorney has lobbied for free transit in New York for over 40 years. Last February he commissioned a $100,000 study that, as it turns out, could put the city's money where the mayor's mouth is. A summary of findings released late last week shows that if the city were to impose a $16 congestion fee ($32 for trucks) below 60th Street in Manhattan, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, along with higher curbside parking fees and a taxi surcharge, the MTA could remove its turnstiles and fareboxes forever.

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Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, ReBlogged by Steve on Dec 22, 2007 at 10:05 AM

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Eyebeam reBlog, on December 22, 2007 5:05 AM

Attendees of the Chicago 2007 MLA conference are invited to join Mark and Jeremy on Fri. Dec 28 as they participate in the poster session/exhibition “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating”, as well as Jeremy’s presentation on the panel “New Reading Interfaces”. If you’d like to stop by and say hi during the conference, our sessions are a great place to do it.

Friday Dec. 28, 2007

250. New Reading Interfaces
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Missouri, Sheraton Chicago
Program arranged by the Association for Computers and the Humanities
Presiding: Elizabeth Swanstrom, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

317. Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating
3:30–4:45 p.m., Columbus Hall K and L, Hyatt Regency
Program sponsored by the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Structure of the Convention in conjunction with the MLA Committee on Information Technology
Presiding: Susan Schreibman, Univ. of Maryland, College Park

At New Reading Interfaces, Jeremy will be presenting on “Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface.” At Electronic Literature, Mark Marino will be presenting on “Beta Writer: Portrait of the Author as Early Adopter,” while Jeremy will be demonstrating “Sculpting E-Poetry in Fractal Space: ConTextTree.” Our abstracts are included at the bottom of this post.

Beyond our own modest contributions, these sessions are also jam-packed with other great participants. In New Reading Interfaces, Joseph Tabbi will be presenting on “Toward a Semantic Literary Web: Three Case Histories”, Elizabeth Swanstrom on “Reading Shaw’s Legible City”, Sarah Sloane on “Reading the Margins of The Magic Book”, and Victoria Szabo on “Texts in Virtual Contexts: Reading Scholarly Work in 3-D Environments”. In Electronic Literature, occasional WRT collaborator Jessica Pressman will be presenting with Helen DeVinney on “Exploring Electronic Literature”, Christopher Funkhouser on “Selections from Selections”, Davin Heckman on “Reading Unwritten Poems: Developing Critical Tools for Electronic Literature”, Elizabeth Swamstron on “Navigating Giselle Beiguelman’s ‘Esc for Escape’”, and Vika Zafrin on “RolandHT”.

For many MLA attendees, ’tis the season to stop celebrating the holidays and cram for presentations and interviews. Still beyond our own sessions there are a host of other exciting talks and events we are looking forward to, including the annual ELO meetup / happy hour. Below are presentations recommended by the Electronic Literature Organization, including an invitation to a happy hour:

Electronic Literature & Related Panels

This year’s convention features several panels (”New Reading Interfaces,” “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, and Navigating,” and “Electronic Literature: After Afternoon”) that are explicitly focused on electronic literature, and several that are more tangentially related to the subject. Below is a mini conference guide focused on e-lit.

Thursday, 27 December

79. Persuasive Games
5:15–6:30 p.m., Toronto, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the Division on Literary Criticism
Presiding: Rita M. Raley, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
1. “Introduction to Procedural Rhetoric,” Ian Bogost, Georgia Inst. of Tech.
2. “War Games,” Rita M. Raley
3. “Guy Debord’s ‘Kriegspiel’: Nostalgic Algorithms in Late Modernity,” Alexander Galloway, New York Univ.

Friday, 28 December

215. Novel History, Media History
10:15–11:30 a.m., Atlanta, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Media and Literature
Presiding: Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana Univ., Bloomington
1. “Beyond Fashion: From the Nineteenth-Century Urban Mysteries Reader to the Cinema Spectator,” Sara Hackenberg, San Francisco State Univ.
2. “Ulysses Player Piano,” Paul K. Saint-Amour, Univ. of Pennsylvania
3. “Remediating the Modernist Novel: Judd Morrissey’s Digital Remix,” Jessica Pressman, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

250. New Reading Interfaces
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Missouri, Sheraton Chicago
Program arranged by the Association for Computers and the Humanities
Presiding: Elizabeth Swanstrom, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
1. “Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface,” Jeremy H. Douglass, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
2. “Toward a Semantic Literary Web: Three Case Histories,” Joseph Paul Tabbi, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago
3. “Reading Shaw’s Legible City,” Elizabeth Swanstrom
4. “Reading the Margins of The Magic Book,” Sarah Jane Sloane, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins
5. “Texts in Virtual Contexts: Reading Scholarly Work in 3-D Environments,” Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ.

256. Professionalization in a Digital Age
1:45–3:30 p.m., Columbus Hall C and D, Hyatt Regency
A forum arranged by the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession
Presiding: William Erwin Orchard, Univ. of Chicago
1. “Rethinking the First Book: Dissertations as Bits and Bytes,” Jennifer Crewe, Columbia Univ. Press
2. “New Media Scholarship: Implications for Graduate Study,” N. Katherine Hayles, Univ. of California, Los Angeles
3. “Digital Pedagogy: Taming the Palatiri,” Ian Lancashire, Univ. of Toronto (abstract available)
Respondent: W. J. T. Mitchell, Univ. of Chicago
For coordinated workshops, see meetings 373 and 472.

317. Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating
3:30–4:45 p.m., Columbus Hall K and L, Hyatt Regency
Program sponsored by the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Structure of the Convention in conjunction with the MLA Committee on Information Technology
Presiding: Susan Schreibman, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
1. “Exploring Electronic Literature,” Helen DeVinney, Univ. of Maryland, College Park; Jessica Pressman, Univ. of California, Los Angeles
2. “Sculpting E-Poetry in Fractal Space: ConTextTree,” Jeremy H. Douglass, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
3. “Selections from Selections,” Christopher T. Funkhouser, New Jersey Inst. of Tech.
4. “Reading Unwritten Poems: Developing Critical Tools for Electronic Literature,” Davin Heckman, Siena Heights Univ.
5. “ Beta Writer: Portrait of the Author as Early Adopter,” Mark Marino, Univ. of Southern California
6. “No Exit in Sight: Navigating Giselle Beiguelman’s ‘Esc for Escape,’” Elizabeth Swanstrom, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
7. “ RolandHT,” Vika Zafrin, Brown Univ.

373. Scholarship in New Media
7:15–8:30 p.m., Columbus Hall C and D, Hyatt Regency
A workshop arranged in conjunction with the forum Professionalization in a Digital Age (256)
Presiding: Markus Zisselsberger, Binghamton Univ., State Univ. of New York
1. “On Scholarship,” Matthew Gary Kirschenbaum, Univ. of Maryland, College Park (abstract available)
2. “On Electric Editing,” Dino Franco Felluga, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette
3. “On Pedagogy,” Todd Samuel Presner, Univ. of California, Los Angeles (abstract available)
4. “On Collaboration,” McKenzie Wark, New School

Saturday, 29 December

541. Electronic Literature: After Afternoon
3:30–4:45 p.m., Mississippi, Sheraton Chicago
Program arranged by the Division on Methods of Literary Research
Presiding: Neil Fraistat, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
1. “Picture and Book Remain: After Two Decades of Hypertext Literature,” Michael Joyce, Vassar Coll.
2. “This Afternoon,” Matthew Gary Kirschenbaum, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
3. “Play, Flow, and Mix: Paradigms for Electronic Literature,” N. Katherine Hayles, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

649. Sampling the Original: Rethinking Appropriation, Attribution, and Copyright
9:00–10:15 p.m., Plaza Ballroom A, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Information Technology
Presiding: Thomas C. Spear, Lehman Coll., City Univ. of New York
1. “Remixing Free Culture: Twentieth-Century Copyright in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom,” Kari M. Kraus, Univ. of Rochester
2. “Media-Enriched Critical Writing as Gray-Market Transgression,” Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ.
3. “You Can, but You May Not: Copyright, Scholars, and the Temptations of New Media,” Jeffrey Ankrom, Bloomington, IN

Sunday, 30 December

670. Annotated Bibliography: New Work in Literature and Science
8:30–9:45 a.m., Water Tower, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the Division on Literature and Science
Presiding: Henry S. Turner, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
Speakers: Mark B. N. Hansen, Univ. of Chicago; Ursula K. Heise, Stanford Univ.; Megan Massino, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison; Arielle Saiber, Bowdoin Coll.; Joseph Paul Tabbi, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago

ELO Meetup at the MLA

As we have for the past several years, we are planning an informal meet-up for people affiliated with or interested in the Electronic Literature Organization at this year’s MLA conference. This year, we are planning on meeting at the “Big Bar” at the conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency, after the “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating” panel, from 5-6 PM on Friday, December 28th. We plan to converge on the bar and have a drink or two. Afterwards, for those who would like to continue the conversation and take advantage of the world’s best deep-dish pizza, we’re reserving some tables at a nearby restaurant. If you’re only planning on joining us for a drink, just show up at the Big Bar at 5PM. If you want in on the pizza, please send an email to Stefanie Boese (sboese2 at uic dot edu), indicating how many people plan to attend and your preference for sausage, spinach, or mixed vegetarian pizza. We’ll put the order in ahead, so we won’t have to wait long in the restaurant to eat. We will “go dutch,” splitting the bill evenly and paying in cash.

WRT abstracts

Beta Writer: Portrait of the Author as Early Adopter,” Mark Marino, Univ. of Southern California

My presentation will focus on “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” and “a show of hands,” two in-progress electronic narratives I am working on. Adaptations of each are about to appear in New River and Hyperrhizome, respectively. This is a “poster” session with computers acting as the “posters.” These pieces emphasize questions of innovation and publication. Both stories were composed on new or nascent technologies. “Marginalia” uses Diigo. “a show of hands” uses Literatronica. In both systems, I was testing the limits and emailing the system designers with questions and concerns. At the same time, when I went to try to publish these stories in online venues, new obstacles constraints arose, particularly how to stabilize the systems reliably.

“Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface,” Jeremy Douglass, Univ. California, San Diego

In “Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface,” Jeremy Douglass theorizes tag clouds: web reading interfaces formed from dense clusters ‘clouds’ of weighted keyword links, or ‘tags’. The poetics of tag clouds are best understood when situated in a history of spatially distributed text art, from contemporary visualization and net.art (e.g. “TextArc,” Legrady’s “Making the Visible Invisible,” Fischer’s “Word News,” Khan’s “Net Worth,” Jean Véronis’ “-ogue”) back through earlier typographic experiments (e.g. the concrete poetry of Augusto de Campos and the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis). While interfaces have become emblamatic of the contemporary ‘web 2.0′ internet era, tag clouds have been fundamentally misunderstood in recent scholarship. Both the close association of tag clouds with ‘folksonomy’ website communities (e.g. del.icio.us, Flickr) and the popularity of the misleading term ‘cloud’ have created a stereotype of tag clouds as reflecting a kind of aesthetics of prolific chaos. Yet, as a special kind of list (the aggregately weighed dense list), tag cloud interfaces are both highly utilitarian (in the Tuftian sense of information richness) and deeply poetic (in their superimposition of constraining order over a set of evocative juxtapositions). In tag cloud poetry, the poetics of proliferation and the system of software meet at the reading interface.

ABSTRACT: “Sculpting E-Poetry in Fractal Space: ConTextTree,” Jeremy Douglass

On the border between authoring and visualization, what common ground can we find between digital poetries based on the continuous line and text-based computer visualizations based on the atomic word? ConTextTree is both a series of eliterature artworks and an authoring framework for visualizing eliterature as clouds, streams, and fractal spaces made of words. The ConTextTree framework is based on context free grammars as used in design, and explores how the “context free” paradigm affects authoring. As with the ‘freedoms’ afforded by other digital paradigms (such as the freedom of hypertext fiction or the freedom of games), context ‘freedom’ is a two-edged sword: it constrains the author to a radical discontinuity of language, but simultaneously opens up the radical possibilities of authoring fractal literature. There is a tradition of poetic experiments that have emphasized unit and form over sequence and series, including Concrete Poetry, Dada, Vorticism, and even the “flowerishes” of Kenneth Burke. Contemporary text-based computer visualization artworks such as “Making the Visible Invisible” and “Word News” have generally emphasized the role of the artist as architect in structuring the presentation of an external source of textually information. Related works like “TextArc” and “txtKit” have primarily emphasized their role as providers of readings and interpretations in relation to prior texts. ConTextTree continues in this tradition, but explores the idea of text visualization as an original authoring metaphor. In doing so, it engages some of the consequences of authoring with context free design: writing as containing its own exhaustive logic - writing as acts of arbitrary inscription rather than managing strings of symbols - writing as concern with individual letters and their representations - writing as the possibilities of low-level random behaviors such as variable handwriting, errata, etc. In a sense, the logics of text and context free design are antithetical: one is fundamentally sequential, the other fundamentally anti-sequential. ConTextTree is one attempt to synthesize this dialectic into new possibilities.

Recommendations?

Have any invitations you’d like to extend to electronic textualists and digital humanists? Let us know!

Originally posted by wrt@writerresponsetheory.org (Writer Response Theory) from WRT: Writer Response Theory, on December 21, 2007 5:11 PM

TECH NEWS

Yep, the conglomerates just don't know what the digital future will hold. Will there be more $500 million deals like this pact between Viacom and Microsoft in the future? Who knows?!

Andrew Baron, producer of the popular video blog Rocketboom, expalins Eight Reasons the TV Studios Will Die. Allow me to propose one way NOT to die: Make a fair deal with the creators of your content so you can work TOGETHER to preserve and grow your business. Seems simple enough.

Poll: More TV viewers turning to the web.

STRIKE ANALYSIS

Handel: Let's cross our fingers that the DGA has the power to get everyone back to work.

Robert Elisberg rockin' the house again on HuffPo.

"...If corporations only have to pay $250 for residuals on the Internet as opposed to $20,000 on TV -- where do you think all reruns will eventually be shown?

It gets worse. The corporations don't want original Internet content covered for the WGA. Where do you think the first-run "broadcast" of a series will be? After streaming once on the Internet, a company can simply "re-air" it on network TV. It's the same screen. The only difference is that General Electric-Sony-TimeWarner-Fox won't have had to pay more than a pittance for the material.

If you don't think this would happen, you haven't been watching the AMPTP offering zero and walking away from the table...

Roger Ebert: Thumbs down on studio greed.

AMUSEMENT

WGA vs AMPTP at Home

Cantinero sings his strike ballad "No Apologies" in Times Square. Yes, the Naked Cowboy inserts himself in the shot.

Christmas Carols!

- From the AMPTP Children's Choir of Truth
- From Peter Rader

Originally posted by John Aboud from United Hollywood, on December 21, 2007 3:00 PM

TECH NEWS Yep, the conglomerates just don't know what the digital future will hold. Will there be more $500 million deals like this pact between Viacom and Microsoft in the future? Who knows?!

Andrew Baron, producer of the popular video blog Rocketboom, expalins Eight Reasons the TV Studios Will Die. Allow me to propose one way NOT to die: Make a fair deal with the creators of your content so

Originally posted by John Aboud from United Hollywood, on December 21, 2007 3:00 PM

Poor Lady L
Originally uploaded by david.

-----
http://apperceptive.com

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on December 21, 2007 2:32 PM

The International Herald Tribune's Year in Pictures for 2007.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 21, 2007 12:39 PM

Long long list of the most overrated and underrated books, movies, tv shows, etc. for 2007. (via mr)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 21, 2007 10:55 AM

On May 10, 2008 -– Pangea Day -– we're throwing a worldwide film festival. Screens in Cairo, Dharamsala, Kigali, London, New York City, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro and Tel Aviv will be videoconferenced live to produce a 4-hour program of powerful short films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music. Pangea Day grew out of the wish of 2006 TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim, who made her wish to "unite the world through the power of film."

Watch the trailer now -- with subtitles in 20 languages! Working with dotSUB, a web-based translation tool, you can choose subtitles in Arabic, French, Chinese, German, Hindi, Korean ... and register on dotSUB to translate it into even more languages.

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion, while uniting millions of people to build a better future. There are many ways to get involved:

Submit your own short film
If you had the world's attention for just a few minutes, what story would you tell? On May 10, 2008, the opportunity is yours. Submit a film. Share a story. The world will be watching. Deadline for submission: Feb. 15, 2008. Find out how to submit your short film >>

Host a screening
People are signing up to host screenings all over the world -- in homes, parks, schools, and more. More than 200 screenings in 46 countries are listed on our Google Map, and we've just begun! Sign up to host a screening >>

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TED | TEDBlog, on December 21, 2007 10:41 AM

Advice from a photo editor at a national magazine on how to talk about photography, particularly to those who know little about it.

I have a sweet technique I use for finding the great images from a shoot that really tends to piss-off the editors: I edit the film without reading the story. This helps me tune into which images have the most impact on me and which ones transcend subject matter and become forces in their own right.

His description of defending good photography applies to design as well.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 21, 2007 9:46 AM

I can imagine that it is easy for some to skip over a blog post announcing the availability of a beta thinking "oh, they just fixed some bugs." But to so with this most recent release of Movable Type would be a mistake. One of the things that makes Movable Type stand out as a product is an incredibly professional, yet agile development process that allows for constant innovation in additional to a steady improvement upon stability and quality, without putting our releases at risk.

So while Movable Type 4.1 Beta 2 contains a huge number of bug fixes as it should being a beta, the development team still found time to include a some significant new features and advancements to the platform as a whole. Most notably:

• AtomPub Support - Atom is something Six Apart has been very involved in since it first emerged as potentially the first Internet standard for syndication over four years ago. We released one of the first implementations of the fledgling protocol over 4 years ago and we were also among the first to support the Atom syndication format when it emerged as an official standard across all of our products. And while Movable Type has long supported the Atom Publishing Protocol in MT4.1 Beta 2 we introduce support for the official AtomPub standard, making it easier and more reliable then ever to use third party posting clients with your Movable Type installation.

• Redesigned Asset Listing and Editing Screens - Beau Smith took the lead on redesigning the asset listing screen to include thumbnails of the assets you have created in your system. In addition, he designed the Edit Asset screen which includes such valuable information as a list of posts/pages in which that asset it utilized, embed information for including that asset elsewhere on the web and additional meta data about the asset. Good work Beau!

• Turing Complete Templating Language - The development team checked in the last of many enhancements to our templating language that dramatically improves upon what one can possibly publish using Movable Type. MT4.1 introduces additional looping constructs, additional variable types (like hashes and arrays) and control flow structures like If-ElseIf-Else).

Beta 2 will be the last beta until the new year, but we will continue to blog through out the holidays to make sure people can continue to get their Movable Type fix. But in case you manage to tear yourself away from the computer for an extended period and you don't check in again for a while, everyone at Six Apart would like to wish you a great holiday season and a wonderful New Year.

Originally posted by Byrne Reese from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on December 21, 2007 9:44 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on December 21, 2007 9:31 AM

There's a story about me in The Economist, which is very flattering.

It has a couple misleading points, though, which I feel the need to clarify. Mostly about Google: I didn't "hate every minute" I was at Google (just some of them). I wasn't there "less than a year." (It was a year and eight months). I don't think Google tackles problems with "brute force." I think they're best at tackling known problems, but they do so very cleverly.

Originally posted by Ev. from evhead, on December 21, 2007 8:38 AM

big news
Originally uploaded by msippey

I don't think it was this piece, but some quick hit on Morning Edition covering some aspect of the new Pew research about online identity and self-Googling, where someone quoted finally made the point that one approach for managing your online identity is to actually post more and more content under your own name. Bloggers have known this for years -- you want to own the Google search results for your name -- and it's nice to hear this thinking finally make its way into the mass media.

But really, this is just an excuse to experiment with a new type of news blogging -- taking a quick picture of the story you find while leafing through the morning's paper...instead of going to the trouble finding the story and actually linking to it. Plus, it was a way to sneak Santa Claus on to the blog...so a big "ho ho ho" to all you Christmas celebrators out there.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on December 21, 2007 8:29 AM

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has rejected Taxi On the Dark Side’s poster as being “not suitable for all audiences.” … What’s offensive about this image? The detainee in the hood. Well, actually just the hood. An MPAA spokesman said: “We treat all films the same. Ads will be seen by all audiences, including children. If the advertising is not suitable for all audiences it will not be approved by the advertising administration.” Welcome to the new age of censorship kids, it makes McCarthyism seem almost quaint.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on December 21, 2007 7:30 AM

photos from two different stories showed the same man painting a storefront and stealing a wallet  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on December 21, 2007 7:28 AM

Filed under: Odds and ends, Internet Tools, iPhone

Christmas is approaching, and what better way to wile away a minute or two than with a virtual snow globe? The kind folks at Pop Art created this iPhone Snow Globe that one 'shakes' by changing the orientation of the iPhone (using this method, perhaps?).

It'll amuse you for a moment, and it is free so why not? That's what the holiday season is all about, right?

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Originally posted by Scott McNulty from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on December 21, 2007 7:00 AM

A list of controversial fashion advertisements. Can't believe the Calvin Klein stuff (the 1995 campaign especially) didn't make it on there.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 21, 2007 5:55 AM

Filed under: Cult of Mac, iPhone

You're standing in line when Bill Clinton, former US President, walks by with his Secret Service escort. Quick! What do you do? (1) Shake his hand. (2) Share a quick joke about Arkansas's night life. (3) Ask him to sign your iPhone.

If you're B. Ioffe, the answer is 3. He writes that President Clinton shared that he is an iPhone owner; Steve Jobs fixed him up with an iPhone for his personal use. This of course demands the question: If ex-Veep Al Gore is on Apple's Board of Directors, why didn't he snag his old buddy an iPhone himself? Or, as Ioffe writes, at least a prerelease 3G version.

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Originally posted by Erica Sadun from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on December 21, 2007 5:45 AM

story links: Know Your Meme, LOLCats, I can has cheeseburger, Make your own LOLCat Pics, LOLcode, History of according to Anil Dash, LOL reference links

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Rocketboom, on December 21, 2007 5:30 AM

The Perl community just celebrated the 20th anniversary of Perl. Here are some stories from Perl hackers around the world about problems they've solved and memories they've made with the venerable, powerful, and still vital language.

Originally posted by chromatic from Perl.com, on December 21, 2007 4:45 AM

Non-profit writing organization 826NYC is holding a Scrabble for Cheaters competition on January 19th with the proceeds going to benefit their programs and students. The more money a team raises, the more they can cheat. Here are some of the cheats:

Flip a letter over and make it blank: $100
Add Q, Z, or X to any word, anywhere: $200
Passport: play a word in any language: $250
Reject another team's word: $450
Invent a word (must have a definition): $500

Entry information and rules available on the web site. Oh, and you'll be playing against John Hodgman.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 21, 2007 4:30 AM

John Maeda (watch his 2007 TEDTalk) has been named the next president of the Rhode Island School of Design. An artist and a coder, Maeda is an enthusiastic connector of art and technology. In his supercool announcement video, he gives a sense of where he hopes to lead the school, saying:

Technology has outpaced humanity, I wouldn't say tenfold, I'd say a millionfold. ... Meanwhile, we're still trying to figure out, what is this stuff for? I think that arts have to advance the culture of knowledge around technology. It hasn't happened yet, but it has to happen.

Maeda will take over in June 2008 from fellow TEDster Roger Mandle, who led the school for 15 years. Aside from growing the school and its endowment, and thus creating opportunities for more students around the world to get an arts and design education, Mandle worked to link RISD with the world, dovetailing with -- and driving -- the design boom of the past two decades. RISD's deep civic engagement with its hometown of Providence has led to both economic and artistic benefits -- showing a generation of students how design and the arts can be socially engaged.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TED | TEDBlog, on December 21, 2007 3:55 AM

The week after this year's LPW was my last LUG meeting of the year. I decided to give a small talk about using CPAN to get other people to write your code for you. Alas between the two meetings I went down with yet another cold, so it wasn't as well prepared or presented as I would have hoped for. Anyhow the talk is available from my LUG and the Internet Archive in several formats, Google Video will follow no doubt. Hants LUG 2007-12-08: Talks. (presentation and various video files) Internet Archive: Talk video. (video only, various formats)

Read more of this story at use Perl.

Originally posted by ajt (posted by brian_d_foy) from use Perl, on December 21, 2007 2:48 AM