Slipr

I mean really. If this was anyone else on Earth, this would be racist. So maybe it is?

Not that I don’t love that actor.

Bonus points to anyone who can correctly identify the medieval siege weapon they use to throw the car.

Just got an invite to the private beta of Persai.

First impression:

My dream of a customizable, private Google News (analogous to their customizable search engine program) has come one step closer to reality.

And while what I really want is the ability to spawn a Google News homepage / engine that is only fed with feeds that I care about (but accomplishes the same kind of natural language processing magic that Google News does to group redundant stories under single headlines), this will do for the time being.

Screenshot: (click for full version)

All I have to say is, while Persai works backwards from the way I’d hoped (I give it keywords and it scours the web for things relevant to them) I’m pleased with its output — and this is the only measure of a news filter that really matters.

I can’t wait for this thing to bust out — customized news filters that go beyond basic things like PageFlakes and Google Homepage are sorely needed in these days of information overload.

– Larissa MacFarquhar in East Side Story: How Louis Auchincloss came to terms with his world

Just found this by accident…

That’s right, Hulu (the new joint venture between Fox and NBC aimed at locking up lotsa revenue on the web rather than sucking it up to the tune of $15 million measley dollars a year in iTunes revenue) will actually let you define the start and end points of a clip you embed from the site.

This is not trivial — this is the difference between sending a friend an entire show and just the 15 seconds you want him to see — this brings cut, paste, paraphrase, blockquote, etc. to web video, and in so doing will encourage the kinds of sharing that already happen on blogs and Myspace pages the world over (while keeping the content monetizable). Bravo.

Also, new word, which Kennedy, in this clip from his first ever appearance on Meet the Press, uses somewhere around minute five (and which, had I known of Hulu’s clipping feature in advance, I would have cut straight to in the clip embedded below): Throttlebottom. As in, that’s not the kind of Vice Presidential candidate Kennedy will pick, Mr. Snooty Meet the Press inquisitor.

(Here’s where you would normally see the embedded video from Hulu, but WordPress won’t let me. F*ck you, wordpress.com. F*ck you and all your embedding rules. If Typepad and Blogger can make it happen, why can’t you?)

Science News is one of the best sources for new science information, period. If you’re looking for really cutting-edge stuff, short of reading actual journals like Nature or Science, there’s only three places (in print) to get it: Scientific American, New Scientist and Science News.

Science News has the advantage over Scientific American that it comes out every week, and is written not by scientists but journalists who are truly experts in their fields, making it informed but also readable. New Scientist also comes out every week, but the signal to noise ratio in that magazine, though I love it dearly, isn’t always that great.

There is one giant blind spot for this mag, however, and that’s its website. Which is tragic, because a mag like this should be a honeypot for all the diggers and bloggers out there.

For instance, without hunting, you’d never find their blogs — again, a tragedy, as they’re among the most thorough emanations from the generally sloppy wasteland that is blogdom. These are blogs with footnotes. In an age when the interwebs are flooded with crap, blog posts this intelligent (way to get scooped by Science News, Fast Company) are like a soothing balm on my idea-starved soul.

Meredith President: ‘We Don’t Hire Editors Anymore’
Hobbled Jack Griffin at FPS: ‘We hire content strategists.’

CBS is adding divorce and crime to its reality development slate…. “Splitsville,” described as “The War of the Roses” meets “Let’s Make a Deal,” is a game show for divorcing couples who battle it out for their belongings in a series of competitive challenges.

Is it wrong to be excited about this show?

via

As an occasionally fast-talking, bespectacled megalencephalic myself, I found this video of Clive Thompson, the thinking man’s Malcom Gladwell, verbally rat-a-tat-tatting about why he blogs quite interesting.

He pretty much hits all the high points - the main one being that blogging is a kind of exercise of your thinking and writing muscles. Journalists who don’t blog are like athletes who don’t train.

via Alfred Hermida’s Reportr.net (yay Flickr knockoff blog names!)

Media brands / businesses are shitty businesses. They’re plagued by narrow profit margins and high overhead (people’s time being the most expensive resource of all).

Starting a new media whatchamagidgit is like saying “I’m going to be a rockstar” or at least “my Jimmy Buffet cover band is going to make enough money to pay for my mortgage and my new baby.”

Only crazy people decide to become content creators or, worse, aggregate the work of content creators into a destination called a ‘website’ or a ‘magazine.’

Is it any wonder so many magazine editors are egomaniacs whose pathological need for narcissistic supply has driven them into the only position on earth where they can exploit a constant stream of it?

What characterizes this bunch of cranks, their one redeeming quality, is a kind of blind faith. Exactly the kind you have to have when you are racing down a runway of uncertain length, burning cash, desperate to connect with the disparate audience you know is out there, hungry for your product — because the most powerful bits of recurring content, be they a show, a column, a blog or a magazine actually define whole new audiences, and gather together people who were previously unaware they were part of a larger community of similar tastes.

And anyway, with the shift to yet another new medium — the web, which is really all mediums in one, delivered in a sort of liminal dream state in which the number of access points to any given piece of content multiplies each day and the behavior of your audience is as maddeningly inscrutable as the movement of the stock market — means none of us who have already committed ourselves to this path have much of a choice. Digital delivery is here, only “here” keeps changing, rapidly, and if we don’t keep up we’ll be erased by someone too naive to know they weren’t supposed to succeed in this sphere.

Here’s rule 0 — 0 because it comes before all the other rules:

The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now.

Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing will be. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing it’s going to be here forever. It won’t.

– Seth Godin, via Brian Alvey

Today’s Times has a great piece on what happens when a military-trained, native-Spanish speaking hasidic Jew takes over an inner city middle school.

The principal enlisted teachers in an effort to “take back the hallways” from students who seemed to have no fear of authority. He enlisted the students, too, by creating a democratically elected student congress.

“It’s just textbook counterinsurgency,” he said. “The first thing you have to do is you have to invite the insurgents into the government.” He added, “I wanted to have influence over the popular kids.”