unmediated

Washington Post sells access, $25,000+ - Mike Allen - POLITICO.com

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:42:11 -0400

Washington Post sells access, $25,000+ - Mike Allen - POLITICO.com:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

And it’s a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24441.html

3G Speed And Reliability Results By City Percentage of 1-minute...

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:26:39 -0400

3G Speed And Reliability Results By City

Percentage of 1-minute performance tests in which service was available, uninterrupted, and faster than dial-up speed:

Verizon in NYC: 100%

Sprint in NYC: 90%

AT&T in NYC: 65%

It doesn’t just *seem* like AT&T only works half the time.

via ericmortensen

Pirate Bay sells for $7.8M; going legal

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:22:00 -0400

Pirate Bay sells for $7.8M; going legal:

noneck:

is this the most expensive digital art project evva?jamiew:

Whoa.

The Simpsons and CSI are getting higher ad rates online than they are on TV

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 01:53:47 -0400

The Simpsons and CSI are getting higher ad rates online than they are on TV:

spytap:

This is an amazing development, but not the turning point for original online content that we need.

How to verify a tweet | Twitter Journalism

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:15:11 -0400

How to verify a tweet | Twitter Journalism:

Twitter is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you have 100 followers or 10,000, you can break news. That’s because all tweets are recorded and indexed at search.twitter.com. If someone types the right keyword(s), they can find your tweet.

Breaking Tweets prides itself on giving many different types of Twitterers credit for breaking news, whether it be someone in Honduras with a dozen followers recording the first “earthquake” tweet or a news organization providing the first details of a major story.

But how do you know a tweet’s legitimate?

Here’s some methods I use at Breaking Tweets that you can try too…

WSJ publisher calls Google ‘digital vampire’ - Crain's New York Business

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:53:29 -0400

WSJ publisher calls Google ‘digital vampire’ - Crain's New York Business:

caro:

randallb:

If Google is such a vampire, why don’t they just edit robots.txt and deny it access? It’s not hard, people.

robots.txt is the new garlic

if:book: Trying to think a bit outside the box or at least change my conception of the box

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:40:50 -0400

if:book: Trying to think a bit outside the box or at least change my conception of the box:

There’s endless talk these days about ebook readers, Kindle and all its e-ink cousins, and future tablets from Apple and other phone makers. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that these devices are all designed to emulate the experience of reading printed material, but this is a starting point not the end point. The forms are going to evolve in ways we can’t imagine and they may not be best served by 2-D paper emulators.

Reading this description of new functionality in Microsoft’s XBox, I started wondering whether as game box evolves into an all-purpose “entertainment hub” which is thoroughly integrated into major social networks, whether it might extend it’s reach to host new forms of (social) reading. if a “book is a place” perhaps one strand of the near future will be to explore that space with a joystick. I hadn’t thought about it before, but perhaps the interview of me in This Spartan Life is a thought experiment in this direction. It would be interesting to re-imagine The Golden Notebook project which proved the viability of an asynchronous reading group as taking place inside of a virtual space where sometimes you would really be “with” other readers and sometimes on your own.

The article that kicked off this little reverie is from this morning’s MIT Technology Review is about a new camera/controller for Microsoft’s X-Box. The sentences that caught my attention:

Microsoft also debuted 10 exclusive new games and the ability to access social networking sites Facebook and Twitter as well as streaming music service Last.fm on the Xbox Live service. The popular social networking sites Facebook and Twitter will be fully integrated into Xbox Live beginning this fall. There were several announcements about the Xbox 360’s video capabilities including increased functionality with the online Netflix service, 1080p high-definition video downloads, live TV in the United Kingdom and the ability to watch movies online with friends.

Half of All Friends Replaced Every 7 Years | LiveScience

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:51:49 -0400

Half of All Friends Replaced Every 7 Years | LiveScience:

You may have more Facebook friends as the years go by, but when it comes to your close friends, you lose about half and replace them with new ones after about seven years, new social research suggests.

As a result, the size of your social network stays about the same.

People might like to think they have control over whom they choose as friends, but social networks could also be influenced by the context in which we meet one another. Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst of Utrecht University in the Netherlands was interested in finding out exactly how much our networks are shaped by social context or by personal preference.

He conducted a survey of 1,007 people ages 18 to 65, and then contacted the participants seven years later. From the original group, 604 people were re-interviewed. The survey contained questions such as: Who do you talk with, regarding personal issues? Who helps you with DIY in your home? Who do you pop by to see? Where did you get to know that person? And where do you meet that person now?

The results showed that personal network sizes remained stable, but that many members of the network were new. About 30 percent of discussion partners and practical helpers had the same position in a typical subject’s network seven years later. And only 48 percent were still part of the network. This finding goes against previous research which had showed that social network sizes are shrinking.

The Proxy Fight for Iranian Democracy - Renesys Blog “As...

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:18:00 -0400

The Proxy Fight for Iranian Democracy - Renesys Blog

“As an experiment, we geolocated a list of about 2,000 web proxies (unique IP addresses and port numbers) that were shared on Twitter and other web sites over the course of the last week, to see if we could discern patterns in the places that are hosting them. Most of these are no longer reachable from inside Iran, of course, precisely because they were made public. The following map shows the distribution of those proxies worldwide.”

Hollywood hits the stop button on high-profile Web video efforts - Los Angeles Times

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:18:00 -0400

Hollywood hits the stop button on high-profile Web video efforts - Los Angeles Times:

The calculus was elementary: If amateur Web stars like “Fred,” the high-pitched persona of Nebraska teenager Lucas Cruikshank, can create the most popular channel on YouTube, imagine what Hollywood could do with its stars, budgets and marketing muscle.

Conceived with great fanfare, big media’s attempt over the last two years to capitalize on the Internet video phenomenon embodied by YouTube and “Saturday Night Live” digital shorts has fallen victim to recession-triggered cuts and inflated expectations about the advertising revenue they would command.

Unlike other media, where larger numbers of viewers lead to higher advertising revenue, high-volume trafficon the Web hasn’t necessarily translated into big money. Advertisers in short-form Internet video pay about $10 to reach every 1,000 viewers, so even a video that gets watched more than 1 million times — a big hit by Web standards — might not generate more than $10,000. Three- to five-minute-long “Webisodes” cost $5,000 to $25,000 to produce.

“It’s very similar to what happened in ‘99 and 2000, where everyone saw gold in the hills,” said Mika Salmi, the former head of digital media for MTV Networks and now a technology venture capitalist, in reference to the first dot-com boom. “The reality is that it’s much harder to make money than everyone thought.”

"One or two generations from now, the impossibility of scrubbing every private utterance for the..."

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:49:42 -0400

“One or two generations from now, the impossibility of scrubbing every private utterance for the demands of permanent public presentation will lead to a society much more accepting of occasional flubs, faults, and flaws. Behold, the triumph of context.”

- I like the disclaimer heather-rivers appended: ”This is what I’ve been banking on all this time with my incurable oversharing.” (via anil)

Layar, worlds first mobile Augmented Reality browser Layar is...

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:48:20 -0400

Layar, worlds first mobile Augmented Reality browser

Layar is an app that provides context-relevant data through the use of the Compass, camera and GPS embedded within the phone. (If that doesn’t make sense, watch the video and see the future.)

(via rocketboom)

State Department to Twitter: Keep Iranian tweets coming

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:11:00 -0400

State Department to Twitter: Keep Iranian tweets coming:

soupsoup:

noraleah:

… the State Department is advising social networking sites to make sure their networks stay up and running for Iranians to use them and helping them stay ahead of anyone who would try to shut them down.
For example, senior officials say the State Department asked Twitter to refrain for going down for periodic scheduled maintenance at this critical time to ensure the site continues to operate. Bureau’s and offices across the State Department, they say, are paying very close attention to Twitter and other sites to get information on the situation in Iran.

The future of journalism on the Web :: Rebecca Blood

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:41:28 -0400

The future of journalism on the Web :: Rebecca Blood: If you’re interested in the future of news and newspapers, read Craig Stolz’s article Washington Post’s Masterful Failure of Online Journalism. It gives no prescription for creating revenue streams online — it’s simply one of the smartest pieces I’ve seen about journalism on the Web. The key question is this: what does the Web do best, and how can I exploit that to create compelling stories? (thanks, jjg!)

"When will this happen? Over the next 5-10 years. And it will leave today’s TV industry looking like..."

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:00:22 -0400

“When will this happen? Over the next 5-10 years. And it will leave today’s TV industry looking like today’s newspaper industry.”

- Sorry, There’s No Way To Save The TV Business (via mikehudack)

lonelygirl15 Studio EQAL Gives Up On Original Content

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:46:20 -0400

lonelygirl15 Studio EQAL Gives Up On Original Content:

mikehudack:

johnfitzpatrick:

ericmortensen:

“Co-founder and COO Greg Goodfried told NewTeeVee that advertisers wanted to sponsor properties that already had large audiences—not new series that weren’t guaranteed to succeed.”

NPR's API Rights Management

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:44:17 -0400

NPR's API Rights Management: (via joshkinberg)

"Google stole the delivery trucks and Amazon stole the newsstand."

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:26:12 -0400

“Google stole the delivery trucks and Amazon stole the newsstand.”

- Paul Bradshaw, How the web changed the economics of news — in all media. (via soupsoup)

"I’m a big fan of Conan. His work with both The Simpsons and with his own show is outstanding. But..."

Sun, 24 May 2009 01:45:26 -0400

“I’m a big fan of Conan. His work with both The Simpsons and with his own show is outstanding. But I think it’s a little silly that we’re all pretending that the Tonight Show, NBC and TV mean what they used to mean. It’s certainly notable that the changing of the guard at the Tonight Show, like the shift at the White House, represents the end of the baby boomer era, but there’s also a third sign of the times…Time slots don’t matter anymore. Conan’s audience has DVRs. They have Bit Torrent and Hulu. Conan’s move to a new time slot is not just irrelevant, it’s unnoticeable.”

- Eric Mortensen
(via soupsoup)

"If you can’t think of a few good questions, you and your producer are in the wrong business. It’s..."

Sat, 23 May 2009 10:46:51 -0400

“If you can’t think of a few good questions, you and your producer are in the wrong business. It’s not about getting fresh, out-of-the-bubble perspectives, as they would argue: most questions sent in are obvious or inane. It’s really about flattering the followers, populist pandering.”

- Garry Trudeau on journalists asking Twitter followers for questions before interviews (via nickdouglas)