Image source: The Equity Kicker

Text source: 60 Minutes

Originally aired January 13, 2008

Note: I saw this on CBS last night and thought it was worth keeping in the archive for possible future reference for several reasons. First, the myth that “the young will lead” in the computer age is promoted eloquently; Facebook’s CEO is only 23 years old. Also, the frenzy that made the WWW so popular before the dot.com bubble burst of 2000 is kept alive with eloquent distance, while excitedly stating that Facebook is perhaps the next “Google”; and to accentuate this point they show Mark Zuckerberg in a large shared office space echoing the early days of the internet boom, particularly in San Francisco; his office is in Palo Alto, not too far from the former dot.com haven. But the most interesting part is to see Zuckerberg struggling to create actual revenue and hitting a wall that other online entities have encountered in the past when they try to make hard cash out of community based sites. Wikia and Shopwiki are two obvious examples. Perhaps Zuckerberg’s most interesting remark is when he explains why Beacon, which was not well received by the Facebook community, did not work. He actually does not know why. And when asked about the role of ads in Facebook, he resorts to a common argument that any business owner uses when asked about the pressure of making money: “I mean there have to be ads either way because we have to make money,” Zuckerberg says. “I mean, we have 400 employees and you know, I mean, we have to support all that and make a profit.”

(CBS) Are you on Facebook yet? The site is up to 60 million users so far, with a projection of 200 million by the end of the year.

If you’re not on Facebook, here’s how it works: you set up a profile page with details about yourself and then decide who gets to see it. Friends use their pages to share personal news, exchange photos, team up on political causes, or just play long-distance Scrabble. It can be a useful tool or an addictive waste of time. Either way, Facebook is having a dramatic impact on the World Wide Web and it’s estimated to be worth $15 billion.

As Lesley Stahl reports, sitting atop this growing company and directing an Internet revolution is a young, geeky computer programmer who created the site only four years ago.

The face of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, the mogul who’s guiding its extraordinary growth. What everyone wants to know is: Is he old enough to be running a company some people say is the biggest thing since Google?

“I’m 23 right now,” Zuckerberg tells Stahl when asked how old he is.

“And you’re running this huge company,” Stahl remarks.

“It’s not that big,” Zuckerberg says.

During her visit to Facebook’s headquarters, Zuckerberg helped Stahl set up her own Facebook page, with a profile of her likes and dislikes. They added her friends and family, and within a few minutes, she got a friend request.

“Here’s a guy I haven’t talked to in two years and I’m so thrilled to hear from him,” Stahl remarks.

Read the entire feature at 60 Minutes

Image and text source: The News Hour

Originally Aired: November 6, 2007

Social networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook have started to allow advertisers to access users’ profiles and target the ads they deliver to that user accordingly. A media and technology writer examines the potential impact this marketing may have on individual user privacy.

GWEN IFILL: Judy Woodruff has our Media Unit look at the balance between online information’s financial potential and individual privacy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s where millions of young people list their favorite hobbies, movies, friends and trends, and now all that information from the two largest social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace, with a combined total of more than 160 million users, will be made increasingly available to advertisers.

Facebook announced today that it will allow companies to show ads to its users, both when they are on and off the site, based on personal information they list online.

Yesterday, MySpace unveiled a self-service advertising tool allowing groups like small businesses, musicians and politicians to post an ad and choose who sees it. They also increased a number of categories that track user preferences by more than tenfold, in order for businesses to better target their products to the much-sought-after 18 to 25-year-old demographic.

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Image: Washington Post Remix

Text source: Information Today
Posted On December 12, 2005

Note: This text summarizes the expectations of an online project by the Washington Post, which is no longer active. The project is worth keeping in mind as a stepping stone and experiment to develop interesting tools for Web 2.0

The Washington Post Co. has launched a new site called Post Remix, described as “the Post’s official mashup center.” Available at http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/post_remix, Post Remix spotlights reader creativity with both washingtonpost.com RSS feeds and other streams of content The Post is making available. The site launched around mid-November, and that’s been plenty of time for interesting content to appear on it. A blog format provides an overview of reader-submitted projects, ordered by date. Among the spotlighted applications are a site that offers Amazon.com book suggestions based on washingtonpost.com content, automated text-to-speech podcasts of Post stories, and a “Tag Cloud” overview of washingtonpost.com content. All these applications use RSS feeds of washingtonpost.com content.

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Image: SPI, dbox

Image and text source: Architectural Record

Note: This is a great resource offering several articles about design proposals for Ground Zero in NYC. Click on the above link to access all articles. It was published sometime in 2006.

Today, New Yorkers awoke to déjà vu. This crisp September morning, with fiercely white sunshine piercing a cloudless sky, was almost exactly like the day that greeted New Yorkers on September 11, 2001. While the similarity is uncanny, the platitudes are correct that the world is forever changed.

Words fail to fully communicate the experience of the terrorist attacks, and their transformative effect on society, politics, and the economy. Can the architecture that will replace and memorialize the Twin Towers fill the gaps?

We are getting closer to an answer. Despite the many conflicts about which commentators had forewarned us early on, Ground Zero’s rebirth inches toward reality. In the few weeks leading up to this fifth anniversary, news of progress has appeared with increasing frequency. Power switched hands, designs were revealed, steel was shipped. Ground Zero promises to be home to works by the generation’s most famous architects. That fact alone guarantees neither universal praise nor timelessness. But its completion will open a new chapter in which the public demands innovation and excellence throughout the built landscape, not just in rebuilding what’s lost.
ward reality. In the few weeks leading up to this fifth anniversary, news of progress has appeared with increasing frequency. Power switched hands, designs were revealed, steel was shipped. Ground Zero promises to be home to works by the generation’s most famous architects. That fact alone guarantees neither universal praise nor timelessness. But its completion will open a new chapter in which the public demands innovation and excellence throughout the built landscape, not just in rebuilding what’s lost.

Text and image source: The News Hour

Note: We are definitely entering a new stage of mass opinion.  The fact that Youtube is playing a role in the next U.S. elections demonstrates the ease incorporation of web 2.0 in mainstream culture: the individual can apparently express opinions and be heard like never before, but how effective is this, really?  The analysts interviewed in the feature below express the outcome to be more or less business as usual as most candidates got to promote their own agendas, while immersing in new media culture.   

Democratic presidential hopefuls fielded questions directly from the voters Monday in a debate sponsored by CNN and the video sharing Web site YouTube. A reporter and political analyst discuss the candidates’ answers and new debate format.

GWEN IFILL: It was yet another candidates’ forum, but last night, the questions came from Internet-savvy Democrats.

REMY MUNASIFI, McLean, Virginia: My taxes put some kids through college, I can’t afford to send myself. Now, tell me, if you were elected president, what would you do to help?

GWEN IFILL: YouTube, the wildly successful Internet video-sharing service, joined with CNN to host the debate at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. CNN screened 3,000 submissions. The ones that aired ranged from serious and emotional…

Read the entire feature at  The News Hour

Abbey Road ipod mash up

Image source: xlr8r.com
Text source: Business Week
AUGUST 31, 2006

Byte of the Apple

The two titans are drawing closer together. If they would just combine their offerings, they’d pose a real threat to Microsoft

I have an admittedly odd affinity for remembering TV advertisements I saw as a very young child. Sometimes those memories pop up when I least expect them.

Today I’ve been thinking of a spot that those of a certain age will remember well: Two guys walking, one eating chocolate, the other, inexplicably eating peanut butter out of a jar. They bump, and the chocolate drops into the jar. The rest, of course, has become marketing history, summed up by the jingle for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: “Two great tastes that taste great together.”

Funny, the ad comes to mind in the wake of an announcement that Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt is joining the board at Apple Computer (AAPL). It’s the latest indication these two Silicon Valley stalwarts are getting closer all the time. And the possibilities for cooperation between the two are legion.

Read the entire article at Business Week

Image source: Youtube
Text source: The News Hour

Originally Aired: April 18, 2007

JEFFREY BROWN: As events in Blacksburg, Va., unfolded Monday, the world saw this: video shot with a cell phone, taken by Virginia Tech student Jamal Albarghouti. The footage, run repeatedly on CNN, allowed the audience to hear the gunshots from Norris Hall, where 31 people, including the gunman, died.

CNN anchors then interviewed Albarghouti, referring to him as “our I-reporter,” part of a project encouraging viewers to submit what’s known as citizen journalism.

JAMAL ALBARGHOUTI, Virginia Tech Student and Reporter: I knew this was something way more serious. It was then when I decided to use my camera.

JEFFREY BROWN: In recent big stories from the 2004 tsunami, to the 2005 London subway bombings, TV news organizations have relied more and more on contributions from nonprofessional eyewitnesses.

In Blacksburg, ABC broadcast these cell phone images taken inside Norris Hall. Martin Clancy is senior producer for ABC News Digital.

MARTIN CLANCY, ABC News Digital: Well, reporting has gone beyond shoe leather and phone calls. This is a much more efficient way to reach a lot of people, to gather a lot of information. Granted, it’s a lot more work to verify it, to bring it up to broadcast or publishing standards.

But this is a really much more efficient way to gather information and to get input and to discover perspectives you didn’t even know existed. I think there’s no end to this. We used to play with getting e-mails from viewers. What started as a trickle of e-mails has become a flood. What is now a trickle of video is going to become, I predict, a flood of video.

‘Everybody is a storyteller’

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Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

Image and text source: NYTimes

March 14, 2007

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — In a classroom at a community center near a slum here, a street-smart teacher offers a dozen young students tips on how to improve their graffiti techniques. One floor below, in a small soundproof studio, another instructor is teaching a youthful group of would-be rappers how to operate digital recording and video equipment.
Students practice drawing because of graffiti’s connection to hip-hop.

This is one of Brazil’s Culture Points, fruit of an official government program that is helping to spread hip-hop culture across a vast nation of 185 million people. With small grants of $60,000 or so to scores of community groups on the outskirts of Brazil’s cities, the Ministry of Culture hopes to channel what it sees as the latent creativity of the country’s poor into new forms of expression.

The program, conceived in 2003, is an initiative of Brazil’s minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, who will be speaking on digital culture and related topics on Wednesday at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. Though today one of the country’s most revered pop stars, Mr. Gil, 64, was often buy cytotec ostracized at the start of his own career and so feels a certain affinity with the hip-hop culture emerging here.

Also see:

Brazilian Hip Hop on the rise
http://madeinbrazil.typepad.com/
madeinbrazil/2007/03/brazilian_hip_h.html
Brazilian Hip Hop On The Rise

Image source: http://www.hypebeast.com/
Text source: International Herald Tribune

February 19, 2007

NEW YORK: MTV prospered for decades because it looked like what a network might look like if a 16- year-old were doing the programming.

But now the music channel is trying to make its way in a multidevice, multiplatform, multichannel world, most of which is being programmed by a 16- year-old.

The velocity of change has left MTV occasionally looking as if were being programmed by an 83-year-old — namely Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, which owns MTV. The network, itself a stately 25 years old, has suffered a decline in ratings and cultural cachet.

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Roy Raphaeli, who is known professionally as Magic Roy, has video clips of magic tricks on Metacafe, a Web site that pays him if he attracts a lot of viewers.
Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Image and text source: NY Times.

Published: February 15, 2007

AT lunchtime, or when he is walking the halls of his workplace, Roy Raphaeli’s colleagues often beseech him to do a magic trick. Usually, he obliges. “I take the opportunity to show people my new stuff and see how they react,” said Mr. Raphaeli, 23, a Brooklynite who works for a mail-order camera retailer.
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Related
10 Sites That Pay for Your Video (February 15, 2007)

While Mr. Raphaeli, known professionally as Magic Roy, has been entertaining people with card tricks and sleight-of-hand since he was 5, he does not perform at birthday parties or casino showrooms.

Instead, Mr. Raphaeli’s stage of choice is the Internet, where he has posted 30 short video clips to Metacafe, a Web site that pays video creators based on how many viewers their work attracts. So far, Mr. Raphaeli has earned more than $13,000 from the site, where his most popular card trick has been seen 1.4 million times.

As video sites look for ways to attract higher-quality content, they are dangling cash, usually offering to cut creators in on the advertising revenue their work generates.

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