Nothing and Some More

Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives, a book and Todd Gitlin's interview

HBO has the advantage of financing itself by subscriptions. Any enterprise that's subscription-based has some latitude. That's true of sex channels or high-end sports events, and it's evidently true of a commercial entity like HBO.
The economic rationale of their imitativeness -- including their self-imitativeness -- is, "Well, we don't really know what works, so let's repeat what worked and let's throw money at the studio or the star or the producers who gave us hits." When there was no competition or hardly any, this was good enough.
Most Americans still think violent crime is increasing, when it isn't. The local news and the cop shows cultivate this fancy.
Do conservative viewpoints come off better than liberal ones on TV?
Yes, and on the radio, too.
Why is this the case? And is that why Fox News is so popular?
Some of the argument is made by Jeffrey Scheuer in his book The Sound Bite Society. What plays best on television is melodrama, what I call percussive punditry, in which the point is to pound and to stir resounding reverberations. That's easier done when you have polarized positions and simple, moralistic declarations. The right is better at that than the left. The right isn't interested in nuance. Rush Limbaugh's people proudly call themselves Dittoheads. The left has many sins, but people on the left tend to be looser and more uncomfortable with flat moralistic declarations. This imbalance gives an advantage to the right.

and a special quote for LeMonde's readers:

Do you believe the New York Times is still America's best newspaper? The Times is our best newspaper, and it's a better newspaper than ever before, but it has this squeamishness about criticism. One of the improvements of the Times is that the news of the week has become more than a book report, more than a roundup. It's actually written by reporters with voices. There must be some growing autonomy there.

See also Open Democracy

K5 has an interesting discussion on the pollution of Google because of their APIs.
I wonder what difference there is between the commercial interface of Google (the one Yahoo uses) and the so-called for personal use one. Is it just a cheap ad campaign? (since for about 3 days now, every small site talks once more about Google.) Is it a trick to have a generation of web developers at ease with the interface and thinking that search==google in every possible way ? Or is it a trojan to get statistical data about what one site will search (in another word, a way to improve the ranking algorithm ?)... Future will tell.

The google.public.web-apis newsgroup can help!

You can also read the KISS rant on Burning Bird (via the heart of things)

If you want people to come to your weblog and hang around for what you say, then say something interesting, unique, funny, controversial, informative, silly, cute, beautiful, smart, witty, sexy, or any of the above.

I am always a bit annoyed when people visits here to look for an original voice, since I have no intention to give any opinion apart from the obvious links and morceaux choisis. Want voices ? see links on the side.
I am selfishly interested in links only. Pictures, words, ideas that stimulates my imagination and creates illusional dreams about what I could do if I had some time left.
Sharing them is all I do and therefore all you can except, hoping I'll share my pleasure at the same time.
Well, it's a lie: you can except fiction once in a while.

(The joke is of course that When I'm 64, I'll just reread this site (being really rude about the closed .root format) and do all I have left to be done. Better than Viagra to get some juice back!)

What is MacBird ?