Craigslist, that giant bulletin board of missed connections, apartments for rent, and drugs (if you know where to look) is taking measures to decrease the number of prostitution services on their site. The site will now charge to place ads in the erotic services section (which they couldn't just get rid of, if they were so worried?) to get the credit card information and phone numbers of people placing the ads. So far, that's dettered the sexy opportunists and ad placement has decreased by 80% as all those "sexy massage parlors" try to keep their numbers unlisted.
So from now on, only people who offer to have sex with random strangers have to do it for free, and be legit, i.e. in the name of filling up that empty void in their life that a hundred cats can't fill.
In the most awesome non-Obama related story this week, cult director/artist David Lynch is planning a new web series based on his book about his experience with transcendental meditation, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity. On Networks is wooing Lynch for the yet-to-be-determined series, along with Amy Poehler and some other names they apparently picked out of a hat.
Lynch is a weird guy like that: he is a total pacifist, and built all these meditation retreats with Donovan and the guru for the Beatles Maharishi Mahesh (before he died), yet he still makes movies like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. Well, I shouldn't say still makes movies. Did anyone bother with Inland Empire?
Below, Lynch's last contribution to the vlog sector: his iPhone rant.
This is Why the Internet Is Allowed to Continue: Is Obama President? Is McCain?
Carry on, The Web.
… redirects to BarackObama.com. Just in case a certain someone is planning her 2012 run. [ElectPalin.com]
The analogy between this election and the one in 1960 when John F. Kennedy defeated Nixon because he was more attractive, is an easy one. Both represent times when changing mediums (radio to television, and now television to web) allowed for greater access to the candidates, greater scrutiny, and was really the winner's game for who could best lasso the convergence of the media to best suit their campaign.
But let's not get too cocky here: it's not a perfect example. Kennedy didn't win the election because he carefully planned and executed a look that came across as more honest and sincere to the voters of America. He just happened to sweat less than Nixon during the debates.
Meanwhile Barack Obama and John McCain have been doing everything in their power to grab the largest chunk of technology users as possible: text the vote, YouTube ad campaign clips, and the use of online video services to play (and replay, and replay) everything from Katie Couric's botched interview with Sarah Palin to Joe the Plumber ranting at Barack Obama, to Jeremiah Wright's infamous "Goddamn America!" speech. So lets not pretend technological adaptability was an accident that the younger candidate somehow fell into. Both campaigns, despite McCain's insistence that he doesn't use the Internet, have found ways to increase their advantage in the more highly interactive medium.
And of course, this comes with an inevitable downside:
CONTINUED »
Who would imagine that this Starsky and Hutch wannabe to your left could receive over $200,000 in corporate contest prizes for videos just like Mr. Watercooler?
Meet Joel Levinson, the 2.0 version of the 50s Evelyn Ryan, made famous in movies like The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio for her ability to support her family on winning contests for advertising jingles. As money for ad men drops faster than the Dow, corporations are looking for cheaper talent to hock their wares. Hence: YouTube contests where the prize money is less than what they'd pay for one day of professional marketers.
But win enough of these online contests, and you're rich, bitch:
He has won trips to Budapest, Buenos Aires and Copenhagen from Delta Air Lines; an iPod from the American National CattleWomen; and $6,000 from the Israel Project, an advocacy group, after honors in three separate categories — English, German and Russian — and he barely speaks German or Russian.
“It’s so great to have license to be an idiot,” he said.
Also, Levinson is from Ohio, so maybe there is just something in the water there (boredom? Can you put extreme boredom in a water supply?) that makes people eerily good at making annoyingly catchy jingles.
After the jump, another example of Levinson's adeptness at capturing the YouTube zeitgeist for cash and prizes:
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In honor of the new UCLA studies by neuroscientist Gary Small that found Internet surfing and texting actually makes people better at certain tasks, like filtering information and making snap decisions, every one should go see Ben X this weekend:
"We're seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills," Small told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Of course, blah blah blah, with great power comes great responsibility and we can't all just go Aspergin' out and hope to become Professor X. But honestly? With the current trends in journalism rewarding online content over print, maybe the smartest move is to start teaching children at an early age how to take ten minute breaks from the screen in order to not hurt their eyes while logging in 15+ hours a day writing in their beginner's blog.
A study done by Google shows that 95% of people who make $1 million or more annually bought their last luxury good online. Why buy online, when the experience of shopping for wealthy (one assumes) includes the atmosphere of the upper class that comes with going to Saks or buying a boat in the Hamptons. It's not if buying a boat with your new iBook comes across as any more nouveau riche than buying it with a Windows 95 operating system, because with the anonymity online, your Paypal account talks, and bullshit, well, you know the rest.
So what's the point of having all the Benjamins if the only way to show it is winning all your bids on Ebay?
And yet…
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Time was, you could rely on wire-services like AP and Reuters to give you the most dry, non-partisan story out there. Just the facts ma'am, with none (well, supposedly none) of the journalistic biases that other papers would then go on to employ while taking quotes and tidbits from the original wire sources.
But nowadays, even the Associated Press needs to have an angle. What was once considered "breaking" on AP is now old news by the time blogs are done with it. With embedded citizen journalists on the campaign trail, wire-services now have to provide subscribers something different in order to compete, though their "solution" is to become the same as everyone else.
Goodbye objectivity, hellooooo new journalistic standards.
This would be the impetus, one assumes, for that insane prejudge on Obama's DNC speech by AP that had everyone up in arms. And then the international AFP did the same thing with Palin's RNC speech!
So is the whole wire-service program becoming just another blog war casualty?
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When someone receives a oral sex while seated on a toilet, it's called a blumpkin. Don't ask why. So what do you call it when a person blogs whilst taking their morning dump?
Perhaps there's not a word for it yet, but there should be: according to a British Broadband company's survey, one in ten Internet users surf while on the loo. And you know if the normally reserved Brits are admitting to this, then there are eight times that amount of Americans doing business while doing their business.
Which is totally disgusting and filthy, unless it's a TOTAL emergency and you need to get that deadline in and maybe check out Perez or something but you're turtle-heading and…aw, whatever. We all do this. Right?!?!?!
Andrew Sullivan, that mess of walking contradictions (Libertarian Conservative/Gay) who blogs for The Atlantic, another mess of contradictions (an ostensibly left-leaning mag that's becoming increasingly right-wing since the late Michael Kelly took over as editor in 1999) wants all of America to know how hard it is being his online avatar.
In an essay titled "Why I Blog," Sullivan spends around 5,000+ words describing his relation to the "quintessentially postmodern idiom" and the nasty, nasty commentator criticism.
Queen Elizabeth has her own YouTube channel, which makes her approximately four hundred times better at the web than John McCain, who still thinks Google is something you do to yourself to relieve stress before a debate.
Here's the Queen visiting London HQ of the Google opperations, wearing the most amazing outfit in the world. If you are queen, you get clothes designed out of mermaids. Awesome:
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This time last year, we were reporting Rufus Griscom, the mind behind sex-with-a-brain site Nerve.com, was expanding beyond his latest spin-off (parenting site Babble.com) with an environmental blog. And then … nothing. Realizing we went nearly a year without seeing Griscom launch his green title, we revisited the issue in August, where Griscom told us "our research indicated that the green advertising category is inadequately mature so we put it on ice … We will launch it at some point, but only when the advertising base is there." Might Griscom have been wiser, then, than the treehugging webtrepreneurs attempting the same thing? CONTINUED »
I Can Has Cheezburger, the hysterical and amazingly simple blog devoted to witty captions attached to pictures of cats, should've been neutered. But then the guys behind the site launched its LOLDogs spin-off I Has a Hot Dog. And then there's the celebrity offshoot, ROFLRazzi. Big media, sensing a trend they'd be able to exploit, now finds themselves trying to replicate the enormous success of these sites. Enter Caption Splash, the just-launched gimmick from Lifetime (yes, that same network that's about to lose Project Runway) that hopes viewers will sign on to MyLifetime.com to write thought and speech bubbles on photographs.
Except, like anytime corporations try mimicking independent memes, it's failed miserably. Just take a look at the photo here to see why. It is not funny. It is poorly executed. And it's got a damn Lifetime product plug in the caption. To use a LOLCats-esque theme: FAIL.
Whoops, Facebook changed again and somehow you didn't notice. Maybe it's because Scrabulous is gone and there is no longer a reason to be on Mark Zuckerberg's crazy merry-go-round of high school and college acquaintances?
Or maybe you did notice, and in protest of your precious social-networking site getting revamped and all your widgets dissapearing, you joined the fifth most popular group on Facebook right now: "I Hate the New Facebook." Yeah, no big deal, you're basically just standing up for your Internet rights, you know, like the hippies, or like those Spartas in the 300. You're a freaking hero with your signing of online petitions.
You know what the Facebook executives do when you join your little groups in protest? They laugh at you:
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Yikes, last week people were actually starting to believe John McCain was web-savvy, if indeed his campaign did buy the domain for VotefortheMilf.com. Concurrently, Barack Obama was losing ground with the web ads, and made an egregious decision to purchase an entire channel's worth of airtime for his campaign.
But! Obama is back on track with being the #2 candidate for the Internet (behind Ron Paul) with this nifty iPhone application promoting his campaign:
CONTINUED »
Let's try a fun little game: Type in "Vote For the MILF" into your browser and see what pops up:
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"Kathy Griffin has filed a cybersquatting lawsuit against a company that owns KathyGriffin.com, claiming they are making money off her name and image. In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court Sept. 16, the comedian, who just won another Emmy for her reality show, "My Life on the D-List," was contacted in July by the owners offering the site for sale for $3,500." [THR]
Barack Obama revolutionized the presidential race when his supporters took to the web in unprecedented numbers to promote his campaign. YouTube, which didn't exist for the 2004 elections, was an influential factor in favor of the Democratic nominee: Think of Obama Girl's popularity and will.i.am's Yes We Can as the campaign slogans of the new media, as well as the new candidate.
But as it turns out, even previously computer illiterate John McCain is more than a little web savvy; his official campaign website drew an average of 1.2 million unique users last month, while Obama's scraped barely more than that with 1.3.
So who's to blame for the popularity of the Straight Talk Express' dot com success? Why, those fickle, conniving women voters, of course:
CONTINUED »
'Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to a web guru.' [Reuters]
Editorial Director
