Steven Leckart

The Venn Diagram of Social Media

Available on a t-shirt for $20.

[via Kevin Kelly]

Steven Leckart

TV is Dead, Long Live PC.TV

My friend Sonia has written a series of posts for the New York Times in which she tests several options for streaming web content to your television. Everything from Boxee to PlayOn.

I'm already saving up for a Mac Mini. Call me a fanboy, but I already have AppleTV (it was a gift).

That said, I'd love to know what all of you are using or eyeballing...

image by hellabella

Steven Leckart

Why I'm Buying An MSI Laptop

Yes, this ad shamelessly rips off Levi's. Yes, the concept is silly. But, man, do I love it. Apparently much more so than our friends at Gizmodo and Gadget Lab, who aren't too keen on the notion of catching a laptop in your buttocks.

Lighten up, fellas!

In fact, go watch some Tim & Eric (NSFW).

[via Gizmodo via Gadget Lab]

Rob Beschizza

Compulsory calisthenics

Netflix imposes rigorous policies at its workplace to ensure movies get to your mailbox quickly. From the Chicago Tribune:

Employees are expected to perform this a minimum of 650 times an hour. Also, customers stuff things into the envelopes. Scribbled movie reviews, complaints, pictures of dogs and kids. That needs sorting too. After 65 minutes of inspection, a bell rings. Everyone stands up. Calisthenics!

<Source [Chicago Tribune via Gizmodo]

Steven Leckart

Stargate Babes Do Chewbacca

Check out Stargate cast members, Alaina Kalanj, Elyse Levesque and Ming-Na doing their best Chewie impersonations.

The footage is from an interview the actresses gave to Wired at Comic-Con. The editing is compliments of my pal Fernando Cardoso.

Can you do better? I'd love to see this sucker get remixed again and again...

[via Underwire]

Steven Leckart

Video: Homage to iChat, Marfa Lights Shot W/RED One

The band YACHT just released a new video for their song "Psychic City (Voodoo City)." Apart from the fun religious/occult imagery, the video features a soundbite that might sound familiar: a blip not unlike the iChat alert (first one at 00:39).

Also awesome: Inspired by the Marfa Mystery Lights, the video was shot using a RED One. It's worth noting, too, YACHT is the creator of FlickrBlockrs.

Steven Leckart

Video: Tron, Astro Boy & Cloudy w/Chance of Meatballs

Wired is hosting a special Cafe at Comic-Con, where I've been interviewing some pretty fun folks in film and TV, including Kristen Bell of Astro Boy, Tron Legacy's Olivia Wilde, and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. You don't get to see my face or hear my voice. But take my word for it, I was there!

Steven Leckart

ComiCon: Day 1 [Verdict: Nerdywood!]

I've tagged along with Wired for this year's ComicCon. It's my first time. So far so good.

Coming Up: a collection of cosplay interviews...

Lisa Katayama

NYT discovers Japanese cell phones

A recent NYT article about Japanese cell phones pretty much rehashes what I wrote about Japanese cell phones on Wired.com and Gizmodo a year ago. Interesting trend, where big media comes out with stories about topics that bloggers have written about a while back, except they add analyst quotes, industry data, and flashy headlines to make it into a "serious news article." Sometimes it even happens at the same publication.

Steven Leckart

HOWTO: Balance Your Media Diet

Here's my contribution to Wired's August issue. Titled "Behave Yourself," the cover package features all kinds of netiquette tips and advice for 21st-century living.

Oh, and I should probably mention Brad Pitt is on the cover, wearing a Bluetooth headset.

illustration for Wired by Jason Lee

Joel Johnson

Old journalists telling jokes

YouTube has launched the YouTube Reporters' Center, with interviews from professional journalists giving tips to—and this is critical—everyone about how best to practice journalism.

Above, Bob Woodward, who you might know as a person who got at least one story right once, offers a story that suggests some practical tips on investigative journalism. The comments on the post are hilarious worthless non sequiturs ("The empowered fascist left is KILLING AMERICA"; "I'll remember to 'check my fucking work' when I'm writing about something I don't know shit about." [Woodward never uses the phase in his video]; "I FUCKED MY STEP SISTER IN THE ASS :D"), as per typical YouTube, since for some reason Google doesn't care about comment quality, but anyway listening to Woodward made me realize how sick of 'New vs. Old Media' stories I keep hearing and how much I actually care about and respect journalism.

There are at least a half-dozen practical tips that Woodward gives in the above video that any writer, from stupid online gadget copy-and-paster to investigative political blogger could stand to pick up. (Here's a hint for one: One of his sources called him.) The newspapers may die due to mismanagement, misdirected editorial efforts, and flagging public interest in hard news, but the biggest mistake new journalists—professional or citizen or any mix in between—could ever make is to think that the tools the old guard honed over decades should be left in the past.

YouTube Reporters' Center [YouTube]

(See also: The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft, the best crash course in How To Do It I've ever read.)

Rob Beschizza

Jammie Thomas fined $1,920,000 for sharing 24 songs

The RIAA seems not to realize that the more it gets per song, the worse it looks. What could this do except further the impression that it is simply a public enemy?

Joel Johnson

Video: Toy Movies

What if more '80s toys were turned into Hollywood blockbusters? Spoiler: They wouldn't be as awesome as this.

Steven Leckart

Social Networking Make Trent Mad!

In a lengthy rant on nin.com, Trent Reznor writes:

I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it's now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.

All this from the guy who spent the last few years going deep into ARGs, online forums, and Twitter.

[via Pitchfork]

image by Andra Veraart

Joel Johnson

Very Sophisticated

Joel Johnson

Dystopic online spiritual sequel to Blade Runner uses tools of the dystopic present

"Purefold" will be an online video series developed in conjunction with Ridley and Tony Scott with the central theme "What does it mean to be human?" If that sounds a little bit like one of the major themes of Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner", you aren't just hallucinating unicorns. From Ag8 (the other group involved in Purefold):

The franchise contains infinite interlinked story lines, turned into short-format episodes by Ridley Scott Associate Films' global talent pool of directors, and informed by real-time online conversations from the audience, which are harvested through FriendFeed, the world's leading 'life streaming' technology.

Taking place in the near future, Purefold enables participating brands to take an alternative route to brand integration than traditional product placement and embrace invention within a narrative framework.

Joel Johnson

What Reporters Write About Air Disasters When They Have No Idea

Choire Sicha:

Sometimes reporters write things that don't even make any sense! Here is Time, recounting an incident on Qantas Flight 72 last year:

The plane abruptly entered a smooth 650-ft. dive (which the crew sensed was not being caused by turbulence) [ED NOTE: HUH? THEY SENSED THAT?] that sent dozens of people smashing into the airplane's luggage bins and ceiling.... After seemingly an eternity -- in reality, the nosedive lasted 20 very long seconds -- the flight crew wrested control of the plane from its wayward computer....

Ha, WRESTED! I think that means they hit the OFF BUTTON, but nice job making the autopilot sound like the HAL-9000.

Joel Johnson

Sony Pictures' Michael Lynton afraid of internet bootleggers who don't seem to be affecting profits

Michael Lynton, Chairman and CEO, Sony Pictures Entertainment:

I actually welcome the Sturm und Drang I've stirred, because it gives me an opportunity to make a larger point...the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.

Sony Pictures' profits are down 48.9% for the year ending in March—which means that in this worldwide recession, they made only $305 million. [via Techdirt]

Rob Beschizza

How TechCrunch turns the screw

Photo: Joi Ito.

TechCrunch's strategy is brilliant: Publicly accuse a company of misbehavior knowing that the claim is possibly false, hoping to reveal a larger truth through controversy. When this happens, run a followup admitting the earlier mistake as part of an aggressive move to shift focus to the bigger picture.

This weekend offers the perfect example. Last.fm tracks the music listened to by its users, and the RIAA sues people who listen to it. A few weeks ago, on the slimmest evidence, TechCrunch accused Last.fm of revealing user data to the RIAA. The claim was false. Now, however, it reports that Last.fm's parent company, CBS, did in fact make the RIAA disclosure, having gained the data itself by lying to staff at its last.fm subsidiary.

Here's what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for "internal use only." It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.

Techcrunch's fresh attack on Last.fm is utterly ruthless: in the headline, it demands that Last.fm deny this, knowing full well that Last.fm cannot speak for CBS, the real villain of the piece. Forcing last.fm to bear the brunt lets TechCrunch portray its earlier mistake as reflecting an "underlying truth," which Last.fm omitted, rather than Techcruch's own propensity for premature accusation. But it also puts the pressure on last.fm to do something--anything--to burn its parent company in efforts to exculpate itself.

While everyone else enjoyed a holiday weekend, Last.fm kept its cool and TechCrunch kept hounding it.

What's interesting is how it circumvents expectations of journalistic proprietry to get to stories that others can't. People don't seem to understand that Doing Good Work isn't necessarily the arbiter of success. TechCrunch didn't even bother to contact Last.fm before the latest piece. But why would it?

This is what its critics think: "Techcrunch will eventually go too far and get sued for libel. Ha! And that will be the end of TechCrunch."

No, it won't. The part that critics miss is that many publications have paid their dues under relentless legal fire. Britain's Private Eye, for example, is a scurrilous satirical mag that has been sued for libel more times than I've had hot dinners. Florida tabloids have budgets to settle their errors: eventually, it results in spectacular success. If John Edwards were president, the Enquirer could have sent him into abdication faster than a dozen Deep Throats. This is why tabloid journalism is worth it.

Mike Arrington isn't afraid of lawsuits. What could energize him more than being attacked? With every carefully-measured payload of pious abuse, he practically begs his targets to sue him or fuck off. And there's nothing anyone--least of all CBS's rattled and wheedling lawyers--can do about it.

But it'll be fun to see them try.

Joel Johnson

A film I liked: "Tom Dowd and the Language of Music" (2003)

Do you have any interest in music production, wiring together 8-track tape recorders by hand, the history of Atlantic records, jazz, R&B, southern rock, or atomic bombs? Then get thee to a copy of "Tom Dowd and the Language of Music", a documentary of the man who pretty much single-handedly developed multi-track recording, working with the likes of John Coltraine, Ray Charles, the Allman Brothers, Eric Clapton, Tito Puente, and Otis Redding. It's well-crafted and easy to watch—Dowd is an affable old coot, and he was clearly stoked to get some recognition of his contribution to pop music, which as any of the dozens of musicians interviewed will testify, was considerable.

I watched it on Netflix Instant streaming, but it's also on Amazon for twenty bucks.

My favorite part might have been the interlude between Dowd and Les Paul, who had quietly been building an 8-track recording system in his garage while the rest of the recording world was still using gear scavenged from radio stations.

Joel Johnson

Welcome, Wired. We call this land "Internet"

Here's the problem with Wired: They think print matters.

Background: Stephanie Clifford warns that Wired may be about to die. Ad sales are down 50%, putting it just above Power and Motoryacht at the bottom of Condé Nast's portfolio of magazines.

I've got some relatively ancient history to share, but I think it's germane.

After I left Gawker Media, I was contracted by Condé to help the newly reacquired Wired.com develop a blogging strategy. I spent a few weeks with the Wired.com chiefs developing a battle plan and presented it to the magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. He gave it the nod—he got what I was trying to do instantly—and away we went.

Three months later the traffic to the Wired.com blogs had doubled. I cleared out writers that weren't working. That didn't always mean they were bad writers, but usually just bad bloggers—there is a difference. Even the best magazine writer may not be able to write and report in front of an audience.

Our most successful blog was Table of Malcontents, run by our friend John Brownlee (with Lisa, too!), who ran with the opportunity, creating a "net culture" blog that was the archetypal model for what we were trying to create: Smart, fast, full of personality, two steps ahead of mainstream tastes. It had a superstar team, and with hard work they were soon the most popular blog on the network behind Rob's Gadget Lab. (They also did much to make my not-so-secret motto come true: "Make Wired weird again.")

Then the magazine folks stepped in. As soon as it became clear that Wired.com's blogs might actually get some traction, the magazine started to dabble. I had structured the blogs so that each had a lead editor, something that that worked very well at Gawker. No one had a problem with that—until it meant that my lead bloggers might be telling magazine staffers what to do.

It's not unusual for print journalists to look down at online writers, and often rightly so. There are some amazing reporters and writers whose work appears in Wired, people who do the sort of storytelling that bloggers rarely have the time or skill to do.

But reporters treating their online peers like that at Wired? It was accepted without much question that the magazine side of the business—literally across the "Berlin Hall"—always trumped the online side.

I made it about six months before I felt too constrained by both the magazine and its publishers and moved on. Since then, Wired.com's grown to 11 million monthly visitors: its blogs are among the best in their fields and its tech news reportage is among the finest, online or off—successes I don't take credit for. The sheer size of that readership speaks volumes: the Times says the magazine has only 700k or so subscribers. (It's a damn shame that online advertising is devalued compared to print advertising, but that's the media world for you.)

Wired makes a fantastic magazine. The "puzzle" edition last month was just brilliant, and I skimmed it from cover to cover. But for technology and pop science reporting, the market has moved on. Tech magazines, now matter how well executed, are nothing more than a cute anachronism, with the same sort of boutique market as hand-made stationery.

Which isn't to say that we or anyone else who writes for money isn't doomed; we just don't have to buy paper by the ton roll, nor keep a support staff around nearly as large as our editorial staff.

Wired is great print, but if the magazine can't make money and is shuttered, taking the website down with it, I'm going to be livid. Not that making money online is easy—it's not, especially without sacrificing your ethics and your voice—but if any mainstream outlet should be able to make the transition, it should be Wired.

I fear that may be impossible, not just for Wired but for all these old brands, because they can't accept that the work at which they have excelled for years will be just as important when it's online—and online only.

P.S. No one actually ever called it the "Berlin Hall" except me.
P.P.S. The fact that it was the Times that published this piece, one of my other dear media orgs also choking and sputtering on the future, was not lost on me.

Steven Leckart

Back Dorm Boys: the lesser-known hits

The Hou She Boys (aka Back Dorm Boys) hit it big in 2006 with their lip sync to "I want It That Way". Wei Wei and Huang Yixin, students at Guangzhou College of Fine Arts, went on to star in a commercial for Pepsi, and become national celebrities. What I never realized is just how prolific they were, both in English and their native tongue.

Here's one of my favorite videos. More after the jump...

We Will Rock You

READ THE REST

Joel Johnson

Quote: Sony Pictures CEO on the value of the internet

"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet," said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. "Period." – Woman's Wear Daily

Joel Johnson

It's 2009 and the L.A. Times is still treating geeks as mysterious others

The L.A. Times profiles Utah's Neumont University, said by some to be a "geek heaven", but also known as a school that exacerbates their students asocial tendencies.

Some of Neumont's female students, who make up about 5% of the 266 enrolled this year, are on a mission to get their peers to tune in to the world around them. In October, one posted a message on Neumont's Web forums protesting what she called "offensive odors."

"The truth is there are people in this school who just don't smell pleasant at all," she wrote.

(Although I'm going to have to back Alana Semuels on the stink thing: Geeks—and in my experience this applies trebly to those of the core gamer variant—can occasionally smell like a sarlacc's vagina. Take a shower every single day. I don't care to hear your excuses about sensitive skin or brittle hair. Wash yourself with soap every day, perhaps even twice if necessary, and wear clean clothes. You're not just embarrassing yourself—you're embarrassing the rest of us.) [via The Awl (which is read by dicks, judging by the comments. Mean ol' dicks!)]

Steven Leckart

Two years of air quality photos in Beijing

Working with the Asia Society and a photographer in Beijing, my former colleague Michael Zhao has designed an interactive site with an amazing collection of snapshots taken through the same apartment window in Beijing. The images date from March 2009 (as I write) all the way back to March 2007.

You can click through them all, and sort by best/worst air pollution index (API) and air quality grade for each day on the Asia Society project site. Or you can watch everything in reverse timelapse and zoom out to see tiny images of every day on Michael's site.

On my last birthday (Dec. 7), Beijing's air scored a C and the index was a 112, meaning "Generally healthy individuals may also notice some discomfort." The photo above is a 115. The worst day recorded/photographed: December 28, 2007, with a score a 500!

Of course, there's some pretty neat tech wizardry that goes into measuring airborne chemicals. After the jump, check out a quantum cascade laser open path sensor...

READ THE REST

Joel Johnson

Advertisers, remember this about Hulu viewers

There's a piece in the Times about Hulu and some conflicting numbers. Nielsen, the same people who try to count the number of people watching television shows, also have a web metrics business. They estimated 9 million viewers a month; Comscore, a competing metric house, estimated 42 million. For an advertising-based business, that much variance in the numbers makes it really hard to sell ad campaigns.

Boring business talk, I know, but I brought it up to say this: I don't watch broadcast or cable television. I rent or buy DVDs, download video from torrent sites, buy from iTunes, or—most commonly these days—watch it online. I actually watch a ton of television, but most of it has been stripped of commercials entirely.

But every day I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, as well as 30 Rock and occasionally The Office. Every single day, usually over lunch. And during those shows I see two or three commercials.

What advertisers should remember is this: Whether your commercial will play 9 million times a month or 42, for a large percentage of users, Hulu is the only opportunity you'll have to reach us with a commercial at all.

Joel Johnson

The spaced out covers of Advanced Materials

If the covers of Advanced Materials, a peer-reviewed science journal published every month by Wiley, were offered as a series of posters, I would not be made of strong enough stuff to resist.

Joel Johnson

Reviews you can use: "Why TomTom Sucks"

It's so nice when a product reviewer gives you a sweeping discouragement against an entire brand, like Wilson Rothman has done as he sticks a finger in GPS maker TomTom's eye, listing everything he's ever hated about their products—and still hates, because they've never fixed the issues.

No sarcastic here. Above the fields of myopic product reviews from thumbwrestling gadget hacks, these are the sort of statements that filter up to the consuming masses: TomTom sucks; just buy a Garmin. That's powerful mojo, as the phone call that Wilson is surely receiving from the TomTom PR stoolie right now will attest.

Joel Johnson

Suggested improvements for TiVo Series 4

Justin Mecham has a list of suggested feature upgrades for the TiVo Series 4, should that ever see the light of day. Here's a taste:

• Keep all first-run episodes, but remove repeats "As Space is Needed" -- Why is there not an option for keeping first-run episodes indefinitely while allowing reruns to come and go as space is needed? I should be able to have different retention rules for new episodes than repeat airings.

• Stay in the overlay mode for new Season Passes -- Don't take me away from watching and listening to the current show when I wish to schedule a Season Pass. I could be okay with this if instead you were taken back to the show at the exact point you entered the menu once you've finished so you can easily pick up where you left off.

Joel Johnson

Avid's new logo

I agree with Brand New that it's a clever twist (oh ho) of the play button icon, but perhaps it's too clever? I could see that little glyph getting lost when among other buttons or, you know, anything. Maybe that's why it's purple.