Cynodon't: Archive

A paywalled NYTimes is not better than free....

OK, so the whole world knows that The New York Times committed itself to stuffing the “free news on the internet” genie back into the bottle. Details haven’t been worked out, but the idea seems to be that they’re going to charge an access fee to “heavy users” while letting casual readers dip into a limited number of articles or pageviews for free. I’m...

Jan 21st

14 notes

Dec 10th

11 notes

Watch

For the web-docu I recently produced for Nature.com, I forced the poor researcher to electrically shock herself half a dozen times on camera. So, of course, I felt obligated to take a spin on The Stimulator (as it’s called) myself. Science! (The shocking starts at 1:28.)

Dec 9th

Why innovating when your back is against the wall...

I just found out that a print client I’m pitching saw one of the worst year-on-year downturns in ad volume of any pub in the U.S. And that was a year ago. Internally, they seem pretty healthy, but that could just be on account of natural attrition taking care of any staff reductions they might otherwise have been forced to enact. So here’s the dilemma: how does that shape what...

Feb 4th

1 note

“Newpapers and magazines are still getting roughly 30% of all advertising...”

– quoth 24/7 CEO David J. Moore almost a year ago (but it’s even more relevant today)

Feb 4th

“inexcusable. this is what happens when total fucking morons go into business...”

– Ma.gnolia Suffers Major Data Loss, Site Taken Offline

Feb 1st

“The notion that the enormous cost of real news-gathering might be supported by...”

– News You Can Endow

Jan 29th

1 note

Streaming video cannibalizing DVD rentals, says... →

Jan 27th

video made by / for Science (the journal) isn't so... →

I really wish it was better. I love Science. I guess everyone’s got to start somewhere.

Jan 19th

News is now officially dead

Yahoo News’s latest syndication partner? PR Newswire. That’s right: now PR is news. Example.

Jan 15th

“A quick analysis [of Scoble’s 1000+ videos] reveals some get no links,...”

– Why Text Remains King of the Web

Jan 15th

Youtube stripping the audio from clips with... →

Jan 14th

TRACING THE HISTORY OF FAKE RAP →

“One aspect of fake rap that we haven’t addressed yet is just how fucking depressing it is.”

Jan 11th

“I think the magazine publishing companies that will be most successful will be...”

– What this year holds for magazines

Jan 8th

CBS kills sort of OK show, puts creators on...

Turns out the producers of MobLogic are now doing a show called Novel ADVNTURS. Besides the positively mongoloid name, this show has the distinction of laboring under one of the most prima-facie awful premises ever: a book club that “lives the books they’re reading.” <blockquote>And so, the four women start a new kind of book club, picking a “novel adventure”...

Jan 7th

CBS pulls plug on Wallstrip, pulled plug on Mob... →

The lesson, as usual: overhead is what kills shows, not lack of popularity. Popularity takes time — enough time that any show that is a significant drain on the bottom line will be killed long before it becomes an “overnight” success. Plan for 1-2 years before something serialized in the news format becomes a hit — always. (And even then, that “hit” may only be...

Jan 7th

Why most online media properties are wildly... →

Jan 6th

Time Spent Watching Online Video Jumps 40% in One... →

Jan 6th

Internet-Ready TVs Usher Web Into Living Room →

“A key factor in the push are new TV sets that have networking connections built directly into them, requiring no additional set-top boxes for getting online.”

Jan 6th

Conde Nast on why it creates ads for clients at... →

Jan 4th

Dec 17th

“The operating policy now, particularly at Condé Nast, basically reads: Revenue...”

– NYObserver catalogues the cuts at magazine websites. Which, depending on how you look at it, are either short-sighted: ceding whatever presence they currently have on the web dooms them to irrelevance later, or tragically spot-on: because they have yet to master the web, they might as well give up...

Dec 17th

“Making videos for YouTube — for three years a pastime for millions of Web...”

– says The Times… yeah sure, in the same sense that playing the Lotto — also a pastime for millions — is, theoretically, “a way to make a living”. Sorry to be the cynical half of this duo, but this kind of facile horseshit really chaps my ass. Let’s not hand out...

Dec 13th

Dec 12th

“I feel YouTube is my home,” he said. “I think the biggest mistake that any of us...”

– YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money (NYTimes)

Dec 12th

Dec 11th

11 notes

Internet advertising up 11% - except newspapers →

Dec 8th

“Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and...”

– Content and Its Discontents by Virginia Heffernan

Dec 6th

Dec 2nd

YouTube Live was a big, sad suckfest, apparently. →

“If I were in the business of producing crummy sitcoms, I would take it as a signal that the Internet poses no immediate threat and that I could feel secure in the crumminess of my product.”

Nov 26th

'News websites must embrace video or die' →

Nov 25th

Watch

Nov 24th

Watch

Nov 21st

“The Rule of Thirds does not apply to the President of the United States. Being...”

– -Tilzy.TV Surprisingly true—see for yourself.

Nov 20th

Monty Python creates mini-Hulu for themselves on... →

All high quality, perfectly legit. Smart.

Nov 19th

“In the projects our company has created, we have found that content...”

– http://dandelion.com/#/about/

Nov 18th

Nov 17th

Most science "news" is just regurgitated press...

Did you know that the most-visited source of science news on the internet, Science Daily, is basically 100% unedited press releases? It’s a great business model: no reporting costs, but plenty of free traffic - just check out how often Science Daily “stories” make it to the front page of Digg. Should we be surprised, then, that a recent survey by the Columbia Journalism Review...

Nov 17th

“Firing people on the writing side because of the incompetence of the business...”

– http://www.slate.com/id/2204372/

Nov 16th

The importance of soliciting feedback

I just set up Feedburner to manage the RSS feed on the new show blog. At the end of the instructions for how to do this, at google.com, I was given the option to check yes or no next to the question ‘was this helpful?’ When I hit yes, it gave me a small text field and asked me what had been most helpful about the instructions. I’m pretty sure no one at Google will ever read my...

Nov 14th