Sean French pointed me to this:
Like him, I’m baffled by how anyone could have such an encyclopedic knowledge of film. This is not the kind of stuff you find by Googling.
More… Quentin (like Sean, a movie buff) writes: ” I wonder if somebody had access to the close-caption text transcripts for a large movie library – you could search that…”
Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
John Milton: Areopagitica
The case for the blogosphere, in a nutshell.
Bill Thompson and I had a hilarious conversation the other morning with an incredulous former newspaper editor in which we tried to explain why Twitter might be interesting, even if it is currently just leading-edge uselessness. Afterwards I thought that perhaps a movie might help. So I made one.
Later… Martin Weller pointed me in the direction of Flickrvision, in which David Troy (creator of Twittervision) does the same thing for photographs.
Still later… Liz Lawley has some interesting thoughts about it, e.g.
What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage—personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages—into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.
The big “P” word in technology these days is “participatory.” But I’m increasingly convinced that a more important “P” word is “presence.” In a world where we’re seldom able to spend significant amounts of time with the people we care about (due not only to geographic dispersion, but also the realities of daily work and school commitments), having a mobile, lightweight method for both keeping people updated on what you’re doing and staying aware of what others are doing is powerful…
Well, well!
Who’d have predicted this — the Torygraph encouraging its readers to dip a toe into the Web of iniquity?
It’s amazing what you find on YouTube. Here’s an interview with Jurgen Habermas.
Thanks to Michael for spotting it! Great Q&A session, btw.
If you want more, why not try the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address?
Very instructive, this. A video shot inside a US Army Humvee driving through suburban Baghdad. The kind of thing you never see on mainstream TV news.
[Source]
A new kind of user-generated content — video from a US Humvee on patrol on a dirt road in Iraq. Contains strong language and is best avoided by readers with sensitive dispositions. But it provides a vivid illustration of why US military power is so impotent in Iraq. This is what Donald Rumsfeld & Co never reckoned with.
[Source]
If you like Heath-Robinson, you’ll love this.
Rupert Murdoch, writing about ‘mixed media’ in Forbes.com…
Those of us in so-called old media have also learned the hard way what this new meaning of networking spells for our businesses. Media companies don’t control the conversation anymore, at least not to the extent that we once did. The big hits of the past were often, if not exactly flukes, then at least the beneficiaries of limited options. Of course a film is going to be a success if it’s the only movie available on a Saturday night. Similarly, when three networks divided up a nation of 200 million, life was a lot easier for television executives. And not so very long ago most of the daily newspapers that survived the age of consolidation could count themselves blessed with monopolies in their home cities.
All that has changed. Options abound. Fans of small niches can now find new content they could never before. Going elsewhere for news and entertainment is easier and cheaper than ever. And people’s expectations of media have undergone a revolution. They are no longer content to be a passive audience; they insist on being participants, on creating their own material and finding others who will want to read, listen and watch.
That’s the bad news, apparently. But,
The good news is that we are learning–and fast. Take the type of media I know best–news. News is in more demand than ever, but the vast network of Internet-savvy news junkies want their news with several fresh twists: constantly updated, relevant to their daily lives, complete with commentary and analysis, and presented in a way that allows them to interact not just with the news but with each other about the news. They won’t wait until six o’clock to watch the news on television or until the next morning to read it in isolation. This plainly provides a challenge for news providers but also an opportunity to be far more engaged with the audience.
Companies that take advantage of this new meaning of network and adapt to the expectations of the networked consumer can look forward to a new golden age of media.
Translation: stick with those News Corp shares.