Ten Best Websites of 2010

Here's a blast from the past article I wrote for Helium back in the day in a year-end review of 2010

1. Twitter-Sure, Mark Zuckerberg is the man of the year for Time Magazine but Facebook has largely been the same over the past few years. To the unfamiliar, twitter seems like a trimmed-down version of facebook with just status messages. However, twitter is in some ways a greater tool for the user to connect with other people. Facebook’s interactions are largely limited to people you know in real life. An exception is the newly added fan feature which allows you to hear news from famous people. Twitter, on the other hand, is far more efficient on this count: Information is streamlined better and it allows you to be a fan of anyone. What’s more, it allows other people to be a fan of you. Twitter is the place for important figures and celebrities to connect with people and for people to connect with each other. It’s also a terrific tool for gaining and receiving real-time.

The rest of the top ten in no particular order:

2. Tumbler.com-It could potentially be characterized as a forward evolution from Blogger.com and WordPress.com. It fuses the advantages and rewards of blogging with social media. People can do the equivalent of retweeting content and blogs that they like. As an added benefit, tumbler’s system provides a solution to intellectual property issues that arise when one blog wants to quote the content of another, since reposting someone else’s blog directs the traffic to the original source in a way that is entirely beneficial.

3. Foursquare-Foursquare has been a most welcome remedy to one of the main problems of the internet. The internet has constrained us all indoors and taken away the importance of place to some degree. Foursquare has once again reminded us of the benefits of leaving the house and circulating to different spaces to our own personal health, the economy, and society in general. With foursquare, visits to mundane places like the pet store or Starbuck’s now have value in and of themselves because Foursquare has turned circulation and movement into competition. 

4. Collegehumor.com’s Video Section-The website is devoted to content that’s humorous and skewed towards college students. Some parts of their site are stronger than others. The humor writing isn’t as strong as other brands (cracked.com, theonion.com, etc.) and it can be unrelatable if you’re not currently undergoing college yourself (recurring topics for articles include hook-ups, distance boyfriends, video games, RA’s, dorm life, and beer). The original video department, however is at the forefront of internet comedy. This group of twenty-somethings with very few TV or film credits on imdb.com (except the short-lived College Humor show that MTV pullled after six episodes) produces comic videos and sketches that are more prolific and often more inventive than Saturday Night Live. The folks at college humor have been marketed very well, are user-friendly and have created a distinct brand of several different series: There’s a web series satirical of office politics called Hardly Working and a very popular odd couple series called “Jake and Amir,” in addition to parodies of the internet (look up “Internet Commenter Funeral” “Web Site Story” or “Professor Wikipedia” on youtube).

5. The AV Club.com-The release of at least three popular books this year, “AV Club’s Inventory” “My Year of Flops” and “The Big Rewind,” two of  which are based on features from this website, solidifies the AV Club as one of the best sources for informative and witty writing about movies, tv, books and pop culture in general. The AV Club began some 20 years ago as a companion piece to the print edition of the onion and it has taken a brand of its own, particularly online. One of my favorite features is “Random Roles” where an actor is asked to riff on a random selection of items in his filmography. Since actors are usually on the press circuit to plus their current projects, it can be a very interesting look. The website reviews TV shows episode-by-episode within hours of the show’s release and sparks lively discussions. The site averages 75,000 comments per year.

6. Daily Beast-An online newspaper of sorts that aggregates some of the best writers in print and on the internet.  Notable political names such as Condolezza Rice, Tony Blair and Meghan McCain have also written for the site. The models created by the Daily Beast and Huffington Post have been copied many times over by other content-based sites on the internet (Both aol.com’s fanhouse and aol.com’s TV squad use this model) and has even influenced newspapers in their online presence. The website pays top quality writers and because the writing is consistently good and informative, it pays to visit the website frequently when looking for content. The site merged with Newsweek Magazine this past year

7. Deadspin-Sports reporting has long been a stale institution. Quotes from athletes are usually cliché and uninformative and beat writers are usually stuck with stale conventions. Deadspin has been very successful at unearthing the darker and edgier stuff in the world of sports. They are often the first to break and cover scandals and devote time to negative publicity about athletes stories that are often too small and insignificant for larger papers to cover (i.e. a Chicago Bull being rude to some waiters in a restaurant).  They had a contest recently in which they wanted whatever evidence they could get that NCAA football and basketball players were highly unintelligent and wasting dollars of tuition money.

8. Linkedin.com-If jobs are all about networking, than linkedin.com is the place to go for that. It allows you to post your resume and make connections with people you’ve worked with. A few employers use the linkedin page to aide with the job application process and I hope to see this trend consider substantially in the future.

9. Flowingdata.com-According to the website’s own description: “FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better – mainly through data visualization.” In other words, the web site is a display of how information can be presented creatively. It rarely disappoints at being uninteresting and spans a wide variety of tidbits on geography, consumer spending, internet trends and more.

10. Walkjogrun.net-Is it me or has recreational running exploded among adults as of recently? I think it’s because our jobs are more automated and, by and large, we are getting a lot less exercise at work. Running stores and running magazines have become very profitable and so has this site which calculates running routes and connects you to other runners who are running along that same route. Another excellent site about the running community (we can call this 10b) is www.flotrack.com which has interviews and videos of world-class races.

Negative Effects of the Internet

This is an article I wrote several years ago for a website called helium which collects people's articles and pays them just a few cents for those articles. Not a good deal. This morning I got an e-mail several years after I wrote this article that my article was deleted from the database for some odd reason, so I'll gladly share it with you here.

In the internet age, everyone's attention spans are getting shorter and a lot is being left out. My sophomore year in college, for example, I had a roommate who had a few habits that got on my nerves. He would cycle through his mp3s and never be able to play a single song all the way through. He would never be able to watch a half hour TV show, instead perferring highlights on ESPN, clips from Saturday Night Live reruns (back when they aired on Comedy Central), and MTV videos.

It frustrated me that he could never sit all the way through a program without changing the channel. I would listen to entire CDs from start to finish, watch entire movies, and plays. I would go to class and listen throughout the entire lecture. How awful it must be to have that small an attention span, that my poor roomate, has, I thought?

Fast forward five years later and after discovering the joys of youtube and other forms of internet video for the past year and a half or so I've turned into him. This is the tragic thing that youtube has done to me.

With so many forms of entertainment being available to me every time I log into a computer, I want to experience them all and can't sit still too long at any one thing before something else grabs my attention. Why watch an entire episode of the Conan O'Brien show where you can just see the clips of the skits since it's on MTV's site? Why listen to the radio when you can get any song you want on demand? I started taking those shortcuts toward instant gratification and I'm having trouble finding my way out. My primary form of entertainment has gone from two-hour long movies to a one-hour long drama like Heroes to half-hour shows to clips of Monty Python, Conan O'Brien or Mad TV on youtube and it's affecting everything I do.

I can't sat still through lectures and often through work I find myself channeling through youtube, a TV show on demand, or some other video or radio station site. I can't watch TV through the commercial breaks and I'm often alternating between two or more shows. I'm an instant gratification junkie, in short, and I'm fully aware that's a more chaotic and less peaceful place that both society and myself have fallen privy to.

How is this a problem? Well, aside from the obvious answers of all the ways a shortened attention span makes it more difficult to focus on anything and get anything done, I feel like we can't fully appreciate anything at all as well. Remember Beethoven's 5th symphony? Oh, silly me, I forgot that you folks in generation X won't dare listen to anything unless it has words being sung/screamed loudly accompanied to a keyboard, guitar, drums and bass, and you folks in Generation Y, live in a world where only rappers are considered true musicians, so that's pretty much synthesizer, drums and bass (see we've already shortened our attention span from 4 instruments to 3).

Anyway, Beethoven's 5th symphony is that one that goes Dum-Dum-Dum-Duuuuum, Dum-Dum-Dum-Duuuuum. It's a very dramatic piece that even my 5-second attention span college roommate had downloaded on his computer but that well-known part of Beethoven's 5th Symphony is only the 1st movement of four parts. If you listen to the 2nd part of the symphony, it's very boring and insipid on its own, the third is kind of iffy, but the 4th is where it all comes together. When you get to the fourth, you realize that the second and third movements were put there for a reason: to provide contrast to the 2nd and 3rd movements. The symphony takes over 30 minutes to listen to (or maybe it's 20 or 40, I really am just guessing here, but it's at least 4 times longer than your average song on the radio, put it that way. I couldn't find on wikipedia, google, amazon, my desk encyclopedia or this old music textbook how long the symphony was) which very few people in Generation Y has the patience to do
but it is that much more rewarding to get to movement 4 . And that's exactly what we're missing when our attention spans get reduced to wax: The metaphorical second and third movements of the movie, TV show, album and quite possibly life itself.

Stand-up comic declares war on the internet!

Chris Gethard is a stand-up comic and comedic actor. He's currently making the rounds of the comedy scene in New York City through stints at the UCB Theater, appearance in internet videos and guest star spots on TV shows.

However, Gethard hasn't caught my attention for his acting. He's caught my attention (and the attention of a few others including Dan O'Brien at Cracked.com this morning) for his curiosity about how internet anonymity brings out the worst in people and his creative attempts to be proactive about it.

One of the commenters on his IMDB page decided to post something really nasty about Gethard and Gethard tracked the commenter down and flew him to New York for an interview on his YouTube channel:



Chris Gethard is a comedian by profession, but in this video, he's not going for humor. He's acting as a social scientist, and perhaps with this video he's creating an artifact of Web 2.0, that seems as valuable to me as any book put out there by 98% of professors who lecture in media, new media, technology and culture, sociology, and the like.

In another similar "sociological experiment" Chris did a comedy routine on CollegeHumor.com's video feed in front of a live audience in which he talked about his experience with commenters on the CollegeHumor.com website. The fact that he performed it in front of a live audience is significant here. Comics like to point out the deficiencies of the world around us so their act often demonstrates how dumb a person is or how dumb a group of people are

In the video, he's making the live audience laugh by pointing out how dumb the CollegeHumor.com commenters are and because the live audience isn't really the target of his jokes, it works comedically. But his larger audience is the people watching his routine through CollegeHumor.com and he's downright attacking them. He goes on to provoke them further at the end of the routine to give them his worst and he'll even go on the message boards themselves and respond to it.

I checked the message board myself and the fact that Chris called them out didn't alter their behavior that much. These people, who might be perfectly civilized adults in real life, knew that this comic was going to read their comments and they still posted terrible things. It's to Chris's credit that he directly showed me how these people really had lost it. It's also to Chris's credit that because of his experiment, I understood how bad it would feel to read all these hurtful comments and how cruel people can be to anyone who gets put involuntarily or voluntarily put in front of any kind of spotlight where they're exposed to strangers. If Chris had a PhD in front of his name, he might be published somewhere for something like this. Who knows?

How much Chris is personally affected or bothered by the problem isn't something I'm sure of but there are some stars who aren't particularly geared towards fame and act rather unusually towards some of its trappings. Some people (3 very very random examples: Kanye West, skier Bode Miller in the 2006 Olympics, Greta Garbo) don't react to media and fame in ways that their press agents would be proud of. They get caught up in what the public at large thinks of them and trying to rebel against it. Chris, in a way is one of those rebels. He's not just answering the media's questions
(even though the media isn't news outlets) about him but daring viewers (like that live audience) to be critical of the media itself.


For example, I specifically remember several years ago, being on an internet message board and discussing on Tina Fey's page whether someone like Tina would read about what we were writing in the IMDB message boards. It seemed inconceivable that even though imdb is the easiest place to look up information about films, that she being famous would use it. She probably has her own version of imdb (and the internet for that matter) and wouldn't ever use the same website as us commoners, and therefore wouldn't ever see any messages we'd be writing about her or her show on the web page.

Ironically, this was parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Sigourney Weaver is obsessed with what everyone's saying about her on imdb.

This is ridiculous to us because of sheer numbers. It's not that Sigourney Weaver or Tina Fey aren't able to look up comments people have made about them to imdb, but even if they did directly address some of the people who were commenting about them, it would be such a small ripple that most of their fan base will never personally hear from her.

Because of the vast scale of imdb.com with the thousands upon thousands of forums, only a few message boards (usually, the just-released films, ongoing TV shows and main message boards) get any traffic at all. Because Gethard's show business career is very small at this point, only four people have ever bothered visiting Gethard's message board and posting something which doesn't make for very much active discussion, so he's very likely to see it. It would be very easy for commenters to not consider that difference between Tina Fey and Chris Gethard and voice their opinions of both the same way.

The difference between the ordinary person and the famous person used to be much larger, especially with twitter, and I think because Chris Gerhard is currently on the bottom of the rung of fame that he's in a unique position to be at the center of this discussion and I think it's been a good discussion to have so far.

Winter TV Show Update: Five Sketch Shows and Three New Shows

Click here for 10 Movies that should be remade.
My critique of various new TV shows:

1. With The Onion News Network, I thought it was odd that the pilot didn't put up the show's strongest material first. The first episode consisted of a 3 or 4-minute bit devoted to the guy who made the hand job and a white woman who will be tried as a black. The first segment is overly crude and the second is too oddly specific. Having seen and laughed at so many of their videos over the internet and you have to ask yourself how a creative time with such a higher rate of hits then misses can make such big mistakes in choosing material for its pilot.

The second episode got slightly better but the snow in New Orleans joke was overdone. The bits about congress forgetting how to pass a bill and escorts needed for women in the army were both hilarious but in two different ways: The former was more goofy and brash while the latter was a subtle bit of sharp satire that passed itself more as news. When the Onion writes a really memorable article or makes a really memorable video clip, it's the kind of thing you remember for days on end and tell everyone you know about. I also particularly enjoyed the bit on Martin Luther King's to make people sort of equal and have institutionalized racism rather than outright racism.

The show is smart to come up with a distinct format that runs from episode to episode. The anchor is memorably passive-aggressive and the guy working the infographic is clearly below her in the pecking order. There's also usually one running news story that the show goes back to two or three times; the closest thing they have to a motif. The anchor's passive-aggressive personality doesn't seem like it builds up towards a larger payoff. It's just a way to sprinkle the script with more laughs per minute and it's already run out of gas by the third episode.

Fans of the web videos will also recognize some of the same features. There are the cheery morning hosts (think a female and male version of Kelly Ripa) who act cheery when they're not supposed to. In the last episode, one of the reporters covered a town stoning of a teenage couple who's annoyingly affectionate and decided to join in. It was a pitch-perfect sketch with a very subtle escalation from normality to insanity (that's the key to a lot of sketch comedy).

There's also the "In the Know" panelists which takes the same kind of skewed off-center perspectives that characterize the Onion and put them in round table debate form. The internet versions of this involve five people and usually run a minute or two longer which allows the sketches to fully flesh out and escalate. Unfortunately, the "In the Know" segments are too short to get to that level.

2. Onion Sports Dome-Unlike Onion News Network, I feel like Sports Dome hit the ground running when it aired. It's the same creative team as ONN and the same style of comedy, so if I had to come up with a reason why one works better than the other, Sports Dome follows and parodies a single format very closely whereas ONN is simultaneously parodying the McLaughlin Group, morning talk shows, the CNN news desk, Fox-style infotainment, and more which requires a more delicate balance. Also, Sports Center and the greater realm of sports reporting in this country is just an area of humor that desperately needed its void to be filled.

3. Portlandia Fred Armisen and Carrie Bowenstein's brilliant new sketch series has much more in common with the Onion's TV shows than I would have originally thought. Their material has already been tested out on people through the internet and they stay well within the lines of parody much of the time. Their target is yuppie culture which is most exemplified by Portland, Oregon. I already read Stuff White People Like and would have thought that there wasn't much you could do that hasn't already been done with this theme, but Armisen and Bowenstein have an even sharper eye. It's as if you're looking at the culture through a microscope with a higher power of magnification. The sketches also are very well-structured as stand-alone pieces. The two sketches with the feminist bookstore owners are examples of how well the annoying cashiers can keep the sketch's momentum going so well with a sort of circular conversation that gets funnier as it goes along.

4. Funny or Die Presents-This came out last year but I watched my first episode very recently and found more of the sketches missing than hitting. Come to think of it, that's very true of the website as well. It's a lot more die than funny. Additionally, it's often the case that when it's funny, it's specifically because of the presence of a celebrity. Funny or Die, the TV show, is devoid of celebrity cameos and highlights the show's inconsistency. I fully disclose that it's based entirely on one episode, but that was the pattern I was seeing.

And lastly, one show that's not new, but I wanted to use as a basis of comparison.
5. College Humor Show This TV series was from 2009 and failed after a 6-episode run but the website's video section is as strong as ever. From a sketch-writing perspective, collegehumor.com is strong. Their sketches are sharp, well-structured, escalate well with twists and turns, etc. The website's staff is also prolific producing a volume of quality sketches on a weekly basis that rivals Saturday Night Live. That being said, I feel like for such a large cultural force, there's very little commentary about this comedic institution. There's probably over 1,000 times more commentary on the internet written about SNL's failures than there is for collegehumor.com. I'm not sure if I'm that person considering I'm going to limit myself to a few minutes on a work break, but....

Still, there are two key problems to College Humor as a brand:
1. They haven't expanded their budget. They still shoot sketches in their office and their attempts to expand outside of their office in select sketches usually don't convince you that they're in an authentically different place. Sketches shot in an office with little or no illusion that it's somewhere else are reminiscent of the Sweded production trend that came out of the movie "Be Kind Rewind." Ironically, if you look at the credits section, you'll see that they have a crew devoted to the production: The short films have directors, production assistant and even a DP so they seem to take themselves seriously as film makers.

2. With the exception of Jake Hurwitz and Amir Bluminfeld when they're making their Jake and Amir skits, Collegehumor.com's Hardly Working series doesn't care about establishing characters. There are about 8 or 9 regulars to the collegehumor series and they all pretty much have the same character traits. Dan Geurwitch is slightly nerdier than the rest but that's only if it serves the sketch. Considering Jake and Amir were able to make strong characters, it's a shame that no one else really has that skill.

Coming up....
Retired at 35, The Cape, Off the Map, Bob's Burgers and Mr. Sunshine

Craigslist is a societal evil

First off, do make an effort to click here if you're reading this so that I can get revenue. Thank you so much

I really don't know much about economics, but I've always been taught as a child that nothing in life is free.

I would have thought that as I grew up, I would see more evidence of this, but at the same time, the world has changed in what seem to me to be bizarre ways. Things that used to cost money are now free on the internet. On the one hand we can celebrate the democratizing nature of this, but we also have to note the consequences. So much of our economy has shifted to the service and knowledge sectors that we threaten to put a lot of people out of business with the internet.

If someone posts real-estate or birdwatching advice for free online, you're taking away money from someone who does that for a living. I'm not suggesting that the person who's not a professional isn't allowed to write on the side as a hobby, but I am suggesting that he should have to acept money for it.

It's like how you are legally required to charge money if you are holding a public screening of a movie (except for outdoor screenings) because that is a law that benefits the greater good. You can't show something for free that was made to make money.

In this case, let's look at craigslist: The founder of craigslist, Craig Newmark, envisions himself as a do-gooder of sorts. He doesn't want to make money and therefore doesn't look at maximizing profit. He says in Wired Magazine "My big mission is to help make grassroots democracy as much a part of our government as representative democracy." Wired choses to attack Newmark on the grounds that he's somewhat dictatorial in the way he controls craigslist, but I won't even go to the absurdity of that since his site doesn't do anything political.

Let's just go to the question: Is someone who decides not to try to make money off his site becaue of altruistic reasons, actually doing good?

I'd say no. He might be saving people who want to advertise for jobs or housing a small amount of money, but he's also putting a lot more people out of business. Ads for housing and jobs have been the bedrock of the newspaper industry. How much does Craig Newmark contribute to the economy? He employs only about 30 people. Try measuring that against the number of people that the newspaper industry employed or the value that they had to society as a necessary component of democracy (something that Newmark proclaimed he wanted to improve, ironically).

I am glad that Newmark charged a small fee for jobs, but he should charge a fee for housing as well. People would usually be willing to pay it.

Is file-sharing and downloading wrong?

I have so many thoughts on the current age we live in where technology allows us so many shortcuts in commerce. Like Andrew Keen, I greatly worry about the effect that web 2.0 has on art, society, and values. This is one of a few different essays, I've written on the topic on helium, including an expose on someone who is downloading the entirety of films on youtube:

One of the more worrisome aspects of the internet and the file-sharing that originated with Napster two years ago is how people believe that right or wrong is not as much of an issue if everyone is partaking in it. Downloading copyrighted music and videos have not become any less wrong just because it is more widespread or the punishments for such activity aren't being enforced. That being said, there are various degrees of wrong with this issue depending on a few factors.

The most prevalent of these is whether you disseminate the material. The difference between whether you disseminate (i.e. share through posting on youtube or a bit torrent) the material and whether you simply choose to download the material is analogous to the difference between an arms dealer and someone who uses a weapon. Uploading a song or video to the internet that isn't yours is wrong in many ways because it takes away the value of another person's work. Downloading a song illegally encourages the uploader to continue his wrongdoing and deprives the creator of the work of profit or whatever else he intended to do with his work.

Specifically, downloading copyrighted music and videos and reproducing them is a violation of of the Fair Use Act which states that you're not allowed to reproduce copyrighted content unless it's from criticism, comment, scholarship, news reporting, or research and there are certain restrictions based on, among other things: The portion used in relation to the entire copyrighted work, the effect of the copyright on market value and the nature of the copyrighted work.

Looking at this law closely reveals that copyright violation is not entirely a black-and-white issue and there are degrees of wrongdoing. Are we sampling a piece of the song or are we just stealing the whole body of work? Are we using the download for some useful creative purpose such as providing commentary of our own or do we just want to hear the song? To me, these stipulations make a lot of sense and help clarify the line between wrong and right.

The intention of the copyright owner is of course something that we overlook the most. Was it a commercial song intended to make money in some form for the artist? In this day and age, a number of artists are increasingly giving out content for free as part of a larger marketing plan. If that's the intent of the artist, than downloading it is ok. At the same time, perhaps that particular artist decided that he wants to charge money for some of his work and that is also his perogative. Just because similar artists are able to give out songs for free does not mean that all artists can profit from that model and we feel that we have a right to download their content for free.

Too often, we are guilty of assuming a "Robin Hood" complex with music that must be paid for. We say to ourselves "Oh, that money is just going to go to the record companies" as if we are doing the people a favor. In truth, we do not know how taking these songs or videos affects the people who are producing it. In a worst case scenario we are putting the artists we want to enjoy out of business by not financially supporting them and we are also depriving ourselves from enjoying the fruits of their labor since they can no longer support ourselves as artists.

Bottom line: As consumers and citizens who live under a code of laws including the very basic one- "Thou Shalt Not Steal" - we need to take responsiblity for how we chose to consume art or art won't survive

An essay of mine against wikipedia

Sometimes it can be frustrating, as one of the many people not in charge of the world, to see society straying down the path of disaster and no one doing anything about it. This is why the next best thing I can hope for is when someone who has more sway than me, in terms of the way the world works, is advocating on my behalf to prevent that chaos. Case in point: I have a weary feeling that the sudden advent of wikipedia could lead to some very negative consequences which is why I’ve been very relieved to have come across the work of Andrew Keen who has published the book “The Cult of the Amateur” in which he discusses the negative consequences of web 2.0.

Andrew Keen recently debated Jimmy Wales, the founder of wikipedia, at Oxford University. Keen said his primary concern was whether knowledge should be given away for free: “We’d all love knowledge to be given away for free just like food or drink or this building to be free, but the realities of this economic system is nothing is free.”

His biggest critique of the web 2.0 is, “It’s premised on the idea that there is some virtue of giving away one’s intellectual labor without monetary reward.” In the process, Wikipedia is disintermediating the creative class and forcing the intelligent minds of society to give away their knowledge for free.Wales responded to this by saying that this is untrue because the creative class is growing and that previous concerns with open source software haven’t held true. On the latter point, the dissemination of scientifically specific data that the average layman can’t understand is much different from giving away things in newspapers. In terms of whether the creative class growing or shrinking, the prevalent example cited by the moderator was how newspapers are cutting their staffs and Wales responds by saying that media is changing but he’s confident it’s just a matter of restructuring along new models. I personally don’t think his “confidence” is enough to put down the red flag just yet. In response to a question by an audience member, Keen said that he didn’t believe the creative industry is growing. Yes, Google is rapidly hiring people to counteract the balance of people being laid off of newspapers, but the new employees of Google are simply selling advertising so the intelligentsia is being cut off.

Despite the fact that a little of general public today have an insistence that the traditional media are inundated with biases, both parties agree that professional journalists do hold great value in our society. In fact, much of wikipedia’s source list is from newspapers such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Because it derives its credibility from these sources, wikipedia would be substantially weakened by the loss of these newspapers of which wikipedia is ironically playing a part in its demise. “The idea of a world with no professional journalists is a pretty alarming one,” naturally responded Wales, but he admitted he didn’t really have an answer for how to fix that. If the creator of a catalyst for destroying the jobs in a very crucial industry that contributes to the betterment of society (professional journalists) didn’t see the loss of those jobs coming and doesn’t have an answer for it, I would call him an irresponsible inventor.

Andrew notes that the most distressing thing about web 2.0 is that people who can promote the disintermediation of the work of society’s scholars are the ones who stand to profit the most. You tube has made a bundle of money by providing a vehicle for copyrighted material to be destroyed. The number of copyright violations that exist on you tube are rampant and you tube does not make much effort to eliminate them. There is no form of punishment for people who violate copyright laws on you tube nor is there an easy procedure for anyone to remove a copyright for anyone who doesn’t own it.

At the same time, for wikipedia to be a non-profit organization does far more harm than good. The word “non-profit” has come to denote a force of good in the world, and it is admirable that wikipedia does not wish to make excessive money, but by refusing to ignore the economic realities of the situation and people affected, he is actively keeping money from people who play the most vital roles in our economy. The biggest and most important industry today has switched from manufacturing and service industries to information industries and these are the people at stake. To have a healthy web 2.0 society in which our scholars, artists, and other creative minds are encouraged to continue producing their products, they have to be financially rewarded and compensated.When asked why he doesn’t reward his contributors, Wales said that it’s for the same reason craigslist.org doesn’t want to make or distribute money off his site: Because the users of his site don’t want him too. This is not an accurate representation of what all the stakeholders of his site want or of the people being affected. There surely are scholars and experts in fields who would want to be paid for their work but are unable to demand payment because people are willing to do it for free. As it exists in actual economic situations outside the internet, the market is disrupted in this case.

There are also sources who get cited in wikipedia who are stakeholders as well, and they deserve to have a say in among other things: Whether people get paid for their content, whether people remain anonymous, how actively and quickly copyright violations are removed. When the moderator asked whether Wales partner up with the New York Times or other media outlets, Wales responded that that would be like the Red Cross partnering up with a for-profit hospital. For that analogy to reflect wikipedia’s relation to the New York Times, The Red Cross would have to be taking supplies from a for-profit hospital, because wikipedia hinders the effectiveness of the New York Times and other print media and the benefits that wikipedia gets from the New York Times are a one-way street.

To fix this, Keen recommends we as the general public have to recognize the value of the media. Keen says, “The truth is that the internet is a mirror…The problem with the internet is that it reflects ourselves, it reflects our impatience, our narcissism, our laziness, and we have to be willing either to pay for the physical newspaper or we have to be willing to put up with going on web sites and putting up with advertising.” “If we think that newspapers have no right to make a profit,” than those are the consequences we face. The media does have public value, and whether we use the media in ways that do or don’t reward them, we are all increasingly dependent on a threatened institution.

I think the wikipedia community really needs to address some of these issues. It's important to not give out too much of their source material online.

Stop the internet, get out of the house

I read in the newspaper how there are some companies that are looking into introducing services and technology for downloading movies. I did write in my last post about how the movie theater business has some sly ways of getting money from people like with the expensive popcorn and all but I would trade the movie theater experience for downloading a movie onto your computer any day of the week. I think a movie theater is an awesome experience: it's definitely part of the escapist element that you go to that big room with the screen and watch it there instead of from your home. That's why I worked at a movie theater too: Because of the atmosphere

I think our society is actually getting too dependent on the internet period for our pop culture fix, which really spells the chaos of our society. I don't know if people are aware of this. I'm really just one person on this planet and can only do so much, and like the "stop pollution in the ozone layer" movement or "stop children soldiers" movement, I really don't see anything getting done on this front of stopping the internet or anything, so like any young person that doesn't control the world (at least not yet), i'm just gonna hope that the powers that be who control things know what they're doing with the internet. I mean isn't it obvious to everyone that if we all get all our arts stuff (movies, music, e-books) everything off the internet for free, then the artists who make them won't make any money and they'll be forced to go do another profession? How selfish of all of you?

Personally, I like to buy books, newspapers and magazines when I can. I also like to buy tickets to movies, and I like to buy CDs as well. Even if I'm strapped for cash, I'd rather do that than download music over the internet. Well, allright, i still download music from the internet but i make it a point to buy CDs. That's actually not a bad way to live: Feeling you have to buy CDs because it's a charitable cause, even when it's out of your budget range. I'm worried that that stuff spreads to newspaper and book circulation and I think it's much nicer to read things out of a newspaper than to read things out of the internet and scroll your screen up and down.

Anyway, the internet is now everything for someone like my older sister. My older sister does everything through the internet. She's a 25-year old (or maybe she's 26, i can never keep track) college professor who grades papers through the internet and posts assignments through it. She also uses the internet to do pretty much everything: book flights, seek jobs, pay her bills, buy holiday and birthday gifts for her family, buy books, book hotels, etc., etc.

I am totally the opposite. I perfer to go to the mall and buy presents there. I perfer to call the hotels (my sister never uses the phone, if she can email) and call the airlines myself or maybe even go to the airport. I think doing this stuff gets me fresh air. The airport is a fun place to see. I also would never really know how i felt about a hotel or a job for that matter without seeing the place. I'm very environment-based in the sense that i'd only know how much I'd like a place if i was there myself. There was a job with a long application i wasn't sure if i wanted to waste my time applying to, so I actually looked up the address for the job and went over there and walked around for a while and asked for a tour of the place before i decided i wanted to waste my time with an application.

Hell, I don't even like blogging. If it would advance my career just the same, I would easily write this stuff on paper and post it in the town square (or i suppose they call it the Arlington County Government Offices).