Hollywood discovers YouTube

Posted on by

Hilarious piece in the New York Times…

“MySpace: The Movie” first appeared on YouTube on Jan. 31 and since then has had millions of hits, enough viewers to rival big-budget films or TV shows. Mr. Lehre, who is 21 and lived at his parents’ home in Washington, Mich., when he created the video, shot it there with friends. He scored the music himself so he wouldn’t have to deal with copyright issues, designed the graphics and Googled any technical questions he had. This development and distribution process makes even independent films, with their retinue of maxed-out credit cards and frenzied film festivals, look positively mainstream in comparison….

The movie can be found here. It’s vaguely amusing IMHO, but cleverly made. Rather like an art-school project. When I looked it had been viewed 526,878 times.

Wonder what YouTube’s bandwidth costs are.

Blogging is personal, mainly

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column…

Mr Sifry reckons that about 75,000 new blogs are created every day, ie about one new blog a second. And just to address the gibe that blogs are like Christmas toys – to be played with once and then discarded – he estimates that 13.7 million blogs are still being updated three months after their creation and about 2.7 million people update their blogs at least once a week.

Professional media folk are predictably incredulous about this. Why would anyone write without being paid for doing so? And, besides, who do these people think they are, gaily airing their so-called ‘opinions’? Jean-Remy von Matt, the CEO of a German advertising agency, spoke for many in the media industry when he fired off an enraged email after bloggers had effectively sabotaged one of his advertising campaigns. In the email he called blogs ‘the toilet walls of the internet’. ‘What on earth’, he asked, ‘gives every computer-owner the right to express his opinion, unasked for?’

This foolish, tragic war

Posted on by

I love the Economist for its journalism, but am generally sceptical about its editorials. This week’s Leader on the escalating madness in Lebanon, however, seems to me to be spot on. Sample:

The war that has just erupted apparently without warning between Israel and Lebanon looks miserably familiar. The wanton spilling of blood, the shattering of lives and homes, the flight of refugees: it has all happened in much the same way and just the same places before. In 1982 an Israeli government sent tanks into the heart of Beirut to crush the “state within a state” of Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organisation. A quarter of a century later, Israel’s air force is pulverising Lebanon in order to crush the state within a state established there by Hizbullah, Lebanon’s Iranian-inspired “Party of God”. That earlier war looked at first like a brilliant victory for Israel. Arafat and his men had to be rescued by the Americans and escorted to exile in faraway Tunis. But Israel’s joy did not last. The war killed thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, along with hundreds of Israeli and Syrian soldiers. It brought years of misery to Lebanon—and, of course, no peace in the end to Israel. The likeliest outcome of this war is that the same futile cycle will repeat itself…

It goes on to speculate that the war may be partly a product of the insecurity that Israel’s new Prime Minister — a man with no military experience — may feel, and which may be leading him into being more belligerent than is necessary. One of the great things about Sharon was that at least he had been tempered in the heat of battle. As the old saying goes, Hell hath no fury like a non-combatant. (In the same context, it’s noteworthy that all the hawks in the Bush administration dodged the draft in Vietnam and never fired a bullet in anger.) The Economist Leader goes on…

It is because the stakes are so high that both sides have rushed so fast up the ladder of escalation. Israel’s aim is not just to even the score by hurting Hizbullah and then stopping. Before stopping, it says, it wants to deprive Hizbullah of its power to strike Israel in future. That means destroying Hizbullah’s rocket stores even if they are concealed in villages and bombing its command bunkers even if they are located under the crowded residential suburbs of south Beirut. It also means cutting off Hizbullah’s resupply, even if the subsequent blockade by land, sea and air brings Lebanon’s economy to its knees. If hundreds of civilians are killed, and hundreds of thousands put to flight, so be it: in war, under Israel’s philosophy, moderation is imbecility. Hizbullah is no different, and in some ways worse. The “open war” declared by Mr Nasrallah consists chiefly of firing rockets indiscriminately into Israel’s towns. Israel says it is killing civilians by accident, but the disparity in firepower means the Lebanese still suffer much more.

This is madness, and it should end. It is madness because the likelihood of Israel achieving the war aims it has set for itself is negligible. However much punishment Mr Olmert inflicts on Hizbullah, he cannot force it to submit in a way that its leaders and followers will perceive as a humiliation. Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon turned into its Vietnam. It is plainly unwilling to occupy the place again. But airpower alone will never destroy every last rocket and prevent Hizbullah’s fighters from continuing to send them off. No other outside force looks capable of doing the job on Israel’s behalf. At present, the only way to disarm Hizbullah is therefore in the context of an agreement Hizbullah itself can be made to accept…

Quote of the day

Posted on by

“I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone”.

Bjarne Stronstrup, actress.

Not to be confused (as I had originally done) with Bjarne Stroustrup, the designer and original implementor of the programming language, C++. I mean, an ‘n’ is just a ‘u’ standing on its head (he said, feebly). Haven’t looked at my email yet, but I bet someone picked up my elementary schoolboy mistake. Wonder what the emoticon for ’embarrassed’ is? Hmmm…. There seems to be some debate on the matter. This source claims that any of these will do:

  • :”->
  • :”-)
  • :$ or
  • :-$

    • What Bloggers write about

    Posted on by

    Interesting research report from the Pew ‘Internet and American Life’ project. Summary:

    A new, national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology.

    Related surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the blog population has grown to about 12 million American adults, or about 8% of adult internet users and that the number of blog readers has jumped to 57 million American adults, or 39% of the online population.

    These are some of the key findings in a new report issued by the Pew Internet Project titled “Bloggers”:

  • 54% of bloggers say that they have never published their writing or media creations anywhere else; 44% say they have published elsewhere.
  • 54% of bloggers are under the age of 30.
  • Women and men have statistical parity in the blogosphere, with women representing 46% of bloggers and men 54%.
  • 76% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to document their personal experiences and share them with others.
  • 64% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to share practical knowledge or skills with others.
  • When asked to choose one main subject, 37% of bloggers say that the primary topic of their blog is “my life and experiences.”
  • Other topics ran distantly behind: 11% of bloggers focus on politics and government; 7% focus on entertainment; 6% focus on sports; 5% focus on general news and current events; 5% focus on business; 4% on technology; 2% on religion, spirituality or faith; and additional smaller groups who focus on a specific hobby, a health problem or illness, or other topics.

    • G’Bye

    Posted on by

    This morning’s Observer column…

    The trouble with IT is that there’s always someone whose business plan involves world domination. For a time, it was IBM. Then it was Microsoft – which hasn’t given up on the goal, by the way, but is beginning to realise that tiresome obstacles like the European Commission might scupper the plan. The latest contender for Supreme Ruler is Google, which until recently was a cheeky startup run by guys claiming the freehold of the Higher Moral Ground, but is now a grubby corporation just like the rest…

    The pleasures of Provence

    Posted on by

    (We’re on holiday.)

  • Waking to sunshine, every morning without fail.
  • Strolling to the village to buy (i) newspapers and (ii) croissants, pain au chocolat and baguettes for breakfast.
  • Sitting in the shade, reading (i) from cover to cover and munching (ii) in a companionable silence.
  • Greeting a sleepy son, recently risen from his bed and now on his way to the pool. Marvelling at the fact that the last thing he did last night was to swim under the stars, with the underwater lights on.
  • Discussing with one’s host whether we should make more coffee, or simply sit and have a cigar. Decisions, decisions…
  • Browsing through the pile of books on the hall table trying to decide which one to read today. (This is book-a-day territory.)
  • Wondering why anybody would want to live anywhere else.

    • The abuse of power

    Posted on by

    One of my favourite books is Power by Steven Lukes. In it, he says that power comes in only three varieties: the ability to make people do what they don’t want to do; the ability to stop people doing what they want to do; and the ability to shape the way they think. The last is the power that our decaying mass media have, and in Britain exercise to a frightening degree. Britain’s tabloid culture explains why it’s effectively impossible to have a grown-up public discussion about any complex policy issue.

    Brooding on this this morning, I came on Martin Kettle’s column in this morning’s Guardian. “It is beyond argument”, he writes,

    that the award of peerages has always been a cynical business. Ditto that Britain’s party-funding system is unsustainable. And also that John Prescott is a busted flush. All these things are true and, in context, serious. But there is much more to politics and government than this. Yet our po;itical culture doesn;t want to know. It seems incapable of getting out of second gear.

    This has been a week, after all, in which politics has emphatically not been about games but about the real thing. The Middle east has taken a sharp turn for the worse. What appears to be Islamist terrorism has been unleashed on a country with impeccable anti-imperialist credentials. And the UK government has announced a major strategic rethink of the country’s long-term energy needs.

    And yet what, for most British journalism this week, has been “the question that just won’t go away” — aka the question we prefer to go on asking anyway? Not the Middle east, Islamist terrorism or whether the lights will stay on. Instead we have a choice of: “Why didn’t John Prescott declare the gift of a stetson?”, “Who else has he slept with?” or “Are the police going to question Tony Blair about Labour loans?” In this political culture, the closest we get to putting it all into perspective is episode 952 of the “When will Blair go?” saga.

    Getting it right second time

    Posted on by

    One of the delights of the Guardian is the “Corrections and clarifications” column which runs alongside the leaders. Not only is it an example of good practice (everyone knows that we journalists make mistakes, so why not make a feature out of a bug?), but it often makes enthralling reading. See, for example, this entry from July 14:

    The photograph of a jellyfish shown in ‘Bathers beware’, page 9, yesterday, was of a Pelagia noctiluca and not, as we have been informed by the agency which supplied it, Auerlia aurita.