Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Consumers challenge FCC antipiracy rules. A coalition of groups--including librarian and consumers associations and the Electronic Frontier Foundation--say that regulators overstepped their bounds with new digital broadcast rules. [CNET News.com] 9:33:20 PM    comment []

Dan Gillmor posted chapter 1 and the intro, in draft form, of his upcoming book "Making the News." [Scripting News] 8:03:25 PM    comment []

Fast Company: The Google of Email? This powerful feature makes folders largely unnecessary. If you insist on filing, Bloomba still lets you. But Bloomba's search functionality and its limitless storage capacity ensure that you'll never need to file a message again, and that you'll always be able to find what you're looking for in a matter of seconds. [Tomalak's Realm] 3:36:55 PM    comment []

Intel to stop selling Wi-Fi chips in China. The chipmaker says it hasn't found a satisfactory way to incorporate an imposed encryption standard into its Wi-Fi chips, as trade tensions between the United States and China heat up. [CNET News.com] 3:24:23 PM    comment []

Not only don't they show videos anymore, but The Real World is a shadow of its former self. And I have to agree. Boob Tube: MTV used to be about ambition. Now it's about hot tubs. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in Washington Monthly. "The Real World" gave birth to the entire genre of reality television, and it has has taken on to be everything that many people have come to hate about such programs: a lowest-common-denominator, near-pornographic sensibility, and the pervasive sense that we are not watching real people or events, but something soap-operatic and staged. But in its early years, when the program was at least a little bit better, "The Real World" embodied the sorts of characteristics that fueled reality television's extraordinary rise to popularity: the intensely personal dramas, the vivid characters, and the sense (as was the case on "Survivor" or "American Idol") of the almost- attainable-exotic, the notion that we were seeing a world that we did not quite belong to, but wished we did. Those first shows were aired when I was 13, and I loved them absolutely. They gave viewers like me a sense that there was a more sophisticated, urbane, mature version of cool out there to which we might aspire, once we escaped the stultifying, tyrannical cool of adolescence. It also gave us some idea of what that new cool might look like. It would involve many friends who had dreadlocks, and some who were intimately acquainted with the operation of turntables. Brightly colored t-shirts with ironic slogans would abound. We would know people who were gay, who were from foreign countries, and maybe even some who were both gay and from foreign countries. Heartbreak would be involved. We would believe deeply in things. There would be exposed brick, and facial hair. We would sometimes be depressed, but when we were depressed, attractive people of the opposite sex would talk to the camera and say how sexy we were when we were depressed; it would be cool to be brooding. We would all be starting out in careers, but they would be exciting (at least to us)--cartoonist, punk rock singer. Everyone would tell us our dreams were not attainable but we would know they were. And we would all grin sheepishly when we admitted that we had been less- than-cool in junior high, but everyone would laugh and not believe us, because how could you believe that we had once not been cool? We didn't realize we were being herded into a narrow cultural corridor from which we would emerge as full-fledged yuppies, renovating row houses and evaluating progressive private schools and pasta pots. We just thought we were going to be cool. >From the beginning, critics said that the fantasy of "The Real World" presented was deeply parochial--a "Saturday Night Live" skit at the time depicted the show as a lot of whiny twenty-somethings in flannels arguing over who had to feed the fish--and they were right, it was parochial. But for people my age, life itself was pretty small- minded, and the parochial ideal that MTV was selling (your hip twenties) was a whole lot better than the parochial culture we were involved in (middle school). Plus, there was a sweet earnestness to those early episodes that inquiring adolescents could appreciate. The characters struggled with real career ambitions and romantic interests. They were not simply acting for the camera: They were acting out their lives. Unlike teenagers who were (and still are) the program's target demographic, the show's characters were in their mid-20s. They had clearly defined and articulated ideas of what they wanted to do with their lives--to be a cartoonist or a dancer--and they were trying to get there. In the first four seasons, the overarching, propulsive drama was that of people starting to immerse themselves in quasi-adult lives and careers, and the episodes documented the ways in which their experiences corrupted or emboldened their original notions of who they were. But "The Real World" has since changed its formula dramatically. No longer an outlet for twenty-somethings to brood about their future careers, the show has become a cyclic three-month on-air party for teenagers to mingle in hot tubs and obsess about the present. The locales have changed--from creative meccas like New York and London to vacation spots like Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Hawaii. MTV has rejiggered the show to require characters to engage in artificial, season-long contests or projects--like putting together a fashion show--which the characters embrace in the way most American teenagers experience spring break: as a big party. The houses, which started off as funky lofts, have become ludicrously large and fancy fantasy palaces: the top floor of the Palms Hotel, a chateau in Paris. The characters don't even look like real people anymore--they are far, far too attractive, the guys all balled-up pecs and biceps and the girls all slim, languorous limbs. The show never depicted ugly people, but the characters, in the beginning, had the luxury of being only ordinary looking. By Las Vegas, the cast looked like refugees from a workout video. MTV made its name by beaming an edgy version of urban cool to middle-American teens, which put it in the position of preaching to its audience, or at least to those suburban kids who already dreamt of the big city. "The Real World" was a crucial part of this image, and it also let the network document for its viewers one way in which adolescents become adults (a topic of eternal interest to the teenaged audience). But MTV now uses the show to broadcast a much different narrative of how to grow up: spring break, hookups, and drunkenness. This is much closer to the experiences and fantasies of most teenagers. This new image has won MTV more viewers--the network and "The Real World" are both more popular than they ever have been. But as MTV has revamped its notion of what is cool, it has thrown its aspirational message overboard. 1:33:24 PM    comment []

Man to pay $25,000 for posting fake report on Internet (Dow Jones/AP). The Securities and Exchange Commission said Nikolai Safavi sold short 1,000 Sina shares at $42 a share on Oct. 24, essentially placing a bet that the price of the stock would fall. On Oct. 28, Safavi published the fake story, which listed two actual Reuters reporters as authors, on a Yahoo Finance message board, the SEC said. Safavi made a profit of $350 before transaction costs and interest, according to the SEC. 11:33:03 AM    comment []

>From Kevin Taglang: COMMUNICATIONS LOBBYING TOPS $100 MILLION Warren Communications News analyzed 400 communications-related lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Secretary of the Senate and has compiled its findings in Paying to Play: $100 Million to Influence Communications Policy, January-June 2003 [$695 retail, but just $495 for you fellow CommDaily subscribers]. As this Congress was just gearing up work and money spent in the second half 0f 2003 could be much higher. $53.5 million of the $100 million was spent on wireline telecom issues and $39.8 million was spent on wireless issues including spectrum management. The top spenders on lobbying were: AT&T ($5.6 million), Microsoft ($5.5 million), the trade group USTA ($4.62 million), USTA members BellSouth ($4.5 million) and Verizon ($4.3 million). [SOURCE: Communications Daily, AUTHOR: Patrick Ross] (Not available online) At the FCC, They Ought to Be in Pictures A humorous "getting to know you" piece in the "In the Loop" column discusses the great shots of FCC Chairman Powell with SpongeBob SquarePants, the Nickelodeon character who lives in a pineapple under the sea; another with Diana Ross; then with Aretha Franklin; and one with Donny and Marie Osmond -- showing that no one's musical taste is perfect. And there's one of his senior staff assistants, Dorothy Clingman, with Stevie Wonder. Kamen writes, "Clearly too much time on their hands over there." But how did Kamen get the time to peruse all the photo galleries of FCC Commissioners -- and what, exactly, was he hoping to find? See the Powell pics at the FCC site [SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Al Kamen] (requires registration) 10:32:54 AM    comment []

The Clash of the Barbecue Titans. An American barbecue master takes on Japan's top samurai chef on Japanese television. By Steven Raichlen. [New York Times: Business] Guess who won? 7:09:06 AM    comment []

Amateur Celebrities Pick a Movie and Join In. Movieoke, karaoke's very young American-born cousin, is trying to find its footing in a small, cluttered East Village basement club. By Randy Kennedy. [New York Times: Business] 7:07:44 AM    comment []

BugMeNot. Are you annoyed when you have to login at some service, just in order to access a little information? Do you enter fake information? Well try BugMeNot. This service maintains a database of usernames and passwords to help you login quickly. Which shows that a login-system is only useful if it offers something valuable for the user. [Blueblog] 7:00:14 AM    comment []

In-Flight Net Set to Take Off. In April Boeing will offer an in-flight broadband connection for those who simply can't bear to be unplugged. The service, Connexion, sounds great on paper, but it may be slow to take off because of cost and competition. By Amit Asaravala. [Wired News] 6:57:17 AM    comment []