unmediated

PSA: If you're going to attempt insurance fraud, you might want to avoid posting on YouTube [w/video] — Autoblog

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:53:43 -0400

PSA: If you're going to attempt insurance fraud, you might want to avoid posting on YouTube [w/video] — Autoblog:

Unfortunately for Chen, during the paperwork processing following that ‘second’ accident, the body shop informed Chen’s insurance company that it had been holding on to the mangled GT-R since March. Investigators then searched YouTube for any evidence of the incident, and apparently they believe that they’ve found it – the insurer alleges that the footage shown after the jump incident shows damage consistent with that of Chen’s GT-R after a mountain run with a Mitsubishi Evolution IX MR goes awry. The actual crash doesn’t look all that bad, but the apparent $76,000 repair bill shows that near-supercars can cost a boatload of money to fix. Regardless of the severity of the accident, as a result of the investigation, Chen has officially been charged with six felony counts of insurance fraud, and his sister has been charged with one count.

"One of the strangest challenges porn faces is competition from online games like World of Warcraft,..."

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:07:51 -0500

“One of the strangest challenges porn faces is competition from online games like World of Warcraft, though the connection may at first seem random. “It is all entertainment that you are getting involved in the same way as porn is entertainment,” said Aiden. “The games are competition for porn. Fans jerk off to porn and are done, but you can keep playing a game.””

- Top 5 Reasons Porn-for-Profit Is Dying - The Daily Beast

Kindle Fans Punish Publisher For Delaying Ebook Releases By Giving Books One-Star Reviews | Techdirt

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:17:58 -0500

Kindle Fans Punish Publisher For Delaying Ebook Releases By Giving Books One-Star Reviews | Techdirt:

Last month we pointed out what a bad idea it was for book publishers to go against the market’s wishes and to delay the release of certain ebooks, hoping to drive more people to the (higher margin) hardcover versions of the book. This is incredibly anti-consumer thinking and assumes, incorrectly, that people will happily accept the format the publisher gives them. Not surprisingly, consumers are starting to rebel. Apparently some of the books are getting hit with one-star reviews on Amazon as punishment. For example, HarperCollins — one of the leading supporters of these silly “windowed” releases — is discovering that its well-hyped book Game Change is filling up with one-star reviews. Going against what your consumers want is almost never a good idea.

Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to...

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:53:12 -0500

Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software

(via googletechtalks)

Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:35:33 -0500

Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail :

Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons — churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you’re done. On the web, no-one knows you’re a content-grinder.

"This will be the year when it becomes apparent that the future of news and media is entrepreneurial,..."

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:22:33 -0500

“

This will be the year when it becomes apparent that the future of news and media is entrepreneurial, not institutional. The year will see the rise of the new overtake the fall of the old. Even so, while we suffer moguls’ death rattles, we will hear continued debate over government intervention to protect them through proposed changes in copyright, tax favours and direct subsidy. If the government steps in, it will be to bail them out as it did for bad banks and General Motors. And we know how well that worked. A concurrent debate in Washington will reach its climax this year over net neutrality and the means to bring broadband ubiquity to the nation. That is the intervention the entrepreneurs seek.

If, instead of the same tired debates over old media, you seek something new, go mobile. In 2010, we will see Google battle Apple for the right to connect us, not just with each other but with information about any place, any thing and anyone. As we also say in America, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

”

- Jeff Jarvis (via soupsoup)

Mimi Ito on Participation Literacy, Part One Mizuko Ito, trained...

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 22:15:20 -0500

Mimi Ito on Participation Literacy, Part One

Mizuko Ito, trained as an anthropologist, has spent more than a decade hanging out with, interacting with, and observing young people who are engaging new media in their own ways - from her early observations of the ways young girls in Tokyo were appropriating pagers and mobile short-messaging for their own social purposes, to her most recent ethnographic study of youth media practices.

The Tsunami of 2004, Online Video's First Major Event

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 16:48:47 -0500

dembot:

Today marks the five year anniversary of the great Asian Tsunami of December 26th, 2004. This was a turning point for online video as it was the first time people from all around the world went online to watch. For all who now take online video for granted, this was even before Google Video. Here is a story I wrote about my own experience which happened just two months after I had launched Rocketboom:

“On a Sunday when I was writing the script and looking for news stories for the following Monday, I witnessed the tsunami go down online via the main stream media like cnn.com particular. So I knew the issue was so intense that there would be nothing else to say on Monday and so I spent all day looking for images and video and personal accounts - anything that I could find to “show”. This was something I had never done to this degree because I had never really had an impetus. But looking around for footage and pictures was what I would do for any event, big or small on a daily basis for Rocketboom so it started as just another day.

Anyway, I couldn’t find any videos on the day of, but I found two sites in Singapore that had about three people total who had posted a whole load of photos. So I believe I created perhaps the first tsunami video online that was a montage of the images with intense background music. While we did not have as much of a reach with our content at the time, we gained very high search return results for “tsunami video” apparently.

There was another major factor that led to the endurance of tsunami traffic: When Waxy and others like myself had accumulated the videos the next day, the same that also became really popular, I decided to turn them all into quicktime videos because there were none. As a result I was the only one serving the Quicktime files for several days and so probably all of those original batch videos that are out there that are quicktime, are generations from me (not to say that makes me special or anything, just pointing it out because i think its interesting), coincidentally. A few sites took these files and re-seeded them in bittorrent sites and then they quickly surpassed our search authority as it stacked against the time, I reckon. I assume Robin Good has an interesting tale to tell because we received a huge amount of traffic from his massive roundup as just one example.

[**aside: Of course I could not pay for the bandwidth and had the videos on the Parsons.edu server space. I brought the graduate multimedia sever down to a grinding halt (the same server that everyone uses to experiment with all kinds of wacky and powerful stuff). We couldn’t even get the server to deliver a 5k gif file until I renamed the videos and brought them back on slowly over days.

[**to the other aside: I watched as iFilm, the massively obnoxious and ad invasive leech site, learned a thing or two during this time as well about search return results. Of course with their link authority, they became the mainstream site to watch the tsunami videos as the only known option to a lot of people to start with. I remember later, on the day before the Superbowl this year, iFilm had posted all of the superbowl commercials, including all of the text and even video and image placeholders for ALL of the commercials in order to get them up first and to receive the best search results. So if you went to iFilm that night before the game, you could click on a bunch of superbowl commercials, which of course never loaded. But all of the advertisements surrounding the commercials were there and they were already making big bucks before they even copied the broadcasts and then posted the videos. Thats crummy of them and you can predict their behavior to be like this in the future too I suppose. I have noticed that over the last few months the obnoxiousness had gone way down, but its still pretty out-of-control for my tastes]”

Here are a couple of note now on YouTube:

For one of the best historical accounts of the various tsunami videos now, see:

http://www.asiantsunamivideos.com/

"As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space – it’s private because we have..."

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:47:28 -0500

“As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space – it’s private because we have control over it. The thing is, for young people it’s not a private space – they have no control. They have no control over who comes in and out of their room, or who comes in and out of their house. As a result the online world feels more private because it feels like it has more control.”

- danah boyd, Guardian Interview

Another gem quote: “As a technologist, we all like ‘techno-utopia’, this is the great democratiser… Sure, we’ve made creation and distribution more available to anyone, but at the same time we’ve made those things irrelevant. Now the commodity isn’t distribution, it’s attention – and guess what? Who gets attention is still sitting on a power law curve … we’re not actually democratising the whole system – we’re just shifting the way in which we discriminate.

(via christmasgorilla) (via mikehudack)

(via ronenreblogs)

Everything old is new again: Facebook and AOL - aiaio - the Alexander Interactive blog

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:04:56 -0500

Everything old is new again: Facebook and AOL - aiaio - the Alexander Interactive blog:

What makes Facebook interesting these days? Basically the same things that made AOL a star a decade earlier.

private messaging without an external email client: just like AOL!

live chat: just like AOL!

integrated games and shopping: just like AOL!

every company feels a need to be there: just like AOL!

And here we are again, with consumers converging on a single site and companies clamoring to capture their attention.

AOL was eventually done in by a lack of openness and charging for options that were free elsewhere. So far, Facebook has avoided those mistakes. It will be interesting to see what social and economic forces drive its future—and whether it ultimately becomes something other than The Next AOL.

"The core of the issue is this: the TV buyers have 50+ years of econometric modeling history that..."

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:33:20 -0500

“

The core of the issue is this: the TV buyers have 50+ years of econometric modeling history that tells them if they buy X amount of GRPs or TRPs (Target Rating Points), it will generate Y in return. Everyone acknowledges that there are major flaws with this methodology, but are, for the most part, resigned to it; accepting it as the best we’ve got.

As video expands to other platforms, including online, digital out-of-home, and mobile, there’s a natural desire to take that same metric and apply. But doing so fails to account for the unique attributes of these new digital delivery channels — things like interactivity, ratio of ad clutter to content, dynamic ad serving, and so forth.

”

- Are All Screens Created Equal? - ClickZ

I’ve already talked about how online GRPs are not the answer. Not only are all screens not created equal, but there is a big difference between seeing an ad inserted into Lost on Hulu and an ad on a monkey video on YouTube.

(via everythingismedia)

Or the powerful custom integration and white label content executions that sites like blip.tv can produce. We’re seeing record interaction rates as we get better and better at figuring out how to make awesome digital video ads that WORK.

(via evangotlib) (via mikehudack)

Losing Net Neutrality, Worst Case Scenario :...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:56:41 -0400

Losing Net Neutrality, Worst Case Scenario : Gizmodo

This is John McCain’s wet dream.

via: soupsoup: atomische

FCC Backs Net Neutrality — And Then Some.

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:41:24 -0400

FCC Backs Net Neutrality — And Then Some.:

Ryan Singel at Wired News

FCC chairman Julius Genachowski delivered Monday on President Obama’s promise to back “net neutrality.” But he went much further than merely seeking to expand rules that prohibit ISPs from filtering or blocking net traffic — he proposed that they cover all broadband connections, including data connections for smartphones.

Genachowski, Obama’s law school classmate, announced in a speech Monday at the Brookings Institution his intent to codify and expand the four current broadband principles (.pdf) known as the Four Freedoms and extend them to all broadband connections. He said that an open internet is necessary for economic growth and democratic participation. The rules were originally applied only to wireline broadband services, and the FCC kept postponing any ruling on whether they also applied to wireless services.

via soupsoup

"The NFL said Monday it will allow players to use social media networks this season, but not during..."

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:34:27 -0400

“The NFL said Monday it will allow players to use social media networks this season, but not during games. Players, coaches and football operations personnel can use Twitter, Facebook and other social media up to 90 minutes before kickoff, and after the game following traditional media interviews.

During games, no updates will be permitted by the individual himself or anyone representing him on his personal Twitter, Facebook or any other social media account, the league said.

The use of social media by NFL game officials and officiating department personnel will be prohibited at all times. The league, which has always barred play-by-play descriptions of games in progress, also extended that ban to social media platforms.

Earlier this summer, Chargers cornerback Antonio Cromartie was fined $2,500 by the team for criticizing the food service at training camp on Twitter.”

- Tweet delete: NFL bans social media in games - ESPN

via Deadspin

I don’t think refs would benefit from being on the internet much.

(via peterwknox)

Publishers Are Killing Web Advertising’s Potential With Misguided Pricing | paidContent

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:53:36 -0400

Publishers Are Killing Web Advertising’s Potential With Misguided Pricing | paidContent:

rafer sez:
Nice, all online ad pricing is wrong. This concrete measurement crap is misleading. The “truth” is contained in offline ad pricing. We should apply that methodology to the Internet.

Who, really, is The Associated Press accusing of copyright infringement? » Nieman Journalism Lab

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:04:20 -0400

Who, really, is The Associated Press accusing of copyright infringement? » Nieman Journalism Lab:

If, say, Newser were to balk at a pricier contract and begin treating AP content the way it deals with other news organizations — headlines, excerpts, links — I get the impression that the AP would take action. “There’s no question that we see value in headlines,” Kasi told me, “and that value in the headlines is that we’d rather that it point to our publishers’ sites than some other site, for example, if all the other site is doing is simply cutting and pasting our content.”

Hackers Use Twitter to Control Botnet : Wired.com

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:56:32 -0400

Hackers Use Twitter to Control Botnet : Wired.com:

Hackers are now using Twitter to send coded update messages to computers they’ve previously infected with rogue code, according to a report from net-monitoring firm Arbor Networks.

This looks to be the first reported case of hackers using the popular micro-messaging company to control botnets, which are assemblages of infected PCs that can be directed to spy on their users, send spam, or attack web sites with fake traffic.

Arbor Network’s Jose Nazario, an expert on botnets, discovered the so-called command-and-control structure. Infected computers were following the Twitter feed “Upd4t3″ (now suspended) through its RSS feed.

“Basically, what it does is use the status messages to send out new links to contact, then these contain new commands or executables to download and run,” Nazario wrote. “It’s an info-stealer operation.”

The tweets turned out to be obfuscated links to sites where further malicious code and instructions could be downloaded.

Hackers have long used IRC chat rooms to control botnets, and have continually used clever technologies, such as peer-to-peer strategies, to counter efforts to track, disrupt and sometimes decapitate the bots.

Perhaps what’s surprising then is that it’s taken so long for hackers to take Twitter to the dark side.

There’s something ironic about this finding, given that Russian hackers allegedly used a botnet to take Twitter down for two days last week.

Movie aims to rein in China’s online mob - msnbc.com

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:57:16 -0400

Movie aims to rein in China’s online mob - msnbc.com:

In the past few years, China’s Internet vigilantes have mobilized to root out, expose and shame people they perceive to be exhibiting corrupt or immoral behavior. Marked for their unfettered zeal, the literal translation of the Chinese term for this ad hoc group of sleuthing online activists is: “human flesh search engine.” Nevertheless, while the stature of this group of online watchmen continues to grow, a new Chinese movie may force the Internet phenomenon out of the online sphere and into the country’s public dialogue. “Invisible Killer,” produced and co-written by Xie Xiaodong, is the first movie to broach the subject of Internet vigilantism and dramatize the pitfalls of having a mobilized and motivated online mob administering its own brand of justice.

Amateur Photographer soupsoup: nevver: 1953 Apparently not a...

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:07:55 -0400

Amateur Photographer

soupsoup:

nevver:

1953

Apparently not a new phenomenon.

Evolution of a Revolution: Visualizing Millions of Iran...

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:42:32 -0400

Evolution of a Revolution: Visualizing Millions of Iran Tweets

via jamiew