Laughing Meme » media

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

Kellan — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 07:04:47 +0000

Content might not be surprising to a Boing Boing reading crowd, or anyone who has paid attention to the media monopoly. But this is well done, engaging, and human, an excellent documentary on the MPAA’s secret rating board. A subject that would be quirky and odd if it wasn’t so problematic.

Make sure to watch the deleted scenes on the DVD, I think they cut some of the best material from the movie.

You may have to be a Netflix subscriber to get this on DVD, as they seem to be the primary distributor for this film.

Rafe: “Go ahead and sugar coat it for us”

Kellan — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 20:33:00 +0000

Newsweek covers from around the world.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rafe/253297162/

“…airline passengers are still advised not to bring storms on board aircraft with them, even tropical depressions you might believe would be harmless.”

Kellan — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 20:31:00 +0000

“And now back to your regularly scheduled security theater.”

http://www.ambiguous.org/archive.php3/2006/08/10#quinn2006810.1

Anyone else hear the rumor that Viacom made an $800mil bid for Facebook, and Facebook said ‘No’?

Kellan — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:38:00 +0000

Z. is playing a very serious game of chicken with Viacom, but wow. update [2006/03/28] Yes other people have heard it

http://facebook.com/

bdv: Del.icio.us partners with Washington Post for story tagging

Kellan — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 02:37:00 +0000

“This isn’t just a clever use of Del.icio.us by a savvy member of the [corporate media]“. WP is certainly my first choice on the rather short list of “newspaper whom will be relevant in 20 years”. I wonder if this is Y!’s influence?

http://hybernaut.com/del.icio.us-washington-post

Being interviewed by the corporate media is one of the most disillusioning events imaginable.

Kellan — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 21:53:00 +0000

Nice to hear that even pros like Jeff Jarvis sometimes can’t help giving them the soundbite they’re digging for.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2006/02/06/behind-the-cameras/

Boing Boing: Current TV’s online storytelling guide launches (with Xeni)

Kellan — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 17:51:00 +0000

good howtos for citizen journalists on using video

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/12/current_tvs_online_s.html

rc3.org: Changing the rules

Kellan — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:19:00 +0000

Sony is changing the cost/benefit analysis of buying CDs vs buying tracks at Apple’s iTunes.

http://rc3.org/2005/11/changing_the_rules.php

CommonTimes Integrates with del.icio.us and Technorati

Kellan — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 01:59:57 +0000

Fishing progressive news out the daily torrent of the del.icio.us link stream

http://blog.commonbits.org/2005/10/commontimes_int.html

CommonTimes: Social Bookmarking as Open Editing

Kellan — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 19:56:59 +0000

del.icio.us is perhaps the beating heart of my web these days, not because I find bookmarks so useful, but because its useful to have a generic service for streaming links. But generic only gets you so far, as an engine for discovery del.icio.us can be painful, flipping through pages and pages of chronologically sorted results. Its comparable to the difference between Google’s search, with its largely generic listing of pages, and Google News which uses its domain knowledge to chunk, categorizes, and summarize the days news.

CommonTimes

This is what CommonTimes is about. A project Jeff, Brian, and others launched a few months ago; it iterates on the successful model of del.icio.us to provide news centric “open editing” for the web. A vertical social bookmarking site, with a light touch editorial process to keep the site on topic.

The Web Needs Editors!

CT provides most of what you’d expect, tags, groups, bookmarklets, heat maps, RESTful APIs and some nice touches like an “Add from Bloglines” Greasemonkey script, and an adapted version of the del AJAX browser.

Perhaps more importantly CT points forward to a strategy (among many) for dealing with ever expanding problem of information overload, “smarter clients.” (Do I sound like a Microsoftie?) One approach is the AI-inspired, strong editor approach of a tech.memeorandum .

But personally my gets are on the “many editors makes categorization easy” technique that has got to be the years surprise success story, combined with tools which take advantage of available metadata, either through inference of explicit scoping.

Now that the idea is out there I’m surprised that there aren’t dozens of these vertical bookmarking sites.

Scaling Down, Scaling Up

Of course social sites, do rely on having a community, and there in perhaps lies the key challenge to building a site like CommonTimes. Thankfully there are solutions. Like breaking out of our silos, becoming a consumer as well as a producer of webservices. I want to tell CT about how to fish in my link stream (e.g. subscribe to http://del.icio.us/rss/kellan/news), and then remix with its own services.

Finally a link to get you started: Ten Ways to use CommonTimes