Freyburg

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

While there are a few A-List internauts who I do follow pretty avidly, there’s a lot of truth in this blog post about people using the web as a bully pulpit for the same old egomaniacal salesmanship as we see in the offline world. (Courtesy of the always awesome Hez).

Not really news at this point, but check out this article by esteemed math-guy and scifi author Rudy Rucker with Stephen Wolfram, who has used his prodigious smarts to come up with a new search engine that takes in questions in complete sentences, and spits back the same. Neat.

With the economic crisis hitting Japan at an even more torrid pace than the rest of the world, many former high flyers are now moving into “net rooms,” which are essentially closets with an internet connection so you can look for a job. And when you think about it, what more do you need? What you might want is another story, but if things get worse here, we might see more net rooms in North America.

It was inevitable that the expanding world of online video would hit the wall that every other industry in America (and elsewhere) has run into, and with that decline has come rounds of layoffs. Revision3 has turfed three of their employees, including some TechTV alumni, and discontinued its distribution deal with Smashface Productions, the creators of Epic-Fu. Not to mention Seesmic, the video commenting service, though I’d contend video commenting is a dumb idea to begin with. Heavy.com, 60Frames…the list goes on.

But the difference between this round of cost-cutting and the tech bubble is that these companies weren’t throwing around masses of worthless stock and spending beyond their means, and the fact that the economic malaise isn’t isolated to the tech sector this time around. And online video is, at least for now, much cheaper to produce than regular broadcast television. Standout shows like Epic-Fu get their start through people screwing around with a camcorder, not a big production deal…so one way or the other, there’ll always be a place for online video. It just might not have venture capital attched to it.

Wired Magazine has an interesting profile of the developers who created Google’s Chrome browser, an attempt by the search megalith to crush IE and revamp the way we access the web. Do we need another browser? I’d say no, since Firefox does pretty much anything I need but what the hell do I know? Here’s some thoughts about Chrome from the rest of the web, and it looks like Chrome is the next step towards a Google OS.

Bon vivant and wit-slinger Stephen Fry isn’t just a first-rate writer and performer…he’s also a complete and total nerd, with a love for gadgetry and computers that knows no bounds. He’s just recorded a salute to free software and doffed his cap to the many and various people who have contributed to the free software movement.

Unfortunately, as with many things Linux/GNU/etc, free doesn’t mean “user friendly.” There’s no easy way to embed the video using the open source Flash encoder provided my the GNU nerds (or at least, they haven’t set u the video to do so), so I have to embed the Youtube version, seen below. If you want to see a much nicer looking version of the video, go here.

Something’s been bugging me for the last little while about the amatuerization of media. While you probably won’t find a bigger proponent of the democratization of tools for creating media and distribution methods than myself, and while there’s never been a better time for someone with an idea and a camcorder to go out and make media, it’s pretty disappointing to me that what catches on with the general public isn’t thoughtful or unique creations but gossip and nonsense. Witness the rise of Perez Hilton, chronicled in the latest issue of Wired. Hilton’s blogging consists of mindless gossip wrapped in an infantile bow of terrible writing, and yet his site makes on the order of 50k a day in advertising. And Julia Allison’s Nonsociety is about…what, exactly? Nothing but navel-gazing and the craven pursuit of fame for fame’s sake.

But we can’t blame vain, shallow people for being who they are. It’s our own damn fault for falling prey to the same craven impulses they wallow in and enabling them. For further spite and bile, check out this Huffington Post article about female New York bloggers, and how they’re cheating themselves by writing about superficial nonsense and staring at their own reflection.

Well, what they really did was take a different poll about web microcelebrity and turn it around to focus on the negative results. Unsurprisingly, attention sponge Julia Allison ranked first, with her former boyfriend Jacob Lodwick close behind. I’d agree with the placement of most of the other people on the list, including Scoble and iJustine, though I dunno what Veronica Belmont ever did to anyone to raise such ire. Ditto for Tron Guy; I’ve heard that anyone who’s met him in person comes away amazed at how pleasant he is…despite the wacky outfit.

Digg, along with its scrappy competitor Reddit, is an interesting idea that has one fundamental flaw; it’s driven by idiots. The whole idea behind Digg is that the users vote on what news is important. That’s fine in theory, but in practice you get a lot of dumb links to dumb things, such as the endless Ron Paul links that festooned Digg’s front page months ago, despite Paul not having a chance in hell of securing the Republican nomination.

Polymeme aims to avoid that trap. The service tracks buzz, but shapes the result into something somewhat more intellectually pleasing than Digg. I’m intrigued, and I’ll keep checking it out for now.