Posts Tagged Under ‘Internet’

Firefox

Though I’m a huge Firefox booster, lately version 2.0.0.11 has been eating up virtual memory like a fat dude at a Louisiana Chinese buffet. And that’s both on my home PC (which is mad old) and work PC (which is still sorta old but faster, like Bruce Smith in his waning days.) Version 3.0, now in beta development, is supposed to fix the memory leaks, but if you use version 2.0, be sure you close firefox.exe from the Windows Task Manager now and then.

And if you use a Mac, you should probably be visiting condescendinghipstercult.com instead. At the moment, nobody’s registered that. Now’s your shot to create the web’s most accurately named Mac community!

Strangest Brand Partnering of the Day

I just saw this today:

http://www.cyberjournalist.net/fox-news-for-iphone/

Fox News and Apple? That one just strikes me as a really unlikely pairing. But maybe Apple devotees have become so contrarian-cool that they’ve abandoned the leftist political views of the urban traditional-cool and embraced right-wing viewpoints as a sarcastic collective paean to right-wing America.

The New Slate Widget

We just launched a new app at work, the random Bushisms generator:

Feel free to grab it and spread it around on your own site / Facebook page / MySpace!

Wiz Khalifa

This guy came out last year, but I had to give blog props to Pittsburgh’s newest and best rapper:

412!

Too Easy, Yet Great

You don’t see these guys living in DC. Some things about New York, I really don’t miss:

Though I’d say hipsterism became a parody of itself around 2003 or so, it’s still funny. (Thanks, John.)

Our Fellow Guests

These dudes shared downtown Indy and our hotel with us during the wedding weekend. (I may or may not have mentioned to the Slate V peeps a few weeks prior that the convention would be there with us.)

Good times.

Things

• For a heavy but very good read, check out this New Yorker article on the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (h/t Mark.) For some reason we haven’t seen many big pieces mentioning the impact of extra-tough interrogation tactics—the euphemism bell just went off—on the interrogators themselves, but this piece notes that it’s not just the bad guys suffering psychological damage.
• On another note from the article, it seems that one argument for putting the detainees through a regular trial is the simple need to be able to put them somewhere. In the meantime, the best the government can do for the “What do we do with these guys once they’re not as immediately useful?” question seems to be a big shrug. If there’s not a court record of a trial and later sentencing, thirty years from now we’ll still be asking ourselves, “Why exactly are we still hiding a bunch of dangerous Arab and Pakistani guys in Poland when it would have been a lot easier to have just tried and sentenced them to our supermax in Colorado?”
• As much as today’s political climate can be depressing, it’s a lot easier to be 27 in 2007 than it was in 1917.
• One easy way to make your online comment / argument look less intelligent and original is to post song lyrics along with it. I was reading a dude’s critique of the media in some comments section recently and he posted the refrain to “March of the Pigs” by Nine Inch Nails, as if the creative effort of an artist who isn’t you is a good stand-in for using things like applicable facts, reason and logic to show that you know stuff.

  Nope.

• This past week saw a mild embarrassment for Rudy Giuliani’s campaign thanks to his daughter’s Facebook membership in “One million strong for Barack”. Meanwhile, it seems that every editor I know from either TIME or Slate (I just gotta use internal title style—force of habit) got together recently and agreed to set up profiles, so now I’m Facebooked in with all the work peeps. So, just a friendly reminder that you never know who’s checking your stuff (probably me, because Facebook is great), and then sometimes you do know, and that person’s kind of a big deal.

  “What?! The Internet is public?! Who knew?”

Peace, I’m out.

Time for a Job in Sector 7-G

This one’s kind of a stretch, but still from a cool site.

The Humans Are Dead

I planned to cancel my HBO subscription this summer, but then I caught Flight of the Conchords and now I’m stuck to the show like a junkie with monkey disease. So I’m going with a copout post of three of the best:

Big Ups to Things

• Big ups to my friends at PandaSmash.com for doing a cool job cutting on the web’s video sites. Right here. I personally would like to see more of Emo Sam, potentially a spinoff series. Hey, it worked for Rhoda.
• Big ups to A-Z Guitar Tabs for having such a complete archive. You think of a song, it’s up on there. Now I need a site to keep me motivated to learn to play. Or I can just wait 15 years for guitar-teaching neural implants and keep playing Guitar Hero II in the meantime. Sweet.
• Big ups to Rock Creek Park. Pretty cool woods and forest stuff to do in the middle of DC.
• Big ups to Morningstar Farms Grillers Original. Cooked in the pan with a little bit of olive oil and topped with some A1, these are sometimes higher than real burgers on the taste scale.
• Big ups to sunblock. Irish people in sunny climates thank yinz guys for keeping us out of lobster territory. Less ups to being pale as hell in the first place, though.
• Also, big ups to lobsters. You are delicious.

I’m out.

Hung, Then Tried, Then Shot?

I agree wholeheartedly with this guy:

Class Divide Online?

Drop Internet knowledge, you say.

Alright.

I just read this interesting article (thanks, Jeremiah) from the BBC about how the Facebook - MySpace divide among teenagers also mirrors American class divisions. There’s certainly something to this. Not to prove a point from my earlier Jason Taylor post, but when I search high-school classmates on Facebook, I only get 11 results; on MySpace, I get 121. I tried this same thing searching for my college classmates to get the upper-crust perspective (let’s face facts about the majority of peeps who attend Northwestern), but Facebook won’t return more than 500 search results.

You can take the analogy even further than that: the craziness and totally unfiltered atmosphere of MySpace and the guideline-driven, orderly approach of Facebook in some ways mirrors the way our capitalist society works: the people at the top are a smaller group who tend to be more comfortable working the system and staying within a certain set of rules while building a secluded and idyllic existence, leaving everyone else who can’t or doesn’t want to join in to fend for themselves in a Hobbesian-type wizorld. Most people are on the outside looking in, kind of similar to how MySpace has a far larger customer base than Facebook.

But while you can make the outside-looking-in argument against Facebook, it’s equally easy for Facebook to make the basic marketing appeal of “come join our pleasant world, away from the noise” against MySpace: the social-networking world of MySpace outside the refined, neat, well-laid-out confines of Facebook is cacophonous, confusing, vulgar and, mostly, really damned stupid. (Also browser-crashing. Can’t leave out browser-crashing.) In a mirror of conservative critique of modern culture, if principled web design stands in for societal culture, then MySpace is setting the culture back faster and faster every day. When you want a break from the clatter, sometimes you just have to clutter together with like-minded people. Enter Facebook: the U Street of the Internet. For those of you who don’t live in DC, that’s a fast-growing neighborhood with lots of cultural history and cool places to chill, but suffering a potential influx of gentrifiers who can partially appreciate the appeal of the place but will kill that appeal by their growing presence. Kind of like Facebook opening up to high schoolers.

Finally, there’s the way both sites are run. Like the upper reaches of society, Facebook isn’t afraid to crib coolness when it sprouts up from the ranks of the masses, so long as that coolness can fit into its defined limits. (Think new Facebook apps.) And the guys with the power over the MySpace masses know that they probably should do better with restricting the negative consequences of the free-for-all, like porn-site friend-invite spam and the massive amounts of junk, but too many people are clamoring for the freedom to put junk onto their pages that restriction would just invite massive rebellion. (Think the drug war or Prohibition.)

I’m a Facebook man myself, though I also have the neglected MySpace account when I want a nod toward populism. But I gotta admit, that clean layout and crap-free functionality—even if it’s just the manufactured invention of some web designer—is just so freakin’ appealing. I guess that makes me a social-networking latté liberal? Either way, coffee tastes like dirt. And I mean that with no connection to my analogy at all, because coffee really does taste like dirt. It’s disgusting.

Knowledge dropped.

P.S. - Sorry, Friendster.

Inner City Pressure

We all just want some muesli. That’s why “Flight of the Conchords” is phat.

Random

• I’ve got a little Short Bus from Filter playing on the iTunes right now. What happened to industrial rock? There was a glory era from about 1992-1999 or so, and then it really faded away. Nine Inch Nails are still around, but they just don’t have the prominence they used to have. I blame Clear Channel Communications, because why not.
• There really aren’t many people who are happy with the direction of the United States at the moment. Whose fault is this? The media? The Republicans? The President? The Democrats? The military?

  I feel like our wise commentators are afraid to call out the common cause behind all of those: the citizens of this currently misguided nation. Because in our society, the people are the ones putting their government in place, consuming the media and shaping the economy, and I just can’t help but think that most peeps have been pretty derelict in their citizenly duties.

• Speaking of that, I gotta read this.
• Luckily though, you readaz are bright people. So I know you’ll go check out Slate’s new video magazine, Slate V, when it launches soon. Help a blogga out: I’ve been working like a mug to get this thing ready to go on a really tight deadline.
• It’s not quite new anymore, but I still think Dirty Jobs is one of the best cable shows in years. Watching a dude get all mudded up and covered in sludge for the sake of good television has a great, dumb appeal, but to roll Gompers-style for a minute, I gotta give it up for the matter-of-fact, highly popular, non-preachy throwback glorification of the American worker in this age of obscene fetishization of the horded wealth of the few. I didn’t like when Mike Rowe shilled for Ford, but otherwise the show is a high-quality effort to remind us bourgeois slobs that societal consumerism doesn’t come easy.

  Also, I like to watch people smash things.

I’m out.

Why Media Companies Shouldn’t Go Public

What up, web.

Last night the Bancroft family, controlling owners of Dow Jones and its flagship paper The Wall Street Journal, seems to have thrown in the towel and potentially opened up to the takeover bid from News Corp., owned by NY Post-Loc Rupert Murdoch. They haven’t sold yet, and a sale isn’t guaranteed, but DJ did issue several statements saying their current structure is untenable and the company would better accomplish its mission “in combination or collaboration with another organization that may include News Corporation.”

That sounds like B to the S to me. The Bancrofts hadn’t been shopping the company around pre-bid; they then very publicly turned down Murdoch’s unsolicited offer earlier in May, hardly the move of a company that needs to sell. The real reason the family is willing to consider a sale is because the shareholders are hardcore leaning on them to do so. The share price of Dow Jones jumped from $36 clear up to $58.47 on May 2, when Murdoch’s bid became public. Shareholders in Dow Jones, like T. Rowe Price, stand to make a lot of windfall if the sale goes through.

This is the worst aspect of publicly traded media companies. The current ownership doesn’t even want to sell to News Corp., chiefly because they legitimately fear that Murdoch will turn their distinguished paper into another vehicle for his own politics-of-the-moment. (That can mean either appeasing the communist government in China or stoking war fever here in the U.S.) Yet the dictates of the public market are forcing their hand. DJ’s investors, seeing the cash to be made from the sale, are more than willing to throw the product itself under the bus, and one of America’s best newspapers—arguably the best—might start to undergo a subtle and disheartening shift. You can read better arguments against News Corp. buying the Journal here and here.

I think the market usually does decide what’s best, and while solvency is a necessity in any economy, an unregulated market will occasionally run roughshod over the very things that society most wants to protect. (Re-read The Jungle sometime.) I’m going to climb back up the j-school ivory tower and state that an independent—note that I didn’t say “objective”, even though that’s important to strive for—press is one of those things. A media that’s solely under private ownership will be more inclined to take risks with reporting, political angles, styles of coverage, technology and business models than a large, public company that’s beholden to shareholders. It’s not the drive for solvency that creates problems with media companies, it’s the drive for constantly increasing returns in a field that has always been more about viewpoints and information than it has about profitability. In theory the extra capital that comes with public ownership could be used to create a better news well, but anyone who follows the press will notice that newsrooms are laying off employees as fast as they can these days and relying more and more on centralized news sources.

Crazy rich guys have always gotten into the media business for the vanity that comes with loudly voicing one’s perspective, not because they see it as a highly profitable investment. They make their money elsewhere, then get into the media. That emphasis on viewpoints is a good thing, because unlike a capital market, the media is nothing if not the marketplace of ideas. I would hate to see the Wall Street Journal be forced into a partnership they don’t even want.