[JackSpratts]

MIT Spinoff's Little Green Laptop a Hit in Remote Peruvian Village
Frank Bajak

ARAHUAY, Peru — Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

At breakfast, they're already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they're dozing off in front of them — if they've managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.

"It's really the kind of conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.

Founded in 2005 by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, the One Laptop program has retreated from early boasts that developing-world governments would snap up millions of the pint-sized laptops at $100 each.

In a backhanded tribute, One Laptop now faces homegrown competitors everywhere from Brazil to India — and a full-court press from Intel Corp.'s more power-hungry Classmate.

But no competitor approaches the XO in innovation. It is hard drive-free, runs on the Linux operating system and stretches wireless networks with "mesh" technology that lets each computer in a village relay data to the others.

Mass production began last month and Negroponte says he expects at least 1.5 million machines to be sold by next November. Even that would be far less than Negroponte originally envisioned. The higher-than-initially-advertised price and a lack of the Windows operating system, still being tested for the XO, have dissuaded many potential government buyers.

Peru made the single biggest order to date — more than 272,000 machines — in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Uruguay was the No. 2 buyers of the laptops, inking a contract for 100,000.

Negroponte said 150,000 more laptops will get shipped to countries including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti, and Afghanistan in early 2008 through "Give One, Get One," a U.S.-based promotion ending Dec. 31 in which you buy a pair of laptops for $399 and donate one or both.

The children of Arahuay prove One Laptop's transformative conceit: that you can revolutionize education and democratize the Internet by giving a simple, durable, power-stingy but feature-packed laptop to the worlds' poorest kids.

"Some tell me that they don't want to be like their parents, working in the fields," first-grade teacher Erica Velasco says of her pupils. She had just sent them to the Internet to seek out photos of invertebrates — animals without backbones.

Antony, 12, wants to become an accountant.

Alex, 7, aspires to be a lawyer.

Kevin, 9, wants to play trumpet.

Saida, 10, is already a promising videographer, judging from her artful recording of the town's recent Fiesta de la Virgen.

"What they work with most is the (built-in) camera. They love to record," says Maria Antonieta Mendoza, an Education Ministry psychologist studying the Arahuay pilot to devise strategies for the big rollout when the new school year begins in March.

Before the laptops, the only cameras the kids at Santiago Apostol school saw in this population-800 hamlet arrived with tourists who visit for festivals or to see local Inca ruins.

Arahuay's lone industry is agriculture. Surrounding fields yield avocados, mangoes, potatoes, corn, alfalfa and cherimoya.

Many adults share only weekends with their children, spending the work week in fields many hours' walk from town and relying on charities to help keep their families nourished.

When they finish school, young people tend to abandon the village.

Peru's head of educational technology, Oscar Becerra, is betting the One Laptop program can reverse this rural exodus to the squalor of Lima's shantytowns four hours away.

It's the best answer yet to "a global crisis of education" in which curricula have no relevance, he said. "If we make education pertinent, something the student enjoys, then it won't matter if the classroom's walls are straw or the students are sitting on fruit boxes."

Indeed, Arahuay's elementary school population rose by 10 when families learned the laptop pilot was coming, said Guillermo Lazo, the school's director.

The XOs that Peru is buying will be distributed to pupils in 9,000 elementary schools from the Pacific to the Amazon basin where a single teacher serves all grades, Becerra said.

Although Peru boasts thousands of rural satellite downlinks that provide Internet access, only about 4,000 of the schools getting XOs will be connected, said Becerra.

Negroponte says One Laptop is committed to helping Peru overcome that hurdle. Without Internet access, he believes, the program is incomplete.

Teachers will get 21/2 days of training on the laptops, Becerra said. Each machine will initially be loaded with about 100 copyright-free books. Where applicable, texts in native languages will be included, he added. The machines will also have a chat function that will let kids make faraway friends over the Internet.

Critics of the rollout have two key concerns.

The first is the ability of teachers — poorly trained and equipped to begin with — to cope with profoundly disruptive technology.

Eduardo Villanueva, a communications professor at Lima's Catholic University, fears "a general disruption of the educational system that will manifest itself in the students overwhelming the teachers."

To counter that fear, Becerra said the government is offering $150 grants to qualifying teachers toward the purchase of conventional laptops, for which it is also arranging low-interest loans.

The second big concern is maintenance.

For every 100 units it will distribute to students, Peru is buying one extra for parts. But there is no tech support program. Students and teachers will have to do it.

"What you want is for the kids to do the repairs," said Negroponte, who believes such tinkering is itself a valuable lesson. "I think the kids can repair 95 percent of the laptops."

Tech support is nevertheless a serious issue in many countries, Negroponte acknowledged in a phone interview.

One Laptop is currently bidding on a contract with Brazil's government that Negroponte says demanded unrealistically onerous support requirements.

The XO machines are water resistant, rugged and designed to last five years. They have no fan so they won't suck up dust, are built to withstand drops from a meter and a half and can absorb power spikes typical of places with irregular electricity.

Mendoza, the psychologist, is overjoyed that the program stipulates that kids get ownership of the laptops.

Take Kevin, the aspiring trumpet player.

Sitting in his dirt-floor kitchen as his mother cooks lunch, he draws a soccer field on his XO, then erases it. Kevin plays a song by "Caliente," his favorite combo, that he recorded off Arahuay's single TV channel. He shows a reporter photos he took of him with his 3-year-old brother.

A bare light bulb hangs by a wire from the ceiling. A hen bobs around the floor. There are no books in this two-room house. Kevin's parents didn't get past the sixth grade.

Indeed, the laptop project also has adults in its sights.

Parents in Arahuay are asking Mendoza, the visiting psychologist, what the Internet can do for them.

Among them is Charito Arrendondo, 39, who sheds brief tears of joy when a reporter asks what the laptop belonging to ruddy-cheeked Miluska — the youngest of her six children — has meant to her. Miluska's father, it turns out, abandoned the family when she was 1.

"We never imagined having a computer," said Arrendondo, a cook.

Is she afraid to use the laptop, as is typical of many Arahuay parents, about half of whom are illiterate?

"No, I like it. Sometimes when I'm alone and the kids are not around I turn it on and poke around."

Arrendondo likes to play checkers on the laptop.

"It's also got chess, which I sort of know," she said, pausing briefly.

"I'm going to learn."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...,6878223.story





Q&A: Craig Newmark, of 'Craigslist' Fame, Looks Back -- and Ahead
Todd R. Weiss

Twelve years ago, Craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark was still a software programmer at Charles Schwab & Co. But that changed after he began sending out self-composed e-mails to a small group of friends to tell them of cool art exhibits and high-tech events going on in his adopted city of San Francisco. Newmark quit his job, did freelance programming and dove into what he saw as the promise of the Internet as a place to share information. From those original, e-mailed events lists arose Craigslist.org, a mostly free site for online classified ads. It's now grown into listings for some 450 cities and towns around the world, where people can buy and sell, find a date, and barter for goods and services. Newmark, 55, founded Craigslist -- it was incorporated in 1999 -- as a for-profit company, and works there today as a customer service representative. More than 30 million people globally use the site each month. He talked with Computerworld recently about how his site began and where it's going.

Excerpts from that interview follow:

So how did it happen that you created Craigslist?
The effort started in 1994 when I was at Charles Schwab, working then on overall security architecture. But I also saw people using the Internet and figured it was going to be important eventually for anyone in the brokerage business. So I started evangelizing that at Schwab. While I was looking around at the Internet, I saw a lot of people helping each other out and thought that I should do something, too. So in 1995, I began to e-mail a bunch of friends about art and technical events in San Francisco. Over the months that followed, people kept asking if I could add the occasional job posting and listings for things to sell, too. Then I said, "Let's add apartment listings, too." It was all done through a very simple e-mail, a cc: list. This is the sort of pattern we still have today -- people suggest stuff to us, we do what makes sense and then we ask for more feedback.

I left Schwab around the same time I began Craigslist. Soon I went freelance and had a lot of fun, while working on Craigslist as a hobby. One milestone was hit in the middle of 1995. At that point, I was sending my e-mails to about 240 people, but the list at that point had gotten around to friends of friends as well. At 240 addresses, though, the cc: list mechanism broke. Then I had to use a listserve. I was going to call it SF Events, since it was still mostly events, but friends told me that they already called it Craigslist, that I had created a brand unintentionally and that I should keep calling it that because it was personal and quirky.

The thing just kept growing. Later on in 1995, I remembered that I was a programmer and that I could turn code into HTML, so I would be able to do instant publishing. It suddenly occurred to me that I could write code and that I could make Craigslist into a Web site where the code would do most of the work for me.

Was making the move from the listserve to a Web site a big transition for you?
Not much at first. People started using the site, but the mailing list was still the big deal then for users. In a sense, back then it was not much different than it is now. At that point, the mailing list was still more popular than the Web site, but I have no idea when the crossover occurred. I'm guessing in the early 2000s.

You began this on a whim. Was leaving your job at Schwab a risky thing or are you a person who doesn't have such fears?
The first three years of Craigslist I ran this by myself and it somehow built critical mass. At the end of 1997, there were three milestones hit: hitting a million page views a month; then the folks from Microsoft Sidewalk wanted to run banner ads on the site. And at market rates, that would be all the money I needed to live. So I figured, hey I'm an overpaid programmer, I don't need the money, and many banner ads are pretty dumb, so I decided not to run them. And the third milestone, [occurred when] a few people approached me about running Craigslist on a volunteer basis. I tried that in 1998, where we would all work together on a volunteer basis. We tried it, but it failed. Things just didn't get done. It just started slowly dying.

How did you not suffer the fate of many businesses that make unsuccessful changes, then never recover their initial momentum and eventually shut down? Why did Craigslist survive that tumultuous period of experimentation?
Well, when I'm committed to something, I'm committed. Then at the end of 1998, some people approached me and helped get me out of denial about what was going on and then I made Craigslist into a real company in the beginning of 1999. I did a mediocre job at best, because I'm not very good at it in terms of the business end of the operation. I had the first ideas about it, but most of what we do is based on what people in the community suggest. Fortunately, in 2000 I hired a guy named Jim Buckmaster. He's turned out to be a natural manager and he does a great job with it.

Is it crazy to say that it's an accident that you created this site?
In a way, this site is a happy accident. We built critical mass and made things happen just by doing what feels right. That statement reflects the first five years of running it. Then, when Jim took over, he made it operate much more smoothly. We're on a very firm footing right now.

Tell me more about that footing. How does the company make money?
The idea is that we're a community service. Almost 100% of the site is free, but we do charge for job postings in 11 cities. We charge for brokered apartment listings in New York.

Why only in New York? I mean, in Seattle, San Francisco and other places, you'd make money.
I understand, but the apartment brokers who we charge asked us to charge them because they figured it would cut down on the perceived need to post and repost the same places and they figured it would get rid of some of the scammers. The principle behind this -- in 2000 I asked a lot of people, "What's the right way for us to pay the bills, and maybe do better than that?" People told us to charge people who already paid too much for less effective ads. Specifically, the consensus was it was OK to charge employers and recruiters and to charge apartment brokers and real estate agents. And so we've done that, but only a little.

And this makes enough money for the company to survive and for your 25 San Francisco-based employees to get their paychecks?
Right. It ain't bad. We just do what feels right and plug away.

So you founded Craigslist, but you aren't an executive? Why is that?
Inside the company, my job is customer service. Jim is a much better CEO. And my skills are not management skills; however, I'm a really good customer service representative. I'm part of a customer service team and we handle things like cases of abuse from users of the Web site.

OK, so here you have Craigslist at your disposal. How do you use Craigslist? Do you buy things or list things for sale?
Once in a while I do all the above. I do so a little gingerly because it kind of feels like a conflict of interest because when I do that I have to disclose who I am. That isn't a conflict of interest, but it still to me feels a little bit like one. I feel the way I do and so I do things gingerly and that seems to be fair.

Five years from now, what do you see changing at Craigslist? Where else can you take this?
It's going to be more of the same, more cities, more languages. It's now in English and we've recently introduced Spanish, starting with Madrid. We're just starting. We have to improve technologies like multicity search. In some cases, we need to be able to search in nearby cities rather than doing multiple searches. We always need to improve customer service -- for example, we need better tools to detect and remove spam listings. One thing we found doing customer service is that there are not that many bad guys out there, that the people with good will far outnumber the bad guys. However, the bad guys make a lot more noise.

Is there anything you'd personally like to see happen with the site in the future? Will we ever see a massive redesign from the white, mostly text-based listings to something with more pizzazz and color?
We're pretty much not really changing. We do one thing well and we don't want to screw it up. And regarding our look and feel, someone said that our site has the visual appeal of a pipe wrench and that was intended and taken as a compliment. We don't need much new fancy stuff in general. We need tools that get the job done.

Why has Craigslist been so successful? How did you get the whole world to know about it and use it?
There are some easy reasons. We were an early mover doing what we do and it does help that the site is almost all free. We think we have a really good culture of trust and that's because without consciously doing so, we have stood by some core-shared values. The fundamental value is that we feel you should treat people like you want to be treated, which means that you provide good customer service and it means that you should have a "live and let live attitude," and it means that now and then you give the other person a break. These are values that most everyone in the world shares. The problem that a lot of people have is following through with those values. That's hard to do sometimes. And I do want to add, that there's nothing noble or altruistic or pious about this; it just feels right.

That's an interesting approach. A lot of companies, though they rake in fortunes from consumers, may not care as much about their own customer service. So why do you have this approach?
Good point. I do feel as the world changes and people get together on the Internet more and more, the companies that don't provide good customer service will either change or will go out of business.

There have been ongoing concerns and criticisms from the newspaper industry that free online ad sites like Craigslist are eating them alive and drastically reducing their revenues. What's your reaction?
No one in the newspaper industry seriously says that. I've spoken to a lot of publishers, editors and industry analysts. They say that our site does have a small but measurable effect on classified revenues. But they say the bigger problems are those niche-classified sites which go after the more profitable classified categories, specifically cars and jobs. There's Autotrader.com and Monster.com. Newspapers have much bigger problems. Newspapers are going after 10% to 30% profit margins for their businesses and that hurts them more than anything. A lot of things are happening on the Internet that never happened before because the Internet is a vehicle for everyone. The mass media is no longer only for the powerful, and that's a huge change for the entire newspaper and news industry.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9053838





Masters of Invention

For the first time, Condé Nast Portfolio has identified the world's most prolific inventors alive—three of them have more patents than Thomas Edison—and asked them the big question: Where do the big ideas come from?
Kevin Maney

Shunpei Yamazaki is the most prolific inventor in history, but you’ve probably never heard of him. He is 65, runs a research and development company—Semiconductor Energy Laboratory, in Atsugi, Japan—and holds 1,811 U.S. patents, nearly 700 more than Thomas Edison. This neatly dressed, polite, trumpet-voiced man, who comes across as something of a mystical seeker, attributes his success to six years under a mentor who taught him the “emotional spirit” of inventing. For Yamazaki and his peers, inventing is much more than just making money from intellectual properties; it’s anything from a compulsion to a calling. Invention is the engine of industry and the raison d’être of nearly every technology company. More than that, it advances civilization. Yet our greatest creators don’t have rock-star status. Oh, there’s Edison, the Elvis of inventors, and a thin sliver of society knows about contemporary pioneers like Dean Kamen, who created the Segway, and Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with envisioning the World Wide Web. But the most successful living exemplars have a Q rating somewhere below that of an extra in Gigli.

Inventors are undervalued but not without controversy. Nearly 90,000 U.S. patents were granted in 2006, up 50 percent from a decade ago—an explosion that has created a mess for some companies. Rampant legal fights over who devised what have become yet another cost of doing business, especially in the technology sector. Overwhelmed examiners sometimes grant questionable patents, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is so inundated that years can go by between submission and approval.

Despite the systemic muddle, anyone who ranks in Edison’s class has lived a remarkable life. I wanted to interview the top 10 living patent holders worldwide—ranked here in order of their number of U.S. patents—in the hope of gaining some insight into the creative spark behind invention. But first I had to find out who they are. Astoundingly, the patent office does not keep such a list. No one does. At the request of Condé Nast Portfolio, the Patent Board, a Chicago patent research and advisory firm, ran the query and came back with the names. (Granted, a tally of the number of patents does not necessarily identify the “greatest” inventors, just as book sales rarely reveal the finest writers. But such a list is the only objective measure we have.) These men—the group is all male—have rarely, if ever, talked to the media. During four months of phone calls and cajoling, I persuaded nine of the top inventors to agree—often reluctantly—to interviews.

Identifying them turned out to be easier than tracking them down. Two of the men do not work in the United States. Four are with a relatively small company, Micron Technologies of Boise, Idaho. Six, including Yamazaki and the four from Micron, work on computer chips. Missing from the list is George Spector, No. 4, who is apparently not an inventor at all. For decades, he ran a New York business that helped small-time inventors obtain patents for novelty innovations such as a motorized pot-washing tool. Spector then added his name to those patents, ultimately netting him 722.

None of the top 10 created any game-changing devices on a par with Edison’s lightbulb, but most people benefit every day from some discovery by the creative minds in the chip business whose efforts have improved laptop computers, cell phones, and digital cameras. Kia Silverbrook, the most secretive, runs Silverbrook Research in Sydney, where he has led a decadelong, superstealth effort to create new computer-printer technology that could be on the market by 2009. At the opposite end of the technology spectrum, Donald Weder holds 1,350 patents, all from his work at Highland Supply Corp. in Highland, Illinois—a decorative-packaging company founded by his father in 1937. Among his contributions to humankind: a patent titled “Performed pot cover formed of polymeric materials having a texture or appearance simulating the texture or appearance of paper.”

The most prolific female inventor alive is biologist Gisela Lorenz, who retired six years ago from the German chemical company BASF. Lorenz has 363 U.S. patents, mostly in the realm of “crop protection”—fertilizers and pesticides. Her prolificacy is partly because she oversaw a team of researchers and her name went on patents she worked on regardless of whether or not the main idea was hers. (When reached at her home in Germany, Lorenz said she had no idea she was the leading female holder of U.S. patents.) Two of the other top women are Jennifer Hillman and Olga Bandman, who both worked for the U.S. biotech company Incyte and have 327 and 250 patents, respectively.

Yet such an output among women is rare. A 2006 Harvard University study found that while women are no less inventive than men, traditionally they have not been in a position to seek patents. “For a long time, I was the only woman in the kind of job I had at BASF,” Lorenz says. “It’s getting better now.”

What can be learned from the leading inventors about the origins of their extraordinary creativity? Certainly education plays a role: Most of the chip inventors have doctorates in science and engineering. But, interestingly, none of the group cites degrees as a key. Instead, many talk about the usefulness of a broad education and how it helps them patch together solutions by calling upon their knowledge of multiple disciplines. “My background is in digital electronics and software, but I’ve deliberately become multidisciplinary—jack-of-all-trades, master of none,” Silverbrook says.

Not surprisingly, most successful inventors were born with an engineering mind-set. Most of them were kids who either built things or took toys and gadgets apart to see how they worked. Micron’s Salman Akram grew up in Nigeria. His father was an electrical engineer, his mother a mathematician. He says his parents fostered his creativity by giving him parts of toys and encouraging him to improvise. Joseph Straeter, Weder’s former colleague at Highland Supply, grew up on a dairy farm, the second youngest of six brothers. He says, “Anything that wasn’t worth anything anymore, I took apart.”

How do inventors actually think of inventions? Most of them say they first define a problem, then come up with a way to solve it. “I look for something not being done efficiently,” says Micron’s Leonard Forbes. “I tour around a lot of conferences and keep up on the literature to try to identify problems. I’ll go through different approaches. It’s not usually an ‘aha’ moment, but more a process of elimination.”
What happens next is the strange, incomprehensible part: finding the answer. Yamazaki says he gets his best ideas after dozing. “Oftentimes, I’ll fall asleep while taking the train home at the end of the day,” he says. “I wake up, and I have an inspiration.”

Mark Gardner, who stopped working for the chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices in 2005, also cogitates while snoozing. “I wake up every day thinking of inventions,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s a curse or a blessing.”

Other innovators don’t close their eyelids to find inspiration but know that their brains function best when they’re not trying to work on a problem. “A lot of times, you don’t come up with solutions right away,” says Akram. “I keep a problem in the back of my mind, thinking about it in different settings, adding a little here and there. Some of this thinking occurs when I’m on a plane or driving my car.” Hearing this, Akram’s colleague Warren Farnworth pipes in, “I hate to say it, but there’s something about standing in the shower, rubbing my head with shampoo, and I’ll go, Wow, why didn’t I think of that before?”

Also important is an environment that encourages experimentation. All the men say they have to feel free to propose any idea, no matter how outrageous. “When chasing an invention, you have to not be very critical of suggestions,” Weder says. “You have to try not to snicker.” Even when the wildest solutions don’t work, they can spark discussion that might lead to other ideas. “There are two kinds of supervisors,” says Akram. “One says, ‘Why are you wasting our time?’ The other says, ‘This is so cool!’ ” Micron’s researchers have thrived under the latter.

Then there is another, less romantic reason why these men have so many patents. All work for firms that value patents, systematically and aggressively apply for them, and reward those who win them. At Micron, the patent lawyers’ offices are next to the R&D lab, so engineers can stop by and quickly find out if an idea is patentable. Yamazaki and Silverbrook now run companies that essentially produce nothing but patentable technology—and they make money licensing it to manufacturers. In his 24 years at A.M.D., which relies on patentable inventions to compete with archrival Intel, Gardner figures he made more than $1 million in bonuses from his patents.

Which brings up the subject of wealth. It’s tempting to think that owning hundreds of patents must be the key to riches, but it’s not necessarily true. Inventions created while working for a company usually belong to that company. The leading inventors are all well paid—their firms understand their value—but none is cruising the Aegean on his yacht or lining up to buy the Yankees. Silverbrook has the best shot at great wealth, if his printer technology takes flight.

Silverbrook, Yamazaki, and Weder will continue to chase one another at the top of the list. They each have nearly twice as many patents as the fifth-ranked inventor, Micron’s Gurtej Sandhu. They are the reticent megastars of invention, each eclipsing Edison just as Barry Bonds roared past Babe Ruth. These three, especially, deserve a place not just in the popular imagination, but also in history.
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/...ific-Inventors





Inside Apple Stores, a Certain Aura Enchants the Faithful
Katie Hafner

It was 2 o’clock in the morning but in the subterranean retailing mecca in Midtown Manhattan, otherwise known as the Apple store, it might as well have been midafternoon.

Late one night shortly before Christmas, parents pushed strollers and tourists straight off the plane mingled with nocturnal New Yorkers, clicking through iPod playlists, cruising the Internet on MacBooks, and touch-padding their way around iPhones.

And through the night, cheerful sales staff stayed busy, ringing up customers at the main checkout counter and on hand-held devices in an uninterrupted stream of brick-and-mortar commerce.

The party inside that store and in 203 other Apple stores around the world is one reason the company’s stock is up nearly 135 percent for the year. By contrast, high-flying Google is up about 52 percent, while the tech-dominated Nasdaq index is up 12 percent.

The popularity of the iPhone and iPod and the intended halo effect those products have had on sales of Apple computers are behind Apple’s vigor. But the company’s success in retailing, as other competitors struggle to eke out sales growth, has been the bonus.

Apple now derives 20 percent of its revenue from its physical stores. And the number is growing. In the fourth quarter in 2007, which ended Sept. 30, Apple reported that the retail stores accounted for $1.25 billion of Apple’s $6.2 billion in revenues, a 42 percent increase over the fourth quarter in 2006.

Apple stores generate sales at the rate of about $4,000 per square foot a year, according to a report last year by Sanford C. Bernstein analysts.

As other electronics makers like Dell, Nokia and Sony still struggle to find the right retail formula, Apple seems to have perfected it.

Not only has the company made many of its stores feel like gathering places, but the bright lights and equally bright acoustics create a buzz that makes customers feel more like they are at an event than a retail store.

The close attention paid to detail in the stores’ designs, such as the maple veneer tables used for product displays, gives the impression that Steven P. Jobs himself, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, signed off on every square aesthetic inch of every store.

“Apple’s retail offering is very compelling,” said Andrew Neff, senior managing director at Bear Stearns, “but the other key is the product. The retail concept ties in very much to the product.”

But the secret formula may be the personal attention paid to customers by sales staff. Relentlessly smiling employees roam the floor, carrying hand-held terminals for instant credit-card swiping. Technicians work behind the so-called genius bar, ministering to customers’ ailing iPods, MacBooks and iPhones. Others, designated “personal trainers,” give one-on-one instruction and lead workshops.

Personal shoppers are available by appointment, and last month the company took the concept of personalized service to a new level, with concierge teams stationed throughout each store.

“They’ve become the Nordstrom of technology,” said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research, referring to the department store that is known for its service.

Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice president for retail, said he believed the high level of service played a large role in the success of the stores.

“The idea is that while people love to come to retail stores, and they do it all the time, what they really appreciate the most is that undivided personal attention,” Mr. Johnson said. The result is far fewer qualms among consumers about paying premium prices: $30 for an iPhone case, $200 for an iPod Nano or $1,200 for a computer.

This month, Apple opened its third Manhattan store, in a three-story, 10,500-square-foot renovated building in the meatpacking district on West 14th Street. With one entire floor dedicated to individualized services, along with small seminar series, Mr. Johnson’s goal is to make the 14th Street store “the most personal store ever created.”

Mr. Gartenberg said people often first go to an Apple store out of curiosity. “Apparently a lot of them like what they’re seeing in the stores, they like the experience and they go back to buy the products,” he said.

The stores’ architecture also makes consumers feel good about spending money there.

In nearly a dozen high-profile urban centers — including New York, San Francisco, London and Glasgow — the signature feature is a glass staircase. Some of the staircases go straight up and others ascend in a spiral skein that appears to be held in place by nothing more than Apple hype.

A customer entered the 14th Street store last week with his two whippets. Their reaction to the impressive stairs was more fear than awe. When the dogs refused to climb the steps, their owner scooped both of them into his arms and carried them up.

Apple stores encourage a lot of purchasing, to be sure. But they also encourage lingering, with dozens of fully functioning computers, iPods and iPhones for visitors to try — for hours on end.

The policy has given some stores, especially those in urban neighborhoods, the feel of a community center. Two years ago, Isobella Jade was down on her luck, living on a friend’s couch and struggling to make it as a fashion model when she had the idea of writing a book about her experience as a short woman trying to break into the modeling business.

Unable to afford a computer, Ms. Jade, 25, began cadging time on a laptop at the Apple store in the SoHo section of Manhattan. Ms. Jade spent hours at a stretch standing in a discreet corner of the store, typing. Within a few months, she had written nearly 300 pages.

Not only did store employees not mind, but at closing time they often made certain to shut Ms. Jade’s computer down last, to give her a little extra time. A few months later, the store invited her to give an in-store reading from her manuscript.

“Everyone is free to use the Internet and do anything they want — within reason,” said Paul Fradin, the general manager of the SoHo and 14th Street stores. Visitors spotted surfing pornographic Web sites are quietly asked to leave, and are escorted out.

Visitors can bring almost anything they like. Ms. Jade showed up nearly every day with her full set of notes, and enough food to see her through a few hours of writing.

Meanwhile, the Sony flagship store on West 56th Street, a few blocks from Apple’s Fifth Avenue store, has the hush of a mausoleum. And being inside the long and narrow blue-toned Nokia store on 57th Street feels a bit like being inside an aquarium.

The high-end Samsung Experience showroom, its nuevo tech music on full blast one recent morning, was nearly empty. And although that store professes to encourage hands-on exploration of its products, the showroom has a clinical, forbidding feel. (Nothing is actually sold there; it’s just for display.)

“Whenever we ask consumers to cite a great retail experience, the Apple store is the first store they mention,” said Jane Buckingham, president of the Intelligence Group, a market research firm in Los Angeles. “Basically, everything about it works. The people who work there are cool and knowledgeable. They have the answers you want, and can sell you what you need. Customers appreciate that. Even the fact that they’ll e-mail you a receipt makes you feel like you’re in a store just a little bit further ahead of everyone else.”

This could be part of the reason that Jack Graham, 16, visiting for the holidays from Worcester, England, spent at least an hour each day of his visit at one of the three New York Apple stores, his parents sitting by patiently, happy to watch the crowd.

“These stores are going to become iconic places that people go to see when they come to New York,” said Mr. Gartenberg, the analyst. “Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall and Apple’s great glass cube on Fifth Avenue.”

As for Ms. Jade, whose modeling career is advancing, she has yet to buy a computer from the Apple store. But she is still welcome to check her e-mail — and stay as long as she likes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/business/27apple.html





Apple Flushes Out Fox to Offer Latest Films for Rent Via iTunes
Matthew Garrahan and Kevin Allison

Apple has signed up News Corp's 20th Century Fox studio for a video-on-demand service, in a deal that could change the way people pay for online films.

The agreement would allow consumers to rent the latest Fox films by downloading them from Apple's iTunes digital media store for a limited time, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Walt Disney is the only Hollywood studio selling its new releases on iTunes at present, but these are available to buy rather than rental.

Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate only sell older titles.

Apple, whose shares hit $200 for the first time yesterday in intraday trade, has spent the past 12 months courting other studios but had had no success until its deal with Fox.

The agreement has the potential to transform film distribution because, apart from letting -people rent online, Apple will also for the first time extend its FairPlay digital rights management system beyond its own products.

A digital file protected by FairPlay will be included in Fox DVD releases, enabling a film to be transferred or "ripped" from the disc to a computer and video iPod. While DVDs can be transferred to computers and moved to an iPod, this requires special software and is considered piracy by some studios.

The launch of iPod-ready films on DVD would "help Apple sell a load more video iPods", said one studio executive.

Other websites offer films to rent and buy as downloads but none has the mass appeal of iTunes.

"Fox and potentially other -studios are coming around to the idea that there is nobody out there to challenge iTunes," said Jonathan Weitz, a principal with IBB Consulting, which focuses on cable, media and mobile -companies.

"Over the last couple of years users have started to watch their media in different places and different formats," he said.

The computer maker is also understood to have been in talks with Sony Pictures, Paramount and Warner Bros about making their new releases available on iTunes to buy and rent.

Sony, Paramount and Warner Bros declined to comment.

Apple is understood to be keen to make the Fox deal a showpiece announcement at the Macworld convention, which starts in San Francisco on January 14.

Apple and News Corp declined to comment.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/195b43ac-b...nclick_check=1





Wal-Mart Cancels Movie Download Service
Gina Keating

Wal-Mart Stores Inc quietly canceled its online video download service less than a year after the site went live, a company spokeswoman said on Thursday.

Wal-Mart shut down the download site after Hewlett Packard Co discontinued the technology that powered it, Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella said in an e-mail. She added that it will not look for another technology partner.

HP spokesman Hector Marinez said the company decided to discontinue its video download-only merchant store services because the market for paid video downloads did not perform "as expected." He noted that the Internet video business remains uncertain and is changing rapidly.

Wal-Mart will continue offering physical DVDs for sale at its stores and online, but would not continue the online downloads business, said Colella, who declined to disclose the number of downloads sold on the site.

A message at www.walmart.com/videodownloads said the service was stopped on December 21 and Wal-Mart offered no refunds for the downloaded videos.

Videos purchased on Walmart.com can be played using the Microsoft Windows Media Player or the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager, but cannot be transferred to a computer other than the one used to download them, according to the site.

The giant retailer's foray into online video downloading began in February and was hailed by media industry experts as a "game changer" that could introduce millions of DVD buyers to the practice of downloading.

Wal-Mart was the first major retailer to partner with all of the major Hollywood movie studios and TV networks to offer downloads the same day titles were released on DVD.

Wal-Mart's attempt at downloading came two years after it pulled out of online DVD rental and directed its subscribers to Netflix Inc, and months after it protested Walt Disney Co's move to sell movies on Apple Inc's iTunes online music store at below-retail prices.

Download sales equaled about 1 percent of the $24.5 billion in DVD and home video sales and rentals in 2006, but industry experts expect downloads to grow to 10 percent within a decade.

The news of the Wal-Mart download service's demise comes on the same day that reports surfaced of an agreement between News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox and Apple to offer the first movies for rent at the iTunes store.

Shares of Wal-Mart closed down 1.3 percent, or 61 cents, at $47.77 on Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Reporting by Gina Keating, editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/inter...26104120071228





Amazon to Sell Warner Music Minus Copy Protection
Jeff Leeds

In the recording industry’s latest move away from its reliance on digital locks to reduce piracy, the Warner Music Group said on Thursday that it would sell songs and albums without anticopying software through Amazon’s fledgling digital music service.

The shift by Warner Music is another step in the decline of copy-protection software, which has led to consumer confusion over the jumble of incompatible schemes governing the use of digital music players and downloaded songs.

Warner is the third of the four major music corporations to reconsider its use of so-called digital rights management software, known by its initials as D.R.M., and offer its catalog in the unrestricted MP3 format. Sony BMG Music Entertainment has continued to hold out, though it is expected to experiment with selling MP3s through a promotion early next year.

Warner, which releases music by artists including Josh Groban and Matchbox Twenty, was considered to be particularly reluctant to drop restrictions on copying. In February, after Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, called on the major record companies to abandon D.R.M., Edgar Bronfman, Warner’s chairman, retorted that since movies and games carry copy protection, the notion of withdrawing it from music was “completely without logic or merit.”

The music companies had argued that Apple, which dominates the digital music market with its iPod player and iTunes service, should license its copy protection software to rivals. But Mr. Jobs has refused, saying that such a move would invite several problems, including the possibility that hackers would crack the technology. EMI Group broke ranks with the other major labels and agreed to sell unprotected music through iTunes in April.

Now, some music executives are privately backing the idea of dropping the software from music sold through virtually every service except iTunes, in order to strengthen Apple’s rivals and potentially diminish Mr. Jobs’s advantage. The major labels have been upset with Apple’s inflexibility on music pricing, among other issues.

Warner’s move comes roughly four months after the industry’s biggest company, Universal Music Group, part of Vivendi, said it would sell music without restrictions through an array of services, including digital stores run by Wal-Mart, Real Networks and Amazon, but not iTunes.

Warner may not adopt the same approach. A person briefed on Warner’s plans said the company was seeking to negotiate a deal to sell unprotected files through iTunes.

The move also comes as the industry faces increasing pressure to bolster digital music sales as its traditional business — selling CDs — suffers a sharp decline.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/te...y/28music.html





The Death of High Fidelity

In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever
Robert Levine

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud.

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get[listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest."

Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn't the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today's listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."

The idea that engineers make albums louder might seem strange: Isn't volume controlled by that knob on the stereo? Yes, but every setting on that dial delivers a range of loudness, from a hushed vocal to a kick drum — and pushing sounds toward the top of that range makes music seem louder. It's the same technique used to make television commercials stand out from shows. And it does grab listeners' attention — but at a price. Last year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums "have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static."

In 2004, Jeff Buckley's mom, Mary Guibert, listened to the original three-quarter-inch tape of her son's recordings as she was preparing the tenth-anniversary reissue of Grace. "We were hearing instruments you've never heard on that album, like finger cymbals and the sound of viola strings being plucked," she remembers. "It blew me away because it was exactly what he heard in the studio."

To Guibert's disappointment, the remastered 2004 version failed to capture these details. So last year, when Guibert assembled the best-of collection So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley, she insisted on an independent A&R consultant to oversee the reissue process and a mastering engineer who would reproduce the sound Buckley made in the studio. "You can hear the distinct instruments and the sound of the room," she says of the new release. "Compression smudges things together."

Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on the Arctic Monkeys' debut, the band never seems to pause to catch its breath. By maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens out the emotional peaks that usually stand out in a song. "You lose the power of the chorus, because it's not louder than the verses," Bendeth says. "You lose emotion."

The inner ear automatically compresses blasts of high volume to protect itself, so we associate compression with loudness, says Daniel Levitin, a professor of music and neuroscience at McGill University and author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Human brains have evolved to pay particular attention to loud noises, so compressed sounds initially seem more exciting. But the effect doesn't last. "The excitement in music comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness," Levitin says. "If you hold one of those constant, it can seem monotonous." After a few minutes, research shows, constant loudness grows fatiguing to the brain. Though few listeners realize this consciously, many feel an urge to skip to another song.

"If you limit range, it's just an assault on the body," says Tom Coyne, a mastering engineer who has worked with Mary J. Blige and Nas. "When you're fifteen, it's the greatest thing — you're being hammered. But do you want that on a whole album?"

To an average listener, a wide dynamic range creates a sense of spaciousness and makes it easier to pick out individual instruments — as you can hear on recent albums such as Dylan's Modern Times and Norah Jones' Not Too Late. "When people have the courage and the vision to do a record that way, it sets them apart," says Joe Boyd, who produced albums by Richard Thompson and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. "It sounds warm, it sounds three-dimensional, it sounds different. Analog sound to me is more emotionally affecting."

Rock and pop producers have always used compression to balance the sounds of different instruments and to make music sound more exciting, and radio stations apply compression for technical reasons. In the days of vinyl records, there was a physical limit to how high the bass levels could go before the needle skipped a groove. CDs can handle higher levels of loudness, although they, too, have a limit that engineers call "digital zero dB," above which sounds begin to distort. Pop albums rarely got close to the zero-dB mark until the mid-1990s, when digital compressors and limiters, which cut off the peaks of sound waves, made it easier to manipulate loudness levels. Intensely compressed albums like Oasis' 1995 (What's the Story) Morning Glory? set a new bar for loudness; the songs were well-suited for bars, cars and other noisy environments. "In the Seventies and Eighties, you were expected to pay attention," says Matt Serletic, the former chief executive of Virgin Records USA, who also produced albums by Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul. "Modern music should be able to get your attention." Adds Rob Cavallo, who produced Green Day's American Idiot and My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, "It's a style that started post-grunge, to get that intensity. The idea was to slam someone's face against the wall. You can set your CD to stun."

It's not just new music that's too loud. Many remastered recordings suffer the same problem as engineers apply compression to bring them into line with modern tastes. The new Led Zeppelin collection, Mothership, is louder than the band's original albums, and Bendeth, who mixed Elvis Presley's 30 #1 Hits, says that the album was mastered too loud for his taste. "A lot of audiophiles hate that record," he says, "but people can play it in the car and it's competitive with the new Foo Fighters record."

Just as cds supplanted vinyl and cassettes, MP3 and other digital-music formats are quickly replacing CDs as the most popular way to listen to music. That means more convenience but worse sound. To create an MP3, a computer samples the music on a CD and compresses it into a smaller file by excluding the musical information that the human ear is less likely to notice. Much of the information left out is at the very high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat. Cavallo says that MP3s don't reproduce reverb well, and the lack of high-end detail makes them sound brittle. Without enough low end, he says, "you don't get the punch anymore. It decreases the punch of the kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitarist plays a power chord."

But not all digital-music files are created equal. Levitin says that most people find MP3s ripped at a rate above 224 kbps virtually indistinguishable from CDs. (iTunes sells music as either 128 or 256 kbps AAC files — AAC is slightly superior to MP3 at an equivalent bit rate. Amazon sells MP3s at 256 kbps.) Still, "it's like going to the Louvre and instead of the Mona Lisa there's a 10-megapixel image of it," he says. "I always want to listen to music the way the artists wanted me to hear it. I wouldn't look at a Kandinsky painting with sunglasses on."

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. "You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3," says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana's Nevermind. "Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things." Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.

As technological shifts have changed the way sounds are recorded, they have encouraged an artificial perfection in music itself. Analog tape has been replaced in most studios by Pro Tools, making edits that once required splicing tape together easily done with the click of a mouse. Programs like Auto-Tune can make weak singers sound pitch-perfect, and Beat Detective does the same thing for wobbly drummers.

"You can make anyone sound professional," says Mitchell Froom, a producer who's worked with Elvis Costello and Los Lobos, among others. "But the problem is that you have something that's professional, but it's not distinctive. I was talking to a session drummer, and I said, 'When's the last time you could tell who the drummer is?' You can tell Keith Moon or John Bonham, but now they all sound the same."

So is music doomed to keep sounding worse? Awareness of the problem is growing. The South by Southwest music festival recently featured a panel titled "Why Does Today's Music Sound Like Shit?" In August, a group of producers and engineers founded an organization called Turn Me Up!, which proposes to put stickers on CDs that meet high sonic standards.

But even most CD listeners have lost interest in high-end stereos as surround-sound home theater systems have become more popular, and superior-quality disc formats like DVD-Audio and SACD flopped. Bendeth and other producers worry that young listeners have grown so used to dynamically compressed music and the thin sound of MP3s that the battle has already been lost. "CDs sound better, but no one's buying them," he says. "The age of the audiophile is over."
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto..._high_fidelity





Trekkie Claims Auctioned Prop Was a Fake
David B. Caruso

A Trekkie who paid $6,000 for a poker visor that was supposedly worn by the android Data on the television show "Star Trek: The Next Generation" claims in a lawsuit against Christie's auction house that the prop is a fake.

Ted Moustakis, of Towaco, N.J., said he began to doubt the authenticity of the visor and other items he purchased at an auction of CBS Paramount props in 2006, after he brought it to a convention in August to have it autographed by the actor who played Data, Brent Spiner.

According to the lawsuit, Spiner recognized the visor as the one that had been sold by Christie's and told Moustakis that it wasn't the real deal. The actual visor had been sold by the actor himself some time ago.

Moustakis, who became a Star Trek fan at age 7, said he was humiliated.

"I thought this was a great piece of memorabilia to have, and I was so proud to get it," he said.

Christie's spokesman Rik Pike stood behind the authenticity of the auction and said the disgruntled buyer's case had no merit.

The lawsuit, filed in state court in Manhattan, demands millions of dollars in punitive damages and a refund for the visor and two other items Moustakis bought at the 2006 auction: a table that was part of a set on "The Next Generation" and a uniform that was in Data's wardrobe. Moustakis said he paid $6,600 for the table and $11,400 for the uniform.

He said that, upon close inspection, the table doesn't look like the ones that appeared the show, and the uniform appeared to be one of several made for the program, not a one-of-a-kind, as Moustakis believed it to be.

"They defrauded collectors, fans, honest people," said Moustakis' lawyer, Richard Borzouye. "It's negligent misrepresentation."

Calls and e-mails to CBS Paramount weren't immediately returned.
http://tv.msn.com/tv/article.aspx?news=290392&gt1=7703





Shifting Coupons, From Clip and Save to Point and Click
Dan Levin

COUPON lovers, take heart. The era of waiting, scissors in hand, for the Sunday newspaper circular is over.

On Jan. 3, Valassis Communications, which distributes paper coupons for products like Eggo waffles and Dr Pepper cola, will take a giant leap onto the Internet by introducing a portal for coupons called RedPlum.com. Until now, Valassis had distributed coupons primarily through newspaper inserts and snail mail envelopes.

Now the company will focus on promoting the RedPlum brand, using its traditional paper circulars to direct people to the Web site. The idea is to lure shoppers — particularly women — online with the promise of coupons, then keep them on the site with other content, like Consumer Reports-style product reviews and a searchable database of recipes, á la Epicurious.com. Valassis has hired three people to create content for the site, and it plans to bring in more.

RedPlum will join a small cadre of similar sites, like CoolSavings.com, Coupons.com and ValPak.com, that have struggled to build traffic and wean consumers off paper coupons. In the 12 months that ended in October, the number of visitors to coupon sites grew by only 6 percent over the previous year, to 20.3 million from 19.1 million, according to ComScore, an Internet marketing research company.

RedPlum will try to stand out by offering helpful features — like the ability to plug in a shopping list and get a matching list of coupons — and by letting people visit its site anonymously. In addition to grocery coupons, the site will offer discounts on items like digital cameras and special deals on family vacations.

“If Google owns search and Amazon owns shopping, RedPlum wants to own value,” said Suzie Brown, chief marketing officer of Valassis, which is based in Livonia, Mich. “To hit the radar screen, we will have to do a fair amount of revenue, we’re not looking for this to replace anything we’re doing currently.”

Ms. Brown said that RedPlum was trying to be different from sites like CoolSavings.com and Eversave.com that require people to enter their full name, e-mail address, birth date and gender. “The single biggest thing is, consumers do not want to give out personal information, and we don’t ask them for anything,” she said. People who want to get coupons specific to where they live will have the option of entering a ZIP code, she said.

•

Valassis has been working on an Internet strategy for more than two years. The goal was to create a brand that would resonate across all forms of media, particularly with women, said Andrea Sullivan, executive director for client services at Interbrand New York, a subsidiary of the Omnicom Group, which worked with Valassis on the project.

“The name RedPlum creates a strong visual and emotional connection for customers, one that’s about celebrating the little pleasures in everyday life,” Ms. Sullivan said. She said that discount seekers like to share their finds with friends and family, so the brand could catch on through word of mouth. For these shoppers, “part of the fun is the hunt,” she said.

Much of the design and content of RedPlum is written for women by women, from pithy snippets about trends to advice for buying flat-screen televisions. “Our target market kept repeating, ‘Don’t write for men,’” said Brian Costello, the general manager for interactive media at Valassis. “Women buy differently, and we wanted to reflect their needs and wants.”

One big customer of Valassis, Domino’s Pizza, is enthusiastic about RedPlum. “We think RedPlum will be the one-stop shop for consumers looking for value coupons online,” said Rob Weisberg, a vice president for marketing at Domino’s. “It’s a great opportunity to ultimately have a relationship where we are willing to pay more for prominent placement and target the exact customer we are looking for.”

•

Valassis is hoping that RedPlum will also help it gain favor on Wall Street, where its stock price has dropped over the last two years. In early 2006, Valassis settled a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission that it had attempted to collude with News America Marketing, its top rival, to eliminate competition between the two. Under a consent order, Valassis was barred from engaging in similar conduct.

Since then Valassis has filed an antitrust lawsuit against News America, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The case is scheduled to be heard in February in federal court in Michigan.

Wall Street also questioned Valassis’s $1.2 billion purchase this year of Advo, a direct-mail marketer. Valassis had sued to get out of the acquisition, saying it had found problems with Advo’s numbers, but the deal ultimately went through. The combined company says it reaches more than 100 million consumers a week — 90 percent of American households — with its newspaper circulars, bags and direct mailings.

One Internet analyst, Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research, said she thought the RedPlum strategy might give Valassis a positive jolt. “Valassis knows their business, they’re just taking it to the next level with RedPlum, which sounds very promising,” she said. “My only question is, why did it take them so long?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/bu...ia/27adco.html





Study: Ads in Online Shows Work Better Than Ads on TV
Nate Anderson

Good news for TV networks: online ads work. As TV shows continue their lengthy migration onto the web, new research finds that the people watching those shows actually pay more attention to both advertising and content when they watch online.

A year's worth of research from Simmons, a media consultancy, shows that Internet video watchers are 47 percent more engaged by the advertising they watched than were traditional TV viewers, according to MediaPost. The same study found that viewers were 25 percent more engaged in the content on the shows as well.

That's excellent news for networks like NBC, which has been making aggressive moves to put its shows online (though not through iTunes) in advertising-supported streaming and downloadable formats. The network appears more interested in mimicking the traditional free, ad-supported model of television than it does in pushing paid downloads, and the Simmons study may vindicate that decision (even if NBC's strategy confuses some viewers in the process).

The study results will also provide fodder for both writers and producers in the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike, which has largely centered on the residuals formula for Internet-provided content. With online video proving so (potentially) lucrative, both sides may have extra incentive to dig in their heels so as not to leave too much cash on the table for the other side to snap up.

And all of this is happening at a time when online ad money continues to flow from the great Madison Avenue Money Spigot. Back in November, the Internet Advertising Bureau reported that Internet ad revenue topped $5.2 billion in the third quarter of 2007, up a full 25 percent over a year before. Combine that with consumers who actually pay attention to ads, and you have an adman's paradise in the making. How long will it be until the serpent of consumer overstimulation does to the new medium what it has already done to television ads?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ads-on-tv.html





Technology in 2008

Three Fearless Predictions

1. Surfing will slow

PEERING into Tech.view’s crystal ball, the one thing we can predict with at least some certainty is that 2008 will be the year we stop taking access to the internet for granted. The internet is not about to grind to a halt, but as more and more users clamber aboard to download music, video clips and games while communicating incessantly by e-mail, chat and instant messaging, the information superhighway sometimes crawls with bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The biggest road-hog remains spam (unsolicited e-mail), which accounts for 90% of traffic on the internet. Phone companies and other large ISPs (internet service providers) have tolerated it for years because it would cost too much to fix. Besides, eliminating spam would only benefit their customers, not themselves.

How so? Because the big fat pipes used by ISPs operate symmetrically, with equal bandwidth for upstream and downstream traffic. But end-users have traditionally downloaded megabytes of information from the web, while uploading only kilobytes of key strokes and mouse clicks. So, when spammers dump billions of pieces of e-mail onto the internet, it travels over the phone companies’ relatively empty upstream segments.

That can’t last. For a start, millions of gadgets are joining the human hordes. Any gizmo worth its silicon these days has its own internet connection—so it can update itself automatically, communicate autonomously with other digital species, and anticipate its user’s every whim.

Part of the solution?

Soon, portable media-players, personal navigators, digital cameras, DVD players, flat-panel TV sets, and even mobile phones won’t be able to function properly without access to the internet. Expect even digital picture frames to have a WiFi connection so they can grab the latest photos from Flickr.

Meanwhile, users are changing the way they use the internet: they are now uploading, as well as downloading, gigabytes galore—thanks to the popularity of social networks like Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.

Hailed by the industry as the wave of the future, “user-generated content” is proving to be a tsunami of unprecedented proportions. Everyone, it seems, is suddenly a budding Martin Scorsese, bent on sharing his or her home-made videos with fellow YouTubers.

Once the biggest files being shared via Napster and other P2P (peer-to-peer) networks were MP3 music tracks occupying a few modest megabytes. Today, music videos and TV episodes of hundreds of megabytes are being swapped over the internet by BitTorrent, Gnutella and other file-sharing networks.

And it’s all two-way traffic. The whole point of P2P is that everyone who is downloading is simultaneously uploading to others.

That’s just the beginning. Legal or otherwise, swapping multi-gigabyte high-definition video and movie files is becoming increasingly common.

In fact, it will soon be the norm. Television networks have found they can make more money from advertising while giving their show away for free over the internet than they can from broadcasting them. Now the movie studios are learning to do much the same.

The result is a gridlock. That the telephone companies are running out of bandwidth can be seen from their equipment orders.

Cisco, the leading supplier of core routers used to direct traffic over the internet’s backbone, has just had another bumper quarter, with net income up 37% over the same period a year ago. Juniper Networks, another information-technology firm, did even better. Both companies credit the proliferation of social networks, the craze for internet searching, multimedia downloading, and the widespread adoption of P2P sharing for the surge in new business.

While major internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all plan to upgrade their backbones, it will be a year or two before improvements begin to show. By then, internet television will be in full bloom, spammers will have multiplied ten-fold, WiFi will be embedded in every moving object, and users will be screaming for yet more capacity.

In the meantime, accept that surfing the web is going to be more like travelling the highways at holiday time. You’ll get there, eventually, but the going won’t be great.

2. Surfing will detach

Earlier this month, Google bid for the most desirable chunk (known as C-block) of the 700-megahertz wireless spectrum being auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late January 2008. The 700-megahertz frequencies used by channels 52 to 69 of analog television are being freed up by the switch to all-digital broadcasting in February 2009.

The frequencies concerned are among the world’s most valuable. They were used for broadcasting UHF television because they suffered little atmospheric absorption, could be beamed for miles, and could then penetrate all the nooks and crannies in buildings. Their relatively short wavelength makes the transmission equipment compact and the antennas small.

Mobile phone companies lust after the 700 megahertz frequencies because of their long range and broadband capabilities. They see lots of lucrative things like mobile television and other broadband services to offer customers.

But the 700 megahertz band is also the last great hope for a “third pipe” for internet access in America. Such a wireless network would offer consumers a serious alternative to the pricey and poor DSL (digital subscriber line) services they get from the likes of AT&T and Verizon, and to the marginally better cable broadband Comcast provides.

Over the past couple of months, techdom has been abuzz with rumours about Google getting into the mobile phone business—with a G-Phone to trump Apple’s iPhone. That’s highly unlikely.

The speculation was triggered by the company’s recent unveiling of its Android operating-system for mobile phones. But the whole point of Android is not to allow Google to make fancy handsets, but to make it easier for others to do so.

The aim, of course, is to flood the market with “open access” phones that have none of the restrictions that big carriers impose—like not being able to download software and games from other makers, or search the internet freely, or make free VoIP (voice of internet protocol) calls from within a WiFi hotspot.

Android has been made available to a group of manufacturers orchestrated by Google and known as the Open Handset Alliance. One of the nimblest of the group, HTC of Taiwan, has already started showing a BlackBerry-like prototype based on the Android operating system. Expect to see a raft of Android phones from other manufacturers over the coming months.

Nor is Google in the business of building a network of cellular antennas and fat communications pipes. Should it win the bidding for C-block, it would presumably team up with Frontline Wireless, a startup with serious expertise and money behind it.

That’s because Google’s core business is organising knowledge and giving users access to it. Google makes its money—and lots of it—from matching advertisers to consumers who use its search engine to look up things, not from tinkering with slim-margin ventures like wireless networks.

But despite owning the world’s largest knowledge base—with over 60% of the online search market—Google is at the mercy of others who control the on-ramps to the internet. That rankles.

Worse, it has no way of getting at the other billion users who rely more on mobile phones than personal computers to organise their lives. Clearly, the time has come to muscle into the moribund mobile-phone business.

Bidding $5 billion or more (the reserve is $4.6 billion) to beat out wireless heavyweights like AT&T and Verizon could give Google the option to become a cell-phone operator in partnership with Frontline, with a ready supply of handsets from its alliance partners and none of the hassles of running a network. Alternatively, it could become an internet service provider with a long-range wireless network to rival the WiMAX networks being built by Sprint and others.

But Google may want to do neither. Sceptics note that Google single-handedly persuaded the FCC to attach all manner of “open access” provisions to the C-block of frequencies—something that was anathema to the mobile-phone companies. Verizon even sued the FCC in a bid to block its move to open access.

Having failed to do so, Verizon now says it will open its network to third-party devices sometime in the future—and presumably for an additional charge. But the FCC is not just taking Verizon’s word for it.

The winner of the C-block of frequencies, whoever that may be (and Verizon is the odds-on favourite), will have to open the network to any device that meets the basic specification. And the devices themselves will have to be open to other suppliers’ software and services.

In short, win or lose, Google has already achieved its objective. Internet searches will doubtless be as popular among mobile-internet surfers as among their sedentary cousins. Owning at least 60% of the mobile search market is the prize Google has been after all along.

3. Surfing—and everything else computer-related—will open

Rejoice: the embrace of “openness” by firms that have grown fat on closed, proprietary technology is something we’ll see more of in 2008. Verizon is not the only one to cry uncle and reluctantly accept the inevitable.

Even Apple, long a bastion of closed systems, is coming round to the open idea. Its heavily protected iPhone was hacked within days of being launched by owners determined to run third-party software like Skype on it.

Apple’s initial response was to attempt a heavy-handed crackdown. But then a court decision in Germany forced its local carrier to unlock all iPhones sold there. Good news for iPhone owners everywhere: a flood of third-party applications is now underway.

The trend toward openness has been given added impetus by the recent collapse of the legal battles brought by SCO, a software developer. Formerly known as Santa Cruz Operations, the firm bought the Unix operating system and core technology in 1995 from Novell (which, in turn, had bought it from its original developer, AT&T).

Short of cash, SCO initiated a series of lawsuits against companies developing Linux software, claiming it contained chunks of copyrighted Unix code. Pressured by worried customers fearing prosecution, a handful of Linux distributors settled with SCO just to stay in business.

But IBM, which uses Linux, was having none of it, and fought the firm through the courts until it won. SCO is now operating under Chapter 11 of the American bankruptcy code.

The verdict removed, once and for all, the burden that had been inhibiting Linux’s broader acceptance. Linux is now accepted as being Unix-like, but not a Unix-derivative.

Bulletproof distributions of Linux from Red Hat and Novell have long been used on back-office servers. Since the verdict against SCO, Linux has swiftly become popular in small businesses and the home.

That’s largely the doing of Gutsy Gibbon, the code-name for the Ubuntu 7.10 from Canonical. Along with distributions such as Linspire, Mint, Xandros, OpenSUSE and gOS, Ubuntu (and its siblings Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu) has smoothed most of Linux’s geeky edges while polishing it for the desktop.

No question, Gutsy Gibbon is the sleekest, best integrated and most user-friendly Linux distribution yet. It’s now simpler to set up and configure than Windows. A great deal of work has gone into making the graphics, and especially the fonts, as intuitive and attractive as the Mac’s.

Like other Linux desktop editions, Ubuntu works perfectly well on lowly machines that couldn’t hope to run Windows XP, let alone Vista Home Edition or Apple’s OS-X.

Your correspondent has been happily using Gutsy Gibbon on a ten-year-old desktop with only 128 megabytes of RAM and a tiny 10 gigabyte hard-drive. When Michael Dell, the boss of Dell Computers, runs Ubuntu on one of his home systems, Linux is clearly doing many things right.

And because it is free, Linux become the operating system of choice for low-end PCs. It started with Nicholas Negroponte, the brains behind the One Laptop Per Child project that aims to deliver computerised education to children in the developing world. His clever XO laptop, costing less than $200, would never have seen the light of day without its clever Linux operating system.

But Mr Negroponte has done more than create one of the world’s most ingenious computers. With a potential market measured in the hundreds of millions, he has frightened a lot of big-time computer makers into seeing how good a laptop they can build for less than $500.

All start with a desktop version of Linux. Recent arrivals include the Asus Eee from Taiwan, which lists for $400. The company expects to sell close on four million Eees this financial year. Another Taiwanese maker, Everex, is selling its gPC desktop through Walmart for $199.

When firms are used to buying $1,000 office PCs running Vista Business Edition and loading each with a $200 copy of Microsoft Office, the attractions of a sub-$500 computer using a free operating system like Linux and a free productivity suite like OpenOffice suddenly become very compelling.

And that’s not counting the $20,000 or more needed for Microsoft’s Exchange and SharePoint server software. Again, Linux provides such server software for free.

Pundits agree: neither Microsoft nor Apple can compete at the new price points being plumbed by companies looking to cut costs. With open-source software maturing fast, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Evolution, Pidgin and some 23,000 other Linux applications available for free seem more than ready to fill that gap. By some reckonings, Linux fans will soon outnumber Macintosh addicts. Linus Torvalds should be rightly proud.
http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ry_id=10410912





High Scores for the Games of 2007
Seth Schiesel

FOR gamers 2006 was all about the introduction of Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii systems; there weren’t many great games released. This year, by contrast, has delivered one fabulous interactive entertainment experience after another. Even without Grand Theft Auto IV, which was delayed until next year, 2007 has witnessed the strongest lineup of new games since the fall of 2004, when Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and World of Warcraft were introduced.

Even with heavy hitters like Spore, G.T.A. IV and Super Smash Bros. on the horizon for 2008, it will be tough for next year to top the crop of 2007. Here are some of this year’s most important, intriguing and just plain amusing games and developments.

BEST NEWCOMER: BIOSHOCK It is rare for a new game to burst onto the market with little publicity and become an instant sensation. When that does happen, it is usually with a game with a unique play style, like Katamari Damacy in 2004 and the first Guitar Hero in 2005. Otherwise players and the press usually see the best games coming from far away. Not with BioShock. Take-Two, its publisher, delivered a game in perhaps the most competitive genre of all, the first-person shooter, that was so intelligently designed that it immediately sailed into the ranks of the best shooters of all time. BioShock is propelled by its lush evocation of an undersea dystopia and a story line capped by a piquant twist at the end.

MOST DIFFICULT DELIVERY: THE NEW E3 The game business may be one of the few in which everyday consumers actually care about the industry’s trade shows. That is because the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo has long been a showcase for the best games coming each holiday season. This year the industry radically downsized the event, known as E3, moving it from the cavernous Los Angeles Convention Center to a constellation of ritzy beach-side hotels. It was a great idea but a logistical nightmare because the demonstrations were spread out among at least a dozen hotels, bars, restaurants and even an airplane hangar. The solution for next year can be summed up in one word (or is that two?): Las Vegas.

BEST ADAPTATION OF AN ADORED INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: THE LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE The dramatic and narrative butchery that could have ensued when Turbine set out to make a online role-playing game based on the “Lord of the Rings” books had Tolkien fans stockpiling torches. Not to worry. This game allows players to make their own stories in Middle-earth without trampling on the canonic tale of the One Ring.

BEST UNAMBITIOUS REPRESENTATIONS OF THE STATE OF THE ART: HALO 3 AND SUPER MARIO GALAXY Halo 3 is a polished gem of a science-fiction shooter. But that is all it is. It has suitably spruced-up graphics, and some of its new online features are welcome additions. But it is a refinement of the time-tested Halo formula rather than a daring attempt to provide a new sort of experience. That’s enough to generate hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is not enough to inspire.

Super Mario Galaxy presents similar questions. Galaxy is finely tuned and a worthy member of the Mario pantheon. Almost anyone can have fun playing it. But as with Halo, Galaxy is at some level mostly a reinvention of classic play modes. In Halo that means battling killer aliens. In Mario that means jumping and dodging and collecting stars to free the princess who, as she has been for more than 20 years, is locked away in a cartoon-style castle. That’s fun as far as it goes. But now that the Nintendo developer Shigeru Miyamoto has gotten the Wii incarnations of his Mario and Zelda series out of the way, perhaps he will turn to creating something genuinely new. (Wii Fit, the fitness system coming to North America next year, could just be it.)

BEST SINGLE-HANDED RESCUE OF A MAJOR GAME SYSTEM: RATCHET & CLANK: TOOLS OF DESTRUCTION Sad to say, many of this year’s big-budget, exclusive games for Sony’s PlayStation 3, including Heavenly Sword and Lair, were mediocre at best. The action-adventure game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune seems strong, but the shining star for the PS3 this year was the new Ratchet & Clank, made by Insomniac Games. Analogies can be overworn, but playing Ratchet is actually like playing an animated film, and that’s a rare thing.

GAME OF THE YEAR: MASS EFFECT Story and characters aren’t everything, but these components of narrative have always been the weakest part of video games. For decades games have made up in frenetic action what they have lacked in dramatic depth. And that is a big reason why games have traditionally appealed most strongly to the demographic group that most enjoys frenetic action: young men. In its choice of milieu — science fiction — Mass Effect is not ambitious at all. But with its focus on character development, personal growth and moral tension, all fueled by a graphics system created to evoke emotional empathy, Mass Effect points the way forward. It may be a harbinger of a time when story and character are as important to video games as explosions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/arts/23schi.html





2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards
Ryan Singel

Once every year, Wired News compiles a list of the most entertaining tech-centric misstatements and verbal foibles from government officials, CEOs and tech luminaries.

Once every hundred years, an upstart Web 2.0 CEO says something so ridiculous it rockets to the top of the list faster than a story about Digg gets to the top of Digg.

This century's momentous proclamation came in November when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg trumpeted his social network's new ad technology, Beacon, saying:

"Once every hundred years, media changes."

Zuckerberg went on to describe how his company's mining and selling of Facebook users profiles would revolutionize ad sales, and thus media. Within weeks, Facebook did an about-face and apologized for not letting users opt-out of Beacon -- a system that announced to your Facebook friends what books, gadgets and movies you'd bought.

Journalists, advertisers and publishers around the world, however, took deep solace in knowing that media only changes once every 100 years, so they no longer need to worry about losing the new media war to free online news sites, blogs and YouTube. Instead, they just need to publish all their stories on their Facebook pages, until the next media change comes in 2107.

- - -

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer, on the other hand, is the mouth that gives almost every year. In April, Ballmer took the opportunity to belittle the iPhone, telling USA Today:

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."

Six months after its debut, the iPhone is outselling all Windows Mobile phones combined. But Ballmer can take heart, because the iPhone doesn't have developers (yet).

- - -

Apple's CEO Steve Jobs managed to lift his own foot over his turtleneck and into his mouth in September. Two months after Apple loyalists spent hours in line for the fetish item of the year, Jobs announced a $200 price drop for the 8-GB iPhone, then poured salt into early adopter's wound with this quote in USA Today:

"That's technology. If they bought it this morning, they should go back to where they bought it and talk to them. If they bought it a month ago, well, that's what happens in technology."

A chastened Jobs issued an apology of sorts the next day, along with a $100 Apple Store credit to full-price payers. "We need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers."

- - -

"I love my job. I hate my customers," Motorola CEO Ed Zander told The Wall Street Journal. Zander, whose fortunes rose with the soaring -- but ultimately fleeting -- popularity of the RAZR, lost his love six months later. Rumor has it he still hates millions of people.

- - -

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, talked his way into retirement by telling a London newspaper that he feared for Africa because black people aren't as smart as whites.

Watson told The Sunday Times he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas all the testing says, not really."

Watson subsequently resigned his position. After he published his sequenced genome online later in the year, Nobel Prize winner Watson was found to have 16 times more genes of black origin than a typical white European.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/t.../YE_foot_mouth





Stopping at 10 Just Seems Wrong
A. O. Scott

BY the end of next week, the number of movies reviewed in The New York Times in 2007 will top out somewhere around 640. The traditions of movie criticism decree that I select 10 as the year’s most worthy candidates for immortality (or at least future Netflix rental). Everyone knows that this is an arbitrary and subjective exercise — that’s part of the fun of it — but this year I’ve found it especially difficult to commit to so narrow and exclusive a list.

That is partly because I liked so much of what I saw. I know it’s hard to believe, but during the past 12 months I sometimes went two or three weeks in a row without finding anything to mock, deflate or be disappointed by, and my inner curmudgeon was frequently elbowed aside by a wide-eyed, arm-waving enthusiast.

It also seemed, though, perhaps more than in other years, that the movies I liked did not entirely stand alone. It is, of course, inevitable that many of those 640 should arrange themselves in clusters and patterns of genre and theme. But apart from this kind of obvious sorting, even some of the more idiosyncratic and original films seemed to be carrying on a serendipitous conversation with one another, about the aesthetic possibilities of the medium and also about its ethical obligation to illuminate some aspect of human experience.

So apart from the top two entries, the list below consists of pairs (and in one case a trio) of films that complete, complement, contradict or otherwise engage each other. Taken alone each film on the list is in some way exemplary, but each is also enriched and complicated by its companion. The twinned selections might work as double features, or as possible alternatives (if not x, then maybe y); above all they demonstrate the vitality and mutability of this impossibly fertile art form. It’s a big world, and we can never have too many movies.

1. Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is the latest evidence of the recent flowering of Romanian cinema. Mr. Mungiu’s film, which will open in New York in January but which can’t wait for my 2008 list, derives some of its power from its charged subject matter: It’s about the ordeal of life under Communism and also about abortion. But what makes this a great movie is the mighty combination of Mr. Mungiu’s ruthless, formal discipline, the unaffected naturalism of the performances (especially Anamaria Marinca’s) and a moral honesty that goes far beyond what we usually think of as realism.

2. “Ratatouille,” for its part, dispenses with realism altogether, but like “4 Months” it still demonstrates a bracing integrity in its commitment to the highest ideals of art. Among these, of course, is the pursuit of pleasure, something Brad Bird, the writer and director, both rewards and defends. As he did in “The Incredibles,” Mr. Bird makes a passionate, somewhat contrarian case for excellence in a world (and a medium) that all too often tolerates and celebrates mediocrity. He also, not incidentally, puts us critics in our place, which is at the table with everyone else, in thrall to the new and ruled less by reason than by memory and desire.

3. Violence, vengeance, motiveless evil: these are on the verge of becoming movie clichés, but genuine, rigorous pessimism about human nature still has the power to shock. And when wedded to the kind of creative daring displayed by Paul Thomas Anderson in “There Will Be Blood” and Tim Burton and Stephen Sondheim in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” misanthropy can attain a jarring, revelatory intensity. As men driven by greed and grief, Daniel Day-Lewis (in “Blood”) and Johnny Depp (in “Todd”) are two of the most charismatic and terrifying movie monsters in recent memory.

4. The lives of popular musicians are irresistible to ambitious actors, Hollywood hacks, hip documentary makers and soundtrack marketers. Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” and Julien Temple’s “Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten” can thus be seen as acts of resistance, upending clichés and matching the mystery and magic of their subjects with inventive visual and narrative techniques. Mr. Temple’s documentary about the leader of the Clash is more straightforwardly biographical than Mr. Haynes’s fractured fantasia on the life of Bob Dylan, but both films discover new and bracing ways to write history in sound and image.

5. Every political documentary has a point of view, but too many are content simply to affirm the presumed beliefs of a narrow, self-selecting (and usually liberal) audience, and too few grasp the difference between stating an opinion and making an argument. Two exceptions stood out this year. Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight,” a devastating and dispassionate chronicle of American folly and hubris in the early months of the war in Iraq, is perhaps not partisan enough to satisfy those who opposed the war from the start, but for just that reason it poses a profound intellectual challenge to the war’s supporters. It is the movie I would most want my conservative friends to see. Meanwhile “Terror’s Advocate,” Barbet Schroeder’s detailed, unsparing portrait of the French lawyer Jacques Vergès, is especially necessary viewing for those on the left who still harbor romantic ideas about political violence as a morally attractive response to oppression, real or imagined.

6. “12:08 East of Bucharest” is the first feature from the Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu; “Live-in Maid” is the debut of Jorge Gaggero, from Argentina. They tell simple, almost anecdotal stories of ordinary people at the mercy of historical events. In “12:08” a singularly undistinguished television panel of provincial Romanians squabbles about the revolution of 1989; in “Live-in Maid” the relationship between a Buenos Aires lady and her maid is strained by economic turmoil. Mr. Porumboiu’s sensibility is more overtly comic than Mr. Gaggero’s, but both filmmakers show remarkable sensitivity and self-confidence, and in their low-key, observant ways each achieves something close to perfection.

7. We talk a lot about freedom — in life, in art, in politics — but what does it look like? You can find one set of answers in the restless, beautiful images of the American landscape in Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild,” and another in the landscapes of memory and fantasy explored in Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” Both films, based on the lives of real people, dwell on themes of liberation, and both filmmakers demonstrate an independence of spirit that helps to make their stories exhilarating as well as sad.

8. There will always be a place, and an eager audience, for melodramas of awakened conscience, in which a cynical, complacent or downright malignant character taps into an unexpected reservoir of decency. These films answer a need to believe that goodness can flourish in bleak times and against long odds, and their sentimental humanism is part of their appeal. It can always be argued that the real world is grayer and more nuanced than the East Germany depicted “The Lives of Others” or the corporate arena of “Michael Clayton.” But these movies, the directorial debuts of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (“Lives) and Tony Gilroy (“Clayton”), work as intelligent, earnest fables of individual heroism, anchored in lead performances — George Clooney’s as the fixer in “Clayton” and Ulrich Mühe’s as the Stasi officer in “Lives” — of extraordinary gravity and conviction.

9. “The Savages,” written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, and Sarah Polley’s “Away From Her,” based on a story by Alice Munro, both deal with the indignities of old age. They are also about the vagaries and difficulties of long-term love, between the squabbling siblings (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney) in Ms. Jenkins’s film and the married couple (Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent) in Ms. Polley’s. There is scarcely a moment of exaggeration or unearned sentiment in either film, and between them they feature some of the best acting of the year.

10. “Knocked Up” enjoys the distinction of being the most intensely argued about movie of the year, as well as one of the funniest. Its send-up of sexual confusion in early adulthood was topped only by “Superbad,” its younger, more anxious brother. The sharp, complicated feminism of “Juno” stands as both a complement to and an implicit critique of those boy-centered pictures. My wish for 2008 is that Diablo Cody, who wrote “Juno,” and Judd Apatow, the writer-director of “Knocked Up” and producer of “Superbad,” collaborate on a hilariously naughty comedy promoting proper condom use.

HONORABLE MENTIONS “Lady Chatterley,” “Into Great Silence,” “Starting Out in the Evening,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “No Country for Old Men,” “The Band’s Visit,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Bamako,” “Zodiac.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/movies/23scot.html





A List, to Start the Conversation
Manohla Dargis

THE whole point of a Top 10 list, a friend recently scolded me, is to number them. (I was declining to do so.) My friend was wrong, but only because Top 10 lists are artificial exercises, assertions of critical ego, capricious and necessarily imperfect. (I have a suspicion that the sacred 10 is meant to suggest biblical certainty, as if critics are merely worldly vessels for some divine wisdom.) More than anything they are a public ritual, which is their most valuable function. I tell you what I liked, and you either agree with my list (which flatters us both) or denounce it (which flatters you). It’s a perfect circle.

Mostly, these lists give me an excuse to remind readers of good and great films that they may have missed. (That’s the evangelist speaking, not Moses.) They allow me to revisit favorites, sift through the year and share a few thoughts that I didn’t or couldn’t get into print earlier, along with fragments, digressions and a few jabs. In some respects the actual list is the least of it, which is why I’ll dispatch with it now with minor annotation and, save for the first two titles, without numbers.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” which I will write about in detail when it opens on Wednesday, and David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” which I wrote about when it was released in March, together constitute my 1 through 10. These aren’t necessarily the year’s best (impossible to determine given the glut of films), just the two that matter most to me, that dug in the deepest and rearranged my own givens. They made me feel like the woman in the start of Orson Welles’s film “Touch of Evil” who says, “I’ve got this ticking noise in my head,” just before she’s blown to smithereens by a time bomb. I’m still intact (more or less), but these films shook up my world in the best possible way.

My other favorite releases of the year are “Into Great Silence,” “I’m Not There,” “Killer of Sheep,” “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Eastern Promises,” “Michael Clayton,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone,” “Lady Chatterley,” “Colossal Youth,” “Monika,” “Superbad,” “Southland Tales,” “No End in Sight,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “This Is England,” “The Savages,” “Year of the Dog,” “Paprika,” “The Host” and the under-appreciated action thriller “The Kingdom.” Each of these was reviewed in this paper, and most are now available on DVD or soon will be. This year’s Cannes Film Festival supplied a remarkable bounty that included Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Flight of the Red Balloon,” Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park,” Catherine Breillat’s “Last Mistress” and Carlos Reygadas’s “Silent Light,” all of which are scheduled to open next year.

You’re probably wise to “The Bourne Ultimatum,” so instead let me share a few words about “Colossal Youth,” from the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa. Obscure in more ways than one, this movie has not been picked up by an American distributor, making it hard for even intrepid filmgoers to see. Shot in digital video, it is a cryptic, arresting work that reveals its mysteries slowly. With their deliberate movements and long silences, Mr. Costa’s cast — nonprofessionals culled from a Lisbon slum — seem as monumental as marble, a heaviness that all but stops the flow of the movie and forces your attention directly on them. You really watch this movie or you flee. If it makes it to DVD, I promise to let you know.

“The Bourne Ultimatum” and “Colossal Youth” (now there’s a double bill) could not be more different: they’re limpid/opaque, frantic/composed, global/local, star-driven/real-peopled. Neither looks like the other or like anything else out this year. Each brings you into worlds through different formal means. “The Bourne Ultimatum” fragments the image, thereby mirroring the fragmented nature of its title character, and accelerates the pace, creating a shattered, violently trembling world that forces you to pay close attention or risk missing something, like the sight of Bourne jumping from a roof and through a window. “Colossal Youth,” by contrast, allows the world to cohere (almost congeal) around its characters, and it slows down its pace so drastically that unless you adapt your rhythms to it, you will never find a way in.

These films exemplify the perceptual extremes of my moviegoing year; somewhere in the middle is the Norwegian film “Reprise,” from the young director Joachim Trier. A coolly funny, touching, exhilaratingly intelligent mediation on identity and friendship, “Reprise” has a self-conscious visual style (jump cuts, freeze frames) that perfectly expresses the worldview of its two self-conscious lead characters, first-time novelists and increasingly alienated best friends. The film has bumped around the international festival circuit for the last year and a half, scooping up awards and love, though not until recently did it land an American distributor. (Look for it next year.) Enthusiastic reviews, intelligent filmmaking, even hot sex are no longer automatically enough to persuade a distributor to jump.

The problem is that the art-house audience that supported the French New Wave filmmakers to whom “Reprise” owes an obvious debt can no longer be counted on to fill theater seats. Or maybe it’s overwhelmed. For a variety of reasons, including the glut of releases, movies are now whisked on and off theater screens so fast that it’s hard for the audience to discover them, much less build a popular film-going culture. In 1984 Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise” hung around in theaters long enough for people to learn how to spell his name. These days too many cool movies are just passing through on the way to your Netflix queue.

I don’t think anyone knows what the solution is, but this year IFC Entertainment hit its stride with its First Take series. Twice a month the company simultaneously opens a film theatrically, including at the IFC Center in the West Village, and releases it via video-on-demand on cable television. If the film does well in theaters, it might go wider than initially planned. IFC isn’t the first company to go the day-and-date route, but so far it’s letting people with great taste buy films — during a multifestival shopping spree, they picked up “The Flight of the Red Balloon,” “The Last Mistress” and “Paranoid Park” — so, until someone comes up with a better idea, more power to them.

IFC also had the smarts to snap up the Romanian film “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” at Cannes before it won the Palme d’Or. (It had a brief Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles and reopens in January.) Directed by Cristian Mungiu, this is one of those putatively dark, difficult movies that industry mouthpieces try to use as proof that critics are out of touch with the audience when it is actually the audience that is out of touch with good movies. Americans consume a lot of garbage, but that may be because they don’t have real choices: 16 of the top box-office earners last weekend — some good, almost all from big studios — monopolized 33,353 of the country’s 38,415 screens. The remaining 78 releases duked it out on the leftover screens.

I doubt that most moviegoers would prefer the relentlessly honest “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” which involves a young woman seeking an illegal abortion, over “Juno,” an ingratiating comedy about a teenager who carries her pregnancy to term. But I wish they had the choice. “4 Months” is aesthetically bracing, but “Juno” has easy laughs, dodges abortion quicker than a presidential candidate and provides a supremely artful male fantasy. Like “Knocked Up,” it pivots on a fertile hottie who has sex without protection and, after a little emotional messiness (and no scary diseases), delivers one baby and adopts a second, namely the man-child who (also) misplaced the Trojans. Both comedies superficially recall the male wish-fulfillment fantasies of “Sideways,” but without the lacerating adult self-awareness.

This year’s baby boom — more bellies popped in “Waitress,” “Margot at the Wedding,” “A Mighty Heart,” “Bella” and even the latest “Shrek” — may be purely coincidental or cyclical or just evidence of the limits of imagination. But because this year our movies also marched off to war — in “Redacted,” “Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs” and “In the Valley of Elah,” among other titles — I can’t help but think we have embarked on a symbolic flashback to the 1940s and 1950s. In the way-back machine of the movies, we are simultaneously returned to the glories, agonies and clichés of cinematic war and to atavistic gendered stereotypes, embodied this year by beatific, inevitable maternity. Filmmakers may be shooting blanks on the war front, but back home they’re getting plenty of action.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/movies/23darg.html





Films That Look Death in the Eye
Stephen Holden

THE betrayal of the body, decrepitude and death: in 2007 an unprecedented number of serious films, along with the usual slasher movies, contemplated the end of life. Might they be a collective baby-boom response to looming senescence and a fraying social safety net? Or do they reflect an uneasy sense that humanity is facing end times, when global warming, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the war in Iraq, or any combination thereof, could bring on doomsday?

At once the scariest and most exhilarating of such films, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” contemplates the world from the perspective of a stroke victim who can communicate only by blinking one eye. If its metaphor of human life as imprisonment in one’s own body is terrifying, the horror is partly countered by its portrayal of the imagination as a means of ecstatic liberation. It’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” elevated to a metaphysical plane.

In “Starting Out in the Evening,” a distinguished American novelist whose books have gone out of print struggles to complete a final opus while recovering from a heart attack and, later, a stroke. “The Savages” examines the tensions between a brother and sister whose father is moved from a retirement community into a nursing home to spend his final days. In “Away From Her” a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s slowly forgets her life while her husband watches helplessly.

Each of these films has at least one devastating performance. In “The Diving Bell” the dancing eyes of the French actor Mathieu Amalric freeze into a Cyclopean stare. In “Starting Out in the Evening” Frank Langella, wearing a look of weary resignation, allows himself to be photographed in all his elephantine dilapidation, being pulled naked from a bathtub. In “The Savages” Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman stand in for every grown-up child reacting to a parent’s decline. And in “Away From Her” the still-beautiful Julie Christie fails to recognize her husband and becomes a ghost of her former self.

For those who prefer their death and dying with a thick sugar coating, there is “The Bucket List,” in which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play geezers dying of cancer who flee the hospital for a final glorious fling with life.

But it isn’t only in personal dramas about illness and mortality that the usual filter separating the movies from reality was removed. Several films flourishing an epic grandeur arrived without the usual romantic packaging. The only word to describe the Hobbesian vision of human nature offered by “There Will Be Blood,” “Sweeney Todd” and “No Country for Old Men” is merciless. All three films imply that happy endings are for fools.

Here are my Top 10 movies of 2007, in order of preference:

‘THERE WILL BE BLOOD’ Grounded in a titanic performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as a ruthless oil prospector who strikes it rich in early-20th-century California, Paul Thomas Anderson’s screen adaptation of ”Oil!,” a 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair, is a raw-boned, radically unsentimental fable about the birth of modern America. Speaking in oratorical cadences that evoke Sean Connery by way of John Huston, Mr. Day-Lewis’s oil baron, Daniel Plainview, dripping with black slime in the early scenes, is a fearsome creature whose soul rots as his income multiplies. Plainview is a proudly misanthropic, power-hungry loner in a world where women barely count.

In the movie’s pessimistic view of history, American capitalism has always been driven by parallel strains of limitless greed and a fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone Christianity preached by madmen and charlatans. As the drama builds to a final confrontation between these two strains, “There Will Be Blood” suggests a fusion of “East of Eden,” “Giant” and “Citizen Kane” with the Hollywood finery ripped to shreds.

‘THE LIVES OF OTHERS’ Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s eerie portrait of East Germany before and after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall evokes an Orwellian nightmare in the age of surveillance and security. The quiet hero (Ulrich Müehe) of this study in state-sanctioned paranoia is a captain in the Stasi, the country’s secret police, assigned to eavesdrop electronically on a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his mistress (Martina Gedeck). His job is complicated by bureaucratic corruption. A great piece of storytelling with a poignant twist ending, the film demonstrates how a paranoid bureaucracy brings on its own destruction.

‘THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY’ Julian Schnabel’s cinematographic tour de force was adapted from a memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, a bon vivant and editor in chief of Elle magazine in France who in 1995 suffered a stroke that left him with a rare condition called locked-in syndrome, mentally alert yet unable to communicate except by blinking an eye. His book was dictated by blinks correlated with letters in the alphabet. The movie takes place largely inside Mr. Bauby’s head, where a very rich, sensuous life exists in his memory.

‘PERSEPOLIS’ Adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s four-volume series of graphic novels about growing up in contemporary Iran, and directed by Ms. Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, this French animated film offers an autobiographical account of Iran’s troubled history from the days of the shah through the Islamist revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Marjane, the narrator, is a spirited young rebel from a closely knit, cultured family, struggling to define her identity in a repressive climate whose shifting political winds require wrenching personal adjustments. The same history translated into a live-action drama could never be depicted with the clarity and forceful drive that bold, simple animation encourages.

‘STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING’ Mr. Day-Lewis’s only rival for the year’s best male performance is Frank Langella’s portrayal of an aging novelist whose time has past. Stylistically his pensive, minimalist performance is the diametrical opposite of Mr. Day-Lewis’s brutal Shakespearean-size prospector. Resignation and an embattled nobility vie for precedence in his sad-eyed visage. Almost as impressive are Lauren Ambrose, as a beady-eyed graduate student who barges into his life, and Lili Taylor, as his neglected daughter.

‘NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN’ In Joel and Ethan Coen’s icy adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, West Texas in 1980 (it could just as well be today) is the same deadly outlaw territory as the 19th-century Wild West. A county sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), a hunter (Josh Brolin) who stumbles upon a $2 million cache of drug money and a killer (Javier Bardem) who monitors the cash through a transponder in the money bag play terrifying cat-and-mouse games in a near-perfect modern genre movie that transcends itself.

‘SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET’ In Tim Burton’s movie of Stephen Sondheim’s musical-theater masterpiece the Grand Guignol is exaggerated to cartoon levels (the blood from slit throats spurts toward the camera), the score is somewhat abridged and the show’s lunatic humor all but eliminated. Johnny Depp’s Sweeney, who wears a continual scowl, takes little joy in his murders. His Sweeney, often filmed in close-up, is nevertheless a riveting creation, and all the more indelible for being in your face during much of the movie; he forces you to identify with him. Vocally he sounds a lot like David Bowie. Nearly 30 years after it arrived on Broadway the show now looks like the ultimate revenge tragedy for the age of Al Qaeda.

‘ATONEMENT’ Ian McEwan’s great novel, about the tragic consequences of an adolescent girl’s lie after observing acts she misunderstands, has been translated by the director Joe Wright into a glossy romantic movie with the same lush ethos as his 2005 debut, “Pride and Prejudice.” Keira Knightley and James McAvoy make fantasy-worthy star-crossed lovers, but the movie is stolen by Saoirse Ronan as the dissembling 13-year-old tattletale.

‘ACROSS THE UNIVERSE’ Julie Taymor’s movie is a rhapsodic ’60s fantasia in which the songs of the Beatles propel a love story about a poor boy from Liverpool and an American girl who go through the decade’s familiar tropes: sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and revolution. Ms. Taymor’s puppetry, the ravishing psychedelic sequences and the performances of Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood make “Across the Universe” one of the headiest trip movies ever, carried off without a dash of irony or cynicism.

‘JUNO’ At last, an American movie about a real, down-to-earth teenager. The amazing young actress Ellen Page plays a sarcastic, punk-savvy 16-year-old girl impregnated by a boyfriend who decides to give the baby up for adoption and chooses the parents-to-be, a yuppie couple whose marriage is not as picture-perfect as it seems. Diablo Cody’s bitingly funny screenplay shatters the conventions of the Hollywood teenage movie.

RUNNERS-UP “Avenue Montaigne,” “Away From Her,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “Breach,” “Eastern Promises,” “I’m Not There,” “Lady Chatterley,” “Lust, Caution,” “Ratatouille,” “The Savages,” “This Is England,” “2 Days in Paris,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/movies/23hold.html





The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
Michael Cieply

TIME was, a movie studio could pack up a picture and all of its assorted bloopers, alternate takes and other odds and ends as soon as the production staff was done with them, and ship them off to the salt mine. Literally.

Having figured out that really big money comes from reselling old films — on broadcast television, then cable, videocassettes, DVDs, and so on — companies like Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures for decades have been tucking their 35-millimeter film masters and associated source material into archives, some of which are housed in a Kansas salt mine, or in limestone mines in Kansas and Pennsylvania.

A picture could sit for many, many years, cool and comfortable, until some enterprising executive decided that the time was ripe for, say, a Wallace Beery special collection timed to a 25th-anniversary 3-D rerelease of “Barton Fink,” with a hitherto unseen, behind-the-scenes peek at the Coen brothers trying to explain a Hollywood in-joke to John Turturro.

It was a file-and-forget system that didn’t cost much, and made up for the self-destructive sins of an industry that discarded its earliest works or allowed films on old flammable stock to degrade. (Indeed, only half of the feature films shot before 1950 survive.)

But then came digital. And suddenly the film industry is wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, aren’t as durable as they used to be.

The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.

Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault.

All of this may seem counterintuitive. After all, digital magic is supposed to make information of all kinds more available, not less. But ubiquity, it turns out, is not the same as permanence.

In a telephone interview earlier this month, Milton Shefter, a longtime film preservationist who helped prepare the academy’s report, said the problems associated with digital movie storage, if not addressed, could point the industry “back to the early days, when they showed a picture for a week or two, and it was thrown away.”

Mr. Shefter and his associates do not contend that films are actually on the verge of becoming quite that ephemeral. But they do see difficulties and trends that could point many movies or the source material associated with them toward “digital extinction” over a relatively short span of years, unless something changes.

At present, a copy of virtually all studio movies — even those like “Click” or “Miami Vice” that are shot using digital processes — is being stored in film format, protecting the finished product for 100 years or more. For film aficionados, the current practice is already less than perfect. Regardless of how they are shot, most pictures are edited digitally, and then a digital master is transferred to film, which can result in an image of lower quality than a pure film process — and this is what becomes stored for the ages.

But over the next couple of decades, archivists reason, the conversion of theaters to digital projection will sharply reduce the overall demand for film, eventually making it a sunset market for the main manufacturers, Kodak, Fujifilm and Agfa. At that point, pure digital storage will become the norm, bringing with it a whole set of problems that never troubled film.

To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.

DIFFICULTIES of that sort are compounded by constant change in technology. As one generation of digital magic replaces the next, archived materials must be repeatedly “migrated” to the new format, or risk becoming unreadable. Thus, NASA scientists found in 1999 that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975; the format had long been obsolete.

All of that makes digital archiving a dynamic rather than static process, and one that costs far more than studios have been accustomed to paying in the past — no small matter, given that movie companies rely on their libraries for about one-third of their $36 billion in annual revenue, according to a recent assessment by the research service Global Media Intelligence.

“It’s been in the air since we started talking about doing things digitally,” Chris Cookson, president of Warner’s technical operations and chief technology officer, said of the archiving quandary.

One of the most perplexing realities of a digital production like “Superman Returns” is that it sometimes generates more storable material than conventional film, creating new questions about what to save. Such pile-ups can occur, for instance, when a director or cinematographer who no longer has to husband film stock simply allows cameras to remain running for long stretches while working out scenes.

Much of the resulting data may be no more worth saving that the misspellings and awkward phrases deleted from a newspaper reporter’s word-processing screen. Then again, a telling exchange between star and filmmaker might yield gold as a “special feature” on some future home-viewing format — so who wants to be responsible for tossing it into the digital dustbin?

For now, studios are saving as much of this digital ephemera as possible, storing it on tapes or drives in vaults not unlike those that house traditional film. But how much of that material will be migrated when technology shifts in 7 or 10 years is anyone’s guess. (And archiving practices in the independent film world run the gamut, from studied preservation to complete inattention, noted Andrew Maltz, director of the academy’s science and technology council.)

According to Mr. Shefter, a universal standard for storage technology would go far toward reducing a problem that would otherwise grow every time the geniuses who create digital hardware come up with something a little better than their last bit of wizardry.

As the report put it, “If we allow technological obsolescence to repeat itself, we are tied either to continuously increasing costs — or worse — the failure to save important assets.”

In other words, we could be watching Wallace Beery long after more contemporary images are gone.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/bu...a/23steal.html





Movie Review
Smiley Face (2007)


Anna Faris plays Jane F. in “Smiley Face,” a comedy directed by Gregg Araki.

Sunshine Daydream, With Pointed Point of View
Matt Zoller Seitz

“Smiley Face,” about a pot-addled would-be actress stumbling through a long, weird day in Los Angeles, is a contradiction in terms: a “stoner” comedy with a purpose.

Directed by Gregg Araki from a screenplay by Dylan Haggerty, the movie at first seems a psychedelic lark, in the spirit of “The Big Lebowski,” “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” and other works distinguished by picaresque narratives and cumulus clouds of marijuana smoke.

Mr. Araki, a trailblazer of early ’90s queer cinema, can stage a non sequitur with the best of them. He gets plenty of opportunities thanks to his lead actress, the “Scary Movie” star Anna Faris, whose freakishly committed performance as Jane F. suggests Amy Adams’s princess from “Enchanted” dropped into a Cheech and Chong movie.

Jane is a giggly, flirty goofball whose perpetual buzz is cranked up several notches when she scarfs a plateful of cannabis-spiked muffins baked by her roommate. Intending to bake a replacement batch, she orders a large amount of product from a dealer (a dreadlocked, droll Adam Brody) whom she can’t afford to pay; accidentally destroys her cellphone while cooking the muffins; then arrives late to an audition for a strait-laced casting agent who reports her drug use to the police; and so on.

Despite its laid-back script, “Smiley Face” is as prankishly political as Mr. Araki’s “Doom Generation,” evincing a deep unease with the media-saturated capitalist nation that Jane crawls inside her bong to escape.

The film depicts Jane’s habit as pathetic even as it plays for laughs. At the same time, though “Smiley Face” suggests that the “straight” characters Jane encounters — the casting director (Jane Lynch); a bullying beat cop (Michael Shamus Wiles); a college professor’s wife (Marion Ross) from whom Jane steals an original copy of Marx and Engels’s “Communist Manifesto”; a couple of amiably clueless meat delivery men (Danny Trejo and John Cho); the humorless Brevin (John Krasinski of NBC’s “Office”), who likes getting his teeth cleaned because it makes him feel “prosperous” — are in thrall to an even more powerful drug: the myth of the American dream.

At one point Jane, who has somehow ended up at the meat-packing plant that employs the delivery men, deflects a supervisor’s ire by claiming to be a union organizer, then fantasizes launching into a Marxist soliloquy about industrial oppression of labor. Mr. Araki intercuts Jane’s rant with unsettling close-ups of meat being sliced, ground and liquefied.

The film’s title is drawn from a scene in which Jane envisions the sun as a smiley face. The implication is subtle but clear: Americans fancy themselves free-willed strivers who live in the best of all possible worlds, but they’re really sentient vegetables, rooted in comfort and nourished by manufactured images of bliss. Jane’s apathy-as-rebellion recalls a quotation from Stella Adler: “A junkie is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong.”

“Smiley Face” is rated R (Under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes sexual situations, profanity and nonstop drug references.


SMILEY FACE

Opens in Manhattan on Wednesday.

Directed and edited by Gregg Araki; written by Dylan Haggerty; director of photography, Shawn Kim; music by David Kitay; production designer, John Larena; produced by Steve Golin, Alix Madigan-Yorkin, Mr. Araki, Kevin Turen and Henry Winterstern; released by First Look Studios. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.

WITH: Anna Faris (Jane F.), John Krasinski (Brevin), Adam Brody (Steve the Dealer), Marion Ross (Shirley), Jane Lynch (Casting Director), John Cho (Mikey), Danny Trejo (Albert) and Michael Shamus Wiles (Officer Jones).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/movies/26smil.html





Long Before Video Cameras, a French Artist Brought Motion to His Images
Kathryn Shattuck

Ah, boredom, the curse of the rich and idle in 18th-century France. So how did the aristocrats while away their leisure time on dreary winter days?

The fortunate ones went to the movies.

In a new book, “Carmontelle’s Landscape Transparencies: Cinema of the Enlightenment,” the historian Laurence Chatel de Brancion steps back into prerevolutionary France to explore the pastimes created by Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle, in his role as resident entertainer at the court of the duke of Orléans.

At the heart of the volume are Carmontelle’s experiments with light and moving images: rouleaux transparents, or “rolled-up transparent drawings,” a precursor to modern cinema. The luminous scenes of verdant parks and splendidly attired people — between 12 and 19 inches deep and up to 138 feet long — were backlighted with natural daylight, wound between spindles and viewed in a boxlike precursor to the television, often accompanied by music or narrated by Carmontelle himself.

“It’s the first time that you see complete action without interruption, with a light from behind and made for the pleasure of the public,” Ms. Chatel de Brancion said in a telephone interview from Paris.

It’s enough to make Sofia Coppola swoon.

“Carmontelle’s Landscape Transparencies” will be published next month by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and Ms. Chatel de Brancion will visit Manhattan in April to discuss her book at the National Arts Club.

“Carmontelle was a court artist, and he very much worked with the aristocracy and gentry and made things that would amuse them,” said Julian Brooks, associate curator of drawings at the Getty in Los Angeles, which has a 12-foot-long transparent drawing by Carmontelle, “Figures Walking in a Parkland,” in its permanent collection.

“I think for us now they give a glimpse of what life was like then,” he said. “All the dress, the carriage, the boat, the way the landscape was arranged, is very realistic. They’re like a window onto the time.”

Born in 1717, the son of a cobbler, Carmontelle insinuated himself into French society through his learnedness and charisma, traits that were in high demand in a culture rife with ignored wives and ennui. He also wrote art criticism, staged plays and made 750 full-length portraits of visitors to the duke’s court — among them Mozart and Voltaire — now considered some of the most useful iconography of the period.

But for the duke Carmontelle’s role was primarily that of party planner, in settings both indoors and out.

Gardening was the vogue at the time, and Carmontelle’s design for the duke’s 28-acre Jardin de Monceau, on the northwestern edge of Paris, reflected current trends: an irregular shape, more English than French in inspiration, the use of architectural follies and integration with the agricultural landscape outside the city.

Mirka Benes, an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Texas, Austin, said there was a major emphasis on entertainment in the garden. In a Chinese pavilion at the Jardin de Monceau, people in traditional costumes pulled a sort of merry-go-round; another pavilion featured people in Turkish garb.

“On the one hand it addressed the local agriculture on the steppe of Paris,” she said, noting that the royals could sample milk and cheese and even lift a hoe — without getting too sullied in the process — in these rural settings. “On the other hand it was highly international, like an armchair tour throughout the world.”

Carmontelle translated his visions — many of them drawn from his garden fantasies — onto fine English paper using watercolor, gouache and a special gum that allowed for brilliant transparent colors. Initially devising a “slide” that fit into windows between panes of glass, he traced exactly the view of leafless trees and bare gardens in the winter months, and then adorned them with luscious hand-drawn flowers and greenery. The effect from outside was an opaque white window. But from the inside it was like witnessing spring in full bloom.

At the same time Benjamin Franklin was astonishing Parisians with his displays of electricity, and light was the talk of the day, especially the white, oil-based kind already known in China and Russia. People were also experimenting with the magic lantern, an ancestor of the slide projector, and the concepts of the panorama and diorama.

Eventually Carmontelle concocted an invention that allowed him to combine the two. He created 11 known transparencies, many of which were later cut into sections and sold as individual paintings. Ms. Chatel de Brancion found seven in her explorations, including a 138-foot-long one that captures the lives of both the working classes and the gentry across four seasons in postrevolutionary France. Another depicts the slightly scandalous shift in fashion as inspired by Josephine Bonaparte.

Still no one — not Napoleon not the Russian czar — wanted to invest in Carmontelle’s innovation, either as a record of a forgotten society or as an idea to be expanded on. He died on Dec. 26, 1806, “heartbroken,” Ms. Chatel de Brancion wrote, “to see the invention that had documented an era stacked up once again in the back of his studio.”

Isn’t that just like the movies?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/ar...gn/27tran.html





Books

Hot Properties
Manohla Dargis

The Star Machine

By Jeanine Basinger.

Illustrated. 586 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

“God makes stars,” the pioneering movie producer Samuel Goldwyn once said. “It’s up to producers to find them.” In this era of D.I.Y. stardom, you don’t need God or Goldwyn to grab your 15 minutes; you need only a Webcam and the minor technological wherewithal to upload your own fabulousness. Information dissemination is cheap thanks to the Internet, and now so is fame, which has become the virtual-reality birthright of every Tom, Dick and Lonelygirl15 itching to go viral. In the new global meritocracy, anyone can be a star.

Jeanine Basinger, whose book “The Star Machine” examines how the old Hollywood studio system once manufactured stars as if they were widgets, thinks they don’t make ’em like they used to (stars, that is). “The importance of stardom has diminished over time,” she writes in this big, sprawling book, adding, “The stars of silent film and of the great studio system were gods and goddesses.” They had faces then, along with glamour and impeccable grooming. The studios taught their stars how to walk, how to talk, how to dance, sing, fence and ride a horse without sliding off the saddle. They plucked their eyebrows, trimmed their waistlines, shaved their hairlines, kept their secrets and tried to protect this human capital at all costs.

Look at Paris Hilton and you can’t help sympathizing with Basinger. Hilton has become a star of sorts simply because she or, more likely, the people she keeps on her payroll have a talent for promotion. Her paparazzi moments are as orchestrated as her red-carpet and clubland appearances, and coordinated for the same instrumental reasons: to get as many images of her out there as possible. But she’s a dull celebrity. Even the sex video that made the Internet rounds was boring (she answered her cellphone in the middle, so she sure looked bored). Compared with a glamour puss like Lana Turner, another bottle blonde who knew how to make an entrance, Hilton comes across as shoddy goods.

Basinger devotes half a chapter to Turner, calling her “the epitome of Hollywood machine-made stardom.” Echoing Goldwyn, she also writes of Turner, “Born a star, she died a star.” This is sentimentalism. By the time Turner died in 1995, she had long faded from the movies after late-career stinkers like “The Big Cube,” in 1969. (The cube refers to an LSD-laced sugar cube that Turner’s character ingests and that leads to her institutionalization. Happily, she’s later cured!) Kindly, somewhat ludicrously, Basinger believes that Turner could have developed as an actress if not for “a series of sensational events in her private life,” most notoriously the 1958 fatal stabbing of Turner’s mob-connected bedroom thug, Johnny Stompanato, by her 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane.

Even if her daughter hadn’t stuck a knife in the boyfriend, it’s unlikely that Turner, then 38, would have developed into much of an actress. Unquestionably she could hold the screen during her delectable physical prime, as she does in the tawdry 1946 noir “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” She plays a slutty goddess in that film, a poisonous honey pot, and all she has to do is look lovely and sexually available, which she does by gently parting her pretty plump lips. Part of what makes this work so well here and in her best movies — “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Imitation of Life,” in which she stayed close to personal type by playing famous actresses — is that you don’t believe a word she says. She’s a beautiful lie.

Turner received an enormous amount of help, of course, from her directors, producers, cinematographers, production designers, costume designers, lighting crews, editors, publicity photographers and fleets of other studio employees whose jobs were to polish and package the stars and sell them to the hungry, movie-crazy audience. Basinger gives approving nods to Turner’s greatest directors, Vincente Minnelli (“The Bad and the Beautiful”) and Douglas Sirk (“Imitation of Life”). But she doesn’t explain how each effectively exploited Turner’s artificiality and lack of naturalness (and lack of acting talent) to reveal her glamorous armature as nothing more than a mask, a construction. Instead, she offers up plot summaries and banalities: Turner “understands the role, and she makes it hers.”

Basinger, the chairwoman of film studies at Wesleyan University, can be a sharp, funny writer, and she’s particularly on point when it comes to the ridiculous clothes that sometimes swaddled stars of the golden age. (In one film, Turner wears so much fur “she’s practically an ecological disaster.”) She has an easygoing, even chatty prose style, willfully different from much contemporary academic writing and clearly aimed at a general rather than a specialized readership. The footnotes are conversational, not reference-oriented; the slim bibliography leans heavily on fan magazines and biographies; and many of the quotations are unattributed or loosely credited. (Only after I looked up one vaguely familiar description attributed to The New York Times did I realize I had written it.)

You can understand Basinger’s wanting to write a serious but accessible Hollywood history. But while you don’t need to write like an academic to be a good scholar, you also don’t need to resort to anti-intellectualism to affirm your populist cred. Basinger does herself no favors when she dismisses, in a footnote, those unnamed theorists and critics who write about the way Hollywood cinema constructs desire through “the male gaze.” Basinger may be on to something when she writes, “Not much has been said about how men underwent the same treatment,” but she drops this fascinating subject before she gets into it, leaving analysis and theory behind in favor of plot descriptions and recycled biographical details.

And Basinger has been done no favors by her editors. The book is repetitive, heavily padded and poorly organized, with entire sections that read like dribbling afterthoughts: “Bonuses: Oddities and Character Actors,” “The Fellas,” “Zanies,” “Exotics,” “Maria Montez,” “Abbott and Costello,” “Dogs and Kids.” The editors may not know that Hollywood High School still exists (Basinger apparently doesn’t), but they should have noticed that she mentions there are 14 Andy Hardy movies on one page, only to correct that tally to 16 several pages later. Though there’s no denying that Tyrone Power was a good-looking man, by the 16th time Basinger calls him “beautiful,” it’s hard not to think her moony appreciation and some lousy copy-editing have gotten the better of her criticism.

She’s more persuasive about Power when she sticks to the evidence offered by his actual films, by the number of his close-ups and the roles he was asked to play. He was built up quickly by 20th Century Fox, which put him in costume pictures, musicals and romantic comedies despite his desire to be a “serious actor.” (Evidently, being the brand-name attraction in movies was not serious enough.) Basinger writes that Power’s aspirations toward gravitas were thwarted by the very machine that had made him, which led to what she sees as his most enduring role: the long-suffering hero in that tragedy titled “The Heartless Movie Studio” (“He had signed on with a system that was driven by money”).

Studio contract stars like Power had it tough, to a degree. When you signed with a studio, you threw away your autonomy and more. As Clark Gable said, “I am paid not to think.” Though some remained freelance, many stars signed long-term contracts that were put up for regular review, though only at the studio’s discretion. Bette Davis fought bitterly with Warner Brothers for years, believing that her home studio was not giving her the roles she deserved. She eventually earned more, but she also had to swallow a five-year contract that stated she had to “perform and render her services whenever, wherever and as often as the producer requested.” If the studio wanted her to stand on her head, she did.

The star system was a cage, but it was a gold-plated, ermine-lined cage, and it provided material comforts and existential relief that most mortals can only dream of (those dreams are one reason movies even exist). This isn’t to deny it can be hard to clock 14 hours a day, six days a week, as stars were sometimes obliged to do. (Davis sought to make a maximum of four movies a year.) Then as now, stardom is a job. The movies invariably try to hide the work that goes into turning a star and the film itself into seamless illusions, which is why Bette Davis was a real Hollywood rebel. She tore out the seams.

Davis’s struggle against Warners wasn’t that of the creative soul aching to be free; it was a fight against an oligarchic industry. That isn’t sexy, but it’s truer than the heroic narratives that fill “The Star Machine,” exemplified by chapter titles like “Disillusionment” (Tyrone Power), “Disobedience” (Lana Turner and Errol Flynn) and “Defection” (Deanna Durbin and Jean Arthur). These stories are diverting enough as generalized biographical and creative portraits, but they say little about the historic construction of stardom and not enough about the machine’s coldblooded operational reality. The story Basinger doesn’t tell is of a business in which an executive like Louis B. Mayer seemed to successfully encourage an employee like Lana Turner to get an abortion because having a child wasn’t good for her image as, in his words, “a love goddess.”

There’s something touching about Basinger’s attempt to restore agency to the men and women who, as she repeatedly reminds us, were forced to surrender their individuality at the studio gate. Certainly this approach is far more expedient (and salable) than academic notions of stars as semiotic signs or sites of contradiction. The star system is more romantic and easier to grasp than the comparatively bland, faceless studio system, with its factory practices, bottom-line imperatives and ruthless genius. Stars are perfect narrative characters, ready-made dashing and lovely leads. But stardom can’t be reduced to personal will, beauty, charisma, oomph or guts, to being photogenic, sleeping with the bosses or having that voodoo magic we call “It,” even if all these can come into play when a Lucille Le Sueur is transformed into Joan Crawford.

Today’s stars, Basinger writes, become famous for the roles they play, while “yesterday’s stars became famous because fans believed they were that role and just ‘playing themselves.’ ” It’s unclear who these fans are (Basinger never identifies them), but it’s hard to buy the suggestion that, say, 1940s audiences were somehow more easily gulled by Hollywood’s dissembling machine than are modern audiences. Stars necessarily inhabit several roles when they step before the camera — the imagined real self, the manufactured icon, the scripted part — and they wear their masks simultaneously. These multivalent identities are always visible, and always were, as nicely shown by the magazine writer who in 1910 wrote of and perhaps to Mary Pickford, “We are glad to see you, little Mary, no matter what part you are playing.”

Stars of the past evoke great feeling in those who write about them, including Basinger. We look at these glamorous specters, these haunting beauties, and wonder what went wrong (why don’t they make them like they used to?) or yearn for plausible alternatives (George Clooney is the new Cary Grant). In doing so we turn our beloved stars into death masks, reminders of a film world long gone. And we turn the movies into a ghost town. This kind of embalming practice is a dangerous habit. It obscures the reality of the past, the uglier truths of the dream factory — including the institutional racism that prevented black performers from suffering the same rarefied anguish as Tyrone Power — and blinds us to cinema’s present.

The nostalgia for old Hollywood often seems to point to something beyond a desire for the comforting regularity of the well-run factories, for those assembly-line films that satisfy just by virtue of their refined craft, perfect lighting, unpalsied camerawork, spatial coherence and unrushed rhythms. From the outside, the old studio system seemed to run effortlessly, its gears slicked and slippery smooth, but in truth it was always plagued by cycles of uncertainty and retrenchment; it was a perpetual mutating machine. The standard line on Hollywood is that though the studios still exist, the system no longer does, having long been dismantled. But while the machine has been disassembled, it exists nonetheless; now the parts simply lie scattered across the factory floor. Movies are still made — stars too.

What has changed over the years is our sense of ourselves as dramatis personae. We no longer seem content to play second banana to our official stars. And why not? In the panoptic culture we have created, in which cameras run from every possible angle day and night, we are always all enjoying our 15 minutes. Once, we created gods and goddesses in our image, idealized visions of our most perfect selves. In time, our gods started to descend, mumbling with Method-actor sincerity about how they wanted to join us on Earth. We welcomed them initially, but after a while we grew to resent them and hold them in contempt. We still love them, but we hate them too, because now the mirror image they hold up is irreparably cracked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/bo.../Dargis-t.html





Quiet Year for Tech on Capitol Hill
Anne Broache

Democrats in 2007 controlled both chambers of Congress for the first time in a dozen years--and with the power shift came a scattershot year for technology policy.

Sweeping initiatives like elevating minimum wage and lowering prescription drug prices, not technology topics, took the forefront. What that meant was a year of largely unfinished business--or, less charitably, unfulfilled promises--for high-tech companies.

Attempts at overhauling the U.S. patent system proceeded further than ever before, with the House of Representatives backing the most significant revamp in decades. But the Senate hasn't acted yet amid lingering battles over the bill's approach, and now a vote isn't expected until 2008.

Another longtime Silicon Valley priority--bumping up the number of H-1B temporary worker visas and green cards for skilled foreign workers--once again appears destined to fail, already a casualty of a divisive immigration bill that perished earlier this year.

Post-election plans from the Democrats to require paper trails of all oft-maligned electronic voting machines used in federal races also appear to have collapsed, thanks to concerns from state election officials about the cost of implementing such a plan.

It was also a quiet year for an issue that so dominated the political debate in 2006: Net neutrality. Just after Congress opened its new session, two senators reintroduced a 2006 bill that would generally prohibit broadband operators from prioritizing Internet content, and House Democratic leaders predicted it would top their tech agenda this year. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. But no action has been taken on the Senate proposal; no counterpart bill has emerged in the House as of mid-December; and no congressional hearings were held, although thousands of comments on the topic poured into the Federal Communications Commission during the summer.

Still, the debate doesn't appear to be over yet: Sen. Barack Obama has pledged to enact Net neutrality laws if elected president, and reports this fall about Comcast's filtering of BitTorrent file-sharing traffic have spurred new calls for such legislation from the Hill. Rep. Edward Markey has said he plans to reintroduce a similar version of last year's House proposal, with hearings to follow, when politicians reconvene in January.

As usual, Congress did a lot of spouting off about how to manage perceived Internet perils. Hot topics this time around included foreign cybersecurity threats to U.S. government systems, terrorist cells flourishing on the Web, inadvertent file sharing through peer-to-peer networks, and sexual predators ensnaring unsuspecting youth through online social sites. And for a third time, the House passed not just one, but two, different bills aimed at deterring spyware.

Digital copyright-related moves were minimal, although the entertainment industry saw some action on its frustration with piracy on university networks, with a House panel backing a bill that would require schools to take a series of new antipiracy steps.

The year wouldn't have been complete without calling a number of technology-related companies onto the hearing-room carpet. Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin was forced to defend his company's proposed buyout of XM Satellite Radio; Google and Microsoft sparred over the search giant's plans to swallow up DoubleClick; and Yahoo executives, including CEO Jerry Yang, endured a verbal lashing from members of a House panel over the company's dealings in China.

Arguably the biggest victory scored by the high-tech industry--although some would say it didn't go far enough--was Congress' last-minute renewal of an expiring ban on Internet access taxes. After some jockeying over the length and breadth of the law, both chambers agreed to extend the moratorium until 2014.

Congress also managed to get President Bush to sign off on some $34 billion's worth of new government-sponsored research, education, and teacher-training programs in the science and tech arena over the next few years. There's no guarantee, however, that Bush will approve the follow-up spending bills that would actually bankroll those programs--and, in fact, he's already warned politicians on the hefty price tag and potentially "duplicative" efforts.
http://www.news.com/Year-in-review-Q...0-20&subj=news





John Edwards Not Playing Rupert Murdoch's Monopoly
KingOneEye

John Edwards isn't shy about letting Rupert Murdoch know how he feels. When asked a question about media consolidation at a recent campaign stop, Edwards said:

"I am not particularly interested in seeing Rupert Murdoch own every newspaper in America."

Nicely done, John. This answer responds directly to the heart of the question and points an incriminating finger at the industry's worst offender.

Brought to you by...
News Corpse
The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay.
KingOneEye's diary :: ::

Edwards continues to solidify his position as the candidate most committed to media reform and supportive of efforts to rollback consolidation. He has spoken out on many occasions on the need for independence and diversity in the press and he has been a leading voice of opposition to the FCC's policy of weakening regulations on ownership caps. He was also the first candidate to refuse to participate in Fox News-sponsored primary debates.

But every time Edwards takes a principled stand, the pundidiots can't help but crack-wise at Edwards expense. In the item linked above, James Pindell of the Boston Globe follows the Edwards quote with this bit of irrelevancy:

"It should be noted that Edwards received nearly $800,000 in a book contract from one of Murdoch's companies, HarperCollins."

Why, pray tell, should that be noted? It is not a political contribution or evidence of electoral support. It is a payment for publishing rights to an author from a book publisher. It is the free market at work. And if anything is notable about it, it is that Edwards will act on his principles even if it is contrary to the interests of corporations who lay out big bucks to do business with him. In other words, they can't buy him.

This isn't the first time this canard has been raised. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post felt it necessary to note the same book deal after Edwards called on his opponents to refuse donations from Murdoch. Never mind that he was not admonishing them to refrain from doing business with News Corp., just from accepting the sort political funding that can be seen as buying influence. And lest anyone think that the book advance in itself has purchased any slice of Edwards' soul, just look to these statements for proof that his independence and integrity is in tact:

"High levels of media consolidation threaten free speech, they tilt the public dialogue towards corporate priorities and away from local concerns, and they make it increasingly difficult for women and people of color to own meaningful stakes in our nation’s media."

"It's time for all Democrats, including those running for president, to stand up and speak out against this [News Corp./Dow Jones] merger and other forms of media consolidation."

"The basis of a strong democracy begins and ends with a strong, unbiased and fair media — all qualities which are pretty hard to subscribe to Fox News and News Corp."

Contrast that with Hillary Clinton's qualifying remarks following a rather commendable statement against media consolidation:

"I'm not saying anything against any company in particular. I just want to see more competition, especially in the same markets."

While Clinton takes pains to soften the blow against her Foxic benefactor, Edwards comes right out and says what he thinks. For this he is often tagged in the press as a phony. That is the same characterization they make of him when he advocates for the poor - something the media apparently believes rich folks should never do. And for his trouble he is ganged up on by sanctimonious pundits that would rather point a finger at targets of their imagined hypocrisy than left a finger to help those less fortunate.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/20.../35/222/426936





Regulating the Japanese Cyberspace, One Step at a Time
Shioyama

With little fanfare from local or foreign media, the Japanese government made major moves this month toward legislating extensive regulation over online communication and information exchange within its national borders. In a series of little-publicized meetings attracting minimal mainstream coverage, two distinct government ministries, that of Internal Affairs and Communications (Somusho) and that of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Monbukagakusho), pushed ahead with regulation in three major areas of online communication: web content, mobile phone access, and file sharing.

Public comments about Internet content regulation (from blogger tokyodo-2005)

On December 6th, in a final report compiled by a study group under the Somusho following up on an interim report drafted earlier this year, the government set down plans to regulate online content through unification of existing laws such as the Broadcast Law and the Telecommunications Business Law [1,2]. The planned regulation targets all web content, including online variants of traditional media such as newspaper articles and television broadcasting, while additionally going as far as to cover user-generated content such as blogs and webpages under the vaguely-defined category of "open communication" [3,4,5,6].

Only days following the release of the Dec. 6 report, again through the Somusho, the government on Dec. 10th requested that mobile phone companies NTT Docomo, KDDI, Softbank and Willcom commence strictly filtering web content to mobile phones for users under the age of 18 [7,8,9,10]. The move to filter content in this area comes at a time when the Japanese market has become saturated with mobile phones, a growing proportion of which are held by high-school and even grade-school students. The proposed policy, in part responding to fears and anxieties expressed by parents about online dating sites, is broad in scope and reportedly covers all websites with forum, chat, and social networking functionality.

Regulation of a third area of online communication, that of online file sharing, was meanwhile advanced through the Private Music and Video Recording Subcommittee of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs (under the Mobukagakusho) in a meeting held on December 18th. Authorities and organizations pushed in this case for a ban on the download of copyrighted content for personal use, a category of file transfer previously permitted under Article 30 of Japan's Copyright Law [11,12,13,14].

The final report on Internet regulation released on December 6th, and the meetings about mobile phone regulation and copyright policy held on December 10th and 18th, collectively touch on nearly every aspect of modern network communication in Japan and together indicate a significant shift in government policy vis-a-vis the Japanese cyberspace. While granted little attention in mainstream media, a series of Japanese-language articles, government reports, and blog entries on the topic together sketch basic details of the proposed regulations. The main points of these documents are summarized below, with references to resources offering more in-depth discussion included at the end of the article.

Step 1: Web content

Plans for regulation of web content are summarized in two primary documents drawn up by the “Study group on the legal system for communications and broadcasting” under the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (Somusho) and headed by Professor Emeritus at Hitotsubashi University Horibe Masao. The first document is an interim report released on June 19th, setting down basic guidelines for regulating web content through application of the existing Broadcast Law to the sphere of the Internet [1,4]. Incorporating the views of a reported 276 comments from 222 individuals and 56 organizations collected shortly after publication of the interim report, the final report, made public on December 6th, sets down steps to move ahead and submit a bill on the proposed regulations to the regular diet session in 2010 [2,5,6].

One of the key points of both reports is their emphasis on the blurring line between "information transmission" and "broadcasting", a distinction that becomes less and less meaningful as content-transfer shifts from the realm of traditional media to that of ubiquitous digital communication (so-called "all over IP"). The reports deal with this difficult problem in part through the creation of a new category, that of "open communication", broadly described as covering "communication content having openness [kouzensei/公然性] such as homepages and so on" [3].

The term "open communication" may itself be vaguely defined, but implications of the new category are in fact very real. While previously largely excluded from government regulation thanks to the limited scope of existing broadcast legislation, all online content, with the exception only of private messages used only between specific persons (i.e. email, etc.), will henceforth be targeted under the proposed policy. Notably included in this category are hugely popular bulletin board systems such as 2channel as well as personal blogs and webpages.

Online content judged to be "harmful" according to standards set down by an independent body (specifics of which are unclear) will be subject to law-enforced removal and/or correction. While the interim report did not specify whether penal regulations would be enforced against policy violations, the final report, in response to concerns voiced in public comments over the summer, moved toward excluding such regulations for the time being at least. Nonetheless, the final report also notes that, if there is a need for it, the "adequacy of punishment should also be investigated" (page 22 of the final report) [5]. It thus remains an open question as to whether, if eventually enacted, penal regulations will be applied and, if so, what form they will take.

Step 2: Mobile phone access

As the number of elementary and high-school students with mobile phones in Japan has ballooned to over 7.5 million, the push for protecting young users from potentially dangerous content, such as online dating services and so-called "mobile filth", has gained momentum in recent years within Japan. The government responded to such concerns on December 10th by demanding that mobile carriers NTT Docomo, KDDI, Softbank, and Willcom implement filtering on all mobile phones issued to users under the age of 18. While optional filtering currently exists and can be implemented at the request of the mobile phone owner, few users make use of or even know of this service. The proposed regulation would heavily strengthen earlier policy by making filtering on mobile phones the default setting for minors; only in the case of an explicit request by the user's parent or guardian could such filtering be turned off by the carrier [7,8,9].

According to the new policy proposal, sites would be categorized on two lists, a "blacklist" of sites that would be blocked from mobile access by minors and a "whitelist" of sites that would not. The categorization of sites into each list will reportedly be carried out together with carriers through investigations involving each company targeted. The Telecommunications Carriers Association (TCA) of Japan is indicating that the new policy will be enforced with respect to new users by the end of 2007 and applied to existing users by the summer of 2008 [8].

While it is not yet entirely clear what content will be covered by the new policy, a look at existing filtering services promoted by NTT Docomo reveals the definition of "harmful" content to be very broad indeed. As noted by a number of Japanese bloggers, notably social activist Sakiyama Nobuo, current optional filtering services offered on NTT Docomo phones include categories as sweeping as "lifestyles" (gay, lesbian, etc.), "religion", and "political activity/party", as well as a category termed "communication" covering web forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, and social networking services. The breadth of this last category in particular threatens to bankrupt youth-oriented services such as "Mobage", a social networking and gaming site for mobile phones, half of whose users are under the age of 18.

Step 3: File sharing

While the cases of Internet regulation and mobile phone filtering primarily revolve on concerns over content, the third government policy proposal advanced this month in the domain of online communication targets the area of content transfer. On December 18th, the Private Music and Video Recording Subcommittee of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, an advisory body under the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (Monbukagakusho), held a meeting to re-examine Article 30 of Japan's Copyright Law. With respect to online file transfer, the existing law currently bans uploading of copyrighted material onto public websites, while permitting copies for personal use only [12,13,14].

At the December 18th meeting, Kawase Makoto, general manager of the agency's Copyrighted Work Circulation Promotion Department, remarked that revising article 30 was "inevitable" [11]. Kawase's comment came less than a month after the same agency received more than 7500 public comments on the topic of the plans, the majority of which reportedly opposed any change to the current Copyright Law [15,16,17]. Haeno Hidetoshi , senior director of the Recording Industry Association of Japan, meanwhile described the state of the recording industry as "spine-chilling", arguing that if illegal file sharing was not stopped the business would hit a dead end [12].

IT and music journalist Tsuda Daisuke on the other hand argued that he did not see any need for legal revision, observing that if users uploading copyrighted files are controlled, then there should be no need to outlaw illegal downloads or file sharing. In an earlier Nov. 28th meeting, addressing the divide in opions among public comments about the regulation, Tsuda noted that results evidenced a "deep gap" between the views of copyright holders and those of consumers. He further warned that to ignore the views of those opposing revision, and to not attempt to understand their arguments, would be to invite further deepening of this gap [16,17].

One of the key issues raised by opponents of the proposed revisions regards the murky definition of "download" itself. Critics argue that a user cannot determine whether a file is illegal before they actually download it, and even once the file is downloaded, such identification remains difficult. Moreover, it is difficult for users to judge whether, at the time of downloading a file, the site from which the file was downloaded was itself illegal or not. While proponents of the legal revision have argued in favour of a "mark" to identify approved sites, this approach brings with it many new problems; most critically, it would mean that every site not bearing the approved mark would be considered "illegal", a blanket policy many consider extreme [17].

The murkiness of the definition of "illegal" file sharing also manifests itself in the difficulties legislators will potentially face in distinguishing between "downloading" and "streaming", difficulties which some argue may ultimately lead to the regulation of sites such as YouTube and Nico Nico Douga. As there is no fundamental difference between downloaded content and streamed content, given that in both cases content is copied locally before viewing, commenters expressed anxiety about how judges with no specialized knowledge will handle this murky middle ground.

The future of "open"

The various problems evident in the regulation policies described above are compacted by the fact that there is a lack of coordination between branches of government, the first two proposals being handled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications while the last is being handled by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Without a coordinated approach to regulation, legal conflicts inherent in the switch to "all over IP" are guaranteed to arise.

Even with such a coordinated approach, however, policy remains ill-defined and extremely vague. The future of online communication within Japan hinges on attracting attention to these issues and on drawing as wide a range of voices into the debate as possible. While current activism by groups within Japan such as the recently formed Movements for Internet Active Users (MIAU) have made important first steps in this direction, international attention is needed to coordinate support and confront the many pressing issues facing open communication in the Japanese cyberspace.
http://gyaku.jp/en/index.php?cmd=contentview&pid=000320





Dog Owner Takes On China's Web Censors

Man sues after government removes posting critical of canine height restriction
Edward Cody

Outraged that his Internet posting about dogs had been banned, Chen Yuhua wrote to the mayor of Beijing. No answer. He wrote to the city council. Still no answer. When all else failed, he consulted a lawyer, studied China's civil code and marched into court with a lawsuit.

"I was very careful to follow the correct procedure," Chen said, pointing at the official legal manual on his dining room table.

Chen's suit, filed Nov. 26, was a bold challenge to the legal authority of the Communist Party to decide what China's 1.3 billion people can say and read on their computers. It was a rare -- perhaps quixotic -- gesture in a country where the power of the Public Security Bureau and Propaganda Department to regulate speech is usually considered absolute, enforced with the threat of jail time.

But it was also a sign that, beneath the ever more prosperous surface, some of China's educated elite may be growing impatient with a one-party authoritarian system in which anonymous bureaucrats decide what movies, plays, novels or social commentaries are safe enough for public consumption.

Chen's posting was an attack on the Beijing municipal government's regulations barring any dog over 14 inches high and restricting each family to only one dog. These rules are unreasonable and are enforced arbitrarily, he contended in his essay.

"It is so funny that people may have a 35-centimeter-high dog but may not have a 36-centimeter-high dog," he said.

Criticism of government policies and nonconformist political views, however, are not taken lightly in China.

More than 30,000 censors are employed to monitor the Internet alone, specialists estimate. They are equipped with advanced technology to block sensitive sites and sound the alarm when words deemed off-color or politically incorrect show up on the screen. The system, part of a vast apparatus extending to newspapers, theaters and art galleries, remains part of life for most people in a China otherwise modernizing at breakneck speed.

As far as is known, Chen's filing, at the Xicheng District Court in central Beijing, marked only the second time that a Chinese citizen has gone to court over party censorship. The first was a suit filed in Beijing last August by a lawyer, Liu Xiaoyuan, who was upset that his blog denouncing corruption was taken down on orders from the censor.

"I never violated the law," said Liu, whose case is on appeal. "All the cases I talked about had already been reported. I just wanted to express my opinion on them. A blog should be a platform for people to express their ideas. It is not right to make a judgment on someone's blog if it does not violate the law."

Chen, 65, a retired Commerce Ministry official and U.N. Development Program accountant, said he sued because he believes that, under China's law and the Communist Party's declared policies, the censors had no right to scratch his musings off the Internet. To back up his contention, he cited President Hu Jintao demanding at the party's 17th National Congress in October that China follow the path of "scientific development" and make government more transparent.

"What they do is not scientific," Chen said, denouncing Beijing's rules restricting dog ownership.

Chen has been fighting for the right to own the dog of his choice since 2003, when two policemen came to his door and said he had no right to keep his two-foot-high hound with floppy ears and an urge to run. Since then, the dog, a male, has mated with a neighbor's dog and produced a second big hound, which also has become part of Chen's apartment in the distant suburbs of northern Beijing. Officially, both dogs are illegal, he said, but he keeps a low profile and local police are less than zealous in enforcing the rules.

The posting, before it was deleted, had been put up on Chinapet.com, a site set up by Chen and other dog owners struggling to loosen official restrictions on their pets. When it was taken down, Chen in effect sued his own Web site. Although Chen knew the Internet host was acting on orders from a "black hand," or censor, legally his target had to be the host organization that physically knocked him off, he said.

"They explained. It's not their fault, and I understand that," he said.

After Chen filed his suit, the court had seven days to respond according to Chinese legal procedure. But seven days later, it replied it would need more time. On Dec. 14, Chen recalled, he was told by clerks that the district court, after referring to higher-level judges for advice, had decided to reject the case.

"They said, 'You know what things are like in China,' " Chen recalled in an interview. "They said I should understand, since I was a former government official. They said this is a sensitive matter. But for me, that is not sufficient."

The next step, Chen said, is an appeal to the Supreme Court.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122501150.html





Google Thinks It Knows Your Friends
Miguel Helft

“Reader and Talk are Friends!”

That’s how Google announced earlier this month on one of its corporate blogs the expansion of the sharing features in Google Reader, the company’s service for viewing blogs. The feature didn’t win Google a lot of friends.

Several bloggers and users have sounded the alarm about this, with some justification.

Here’s what the brouhaha is about. For some time now, Google has allowed you to share with your friends blog posts you view using Reader. You got to select the items you wanted shared and you got to choose your friends. When you marked a new item as shared, your friends who use Reader would see it. (Technically, your shared items were on a public Web page, so they could have been seen by others who are not your friends, if those people could figure out how to find that page.)

Now Google is assuming that anyone you have had a conversation with using Google Talk is a friend, so they’ll automatically be able to see and read what you’ve read and marked as shared. You can still manage your friends list and explicitly tell Reader not to share with some of your newfound friends. Of course, you’d have to know that Google had started sharing your items more widely, which many people apparently did not, even though Google alerted them through a pop-up window.

I checked with a few of my tech-savvy colleagues whose shared items I was suddenly able to see and they had no idea that they were sharing them with me.

It seems that the problem is the following: Google is desperately trying to become a force in social networking. It wants to make many of its applications and services more “social,” to, for example, tell your friends what you are reading with Reader or cataloging with MyMaps. But unlike Facebook and other social networks, it doesn’t really know who your friends are. So it is creating a list of friends for you, assuming that anyone you Google Talked with is your friend.

Why Google Talk friends and not, say, those people who you’ve e-mailed with or have in your address book? “With Google Talk, the parties have mutually consented to chatting with each other,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. “This type of mutual consent is not required for Gmail interactions.” In other words, they didn’t want to turn everyone you’ve e-mailed (or spammed) into your friend. Fair enough.

But Google Talking with someone and befriending them is not the same thing. Consider how two of my editors use Google Reader’s sharing feature: To alert another colleague about articles they believe deserve to be noted on the New York Times Web site. Now one of my editors has conversed with Google Talk with former colleagues who now work at competing publications. Do they really want those former colleagues to know what they think makes for interesting reading? Clearly not.

Google could have avoided a lot of flak allowing you to opt-in to, rather than opt-out of, the expansion of your Reader friends list. But it didn’t.

If Google wants to come up with its own social graph, the connections between people that are behind the power of social networks like MySpace and Facebook, it’s going to have to work a little harder — or risk alienating a growing number of users.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...nds/index.html





Blogging’s a Low-Cost, High Return Marketing Tool
Marci Alboher

TO its true believers at small businesses, it is a low-cost, high-return tool that can handle marketing and public relations, raise the company profile and build the brand.

That tool is blogging, though small businesses with blogs are still a distinct minority. A recent American Express survey found that only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs. Other experts put the number slightly higher.

But while blogs may be useful to many more small businesses, even blogging experts do not recommend it for the majority.

Guy Kawasaki, a serial entrepreneur, managing partner of Garage Technology Ventures and a prolific blogger, put it this way: “If you’re a clothing manufacturer or a restaurant, blogging is probably not as high on your list as making good food or good clothes.”

Blogging requires a large time commitment and some writing skills, which not every small business has on hand.

But some companies are suited to blogging. The most obvious candidates, said Aliza Sherman Risdahl, author of “The Everything Blogging Book” (Adams Media 2006), are consultants. “They are experts in their fields and are in the business of telling people what to do.”

For other companies, Ms. Risdahl said, it can be challenging to find a legitimate reason for blogging unless the sector served has a steep learning curve (like wine), a lifestyle associated with certain products or service (like camping gear or pet products) or a social mission (like improving the environment or donating a portion of revenues to charity).

Even in those niches, Ms. Risdahl said that companies need to focus on a strategy for their blogging and figure out if they have enough to say.

“As a consultant, blogging clearly helps you get hired,” she said. “If you are selling a product, you have to be much more creative because people don’t want to read a commercial.”

Sarah E. Endline, chief executive of sweetriot, which makes organic chocolate snacks, said she started blogging a few months before starting her company in 2005 to give people a behind-the-scenes look at the business.

The kind of transparency is a popular reason for blogging, particularly for companies that want to be identified as mission-oriented or socially responsible.

A typical post on sweetriot’s blog described the arrival of the company’s first cacao shipment from South America and how Ms. Endline met the truck on Labor Day weekend after it passed through customs at Kennedy International Airport.

She wrote about climbing aboard to inspect the goods and then praised the owner of Gateway trucking company, who helped her sort through the boxes so that she could examine the product.

“At sweetriot we don’t use the word ‘vendors’ as we believe it is about partnership with anyone with whom we work,” she wrote.

For companies in the technology sector, having a blog is pretty much expected. Still, Tony Stubblebine, the founder and chief executive of CrowdVine, a company that builds social networks for conferences, said that one of his main reasons for blogging is to show that his business model is different from the typical technology start-up.

“Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on venture capital funding and having an exit strategy,” he said. “Because I’m not focused on raising money, I can focus on my customers, since they aren’t a stepping stone to some acquisition or I.P.O.”

He added: “I’m trying to create a community of help for small Internet businesses like mine. My blogging philosophy is like the open source model in software. It’s sort of a hippie concept. If I can help other people, it’s personally rewarding. And those people will likely pay it back in some ways.”

Mr. Stubblebine said he gets new customers largely by word of mouth, and he uses the blog as a way to share news with friends and people who wield influence in his industry as well as a reference check for customers. “That’s why I cover the growth of the company.”

David Harlow, a lawyer and health care consultant in Boston, said he started his blog, HealthBlawg, as a way of marketing himself after he left a large law firm and opened his own practice. Besides, he said, blogging was easy to get started and the technology was straightforward.

Now, after about two years of blogging, Mr. Harlow said he was pleased with the results. He gets about 200 to 300 visits a day, he said. He has also become a source for publications looking for commentary on regulatory issues in the health care field and has even gained a few clients because of the blog. In addition, he has formed relationships with other legal bloggers (who call themselves blawgers) and consultants around the country.

Many small business bloggers achieve their goals even if only a handful or a few hundred people read their blogs. But some companies aim much higher.

Denali Flavors, an ice cream manufacturing company in Michigan that licenses its flavors to other stores, for example, is a small company with a limited ad budget. It decided to use a series of blogs to build brand awareness for Moose Tracks, its most popular flavor of ice cream.

John Nardini, who runs marketing for Denali and is responsible for the company’s blogs, said he has experimented over the last few years with different types of blogs to see which would generate the most traffic. One blog followed a Denali-sponsored bicycle team that was raising money for an orphanage in Latvia. Another tracked the whereabouts of a Moose character that would show up at famous landmarks around the country.

But by far the most successful blog, in terms of traffic, turned out to be Free Money Finance, a blog that has nothing to do with Denali’s business. Mr. Nardini’s plan was to create a blog with so much traffic that it could serve as an independent media outlet owned by Denali Flavors, where the company could be the sole sponsor and advertiser.

He chose personal finance because it is a popular search category on the Web and because he knew he would not tire of posting about it. And post he does, about five times each weekday.

He uses free tools like Google Analytics and Site Meter to understand how people are finding the site and which key words are working. Free Money Finance receives about 4,500 visits a day and each visitor views about two pages, which means they see two ads for Moose Tracks ice cream. The effort costs about $400 a year, excluding Mr. Nardini’s salary.

The site also accepts advertising, which earns the company about $30,000 to $40,000 a year, all of which Denali donates to charity. “We run ads because it legitimizes the site; it’s really not about the money,” Mr. Nardini said. “We’re hoping people will go into Pathmark, see the Moose Tracks logo and say, ‘Hey, I just saw that on the Web site I go to every day.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/bu...ss/27sbiz.html





Casual Blogging Not Just Lunch Money Now
Candice Choi

Zach Brooks pocketed $1,000 this month blogging about the cheap lunches he discovers around midtown Manhattan ($10 or less, preferably greasy, and if he's lucky, served from a truck).

The site, Midtownlunch.com, is just a year and a half old and gets only about 2,000 readers daily, but it's already earning him enough each month for a weekend trip to the Caribbean -- or in his case, more fat-filled culinary escapades in the city.

In the vast and varied world of blogging, Brooks is far from alone.

It's no longer unusual for blogs with just a couple thousand daily readers to earn nearly as many dollars a month. Helping fill the pockets of such bloggers are programs like Google's AdSense and many others that let individuals -- not just major publications -- tap into the rapidly growing pot of advertising dollars with a click of the mouse.

In 2006, advertisers spent $16.9 billion online, up steadily each year from $6 billion in 2002, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. In the first half of 2007, online advertising reached nearly $10 billion, a nearly 27 percent increase over the first half of 2006.

Little technical skill is needed to publish a well-read blog, meaning just about anyone with something worthwhile to say can find an audience, said Kim Malone Scott, director of online sales and operations for Google's AdSense. That's attracted greater readership and advertising dollars, she said.

According to 2006 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 39 percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, said they read blogs, up from 27 percent in 2004, or 32 million.

That doesn't mean bloggers are suddenly flush with money. For every blogger earning a decent side income like Brooks, countless others will never earn a cent.

But with the right mix of compelling content and exposure, a blog can draw a dedicated following, making advertising a low-hanging fruit.

''This is really a continuation of how the Web in general has enabled smaller businesses and individuals to compete if not at a level playing field, at least a more equitable level,'' said David Hallerman, a senior analyst with the research group eMarketer.

Google's AdSense is an automated program that places targeted advertising on sites big and small. Other programs such as PayPerPost are just as user friendly; bloggers sign up and advertisers cherry pick where they want to place ads based on categories and the number of impressions a site captures.

Getting paid might even help validate what may otherwise seem like a silly or obscure obsession.

For Samuel Chi, BCSGuru.com started as a way to demystify the convoluted universe of college football rankings for fellow fans.

Chi, a former sports journalist with training in statistics, posts his calculations every Saturday night during the season before official results are released on Sunday. Between Saturday night and Monday, about 4,000 sports fans log on daily to check out the ''guru's'' forecast.

This season, Chi made about $8,000 total from the blog; ticket brokers contacted him directly after word about his site got out. Google's AdSense brought in another couple hundred dollars for Chi, the owner of a bed-and-breakfast in Amelia Island, Fla.

Neither Chi or Brooks had to do much to gain a loyal readership; when it comes to such rarefied interests, word about a good site can spread rapidly in online communities.

''All it takes is a couple of mentions (on other sites) and hundreds of people can be directed to your site,'' Chi said.

BlogAds, which helps advertisers target relevant blogs for a commission, prices ads by the week, with sites tiered by the amount of traffic they get.

When the company started in 2002, founder Henry Copeland said it was mainly small advertisers selling T-shirts or promoting bands. Now he said ''there's no big brand that doesn't advertise on everyday blogs.''

About a third of BlogAds' 1,500 sites earn between $200 and $2,000 a month, Copeland said. Those sites get anywhere from 3,000 to 50,000 daily impressions.

Google's Malone Scott said access to advertising online is more democratic, since an ad click from a tiny site is just as valuable as a click from a site with a million readers.

Some advertisers have even found better response from smaller sites with more passionate, engaged audiences.

For ticket broker RazorGator, advertising on blogs like BCSGuru.com means reaching a very specific audience.

''We have found that more and more sports fans are turning to blogs and smaller fan sites to get their information so as an advertiser it makes sense to follow your audience,'' spokeswoman Toni Lamb wrote in an email.

The broker has advertised on smaller blogs like Chi's for the past two years; Lamb would not specify how many blogs it currently advertises on.

Despite rapidly rising advertising dollars online, blogs usually don't start out as a way to make money -- they're more a means of speaking to an audience of like-minded individuals. MidtownLunch.com started as a way for Brooks to indulge his food obsession, but he soon realized his quest struck a note with a legion of office workers.

Taking that extra step to get advertising was a no-brainer. Companies like Random House's Broadway Books have posted ads for food books on the site, along with the makers of independent films seeking a New York City audience.

Brooks only spends two hours at most each day on MidtownLunch.com. But the blog affects his life in other ways. Like Chi, he's met close friends through his site. He has also scored freelance writing assignments, and, above all, the site has given his endless fascination with greasy foods a sense of validation.
http://www.physorg.com/news117895164.html





Girl Power Is in Full Force Online
Alex Mindlin

Teenage girls are more likely than boys to have engaged in creating most kinds of online content, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. They are more likely to have created a blog, more likely to have joined a social-networking site like Facebook and more likely to post pictures online. The study used telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 935 Americans age 12 to 17.

Surprisingly, teenagers from single-parent households are more likely to have started a blog than teenagers living with married parents; those in lower-income houses are more likely to blog than those in families with higher-income brackets.

The Pew study also charts the decline in teenagers’ use of e-mail, which has been largely supplanted by cellphone text messaging and by the chat features of social-networking sites. Only 14 percent of the teenagers reported sending e-mail messages to their friends every day.

“E-mail is not the primary way you talk to your friends,” said Amanda Lenhart, one of the authors of the report. “It’s used to talk with groups, if you’re planning something complicated and you need to send long, letterlike messages.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/te...y/24drill.html





A Babe Scorned

All I Want for Christmas is for FOX to Stop Using My Copyrighted Photos in Their NFL Broadcast Without Asking My Permission
Tracey Gaughran-Perez

Is that so much to ask? Seriously?

SO. Here's what happened.

Earlier this afternoon I was in our kitchen doing dishes, minding my own business. Jamie was in the living room, watching some NFL football.

It was quiet.

Too quiet.

Suddenly, Jamie called to me from the other room, claiming I had to come see something. When I entered the room, he unpaused the broadcast he had been watching (thanks, TiVo!), and immediately I saw the image of an adorable pug, dressed in festive Santa gear, pop up at the bottom of the screen beside FOX's Happy Holiday's ticker. I vaguely remember Jamie saying something to me to the effect of, “Gee, that dog looks a lot like Truman, doesn't it?”, but I couldn't really process something as complex and nuanced as language at that moment, what with MY FREAKIN' HEAD EXPLODING ALL OVER THE PLACE. Because that adorable pug? That pug didn't just look a lot like Truman. THAT ADORABLE PUG *WAS* TRUMAN.

After making Jamie pause and rewind and unpause and re-rewind the incriminating footage several times, I was convinced beyond a shadow of doubt. FOX had gotten hold of one of my photos of Truman -- specifically one in a series I'd recently posted here with him wearing a Santa suit -- very slightly doctored the image by removing the flash-flare lighting his eyes (good aesthetic choice there, FOX!), slapped a superfluous Santa Hat on his head, and then dropped the purloined pic into the on-screen graphic rotation for their Saints/Eagles telecast.

I know. Can you even believe that bald-faced shit?

It took another appearance of Hijacked Truman on FOX's broadcast to convince Jamie. Always the eternal doubter and naysayer, it wasn't until FOX threw up on the screen a second, much larger version of the same photo, and I stood beside the television with my laptop in hand pointing studiously to my original photo and then to the nicked one on the television, that he became a believer.

Durr? You gonna eat that pizza crust or what?

OMFG! I've been sucked into an alternate dimension against my will! LE HALP!

I can has all rights reserved copyrights nao?

Yeah, so as you can imagine, I'm a teensy-weensy bit... oh, how shall I say? On the enraged, indignant, and generally pissed-off side.

I'm trying to imagine what went through the person's head that did this. Did they think that FOX, being a big ol' monolithic Capitalism-with-a-captial-C company could sort of, err, do whatever the hell they wanted? That the words ALL RIGHTS RESERVED and COPYRIGHT somehow didn't apply to them, despite being visible on my flickr stream and on every page of this site, respectively? Did FOX Broadcasting, without my knowledge or consent, sign a contact with Truman behind my back giving them rights to all extant images of his adorable, fawn-colored smushiness? I mean, I know Truman's a bit hungry for fame, but I never expected this kind of shameless Eve Harrington shit out of him. Traitor.

What really, REALLY sticks in my craw is that following all this I was forced not only to sit through several more hours of football just to make certain they didn't show the image again (yes, please shower me with your pity), but I also had to endure the endless tape-loop of FOX's NFL copyright warnings, which seemed to repeat every five minutes or so. Hilariously enough, FOX Broadcasting and the NFL are apparently very, very concerned about legal rights to their telecasts and rebroadcasts of their telecasts. They're concerned about -- ho ho, it's rich -- PEOPLE STEALING THEIR SHIT. But as far as them stealing other people's shit goes? Errm, not so much. See also: Please to go fuck yourself if you aren't us.

Oh and let's not forget that this is the corporation who sued YouTube over leaked TV Shows. Because people, traffic of content between the web and broadcast TV matters. Like, a lot and stuff.

Oh god, I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Listen, the bottomline is that this kind of thing has to stop. It's ridiculous. Hello, I OWN MY FREAKIN' CONTENT. How many times, and in how many different ways, do I need to say this? I have indicated on every single page of this site that my content is copyrighted. I have all rights reserved on my photos. So reason suggests that if you want to use a photo or some other content I've created on a national TV broadcast, YOU SHOULD ASK FIRST AND YOU NEED TO PAY ME FOR IT. And not in NFL-logo water bottles, commemorative hat pins, and autographed copies of The OReilly Factor For Kids. No no no. Greenbacks pleez, beeyatches. Dolla dolla bills, y'all.

In case it wasn't clear, FOX Broadcasting picked the wrong stupid Mommyblogger to mess with.

Oh and FOX legal -- if you're reading this -- you might want to get in touch. Jus sayin'.

PS: God bless us, every one! snort.
http://www.sweetney.com/001944.html





Egypt to Copyright Pyramids
AFP



In a potential blow to themed resorts from Vegas to Tokyo, Egypt is to pass a law requiring payment of royalties whenever its ancient monuments, from the pyramids to the sphinx, are reproduced.

Zahi Hawass, the charismatic and controversial head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told AFP on Tuesday that the move was necessary to pay for the upkeep of the country's thousands of pharaonic sites.

"The new law will completely prohibit the duplication of historic Egyptian monuments which the Supreme Council of Antiquities considers 100-percent copies," he said.

"If the law is passed then it will be applied in all countries of the world so that we can protect our interests," Hawass said.

He said that a ministerial committee had already agreed on the law which should be passed in the next parliamentary session, while insisting the move would not hurt Egyptian artisans.

"It is Egypt's right to be the only copyright owner for these monuments in order to benefit financially so we can restore, preserve and protect Egyptian monuments."

However, the law "does not forbid local or international artists from profiting from drawings and other reproductions of pharaonic and Egyptian monuments from all eras -- as long as they don't make exact copies."

"Artists have the right to be inspired by everything that surrounds them, including monuments," he said.

Asked about the potential impact on the monumental Luxor Hotel in the US gambling capital of Las Vegas, Hawass insisted that particular resort was "not an exact copy of pharaonic monuments despite the fact it's in the shape of a pyramid."

On its website, the luxury hotel describes itself as "the only pyramid shaped building in the world," but Hawass said its interior was entirely different from an ancient Egyptian setting.

Hawass's declarations came after the opposition daily Al-Wafd published an article on Sunday called for the Las Vegas hotel to pay a slice of its lodging and gambling profits to the city of Luxor.

"Thirty-five million tourists visit Las Vegas to see the reproduction of Luxor city while only six million visit the real Egyptian city of Luxor," the paper lamented.

Samir Farag, head of Luxor town council in southern Egypt, home to the legendary Valley of the Kings, said that it would be difficult to prohibit use of pyramid shapes.

"We can't forbid people from using the name of Luxor and copying monuments from (Luxor) city, which is the world's richest city for monuments," he said, adding that "tourists going to Las Vegas doesn't affect our city's business."
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...Z3O5S8f_6VhHww


















Until next week,

- js.



















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