Back in the good old days of the Internet, when you Googled "dumb motherfucker," the first result you got back was a link to a store selling George W. Bush tees. It was the result of a "Google bomb," where crafty blogger types gamed Google's search engine algorithm by linking specific keywords to a single site, to juice up the chances anyone searching for those keywords would be pointed to the site they favored. There have even been contests to see who could come up with the most creative use of search engine optimization tricks to get various phrases linked to specific web addresses. But now, no fun Google — who has long frowned on the practice — says it's disabled the loophole entirely. CONTINUED »
Whew. The CW is finally ending what they've been calling an "experiment" — that ridiculous decision to stop streaming episodes of Gossip Girl on its website for fear of cannibalizing its television audience. After kicking off the second part of season one without free web streams, Nielsen's numbers for the show didn't exactly go up by anything significant. Instead, they did this.
What magazine isn't getting into the reality TV business? Well, not Vogue! Except they are. They've got a new web series out next month — the annoyingly punctuated Model.Live — that'll track three models as they run from casting calls to runway shows in eight-minute webisodes. Naturally, because this is Vogue doing it, the project is the most expensive of its kind. With a budget of $3 million, the show costs about $31,000 a minute. But fret not! There is sponsorship attached. Express paid a low seven-figure fee to take part, somehow convinced that stocking its clothes in the closets of the models will produce a decent ROI. (It won't. At least not without additional integrations.)
It's Vogue's "at last" foray into the reality segment, because editor Anna Wintour, one who hates the word "blog," passed when Project Runway came calling (you know, in the days before it started charging magazines seven figures to take part). So why this web project? Because everything else that came their way was "not reality at all, just amateurs live," insists Vogue's Tom Florio.
Hah. CONTINUED »
News that Bronx prosecutors subpoenaed the indie political Room 8, looking to identify some of the site's anonymous commenters — and threatening legal action if the blog even mentioned that they'd been served with a subpoena — shouldn't have been entirely surprising. Because where there are blogs, there are potential lawsuits.
Actually, not just potential lawsuits. Actual lawsuits. Like this one against Perez Hilton. CONTINUED »
Google's virtual world cross-over Lively — it's part Second Life, part chat room — is supposed to be a safe, fun space for Internet nerds to geek out over their latest obsession, whether it be the iPhone or some new limited edition action figure. It is not, as far as Google's original intentions would suggest, a place for Internet trolls to gather for live sex shows. Except that's what's been happening. CONTINUED »
If immune-from-backlash Craigslist can reduce the hassle or finding an apartment (or increase it, depending on how you look at it), brings two strangers together who exchanged a smile on the sidewalk only to walk away without exchanging numbers, and find somebody willing to take a few of your Topps baseball cards off your hands, why can't Craigslist do the impossible — and save the very newspaper industry it's supposedly killing? CONTINUED »
Blogger accounts. Twittering. Facebook status updates. Everyone is pouring their personal lives out online, which leads the Journal to ask, Does everybody need their own personal website? "The answer is still 'no' — but that 'no is no longer quite so firm as it used to be. And sometimes that hesitation is a sign that the wheels of social change are starting to turn — that 'no' will turn into 'maybe' and then from there move quickly to 'yes' and then finally to 'it's weird that you don't.' If you're a thirtysomething, you've seen answering machines, voice mail, email addresses and cellphones complete the journey from curiosities to perceived necessities, just as our elders saw the same thing happen with TVs and phones."
But how to tell where this trend is really headed?
By looking to a certain pair of individuals who have dictated whether any trend in life is noteworthy, or not worth persuing at all.
Their names? Brad and Angelina. CONTINUED »
Sound familiar? Indeed: Back when John Kerry bungled the Democratic party's hope for the White House, he also left his campaign with 3 million people on his listserv. Guess who's still worth talking to so he can press the forward button on your fundraising drive? Though Politico doesn't say how big Clinton's email list is, she does have 158,000 “supporters” on Facebook and more than 191,000 “friends” on MySpace. Maybe they'll even post her iPod playlist. [Politico]
After many months and months in development, former Radar editor and up-and-coming new media titan Remy Stern today launches Cityfile, a database of who's who in Manhattan industry circles. Artists, media types, socialites, designers, and foodies are all on board, with Stern's crack team of writer-researches having already compiled 2,109 names. The site promises to add new profiles all the time — but also, more excitingly, to drop names, too, because sometimes important people are suddenly no longer important, and this distinction MUST BE MADE.
So what's a site like this good for? For blogs like ours, the answer is obvious: Free research tool! For others, however, Cityfile as a resource might be less clear. Allow us to help. CONTINUED »
It's certainly not our personal mission to make Google a cause célèbre, but we have a special place in our hearts for any company that challenges Nielsen Media Research, the bumbling audience analytics firm headed toward further catastrophe by David Calhoun, the former General Electric vice chairman. Google recently unveiled Google Ad Planner, a new framework that combines website metrics with media buying, which is supposed to replace the guesswork employed by companies like Nielsen and comScore, which use a complicated and mostly flawed mixture of audience panels and computer logging to tell clients how many people visit a website, and what type of people they are. Google, which collects metrics data itself, directly from websites that carry its tracking code, wants to challenge these industry leaders in a market they've long owned, and which media buyers have always had to rely on to know where best to spend their millions in ad buys. Except now that the service has debuted and the biggest media agencies have had a look, it appears Nielsen isn't in much danger of no longer holding clients hostage. CONTINUED »
SOHH, the enormously popular hip-hop website, was 0wnz0red during the overnight. In its place, oh so clever hackers claiming to represent Ebaumsworld.com (itself an enormously popular "funny video" dumping ground), plastered various racist and anti-Semitic hate speech, Nazi logos, and horrific sex pics (think goat.cx, if you're familiar). While one blog has screencapped the takeover, the website is still in disrepair, so if you're of the faint of heart, at work, or not a morning person, we don't suggest you visit. [SOHH, Street Knowledge - NSFW]
You know how blogs have let any would-be writer spew their deep thoughts onto the Internet, regardless of taste or talent? Some call the medium a tool for the democratization of ideas. We call it the worst thing to happen to our leisure time.
So we're troubled by a new platform for would-be publishing mavens that takes the whole "barrier to entry" thing — which has kept the financially, and talent, deficient off the cultural radar for so long — and throws it out the Microsoft Windows. CONTINUED »
China has given the OK to 247 video-sharing sites to resume operations after shutting them down earlier this year. Curiously not making the cut? Tudou.com, Youku.com and, yes, 56.com. [Variety]
While airplane passengers will normally have to pay $12.95 for in-flight Internet access, a special trial group of fliers will get the service gratis in a single round-trip American Airlines flight from JFK to LAX and back. American is testing the capabilities of the service and eventually expects to carry it as a regular offering — you know, one more thing to nickel and dime you on as you lose the right to check bags, receive nutrition on board, and, probably somewhere down the road, are forced to bring your own toilet paper. Supposedly, passengers today won't have any idea that they are among the lucky few to try out the service. Learning they're American's guinea pigs, then, will certainly alleviate their stress as they're stranded on the runway for an hour and a half before takeoff.
You know who would've benefited from seeing this pair of creative ads for Porn Blocker software? Clinton Raymond McCowen, who's on trial in Florida for distributing porn that qualifies, prosecutors are arguing, as "obscene," that nasty over-the-line definition that means whatever the hell you're doing is not protected by the First Amendment.
(This is not to be confused with a similar obscenity trial underway in Los Angeles, where pornographer Ira Isaacs is defending his human-on-animal flicks, and where the Hon. Alex Kozinski recused himself after he was found out for posting some of his own borderline-acceptable porn on what he thought was a private web server.)
McCowen is on trial for producing group sex porn, raking in an estimated $1 million per year from 5,000 subscribers who pay $30/month for their orgy fix. (Also, prosecutors say paying the "actors" amounts to prostitution.)
What constitutes obscenity hinges on the Supreme Court's 1973 decision, which puts forth a 3-part test to determine if material is obscene based on "contemporary community standards"; that is, does the community think the material is obscene? And to argue that it's not, McCowen's attorney is turning to Google — and its cache of data on your search history. CONTINUED »
Though it is unlikely to surpass Scrabulous in membership, John McCain's new Facebook video game Pork Invaders which turns the Republican candidate's campaign against pork barrel spending into a lunch-hour escape for would-be Internet predators. This is proof that Mr. McCain, like Barack Obama, gets Web 2.0, hurrah! [Joystiq]
"China's YouTube," the website 56.com, has been offline since June 3, with this notice, which says something about a service upgrade, the only evidence it even existed. Some might point the government's regular crackdown on Internet content, which runs afoul of its standards policies, now extending to online video. Or maybe they're just getting a head start on keeping any unauthorized Olympics broadcasts off any site that isn't stamped with NBC's seal.
The New York Times, always striving to do something to impress the geeks, is getting itself into the business of social networking. Their little toy is called TimesPeople (no space!), and it'll let you do things you're already familiar doing, such as saving articles to your TimesFiles, commenting on stories, and emailing their most ridiculous trend pieces to friends (and Jossip editors). But now you'll be able to share your favorite items with your friends. The final product is very Facebook — at least when it comes to the newsfeed you'll begin spitting out as you start recommending stories to your friends — and, thanks to the millions of user accounts it already has, will immediately become one of the Internet's largest social networks. Unlike Facebook, however, you will not be able to throw vampires or sheep at the Thursday Styles section.
There once was an innocent time in the celebrity industry, where actual D-list stars were bumped up from their status of hangers-on and has-beens by a new crop of attention whores: reality television cast members.
That innocent time was upon us not even a decade ago. And now it's been threatened, nearly to extinction, but another underclass: the microfamous. This class of cewebrities is composed of MySpace celebrities (who get their own reality TV shows), YouTube stars (who get their own cable network deals), and blog boldfacers (who get their own magazine deals, then lose them).
Rex Sorgatz, who had his own bout of microfame, now provides a handy how-to guide to becoming one of them, a primer that should be treated like those nuclear bomb building guidebooks circulating the Internet: buried at all costs.
Michael Agger's exercise in explaining how we read things online goes like this:
• Keep it short
• Put it in bullet-pointed list form
• Use bold when necessary, even when it's not necessary
