Guesswork

A couple of articles about music downloading caught my eye last week. The first was the news that the Songwriters Association of Canada wants somebody - the government, I guess - to tack an additional five bucks a month onto our Internet fees to help pay songwriters and artists for illegally downloaded music. I can […]

Does hair really equal sex? For me, I’m lucky enough to have a full, lustrous head of hair which if my maternal grandfather is any indication, I should expect to carry into senesence and the next life, so I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the Hair Club for Men.
However their […]

About a year ago, I posted a lengthy, poorly researched piece suggesting that user-generated video was not the future of on-line entertainment because most of it sucked, and that professional content would be the mainstay of the YouTubes of tomorrow.
Well kudos to me for stating the obvious, because now Businessweek has jumped on my […]

Facebook, the bloom is off the rose. A few months back I gushed like a schoolgirl about the Internet phenom that’s turned millions into social trivia junkies, but the blinders are starting to come off.
Facebook doesn’t really do anything useful. No news, weather, not even sports updates, and certainly no learning. […]

If you want to reflect on both the prescience and the profound injustice of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame observation, look no further than Chris Crocker. He’s the hypersensitive 19-year-old who got 8 million hits on YouTube with his weepy shrieking defense of fellow Southern eccentric Britney Spears.
Now based on this vid, his […]

As in old school for realz; Business Week reports that an increasing number of older people are logging on to Facebook. Stats show that 41% of visitors to the networking site are over 35, and that doesn’t even account for those who are lying about their age.
The article caught my eye because I’m one […]

The Sydney Car Centre must be booming. In the last week I’ve had 12 job offers from them, presumably in separate divisions since all the emails are signed by different people (specifically Louise Blount,Francis Morrison, Jeannie Donahue, Xavier Irvin, Mickey Abraham, Roxie Goldberg, Marcus Acevedo, Billy Gillespie, Stacy Pack , Jamel Kincaid, and Rodrick Robison, […]

Below a list of Media/Communications/Technology things that irritate me. It’s far from a comprehensive list, and very subjective.
1. TV shows that use the title as a way of describing the entire concept “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” and
So You Think You […]

A couple days ago I read about a study which found that young people don’t like email much, preferring to use text messaging or social sites like Facebook to communicate with their peers. Email, only yesterday the stuff of Jetsonian fantasy, is now perceived as an antiquated technology suitable only for corresponding with elderly […]

It’s funny how a lot of the terminology that has sprung up around the tech revolution has psycho-sexual connotations, possibly because it’s made up by lonely technophiles whose relationships usually center around a monitor and a fistful of hand cream. Hence we have terms like facebooking, shareware, Trojan, cookie, and the latest expression […]

Like most people, I win about 4 or 5 internet lotteries a week, and the informational emails tend to have a certain sameness bout them that makes them a little dull to read, even when they’re giving me fabulously good news. However, I got one the other day that I thought was a cut above […]

There’s something really sad about an abandoned blog. It doesn’t have the crumbled majesty of an ancient ruin like the Colosseum, or the bleak sinister appeal of an old shipwreck. It’s just a blank space, a testament to wasted intellectual endeavour, a sad reminder of a lost enthusiasm and a misjudged level of public […]

Celebrity news aggregator and professonal nuisance Perez Hilton is probably cursing his own singular lack of creativity. Less than a week after being threatened with a $150,000 lawsuit for stealing his glitter queen logo from NailPro magazine, he has apparently removed the offending campiness from his web site and slunk […]

Like many people I use Google all the time, and also like many people, no doubt their data banks in Mountain View are loaded up with dishy blackmailable material about my strange and anti-social search habits. Fortunately, Google do not use this awesome power to rule the world, because as when Frodo humped that […]

The Los Angeles Times reports that a Pasadena news website is outsourcing its local reporting to India. Pasadena Now has hired two journalists in India to watch webcasts of Pasadena City Council meetings and write the stories up for the site. The idea has raised some hackles, particularly among journalists who probably thought […]

As an enormously successful blogger, I often get correspondence from readers asking for advice on personal and professional crises in their lives, particularly problems that involve media and communications technology.
As a public service, I’m going to post a couple of these questions, along with my responses, in the hope that it may prove […]

So who do you reckon is the most influential person in the world? George W. Bush? Hu Jintao? Maybe Bill Gates? Nope. According to a Time magazine online poll, it’s Korean pop singer Rain (real name Jung Ji-hoon) who scored more than 470,000 votes out of 2.5 million cast. If you’ve never heard of […]

Are you concerned that in spite of constant updates to your MySpace, FaceBook, and Friendster pages and incessant downloads of personal videos to YouTube and Zippy Videos, the wired world still isn’t getting enough of you? Well, good news….the latest trend in social networking are services which allow the tech-savvy and the desperate to […]