RojoBlog

Rojo: News Pollution; Hillary Baiting; Blog Attack!

Top Stories for the Week of May 5 - 9, 2008

Blogs have been dishing out postmortems all week on the crashed Microsoft-Yahoo deal. Now analysis has circled inward. Is there too much news about the same stuff pasted into blogs? Are we simply repeating ourselves? And: are we simply repeating ourselves? Scott Karp has a post at Publishing 2.0 titled "The Declining Value of Redundant News Content on the Web."  Karp also has a new post at Seeking Alpha titled "The Declining Value of Redundant News Content on the Web." Right. 

Karp writes that Google News "is currently tracking about 2,000 versions of [the Microsoft-Yahoo] story," many of them quite similar. In "Microhoo: A Study in Web Content Pollution" at IP Democracy, Cynthia Brumfield writes: "I couldn't agree more and I hesitate to even write this post because I don't want to add to the growing level of news noise." Broadstuff looks at which blogs get cited most on Techmeme and says: "there are simply too many A and B List blogs competing for attention with the same stuff to be sustainable, there has to be a shakeout."   

If you give a hoot, how do you not pollute?  Online Media Cultist recommends "content aggregators and smart people networks to help individuals filter out what is the most important." Mashable as usual is ready with the latest meta-search aggregation tools that may save the world, or destroy it, here and here.

Hillary in Black and White: Hillary Clinton is staying in the primary race and tells USA Today that she has more support than Barack Obama among "hard-working Americans, white Americans..." Well, there it is. Pam Spaulding at Pam's House Blend takes justifiable issue with implication that hard-working and white people are not part of Obama's base and says the remark "manages to top any dog-whistle race-baiting that her husband put out on the campaign trail." Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish writes "If a Republican said this about a black opponent, his career would be in jeopardy for racism."

Michael Crowley at The New Republic blog The Stump says the potential for racial prejudice among some voters is an uncomfortable topic but that "everyone in politics and media has been having this conversation for more than a year now."

Throwing Spitballs: Sports bloggers are still howling about a recent episode of HBO's "Costas Now" show. In a live panel about sports and media, Buzz Bissinger—author (Friday Night Lights) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist— came out throwing uppercuts at fellow panelist Will Leitch of Deadspin. Buzz opened with: "I think that blogs are dedicated to cruelty. They're dedicated to journalistic dishonesty." And it got worse from there. [Full video here. Warning: anti-blog crude language]. Leitch did his best to say blogs are just something different from newspapers and you don't need a journalism degree to have an opinion about the ballgame. But it got ugly.

Sports bloggers fired back. Top Shelf wrote: "Buzz Bissinger is an Angry, Closed-Minded Jackass." Juiced Sports Blog posted: "Buzz Bitchinger: Why He Didn't Major in Economics." Nice Guys Finish Third was just a bit kinder in suggesting "Buzz Bissinger is Gene Simmons." Bissinger cooled down and gave The Big Lead a more level-headed take on his thoughts, apologizing for his cussin'.

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Everyone Wins a Webby

Winners of the 12th Annual Webby Awards were announced yesterday, and if this cool-looking clicky-square gallery is accurate, there were 594 nominees and winners. And 594 press releases went out trumpeting the honors. Or, as Valleywag puts it: "another round of nominees who paid up to $475 to be considered for a Webby have been awarded their publicity prizes." According to Jack Schofield's less snarky tally on the British newspaper Guardian's tech blog, multiple award winners this year were NYTimes.com (8); The Onion (7); PostSecret (4); National Geographic (4); Apple.com (4); Hometown Baghdad (3); "You Sujck at Photoshop" (3), Flickr (3); FactCheck.org (3); BBC (3); TED.com (3); ESPN.com (3); and CondeNet (3). "Conspicuously absent from the list," notes Mashable: "Business centric old-schoolers like LinkedIn and Plaxo and Facebook predecessors Friendster and MySpace..."

Stephen Colbert was named Web Person of the Year, and Nerd Core Online celebrates: "Gone is the time when techie dorks and uber smart geeks were named the Webby Award’s best man." Among the blogs honored were the Financial Times' Alphaville, its name borrowed from the French new-wave Jean-Luc Godard movie (and from the financial term for a mutual fund's risk). This biz blog provides "instant market insight." PostSecret—which has been explained as "a community art project in which people write their secrets on postcards and mail in to be posted online"—was the Judged and People's Voice winner for personal blog. Huffington Post swept the political blog category, but nominee Why Tuesday? (the only non-mainstream-media blog nominated in politics) is worth a look.

The good news for everyone: now all your favorite sites can stop imploring you to vote for them.

MicroHoo Meltdown: The 90 Second Version

After 3 months of discussions, the possibility of a Microsoft-Yahoo mashup finally collapsed. Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer walked away from the acquisition, as some clairvoyant pundits had predicted (via Yahoo TechTicker) or advised (via Valleywag) earlier.

A New York Times report on the weekend break-up said Yahoo executives were high-fiving each other for defeating Microsoft’s takeover bid. But Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang immediately fired up the the blog-o-tron to deny such fiving. In his corporate blog Yodel Anecdotal, in a posting called "OK, so now what?" he writes: "No one is celebrating about the outcome of these past three months." All's well that end's well, he figures, and now "we’ll be better able to focus our energy on growing our industry leadership and maximizing value for stockholders." Isn't that what Yahoo was trying when they got into this mess? Search Engine Watch says "Yahoo has some innovative plans for improving search results but no plans for increasing market share."

Boomtown figures Yahoo execs will really be getting ripped today by employees whose stock options are now in a precarious position. By midday today Yoohoo shares were off about 15 percent by from Friday's close (not quite as disastrous a hit as the 40-point stock drop that Stark Industries suffered recently when Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) announced his company will no longer make weapons). 

"The only question is whether this is really the bottom" for the stock, says Tech Trader Daily. TechCrunch says: "If [Yahoo] shares don’t drop much further, that could mean Wall Street is still pricing in another takeover attempt from Microsoft or someone else, or perhaps a Google advertising deal."  A survey of analysts at Paid Content includes a forecast that deals with AOL and Google are still possible.  And In case you thought only Yahoo's future is up for discussion, Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch asks if Ballmer needs to start looking for a new job.

Rojo: The Web Turns 15; Hannah Montana Causes a Recession

Top Stories for the Week of April 28 -May 2, 2008

15 Glorious Years of HTTP: The Web was born 15 years ago this week, according to a special report at BBC News. So the Web is almost legally old enough to get a job. Finally! Bloggers (many of whom also are 15) immediately commenced a one-upsmanship to see who remembered the earliest details and who gave Tim Berners-Lee the whole Web idea in the first place. 

Ivan at the Snipperoo blog says he named his magazine World Wide Web (at right) in way back in 1993. Alan Patrick at Broadstuff fondly recalls early network software like Archie, Veronica and Gopher that the Web rendered irrelevant. John McCrea at The Real McCrea says he "led the effort to develop the first turnkey web server and the first WYSIWYG HTML editor, under the first 'web' brand anywhere, WebFORCE." Bill Thompson at The Billblog presents a scan of what he says is the actual original document that established the Web. The Magna Carta of Web 1.0!

Repression of the Recession: Many charts (see: here, here and here) bloomed this week as fanboys of economic data pondered whether America is in a recession. The Big Picture says, yes, ma'am, we are in a recession. Mashable says no way. At Econbrowser, you'll have to figure out for yourself what the heck is happening, but it doesn't sound good.

At least that's one societal problem you can't blame on the Grand Theft Auto series. Take-Two Interactive's GTA IV, just out, may be the best selling video game ever. Daniel Terdiman at Geek Gestalt points out that game-king EA was in the process of trying to take over Take-Two Interactive, GTA's publisher. Now, he writes: one has to wonder what the thinking is over at EA and whether it will have to modify its $2 billion bid for Take-Two.

There are the usual objections to the game's violence and sex. The game is set in Liberty City, a replicant of New York, and Gothamist rounds up complaints from real-life New York officials and crime victims who understandably aren't happy at all. But some undaunted people are trying to have fun with the game. At Ed Levine's New York Eats, Ed reviews the restaurants in Liberty City.

Speaking of Turning 15: The shock and awe continues over the Annie Leibowitz photos of teen singer/actress Miley Cyrus (aka Hannah Montana) in the new issue of Vanity Fair. The media called the shots topless, but backless is more honest. Gawker has a compilation of fake reactions to the photos. In a great essay at The Huffington Post, blogger/actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who has had her own topless moments, writes: "I woke up this morning concerned about the world food shortage and Korean defectors attempting self immolation in protest of Beijing and was astonished at the amount of attention a young woman named Miley Cyrus was getting..." At Comment is Free, Zoe Williams writes that the cheesy exploitation of young stars is sadly routine: "Never mind what a ludicrous system this is that chooses young women for their sex appeal and then expects them to act as role models for the chastity of the rest of the population." Hey, at least this is one set of photos of questionable appropriateness that you can't blame on the good old World Wide Web.

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Good News for People who like Bad News about News

The latest figures on U.S. newspaper circulation show things just getting grimmer for the pulpy old media in the age of Digg and Reddit. Newspaper circulation is down 3.6 percent across the nation, but that's just part of the story. This year could reach the lowest circ level since 1946, says Newsosaur which calculates that newspaper use generally is about half of what it used to be back when Humphrey Bogart was a superstar. As Venture Chronicles points out, newspaper’s aging print audience is literally dying off. The 90-year-old Madison (Wisc.) Capital Times recently killed its own print audience, shifting to online-only, and Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine says "every newspaper in America should be delighted this is happening and watching it closely." Meanwhile, at the Daily Nightly, TV news anchor Brian Williams blogs that he can't find much that's great to read in the Sunday New York Times.

Newspaper reporters still generate much of the, uh, actual news that ends up online. But papers' own web sites have not been popular with advertisers. As Advertising Age points out: NYTimes.com gets more unique visitors than any other paper's site, but print revenue still made up 90 percent of last year's advertising total. Henry Blodgett at Silicon Alley Insider says it's just going to get worse as the economics of printing and trucking tons of paper around town get worse. But he figures the decline of print leaves $42 billion in advertising to go elsewhere. He gives newspaper web sites $5 billion of that stash and $25 billion of it to "Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, job sites, blogs, mobile ads, video ads, etc." 

Web 2.0 is Alive and Kicking, Sorta

The Web 2.0 Expo wrapped up in San Francisco last week, leaving behind a clear impression that the future is murky. As Caroline McCarthy describes it at The Social, the conference had a weird mix of bubble-licious revelry and recessionary caution.  Venture money for start-ups still flows, but "the economic attitude of the Web 2.0 Expo hangs in an awkward limbo," she writes. Adds an equally ambivalent posting at The Real McCrea: "Are we on the cusp of the open Social Web or the brink of a nuclear winter — or both?" (Keynote speaker Marc Andreessen used the term 'nuclear winter' to describe one possible future for Web 2.0 funds.)

Marketing Shift points out that even amid cautious optimism, the old media recognizes that Web 2.0 technologies are the future, so there's that. And even with the Microsoft/Yahoo! face-off unresolved and now past a supposed deadline for action (via Silicon Alley Insider), it's worth noting that Twitter seems to have raised another $15 or $20 million and it's not surprising that they did, says Sarah Lacy.

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, which makes money mostly from hardware, told the Web 2.0 Expo crowd that (free) blogs and (free) open source software are just dandy, and he said "at some point the word 'blogging' will be anachronistic."  Meaning what, exactly?   "If his point is that blogging will become ubiquitous ...then I totally agree," the Waggener Edstrom blog Glass House says.  "Somehow though, I don't think that was what he was saying...." 

Meanwhile, Charlie Cooper at Coop's Corner says Web 2.0 should be so over, too—as a catchphrase.

Rojo: Apple Surge, Sexy Spelling... and Tom Cruise As a Nazi

Top stories for the week of April 21 -25, 2008

Given time to digest the results of Pennsylvania's Tuesday Democratic presidential primary, pundits are doing some aftermath math.  Let's see: Clinton beat Obama by ten percent but still trails in delegates. At the Huffington Post, contributor Lanny Davis says the ten points that really add up are the ones in his Top Ten List of Undisputed Facts Showing Barack Obama's Weakness in the General Election Against John McCain. The Moderate Voice wonders Why Obama Can’t Close the Deal. Real Clear Politics gives points for persistence: "Like her or not, you have to be impressed by Hillary Clinton's resilience as a candidate."  This equation has no solution yet.

In tech, Apple and Amazon impressed with their earnings. Apple reported record second quarter results - up 43% year over year. "It needed its Mac business to drive growth during the March quarter, and it came through," says Silicon Alley Insider. But the recession and gas prices are taking a toll elsewhere. UPS CEO Scott Davis said its first quarter results "illustrate the dramatic slowing  in the U.S. economy (via Infectious Greed). And: "blaming consumers in hard-hit housing markets of California and Florida," Starbucks slashed its quarterly and 2008 profit forecast writes Huffington Post.

The spelling bee world was abuzz with the announcement that this year's televised Scripps National Spelling Bee on ESPN and ABC in May will feature sexy "sideline reporter" Erin Andrews (via Deadspin). Also this week, a number of sports teams made trendy attempts to go green for Earth Day (thanks UniWatch Blog).

And in entertainment, The New York Times ran an article about the delayed release of Valkyrie, a film in which Tom Cruise plays a Nazi officer with a plan to kill Hitler. The article focused more on bloggers' reactions to the delays than on news or inside sources. Maybe that was because the blog Defamer did the story first. Now bloggers are reacting - to the Times article. "I just want to make clear that while this blog is mentioned in the New York Times story on Valkyrie, I have nothing to do with Defamer's...take that UA [Cruise's United Artists studio] is dead because of this film," writes The Hot Blog. Adds Spout Blog: "The timing of the [Times] piece just seems bizarre. It’s been ages (in internet time, at least) since Valkyrie’s release date was pushed back to February 2009."

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Indecision 2008 Races On

Many are rejoicing at Hillary Clinton's ten-point primary victory in Pennsylvania. Barack Obama supporters are getting up and dusting themselves off for the rest of the battle. What does it all mean? Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish suggests that yesterday's vote was "the worst possible result for the Democrats...It doesn't change the race's dynamic or the math; but it will give Clinton just the tiniest sliver of an argument that she should not drop out." Swampland compares the inconclusive result to the endless inconclusion of the movie "Groundhog Day," suggesting that "Democrats are getting nervous that the race is dragging too long and it could start to hurt the party."

The party does remain in a quandary. "Why hasn't Obama won key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania--even though he outspent Hillary there? asks Buck Naked Politics. "Exit polls showed that only slightly more half of those who voted today consider Hillary Clinton trustworthy. Yet Clinton has won a decisive victory. Obama must be fairly unpopular in Pennsylvania," figures Power Line. 

Still, Obama holds a national lead in delegates, and conservative blog The Corner suggests that if Clinton can't really win the nomination, "she’s basically a stalking horse for [Republican nominee] McCain. She’s preparing the demographic ground for McCain, by getting white working-class Democrats used to (if you will) not voting for Obama." In any case,  now, "Indiana is the new Iowa," suggests Real Clear Politics. "With last night's win, Clinton is probably in this thing for the duration, but Obama has another chance to effectively put this contest away in two weeks by winning both North Carolina and Indiana on May 6." Although to the Irish Trojan in Tennessee the real question of upcoming primary campaigns is: with the Kentucky primary on May 20, "will Clinton and/or Obama attend the Kentucky Derby?"   

At least that's a horse race that is over in two minutes.

Happy Earth Day to You

Tomorrow is Earth Day, a celebration of our favorite planet. The holiday was born in 1970, a year after the NASA moon landing.  That's one small step for man, one giant carbon footprint for mankind. 

Mashable comes in handy with 10 tools for the best Earth Day ever! Brave New Traveler asks "How will you celebrate Earth Day?" and offers suggestions such as changing to more efficient light bulbs or not using plastic shopping bags. Treehugger rounds up newspaper comics with green themes. Ecolibris continues its list of 'green' books for kids, and The Green Parent suggests some mother-tested/kid-approved Earth Day ideas. 

But it's not all sunshine (solar panels) and lollipops (made from sustainable ingredients) in green-land. At Wired's Green Tech Blog, Elsa Wenzel points up the tradeoffs and quandaries of going green, like: What if the making of solar panels would pollute a city in China?

Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine both have green issues out now, and Folio (the magazine about magazines) takes them both to task for not printing on recycled paper. “There was no reason to expect that Condé Nast would actually display some sort of responsible environmental citizenship in the production of its third annual "green" issue for Vanity Fair,” writes Frank Locantore in a blog posting at FolioMag.com. (Folio on the Times mag here.)

On global warming, American Thinker says "Americans must speak up and resist changes that would undermine this nation's economy and alter our way of life, all under the guise of saving a planet that has repeatedly experienced cooling and warming period over the ages." The Thinker must have seen a recent Scientific American article that says, "even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy."

Hey, there's always cyberspace. At VentureBeat, Dean Takahashi notes that IBM has created a virtual world game for Earth Day called Power Up.  The goal is "help rebuild broken wind turbines, solar panels, and dams" and save the planet.

Rojo: Pope Visits, Twitter Saves, Vista Rocks (Not)

Top Stories for the Week of April 12-18, 2008

Split Decision 2008: If polls know anything about pols, Barack Obama is gaining on Hillary Clinton in the the April 22 Pennsylvania Democratic primary race. Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling writes “it seems more clear with each passing day that Hillary Clinton's efforts to hurt Barack Obama for his 'bitter' remarks are not working." Sam Stein at the Huffington Post noted this week that Clinton herself had some unkind words about  so-called lunchbucket Democrats in 1995. But do people really care much what a candidate said to somebody once? Suggests George D. Wenschhof at Air it Out with George, “voters are tired of the 'gotcha' politics played up by the media. They don't want to hear more questions surrounding how the word 'bitter' was used in regard to frustrated working men and women who live in small towns or whether a landing in Bosnia occurred under the threat of sniper fire.” 

Papal Chase: The Pope is visiting America this week, on serious business, though that shouldn't stop us from showing this cool Pope poster that looks like those Obama "HOPE" posters. Pope Benedict XVI met with George Bush. "But hyping the relationship between the President and the Pope is pure political exploitation," Time's Swampland politics blog suggests, "a play for the electoral affection of American Catholics. The Pope is no doubt aware of this, but he is blameless in his complicity. The more attention he gets, the more broadly he is able to spread his message."

Twittering for Help (and Other Tech News): Student James Karl Buck was arrested in Egypt last week after taking photos of a protest, and he Twittered for help.  He wrote "ARRESTED," and that motivated his friends to help get him released. "What’s important about this story?," asks Chris Brogan. "Everything. Twitter has a powerful ability to move people to action... If a messaging platform can free a man from prison, what else can it do for YOU?"  Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider says "it seems that Twitter probably didn't spring him—being an American, with access to a cell phone, was probably more important.” John Jones figures "the reality is somewhere in between" and what really helped was that Twitter created a permalink of the initial post.   

Elsewhere, a painful Microsoft-produced video—a music video of "Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band" performing "Rocking Our Sales"—leaked onto YouTube and blogland and was justifiably mugged for being so incredibly, incredibly, incredibly lame (via CrunchGear, Microsoft Watch, Tech Tracks). Now the word from Redmond is that it was a just goof, a spoof, a lark.  "A way for Microsoft to have some fun at its own expense" (from Coop's Corner). Yeah, sure it was. It looks exactly like the kind of dorky high-tech sales-team inspiration stuff we've seen out in the wild.

And in Lack of Entertainment: The cheesy OK! magazine says photos prove Ashlee Simpson is pregnant, but "I think it is just the way her shirt is hitting the top of her jeans," suggests the blog Seriously? OMG! WTF? Really!

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