How professionals handle high-volume image flows

Absolutely riveting article by Rob Galbraith explaining how the staff of Sports Illustrated handle the thousands of digital images that flood in from a big sporting event.

CNN discovers News Readers

Finally Big Media gets it. Nice and accessible article on the CNN site about RSS feeds and the significance of the technology. It’s a bit breathless and gee-whizzy. For example,

“Hang on to your hats boys and girls, because your experience of the World Wide Web is about to change, possibly for the first time since Mosaic, one of the first graphical browsers, was unleashed in 1993 from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois….”

But, on the other hand, it communicates well to non-techies. And gives lots of useful links. Author Christine Boese has performed a useful service for her industry.

The paradoxical US of A

From the Economist of 28 February.

1. “America is one of the most religious countries in the industrialised world. Over 80% of Americans claim to believe in God, compared with 62% of the French and 52% of Swedes. About two-thirds of Americans claim membership of a church, 40% go to church once a week, and 43% describe themselves as born-again Christians. Three times as many people believe in the Virgin birth as in evolution.”

Further down the same column….

2. “But America is also one of the most secular countries in the world. The Constitution guarantees a rigorous separation of church and state, and secular groups are assiduous in using the courts to enforce that separation. (On February 25th, the Supreme Court ruled that states could withold scholarships from students studying divinity.) Public schools recoil from even the mildest religious imagery. More than 29m Americans say that they have ‘no religion’, a number that exceeds all but two religious denominations, Roman Catholics and Baptists. For the most part, the people who run America’s media industries in New York and Hollywood are aggressively secular, combining intellectual hostility to Middle America’s religious fundamentalism with a generous measure of cultural disdain.”

Valuing a ‘brand’

From James Gleick, writing in the NYT:”The word NIKE is thought by analysts to be worth $7 billion; COCA-COLA is valued at 10 times as much.” Hmmm… The latter has just depreciated a bit, at least in the UK.

Gleick’s piece is full of examples of the absurdity of the world we are creating. For example:

“An Atlanta music writer known as BILL WYMAN received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing the former Rolling Stones bass player known as Bill Wyman: demanding, that is, that he ”cease and desist” using his name. In responding, Bill Wyman No. 1 pointed out that Bill Wyman No. 2 had been born William George Perks.

The German car company known as Dr. Ing. h.c.F. Porsche AG has fought a series of battles to protect the name CARRERA. But another contender is a Swiss village, postal code 7122. ”The village Carrera existed prior to the Porsche trademark,” Christoph Reuss of Switzerland wrote to Porsche’s lawyers. ”Porsche’s use of that name constitutes a misappropriation of the good will and reputation developed by the villagers of Carrera.” He added, for good measure, ”The village emits much less noise and pollution than Porsche Carrera.” He didn’t mention that José Carreras, the opera singer, was embroiled in a name dispute of his own. The car company, meanwhile, also claims trademark ownership of the numerals 911.”

Though presumeably not of the string 9/11.