video

This is a good one.

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Chris Anderson web-site.

Marc Gunther, reviewing Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail in Fortune, deplores “the extinction of mass culture.” Some of us consider it cause for celebration.

Anderson rejoices in the proliferation of niche markets and consumer choice, but Gunther argues that “The advent of 300 channels and the Internet has fragmented audiences – and the explosion of choice has left us poorer.”

I think the explosion of choice has left us poorer in at least two arenas. The first is journalism. (Yes, as a Fortune writer, I’ve got a stake in the health of the mainstream media, which bloggers call the MSM.) The network evening newscasts, big-city newspapers and the national news magazines once had the money, access, skills, commitment and power to deliver lots of original reporting and put important issues on the national agenda. Today, they are all diminished.

To pick a single, timely, example, The Tribune Co. announced just the other day that its newspapers would be closing foreign bureaus in Johannesburg, Moscow, Lebanon and Pakistan. This is happening all over newspaperdom and it happened years ago at the broadcast networks.

Yes, there is more information available to us than ever, but I don’t think we are better informed. Niche media will, inevitably, continue to weaken mass media.

The second arena where we are worse off is politics. This is related to journalism, as the moderate and responsible (okay, bland) voices of the MSM get drowned out by partisan, opinionated cableheads and bloggers.

Yeah, right, I’m really depressed about how responsible (but, unfortunately, lying) voices like Dan Rather’s were drowned out by (fact-checking) Charles Johnson and Powerline.

Jason Zangerle of the New Republic yesterday dropped a bomb on the left-side blogoshere, opening up for general discussion a very damaging story (previously reported way back in January of 2005 in the WSJ, and pooh-pooh’d at that time by Salon, finally re-emerging last week in New Republic –and in the subscriber-only section of the New York Times) of influence traded for money, and back-room coordination of the left-side blogosphere’s message.

Are Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas (Zúniga) (of the famous Daily Kos) engaged in a pay-for-play scheme in which politicians who hire Armstrong as a consultant get the support of Kos? That’s the question that’s been bouncing around the blogosphere ever since The New York Times’s Chris Suellentrop broke the news last Friday about a 2000 run-in Armstrong had with the Securities and Exchange Commission over alleged stock touting. But Armstrong, Kos, and other big-time liberal bloggers have almost entirely ignored the issue, which is a bit surprising considering their tendency to rapidly respond to even the smallest criticism.

Why the strange silence in the face of such damning allegations? Well, I think we now know the answer. It’s a deliberate strategy orchestrated by Kos. TNR obtained a missive Kos sent earlier this week to “Townhouse,” a private email list comprising elite liberal bloggers, including Jane Hamsher, Matt Stoller, and Christy Hardin Smith. And what was Kos’s message to this group that secretly plots strategy in the digital equivalent of a smoke-filled backroom? Stay mum!

Kos certainly went ballistic this morning on the New Republic:

People talk about the need for the left to work together and have a unified message in the face of a unified conservative noise machine. So a google group was created called “Townhouse”, and it included many bloggers and other representatives of the netroots as well as a large number of partisan journalists and grassroots groups. It allowed us to discuss policy, issues, tactics and coordinate as much as you can ever get a bunch of liberals to coordinate.

There was one big rule for this list, an important cog in the growing Vast Left Wing Conspiracy — everything discussed was off the record.

That was obviously violated today as the New Republic betrayed, once again, that it seeks to destroy the new people-powered movement for the sake of its Lieberman-worshipping neocon owners; that it stands with the National Review and wingnutoshpere in their opposition to grassroots Democrats.

The magazine published, in its website, an email I sent to the list. There is nothing controversial about the email, but Jason Zengerle tried to spin it as evidence that there is a “smoke-filled room” and that I send “dictats” to other bloggers, controlling what they can and cannot write about. In a subsequent post, Zengerle went further, saying that I control the financial fates of much of the progressive blogosphere. My power apparently knows no bounds!

Ludicrous, all of it, but that’s the new rules of the game. TNR and its enablers are feeling the heat of their own irrelevance and this is how they fight it — by undermining the progressive movement. Zengerle has made common cause with the wingnutosphere, using the laughable “kosola” frame they created and emailing his “scoops” to them for links. This is what the once-proud New Republic has evolved into — just another cog of the Vast RIGHT Wing Conspiracy.

If you still hold a subscription to that magazine, it really is time to call it quits. If you see it in a magazine rack, you might as well move it behind the National Review or even NewsMax, since that’s who they want to be associated with these days.

Charles Johnson of LGF thinks that New Republic’s rejoinder written by the same Jason Zengerle, has a great deal to say “about the leftist blogosphere’s coordinating committee, the private email list called ‘Townhouse,’ ” and its central role in coordinating the left-side of the Blogosphere party-line.

I’ve noticed on many occasions that all the lefty blogs will suddenly go into lockstep, echoing the same talking points, whenever a breaking event happens. Now I know why. There’s no doubt that this list is also used to coordinate attacks when they decide to go after blogs like LGF or any of their other favorite targets.

But it’s highly revealing that the very thing the moonbat blogosphere always accuses the “right” of doing—secretly following orders from a central machine—is exactly what they’re doing themselves!

If there’s an equivalent list on the “right,” no one has ever invited me. But that’s OK; I wouldn’t join anyway.

Zengerle speculates that Kos’s power on the left-side may be based on more than good looks.

Now, on to the question of the source of Kos’s influence. As I wrote in this post, some of that influence likely stems from the ideological and partisan loyalty liberal bloggers feel toward him. But I also raised the question of whether Kos exercised some degree of financial influence over liberal bloggers through something called the Advertising Liberally BlogAds network. A number of Kos’s defenders have criticized me for misunderstanding the nature of Advertising Liberally and Kos’s relationship with it. The most thorough and heated critique I’ve seen comes from the aforementioned Steve Gilliard (you can read it here), so let me try to respond to his criticisms in the interest of answering the others.

Gilliard writes, “If Zengerle had done some reporting, he would have found out that Henry Copeland, owner of BlogAds, manages the network.” This is incorrect. Henry Copeland doesn’t manage any of the networks; he operates the overall BlogAds service. Each of the networks (like Advertising Liberally) is operated by a network manager, who is a blogger. In Advertising Liberally’s case, the network manager is MyDD’s Chris Bowers. But, according to e-mails I have that Bowers wrote in 2005, he consulted with Armstrong and Kos when it came to making up the rules for the Advertising Liberally network. (Indeed, this post from today by Bowers over at MyDD acknowledges that Kos sits on the Advertising Liberally “advisory board”; Armstrong left the board in late 2005.)

As for the network manager’s rule-making power, Gilliard writes, “They [i.e. Kos, Armstrong, and Bowers] formed the network, but none of them had the right to remove any other site by fiat.” This is also incorrect. Per the BlogAds rules for its advertising networks, each network manager has absolute control over setting standards for the network and deciding who is in and who is not. This actually became an issue for the Advertising Liberally network last fall, when–according to a source and e-mails in my possession–Bowers, Kos, and Armstrong drew up new membership rules for the network, which led to some blogs being kicked out of the network.

Finally, Gilliard writes:

The idea that one must “stay in Kos’s good graces” to remain in the network is a joke. Kos doesn’t care, he has DK and a sports network to run, Armstong has a job, and Bowers has MyDD to keep up and running, and that’s not easy.

All of this may well be true. I know of no instances where Kos, Armstrong, and Bowers excluded a blog from the network explicitly because the blog did something to fall out of their good graces. But the fact remains that Kos does exercise some control over the network and, according to a source, the fear of angering Kos among some liberal bloggers stems from that control. Is the fear irrational? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Lastly, let me address the issue of Kos’s anger. His response to my original posts is basically a long and blustery attack against TNR. His restatement that he is not a consultant still does not answer the serious questions that have been raised about his relationship with Armstrong and whether there is some arrangement by which politicians who hire Armstrong as a consultant then receive Kos’s support. And yet, because I continue to ask these questions, Kos contends that “TNR’s defection to the Right is now complete.” How asking legitimate questions of and about two individuals can be construed as an attack on liberalism as a whole is beyond me. Kos evidently believes that, as The Democratic Daily put it, “the left c’est moi.”

I’d certainly like to be reading Townhouse list today, but there is the danger of one’s mailbox being filled.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
–Adam Smith

Brian Carney interviews Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster in the Weekend Wall Street Journal, and finds a man operating a sensationally successful business operation based on an atypical, casting one’s bread upon the waters, model of customer service.

I put the question to Mr. Buckmaster: Google has turned unobtrusive text ads into a multibillion-dollar revenue stream. And posting a Google-type ad or two next to its search results wouldn’t cost Craigslist users one thin dime. So why not cash in?

“In the big Internet boom, thousands of companies were set up,” explains Mr. Buckmaster, who also counts himself as CFO and COO of the company. “With the exception of us, pretty much all of them were set up with the primary objective being to make a lot of money.” And yet, he continues, “Almost all of those businesses went under and never made any money. Even businesses like Amazon still haven’t made any money. They are still, over their entire lifetime, net negative. Here we are, we’ve been in the black since 1999 — six or seven years.”…

Mr. Buckmaster figures that Craigslist employs 21 people, and starts to count them on his fingers. It never brought in venture capitalists with their grand designs and exit strategies. “We didn’t want to have those voices at the table,” he says. So Craigslist has remained beholden to no one — except, as Mr. Buckmaster constantly intones, its “users,” who pay nothing for the privilege of posting or searching the millions of pages of apartment listings, moving sales and personal ads that make up the Craigslist ecosystem. “If it’s not something that users are asking for,” he says, “we don’t consider it.” The money that does come in comes from businesses posting in just two categories of classifieds in three cities — job listings in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles and, this week for the first time, brokered apartment rentals in New York…

We’re much more comfortable charging companies than charging individuals,” Mr. Buckmaster says. “Businesses are better equipped to afford a small fee and businesses can pay for fees out of pre-tax dollars where on average users are less able to pay a fee and they have to pay in post-tax dollars.” Giving users something free and denying money to the government at the same time? This man is no commie. What’s more, he runs a lean outfit. “There are big advantages to focusing exclusively on user wants and needs as we do, and blocking out everything else. That’s one of the ways we keep our staff small and our operations simple.”

As for the banner ads, “It’s not something our users have asked us for,” Mr. Buckmaster deadpans, his 6-foot-8-inch frame slumped in a leather chair in his living room and his eyes fixed on some distant point out the window. It turns out this is something of a mantra for Mr. Buckmaster; what Craigslist’s users want, they tend to get. No more and no less…

When asked whether there’s a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: “It’s unrealistic to say, but — imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?”

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. “Now, there’s something wrong in the reasoning there,” he admits. “You can’t run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company” — more points for understatement. “But still, it’s a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible.” As an end-user, I suppose I do, too.

Buckmaster’s approach to capitalism as an exercise in serendipity clearly works for Craigslist. It could be argued that this sort of business model in which adversarial friction is minimized, and the delivery of value is maximixed, is closer to the original free market ideal than today’s more commonly encountered vastly regimented and hierarchical bean-counting organizations.

The Wall Street Journal’s amusement feature today was about the latest Internet phenomenon in the Orient. A passenger on a Hong Kong bus took a video on his cell phone of the six minute tirade by an older man over a request by a younger fellow to lower the volume of his cell phone conversation.

His repeated “I’ve got pressure,” (in Chinese) has become a popular slogan, available on to shirts and coffee mugs.

While riding public bus 68X on the night of April 29, Elvis Ho tapped the shoulder of a passenger sitting in front of him who was talking on a cellphone. The 23-year-old Mr. Ho asked the man to lower his voice. Mr. Ho called him “uncle,” a familiar way of addressing an elder male in Cantonese.

Instead of complying, the man turned around and berated Mr. Ho for nearly six minutes, peppering his outburst with obscenities.

“I’ve got pressure, you’ve got pressure!” the older man exploded. “Why did you have to provoke me?” A nearby passenger who found the encounter interesting captured most of it on video with his own cellphone, and it was posted on the Web.

“Bus Uncle,” as the older man is now known, has since become a Hong Kong sensation. The video, including subtitled versions, has been downloaded nearly five million times from YouTube.com, a popular Web site for video clips.

Teenagers and adults here sprinkle their conversations with phrases borrowed from Bus Uncle’s rant, such as “I’ve got pressure!” and “It’s not over!” (shouted when the young man tried to end the conversation several times by saying, “It’s over”). Also, there are several insults involving mothers. Web sites peddle T-shirts with a cartoon of Bus Uncle and the famous phrases. They are also available as mobile-phone ringtones.

Fans have edited the footage into music-video versions of disco, rap and pop songs that have themselves become popular online. One video projects a slowed-down version of Bus Uncle’s voice over an image of Darth Vader. Another sets Bus Uncle audio clips to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” beginning with a title that says, “All he wanted to do…was to talk on his phone and relax from his stress…but someone HAD to tap him on the back.”

Jon Fong, the 21-year-old accountant and night-school psychology student who captured the bus incident on his Sony Ericsson cellphone, has become famous, too. Mr. Fong has told reporters that he often takes videos as a hobby, and had just planned to share this one with friends. “Next time, I’ll put myself in the frame,” he told Hong Kong’s Cable TV news.

The Internet has allowed the Bus Uncle video to join a slew of other instant amateur films in attracting a global audience. Here in Hong Kong, it has a special resonance. For many, Bus Uncle personifies the stresses of life in their city.

the video (contains obscenities – uncensored)

the video (cleaned-up subtitles)

Bus Uncle rant set to Sammi Cheng pop song

Motherload of Bus Uncle links

Tech guru Jaron Lanier objects to new-fangled collective-based web phenomena, like Wikipedia, as Digital Maoism, and comes out for individualism.

Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure…

..the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous…

For instance, most of the technical or scientific information that is in the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. You could always use Google or other search services to find information about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value. Since search engines are now more likely to point you to the wikified versions, the Web has lost some of its flavor in casual use.

When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn’t just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even Britannica has an editorial voice…

..The artificial elevation of all things Meta is not confined to online culture. It is having a profound influence on how decisions are made in America.

What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments, and major universities have all gotten the bug.

Most people have probably already experienced the joys of playing with Google Earth and Windows Live Local. NASA is now offering another really cool satellite imaging program, with add-ons for Mars, the Moon, and the Night Sky. Go to: NASA World Wind, and download. Don’t forget the add ons.

The SF Chronicle profiles an intriguing new Google feature:

Elmhurst, Ill., Loves Gay Porn. Which U.S. city seeks the most sex? Who wants to impeach Bush the most? Ask Google Trends…

the fact is, for all of last year, Elmhurst, Ill., population about 43,000, home of the Sunshine Biscuit Co. and former home of the largest Chevy dealer in the United States and pretty much quaint upscale yuppie Anytown, U.S.A., was the American city that looked up the term “sex” most frequently on Google.

Isn’t that cute? Isn’t that interesting? Sort of? I know this because Google just unveiled this nifty and somewhat baffling tool called Google Trends, wherein you simply enter your search term and choose a couple of parameters and hit Return and boom, you can see which regions (or countries or cities) in the world are looking up that term most actively for a given year (the data also shifts day to day), using Google’s massive search database, and it’s random, semipractical stuff like this that makes it difficult to hate Google for whoring out to China and for becoming the new Microsoft and for their billionaire geek teenager CEOs. But that’s another column.

Google Trends. It is utterly fascinating, at least for a while. It is cool and useful and at the same time enormously frustrating due to its obvious limitations, though I imagine it will spawn enormous amounts of titillating filler for countless PR firms and marketers and research papers and news reports that cite all sorts of vague data that seems to tell you something really important but when you stop and think about it doesn’t really tell you all that much at all. You know, just like religion.

Elmhurst, Illinois, is apparently way into sex. Or at least the idea of sex (googling that hugely broad term returns a decidedly unsexy array of sites, including those for “Sex and the City,” the Sex Pistols, Playboy.com, the National Sex Offender Registry and Sex Addicts Anonymous — not exactly a steaming cup o’ hot titillation).

But that’s not all. Elmhurst has darker, juicier secrets. Turns out Elmhurst is also, at least for 2006, the town most actively looking up “anal sex” (followed closely by Norfolk, Va., and, of course, San Antonio, Texas). And also “porn.” And also “gay porn” (just ahead of Las Vegas). And also “vibrator.” Do you sense a trend? I sense a trend. And also someplace I might need to get a summer home.

What does this say about Elmhurst? What does this say about small towns across the United States? What do you think it says? Because that’s pretty much what it says.

Google, thoughtfully, also includes any relevant news articles it can dig up to go alongside your search results to perhaps explain some of the interest. Does this help explain why Rockville, Md., looks up “Vishnu” more than any other city? Verily, I have no idea.

But still, it can get interesting. Who’s looking up “impeach Bush” most actively? Portland, Oregon. (San Francisco is third). “American Idol”? Honolulu, Hawaii — by a strangely huge margin. “Gas prices”? Minneapolis. “Dildo”? That would be Oslo, Norway. “Dildo,” among U.S. cities? Tampa, Fla. “Tom Cruise”? Cambridge, Mass. “Tom Cruise gay”? Irvine and New York. “Da Vinci Code”? Salt Lake City. “Gun control”? Cincinnati. And “Viagra,” for 2006? That’s Fort Worth, Texas. Go figure.

In fact, Google Trends is pretty much the biggest “go figure” tool you’re likely to see all year. You can speculate to your heart’s content about why the hell Phoenix would be looking up “Jenna Jameson” more than Las Vegas, or why Nashville is so heavily into Christ, or why they really love Ashlee Simpson in Newark, N.J., or why Philadelphia, for some unknowable reason, loves the fact that Britney Spears is pregnant whereas Santiago, Chile, really, really loves Pearl Jam, but you could only guess. One bit of historical news: Jesus has resurged and is once again more popular than the Beatles. Just FYI.

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Hat tip to Stephen Frankel.

Yesterday was the natal anniversary of renowned Spanish (and Catalan) artist Joan Miró, born April 20, 1893 in Barcelona, and Google (in what I would consider a gracious tribute) modified its logo into an homage to Miró.

Google had, in the past, similiarly saluted Salvador Dali, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and such occasions as Valentine’s Day.

Google’s gesture might possibly have some very modest economic impact, enhancing the value of that artist’s work through such a widely-viewed public acknowledgement of his fame and artistic stature, but it obviously did not make Google one plug nickel. Rather than accepting this one-day tribute, however, in the spirit in which it was offered, some grasping Miró heir, who had stumbled upon the Miró-ified logo, notified the Artists Rights Society, a group representing some 40,000 artists (and their estates). The pettyfoggers and beancounters at the ARS leapt into action, demanding that Google remove the logo, which incorporated some elements from the artist’s (copyrighted) images:

It’s a distortion of the original works and in that respect it violates the moral rights of the artist,” said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society. “There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miró, and they are putting it up without having the rights.”

So, if an Internet company, like Google, wishes to pay homage (for one day) to an historic figure in the world of Art, it is not enough that Google donates its time, creative work, and publishing space, it should also donate the time of its executives and attorneys to enter into correspondence, negotiations, the drafting of legal agreements, and possibly pay a fee for the privilege of saying: “Happy Birthday, Joan Miró?”

Preposterous. This kind of dog-in-the-manger punctilio over non-economic use of cultural references is crass, absurd, and culturally impoverishing.

John Paczkowski is a brilliant reporter on Technology, but I think he is completely wrong on this one.

Your connection speed tested for downloading and uploading. Useful to know and amusing.

link

The Washington Post recently announced that it will be terminating 80 of 870 newsroom positions. It’s too much to hope, I’m sure, that Dana Priest (mouthpiece for the Pouting Spooks) will be among those departing.

WaPo Ombudsfem Deborah Howell looks at the Post’s declining readership (and profits), and tries a little whistling in the dark.

In the future, newspapers probably will be smaller, more expensive and more tailored to readers’ needs. Lavine says newspapers will be fine “if they discover more interesting stories and then tell them in profoundly more interesting ways and then drive all of this by understanding and connecting with their audience — and then use the Net and wireless to expand their ability to provide all of that where, when and how the readers want it.”

There’s one big intangible in all this: a paper’s connection with its readers. Readers who feel respected and who love their newspaper don’t depart easily. If Post journalists write every story, take every photo, compose every headline and design every page with readers in mind, and the newspaper is printed well and delivered on time, The Post will be fine.

It might also help if they covered US wars from a pro-US perspective. Failing to carry political partisanship to the point of jeopardizing national security might cause more readers to “feel respected.” And a less anti-market, less anti-American editorial perspective, one resembling the point of view of normal Americans, rather than that of some French socialist professor of deconstuction might actually make the Post somewhat more widely loved.

Mike Reed has a web-site devoted to a gallery of the types of belligerents infesting Internet discussion forums. I recognize myself in more than one of his specimens, and my regular correspondents in many others.