Murdoch Changing Another Media Model?

According to The Guardian and Mashable, Murdoch plans to start charging for online news and he expects to make a profit. If he does, of course all media will follow like they did when he created his first profit horse business model and transformed the nature of news into entertainment.

I wonder what Murdoch is really thinking? Perhaps he figures that traffic volume isn't that important? So many people interact with News Corp owned media that if it reduces by ten, twenty, even fifty percentage points then who cares? 50% of Facebook readers is still 15 million people.

Meanwhile, Digg seems to be embedding semi-incognito advertisements in content. People can still vote ads up or down meaning bad ads will get buried quickly, but is this the future or a blur between product and content that crosses the line?

I'm going to read Chris Anderson's Free by the end of the week and I should have more ideas on the future of media, but for now I thought I'd share Murdoch's intentions and Digg's plan so we could see what comes of it together.

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Stephen Shiffman and the Land Of No will release their album in ten days. It will be well worth a listen.

To Do, New York

DATE SPECIFIC

August 12th, Ottos Shrunken Head, 10pm, ottoshrunkenhead.com - An evening of cover songs remixed by DJ Xerox and others.

August 13th, 679 Riverside Drive at the Riverbank State Park Skate Rink, 8-11pm - Robot Chicken on Wheels, a free skating extravaganza with a performance by The Gym Class Heroes and special appearances by Seth Green and Matt Senreich. (I'm not entirely sure if this is my scene, but listening to live music while skating, that sounds like a ball)

August 13 - Borough President Billy Joel Starlight Tribute Concert on Staten Island, 10pm

ONGOING

Exit 9 in the East Village - An excellent place to wander around checking out kitsch and all sorts of items you don't need but would really make your life that much happier.

La Plaza Cultural (E. 9th St at Ave C, laplazacultural.org) - A great place to hang your hat and rest awhile, this relaxing lawn and pond area features scultures by Rolando Politi.

Mogador (101 St. Marks between 1st Ave and Ave A, cafemogador.com) - Their $9 lunch special will blow you away.

Free, Almost Daily Boating in Hallets Cove (liceboathouse.org, 718.228.9214) - Grab a kayak or canoe and push off from the Socrates Sculpture Garden onto the East River.

The Tree Museum, Grand Concourse between Moshulu Pkwy North and 138th St, Bronx all the way to 149th St and Grand Concourse, Daily thru Oct 12 - 100 trees, 100 tales. Dial the numbers posted on the trees to hear different stories about the borough.

Free Hyperlocal Story Scavenger Hunt, fluffyseme.net/groups/entry/hyperlocal, Daily thru Aug 31 - Receive text messages to send you on various missions and save your answers in order to solve the final mystery.

Free Public Tours of the Plaza Hotel (Tues and Sat at 3pm, RSVP required to 212.546.5477)

Is Cyber Warfare Effective?

Cyber warfare. It's one of the only social media related news I heard about after reports started coming out offering reasons why Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal were experiencing so many problems. It was DDoS (Denial of Service Attacks) related to the conflict between Russia and Georgia, and the attackers wanted to stifle the voice of a guy with a handle of Cyxymu.

In turn, people suddenly started talking about ways to back up your social media profiles and Twitter accounts, and just about everything else on the elusive cloud where we're all starting to store more of our data. They also started talking about cyber warfare and how it might become a piece of the future. But before the lights went out on Twitter I had no idea Cyxymu even existed, and goodness knows I didn't know to he was someone whose voice was important enough to send internet usage for millions to a screeching halt.

Now my appetite for Cyxymu's words is insatiable and it makes me wonder. If an attempt to stifle a voice sends its decibels further than they would have reached before, can this so called cyber warfare really be effective?

Let's hope not.

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Now for some affable folk (although as a warning, some of his songs will hit you hard and leave you wallowing on the floor in sweet misery...okay that was major hyperbole). Check out Brooklyn's own Jonah Smith.

Nothing Is a Vault

I learned yesterday that Twitter keeps any single person's 3,200 most recent tweets and then poof, it's gone. I feel stupid for not knowing this and particularly distressed (in a not really distressed and I realize I'm being dramatic sort of way).

I suppose 3,200 is a lot, but to think that in an age when storage costs virtually nothing, Twitter isn't playing the Google card of unlimited storage? I thought we had finally found something that would put moments in a vault and help us remember the time when we picked out all the marshmallows in the Lucky Charms to see if there was enough in a box to fill an entire bowl, and then spent the rest of the night snacking on the sweetest part and wondering if we were Lucky, Charmed, or both.

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If you like Postal Service, Vampire Weekend, and/or Ra Ra Riot you've got to check Discovery.

Discovery - "I Want You Back" (Jackson 5)

Triumph For Pack Rats

I'm a pack rat, and not just the kind spouses complain about when it comes time to clean the garage. I'm the pick-up-everything-in-sight-because-one-day-this-moment-and-object-could-define-my-life sort of pack rat. In other words, my compulsion for keeping is really. really. bad.

Then I discovered the hard drive. I picked up fewer rocks and started collecting music and then words and pictures. I still pick up especially beautiful rocks here and there and often find myself slipping objects in my pocket so that I can hold a moment forever, but the tendencies that probably would have buried me in objects has shifted toward the computable intangibles.

When I started getting tangled up in the web I transfered my pack rat tendency toward the world of links. I tried to collect them in browser favorites but of course most are lost. Many of the sites would be changed or expired by now even if I had all those links, but the ones that are left would serve as a sort of continuous time capsule diary for what I found relevant and profound at the time. I would love to look back on the sites I adored back when the internet chugged along dial up telephone lines at 56k, but alas, all that is gone.

I'm going to sound like a blatant product promotion here, but the moment I found Read It Later I knew that I'd found another brilliant tool to cure my satiated bookmarks bar and the sorrow of losing old Favorites. I no longer needed to send myself links of articles I didn't have time to read at the specific moment when I found them and I knew that I'd never have to write a URL on the back of my hand again. Instead I use Read It Later, a site that stores every article I haven't had time to read and archives the ones I've checked off.

Convenient, of course. But that time capsule of a diary I wrote about a second ago. I can finally make it. And someday when I'm navigating the web on whatever is going to come a couple generations after Google Wave (a tool that's supposed to change our way of using the internet) I'll look back and laugh.

"You were concerned about DDoS attacks on Twitter and figuring out why the biggest growth demographic for tweets was not teenagers, but adults," I'll say. "Because really, the important thing all along were the rocks that made the ground you're standing on."

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Miike Snow's music will capture you faster than you could read any description I could give. Check the trio out here.

Miike Snow - "Animal"

Re: Sneakers

Many of you may remember my talk on sneaker trends and the democratization of footwear this past spring. In it I suggested that the lines between dress shoe and sneaker will continue to blur. I also wondered if sneaker companies would capitalize on this trend as much as actual stylish clothing brands. Other than the Nike Cole Haan partnership (which doesn't really count) or brands like Puma (which still remain largely casual), we aren't really seeing brands like Adidas spiffing up their shoes to create comfortable hybrid dress shoes and I wonder why that is.

It seems like the H&M or Zara type places that sell casual footwear are the ones that are winning out. Specialty brands like Marc Jacobs, Swear, and Schmoove have also capitalized on this concept of creating sneaker like dress shoes. Does this mean that streetwear is going to swing back away from the cool of casual sneakers and back toward something "nicer?" Is this what the new oxford trend is telling us? Your guess is as good as mine.

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Tonight I'm listening to Marching Band, a Swedish indie pop rock group.

Fashion Forward with Oxfords

Simple canvas lows, trojan sandals and boat shoes of the season seem to be marching out of the way for a classic Oxfords. Traditional black and/or brown oxfords, metallic silver oxfords, neon oxfords, oxfords with shorts, or oxfords with cuffed pants, it's all in style. When I first started wearing these early summer people looked at me with intense curiosity and now strangers are coming up to me with compliments meaning that if you haven't seen much of them yet I'm almost sure you'll see more come Fall.

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Lately I've been jamming on a lot of Kid Cudi. Not so much the intensely popular "Day 'n' Night" Kid Kudi, but Kudi of "Man On the Moon" and "The Prayer." I love the way he puts hip hop on ice and sings pop culture phenom one liners with ease. He's a student who incorporates his genre and subtly transcends it. In "The Prayer" he confronts hip hop directly, "If I slip away, if I die today, the last thing you remember won't be apple bottom jeans and the boots with the fur." Undoubtedly, we'll remember something much more important.

Kid Kudi - "The Prayer"


Kid Cudi - "50 Ways To Make A Record"