interesting things
“I feel that I no longer wish to support your presidential campaign and ask that you please return the maximum contribution that I gave to you last year,†Bill White wrote to GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney in a letter requesting the return of a $2,500 donation.
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Grover, we’re worried. This photo we’ve obtained of you — bleary, boozy, disheveled. It doesn’t look good. Want to tell us what’s going on here?
“Acting!†declared Grover Norquist, doing his best
Jon Lovitz-as-master-thespian imitation.
via Style: Culture, Arts, Ideas & More – The Washington Post http://www.pheedcontent.com/click.phdo
What goes bump in the night? In many U.S. households: people. About 3.6 percent of US adults — or upward of 8.4 million — are prone to sleepwalking, new research shows. The work also showed an association between nocturnal wanderings and certain psychiatric disorders, such as depression and anxiety. A large number of people reported sleepwalking in childhood or adolescence making the lifetime prevalence of sleepwalking 29.2 percent.
via ScienceDaily: Latest Science News http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120514161614.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — From across the city, they are summoned to pay reverence….
via AP Top Headlines At 7:32 a.m. EDT http://hosted.ap.org/specials/bluepage.html
The nerds finally beat the jocks. The historic Gold’s Gym location in Venice Beach, “mecca of bodybuilding” where former governator and movie star Arnold Schwarzenneger once trained, will soon be occupied by Google. This gym site opened in the late 1960s (and, to be honest, it was pretty shabby in recent years—I was a member for some time). Ahnold is shown in the vintage stock reel here, along with other beefy Gold’s Gym dudes of the seventies.
Facebook is planning to increase the price for its hotly awaited initial public offering to a range of $34 to $38 a share because of rampant investor demand, a person with knowledge of the matter told DealBook.
via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/14/facebook-expected-to-price-at-34-to-38/
You spoke too soon, Rand Paul. It sounds like the President’s views on marriage just got even gayer.
Somewhat buried in CNN’s story on Barack Obama’s fundraiser in New York is this little tidbit about his administration’s plans for marriage equality—
He also outlined goals he hopes to accomplish under a second term, including the repeal of the Defense Of Marriage Act, which the administration has already stopped defending.
This is the first time Obama has said that he wil actively work to repeal the law.
At the fundraiser, hosted by openly gay pop star Ricky Martin, Obama called same-sex marriage the “right thing to do.” He also said that contrary to what many rightwing pundits have alleged, marriage equality will help families.
I want everyone treated fairly in this country. We have never gone wrong when we’ve extended rights and responsibilities to everybody. That doesn’t weaken families, that strengthens families.
The President also touched on his freshly out same-sex marriage stance on The View. The segment, which he taped today, will air on ABC tomorrow.
According to some White House officials, Obama had intended to speak out in favor of marriage equality on the talk show, but he was spurred forward by Joe Biden’s early endorsement.
[Image via AP]
via Gawker http://gawker.com/5910277/obama-announces-plans-to-repeal-defense-of-marriage-act
Timothy B. Lee uses San Francisco as a case study. With freer housing policies, he claims the Bay Area would have 11 million rather than 7 million residents:
Among those extra 4 million people would likely have been hundreds of thousands of additional engineers starting new firms or expanding the Google and Facebook workforces. In short, the reason there’s too much money chasing too few businesses isn’t that the country is running out of people with good technology ideas. It’s just that bad housing policies mean that there’s nowhere for additional people to live.
via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/05/is-a-lack-of-housing-preventing-innovation.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Daily+Dish%29
We’ve made the argument before that Twitter is effectively a media entity, distributing news and entertainment and other content to millions of readers in real time — although unlike traditional media entities, Twitter does this with anyone’s content rather than content it creates in-house. So far, the company has shied away describing itself as a media company, or exercising much editorial control over what it distributes, but there are some tantalizing signs that it may be moving in that direction. Could Twitter become a media player in its own right?
One element of Twitter’s potential mission appeared on Monday with the announcement of a weekly curated email that is designed to show users content they might be interested in from elsewhere in their social graph. The email is clearly an extension of the move towards curation that Twitter made when it acquired Summify earlier this year — and it both looks and sounds an awful lot like the missives that Summify sent out with similar highlighted content, a feature the company said was one of its most popular (News.me offers a similar type of daily newsletter).
The second sign of what Twitter might have in mind came last week, when a job posting started making the rounds of journalism mailing lists and Twitter streams: namely, an opening for a “sports producer†who could help curate interesting news-related content around sports events. A Twitter spokeswoman suggested that the job was just another part of the media-evangelism task force that works with the company’s various potential media partners to highlight best practices — in other words, nothing special.
Still, it’s interesting to think about what might come next: Is Twitter planning to hire other types of editors in different fields? Does it want to try and create a BuzzFeed-type of offering, where it highlights interesting content being shared by users? The company isn’t saying, but it wouldn’t be a crazy idea — as we’ve discussed before, people desperately need better filters and curation to sift through the massive streams of information that are flowing past us all day every day, and Twitter is in a perfect position to provide them. But does it want to do that, or is it happy to leave that to others?
If it really wanted to, Twitter could not only use its own algorithms to generate aggregated content in interesting ways, it could start to accumulate a suite of tools that allow users and even journalists to do the same — whether it’s something like Storify or Storyful (which has a paid-for Pro version that helps media companies verify and fact-check the content they are collecting) or another curation/discovery service like Prismatic or Percolate, or even a consumption and recommendation app like Flipboard.
At the moment, Twitter seems to be trying to walk a tightrope of sorts between being a media entity and being a platform that is used by other media players. Being a platform or a tool is good, because it means that the company can form all kinds of valuable partnerships with traditional media entities such as broadcasters and TV networks and movie studios — the kind that Chloe Sladden, head of Twitter’s media group, has gotten a lot of attention for. But platforms don’t always generate large amounts of revenue.
Part of the sales job for the media deals it strikes with broadcasters is that Twitter makes a great “second screen†experience for things like the Olympics, etc. So media conglomerates can incorporate Twitter into shows like The X Factor, and it increases the engagement between the audience and the content, and everybody wins. If Twitter were to start looking and acting too much like a media company itself — producing content or curating it in such a way that it added a lot of value — some media partners might theoretically see it as competition rather than a platform partner.
In a sense, this is the same kind of tightrope that YouTube has had to negotiate: it used to be just a carrier of content, and most of it was user-generated and of little interest to major media players — the only time they cared about YouTube was when it infringed on their copyright and they could launch a lawsuit. But then the network started creating its own channels and content, at the same time as it was trying to sell the networks and studios on its value as a place for long-form video.
Obviously, Twitter isn’t likely to suddenly start producing movies or books based on tweets, so the competitive aspect at least for TV networks is minimal (which could be why that was the first place Twitter started looking for media partnerships). But when it comes to the kind of content that newspapers and magazines are interested in, Twitter looks more like a potential competitor — especially if it gets really good at either aggregating/curating information in real time and/or recommending it.
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user See-ming Lee
As the company goes public, it has to figure out how to use its vault of information to grow and enrich its eager shareholders.
via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/technology/facebook-needs-to-turn-data-trove-into-investor-gold.html
