I’m more sick today than I have been since Thursday when this cold came on, I thought I was going to be better by now; just in a haze, reading some things, hard to concentrate, so I’m just going to quickly spew off the ones I don’t have to still chew on later.
I titled this “The Media Hype Machine” but that’s way too broad a stroke. It’s the 24 hour news channels and the idiot local stations. I tell my wife when she’s watching the news and starts to get a little panicky that armagedden is around the corner that the “evening news” is really the “evening BAD news” where they tell you about all the horrible things people did today. There’s 6 BILLION people on the Earth right now, every day a very, very small portion of them are going to do something that is bad or something very tragic is going to happen somewhere. It’s just a reality of having so many people. However, the vast majority of the people out there are not psychos, perverts, maniacs, killers and terrorists. This is why on some days, by pure bad luck, there’s nothing truly horrible to report, so these stations have no recourse but to invent shit. Like a disaster, “showdown”, crisis or incident.
Protest fears scrap US poetry forum
The White House has cancelled a poetry forum over fears it would be taken over by ant-war protests.
Damn artists always gittin people to think!
This led me to wonder: should RSS capabilities and browsing capabilities be merged into a single “uber-browser” application?
No shit! Just hang on, I want/am slowly working on the one app that does literally all of my IM in one, simply and intuitively (because we all gave up on Outlook years ago). Read RSS, email, post to blog, site, calendar, organize life and share it with the world all in one. (No emails saying “Yes we call it an iMac” please.)
More balanced reading in the OH MY GAWD dept.
Weblogs are one of the few things online still capable of generating both media buzz and bucks.
Who says the British aren’t optimistic people? Of course, according to the article, only Brits ARE making money at blogging (of course they all live over HERE), so there you go…(Note to self: actually just more validation of my working almost exclusively with US-residing Brits.)
AMATEUR HOUR: the “me” in media
Still have to read this one, but from the few second glance I took at it, looks superfab. i.e. Very first sentence:
Mass media in the last half of the twentieth century turned us all into entertainment consumers; taking away much of our natural, human inclination to creativity as singers, pianists and storytellers.
Awesome! Too bad I’m in too much of a sick haze to concentrate on it.
Today, the rapid proliferation of cheap professional-quality media-making tools, paired with the drastic decrease in the cost of content distribution is leading to a quiet, but very real revolution in the quantity and quality of ‘amateur’ content.
Yeah yeah. Integration Research in full effect dog.
(via the just-in-case-you-ever-think-I-blog-alot werblog)