July 2011
29 posts
June 2011
52 posts
How Corporations Buy Access to Power →
alternet.org
I think you can imagine how a major bank/investment firm like Goldman Sachs can gain access to power. They obviously can make or withhold campaign contributions. They can throw money into political action committees that go after politicians who want to mess with them. They also can offer politicians lucrative six or seven figure jobs should they ever fail to win reelection or want to retire from public service. They can use their pull to get their employees hired by the government. They can hire their regulators. There are many ways that rich Wall Street bankers can assure that Washington DC will let them do pretty much anything they want to do, even if it’s harmful to the country. But, sometimes, they don’t need to do anything.
Read the rest (it’s only about 300 words more) but we warned: it’s going to infuriate you.
“Well what I want them to know is just like, John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too.”
—
Rep. Michele Bachmann, kicking off her presidential campaign in Waterloo, Iowa—and trying to make reference to American movie star John Wayne. But the John Wayne she was thinking of was from Winterset, Iowa, as the Washington Times notes. Serial killer John Wayne Gacy was from Waterloo. (via officialssay)
Incredible.
(via mikehudack)
“One of my responsibilities as Commander in Chief is to keep an eye on robots. And I’m pleased to report that the robots you manufacture here seem peaceful. At least for now.”
—President Obama talking to the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon. (via juliasegal)
Play
“Team Bondi recreated 1940’s Los Angeles by using aerial photographs taken by Robert Spence. In a career spanning over 50 years, Spence took over 110,000 aerial photographs of Los Angeles. The developers used Spence’s photographs to create traffic patterns and public transport routes as well as the location and condition of buildings.”
—L.A. Noire, Wikipedia
“A redesign of the blip.tv home page last month has resulted in a sleek, uncluttered template that highlights 12 shows in a grid under the headline ‘Discover the best in original Web series.’ They are unlabeled, but floating your cursor over one of them brings up a larger box with the show’s title and a description.”
—
All Those Online Videos, Still Chasing an Audience - New York Times
New York Times TV critic Mike Hale decided to use his Sunday column to talk about blip.tv and original Web series. We didn’t pitch the story, he just decided to do it. Which is very flattering. It would seem that we’re making some waves.
Overall the article is well written and entirely fair. Hale notes that many of the series we feature have “narrow and homogenous” target audiences, and uses Hacker News Network’s “HNNCast” as an example. This is true. Most Web series today have narrow and homogenous target audiences, and this is one of the features that differentiates them most strongly from television. On TV you have massive opportunity cost and so you have to program, effectively, to the lowest common denominator. On the Web a “narrow and homogenous” audience of hundreds of thousands or single digit millions can be plenty to profitably sustain a series. This is why Web series audiences are generally more passionate about the shows than TV audiences are. You’re not just channel flipping and finding something that’s “good enough” to occupy your time. You’re going out of your way to find something interesting and engaging that fits your interests.
But a great many of the series being created and featured on blip are interesting to broad audiences and are funny, entertaining and fictional. One of my personal favorites remains Aidan 5, but our drama category and comedy category feature a great many more.
We’re still figuring out what to feature, when to do it, and how to do it. But original web series are coming into their own. The fact that Mike Hale and his editors decided to use half a page of Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section to comment on the phenomenon is evidence of this. So are the tens of millions of viewers who watch blip.tv series every month.
The one thing that bummed me out? Hale wrote that “Taken as a whole the Blip editors’ selections defined a territory for original Web video series whose borders would include reality TV, sketch comedy, geek-culture channels like G4 and, to a disturbing degree, public-access cable.” This, my friends, is not public access cable. This is TBS, CNN, HBO and MTV in 1981.
(via mikehudack)
