While smart from a marketing and strategy perspective, Apple’s first-to-market launches always lead to a lot of bugs, so I await the list of flaws when people really start to buy this thing. (Yes, I’m still angry about my iPod dying exactly one month after the warranty ran out. And that one wasn’t even a new product.)
I still think products like this or the Kindle need to be physically flexible, i.e. soft instead of rigid, before they’ll really catch on as a commuter / on-the-couch reading device. So it’s unfortunate that this isn’t the salvation of media that so many outlets want it to be, even if it’s cool.
I still would rather have a really solid smartphone than a cool tablet device — Nexus One, please.
In America, this could work to an extent, because News Corp.’s two big properties here are the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, both outlets with a dedicated (read: rabid) readership that turns there for a specific take on things that really speak to them. But outside the U.S. and for most of the company, I think this is a really bad idea: I don’t see anybody paying to access Sky News online, or junk tabloids like The Sun or New York Post (American, but more reminiscent of a British or Australian News Corp. publication).
I don’t think the blanket approach is a good way to go, and this type of drastic change should have been evaluated on a per-publication basis. (Maybe it was and they went with this anyway, but that would be puzzling.) TIME.com tried this when I was there, and it was a big failure — TIME is going for such a wide volume of readers that they don’t create a really targeted, “I need my fix” demand, and Sky News isn’t exactly media crack, either. Even the NY Times couldn’t pull this off with their opinion section, and that’s at least at the heroin-level of punditry.
I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post criticizing the Obama-as-Joker poster, in which the author argues that the poster is playing on racial fears and says that this poster isn’t as effective as the “Hope” one from the election.
That seems wrong on two counts. First, even the article itself takes a way long rhetorical path before it can make a connection between the Joker and racial fear. The Joker has always been a white guy, except on the ’60s Batman TV show, when you could possibly say he was sorta-Latino thanks to Cesar Romero. This article just doesn’t convince me that there’s anything about the Joker that links to blackness at all — if you want to break this Joker dude down racially, Heath Ledger clearly depicted him as a source of random violence, a.k.a. terrorism, and I’d say there’s a defined ethnic group that has a clear monopoly on being considered terrorists. Also, the Joker is a sociopathic serial murderer, and “weird middle-aged white guy” is the depiction that immediately springs to mind with that term.
Second, the Joker poster is totally blunt, but that’s not really ineffective: the great bulk of people are going to think, “Joker bad and socialism bad, so Obama bad”. I’m already seeing it as online avatars, so clearly it’s blunt enough to work on some level. You could get into the fact that probably 70% of people who dislike socialism have any knowledge of the topic besides negative word association, but the point is the poster ties the president pretty effectively to two things Americans dislike. Fair or not, it’s effective, and it’s not racist.
The Chicago Tribune launched a redesign today. I’m struck first off how much the top navigation looks like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette site. (Check out the two local-newspages, which for the Trib is the one I read the most.) But they did do a good job of cleaning it up a bit, particularly the headlines toward the bottom of the local-news page that used to get lost with no context, a.k.a. subhead, and the fact that the flyout links under the top navigation bar seem to be pretty flexible for spotlighting new stuff.
My pick for Michael Vick’s ultimate destination: the Oakland Raiders. Here’s why:
Back in my TIME.com days, I developed a serious music-at-work habit that kept on going all the way through Slate. Fortunately for me, my summer workplace at Kaplan Higher Ed is also cool with employees listening to headphones during the day, so I haven’t had to spend my time here sans face-melting shredfests.
Even more fortunate for me in the wake of my busted iPod, a coworker from Slate (props to Ellen) pointed me in the direction of Grooveshark, a startup music site that lets you search for any tune you want and stream it. It has similar functionality to Pandora, as you can click on a song and get a list of related songs, but with the instant playability there’s no need to wait to see what gets played next. Not only that, but mugs with a free profile can create and save playlists, mark songs as favorites, send out URLs for individual songs, and create exportable widgets like the one I have down below in the right column. (Though I’m a little disappointed at the lack of volume control on the individual-song widget. How are you supposed to go to 11?)
I set this player up so you can all rock out to a bad-ass metal tune from the ’90s:
I’m hella confused as to how this site is allowed to exist, but Grooveshark’s DMCA-infringement policy and the fact that all of the music is uploaded by users would seem to put the legality onus on the general webgoing public. I can imagine record companies and Apple’s iTunes division wouldn’t think this is such a big deal right now because the songs aren’t downloadable to a hard drive or music player, but once everyone’s got high-quality web access on their cell phones and less of a need for hard copies of music files, record companies better check themselves before they wreck themselves. (That reminds me to go listen to that Das EFX song, particularly for Ice Cube’s ability to rhyme “knife, ho” with “rifle”.)
But for real, Grooveshark = mad good. Give it a visit.
Also, I updated some site CSS this weekend, so I wanted to point everyone to the style chooser up top. You get your choice of red, blue, green, black, or old-school viewing.
Last week I was reading some online commentary about a piece by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, this one about Goldman Sachs. I first read Taibbi in Spanking the Donkey, and I usually like the dude’s cynical, New-Journalism-style writing, even when it’s a bit sensational.
The Goldman Sachs thing — at least the parts I could read, since the whole thing isn’t available online (very Time Inc. circa 2003 move by Rolling Stone) — so then I started reading some of the criticism. One of the articles I read mentioned that Megan McArdle (who I haven’t read before) from the Atlantic wrote a big response to the article, so I decided to go try and find that. I typed this into Google:
We all know search-engine listings are important, so how did HuffPost pull this one off? When I look at the source code, it seems like The Atlantic is missing some simple SEO best-practice stuff that could have helped them out here. HuffPost isn’t kicking ass at SEO coding, exactly, but they’re doing enough of the small stuff right that it’s likely that was enough to get Google to list them over The Atlantic. Running down the basic-level SEO checklist:
Friendly URLs: Sort of a wash; both URLs contain the keyword strings “taibbi” and “atlantic” at some point. Header tags: Running into some trouble here — HuffPost has the page title “The Atlantic: Taibbi Is ‘Becoming The Sarah Palin Of Journalism’” in an h1 tag, while “Matt Taibbi Gets His Sarah Palin On” is an h3 tag on The Atlantic. That’s a weird one, particularly because there’s no other competing h1 tag on the Atlantic page and we’re looking at an individual post here, not the main page of the blog where you might use the h1 for the blog title. Meta keywords: Keywords are one of the few meta tags that actually count for search engines, and while they’re downplayed a lot in best-practice techniques compared to the days when people would put 200 keywords into the source code, they still serve a contextual purpose. The Atlantic didn’t even use any — not good, not even as good as the cursory list on the HuffPost page.
Plenty of SEO-consultant advice is voodoo, as Google’s algorithm is a mystery to most, but low-level code tactics like URL structure, meta and header tags make a difference.
HuffPost gets some flak now and then for not doing enough original stuff (or sometimes going beyond that), but in cases like this, they’re grabbing the traffic in a perfectly legal way. Even if they do link through in the end, this is a tangible example to pay attention to best-practice coding when you’re building a site, because otherwise, web dudes will come and G up even those readers specifically looking for your stuff.
The only part that confuses me is whether newspaper websites are OK for the web users to read. If not, then that does hurt the web team’s ability to keep up on things, but if so, I think there’s no question the web is going to beat the hell out of a print newspaper for information purposes. I should make a point sometime of counting how many times per day I read something online and then go to Wikipedia to look it up. (Wikipedia may be disallowed for most academic research, but it is the bomb at providing introductory glimpses into just about anything on Earth.)
My iPod started acting ill today, and now I’m in the middle of restoring the factory settings. Since I have to completely re-upload all of my music, photo and backed-up files, I got some time to write. First, the news:
• At first today, it really annoyed me that the entire media-swilling world spent the day rending its garments and pulling out its hair over Michael Jackson. (It’s 10 p.m. here, and the funeral is still the top story on CNN.com.) But then I thought, “Parts of the U.S. have been doing this for more than 30 years for Elvis, so this is really nothing new,” and I felt better about our modern era — or worse about past eras, I can’t decide.
• I’ve been asking people for a percentage: how many people watching Michael Jackson’s funeral know who Robert McNamara is, and they have to understand that he was far more historically important than MJ. The common response is less than 1 percent, but I would think it’s actually up around 4 percent. Call me an optimist.
In fairness to that other 96 percent, I did call him “George McNamara” at lunch today. But to burnish my own history-nerd credentials with an even bigger bit of nerdness, I was also thinking of McGeorge Bundy at the time.
If policy now tilts too far toward deficit cutting, some argue, that would treat job creation as an option the nation somehow cannot afford, in contrast to “must haves” like tax cuts for wealthy Americans and unpopular foreign military entanglements.
True, but you also can’t ignore the fact that those tax cuts and unpopular entanglements were put in place, and now they are indeed making the job creation that much more financially difficult. I fall reluctantly in line with the spending advocates — I don’t think now is the time to pay down the deficit, because government spending at the moment really is a big portion of the money flowing into the economy. But if things do turn around, raise my taxes. It sucks, but it’s better than betting our economic livelihood on the whim of the Chinese government.
And on to frivolous stuff:
• I’m sorry to see the Penguins lose Rob Scuderi to the L.A. Kings, but they were right not to pay what the Kings paid. The dude is good, but not $13.6 million good.
• I got a Lollapalooza ticket for Sunday, August 9, hombres. Jane’s Addiction original lineup? I am hella there.
• This past Friday I went to see The Hangover. Verdict: four phats. Definitely some gross humor; definitely a weird Zach Galifinakis; and most likely worth seeing. (Though don’t take your parents.)
Even stranger, the movie featured both Heather Graham and Mike Tyson in prominent roles. Why is this strange? Those two were both guests at a 2004 arts-benefit party at the Guggenheim in NYC attended by yours truly, who by all rights should not have been there in the first place. (I’m pretty sure this Heather Graham photo is from that very night.) Mike Tyson is somehow even scarier when he wears fur, and I even made eye contact with Ms. Graham — or as I have no right to call her, Heather — for a full second.
The moral here? I really should have been offered at least a cameo appearance as the third part of that party trifecta, Hollywood.
You heard it here first: Neverland is the new Graceland.
Man, what a week for news. It’s been a while since we had such a contrast of the important (Iran) and the junk-ridden (Transformers 2 = 2nd highest grossing opening ever).
My vote for biggest story: Considering that I live in the U.S., it has to be the start of American withdrawal from Iraqi cities. There’s the potential for the sectarian pot to boil over again now that American troops won’t be piled onto the lid anymore, but the alternative of policing the country forever isn’t going to work. This is all after the fighting there has been all but forgotten by the general public. I’d put Iran second, and the dramatic turnaround the nation’s opinion of Michael Jackson third, but in my mind it was a return to the big story of the decade.
Michael Jackson: it’s sad that the guy fell so far from the heights of the ’80s and never made it back, but the country this week seemed to forget the past 15 years in a single afternoon. This is the same thing that happened when Richard Nixon died — granted, Nixon did real harm to the country, while Jackson was just weird — but I wonder if it’s a uniquely American thing for national opinion of a controversial guy to turn on a dime whenever that guy passes on.
I first heard about Jackson’s death on Twitter myself, but this is just incorrect. You know what I did after I first read that whiff of the story on Twitter? Started hitting the NY Times, CNN and BBC news sites. You can’t note that people check the “respected” news outlets before they really believe an account of something, then turn around and say that this proves those respected news outlets are pointless. Plus, I don’t get the comment about TMZ representing “the new realities of journalism” when they got their scoop through old-fashioned reporting. The truth is that the base of all news will always be reporting, and obviously you don’t have to be a giant, 100-year-old paper to do that, but it still has to happen somewhere along the line.
Let’s also face the fact that TMZ had nothing to lose by claiming Jackson was dead at the very first moment there was speculation. He’s not actually dead? “Well, they’re just a tabloid anyway.” He died? “Brilliant job getting the story!”
Guy who benefited the most from Michael Jackson’s death: Mark Sanford.
Gail Collins said it better than I can on Sanford: it’s not that he committed an affair or that he’s a total moral hypocrite that makes him a bad governor; it’s the fact that by definition, bailing out on being governor tends to make one a bad governor. And no, I don’t feel bad for him, even if I give him credit for a more human response than most politicians caught cheating.
Transformers 2 has been a lot of fun for me, and I haven’t even seen it: every critic has sharpened the knife for the review, so at that point it’s a contest to see who can get it the sharpest. Naturally Roger Ebert’s review is brilliantly written, but I also liked Dana Stevens in Slate and The A.V. Club. I like my wit dry, with just a hint of acid.
The funniest part of it all is that Transformers 2 has been critically hated-on more than any movie I can remember, yet it also had the second-highest opening of all time. (Thankfully for the American cultural soul, Dark Knight barely kept the top slot.) One of the commercials this week even ran a bunch of critical excerpts with the tiniest possible font for attribution. Interesting move by the studio to do a Terrell Owens on the Dallas 50-yard line.
R.I.P., Billy Mays. As I felt the need to tell anyone each time he showed up on TV, the dude was from Pittsburgh. The guy sold some bizarre products, but he was the rare salesman where I enjoyed the pitch.
As a tribute to the man, I will republish that in the style he knew best:
R.I.P. BILLY MAYS! AS I FELT THE NEED TO TELL ANYONE EACH TIME HE SHOWED UP ON TV, THE DUDE WAS FROM PITTSBURGH! THE GUY SOLD SOME BIZARRE PRODUCTS, BUT HE WAS THE RARE SALESMAN WHERE I ENJOYED THE PITCH!
The TV world lost a truly fun character. Vince from ShamWow just isn’t the same.
I’m curious to see who will buy AOL and what they think is valuable. They have a decent development team down there, so I’d imagine that gets some interest, but otherwise it’ll be interesting to see.
There’s a been a rash of new Comcast ads in the past few days, featuring a bunch of people in three-quarter view singing a really strange and monotonic rhyme about Comcast and all the ninjas and explosions it offers. But that’s funny, because when I think “Comcast”, I don’t think “funky and hip” so much as “they care more about customer satisfaction at The Wiener’s Circle.”
I haven’t had the same bad experience with customer service; the people on the phones are mostly friendly. I do, however, rate this place only one star for its ridiculous service plans.
Here’s the best: if you call to cancel your service say, three weeks from the date you call, they turn your Internet service off IMMEDIATELY. I had to schedule a pickup the day before moving, which was, yes, three weeks from the date I called. Next thing I know, my Internet stops working. I call them up and they tell me it’s company policy that as soon as you request a service stop, they turn your modem off no matter how far out the actual end date may be. So I had to cancel that end of service, call again today (the day before we move out of town) and find out they don’t have a tech to come out today, so now we have to drive to the ass-end of NE and drop off the stuff ourselves.
Buy from RCN, whatever you do!
There you have it. Comcast: Truth in advertising is a bad idea.
There’s a been a rash of new Comcast ads in the past few days, featuring a bunch of people in three-quarter view singing a really strange and monotonic rhyme about Comcast and all the ninjas and explosions it offers. But that’s funny, because when I think “Comcast”, I don’t think “funky and hip” so much as “they care more about customer satisfaction at