David lafontaine's
Sips from the firehose
A site that attempts to render the internet down into one easy-to consume mental beverage.
Ukrainian Sarah Palin Berated by Exasperated Director
This is the mayor of Kharkov, and he was trying to record a TV campaign commercial, but couldn’t manage to string enough coherent words together to spit out a sentence.
I was particularly impressed by the torrent of expletive-laced abuse hurled at this guy by the director (who we see in some of the early shots). I think this must have come at the end of an exhausting filming session, because the director is just going off on him in a way that would put Joe Pytka to shame.
No Apology Necessary…
No Apology Necessary..., originally uploaded by Wordyeti. Not sure what they're apologizing for - maybe the subheds here read something like "Back, Despite Popular Demand!" "Always high prices and low quality! Free botulism lollypops for the little onesl" It was...
Kiev, and Everything After
I’m on an internet connection here that is a bit iffy, so I’m going to experiment with a gallery plug-in that may or may not get me marked as a spammer, as well as uploading the shots. So bear with this experiment, and there should be more eye-candy goodness as the week progresses.
Facebook & Pajamas Media: the “Site Traffic” Monetization Myth
General interest sites, however … well, let me put it this way. Check out the sode aisle in the supermarket next time you’re there. Diet Coke, Diet Coke with Lime, Diet Coke with Splenda, Diet Vanilla Coke, Diet Black Cherry Coke, Coke Blak, Regular Coke, No-Caffeine Coke, Coke Zero, Diet Caffeine Free Coke, Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Coke with Vitamins.
Each of those products exists because there is a niche out there that wants to drink them. Why would Coke want to waste its ad dollars for health nuts that want a soda that has vitamins and that they can delude themselves into thinking that is “good for them” … on a site that has an audience of cigar-smoking red-meat-eaters?
The advertisers have had to fragment their products. Those fragmented products have to be marketed just to the people who are going to buy them, or they are not viable. That means that the platforms that those products advertise on have to be similarly well-defined.
The root of the problems with mass media isn’t that there isn’t interest in the information – it’s that the advertising money is shifting away to places where the audience is better defined & targetable.
Bailout Cash for Newspapers? A Cure That Would Only Worsen the Underlying Disease…
OK, it’s a given that journalists have something of a Messiah Complex. You have to have something else going on psychologically to get into this low-pay high-stress field. But this is really crossing the line. And making an unfortunate conflation between the newspaper industry and good journalism – yes, it gets done at newspapers, and there are some magnificent examples of this. But the industry is asphyxiating itself, and dumping wads of cash on it will not solve the underlying problems.
Government intervention here would create more problems than it would solve.
E-Ink Chatter Getting Louder: Dying Newspapers May Jump to E-Paper Devices
I still think that obsessing on the platform that the news comes across on is symptomatic of a severe case of Missing The Point. Let me say it again: viewing the newspaper crisis as being caused just because people don't like buying paper anymore is akin to a...