David lafontaine's
Sips from the firehose
A site that attempts to render the internet down into one easy-to consume mental beverage.
Watching the Watchmen: Chron Reporter Fired for Criticizing Bosses
Man, I didn't think there was anyone left at the Chronicle to fire - and here I read that they just canned 151 more people? Delfin Vigil, a reporter at the Chron, took out an ad in the Examiner to decry the sorry state of the paper after all the cutbacks, layoffs,...
Micropayments and Unintended Consequences: See LUN in Santiago, Chile
And for the editors and reporters who fear that switching over to a reader-driven basis for content is going to lead to endless pages of bikini shots and [fill in the anatomical blank] slips … well there are plenty of sites dedicated to that kind of content already.
The users have the power, you see, to go to wherever it is that we want to go to, to find the kind of pictures/video/stories that we want.
If all there were on the web was imitations of Maxim-meets-Ogrish, that would be unbelievably boring after a while.
Friday (after-) Noon Videos – Week of May 8
At some point, we’re going to figure out that the copyright laws actually are more of a hindrance to the creators of intellectual property like this, than they are of a help. It took George Lucas a couple of decades to learn that the best way to communicate with his fan base was not via “cease and desist” letters, but through actually talking with some of the amateur fimmakers who felt so touched by his art that they wanted to make their own art so they could keep playing in his wonderful sandbox.
Just as newspapers are having to learn that they don’t own the news anymore – as if they ever really did – so too are TV and filmmakers going to have to learn in the years ahead that they don’t really “own” content that connects with, and inspires the audience in the way that the LOTR franchise so obviously connected with, and inspired these filmmakers. Check out this article for more on the prosumer impresarios.
Wm. Marc Salisbury: The Annie Liebowitz of LA’s Digerati
Wm. Marc Salisbury … [has] assigned himself the task of covering all the meetups of the smarty-pants computer geek/film nerd/tortured writer clique(s).
The Cure to Swine Flu Hysteria: Laughter
The swine flu pandemic - er, ahem H1N1 virus (now the officially gov't sanctioned name for the Aporkalypse) - has generated hysteria in the news that rivals the Deadly Y2K Bug That Was Gonna Kill Us All (if you don't remember - a sample headline from Wired at the time...
River of Bats
River of Bats , originally uploaded by Wordyeti. As promised, here is a short clip showing the stream of bats that comes out at dusk in downtown Austin. Please forgive the shaky, jumpy camera moves - this was shot with my tiny Sony W90 camera - about the size of a...