media

Jeff Jarvis points to an LA times piece on the latest antics of the ‘F*CCed’: “The FCC posted the complaints on its website. One person reported hearing an obscenity; one objected to the male anatomy on a representation of Greek sculpture; another thought a woman’s breast had been revealed; and yet another claimed to have seen a couple making love.” PDF of Olympic complaints from FCC website – much more entertaining than the Olympics themseves. The classical architecture of Capitol Hill may be similarly peni ridden and has anyone ever been to a sports event where there wasn’t swearing? Should all Christian religious programming should be censored – for containing an image of a naked man being tortured to death? If the FCC is seriously going to waste time and money considering complaints from people who have clearly lost their marbles, then perhaps we should all start complaining about everything…

Business Week on the New York Times: “A majority of the paper’s readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering.” That’s a problem indeed, but nothing compared with local newspapers’ loss of classifieds to Craigslist and the like. I can’t help but feel that there may be an opportunity for newspapers in premium, Zagat-like online directory businesses. Joi Ito’s Web: The Future of the New York Times

Instead of meeting halfway with consumers, the music and movie industries seem to have shifted their attention to hardware and software media players in a war of attrition. As a result consumers are being ripped off. A Byzantine maze of restrictions, poorly thought out and being debugged on-the-fly by end user guinea pigs stops people from viewing or listening to things they have legitimately bought. (I can’t watch UK DVDs in the US for example which really pisses me off). This is clearly going to get worse. Is there already a specific consumer rights group to tackle this? If not, someone like Cory Doctorow would be great as a DRM Czar. Below, Jenny, AKA The Shifted Librarian, wrestles with a Kafkaesque DRM nightmare: “I spent about an hour trying to play back a disc I legitimately bought and went as far as installing and updating a 3rd party application to…

Arguably the first music video ever, and possibly the first Powerpoint presentation, in “Don’t Look Back,” Bob Dylan holds up cue cards with words from the song Subterranean Homesick Blues on them and flips them, while staring at the camera, as the song plays: ‘Johnny’s in the basement Mixin’ up the medicine…’ Slideshow presentations went downhill from then on: Times Roman font, meaningless bullet points, a blue blend background, droning presenters wearing company polo shirts and pleated khaki pants. Powerpoint is an art crime. Because of this, I rarely pay much attention to conference presentations. However, one of the best things I saw at at Web 2.0 was how Larry Lessig has perfected his trademark slideshow. Like in Subterranean Homesick Blues, the slides flow along nicely with the lyrics. A lawyer defending the right for people to create digital collages produces a presentation that is an art form in itself,…

Gawker launches 3 new blogs: Screenhead a funny-stuff compilation. Jalopnik a cool-cars blog. Kotaku a video games blog. My car is crapped out and I have to avoid video games, because I will play them till my eyes bleed, but I’ll be a regular reader of Screenhead.

Niall McKay: “the philosophy and theology in the first movie that prompted books like The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real and Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix are replaced by a series of platitudes such as “believe,” it’s just about “choices” and “that’s karma,” baby.” From Aristotle to Russell philosophers have always been good at asking questions but bad at explanations or conclusions. No surprise then that the conclusion of the Matrix trilogy wasn’t exactly profound. The audience for the Matrix at the IMAX theatre in downtown San Francisco was more entertaining than the film. 1:30pm on the opening day and every seat taken by under employed engineers. The guy next to me was wearing a combat kilt and started talking about mac clusters and OS X. Apple seem to have taken their ubiquitous movie product placement to a new…

“We named the company Netflix and not “DVD By Mail” for a reason, which is we plan to lead the downloading market and over time we will offer both DVDs by mail and downloading.” At this point the music and film industry diverge. Because watching a film is a significant investment of time, the issue of ‘all you can eat ‘ downloads is not such a problem if people rip DVDs. As a result the DVD sales market is less than the rental market. You pay to see movies or they can be supported by commercials both within the movie (product placement) or as interruptions during it. With music it is the other way around – you can listen to music for free (without commercial interruption during the song) but the sales of CD’s are a big market. So in this way it is hard to imagine the RIAA putting…

Fox’s Simpsons show ran a joke banner at the bottom of the screen: The cartoon ticker read: “Pointless news crawls up 37 per cent … Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com … Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer … Dow down 5000 points … Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay … JFK posthumously joins Republican Party … Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple …” But Fox news didn’t get the joke and therefore Fox threatened to sue itself. Doh! Murdoch’s Fox News in a spin over ‘The Simpsons’ lawsuit

My Diana conspiracy theory is that Dodi Fayed never existed because his father is too preposterous to be real. Even if he were, Siegfried and Roy’s stylists already have all their work cut out to have time to cultivate such an entity. Today, the UK tabloids are all a flutter with the publication of a note written by Princess Diana that predicts someone would try and bump her off by tampering with the brakes on her car. In this note, she names the person but the press are refusing to reveal who it is. Only a matter of time before someone blogs it – but until then, Conspiracy Planet have a large picture of Prince Phillip under the headline” Princess Diana Names Her Killer“. Diana conspiracies are particularly entertaining due to the aforementioned weirdness of her partner, Dodi Fayed’s father, Al Fayed, who is often to be found fueling them….