RojoBlog

Rojo: AdSpace TV; Blog Censors: Twits with Money

Top stories for the week of June 30 - July 3

TV has been a way to sell annoying advertising since the dawn of the broadcast networks, so Google's plan to distribute sponsored cartoons via its far-reaching AdSense network is no shocker. A New York Times story reported that GOOG struck a deal with Seth MacFarlane, creator of Fox's Family Guy, to create "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy." Apparently 50 two-minute webisodes will be created to run in the AdSpace rail on sites targeted at adults who still like cartoons, starting in September, with advertisers paying more than they do for text-only teasers. Metarand says the move leverages Google's existing AdSense infrastructure beautifully. VentureBeat calls it thinking outside the [TV] box. But WatchMojo points out that Google supposedly was going to try the exact same thing with SpongeBob Squarepants two years ago. Digital Destiny complains there are privacy issues in targeting TV at people like this (umm, DD, have you seen the Google ads on GMail that play off personal messages?). Paid Content says the Times story goes "a bit overboard" in calling it “a bold step into the distribution business."  The Times going overboard about Internet business? Now that's a shocker.

The Week in Blog Censorship:  Some bloggers are up in arms that pioneering proto-blog Boing Boing purged itself of any posts by former contributor Violet Blue, who writes about sex or something. Tomorrow Museum captured the spirit of the minor public outrage by saying "This is sexism. It’s also bad journalism. And it goes against the free interactive spirit of blogging." Gawker says it's just uncool. Boing Boing explains: Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility... we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day." You got a problem with that?

It appears Barack Obama supporters have tricked Google's Blogger service into suspending several anti-Obama sites as "spam" sites. Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, several listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama site.  "It looks like Google has officially joined the Barack Obama campaign," says the conservative blog NewsBusters. Bloggasm contacted affected bloggers and "every single one was convinced that it was Obama supporters who had flagged the blogs in some kind of concerted effort to silence them. But when I asked for specific evidence of this, most simply pointed out that only anti-Obama blogs were targeted — a fact that is certainly suspicious but not especially conclusive." BlueLyon, one of the suspended bloggers, posted Google/Blogger's apology letter in a WordPress blog. It read: " …we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the “Just Say No Deal” network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam…” Black & Right asks: "What's next, YouTube?"

Friends (and Twits) with Money: Well, it appears that a movie version of Friends is going to happen. Dlisted says Jennifer Aniston had been the holdout because she's too successful and then scoffs on her movie Derailed.

The National Venture Capital Association says the drought for venture-backed startups is in “crisis.” There were no VC-backed IPOs in the 2nd quarter, and TechCrunch notes that the last time there were no VC-backed IPOs in a quarter was 1978. TechDirt and Infections Greed say Sarbanes Oxley regulations, which make paperwork a hassle, are making companies reluctant to go public. Uhh, maybe potential stock buyers have just looked at the market lately.

A post at Innonate (and later on Silicon Alley Insider) insists Twitter could make itself worth $1.5 billion by turning into a PayPal-like online payment system, specifically fro mobile use. Twitter is everywhere, you see, and people could just type "P somebody $5" and that would do it. "Forget, for a moment, that Twitter has had serious scaling problems" Innonate says. OK. Is the moment over yet? Joe Duck seems to recall that "Nobody trusts Twitter to stay up, let alone handle their money." 

Happy 4th!

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It's a Wall-E World, Bloggers Just Blog About It

Bloggers are an ironic bunch, but their reviews of WALL-E are remarkably snark-free. “A masterpiece . . . a universal film with timeless appeal,” says /Film (which also has an extensive list of Easter eggs in the film); Reel Fanatic ponders whether any recent film has “had more to say about the power of love.” Among the seemingly disparate groups the cute trash robot has brought together: Catholics (“a celebration of what makes life worth living,” says Catholic Media Review, and Happy Catholic has a list of other glowing reviews from Christian media); nervous parents (ParentDish calls WALL-E “a neat friend and a positive hero”); Mac lovers (“As soon as he’s fully charged, he emits the Mac’s familiar startup chime,” notes Apple a Day); and science fiction geeks (io9 pays homage to real-life trash robots).

Of course there are haters, mainly from conservative corners. “A $170 million art film,” according to KyleSmithOnline. “Will you go see Wall-E knowing it makes fun of Bush?” asks The Conservative Mindcleaner. In “An Open Letter to Conservatives Pissed Off at Wall-E,” Plog says those right-wingers have a self-image problem and are out of touch—and audiences seem to agree (via Blogging Stocks). WALL-E’s currently rated 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s even higher than Ratatouille’s 95%—and definitely higher than Bush’s approval ratings.

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Rojo: Bye Bill Gates; GTA Shocker; Carlin's 7 Words

Top Stories for the Week of June 23 - 27, 2008

It's the end of an era. Bill Gates has retired and will stop punching his time card at Microsoft. Let's just hope he stashed away some savings. In stunned reverence, Gizmodo has uber-tagged its finest Gates-related posts into a Bill Gates Retirement Party compilation. Our fave is a video of the greatest billg parodies, a mashup of clips from The Simpsons, Celebrity Death Match, South Park, 2DTV, Freakazoid and Pirates of Silicon Valley. Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog can think of no finer way to honor Gates than by starting its series on his departure by printing internal memo Gates wrote, documenting his own frustration trying to use Microsoft products. "The lack of attention to usability...blows my mind," Gates wrote to colleagues after trying unsuccessfully to download Microsoft software. A Seattle radio guy read the memo on the air. Michael Krisman at IT Project Failures reproduces the best bits of the memo.  To Mashable, Gates' rant shows big companies have "lost all reasoning about what’s usable and what’s unusable..." All these guys will miss Gates the way political comedians will miss George Bush.  He's provided so much material over the years.

PaidContent.org picked up on a New York Times article about Google News, which compiles breaking stories from other Web sources using algorithms instead of editors. The site hasn't been taking over the world as feared. Google hasn't monetized the service with ads, and PaidContent says "It can’t, without getting into too much trouble with the news media companies." Indeed: the AP is still using cool text-fingerprinting software to hunt down blogs using its content without paying, and Signal to Noise asks: "When is old media going to realize that the world of charging $$ for proprietary content isn’t the only model that works any more?"

Lawyers for a guy on trial in Florida for running a porno Web site have used Google to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie.” That's a great use of marketing intelligence, says Buzzmachine.  Adds TalkLeft: "Technology makes the concept of contemporary community standards meaningless."  Meanwhile a class-action lawsuit over a hidden sex scene in videogame Grant Theft Auto: San Andreas was joined by only 0.022% of the game's buyers, says Joystiq.   Words of the Weasel Sort says the mere existence of the suit shows the nation is messed up: "You'll allow your 11-year-old to play a video game named after a felony, but once you hear that it gets a little naughty, THEN you start to think that maybe he shouldn't be playing it."

All this obscenity is a fitting segue into the passing of profane/profound comedian George Carlin who bloggers mourned on Monday - and all week. Kuro5hin commits some kind of sin by editing the eulogy for Pope John Paul II into one for Carlin. Searchengineland uses Google to show that a lot of people were searching for Carlin material this week. The Unofficial Apple Weblog points to Carlin performances available on iTunes (including his infamous "seven dirty words" bit) and there are many compilations of YouTube clips of his act (like here and here). The Beat, in a epic look at Carlin's material and politics, points out that a transcript of the dirty words routine ended up in court documents. So there. Says the Beat: "George Carlin was, like the radicals of an earlier age, an idealist – and a patriot -- of a deeper sort than is encountered very often these days."

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George Carlin, You Will Be Missed

“If you need us to tell you that it’s pretty much all NSFW, then you have a lot to learn, kid,” says Best Week Ever. Today bloggers are commemorating comedy legend George Carlin, who died of heart failure on Sunday at the age of 71, with video clips galore. Going beyond “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television,” which is everywhere (and here’s the transcript from the FCC case that followed), The Big Picture compiled some of Carlin’s political clips and a list of one-liners, while Jesus’ General is running 8.5 hours of his material in a loop all day. Blogger reaction ranged from lukewarm (The American Mind’s Obama-on-Hillary-esque “Carlin was entertaining enough”) to poetic (“Like Lear’s Fool or Hamlet’s gravediggers, he did not polish or varnish the brutality of life” via Bark Bark Woof Woof) to near-manic (“Oh, God…no,” cries Brilliant at Breakfast). “A true hipster of the old-school variety,” says A Deeper Shade of Soul, while Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Norbizness compares Carlin to “a foul-mouthed Wittgenstein” and rounds up his best jokes on religion. “Carlin would have had a field day with the coverage,” says No-Name247, and indeed, the c omedian was a blog reader himself: Last year, he told HuffPo’s Rachel Sklar in a long exclusive interview: “Every time you read someone’s blog or someone’s column on the Net, they’ve got a series of links for you of other bloggers and columnists. So I just go down the hole . . . I just get like six or seven steps removed from the one I was reading originally by following links. And then I wonder where the fuck I was, you know?”

 

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Rojo: Firefox Cakes, Google Pools, and Tiger Knees (Oh My)

Top Stories for the Week of June 16 - 20, 2008

Mozilla wanted to set a record for most downloads of a software program in a 24-hour period when it released Firefox 3 on Wednesday, and since no one else has ever bothered to really count, they did it! 8.3 million served! Users partied, and Microsoft sent a cake (with a DLL file baked inside). Arcanology, which speaks from inside the Mozilla-torium, says "the new cake is much nicer (and much less brown) than the old one." John's Blog, also an inside job, reports at the peak there were 283 downloads per second. BWTorrents says the Moz became a victim of its own PR stunt as its servers crashed amid the swarm. All the fuss was about the new Firefox browser, which won't change the world or even the Web but has cooler bookmark management, a larger "back button," and other magic as detailed by Lifehacker.

Speaking of crashing, the UK blog Register Hardware says bored youths this summer are using Google Earth satellite images to find houses with swimming pools, then using Facebook to organize pool-crashings.  Wonder if they could use Google Earth to find a job? Elsewhere in technology use and abuse, YouTube said it will now accept longer videos from certain partners. The max file size is now 1 GB, which Silicon Alley Insider says is nearly enough for a full movie in standard definition (for example, "Semi-Pro" runs an hour and 38 minutes and consumes 1.1GB.)  Blog Maverick (aka Mark Cuban) says it's about countering Hulu, with long-form content that YouTube can sells ads against. YouTube is "under the gun to start monetizing those 82 million viewers a month," says NewTeeVee.

In old media, TV newsman Tim Russert will be missed, but the relentless TV coverage of his passing (Wolf Blitzer again?) seemed excessively insidery to many normal people (and also bloggers). Balloon Juice wrote that the marathon coverage "is indicative of the problem...[TV newspeople] think they are the story. It is creepy and sick and the reason politicians get away with all the crap they get away with these days..." Added Below the Beltway, "It’s gone from remembering a good guy to a bunch of NBC hacks sitting around talking about him for no apparent reason other than filling up air time." Asked Jack Shafer at Slate's Press Box: "What has possessed NBC News to televise a never-ending video wake?" Thank goodness one brave media critic, Pop Culture: Adam Graham stepped up and wrote there were excessive stories complaining about excessive Russert coverage.

And in sports, Tiger Woods announced he's having surgery to fix a torn ACL that will end his participation in pro golf for the year, and Deadspin says that means the PGA will "lose a large portion of its fanbase not ingesting daily doses of Centrum Silver vitamins" (that's a joke about older folks!). There's no guarantee Tiger will return in top form, and The Golf Blog frets injuries might jeopardize the Tigerquest to break the world record for most downloads in one day (or some such thing). The Boston Celtics won the NBA Championship, and few commentators have done a better job than Most Valuable Network of describing the turnaround in Boston's sports psyche, which used to be about "expecting the worst and bracing for heartbreak." Boston fans are so happy now they even sent Microsoft a cake.

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Blogopticon: Map of the Blogosphere

In a brilliant piece of linkbait, the Vanity Fair VF Daily Blog produced an A-List map of the blogosphere that ranks top blogs from Scurrilous to Earnest (Jossip to Think Progress) on one axis to News and Opinion (think Consumerist to The Daily Dish) on the other. Do NOT hit the link unless you have hours to wander around, writes The Whited Sepulcre. Blatant New York Magazine theft says emptyage and VF clearly didn’t bother to read 60% of the sites they describe. Valleywag is trying to grasp how it ended up on the Earnest end of the scale (frankly, so are we). Surprises on the list? Just one: Calacanis at bottom right as the most Earnest (ahem) and Opinionated. The predictable “we made the list” blog posts ensued. Mission accomplished!

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AP Declares War on Bloggers?

Here come the takedowns. The Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news organizations, is facing a blog–bully firestorm after threatening Rogers Cadenhead and his Drudge Retort (a Drudge Report parody site) for linking to and reproducing 39 to 79 word snippets of AP stories (thanks Techdirt). The AP backed off over the weekend (via Wordyard) or did they? AP executives told the NY Times “We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this.” But they didn’t withdraw their demand that Drudge Retort take down the articles writes Paidcontent. 

Blogger reaction was swift and harsh. “AP, hole, dig” wrote BuzzMachine followed by another post titled “FU AP.” “The Associated Press: FAIL!” says Marketing Pilgrim. TechCrunch’s new policy on AP stories: they’re banned. If we all stop linking to and reading AP stories, maybe they’ll come to their senses says Texas Startup Blog. The silver lining: It's an amazing opportunity for other local and national news sites to get that blog link love and traffic says Publishing 2.0.

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Rojo: Salary Voyeurs; Free Appleware; McCain's Beer Flub

Top news stories for the week of June 9 - 13, 2008

TechCrunch calls the new Glassdoor.com a way to find out how much people really make at Google, Yahoo and other companies. VentureBeat says it's a way to let your boss know what you think. Infectious Greed proclaims "call it a PG...version of F***edCompany.com"—and reproduces a Glassdoor chart showing Yahoo and Microsoft employee approval ratings of their CEOs, Jerry Yang and Steve Ballmer. Startup Chatter suggests (in a self-defeatingly-ranty way) that Glassdoor's exploitation of unverified scuttlebutt makes it "scarier than Wikipedia."   

Hey, everyone's right! 

Inquisitr (which calls Glassdoor an employment conditions service) says it extends the idea behind The Funded to potentially every company. Anonymous employee gripes and salary reports are "untapped space that would seem to have huge possibilities," Inquizz says, although we seem to remember several sites already tapping that inner space, like Vault.com for worker evaluations and Payscale.com for competitive salary dope. 

Meanwhile, Valleywag has its own takes on high-tech jobs (and Jobs), with its tournament to discover the worst entry-level jobs in tech and an item wagging over the hauntingly thin appearance of Apple boss Steve Jobs at the WWDC (Apple says he just had a bug).

There's no "i" in Phone: Apple Insider says financial analyst/cheerleader Piper Jaffray predicts Apple's soon-to-open App Store, an online mart selling apps for the iPhone and coming iPhone 3G, could do $1.2 billion in sales in 2009. And that's all from one guy buying Super Monkey Ball. Sure, it sounds like a lot, but they misplace that kind of dough in Iraq all the time. Mark Evans sees it all as part of the iPhone's evolution from a fancy object of desire to a revenue platform for Apple—getting cheaper to buy with plenty of new ways to pay to use it. Well, yeah. Though Tech Beat reports that 71 percent of enterprise iPhone apps will be free (hence the Super Monkey Ball theory). And—before you get tired of free stuff—Mozilla announced it wants to set an all-time download record when it releases Firefox 3 on June 17. Gizmodo calls that a crass marketing ploy but says "it's tough to blame a company for shameless self-promotion of a superb free product."

On the entertainment trail: You can't stop Hulu. Viacom will begin syndicating The Daily Show and Colbert Report through the online TV-show-watching service, and PaidContent says that's validation for the growing Hulu.com, a joint venture of NBC and Fox. And Gold Derby thinks it's "very strange" that actress Katherine Heigl withdrew from contention for an Emmy this year—but still-worth printing a photo.

On the vote-pandering trail: It seems lame to poke fun at John McCain for his little slip of the tongue saying he'll "veto every single beer—bill with earmarks" (from Political Ticker). Hey—there's so much else to poke at. Andrew Sullivan says it's really true that, to McCain, it doesn't matter when U.S. troops come home from Iraq. And The Raw Story has details on a new book that does a hatchet job on Johnny Mac's personal life. Political Radar breaks the news that Barack Obama has copped to smoking—tobacco! Scolds The Sundries Shack: "It’s a shame that he can give a more direct and serious answer about his smoking habits than he can about his bigoted spiritual adviser..." Web Scout says Obama keeps fighting false online rumors and reports that Snopes.com has 18 entries for rumors about Obama, just one of which may be true. Nevertheless, The Hill says Obama could bring in $100 million in June. At that rate, he'd be in a dead heat with Apple App store!

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WWDC 2008: iPhone 2.0 = $199

It's been a leak-filled wait, but Apple finally announced the 3G iPhone today at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Bloggers went wild over the Steve Jobs keynote (liveblogging blow-by-blow courtesy of Engadget and Gizmodo, respectively) and Fake Steve Jobs secretly despises all the idiots who camped outside overnight to get into the Moscone Center. New iPhone features announced today include MobileMe for synching mail, contacts and your calendar to all your mobile and desktop devices, and a GPS service so you can track your friends. But don't line up at Apple stories yet: there will be no iPhones available for about 6 weeks, reports News.com. And for those excited about the new $199 iPhone price, check out these videos of your brain on a cellphone (yikes! via Whatsnextblog). Headset, anyone?

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Rojo: Pseudo-Celeb Blogging; Veep Sweep; Scary Sites

Top Stories for the Week of June 2 - 6, 2008

The fallout from the aftershock to the backlash continues in response to ex-Gawker Emily Gould's New York Times magazine essay about the perils of oversharing personal information via blog. Mediaworks looked at the rise and fall of "pseudo-celeb" bloggers and quoted one young job-seeking writer as saying: "I wonder if I should take Gawker off my résumé." Melissa Lafsky at HuffPo (and also at Opinionistas—nice double dip! getting not paid twice for the same post!) asks, "Does blogging about your life necessarily ruin it?" (Spoiler alert: nah, it's still cool!) Variety editor Anne Thompson, who blogs Thompson on Hollywood, gets into the navel-gazing spirit by suggesting Gould's essay "reminds me of myself." Sounds like she has a future in this business.

In other new tech for people who love to read, YouTube has added a video annotation feature, which lets you add text bubbles and boxes—with links!—to create your own pop-up videos, as NewTeeVee describes it. Silicon Alley Insider points out that the linking feature enables production of choose your own adventure type videos. But Webware suggests "the purity of home videos is about to get a little more cluttered."   

About four percent of websites are dangerous (in virus-y sort of way), says a new report from McAfee, "Mapping the Mal Web Revisited," according to the WSJ Tech Blog. The numbers are juiced by the generous 12 percent of .info sites that are potentially evil and 19 percent of .hk sites (now entering Hong Kong) that could become hell on earth. Ars Technica suggests the ratings system seems squishy, as McAfee "equates aggressive pop-up marketing with virus propagation." AppScout somehow sees in the McAfee warnings a fun world geography lesson. Meanwhile, ReadWriteWeb reports that Japanese wiki-media company Nota has solved the age-old remixable t-shirt problem. With its C-Shirt service, it sells t-shirts with cool designs and codes on them that can be scanned with a mobile phone. What? You can see someone wearing a cute shirt design, scan and upload it, remix it, and create a new shirt design. It's like Frankenstein, with a Hello Kitty twist.

Bloggers are everywhere! Bill Clinton's "sleazy-slimy-scumbag" invective, aimed at Todd Purdum's gossipy Vanity Fair hatchet piece, was recorded on audio by a "citizen journalist" named Mayhill Fowler, while mainstream press were being kept away from the rope line where Clinton made the acid remarks. It further turns out, says Scripting News, that Fowler is the same person who recorded Barack Obama's comments about poor people in Pennsylvania. Fowler, who calls herself "an over-educated sixty year-old woman with politics in my blood," now blogs for Huffington Post and has the Clinton audio right here. Porch Dog has an awesome compilation of all the unnamed sources credited with providing the VF story's information including Clinton's "old friends" and "others."

Thankfully, there won't be any nasty primary elections to get America some vice president nominees. Veep candidates for both parties will be picked through insider politics, closed-door meetings and quid-pro-quo-deals, just like the normal government works. Hillary Clinton is ready to suspend her campaign this weekend and endorse Barack Obama. Now, Bob Reed at ReedBiz says Obama needs to offer her his VP slot "to reach out and bring Hillary's backers into his orbit." TalkLeft concurs and asks: "Does Clinton's promise to campaign for Obama if he's the nominee, begin now or in August when he officially becomes the nominee? Did she ever say?"  But Jimmy Carter says picking Hillary would be "the worst mistake that could be made" (from the Guardian via Politico). Carter, who is an engineer as well as a former President, figures like this: a lot of people won't ever vote for Clinton, and a  lot won't ever vote for Obama. Why combine the haters into an "anybody but them" mega-bloc?

Scouting the Red team, Words of Wisdom runs down the vitals of VP eligibles Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Charlie Crist and Bobby Jindal. WoW's negative on Huckabee: "Thinks the Flintstones is a documentary." While Johnny Mac picks a mate, the GOP has begun circulating vintage video of Hillary Clinton questioning Obama's experience and praising McCain's: “Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, I will bring a lifetime of experience and Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002,” she said in March. "Thanks, Hillary!" says Balloon Juice (whose gratitude we're sure Hillary was shooting for).

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