Here’s an interview with the man behind Battlestar Galactica, in which he agrees with his interlocutor that making a “highly serialized” show like BSG, in which it’s easy to lose viewers who miss only an episode or two, and hard to gain new ones because the enormous back-story is daunting to viewers new to the series, is a problem TV can’t solve: it makes for better storytelling, but worse ratings.

But of course Netflix has already solved this problem. And the internet can really solve it: whatever you want, whenever you want it, on whatever device you like, means you can jump into any series at any time in your life. Shows like BSG won’t be judged on their ratings when the show first hits the ‘net — instead, in a trend reminiscent of the behavior patterns you see with downloadable media, peak viewership will be spread across a long period of time, with spikes corresponding with coverage of the series.

Shows will become properties that are continually generating income, spanning years. This happens now, but it’s contingent on releases of DVDs — and not everyone wants a boxed set.

This means that the penalty for creating “highly serialized” narratives will be reduced. Indeed, the whole equation might be flipped on its head — individual hit shows in properties that aren’t serialized will be nice, but for a network to have a steady stream of income, they’re going to need more serialized shows, not fewer.

Matthew Myers is a painter who puts funny, slightly cartoonish images on just about anything he can get his hands on–headboards, the tops of toilet tanks, a stretcher–even other paintings.

He also has a rare ability to give them thoughtful and amusing captions… at least one of his works constitutes one of the few pieces of social commentary I’ve ever encountered that actually made me laugh out loud (being somewhat epic, the captions are too small for viewing on the web on that one, alas).

Despite decades as an award-winning creative director for various advertising agencies, he’s relatively new to the fine art world, in terms of that being his main thing… I’ve little doubt that I’ll see his work on the cover of Juxtapoz in the near future, or his forthcoming children’s book on the shelves of B&N.

You can see more of Matthew Myers’ work at his online gallery.

I would totally do this if I was really hungry. Maybe I’d kill it before eating it though. On the other hand, it’s hard to kill something with a distributed nervous system without first turning it into an even less-appetizing scorpion mash.

(Click on the image to be redirected to the source video, which is one ep in Discovery’s iTunes feed, which is basically just snippets of their cable shows and is, frustratingly, solely focused on pushing you to watch their real cash cow–television–rather than creating a satisfying experience for fans who would prefer to consume the content through iTunes and on portable devices.)

http://fluidapp.com/

Here’s a demo of what one dude accomplished with Fluid and a muxtape. Looks pretty, but the real value of Fluid is in making those apps you have open all day (e.g., Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Chat, Googe Docs, Muxtape/Seekpod/Youtube) behave like actual applications (i.e., living in the applications dock and not in a browser window, and not all having to be closed at once when Firefox locks up on a single page).

from blip.tv posted with vodpod

Boo f*cking hoo. I’d like to sue God for giving me an abusive childhood which left me unequipped to function normally in school and then university and then adult life, but instead I just SUCK IT UP.

Ivy League Prof Sues Students For Being Mean to Her

Daily emails are awesome loyalty tools and traffic drivers. At least as good as RSS feeds. Yet, despite being the older technology, automated emails are not ubiquitous. (Probably because RSS feeds are automatically generated by every CMS on the face of the earth, while daily emails are still a pain in the ass to produce.)

Mediabistro believes in them so much they’ve put not one but two promotions for them on top of every single post on their blog (red arrows).

Note that in the same position they’re also promoting their job boards, which is how they make a lot of their money (green arrow). Websites without permanent promotional positions like these are leaving so much traffic (and therefore money) on the table.

MIMS
7 songs, 28:33 minutes

A plus D - Close To Konichiwa Bitches (Robyn vs. The Cure)

Santogold / xxxchange - L.E.S. Artistes (xxxchange remix)

Tokyo Police Club - Be Good (RAC Remix)

Dmitry Fyodorov - 1b-1

Trade Secrets - I Know You Got Soul (Acen Remix)

PJtheVIKING - Raining Blows (Original)

The Chemical Brothers - Where Do I Begin (A Copycat Remix)

Because really, what kind of computer skills are a bunch of square-jawed g.i. joes going to have?

In an interview with techie forum Slashdot in early March, he was asked if hackers with checkered pasts, and overweight geeks who couldn’t pass a physical training test, were candidates to join the growing ranks of cyber soldiers. “I believe even the most unlikely candidate, when working for a cause bigger than himself, turns out to be a most loyal ally,” the general wrote.
…
A visit to the embryonic Air Force Cyber Command at Barksdale by BusinessWeek reporters in March shows how the Air Force’s current ad campaign is more a Hollywood-version of Cyber Command. In an aging former recreation building on Barksdale’s leafy grounds, fatigue-clad airmen—some with the physiques of couch-potato hackers—use off-the-shelf PCs to monitor Air Force computer network traffic.

Recruiting for the Cyber Wars | BusinessWeek

Word of the day:

Zoonosis

Any infectious disease that is able to be transmitted (by a vector) from other animals, both wild and domestic, to humans or from humans to animals (the latter is sometimes called reverse zoonosis).

The word is derived from the Greek words zoon (animal) (IPA: zo’on) and nosos (disease). Many serious diseases fall under this category.

One of the first rules of writing web-friendly headlines is extracting the most unique or compelling detail from a piece and making that the headline. It’s the difference between getting dugg and being ignored.

But this is just annoying.

This is like following the headline “STDs Rampant in 5th Graders” with the dek “More 10 year olds have herpetitis than at any point except for two years ago, oh and all the years before 2000 when there was a frakking epidemic (you moron).”

This is why magazines aren’t nearly as threatened by the internet as newspapers:

Unlike newspapers, there is nothing on the internet that reproduces the magazine experience and is also better than magazines.

Magazines look good and, unlike awkward broadsheets, provide an excellent user experience. It doesn’t matter that (if they’re a monthly) they were written two months ago, because they’re about things that have a longer shelf-life. They’re where we go for insight and reportage, not news.

Some day there will be a device that at least mimics the magazine reading experience. However:

“In a decade time frame?” asked Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. “No. Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”

Where Will Magazines Be Ten Years From Now? | New York Observer

Sticking article tools and related content in the flow of an article’s text is nothing new, and there’s plenty of evidence that it works better than most anything else in terms of click-through — or did you think the text on a typical New York times article was lately sandwiched between article tools and supplementary content just because their designers like it that way?

(It used to be more of a sinuous river hugging the curves of the tools and extra links, which I think is more effective — as soon as you put text into a rigid column you’re telling the reader to ignore what’s to the left and right of it — it might be ads.)

But this is new: Wired isn’t sticking its own content into what’s normally a related content space, it’s sticking Portfolio’s content into that space.

Previously, sites like Slate and WaPo have cross-promoted each other’s content in designated ghettos in their right columns (which, due to the ads, are a visual and click-through no-man’s land) but this is probably much more effective.

Granted, by doing this Wired is in part devaluing that territory — if I’m a Wired reader who doesn’t care about Portfolio (and I bet there’s a lot of them), I’m now being trained to ignore that space.

On the other hand, the last time I saw cross-promotion this well integrated was on Gawker, where whole posts (or at least the part before the ‘click to read more’) are regularly cross-posted and are the only reason I and probably a lot of other readers ever bothered to check out Jezebel in the first place — it showed up on Gawker.

It’s nice to see this space maturing, and everyone getting better at pimping their own material rather than watching it fall into the abyss of the archive.

Oil is getting scarce. OK, no problem, we drive smaller cars.

Water is getting scarce. Food is getting scarce. No problem, we desalinate, we put more land under cultivation.

But: Land is getting scarce. Oops.

From the end of Food Prices Rise, Farmers Respond

Despite the back-to-back increases [in price of commodities like soybeans and corn], the number of acres under cultivation [in the U.S.] is still about six million below the level of a decade ago. The government is not entirely sure why that is happening, but one possibility is that some land has been swallowed up by suburban construction.

Higher demand + inflexible supply = higher prices. The economic equation is so elementary it is a wonder we are not having a more urgent discussion about it.

I suppose the answer is that this will, as always, affect the poor first. Adios, developing world.

Also redundant coverage. Do we really need 635 versions of the same wire story cropping up on Google News?

“serious journalism was described at the conference, repeatedly, as something like broccoli, or medicine the citizenry needs to spoon down, no matter how unpalatable, if democracy is to survive.” He “[struggled] to think of another industry that views its premium product as something akin to a nasty cough syrup - necessary, good for your health, but irredeemably foul-tasting.” He wondered, shouldn’t at least some of the value and energy journalists now place in investigative and civic journalism be placed toward making their work more “palatable?”

Nanny-Journalism is the mother of all news business problems from The Future of News

First, some context: Michel Gondry’s movie Be Kind, Rewind has apparently inspired dozens of amateur filmmakers to do their own slap-dash remakes of famous hollywood films. Below, a fine example of the genre, known as Sweding.

The more times you’ve watched Total Recall, the funnier this will be. (And if you haven’t watched it at all, well, this won’t make any sense.)

via NewTeevee

I say that as a fan.

Also as someone who is totally psyched that in the process of rebuilding the site, they moved it to an open platform, namely Drupal.

But to take a magazine that is as rich in visual content as PopSci, and boil it down to a homepage that only includes 10 posts, or 11 if you count the header, plus only two right-column elements for featuring content by other means (plus a candybar at the bottom — which is the one unqualified good move on this redesign), I mean come on.

This is a homepage that cannot even accommodate a single day’s worth of content. What happens when they increase their posting volume?

Look, what am I going to compare this to — the blogs it apes? Even Engadget manages to get, by my count, 17 articles above the fold on my monitor. Ten of which are accompanied by click-boosting thumbnails or images. Granted Engadget is a little dense these days.

Let’s condense this into a bulleted list of the information architecture and design faux pas:

* Article-featuring header requires user click to access additional stories. (Sciam.com does this too and I hate it.) Here’s a rule: every click you put between a user and a piece of content reduces the frequency with which they’ll access it by a factor of 10. If you’re going to feature articles in a header, users have to be able to scan them visually in a microsecond — this is why Slate hasn’t changed their 6-article header (5 thumbnails and a big image — with extra headlines) in forever.

* Magazines are not blogs. They just aren’t. None of them. Wired.com features blog posts on their homepage — but their homepage isn’t a blog. New York magazine and Radar put their blogs front and center — but along with a bunch of other stuff. (etc.) Even blog networks — which are entirely composed of blogs! — do better when they don’t turn their homepages into blogs. (Also.)

* Page templates that do not vary between homepages and article pages are for blogs that aren’t sophisticated enough to differentiate the two. Not magazines that should know better — people have different needs when they land on your homepage vs. an article page.

I could go on, but it feels like beating a dead horse. I hate to say it, but in a lot of ways the old site was better (from an end-user perspective). I’m going to assume this is just round 1 of an ongoing development process… so much is possible given the platform PopSci has chosen — just look what Fast Company and The Onion have accomplished.

Update: I should specify that I admire Fast Company’s attempts to tightly integrate community. But from a design and usability perspective, the homepage of Fast Company, itself, is a complete disaster.

More at SciAm.com: Even Skeptics Admit Global Warming is Real [Video]

Layoffs at the New York Times are nothing new, but neither is its dominance on the web:

the Project for Excellence in Journalism… concluded that Americans are still relying on the same sources for most of their news, but just getting to them in different ways. The “legacy media” — CNN, MSNBC, CBS, The New York Times — in both their original and Internet forms are attracting even larger audiences than they did before the explosion of information sites on the Web.

The problem, and it’s gratifying to hear actual media professionals with actual data say this, because I’ve been beating this drum for a while, is that advertisers have yet to catch up:

Newsrooms, rather than being disconnected from the public, are seen as the “more innovative and experimental part of the news industry.” By contrast, “my middle management in advertising and distribution is where I see the deer-in-the-headlights look,” one publisher told PEJ.

Which is sort of like spring break for geeks.

No time to blog, so mostly will just be twittering on my ghetto-ass last-gen ibook while everyone else records the proceedings via their $600 1st edition iphones and/or blackberry pearls on unlimited plans.

Oh and it took me 27 hours to get here instead of just 8.