overall music sales during the Christmas shopping season were down an astounding 21% from last year. From the week of Thanksgiving up through the day before Christmas Eve, 83.9 million albums were sold, a decrease of 21.38 million from 2006′s 105.28 million.
Source: variety.com
Tags: Business | freefall | Money & Stuff | Music | shopping
Scott Rafer has been facebooking about new things ahead for Feedster. What’s up Scott?
Tags: aggregators | feedster | RSS | Scott Rafer | Technology
Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal and and an advisor to NowPublic has started up an interesting new venture. Dries is an exceptional guy and this business will do well with him behind it. Good luck Dries.
Only a few days ago did Dries Buytaert, the Belgian developer behind Drupal, the open-source content management system, decide to launch a start-up to take parts of the effort commercial. Today, Acquia, the company formed to pusue that effort, has gathered together a $7 million first round investment. The round was led by North Bridge Venture Partners as well as Sigma Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
Buytaert put Acquia together to be “a company that is to Drupal what Ubuntu or RedHat are to Linux. If we want Drupal to grow by at least a factor of 10, keeping Drupal a hobby project as it is today, and taking a regular programming job at a big Belgian bank is clearly not going to cut it.”
Source: mashable.com via mtippett
Tags: Bridge | going | Acquia | AlphaTech | belgian | commercial | content management | developer | Dries Buytaert | Drupal | factor | formed | gathered | hobby | investment | keeping | Linux | Money & Stuff | NowPublic | open-source | programming | project | pusue | RedHat | sigma | start-up | ubuntu | Venture Partners
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – “Don’t Tase Me, Bro,” a phrase that swept the nation after a U.S. college student used it seeking to stop campus police from throwing him out of a speech by Sen. John Kerry, was named on Wednesday as the most memorable quote of 2007.
Source: news.yahoo.com via mtippett
The phrase ‘don’t tase me, bro’, was captured on video by an accidental bystander during a John Kerry rally. We will continue to see participatory media gain in cultural influence as people have a greater ability to record events they witness. This is just the beginning.
Tags: Angeles | Campus | college | Florida | Florida | police | Andrew Meyer | citizen_journalism | Culture | Don't Tase Me Bro | Fred Shapiro | John Kerry | Journalism | memorable quote | named | NowPublic | quotations | Tase | Wednesday
In Ad Age’s yearly review of trends they’ve identified ‘Brand Swarming’.
Marketers will move decidedly in the direction of DDB CEO Chuck Brymer’s “swarm theory” — the notion that people and their opinions coalesce to form critical forces that massively influence marketplace ideas and concepts. “Swarm theory” will elevate social networking to new levels, confirming the immense impact that consumers have on each another. Marketers that embrace this trend can form consumer brand “advocates” and drive brand loyalty and trust to new heights — if done responsibly.
Facebook has already dipped its toe in the water with Beacon with disastrous consequences. Hopefully their next foray will be done less ham-fistedly.
Tags: economy | Audiences | Brand Swarming | brand-marketing | Brands | consumers | facebook | growth | MARKETERS | Money & Stuff | online | Politics | spending | Trends
As far as I know this is the first art application in Facebook. Quite an accomplishment given that there are over 100,000 people developing for FB:
I think utilizing Facebook to distribute (and generate) content in art is not only brilliant, but also extremely inclusive. In Why Some Dolls Are Bad, the viewer becomes a participant, charged with curating sequences of these frames into linear narratives. In many ways, interacting with the piece reflects the act of interfacing with user-driven social media. What is using Facebook but sorting through images and tagging nodes? We
create “collections” of contacts and everybody has an opportunity to reconfigure these networks into their own personal inventory of friends.If you are a user of Facebook, and interested in exploring Why Some Dolls Are Bad you should visit the Facebook application page for the project or examine the dedicated project page for the piece. Why Some Dolls Are Bad was recently featured as an installation at the Interactive Futures 2007 conference in Victoria, British Columbia.
Be sure to check out Kate’s personal site as she is quite prolific!
Source: serialconsign.com via mtippett
Tags: british columbia | British Columbia | content | Media | Victoria | application | Art | Culture | developers | DOLLS | facebook | Fiction | installation | interacting | interested | Kate Amstrong | project | Site | why some dolls are bad | Widgets
This study focuses on Satellite services but TV will also face challenges from IP based TV like iTunes, YouTube and Veoh:
Satellite TV services and other subscription TV alternatives to wire cable continue to gain share. Wired cable penetration fell to 61.3 percent of all TV households from 62.1 percent a year ago, the lowest its been since Feb. 1990.
Source: mediaweek.com via mtippett
Tags: albuquerque | cable | Santa Fe | alternative | gain | HOUSEHOLDS | lowest | penetration | Percent | Satellite | services | subscription | Technology | television
It’s time to get out of the armchair and apply empiricism to epistemology…
now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments. The newborn movement (“x-phi” to its younger practitioners) has come trailing blogs of glory, not to mention Web sites, special journal issues and panels at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. At the University of California at San Diego and the University of Arizona, students and faculty members have set up what they call Experimental Philosophy Laboratories, while Indiana University now specializes with its Experimental Epistemology Laboratory.
Source: nytimes.com via mtippett
Tags: Arizona | California | goes | harm | Indiana | New York | San Diego | university | a-phi | American Association | chairman | Culture | Environment | Epistemology | Experimental Philosophy | EXPERIMENTS | intentionally | Issues | LABORATORY | philosophical | Profit | program | x-phi
There was a time when Walter Cronkite was the most trusted person in America. That he was a news anchor made him a perfect candidate for that position. But these days the news business is becoming a less influential part of people’s lives. Is Oprah the new Cronkite? Does the evening news even matter anymore?
How do people know what other people think? The sad truth is that it doesn’t come from talking to one another; it comes from the media. And the media, for reasons ranging from mercantile to ideological to laziness, frame every issue, including the Iraq war, as (at best) a battle between two plausible sides, or (at worst) as a crusade of the Right against the Wrong.
That’s why no journalist can today occupy the place that Walter Cronkite did when, at the end of a CBS documentary about the 1968 Tet offensive, he said the U.S. was in a stalemate in Vietnam and should get out. That moment, it’s said, caused LBJ to tell an aide, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” But today there’s no MSM journalist who channels Middles America. Whatever their other virtues are, the ABC, CBS and NBC anchors are paid their multimillions not to tell the truth, but to sell the truth-has-two-sides story, which is also how you maximize audiences. (Drop a coupla zeroes from the salaries and viewerships, and it’s true of PBS, too.) Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert actually do tell the truth, and they mercilessly deconstruct the biases of “fair and balanced” faux news and fatuous “narrative” narratives, but their audience sizes limit their impact, and their matter is more than matched by Republican media anti-matter.
Source: huffingtonpost.com via mtippett
Tags: America | Iraq | Iraq | Media | stewart | audience | Barack Obama | Bill Moyers | channels | Cronkite | Culture | frame | journalist | Keith Olbermann | Majority | narrative | news | Oprah | overwhelming | Politics | republican | Stephen Colbert | TRUTH | Vietnam | WALTER | winfrey
Is this the beginning of the end of Facebook?
Facebook has turned all the people who rooted for it into a lynch mob. In the space of a month, it’s gone from media darling to devil. The most interesting thing about Facebook right now is who will replace it.
Source: techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com via mtippett
Tags: Beacon | facebook | Money & Stuff | shark
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