BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

December 21, 2002

Rabid redux
: A Time/CNN poll says Hillary Clinton leads the Democratic pack for President.
Maybe just name recognition.
Or maybe people really do respect the Clinton dynasty.
And maybe they wish she had reformed f'ing health care.

LINK | Comments (2)

The Blook is in! The Blook is in!
: Just got my copy of Tony Pierce's Blook -- the book begat by his blog -- with a few other Merry Christmas goodies in the box (thank you, Tony).
I opened at random to one of my favorite posts from way back last spring, the tale of the nosey neighbor, a story on a page (as it turns out in print) that could turn into a novel or maybe a sitcom; it's dense like a fruitcake but one you'd actually like to eat.
I'm looking forward to reading more and more.
(By the way, Tony is terribly generous, giving me a thank-you on page 2 for inventing the title.)
Order your Blook now.

LINK | Comments (0)

FREE SEX (well, one out of two ain't bad)
: Glenn Reynolds quotes blogger Acidman, who finds the fit of begging after Andrew Sullivan's successful hat-passing, to be unseemly, turning bloggers into squeegee men and homeless pundits. Agree.
Glenn says he has a decent day job with a passable paycheck and so he won't beg or charge for his good services. Agree.
I love doing this (that must be why I keep doing it, even when I should be starting to write a book or something useful). I have a day job. I'm no good at sales or begging. So this, too stays free. I take the Glenn Reynolds free pledge.

LINK | Comments (0)

Oink
: I usually leave this turf to LittleGreenFootballs, but I still couldn't resist this excerpt from a report on Saudi education at Memri:

A textbook for 8th grade students explains why Jews and Christians were cursed by Allah and turned into apes and pigs.Quoting Surat Al-Maida, Verse 60, the lesson explains that Jews and Christians have sinned by accepting polytheism and therefore incurred Allah's wrath.To punish them, Allah has turned them into apes and pigs.

LINK | Comments (0)

The Two Towers: Part III
: David Galbraith, a real architect (and smart guy) says of the WTC designs:

The bad news: they are all either mediocre or unbuildable.
The good news: the architects themselves are not all mediocre and the eventual buildings will be nothing like the original competition entries.

LINK | Comments (0)

Harumph
: Rick Bruner calls me "the old man of new media."
Remember this: The beard is prematurely gray. Very prematurely. Damnit.
But I'll forgive him because he takes kindly to vlogs (scroll down till you see a prematurely gray beard on TV).

: OK, maybe I am the old man of new media for I remember Linotypes, the wonderful, filthy, kerchunketa-kerchunketa machines that used to set type back when type was type and rewritemen were rewritemen. I was there when we switched to cold type and then to computers (that's how I got into this whole technology thing in the first place).
Anyway, I loved the old machines. And now here is a site dedicated to Linotype memories. [via ein Blog]

: And here's more proof that I am the old man of new media. Damn.
I just recalled wowing a consultant type recently recalling that I was there the day WYSIWYG was invented. I was at a conference of publishing technotypes in California for Time Inc. way back when it was still Time Inc. and John Seybold (the patriarch of all the other Seybolds) stood up and noted a trend in publishing systems back then, an entirely new idea, the thought that you could change something on a screen and end up with exactly that on paper. He said he heard a lot of people talking about "what you see is what you get" and he abbreviated it then and there. You may not be impressed. But some are.

LINK | Comments (1)

Who's who
: I just noticed that Mickey Kaus has the best blogroll around. It's annotated. (Scroll to the bottom of the page.)

LINK | Comments (0)

True multimedia
: Visionary and nice guy James Lileks gets a DVD with his New Yorker and ponders the future of maximultimondomedia (nevermind the nice plug for me):

Here’s to the day when every issue of Entertainment Weekly comes with ten trailers for movies you want to see, and a dozen MP3s and two audiobooks and a comic strip and a game demo, and a contest to see who can find the face of EW progenitor Jeff Jarvis, which is hidden somewhere in the data.

They would hide the face, believe me.
In any case, Lilek's right: It's now not hard to imagine a magazine coming with a soundtrack and b-roll (and, of course, ads that sing and dance and pop up and over and under and through). You could also call that the Web. But as I'm learning in my new career as a bandwidth hog (see links below on Vlogs), it will still be cheaper to deliver lotsa bandwidth on discs, for a little while longer.
Imagine if AOL had actually sent out some Warner Bros. songs or movie trailers on all those CD-roms over the years; people might have actually welcomed them instead of ridiculed them.
But soon, the delivery won't matter -- you'll get content over your Internet connection or your TV (to your TiVo) or even in the mail with a disc. And devices won't matter, since your TV and computer and MP3 player/stereo will all be wifi'ed together to collect and play anything. What will matter is the content you want when you want it.
On the Internet, content was not king. In an anarchy, no one is king.
But in a world of bandwidth everywhere, content shall rise again.

LINK | Comments (0)

Location, location, location
: Next May, a blog conference in Vienna [via Klog] -- in English oder auf Deutsch.
Wien? Ich kann auf Deutsch blog. Blog mit Schlag!

LINK | Comments (1)

The Lifetime Achievement Award goes to... [hushed anticipation]... Mario!
: The game industry gets its own awards show.

LINK | Comments (0)

Flesh is good (so long as it's alive)
: PETA gives you its celebrity calendar and the electronic equivalent of pin-ups: desktop wallpaper.

LINK | Comments (0)

Modesty
: If anybody deserved a little web triumphalism post-Lott, it'd be Josh Marshall, who dogged the Lott story like a Southern sheriff's bloodhound. But you can't sniff a whiff of nya-nya on his site. Liberals are dignified.

LINK | Comments (0)