On The Turning Away

For many, it’s the last working day before the long weekend. With gas prices coming down, even armchair traveler is eyeing… where else, the small concrete island that is Manhattan. And news today just confirms our worst fear: the island is full of smug, over-educated, over-ambitious, type A personalities.

In a widely quoted piece, “America’s smartest cities“, the list of top 25 “brainiest” cities (with more than 250,000 population, ranked by percentage of bachelor’s degrees among residents 25 and older) is out. Seattle tops the list with 52.7%, followed by San Francisco 50.1%. Our fair city “cranks the top 25 list” at 20th, with 32.2%. However, the catch is, if Manhattan were counted as a city, it would make it to the top - “the percentage of residents with bachelor’s degrees is a whopping 57.5, and the figure for advanced degrees is 26.9 percent.”

So it seems this concrete island is not really as diverse, culturally and otherwise, as you might think.

Predictably, we’re fashionably late to the whole feeds scene and have just learned of Tailrank, a neat “memetracker which finds the hottest posts from thousands of blogs so you don’t have to!”

It’s almost frighteningly up-to-date - we were just at it when this came out: “PINNED: Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 Released“, along with the blogs on this subject. We were immediately hooked - this surely is the cool place to hang out!

Tailrank was founded by Kevin Burton, a veteran of “feeds” technology.

This must have been one of the slowest weeks of the summer, which, gasp, is almost over. Are you screaming to get out of town? Don’t leave without this YouTube clip that is doing the rounds in the blogosphere.

One of the world’s most recognizable paintings by Edvard Munch, The Scream (Skrik, 1893), showing a waif-like figure apparently screaming or hearing a scream, has just been found after it was stolen in a bold, daylight raid by masked gunmen from the Munch Museum in Oslo on Aug 22, 2004. The seminal painting with its iconic open-mouthed scream is said by critics to symbolize modern man suffering an attack of existential angst. In the late 20th century, The Scream acquired iconic status in popular culture. Andy Warhol made a series of silk prints of works by Munch, including The Scream.

Intriguingly, earlier this week M&M launched an ad campaign to offer 2 million dark chocolate M&M’s for the return of “The Scream”, all in the name of “making eating dark chocolate a scream”. Is it a work-in-progress of life imitating art?
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What’s in common among rock concerts, widescreen movies, live sport games? User experience. These high-fidelity (as the total experience of something) events tend to be expensive and inconvenient. So we trade them off for convenient but low-fidelity experience by watching them on TV. Or in Web 2.0 era, on cellphones and other mobile devices.

The knowledge that consumers move up and down the fidelity/convenience path is part and parcel to content distributors and gadget makers alike.

USA Today delved into the insection of engineering and consumer behavior to look at how a particular medium takes off. iPod is a stellar example of consumer electronics that balances fidelity with convenience. The movie theatre business, on the other hand, has been caught on the wrong side of the fidelity/convenience threshold. Videoconference also testifies to the lackluster fidelity. This fall Cisco is unveiling telepresence, which uses massive amounts of bandwidth to transmit large-screen, high-definition teleconferencing, all in the name of improving fidelity.

In the wake of new “ethnicity-centered format” for Survivor that has drawn criticism, several advertisers, including GM, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, United Parcel Service and Campbell Soup, have dropped the show, the NYT reported today.

GM has been a sponsor of the hit show since its debut in July 2000 and accounted for 18% of the show’s top 50 advertisers in 2006. Thus its decision to withdraw dealt a blow to CBS, which annouced the new format that will pit teams against one another based on their ethnicity.
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Monday Books is to publish a series of books based on blogs, Guardian reported. The first one, “It’s Your Time You’re Wasting”, is developed from a blog: Mr Chalk, a teacher’s blog about hellish classroom life. The second, “Wasting Police Time”, is about the “crazy world of the war of crime”, based on The Policeman’s Blog.

What’s more? It’s reported that pre-publishing buzz in the blogosphere has boosted the first book - pre-orders at Amazon have forced the publisher to “reprint” before a single copy has been sold.
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Media investment seems to dominate the news on the financial front. One blog-worthy piece is about Ovation, the high-brow arts cable channel, was acquired for a reported $55m by a consortium that includes Harvey Weinstein’s new gig, Hubbard Media Group, and Arcadia Partners.

Another (activist) hedge fund, Steel Partners, is said to have been circling a piece of real estate in the even more rarefied space: adult entertainment. SeelingAlpha first broke the news last Nov - Steel’s interest in New Frontier Media - but today MarketWatch has confirmed the melding of shark-smelling-blood hedge funds and racy porn.

Today’s the New York premier of Blogumentary, a documentary “playfully” explores blogs as they have entrenched themselves in the spheres of media, politics, and personal relationships. We wonder what’s more riveting, “love at first blog” or “a friend’s suicidal blog post”. After all, without blogs and “Blogcumentary”, our hyperconnected existence would not have been possible.

There’s some follow-up news on MTV’s Flux plan we first brought to you last month. PC World has learned that Flux will be launched in Japan later this year and is likely to follow in other countries, announced by MTV execs at a news conference in Tokyo.

Since it entered its 25th year, MTV has been going out of it way to send the message out to web-savvy young audience: “We’re no longer a TV-centric company anymore. We are now poised to lead in digital.” Flux is their showcase. A key feature of the service - billed as part YouTube, part MySpace - will be to let users organize their own playlists of content and share them with friends.
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