On The Turning Away

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Jeff Cohen, former aide of Dennis Kucinich, explains why the media is out to get John Edwards, who’s leading in polls in Iowa, where the first caucuses vote next January. “[C]urrent media coverage of Edwards bears an eerie resemblance to the scary reporting on the Democratic frontrunner four years ago, Howard Dean…The media barrage against Dean in the weeks before Iowa - ‘too far left’ and ‘unelectable’ with a high ‘unfavorable’ rating - helped defeat him.”

Today, Beltway pundits are doing their best to “raise Edwards’ unfavorable rating”. But can the independent media and the Netroots, albeit four years stronger and have more clout vis-a-vis corporate media than during Dean’s rise and fall, pull off a coup d’état against MSM?

This just in - according to AP, Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old Atlanta personal injury lawyer, has been identified as the man travelling with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis across two continents. Conveniently, his new father-in-law, Bob Cooksey, is a “CDC microbiologist specializing in the spread of TB and other bacteria”.

It makes you wonder whether it’s a coincidence and how the case came to the attention of federal health authorities. Mr Speaker was flown from Atlanta to Denver today, accompanied by his wife and federal marshals, to be treated at Denver’s National Jewish Medical and Research Center. It’s the first US government-ordered quarantine since 1963.

Spams are more than a nuisance, if our recent experience is any guide. Now computer users can rejoice at the news that one of the world’s most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday. Robert Alan Soloway is accused of “using networks of compromised ‘zombie’ computers to send out millions upon millions of spam e-mails”.

A federal grand jury last week returned a 35-count indictment against Soloway charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

Soloway’s case is the first ever case in which federal prosecutors have used identity theft statutes to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else’s Internet domain name. He could face decades in prison.

Fortune’s editor-at-large apparently thinks so. He even likens Apple TV to Zune, a hyped MP3 music player from Steve Jobs’ nemesis: “you’d think Jobs was so busy with the iPhone that he outsourced the Apple TV project to the folks up in Redmond.”

Touché. In fact, the most touted feature of Apple TV is its weakest one: the downloaded video from iTunes is so low-resolution that it looks as fuzzy as plain old broadcast TV. And you can’t order a movie directly from the iTunes store via your TV, rather you have to download it to your computer first.
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In a move to combine traditional broadcast with online radio to target younger demographic, CBS is buying last.fm, a UK-based social music sharing Website that claims more than 15 million monthly users internationally, including more than 4 million in the US, for $280 million.

Last.fm offers Internet streaming radio and is best-known for its social-recommendation engine Audioscrobbler, in which new artists are suggested to users based on their playlists and what tastes they may have in common with other users. By offering 30-second samples, “scrobbling” doesn’t need licenses to play music.

The acquisition is “emblematic of the sharp change in direction at CBS”. Instead of focusing solely on creating programming, the long-staid company now is medium-agnostic as far as reaching the broadest possible audience is concerned.
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So screamed the subject line of an email from a friend of ours, who’s a renaissance man. Because of the archaeological entertainment value, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention it here.

DNA evidence shows that human remains, found in a 1,400-year-old Chinese tomb in Taiyuan in central China, belonged to a man of European origin. The tomb, which also contains the remains of a woman of East Asian descent, has been undergoing excavation since 1999.

Research by a Chinese team studying their mitochondrial DNA shows that the man arrived in Taiyuan approximately 1,400 years ago and most probably married a local woman. Discoveries like this “give a clearer picture of human movements and human gene flow” and hold great promise “for enhancing our understanding of human prehistory”. And “yellow fever“.

Was Andy Roddick’s loss in the first round of the French Open to an unseeded Russian due to his sexed-up cover shot on Men’s Fitness, where his arms were “enhanced to make them look more muscular”? The fallout has been plastered all over the place since it came out last week.

Even the tennis pro confessed in his own blog, “Little did I know I have 22-inch guns and a disappearing birthmark on my right arm.” Perhaps photoshopped (image) is the new black?

According to the latest report from Hitwise, Google dominated US searches with 65% of market share in April, followed by Yahoo! at 21%, MSN 5%, and Ask 4%, whereas the rest accounted for a meagre 1.86%.

The results also shed light on Web users with health and medical searches leading the overall traffic with close to 45%. Travel was the runner-up with 31%, followed by shopping and classifieds at 25%. News and media, surprisingly, took the 5th spot at slightly over 20%, only a whisker behind entertainment. Business and finance rounded up the top six categories.

BusinessWeek is mulling a business YouTube as an online video hub for wannabe moguls to post short pitch videos for new ventures. The service will be user-driven - participants would rate each proposal and ultimately vote on the winner, who would receive VC funding to implement the proposed business plan.

Is BusinessWeek concerned about losing audience? The YouTube style platform will certainly help widen its reach to non-business readers but whether the “broadcast yourself” idea will rub off on the existing users is an open question. No matter, the name of the game today is “deepen the audience experience” with content.