Last evening I ventured out with my friend Heathervescent and a few others to watch “We Live In Public,” a fascinating documentary of the wild, wild Web in the 90s that morphs into a sobering look at how we (de)value privacy and intimacy in an age where everyone is desperate to be famous, and we [...]
What does the ongoing foreclosure crisis have in common with the plague food recalls? Quite a lot, as I was surprised to discover.
Most of you who have followed the housing crisis (and subsequent global economic meltdown) know that a principal cause was the packaging and reselling of individual mortgage loans as securities to hedge funds [...]
Some of you may recall that Time Warner Cable made the boneheaded move a little while back of trying to roll out bandwith caps for users in markets that had no competition from other ISPs. The response was swift, brutal, and definitive, and I’m proud of the role I played in putting the hammer down [...]
A few people sent me the link to this editorial by Jason Lee Miller of WebProNews. His basic thesis is that net neutrality (Do a search in my blog for the term if you don’t know what that means) is no longer a high-priority topic for Democrats in the Obama era, and that the legislation [...]
I’d known for a little while that there was a new effort underway by Hollywood and the music industry to enforce heavier criminal penalties against piracy and downloading, but it seems that the much-reported leak of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” has added new fuel to that particular fire. Quoth Bloomberg:
Hollywood was already revving up to [...]
Yesterday I read another one of those hand-wringingly apocalyptic columns in a media trade rag–Advertising Age–that outlined the media meltdown in such hysterical terms I had to double-check to make sure I wasn’t reading The Onion by accident. Consider:
The toll will be so vast — and the institutions of media and marketing are so central [...]
For the five of you that didn’t watch the Super Bowl today, one of the more interesting between-game ads was Alec Baldwin’s “cerebral-gelatinizing” pitch for Hulu, the online video/TV site jointly created by NBC and Fox. That a network would use ad time to pitch one of its other offerings isn’t so revolutionary, but here’s [...]
In this week’s video/radio address, President-elect Obama unveiled his plans to create 2.5 million jobs by 2011 through combining energy independence efforts with infrastructure rebuilding:
This is exactly the right tack to take–as it’s really the only tack we have. Rather than injecting capital into markets, what we need is to create new jobs, get people [...]
The Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett has a must-read column about what a potential depression would look like in 2009. Rather than the historical vision of bread lines and people in rags that we remember from 70 years ago, this time may find people hunkered down in huge, empty dwellings, watching TV because they can’t afford [...]
By now most of you have heard that Rahm Emanuel has accepted the job as Obama’s chief of staff. This is a telling move that will set the tone for what kind of administration Obama wants. Rahm is a pro-Israel hawk, big business kind of guy who I disagree with politically. But by taking him [...]
