I don't care if you do think it's effective - only a sick person, removed from the reality, would be "proud" of torture http://bit.ly/aincKU3 hours ago
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.
This is certainly the ruffest consumer technology in a long time: Scan a barcode with the Red Laser application, and it’ll return product reviews, price comparisons and all the other useful info online. Plus it’s got an open SDK, so once other phones start adding in the iPhone-style laser device, I imagine some permutation of it will show up for widespread use.
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.
So, some background on this: all MBA1s do a MAP as the last quarter of the first year. At the end of December, the list of available projects comes out; about half of these are international, and this year there were projects in India, Ireland, Peru, Brazil, France and several others, as well as a bunch of domestic projects all over the U.S. Our top ten list of preferences was due in early January, and the school formed teams of 4-6 people based on preferences. I was lucky enough to get my number one pick: helping out these guys as they launch their mobile device in India, getting market feedback and other stuff useful to the company.
I’ll be gone from mid-March to mid-April, so I promise as much India blogging as I can find time to do. I gotta keep yinz updated on what it’s like to eat curries for breakfast, yo. Good times and ghee for all.
I no longer work there, but that won’t stop me from plugging this nicely summarizing Slate piece by Tim Wu detailing the two presidential candidates’ positions on media ownership and net neutrality.
Suffice it to say that I fall squarely within the Obama camp on the question of net neutrality: the Internet can no longer be considered a product, but instead a network similar to the airwaves. Like the airwaves are licensed by the government, there’s room for licensing of the Internet’s physical network by bandwidth costs, but you can’t package “the web” and sell it to consumers in a realistic fashion. That’s a really old-fashioned way of thinking about it. Instead, the web is the marketplace wherein websites sell their goods and duke it out for audience and revenue share. To change the web into a cable-television model is just imposing an old-fashioned dynamic on a system that’s already created its own rules.
As for fair share of political views within the media, the lefty side of me thinks it’s necessary, but the MBA/realist side of me thinks differently: people are going to listen to or watch the crap no matter what you do, so somebody might as well make some money off of it. Do you then require those moneymakers to put on informed, objective (if that’s even possible), educated content as a result? I don’t think it’s even relevant: the media marketplace is so segmented these days anyway that the consumer is going to seek out whatever they want and likely find it, whether that’s on-the-scene reporting from Zimbabwe’s reconstituted parliament or the skateboarding dog.
As someone who once spent three weeks as a copy-edit intern, and thus as someone highly qualified to pass judgment on any copy-editing decision ever made, the following are my issues with the Atlantic headline “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
The web is much bigger than Google;
While it is mentioned several times, the article is not about Google itself;
“Stupid” is a value judgment, and thus an inaccurate headline for an article that instead focuses mostly on the value-neutral, meta-thought-process changes wrought by the web.
On to the substance of Nicholas Carr’s piece: some yes, and also no.
I was reading a response to the article that notes how few of the piece’s critics will cop to having had a, “Hey, that’s cool, I’ll read this thing I found … oh wait, that looks cooler … what was I originally reading again?” experience. I will more than cop to that, as it happens to me almost every day. In one hour today I bounced between Newsweek, The A.V. Club, Rotten Tomatoes and several friends’ sites, to the point that it took me an average of 20 minutes to get through each article that would have taken five minutes without the distraction of the others. So yes, I do an incredibly greater amount of skimming online than I would in print.
But–always a but. Skimming online doesn’t mean I avoid skimming the newspaper, or even skimming the library. Back in the day I used to sit in this great, undisturbed backroom at the Carnegie Library picking out books on World War I or II, leafing through each one until a passage caught my eye and then putting the book back before moving on to another. (Lest you worry too much for my back-in-the-day social life, I did do plenty of things that didn’t entail sitting alone in libraries. But then I do have a strong nerd side, so it wasn’t an insignificant amount of reading.) The reality is that briefly glancing over things to find the meaty parts didn’t come along with the web.
And on the book tip, I think this paragraph is especially strange:
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
I do appreciate the link to Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0, which is right up my professional alley and which I hadn’t read before. But really, no more books and in-depth tomes? In the past two weeks I made it through Generation Kill and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I can safely say that my experience of each was in no way harmed by my Internet reading habits. A book is just a different experience: when I want wide-ranging and cursory, I’ll read online. (I’d say this brief familiarity with so many topics is more useful in a hugely varietal world than knowing just a few topics very well.) When I do want that informed look at just one topic, I pick up a book. I don’t think a failure to pick up a book is all that widespread among people who are reading a lot otherwise online; so many of the cultural touchstones for intelligent online readers of, say, The Atlantic continue to come from books. If you’re hung up on the printed format, we now have Kindle to bring books up to speed with other electronic publishing.
So yes, the web is restructuring how we consume media, and probably even restructuring our thought processes. It doesn’t mean older formats are going to be erased and crowded out. I think Carr makes this point himself in the last few paragraphs when he talks about the advent of writing, and of the printing press. Oral communication didn’t die with writing, nor will in-depth thought on a single topic die with the web.
The more forms of information that come along, the better.
I’ll tout another piece of the site on which I recently worked, the new political ringtones we launched this week. We don’t yet have Verizon support–annoying for me since I have Verizon service–but anyone else can download these and annoy your friends with the Hillary laugh:
I feel like I’ve run into iterations of this question a few times lately, so here go some words of whizzzdum.
If I were some 21-year-old dude again, but my 21-year-old self was transported to 2008 and I was looking for a job in media websites, I’d pick up some books on the following languages at SBX. I could stop in during my next trip to EV-1 for a Busch Light 30-cube. ($10.99, readers. But that was in 2001 prices. I imagine with the surge in grain prices, it’s gone all the way up to 46 cents per beer or so.)
The geek glasses know
First, I’d learn Flash. Front-end developers can do really well with this, even though I think it’s a really bad idea to use Flash for basic page templating. Instead, Flash is awesome for news graphics, such as the popular delegate calculator we rocked at Slate. It’s really portable for things like embedded video players and widgets (see the Bushisms widget), it can do great visual effects that DHTML still can’t do with ease (or at all), and it’s a lot less dangerous than Javascript for site stability. If your swf file is f’d, it’ll take down your movie but likely not your site performance. (Unless it’s way huge and you’re seeing too many downloads, but file size is a problem for anything.)
Second, I’d get really good at CSS. It’s the best way to control page display, so clearly it’s mad useful. The HTML part is fairly simple; you’re just wrapping things in divs of different class and ID. Then the CSS comes into play and keeps your site looking tight.
Third, I’d learn object-oriented programming. It’s the basis of Javascript behaviors and used in back-end programming as well, and that’s across all platforms. ASP.NET, Java or PHP, you’ll want to know the underlying structures. And that’s once you know basic programming stuff like loops, conditionals and database connectivity; if not, learn that first.
Assuming you already have the media knowledge down — journalism and such — you’d be representin’ for an entry-level producer or front-end developer job. Other useful technologies include Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress (for the occasional print thing), IIS or Apache server admin, and database structure. That last one is obviously useful in general web development, but I’m assuming you’re looking for a job with a media company big enough to have its own DBAs.
As far as the PHP / open-source question, I definitely advise people to learn it, but I say that with the knowledge that you probably won’t be using it working for a media company in the next few years. PHP is great and I love all the innovation around it, but most companies are still running legacy systems in ASP.NET, Java or other technologies and will bust out some criticism about scalability and support issues if you suggest moving to PHP / MySQL. (Facebook apparently not being large-scale and uptime-critical enough.) So, while PHP is great if you want to set up a site from scratch and will be useful when it becomes more supported with big sites, you probably won’t need it on a day-to-day job basis.
Apologies to any non-code people who were bored stiff on this one.
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!
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 
Hey readaz.
I’ll tout another piece of the site on which I recently worked, the new political ringtones we launched this week. We don’t yet have Verizon support–annoying for me since I have Verizon service–but anyone else can download these and annoy your friends with the Hillary laugh:
