MemeStreams now supports direct embedding of Al Jazeera.
The world's first English language news channel to have its headquarters in the Middle East; covering the world, bridging cultures and setting the news agenda.
These videos are drawing very few viewers ... one of the more popular programs is called "The Fabulous Picture Show":
The Fabulous Picture Show (FPS) is Al Jazeera English's international film show, hosted at the Everyman Cinema Club by the network's Entertainment Editor and Presenter, Amanda Palmer.
FPS brings filmmakers from across the world face-to-face with an international audience, by inviting our cinema audience to question filmmaker guests in a lively, insightful, and often revealing debate. And of course, all cinemaphiles are welcome!
The audience for this is not people who care about the world, but people who believe it is important to care about the world. When other magazines say they want to be like The Economist, they do not mean they wish to be serious. They mean they wish, by whatever means, to be taken seriously.
"I suddenly realized that the people who had put my books on best-seller lists were not those Mondo 2000-era hackers and Internet homesteaders I so admired, but rather the public relations and advertising industries," he said. "I had been selling 'cool' to corporate America. My books were primers, required texts for young executives on how to take advantage of new media to do the same old thing they were doing before. That's when I realized that we were in an arms race and that I was just as caught up in it as everyone else."
Rushkoff apparently made the mistake of thinking that hackers readbooks.
I don't read books on a regular basis. I seem to read the internet instead. I'm quite well informed on current events, but I tend to prefer my information in bite sized morsels.
Isn't it ironic that Rushkoff trained the ad wizards to feed you those morsels that seem to keep you away from his work?
(270 minutes) In a four-and-a-half-hour special, News War, FRONTLINE examines the political, cultural, legal, and economic forces challenging the news media today and how the press has reacted in turn. Through interviews with key figures in the print and electronic media over the past four decades -- and with unequaled, behind-the-scenes access to some of today's most important news organizations, FRONTLINE traces the recent history of American journalism, from the Nixon administration's attacks on the media to the post-Watergate popularity of the press, to the new challenges presented by the war on terror and other global forces now changing -- and challenging -- the role of the press in our society.
I expect this to be excellent. Frontline is great.
Check out the episode breakdown:
NEWS WAR: SECRETS, SOURCES & SPIN (Part I)
Feb. 13, 2007, 9pm (check local listings)
In part one of News War, FRONTLINE examines the political and legal forces challenging the mainstream news media today and. how the press has reacted in turn. Correspondent Lowell Bergman talks to the major players in the debates over the role of journalism in 2007, examining the relationship between the Bush administration and the press; the controversies surrounding the use of anonymous sources in reporting from Watergate to the present; and the unintended consequences of the Valerie Plame investigation -- a confusing and at times ugly affair that ultimately damaged both reporters' reputations and the legal protections they thought they enjoyed under the First Amendment.
NEWS WAR: SECRETS, SOURCES & SPIN (Part II)
Feb. 20, 2007, 9 pm (check local listings)
Part two continues with the legal jeopardy faced by a number of reporters across the country, and the additional complications generated by the war on terror. Correspondent Lowell Bergman interviews reporters facing jail for refusing to reveal their sources in the context of leak investigations and asks questions on tough issues that now confront the editors of the nation's leading newspapers, including: how much can the press reveal about secret government programs in the war on terror without jeopardizing national security? FRONTLINE looks past the heated, partisan rhetoric to determine how much of this battle is politics and whether such reporting actually harms national security.
NEWS WAR: WHAT'S HAPPENING TO THE NEWS
Feb. 27, 2007, 9 pm (check local listings)
(90 min.) The third part of News War puts viewers on the front lines of an epic battle over the future of news. America's major network news divisions and daily... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]
In the aftermath of the reported panic, a public outcry arose, but CBS informed officials that listeners were reminded throughout the broadcast that it was only a performance. Welles and the Mercury Theatre escaped punishment, but not censure, and CBS had to promise never again to use the "we interrupt this program" device for dramatic purposes.
One can imagine TBS having to promise never again to use "the obscene gesture" for advertising purposes.
A study by the Radio Project discovered that most of the people who panicked presumed that Germans — not Martians — had invaded. Other studies have suggested that the extent of the panic was exaggerated by contemporary media.
When a meeting between H. G. Wells and Orson Welles was broadcast on Radio KTSA San Antonio on October 28, 1940, Wells expressed a lack of understanding of the apparent panic and suggested that it was, perhaps, only pretense, like the American version of Halloween, for fun. The two men and their radio interviewer joked about the matter, though clearly with some embarrassment. KTSA, as a CBS affiliate, had carried the original broadcast.
Both the War of the Worlds broadcast and the panic it created have become textbook examples of mass hysteria and the delusions of crowds.
It doesn't matter whether the ideas themselves are good or bad, just that they "stick."
The stickiest ideas, regardless of intrinsic merit, have a lot in common. Or, more accurately, the ways they are presented have a lot in common.
The magic recipe is:
simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and story-containing
Of course, all of that is old hat at the General Memetics Corporation.
This article is essentially a book review ... of a book that I've already passed over several times at the store. The reviewer here says it's more useful than Gladwell's books, although it probably won't sell as well. Publishers Weekly agreed regarding the book's practical utility, giving it a starred review.
When it comes to writing a MemeStreams description that will attract clickthroughs, here's your help:
... they call [it] "the gap theory" of curiosity. This is the notion that a gap in knowledge is painful – it's like having an itch that needs to be scratched. ... But to capitalize on this kind of natural situational interest, ... "we need to first open gaps before we close them. And yet, too often, the communicator's tendency is "to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts."
For the last eight years [Chip Heath] has been studying why ideas survive in the social marketplace of ideas.
(He'll be in New York the day before, giving the same talk.) Here is an endorsement of Heath's GSB course on the subject; also, check out this short video in which Heath himself describes that course. GSB also has an older story about Heath's research, from early 2002.
If you can't take the Stanford course, and you don't live in New York or Boston, check out his recent talk on IT Conversations:
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Stanford Business professor Chip Heath, who explains why urban legends grab our attention, why some ideas inspire us while others don’t, and how to craft your message so it sticks with people.
But I did like this turn of phrase on the upcoming primaries:
... the scene of multi-candidate cattle calls in which entrants will moo canned messages ...
If that wasn't enough to make you see Kaplan more as a comedian than a man of nuanced policy, the article loses all sense of seriousness when we get to this:
Newt has been calling for a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates across the nation. I'd like that. I'd also like a pony, an end to racism, a cure for cancer and a date with Scarlett Johansson.
Speaking of Scarlett, did you know she has five films on tap for 2007? Now there's a hard-working woman in show business. Do you think after that, we could get her to run as a VP in `08?
Here's his pitch for civil war in Iraq:
Maybe we don't need a national debate. Maybe what we really need are leaders with more character, followers with more discrimination, deciders who hear as well as listen and media that know the difference between the public interest and what the public is interested in.
I really like that last thought there, but it's incredibly difficult to achieve through the contemporary model of a "free" press forever at the mercy of fickle, demanding advertisers. If more people were willing to pay their own way for news they didn't want, but, like vegetables and fiber, knew they should have, then perhaps the products of that press would be more useful.
I disagree completely; it is for journalists to report points of view, not judge. My ideology tells me -- my liberal bias says -- let reporters report in as balanced a manner as they can and let we the jury decide.
The issue is one not so much of the reporter as of the editor. In any newspaper of significance there is room for a variety of content, from "just the facts" basic street beat reporting, to in-depth profiles, to news analysis, to investigations, to editorials, to letters, to opinion pieces, to regular columnists, and more. Any "balanced" newspaper ought to have all of these, in the same way that a "balanced" investment portfolio will have a little of everything.
What distinguishes a great newspaper from a merely average one is two-fold: first, the quality of its content, and second, the editor's skill in selecting and organizing a small subset of the available content. The requirement for good content goes without saying; even the best editor would be hard-pressed to turn crap into a great newspaper. (Nonetheless, let it be noted that a talented editor can still make crap sell like hotcakes.) The editor's role is perhaps less widely appreciated, but I'd argue it's essential to a top quality product.
An editor, in attempting to "balance" views, relies on internal scales to do so. What is equal? Is it based on word count? How do you equate photographs?
A TV Comedy Turns an Unconventional Weapon on Iraq’s High and Mighty: Fake News
Topic: Media
4:34 pm EDT, Oct 24, 2006
Nearly every night here for the past month, Iraqis weary of the tumult around them have been turning on the television to watch a wacky-looking man with a giant Afro wig and star-shaped glasses deliver the grim news of the day.
Mr. Sudani, the writer, said he has lost hope for his country. Iraq’s leaders are incompetent, he said. He fears that services will never be restored. The American experiment in democracy, he said, was born dead.
What's new is the use of evolutionary algorithms in programs that laypeople might use to invent things. A simple demonstration on Icosystems' website, for instance, asks a user to select a few initial designs for Mondrianesque wallpaper or bathroom tiles; the designs' evolution can then be directed toward the pattern the user likes best.
The first standalone commercial service based on the Hunch Engine will debut this fall, when Icosystems launches an online company-naming service. Bonabeau says that for $15 or so, the naming engine will let a user recombine random phonemes and filter the resulting names until something pleasing, inoffensive, and non-trademarked emerges.
Until now, software programs like that were the closely guarded trade secrets of advertising agencies. It's nice to see this coming into the open.
It's a magazine that runs 10,000-word articles on African states and the pension system, has almost no pictures and is published in black and white. So how does the New Yorker sell more than a million copies a week?
Says Malcom Gladwell: "we live in a suddenly serious time, where people have an appetite for intelligent, thoughtful explanations of consequential topics."
It doesn't take a genius to work out that one hundred per cent of his readers are not going to get home from work, put their keys down and say: "You know, honey, what I need to do now is read 10,000 words on Congo."
You might say that what looks at first like common sense is David Remnick's most winning eccentricity.
You can see Remnick on the same recent episode of Charlie Rose that features Arielle Dombasle.
"Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it's about inspiring the enlisted."
Update: Remnick talks about his recent travels with Bill Clinton in an online-only Q&A for the New Yorker.
