05 December 2007
10 December 2006
The web is a great equalizer
After calling Britney Spears a backstreet floozie last week, web searches and posts for Camille Paglia have skyrocketed. Bloggers have been especially active in documenting what has been described as the virtual altercation between the pop star and the feminist. Celebrity Dream Network, a celebrity gossip blog that unashamedly "puts words in the mouths of the stars" quoted Britney as having said:
“I’m a 25-year old dropout mother of 2 from the friggin’ Bayou, who is currently leading the whole planet around by its nose with my vagina. If you can’t see the delicious, pro-feminist irony in that, you’re just out of touch. I got a billion uniques today, bitch! WTF did you do?” -- from Camille Paglia gets Owned
02 November 2006
Cindy Margolis, DRM and the Playboy Empire
Once touted as the most downloaded woman on the Internet, Cindy Margolis is making her nude debut in the December, 2006 issue of Playboy Magazine. At the not-so-tender age of 40, Cindy is undoubtedly beyond the physical prime that once accounted for her online popularity. Yet, as many aging actresses and imminently forgotten female celebs have done before her, she’s decided to pose nude in what must be the hopes of a last hoorah. Playboy has an incomparable track record of wooing female celebs onto its pages. Part of the allure for prospective celeb centerfolds must be that Playboy promises to make them look good, sometimes better than they ever looked before, even if it takes a little airbrushing and mood lighting to achieve the desired effect. As fans we are generally happy to have whatever glimpse of them we can get. For the female celeb, especially if there is already a large amount of extant photography (as in Cindy’s case), the Playboy images may become the definitive images of their career — displacing less flattering or controversial images from the public attention. It is naive of Playboy, however, and a tragic shortsale of the potential benefit to the model, to try to preserve these images exclusively in the medium of print. It is impossible to prevent their digitization and rampant dissemination upon the Internet. It is also far beyond the capacity of even the most well-funded and determined of companies to police the unauthorized duplication and use of images upon the Web — especially when they have been so widely distributed in print... more about Cindy Margolis in Playboy
24 July 2006
The Truth about Blogs
THEORY: I think it's entirely possible for bloggers to take control of the global flow of information. We would do this, essentially, by cutting out the middleman. From a network topology standpoint, Mass Publishers are information bottlenecks. What we'll do is we'll allow the Internet to operate as it was designed to do in the case of "damaged areas" permitting of no flow. We will circumvent them.
This incredible opportunity exists today for the efforts of companies like Google. What Google and others have done is turned the conventional broadcast (one-to-many) information distribution scheme inside out. The blogosphere provides for the inclusion of all voices, but it does not aggregate them at any central point. It is the opposite of a bottleneck. The blogosphere is a near-perfect democracy. It not only shows us concensus, it permits for that concensus to change (very quickly!), in response to new information. Even beyond the trust issues, one of the problems with the information output of Mass Publishers is it is rather static, once created. Mass Publishers output new information at a regular and frequent rate, but the bulk of "current" information is always in a tiny minority, against the total information footprint of the Publisher's archive. The only thing that keeps that quite small number of pages at the forefront of visibility on the Web is their Trustrank. In many cases, this trust is deserved. But in many other cases, what keeps us typing in those URLs and giving links to Mass Publishers is the expectation that their information is credible. This needn't be so. Who says there is any reason to trust the New York Times or the CBS Evening News? Remember that we are, all of us, as a culture, still under the influence of the Mass Messages that pervade the other mediums. We're all still making judgements about brands and companies based on their marketing... truth
the truth
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