That unfortunately timed film about FIFA really wasn’t box office dynamite. Proof that the opposite of promotion can also be quite effective, and that audiences aren’t all that keen on films about meetings.
Author: loughlin
✩ Want You To Know: Here Comes The Summer School
Ron Swanson, not in Glenties
We’re back, because there’s just too much excitement. Everything has been hacked! Gawker is tearing it self apart from within! The MacGill Summer School is in full swing! (Wait, that last one isn’t remotely exciting, or important, or even funny.)
First up, hackers got hold of lots and lots of user data from Ashley Madison, the Internet’s number one destination for people who want to have extramarital affairs. The site boasted how secure it was last year, and if that isn’t a red rag to a bull then I don’t know what is. Puerile giggling aside, this has the potential to cause real damage to users of the site who may have naively believed Ashley Madison’s claim that it could fully scrub all their details. For a fee, of course. Privacy is privacy, no matter what, and protesting Ashley Madison’s poor handling of it’s privacy promises by breaching user’s privacy isn’t a justification.
Yet another example of how, for most firms, security is expensive and at best an afterthought. Here’s a depressing 1999 hot take on it from the then CEO of Sun, Scott McNealy: “You have zero privacy anyway”.
Onwards to the good ship Gawker. It’s the old, old story here – put a sleazy post up, take the post down, lose your managing editor and editor-in-chief amidst a lot of handwaving about Chinese walls and publishing of the Gawker brand book. But does anybody outside US online media really care?
Worth Pondering
Eye Candy
Totally Confused
Peak juice, against subwoofers, flying for free, harassers are literally losers and Richard meets J.
Finally, this mildly dystopian vision of the future of office software is well worth a read. Includes a cameo from Jack Lemmon as a spreadsheet cell.
Yours etc., @loughlin
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Mecca Live
Mix 27
So, That Latest Reddit Thing
The regularly excellent ReplyAll podcast has a good roundup of the current drama over at Reddit. Useful if you don’t know what a Reddit is. Equally useful if you do know what a Reddit is but tend to avoid it because of its Redditness.
If you want to read more, here’s a collection of the least confusing articles about Reddit.
TL;DR: Reddit is a valuable online property because it can direct vast amounts of traffic. This value is based on the work of unpaid Redditors who act as taste makers. A surprisingly large number of these taste makers also happen to be quite awful people. Whether they’re genuinely awful or just being ironically awful is immaterial. What is at issue is that for Reddit to monetise it’s traffic-directing ability and appeal to wary advertisers it has to clean up the nastiness that frequently spills onto its front page. (Of course, removing all the illegal and distasteful material up there would be ideal but hey, baby steps.) Any attempt to do this is met with user and moderator revolts and outrage. In order to sort this out Reddit would need to pay for some professional fumigation and ongoing community management. Thus far it has shown little inclination to do so.
- ‘The Death Of Reddit’, Chuq Von Rospach
- ‘No One Wants To Admit It, But Reddit Can’t Be Saved’, Sam Biddle, Gawker
- ‘Après Moi, Le Déluge: What Went Wrong On Reddit’, Sarah Jeong, Forbes
- ‘Reddit Is Not The Front Page Of The Internet’, Smantha Allen, The Daily Beast
Consider This
I saw a note recently about a parent who disciplines their child by restricting him to only watching television instead of YouTube. Like it or not, this is where the mass entertainment puck is going.
Of course, YouTube comes as standard on all new Smart TVs. YouTube is where the smart advertising dollars should be going. There’s a short enough window now for figuring how to do it right without breaking online video with advertising the way online text has been broken by online advertising.
Something Else That Is Eating The World
Interesting enough to people who haven’t been paying much attention for the last five years I guess.
Something For The Weekend
The thing I most regret from the first half of this year is not making the Sleater-Kinney gig in Dublin. Oh well, this sort of makes up for it.
Quote Magnets
More on the Wrongly Attributed Statement from Crooked Timber. In a break with usual Internetting policy, I highly recommend reading the comments. There’s some great material in there.
Every two minutes on Twitter, someone tweets, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” and wrongly attributes it to Edmund Burke. Burke never said any such thing. But the myth persists.
Mom Rock?
Well, it was about getting to know that I had a bias about music. The bias was broken standing in line at Best Buy in my teacher-consultant clothes after working, looking like I don’t fit here with the long-haired, studded, metallic-looking kids who looked like they were going to be tough but were actually the kindest kids.
This really is the softest metal story ever.
Everybody was awesome to me, I was treated like a princess! The bouncer was not going to let me sign more than one thing, and then…Dave Mustaine? Am I right?
Yes, you are right.He was like “Let her go.” And everyone in line took a picture of me with Dave. You gotta let that barrier down.
From radio.com, What Is ‘Mom Rock’? A Mother Responds. There’s a whole lot more discussion about what constitutes Mom Rock over on Metafilter.
One time, when I was home from college in the 70s, my white surburban mom took me aside and said she had to ask me something. She then took out a small notepad and said, I keeping hearing this song on the radio, and it has a part where the singer says (reading from the notepad) I’m never gonna give you up, cuz quittin’ just ain’t my stick. Did I know this song? I told her it sounded like the song she wanted was “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Barry White. She took down this information very carefully in her notebook. Much later she told me that she thought that Barry White’s voice was incredibly sexy, but she was alarmed by how overweight he was.