Maya Arulpragasam, or as the rest of the world knows here, M.I.A., short for Missing in Action. Previously she was probably best known for her hit Paper Planes and last week she released an incredible video for her new single, Bad Girls.
If you’re aren’t aware, during yesterday’s Super Bowl performance came out to do a short rap during Madonna’s performance of her new single. At the end of her lines, M.I.A. added the line, “Yeah, I don’t give a shit” and then gave a hundred million people the finger. Here is a clip of the incident (it will probably be taken down soon).
Opinions are all over the place about whether or not it was intentional. A “source” claims she was caught in the moment, but I don’t buy it one bit. The same person who puts out a politically charged music video which YouTube permanently bans, doesn’t accidentally do something like this at the Super Bowl. She knew exactly what she was doing and that’s what makes it so great. In the same Super Bowl that featured former bad boys Motley Crue selling a Kia, M.I.A.’s gesture says something about authenticity and what it actually means to be rebellious these days.
At the same time it should (although it won’t) start a conversation on how ridiculous this outrage actually is, I could say more, but I’ll leave you with the image below.
Update: a quick Google search reveals that this line is actually in the original lyrics, wow that makes the outrage even less relevant.
Every year Nick Denton (the guy who built Gawker and turned it into a $300m media empire) puts out a memo about the state of journalism and publishing on the web. It’s always interesting to see what someone at the forefront of an industry is seeing and this year’s memo is no different.
Absent from the memo is much talk about longform web journalism. Over the past few years this category has developed into more of a cohesive writing form. Instead of pithy blog entries of only two or three articles, longform has embraced articles that routinely take thirty to forty minutes or more to read. Here are some examples of some good ones I’ve read in the past week or two.
Longform is great for a couple of reasons. It’s interesting and intellectually much more stimulating than a lot of other web content. I love having a cache of long interesting pieces to choose from if I don’t feel like reading my book on my commute every morning. Most importantly, it is legitimizing the idea of “reading stuff on the internet.”
While Denton’s memo points out a lot of other interesting trends, I think longform is definitely one you should look into if you’re not already aware of it. Two great resources to finding articles are Longform.org and Give Me Something to Read.
For those of you who know me well, it’s no secret that I love timelapse videos. There is something about them that is mesmerizing. They have been everywhere for the past few years. People are constantly making them. Now I think supercuts are replacing them. Supercuts are videos where one person doing one thing across a bunch of different clips are combined into one.
Here is an example of what I’m talking about. I didn’t realize it individually, but put together it’s obvious. And now whenever I see Brad Pitt eating something in a movie I think, wow, now I’ve been made aware that this is apparently something he does all the time. Fascinating.
I am still going to make my own timelapse video at some point, but now I need to add editing a supercut to the list.
Some thoughts on the Super Bowl.
Or has the internet rendered Superbowl commercials irrelevant? In the past few days car* companies everywhere have been “leaking” their commercials (along with many others). The average price for a commercial is now $3.5 million (not to mention production costs). In America alone, 1 out of every 3 people watch the game. Not a bad price to get almost guaranteed attention of that many people. But for that much money couldn’t you market an internet video and get over 100 million views (the amount of U.S. viewers of the game)? You could, but that’s not the only value in a Superbowl spot. Brands ensure that they are talked about as much of the game itself for days to come. The internet has actually exacerbated this. I can guarantee that Monday morning my Twitter and Facebook feeds will be cluttered by people sharing videos of their favorite commercials. Stephen Dubner from Freakanomics examines the topic in this interesting clip. Definitely worth a watch.
There is an old joke about trying to look up what time the game actually starts. The network covering the game wants you to tune in early and watch their coverage, so they aren’t reliable. Then a bunch of sneaky marketing people decided to write up a bunch of specific web content to get to the top of the results. These stories never answered the question either. They would be so key word laden that they made you even more confused. Seems like someone (Google?) finally fixed it this year. The game starts at 5:30/6:30 EST if the official Super Bowl site is to be believed (I’m still skeptical).
One final thought. It’s disturbing that the week before the NFL is finally going to stream the big game on the internet that the FBI conveniently decides to conduct a major operation and shut down most of the sports streaming sites out there? Nothing like a big corporation getting the government to eliminate its competition right before the big day, right? Yes, I realize these sites are doing something illegal, but these raids are just as shady.
Ok…one more quick thought: this is so dumb.
*What a sellout
I spent most of this morning reading all the coverage on the inevitable Facebook IPO. Here are some good articles on the subject. I spent a lot of time reading this, because apparently there wasn’t any other tech related news going on.
The question that pops into my mind is: should I get in on this? The answer that immediately comes to mind is: I really don’t know enough about the stock market to make an informed decision. When Google went public it’s stock was under $100, it’s now trading at $585. In hindsight it seems so obvious. Facebook is bigger (revenue and profit) today than Google was when it went public and Facebook is growing at a ridiculous pace.
The problem is that Facebook’s growth is slowing. Growth (usually in profits) is one of the major drivers of stock prices. Analysts want to see growth and love to see companies beating growth expectations. Facebook is still growing, but just not as quickly as they once were. They are reaching a saturation point in a lot of countries. There are only so many potential users out there and when they have broken 60% in a market (like the U.S.) or 80% in a market (like Chile), each additional user is even harder to acquire. It’s called diminishing returns. Basic law of economics.
To continue growth Facebook is going to have to focus on less saturated markets, namely places like China where the penetration is effectively 0%. They are smart, they realize this. That’s why Mark Zuckerberg had that really public trip to China and why the company has been doing everything they can to get a blessing from the government there. What totalitarian government (which already employs widespread censorship on the internet) is going to allow their citizens to use a service that has been lauded as one of the reasons for the Arab Spring? I predict Facebook is going to, or has already started building tools to facilitate further censorship to appease the Chinese government. They have to do this to get at the nearly one billion potential users the country can offer in return.
This is the problem with publicly traded companies. Profits becomes the motivating factor for decisions. Facebook already has a terrible track record regarding privacy and censorship. I can’t support a company that is going to have to willingly undermine basic freedoms of users to make money. Not to mention support one that is already doing this to some extent.
So I won’t be investing for quasi-moral reasons, but will the stock go up? I think there will be a huge surge on day one because of the pent up demand and then the stock will cool off by the end of the following week and then see steady growth until the next end of quarter earnings report.
Obviously a lot of speculation here and at the end of the day I should probably issue some sort of legal disclaimer that I’m not an expert (as if that wasn’t obvious). What do you think? Anyone hitting f5 on the keyboard to buy some $FB stock?
Even though I’m posting this a day late, I’m going to go ahead and do it. I’m going to challenge myself to post every day for the month of February to try to get back into the habit of posting on this blog instead of only on my Tumblr. Twenty eight posts in twenty eight days.
I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. Mainly, I’ve really neglected this space. Only one post in three months time. Not good. The other reason is for seo (search engine optimization) reasons. I’ll elaborate on this in a full post, but I’m also using this as an experiment to test assumptions about the changing influence social has had on search results.
Predictions on how far I make it?
I switched from Firefox to Chrome a few months back and haven’t switched back. In a nutshell:
-faster, uses less resources
-better bookmark manager
-search from the url bar
Makes me wonder, what other services that I’ve used forever should I reconsider?
The internet will eventually disrupt all existing industries. Think about the ones it has already fundamentally changed forever: music, software, retail, travel and your phone. What’s next? Television.
Consider the following:
- The average American still watches over five hours of tv a day.
- The cost of producing professional looking content has plummeted (my phone shoots HD video).
- Companies like Netflix are going around traditional content providers (cable industry) and producing original content on their own.
- Kids ages 12 to 17 spend one third of their time online watching video.
- Online video advertising spending has doubled in the past two years and estimates say it will increase by 33% this year.
- 1.3 Billion Videos are watched every day.
- The entire tv viewing experience is archaic and frustrating for the user (commercials, programs in time slots).
- Yet, over 90% of American households still pay for tv, because there is no serious alternatives (yet).
And now there is this Washington Post story about Steve Jobs talking on the subject. Television is definitely the next big industry to be disrupted by the internet. It can’t come soon enough.
David Pogue writing in the New York Times recently said the following:
Every time I’m tempted to write about some tech product that’s been around awhile, I’m torn. On one hand, I’ll be blasted by the technogeeks for being late to the party. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem right to keep something great hidden under a barrel from the rest of the world.
I feel that way about a lot of web services. The service Pogue mentions is Dropbox. I recently was telling my Dad (and new iPhone owner) about it. Then a few days later I was telling a friend about it. I’ve used it forever and can’t believe there are still people out there who haven’t heard about it or people didn’t realize that this was the service they needed to make their lives much easier. David Pogue’s review makes a better case than I could ever do, I urge you to check it out if you need some convincing. Or just click here to sign up and try it for yourself.
I’ve been putting a lot of thought into this recently. The other day I was explaining to my room mate what I had to do to change my driver’s license over to a New York one. Somehow we got to talking about being an organ donor.
I have moved a lot over the past six or seven years. I headed off to college in a different state, after graduation I moved to another state to take a job, then I moved to New York. Every state handles the organ donor question differently. At the end of the process in New York they ask you to check a box on a form you have to sign, indicating if you would like to be an organ donor or not. The phrasing of this question is significant.
I would be really interested to see the different rates of sign ups by state and by how this question is posed. I would guess the conversion rates vary wildly from places where you have to just check a box versus places where the back of your license just says to sign it if you’re interested.
Something to think about. How a question is phrased to someone has a significant impact on their response. Questions should always be worded in a way that will illicit the most desired response.
