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Closure on the McCain Girls.
In what is probably my last post on the McCain girls (see here and here and here), I present some closure on the mystery surrounding the creators.
So yes, I did go to elementary school with the long-haired brunette in the video.
And the comedy site 23/6 (owned by IAC) was the producer of the content, as outed by the NY Times today.
Case closed.
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Improv Everywhere Turns Little League into the Big Leagues.
Improv Everywhere, the group behind the Grand Central Station and Best Buy stunts have just launched a new one: turning a Little League baseball game into a major league-style event.
Somebody get these guys some damn online sponsorships.
The Mets Get RickRolled.
Earlier, I discussed the campaign to get Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up played at Shea Stadium.
Well, it happened. The song got over five million votes.
I caught it on my mobile phone at the game. The fan reaction was pretty harsh. Watch it here:
Here’s what it looked like on TV:
More ‘Raining McCain’?
My sources tell me that this weekend we will see a premiere of a follow-up to the now legendary ‘It’s Raining McCain” video (see BoingBoing’s coverage here).
Check back here for the next release…
I told you I had someone on the inside.
In case you can’t remember the original, here it is:
Recognizing Memeoganda.
The onset of digital media has enabled communication, information, and news to flow quicker than ever before. The sheer velocity of information has had devastating effects on the newspaper industry (at least the printed elements) and consumers have changed their behavior to adapt.
No longer do we have to wait until the 11pm local newscast to find out what happened in our city. We don’t even have to respect the anchorperson’s request to stay tuned until after the commercial break to hear about a news story. We can just go to any number of websites to get that news before that brief break is over.
When an online news source breaks some piece of information (with our without fact-checking), blogs swoop in to comment, and news aggregator (i.e. Digg) users vote stories up, and they become ‘the news’. And the more news becomes endorsed by the people reading it, the more ‘true’ it feels. Fact-checked or not.
I recently saw a panel at SXSW on the online behavior of teens and tweens, and when a few of the teenaged panelists mentioned that they got their news from Digg, it made me shudder. As great of a tool as Digg is for finding interesting pieces of online content, it’s not a news source. Just an ‘interesting content’ recommendation engine.
But even journalists and professional bloggers use recommendation engines. They’re out there; techmeme is an example. And sometimes those recommendation engines are other journalists and bloggers. In this new era of online journalism, these recommendations have become known as ‘memes’. Wikipedia defines a ‘meme’ as consisting of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a “culture” in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus.
While memes often reflect important topics, they also have the potential to create stagnant monologues that doesn’t necessarily get us anywhere — eventually just turning what should be solution-deriving conversations, into noise. That’s when memes make the leap from becoming units of cultural information and legitimate conversation to being momentum-generated waves of propaganda. Or, as I will business cliche-ify, memeoganda.
What used to be called ‘trend pieces’ are now being ripped from the headlines of blogs and even other publications. The biggest culprits tend to be traditional (especially print) media, and overzealous bloggers (in fact, I randomly stumbled upon this post by Mark Evans on the topic of blog topics via Techmeme) looking to capitalize on popular conversations/memes.
When journalists in traditional publications stop having original things to say, or just have the same ruminations on existing problems without offering up solutions, we get classic memeoganda. Lately, I’ve seen examples of memoganda regarding the ad industry ranging from the ‘death of ad networks’ to ‘facebook’s demise’ to ‘google click volume’ to ‘the death of the music industry’ to even the state of the economy/recession.
These trend pieces get written so quickly and so close to each other, that while they may raise awareness of important topics, they water down the depth of the coverage, and result in a stream of ‘also-ran’ stories.
I started writing this blog post last night, and right on cue, this morning Techcrunch tells us about a new startup called Publish2 that will make memoganda even easier by providing journalists and newsrooms with their own Digg-like resource for finding out what’s hot.
You know, maybe it’s just me, but I yearn for the days when journalists broke hot stories rather than write about stories that are already hot. Memeoganda is sucking the life out of investigative journalism and seems to be more about finding new and exciting ways to conjure up ad inventory than to publish content with depth and meaning. And while stories that yield more ad inventory (read: linkbaiting) can be good bottom-line revenue band-aid, they are not the solution to mainstream journalism’s woes.
The long-term answer is to strive to be the best at what you do. Break the news that matters. Investigate the broken news deeper. Don’t fall prey to the easiness of spreading memeoganda.
We Are On The Wrong Side of The Political Support Video Curve.
Watch this and you’ll understand. It’s like watching a car crash, or the Zuckerberg/Lacy interview. You want to turn away, but you can’t. And once you see it, you’ll wish you could unsee it. But you can’t. So you just watch it over and over again.
And I swear to you, I think I went to grade school with the girl in the black outfit. I’m not kidding. Jamie, is that you?
(Via Boing Boing.)
GTA IV Teaser Trailer: Gone Too Far?
Is it me, or does this trailer by Rockstar Games for Grand Theft Auto IV go too far in its sarcastic portrayal of police officers?
Maybe its that I’m an NYC native. Maybe it’s that I was here on Sept. 11. Maybe I saw what true heroes are made of.
I normally have a thick skin and can laugh at just about anything. But put it in the context of trying to sell me something, and I’m not sure it can work.
If people start speaking up about this, I could see them not necessarily being represented as Jack Thompson-supporting loonies.
Rockstar, I’m usualy with you. But I don’t think I am on this one.
Church of Scientology Fights Back Against Anonymous.
It was only a matter of time before the Church of Scientology turned to the internet to fight back against Anonymous. See previous entries here and here.
They’ve launched a website called Anonymous Exposed that purports to reveal Anonymous’ death and bomb threats against the church.
Here’s the video that explains it all:
Spy Satellite Shoot-Down Video.
I told you the Spy Satellite Shoot-Down video would be online in a jiffy. Here she is:
Could This Be the Next Must-See Online Video?
According to the WSJ (subscription requred), the U.S. is planning on shooting down a broken spy satellite that would have dropped to Earth by some time in March. The deed will be done by a missle fired from a U.S. Navy cruiser, hitting the satellite before it enters our atmosphere.
If the Pentagon can document this, or better yet, simulcast this, live on the web and TV this could be a very cool video event.
Come on, The Pentagon. Get an HD crew out there, and shoot yourselves shooting down a satellite. We’d love to see it. So will all the kids on Digg.
I’ve got a few clients that might be willing to sponsor that video too, so maybe we can coordinate something.
