January 10, 2006

Microsoft as Aging Baby Boomer?

I love Seventies rock as much as the next music fan, but I'm not sure aging rockers are the best solution for polishing the sound of a Windows operating system likely to last the rest of this decade. If the report over at Bink.nu is true, Microsoft hired Robert Fripp of King Crimson fame to handle the duties of creating sounds for the next generation Windows operating system. According to the release, Fripp is shooting for a 2001: A Space Odyssey sound for Windows Vista. So we've got a psychedelic rocker recording 1970's space age sounds for the next millennium's operating system? Either everything old is new again or Microsoft is suffering from a case of reliving the glory days at a college reunion.

Posted by Jake at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

December 03, 2005

Citizen Television?

The citizen's media movement online has primarily been an act of individuals writing or recording their views and sharing them from an independent platform like a blog. Some commercial entities, like Nashville's WKRN and KRON in San Francisco are enabling a small group of citizen reporters to tell news stories their way in the local markets. The television stations are paying their citizen journalists for work completed. Local markets get better coverage, in theory and the people doing the coverage get paid. Nothing's wrong with that.

So what happens when a popular television show starts enlisting fans to do the shows writing for free? That's exactly what Showtime's The L Word is doing, according to a recent New York Times article (linked to from FanLib.com, the marketing company in the middle). FanLib solicits scene submissions from viewers during a 12-week contest. The writers get to use any of the submitted material as part of the upcoming season. And in theory, the winners get to see their scenes acted out on the show. At the end of the day, the show's writer's end up looking smarter as a result and still get paid. Sounds more like Citizen fleecing to me.

Posted by Jake at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2005

Understanding The News

Newscasters have tag lines for everything. Terms like 'Breaking News', 'Team Coverage' and 'This just in...' are all used regulary to lead us past each commercial break and into the next segment. These tag lines meant something in the days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. Today, this is watered down codes for, "please don't turn the channel, we need to eat." Lost Remote did a nice breakdown of these terms to help us decipher the nightly news. For example:

"We have a crew on the way."
OLD: We have a crew on the way.
NEW: We just saw the story on the other channel and we're calling in our truck guy from his day off.

"We have new details..."
OLD: We have found out additional facts that are new and pertinent to your understanding of this complex story.
NEW: We got nothin', but we're rewriting the copy in the present tense.

Read the guide to new newswriting

Posted by Jake at 08:36 PM | Comments (0)