Friday, May 21, 2010

Canuck tweets while Bangkok burns

/> The photo above courtesy of Kees


Is this a good idea? Tweeting while Bangkok burns... Mark MacKinnon, an earnest Canadian journalist from the Globe & Mail, breezed in from Beijing and might have been more alert to the nuances of the situation in Thailand if he weren't thumbing his blackberry every few minutes. The chaos unfolded right outside the Foreign Press Association (at Chidlom station on the fabled skytrain) and more and more, one of Asia's great capitals looks ripe for revolution, especially if the revered King expires. Still, in retrospect it's instructive to see the chaos unfold in real time, and the rumors affirmed or supplanted. MacKinnon even photo-tweets during an ambulance ride!
(hat tip to Kees for final photo; middle one tweeted by Mark MacKinnon.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

NYT highlights business models for online


Grey Lady talks up some whiz-bang net start-ups: The New York Times magazine profiles the Faster Times. Journalism as we now know it is measured by clicks. Uh-huh.

Feral Beast could have enlightened the reporter on such mundane matters: the top-ever hits on our site are for items tagged "Marilyn Monroe Fellatio" or "Kiddie porn". There's a reason that aggravating aggregators like the HuffPo now favor slideshows that require multiple clicks to get through and often a little "vote your fave-rave" poll. And everyone knows that the proliferation of online videos is due to the discovery that an advertiser can compel a viewer to watch a 10-second spiel before the actual requested video gets played.

The Feral Beast knows that users prefer not to pay for content. (Same thing used to be true of early television, way before cable, when it was free to those who owned a set and commercial sponsors were the angels that funded programming. Even on pay-tv cable these days, advertising creeps in, and mini-commercials sometimes crowd the margins of the screen, like Mad Magazine's marginal cartoons used to do)

Perhaps the middleman should pay for the content it provides its customers. Internet users pay for online connection, through WiFi providers. These businesses are the ones who gain from hit-heavy websites and the free news content...although they could probably make a decent living off the porn alone.
(Hat tip to Sarah S Bangor, savvy blogger of "The Web We Weave" on wordpress for the photo of newspapers on a laptop. Happy to see you have a paid gig now!)

Friday, May 7, 2010

Uh oh. X Rated.


How 'bout that Barack Obama Hussein X? Rad, Man in de (White) house.
The WashPo online had some quick correcting to do when they somehow confounded the present prez with the late preacher... so these page grabs by Gawker have got to be embarrassing indeed

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Obama shines at White House Correspondents' Dinner


A teleprompter speech, written by others,,,but the Prez rocked it and the press ate it up. !