MEDIABLITZ

The Ambition Condition is a lengthy essay on bitch magazine , written by Anna Clark, about historic prejudices against women writers that surprisingly persist today. She points out that even J.K. Rowling adopted a gender free moniker because it was thought that young boys wouldn't want to read a book by Joanna Rowling. The article seemingly was prompted because of the huge, negative response Emily Gould (Gawker) received after Exposed was published in May, 2008 as the New York Times Magazine cover story. It is an article about blogging publicly about her private life felt. I think Clark believes that most of the 'haters' were jealous and assumptively wouldn't have acted that way if she was a man. I've never been a big Gawker fan although I know many people who are and were. I used to work in "publishing" from early 2005 through 2002. When the first bubble burst I headed for the Hollywood Hills and started working in television. Unlike most of the ...

Hot blog posts I ran into today while I was browsing the blogsphere: 1) 21 reasons you should create art from The Future Buzz a personal blog from Adam Singer on social media, marketing, PR and creating buzz on the web. He is the Director of Digital Strategy for Pierson Grant Public Relations in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 2) Media Director's weigh in on their favorite sites to buy advertising on iMediaConnection . This isn't surprising, the subheads are Go Big (ie Yahoo), Go Wide (expand your broadcast buy to include the broadcaster's web sites), Go Deep (MySpace and EW (ha?!), Other Options (the most interesting page in the article, talks about Digg, Veoh, iMeem as well as TMZ & Disney), the author, Robert Moskowitz, goes on to talk about the importance of niche and WOM.

I wonder how good of a deal this is, 250 square feet in SoMa starting at $280. It's the Cubix Yerba Buena 4th & Howard.

MUSIC Winner: Flaming Lips 5-Word Speech: "First a Grammy, now a Webby." People's Voice: Flaming Lips Other nominees: Metacritic Okayplayer.com pinknoises.com Tech.Nitions NETART Webby Winner: Listening Post 5-Word Speech: "Scripted formula. Vegans. Political. Fashionable." People's Voice: Penny Arcade Other nominees: Andy Deck-Art Context BlinkenLights NYC Surveillance Camera Players PuppetTool

'Pop Candy' , the USA Toda y column done by Whitney Matheson , readers created a Pop Candy Twitter Comic book based on her Tweets . It's cool, it's Flash. I used to hate Flash but I think that was because connection speeds were too slow or the program wasn't as advanced as it is today. Now I have no problem with it and I just love the way this page looks and sounds, even more than I like the individual comics.

The Kids From Boing Boing .net Stars in your lap They crack open a beer, they joke, they spoof, they dissect the news — and they're just a few keystrokes away. Bobbie Johnson meets the new wave of cyber celebrities. Can they break out of the techie real and into the bigtime?

Visa Network on Facebook: Viral, social marketing. Visa bought $2 million in advertising on FaceBook. Gave $100 advertising credit on Facebook to each of the first 20,000 U.S. businesses that download the Web application. Arrived online on Tuesday, June 29th. Apparently 80,000 small businesses are already on FaceBook. Google provides some of the services available on the Visa Network. Creative application of attempting to achieve holy grail of monetizing social networks.

Facebook is not compelling precisely because there is no community.

The AP writer on Yahoo just reviewed digital pens. He likes the LiveScribe Pulse the best, the cheaper model of two pens the company produces. It sells for $149 from their web site. The more expensive $199 version has twice as much memory but he prefers "the cheaper model (which has) has room for 35 hours of audio at the highest quality setting, or more than 100 hours at a lower setting." It is a sound recorder as well as a tool that remembers what you write which you can later transfer to your computer as a picture. The best feature is that you can insert "bookmarks" in your audio recording so you can find what you're looking for at a later date instead of having to listen to the whole recording. You can tap a place on your notes and the recording will go to what it heard when you wrote those words. You need to buy special paper with little dots on it that isn't prohibitively expensive. He says it's the best tool for taking notes during interview...

I'm so impressed that there is an artist in residence at the actual San Francisco Waste and Recycling center (or something to that affect). When I first saw some pictures at Laughing Squid I thought he was referring to a gallery called "Dump".

A neologism is a word, term, or phrase that has been recently created (or "coined"), often to apply to new concepts, to synthesize pre-existing concepts, ... Neologism - Wikipedia

MSNBC.com Teen describes role in MySpace hoax Says mother of a friend was more active in the ruse than she has admitted The Associated Press updated 6:24 p.m. PT, Tues., April. 1, 2008 DARDENNE PRAIRIE, Mo. - A teenager involved in an Internet hoax blamed for a 13-year-old girl's suicide said Tuesday that the mother of a friend was more active in the ruse than she has admitted. Ashley Grills told ABC's "Good Morning America" that Lori Drew called it "a good idea" when Grills and Drew's daughter suggested communicating with Megan Meier over the Internet to see what Megan was saying about the daughter, a former friend. Megan, of the suburban St. Louis town of Dardenne Prairie, hanged herself in October 2006, after mean-spirited online comments from what she thought was a boy she had befriended, "Josh Evans" and others. The boy was fictional. Grills, 19, said she created a false MySpace profile of Josh Evans and even found a picture of a good-l...

MSNBC.com Growing up online: Is your teen baring all? Coming of age in the wired world is entirely different from what you knew By Dr. Laura Berman TODAYShow.com contributor updated 9:49 a.m. PT, Tues., April. 29, 2008 Sexual experimentation has always been a part of adolescence, but in previous years it was confided to games of Spin the Bottle or Seven Minutes in Heaven. However, thanks to the Internet and the development of recent technology like camera phones, a new generation of teens is experimenting with sexuality in a whole new way. Their first forays into sexuality no longer occur on a small scale within a circle of peers, but on a very large one, such as on MySpace and Facebook. From racy pictures posted on these online social networks to sexy photos being sent on camera phones, teens are making their first sexual decisions with an audience of thousands. Even Disney star Miley Cyrus has received a barrage of press lately for photos that have surfaced on the Web which featu...

Summize lets you search on a word and it brings up the recent tweets which has that word. It also offers "Trending Topics" which let you know which topics are hot at that particular moment. It's just one of a family of products from the Summize labs. Others are Realtime Sentiment where you input a word and the program reports how those talking about that subject feel about the word. For instance I put in "love" and it reported that the prevalent attitude toward this word was "great" (the highest grade). I put in "hate crimes" and the attitude was wretched, the worst grade. Reviews, potentially very interesting, it summarizes attitudes and opinions from millions upon millions of comments throughout the web. (47,056,81 at this particular time). You can query for movies, books, music and interesting data magically appears. This is the search result for Madonna it provides opinions on all her products and even shows which bloggers are t...

eMarketer projects that by 2012, 50% of the online population or 108.5 million people will be creating UGC (User Generated Content). This includes audio, photos, personal blogs, personal web sites, online bulletin board postings, personal profiles in social networks or virtual worlds and / or customer reviews on sites like Yelp! The full report costs $695 and is available at eMarketer.

Variety : Media Titans Focusing on Ubiquity vs. Privacy LA Times : Hulu Now Playing on YouTube Social Times : MySpace Charging Applications for Prominent Display MediaPost : ATT&T's Mobile TV Initiative (CNN, Sony Pix, Concerts, etc.) eMarketer: HipHop's Youth Influencers

Web 2.0 Asia ...

Ever not be able to access a site and you don't know if something is up with your computer or if the site is actually down for everyone? I learned of this cool tool that helps you determine whether its you or them without having to ask a bunch of people to test it for you. Appropriately enough it's called Down For Everyone Or Just Me and that is exactly what its URL is. I love it when that happens. I learned of this from @pistachio on twitter.

Because the economics of the publishing business are changing, HarperCollins is experimenting with a new imprint that won't accept returns from retailers and will pay little or no advances to authors. They won't pay for desirable shelf-space in brick and mortar stores but instead will concentrate most of its sales efforts on the Internet and share profits with authors. The new venture is expected to publish about 25 titles a year, emphasizing shorter hardcover titles priced at about $20. It's run by Robert S. Miller who is leaving Disney's Hyperion, an imprint he founded in 1991. Read the whole story at the WSJ

Ross Mayfield talks about the offline web experience (ie the client based experience). Seesmic is a personal video sharing web site that makes recording and publishing person web videos easy and Thwirl is a client based application for Twitter which basically means that you can interact with Twitter from a client seperate from a web page. Seesmic plans to make the Thwirl client it's primary skin. The use of the word "acquire" is interesting, the exact finance facts aren't being released but the German developer now works for Seesmic.

ReadWriteWeb which is a site that I like but find it hard to look up previous articles has a piece today on " How To Break The Techmeme Habit ". I actually hate Techmeme and don't find it useful because basically it shows a lot of the same thing. For instance they list a headline and then 50 other blogs where you can read the same story. I find the headlines old and the relevancy doesn't seem based on anything important. This article lists several other services including Elite Tech News Reddit.

I was showing a friend Twitter and asked users to explain what it was. These are the wonderful answers I got very quickly. It was amazing. zjjtrans Twitter is an information pool like a network of walkie-talkies. BeckyMcCray More bad quotes at my Favorite Tweets http://is.gd/45o verso @ apenny more than IM, less than email. But with a megaphone BeckyMcCray Twitter is the Chameleon of Social Networks. It changes to match your needs at any moment. Conversation, Info, Announcements @ sass zachw http://tinyurl.com/384n2f <-- common craft: twitter in plain english lisamer Hi to you @ penny and your friend. It's hard to describe Twitter; its charms announce themselves through use more than demonstration. BeckyMcCray “Twitter germinates, where Facebook merely incubates.” from @ danlight on SxSW http://tinyurl.com/39zqs3 BeckyMcCray "It's like LinkedIn had a cocktail party." - @ NewMediaJim sioksiok Twitter is an onl...

FriendFeed is the new cool kid on the social media block. It pulls in your feeds from up to 32 sources listed in this picture. I'm sure new ones will be added as they go along. Personally it's an overwhelming amount of information and I find it disconcerting that it's organized by "friend", for instance a list of the 4 twitters person X twitted that day completely out of context. But that might just be a learning curve for me since I haven't really looked at it seriously. I find it interesting that LinkedIn is one of the feeds and not FaceBook. You can comment, like, link mute comments, and unsubscribe for each individual post at FriendFeed itself. It's a pet peeve of mine that when you comment on something people reply to your comment at the same location where you commented so you have to go back there to read the comment. I usually don't go back and so if someone does reply it's lost to me. Michael Arrington has a post about it on Tec...

Jason Alba who founded Job Search Management Service JibberJobber.com was covered nicely in US News and World Report about his new book "I'm on FaceBook: Now What?" and boosting sales through corporate networking. Guy Kawasaki posted 10 things you didn't know about Facebook which come from the book also written by Jesse Stay on 4/3/08.

Like, duh. I'm kind of overwhelmed by all the recent developments in Web 2.0 and I didn't even go to SXSW. It's been about a year since I became interested again in all things Internet after taking a couple of years off to work in traditional TV in Hollywood. I almost said "real TV" and I'm reminded many years ago of when I got out of MBA school and I moved to Los Angeles to become a TV producer (one can dream, no?). I had worked at Showtime Networks and MTV Networks for 2 years each. Some guy who was friends with a professor had me in to discuss breaking into the biz. He worked at an impressive production company that hadn't had a hit in over 10 years and told me, "call me when you get a job in real TV." Not nice, not nice at all. It's interesting though. Did you know that The Real World on MTV which arguably got the whole reality TV ball rolling is celebrating its 20th season. I started working online in 1995 at Time Warner's ...

By Jacqueline Emigh , BetaNews March 3, 2008, 2:23 PM JupiterResearch analysts are pointing to the music industry's need to revolutionize its business model even further, as social networking sites, Internet radio stations, and legit P2P services are taking command of the market. As music steps more and more toward online distribution, it will become increasingly important for the entertainment industry to find new business models along with new device paradigms, according to analysts at JupiterResearch. READ THE REST

A new and redesigned Ad Age has an article about a new report from Forrester. Ad Agencies need to establish social connections and develop relationships with decision makers since most people get information from their friends and community members. Consumers are increasingly not paying attention to advertisers messages but they are interested in participating in a conversation so they can learn about how choose and use products.

From Smashing Magazine 10 Designers Checkpoint Services: Measure all sorts of things, keyword popularity, click-throughs, traffic, accessibility.

From Fast Company , a conversation with John Morreall on the link between humor and innovation, why authoritarian bosses fear humor, and the funniest CEO in America. John Morreall, a professor at the College of William and Mary, is the founder of Humorworks, a consulting firm for companies such as AT&T, Cisco Systems, IBM and Time Warner. He has written four books on humor and is working on a new one titled "Funny Business" with New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff. You say that humor increases productivity, reduces conflict, and fosters change. Is this a joke? Humor is healthy, especially the way it reduces stress. Humor is the opposite of fight-or-flight emotions -- especially fear and anger. I can't be laughing with you and angry or afraid of you at the same time. How does it encourage creativity? Humor makes us think more flexibly. People who think funny do better on creativity studies. To put it really simply, humor loosens up your brain to think of more poss...

Easy to use tutorials on best practices for usability and effectiveness for Web site design. Usability First A List Apart (Topics) CSS Beauty Basics of Web Design From Scratch Web Design @ About dot com Web Page Design for Designers Web Design Resources (Mahalo) The Webby Award Winners The Nonprofit Times (Hot Web Sites) TechSoup dot org (The Technology Place for Nonprofits) Accessibility Web Building

Well Tumblr, Hysterical Paroxysm & a post pointing out a disease I didn't realize I had -- MADD A Writing Disorder That Stifles Your Creativity from copyblogger.

From the Sydney Herald, via THE BURGER via JaffeJuice.com: Here they are: 1. The Chumby 2. Microblogging 3. Everyblock 4. 23AndMe 5. Peer-to-Peer Lending 6. Mob Rules 7. Guerilla Wi-Fi 8. World Community Grid 9. Loopt 10. One Laptop Per Child I'm hooked on Microblogging (Twitter), The Chumby looks silly, all for Guerilla Wi-Fi and One Laptop Per Child, hopefully going to children who can really use them. The Burger makes a good point that maybe children need health care and food first.

Often on Twitter (can I mention twitter too many times?) .... someone says something that sounds provocative or insightful or amusing and I tell myself, "self, who said that? who is @tsfowg3x2z ??" and I look at their bio area. There you find a picture, screen name, full name, a link to their blog / flickr / facebook or whatever --- and a little quippy sentence or two. Mine currently says "I'm a lot of things, some of them good", which I think is cute and accurate, if vague. Frequently I discover great blogs that I bookmark and then never get back to visit. Here are a couple I've seen recently and look forward to spending more time with. 1 . KD Paine's PR Measurement Blog #233 on AdAge's Power 150 Top Media & Marketing Blogs 2. What's Next Online? 3. Colleen Coplick has a PR Agency in Vancouver ( Type A PR ) & definitely gets around (the world) ... recently she twittered that: " top 3 SM tools for sm biz being recommended i...

Steve Jobs checks out smartphone market share in the U.S. during the Apple Keynote on 1/15/08 RIM's Blackberry is in the lead, but the iPhone is in second place, with 19.5 percent market share. comparing to the other hardware manufacturers, as Apple ranks above Palm and Motorola. Not sure how he's defining smartphone, but, hey, it's his keynote. (from C|Net's live coverage) iTunes has sold 4 billion songs and 7 million movies, which sounds like a lot, but Jobs admits that hasn't met Apple's expectations. So, as expected, today Apple is introducing iTunes Movie Rentals.

I loved the movie Juno. The characters were so well written and unique and it all tied together. It had a quirky folky sound track which I found endearing against the background of the film but too syrupy to listen to without it. It seems to be the kind of soundtrack (movie?) that one either loves or hates. I just learned that the writer, Diablo Cody (with a name like that you better be a stripper!), was in fact an erotic dancer and a blogger / diarist. She published a book in 2005 called Candy Girl and the Juno script book has been published. (I just ordered both) She has a note on her most recent blog (a blogspot blog that was launched in September of 'o7) that she's using myspace more frequently now. She has 4,500 friends which I think is a sane, healthy number. I like the actress Ellen Page and saw her on Letterman. She was born on February 21st, 2007, so I guess she's turning 21 soon. She seems sharp and funny but the character in the movie was much younger. ...

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