Category: Media

The backlash against Friendster, Orkut, and other “social networking” apps continues, and I have to say I’m in total agreement with the general “Where’s the beef?” day-after assessment. Despite initial enthusiasm about Orkut, I’ve since lost all interest, and never visit the site without provocation. ZeFrank has a hilarious and searing video indictment of social networking sites. Especially telling: Almost all of my real friends who received inviations from me to join Orkut simply ignored them.

But the problem isn’t with social networking per se’ — the problem is implementation. Friendster, Orkut, etc. make a big deal about who you know. Who cares? No wonder people get burned out on these services – they emphasize the wrong thing. What matters is (surprise!) content.

And guess which social networking experiment got that message from the beginning? LiveJournal. Sure LJ lets you hook up with rings of friends, but those friends are (generally) accumulated as a result of real conversations. Rather than starting with a databased list of favorite TV shows and cat names, people think and speak, others think and speak back, and relationships are forged as a result. Elemental. It’s possible to create relationships that way on Orkut too, but on Orkut, conversation is secondary to the process of artificially jacking up your tally of so-called friends to make yourself appear popular.

I doubt I’ll pull out of Orkut, but I don’t see myself contributing to it either. To me it’s become a non-starter.

No Movable Type 3.0 yet, but TypeKey has been announced – a centralized login service for all MT and TypePad weblogs (and others?). Free to all, anonymity possible if desired. Most of the advantages seem academic, but this will be a huge win in the fight against comment spam.

Big event being sponsored by the J-School this week: Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, Christiane Amanpour of CNN, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV join 50 other journalists and foreign policy experts conducting three days of panels, lectures and discussions on the topic of journalism’s coverage of and bearing on the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

For a change, the J-School is not webcasting this one — campus central command is (though they’re not doing live, which we usually do). Parts of the conference will also show up on C-SPAN. Much of the conference will also be covered in near-real-time by Jim van Nostrand at the Western Knight Center seminar weblog.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but children’s programming has become even more cosmic/surreal than the Teletubbies.

The Boohbahs, five magical atoms of power, light and fun travel in their Boohball around the world, from child to child. Fifteen countries are visited throughout the changing title sequence.

In the intro, five balls of light float, squirt, and poot through intensely psychedelic swirls of gelatinous color and sparkles until the Boobahs are magically born into their interstellar travel pods. I have to conclude that the Boobahs are starseed, sent to this galaxy from another to give one-year-olds positronic vibrations.

Needless to say, Miles is transfixed by the Boobahs, even more than he ever was by Teletubbies. Kind of blows my mind that some people are down on Boobah – ummm, lady? The show (as far as I can tell) is for pre-lingual kids, not for eight-year-olds to learn geometry.

Richard Brenneman of the Berkeley Daily Planet surprised me at work recently with a phone call, wanted to discuss blogging for a piece he was working on. We had a meandering conversation for twenty minutes or so. Talked about blogging as a general phenomenon, about the kinds of sites the J-School is driving out of Movable Type, and about Berkeley blogs in particular. Talked about birdhouse a bit. When the article ran, (mirrored at City of Berkeley) I was amazed to see that he had devoted several column inches (are there such things as column inches on the web? what if you resize the browser window?) to birdhouse.

Hacker runs one the city’s most sophisticated personal blogs …

Whoa! Generous complement, but I’d hardly describe this random, free-for-all braindump style as “sophisticated.” It was weird to see some of the ways that bits of what I thought were casual conversation became factoids in the piece, like my comment on LiveJournal’s largely teen audience still counting as blogging.

My strongest quibble was with definition: I had said that I agree with Rebecca Blood in saying that the only core defining characteristic of the weblog is “reverse chron via automated publishing tools.” Brenneman re-quoted “reverse chron” as “chronological order,” which I felt was a reversal of meaning (he said in a later exchange that he felt that context made the meaning clear).

He did dig up a very nice cross-section of Berkeley Blogs, though one could of course point to lots of great East Bay blogs he missed (and to be accurate, birdhouse isn’t based in Berkeley, despite my workplace).

One of Miles’ toys (a rat puppet that ducks down into a conical hiding place via attached dowel). First image ever shot with the new phonecam. Posted to MT via mfop2. Great set of scripts, and really responsive, generous developer, but I’d rather not rely on an external service; would like to run the image receiving module on my own server. Word is that MT Pro will have moblogging ability, but we wait …. Images from the phonecam look pretty good on the phonescreen, not so hot on the computer until sized down. A small dose of gaussian blur helps to smooth out the artifacts.

MoveOn raised the $1.6 million it needed to get an anti-Bush spot aired during the Superbowl, only to be turned away at the gate. CBS has rejected the winning ad on the supposed grounds that they don’t do ideology, only product. Although exceptions are being made to air anti-drug and anti-smoking ads. This isn’t the first time money hasn’t been able to buy commercial airtime to express political opinions:

In 1997, anti-consumerist activist Kalle Lasn was rejected when he tried to buy a Thanksgiving Day commercial promoting “Buy Nothing Day,” his anti-shopping initiative. Last year, MTV refused to run an antiwar ad directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple. This year, CBS also turned down a Super Bowl spot that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals tried to buy for $2 million.

We so seldom see money not talk. But some forces are even stronger…