Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni has a blog and he uses it to slum in a review of Hooters.
I walked in and noticed two kinds of outfits. Some servers wore tight white T-shirts and tighter white shorts. Others wore tight white T-shirts and what looked like orange panties.
A group of four servers stood inside the door.
“Can I ask a stupid question?†I said.
One of them responded, “There are no stupid questions at Hooters.â€
So I inquired about the different uniforms.
A woman in white shorts pointed to herself and said what sounded like, “Dough hoe.†Then she pointed to a woman in orange and said, “Waitress.†She repeated the gestures and words. “Dough hoe.†(Herself.) “Waitress.†(One of her companions.)
Come again?
“I’m a door whore,†she said, decoding the abbreviation she had used. “A hostess. She’s a waitress.†Ah! Do’ who’!
Telegraph staff blogger Anton La Guardia reports on the pathetic concern of the Danish Union of Journalists in the matter of those cartoons:
One would assume that Danish journalists would be eagerly seeking international support for cartoonists facing death threats because of their drawings of the Prophet Mohammed, or perhaps pledging solidarity with Muslim journalists in trouble with their authorities for reproducing them.
But no, the Danish union’s central worry, as set out in a statement translated into English on its website, concentrates on the question of money and the infringement of the cartoonists’ copyright.
Magnanimously, the union declares that it has “decided not to take legal action against the many media which have reproduced the cartoons without permission”.
They’re requiring payment of 250 euros per cartoon, not to go to the cartoonists but to a prize for cartoonists facing social issues. Like rioting and killing over cartoons?
: La Guardia also reports on what is happening to journalists in the Muslim world who have dared run the cartoons:
One of the first was Jihad al-Momani, who published three of the caricatures with a commentary which said: “World’s Muslims, be logical. Which one do you think damages Islam more? These cartoons or the scene of a suicide bomber who blows himself up outside a wedding ceremony in Amman, or the kidnappers that slaughters their victims before the cameras?”
Similar news has come out in snippets, for instance in this story from al-Jazeera. At the last count at least nine journalists in Muslim countries - Algeria, Jordan, Yemen and Malaysia - have felt the heavy hand of officialdom.
Call me a populist and a utopian and I’ll say thanks.
There has been much linking and buzzing about Andrew Keen’s militantly snobbish piece in The Weekly Standard in which he bemoans the internet and web 2.0 as a geeky rendition of communism. He reveals a sort of neoneoconservatism that wraps back around to the days before liberals became cultural snots and conservatives tried to act populist and class-blind, the days when conservatives where elistist power hoarders in small, closed societies of privilege.
This is just the sort of ridiculous piece that gets links and I don’t know why I’m falling into the trap except that it’s just so laughably insulting to the entire human race that it makes me feel as if I am Mr. Matter meeting Mr. Antimatter here.
My view of cultural weltanschauung was transformed in the mid-80s, when the remote control took over half of American couches and the cable box and VCR gave us choice — and, lo and behold, when given the chance to watch good shows, we did. It turns out that we do, indeed, have taste and TV, of all things, proved it. I came to see that if you are not a populist, then you cannot believe in democracy or free markets or education or reform religion or education: Why bother with the people if the people are fools? Those technologies gave us control over the consumption of media and the internet gives us the means to create media and that’s what Keen dreads but I celebrate.
In web 2.0, Keen sees the means of flattening culture. I see the means of the people speaking. That’s not communism. That’s democracy. That’s freedom.
Rather than Paris, Moscow, or Berkeley, the grand utopian movement of our contemporary age is headquartered in Silicon Valley, whose great seduction is actually a fusion of two historical movements: the counter-cultural utopianism of the ’60s and the techno-economic utopianism of the ’90s. Here in Silicon Valley, this seduction has announced itself to the world as the “Web 2.0″ movement…. This Web 2.0 dream is Socrates’s nightmare: technology that arms every citizen with the means to be an opinionated artist or writer.
The means to speak.
So what, exactly, is the Web 2.0 movement? As an ideology, it is based upon a series of ethical assumptions about media, culture, and technology. It worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone — even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us — can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 “empowers” our creativity, it “democratizes” media, it “levels the playing field” between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is “elitist” traditional media.
Amen. But, again, do not assume that everyone who uses these tools wants to be published in The Weekly Standard. What you see is not a mass of minimedia. What you hear is the people, talking. And if you refuse to listen, you will make a rotten capitalist, journalist, politician, statesman, cleric, teacher, or neighbor. Keen hears the voice of Marx in Kevin Kelly fretting about “Mozart before the technology of the piano… Hitchcock before the technology of film. We have a moral obligation to develop technology.” Keen says:
But where Kelly sees a moral obligation to develop technology, we should actually have — if we really care about Mozart, Van Gogh and Hitchcock — a moral obligation to question the development of technology.
The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts.
No, it is inherently dangerous for the business of those who used to control the means of creation and distribution. And that is Keen’s real fear:
Traditional “elitist” media is being destroyed by digital technologies. Newspapers are in freefall. Network television, the modern equivalent of the dinosaur, is being shaken by TiVo’s overnight annihilation of the 30-second commercial. The iPod is undermining the multibillion dollar music industry. Meanwhile, digital piracy, enabled by Silicon Valley hardware and justified by Silicon Valley intellectual property communists such as Larry Lessig, is draining revenue from established artists, movie studios, newspapers, record labels, and song writers.
Is this a bad thing? The purpose of our media and culture industries — beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people — is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent. Our traditional mainstream media has done this with great success over the last century.
Traditional, controlled, centralized, elitist media that gave us The Beverly Hillbillies and Oliver Stone movies and Oprah and monopoly newspapers and Mary Higgins Clark books on the successful end… and unread literature on the unsuccessful end.
In the Web 2.0 world, however, the nightmare is not the scarcity, but the over-abundance of authors. Since everyone will use digital media to express themselves, the only decisive act will be to not mark the paper. Not writing as rebellion sounds bizarre — like a piece of fiction authored by Franz Kafka. But one of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 future may well be that everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience.
Aha. And there is Keen’s other essential fear: that is voice will not rise above that of the masses. But he does not have the courage not to speak. He blogs and podcasts. Heh.
: It’s no surprise that fellow digital snot Nicholas Carr agrees with Keen but Matthew Ingram does not.
: And a sort of moral opposite to Keen’s argument is the wail we hear from some quarters that now the people, empowered, are turning into gatekeepers, to which Doc applies proper perspective.
Treonauts reports that BMW’s latest clever marketing move — after making movies — is releasing free audiobooks. It’s a very good and creative ad idea. However, since I consider BMW drivers probably the most obnoxious on the road, I hope the stories aren’t too distracting.
Blogs have already become prisoners of their format. Time to light some dynamite.
The problem isn’t the tools, it’s the templates. Blogging tools are merely content management systems without the million-dollar consultants and bills; that’s what I’m telling newspaper folks who complain that it’s hard to put content online. Templates let you format or unformat your stuff however you like and also include stuff of any medium. I’d love to see more clever examples of templates.
Probably the best or at least cleverest use of blogging templates I’ve seen in the San Francisco State student paper, the Xpress, which uses categories or separate Movable Type blog feeds (I’m not sure which) to maintain separate sections on its front page. It also includes photo players and other multimedia.
Do you have other examples of interesting, different, creative, clever blog templates that use the form to break the form?
But the basic format of a blog has remained unchanged.
For instance, why can’t we have a blog template with the ability to have multiple tabbed pages? Then Om could have a page 1,2 and 3.
I mean if newspapers and magazines can have multiple pages, why can’t blogs?
And then, how about offering different ways to present content within those pages than the standard headline, sub-headline, post approach? Why can’t we have headline-less short bits of text if we wanted or a streaming ticker tape for content we want to high-light? What if we wanted to feature specific posts that readers particularly liked on a separate page, thus giving those pieces an extended “Shelf-life”?
One of the reasons services like MySpace have taken off is that they gave users a ton of flexibility in the ways that each user could customize the presentation of their content.
Anybody want to design Michael his template? As I see it, different categories could feed different pages and different design behaviors, no?
See also Magnoto, which I blogged about a few days ago; it turns media elements into chunks that can be moved anywhere on a page.
This is all fine for me to say but I wouldn’t be able to design or adjust a template to save my soul. That’s why I have a son.
Here’s a good nuts-and-bolts interview with my next boss, Steve Shepard, about the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
But ask Mr. Shepard why he is here, and the first answer out of his mouth is something else. “There needs to be a publicly funded graduate school of journalism in this part of the world,” says Mr. Shepard, who took up his CUNY post last April. “There’s not one in the entire Northeast, which means if you don’t have $35,000, you’re out of luck. And that just doesn’t seem right.”
And then he segues into his diversity talk, a frequent theme: “People complain all the time that the profession isn’t diverse enough. And I don’t mean diversity just in the sense of racial and ethnic diversity, but I mean in class terms, too. Working-class people, immigrants, people who have served in the military. The press in this country is not very representative.”
Tonight’s panel on Bill Maher’s return to HBO is the weakest ever: Helen Thomas in the center square?? Eddie Griffin blathers. And there’s Daniel Senor, official spokesman in Iraq. What, Paris Hilton was busy?
I find it offensive, even anti-Semitic, when people equate whatever they don’t like with Nazism, trivializing its horrid crimes, and we see one prime example of this in today’s Times, in Stephen Holden’s over-the-top review of ‘Sophie School: The Final Days.’
How would you behave during the kind of relentless interrogations that Sophie endures? If sentenced to death for your activities, would you still consider your resistance to have been worth it? In a climate of national debate in the United States about the overriding of certain civil liberties to fight terrorism, the movie looks back on a worst possible scenario in which such liberties were taken away. It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?
Thus Holden is equating with Nazism and fascism and even the Holocaust with — what? — secret data analysis of international phone calls? Taking off our shoes in airports? Mr. Holden, go down to the Holocaust Museum in Washington and stare at the pile of shoes in Washington and then come back and write such tripe as this. Get your perspective, man. And they say that bloggers go over the top and journalists don’t? Bullshit.
How many shampoo brands can you name spontaneously? The average is about five for shampoo category. Within the context of merchandising, that figure is quite dependent on product category structure and distribution rate (the number of brands) in the shelf space. It could be as low as two when the category is inactive and calm such as kitchen detergent and as high as five when the category is active and noisy such as shampoo or skincare….
Now, ask yourself: How many blogs can you name spontaneously? Or, how many do you subscribe and consume? What is your blog repertoire? If it is greater than, say, ten, then we could say this category is quite different from the rest of products or services especially those we consumer in our daily life.
He bets that the average is 30 — more than other media brands you could probably name. What does that mean? Not sure. Maybe it means we’re just people, not brands.
: Separately, I was reading a piece in Ad Age with outgoing Time Warner exec Don Logan, who was asked what was different about the publishing business today and replied:
Too many magazines. Everybody needs to prune their portfolio a little bit. Go out to a newsstand and there’s so many out there jammed in that it’s hard to find them. And most of the magazines are not very good… they just throw things together thinking they can generate some advertising.
In that view — media 1.0 — outlets and brands are a zero sum game of limited shelf space. In the new view — the distributed-to-the-edge internet — there is no scarcity of brand space. Now some will argue that there is, instead, a scarcity of attention but I don’t disagree: We all have the same attention we always had, we now get to chose to spend it more wisely, that’s all.
Yes, Dell’s profit rose in a snapshot but the clouds are gray:
…However, the double-digit growth rate does not portend a return to high growth for the company, the world’s largest seller of PC’s. … The conservative forecast for revenue growth dimmed analysts’ enthusiasm. “It was really a mixed bag,” said William Shope, an analyst with J. P. Morgan. “Impressive revenue growth came with a degradation of margins.” Dell’s gross profit margin was 17.8 percent, the lowest since 2002, said Mr. Shope. “The slowing growth and deteriorating margins could mean that 2006 will be a more challenging year than 2005 was,” said Brent Bracelin, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Ore.
You can grow too big. And being the biggest isn’t the only way to make money. Sometimes, being the best still is.
I haven’t watched the Olympics or heard the slightest buzz about them this year. And I’m certainly not alone, as American Idol and even Grey’s Anatomy beat the games. The Times talks about NBC’s weakness and others’ counterprogramming but I think it’s a bigger story than that, about:
* The end of the Big Event — we’re no longer captive to the coverage or the hype because we exercise ever-increasing choice. This doesn’t mean there will be no Big Events (see: SuperBowls) but there will be fewer.
* The ubiquity of instant information — media no longer controls the timing of the story and the basic news is a commodity available anywhere immediately.
* The primacy of the niche — the Olympics are, in a sense, the ultimate niche event as some watch curling and some watch ice-dancing and nobody wants to be forced to watch it all and that is the natural state of media.
* The disillusionment with Olympic hype — we don’t buy the narrative of nobility as scandals and greed — reality, in other words — take over.
The value of the Big Event will continue to decline as the value of big declines.
: LATER: Quickly, good comments are coming in on fatigue with both NBC and the Olympics.
Drat. Carl Icahn gives up his effort to break up Time Warner. I talked with some big-business guys who’ve worked atop and with big-media companies after Icahn’s report on TWX came out and they agreed it was “80 percent right.” But now the company will blob along with a few more minor changes, a few baby steps in a world that needs giant steps. Damn. My FU money keeps telling me to FU.
