Life On the Wicked Stage: Act 2

Twitter’s Decline Begins with the Advent of Advertising

Twitter is starting to monetize by letting users get paid for advertising in their tweets. It is the beginning of the end. Oh, the end won’t come soon, and it won’t even look like an end.  There will be an upswing. Twitter and people will make money and things will blossom. Then things will plateau. Then Twitter will become just like every other communications and entertainment medium. It will still exist, it may remain profitable, but it will lose its soul and everything it promised in the beginning will become a faded, jaded memory.

The above prophecy of Twitter isn’t hard to predict. It is the same path that every other entertainment medium has followed since the dawn of advertising. Yes, advertising is the way to make money, because apparently we’re all foolish enough to keep wanting to be manipulated. But like radio, broadcast TV, films, YouTube, DVD/Blueray discs, blogs, the Internet in general, newspapers, and your local church bulletin, everything that started out as a way to communicate and then looked at advertising as a way to monetize, the message gets lost in the money at some point.

Sunday Morning Reading

Some Sunday morning reading to share.

Twitter is going to do ads, and in some cases already is. Folks are making money from this. I’ll put up another post about my thoughts on this, but the sum is, end of an era. Robert Scoble chimes in here with a good post on the subject.

The Senate passes a procedural vote to allow debate on health care reform. All this means is that we’ll be subjected to more of the same nonsense as they do everything but debate, until other votes are taken. The circus continues. I love this headline: Bruising Debate Awaits Health Bill in the Senate. We won’t hear much new. There won’t be anything resembling debate, (more like infomercials full of bunk from both sides) and the only bruises will be the ones on our foreheads from slapping ourselves for voting for these idiots on all sides.

So, Sarah Palin’s book is out. The tour is on. Frank Rich has a good piece on the hullabaloo. Now, it appears that phenomenon has created another small controversy. The AP, you know the folks who don’t believe in Fair Use, got hold of her book, ripped it from its spine and scanned it so it could be searchable for its reporters. Hey, it’s fair use for us. Not for you.

Hands on winner for dumbest Apple Tablet rumor post of the year goes to PCWorld for this.

Speaking of Fair Use hypocrisy. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t believe in it either, especially when it comes to Google and the internet. That doesn’t stop his papers from ripping of entire blog posts and publishing them. Ask Edgar Wright. Hey, it’s fair use for us. Not for you.

Roger Ebert on how he gave Oprah her start.

So, a cop tases a 10 year-old girl who is throwing a tantrum at home. Sounds bad right? Well, the idiot mother asked them to do it. Yowsa.

Sunday Morning Reading

Some Sunday morning reading to share.

Saul Hansell of the New York Times wonders: Is There a Method in Cellphone Madness? Saul is a brave man as he trys to meander through the morass of billing, costs, and basically anything having to do with costs on phones as we experience them now. He’s brave because I don’t think anyone really understands the pricing plans and economy. It is worth a read if for no other reading that he uses the phrase “avaricious oligopolists.”

The MPAA shuts down a town’s municipal WiFi because someone in the town was pirating movies. It’s a small town (Coshocton, OH) with a small set of users who all used the same IP address but this sort of craziness is nuts.

Carrie Prejean must be really trying to outdo other colossal PR disasters and create a new definition of hubris. How else could she continue to trip over own mistakes so easily. Let’s skip over her early failures. Lately, word surfaced that there was a (GASP) sex tape of her, doing the naughty by herself. She claimed it was the single biggest mistake of her life. Well, apparently that single biggest mistake turns out to be more than single, as more tapes have supposedly surfaced. Larry King must be laughing. Not since Sarah Palin.

Maybe the Tea Baggers movement will end up feuding itself into oblivion. Somehow I doubt it, and I hope it doesn’t. At the moment the Tea Baggers ire is focused on the Democrats. If power changes hands, I’d love to see if the anti-government hysteria would continue.

Joe Hewitt of Facebook, who developed the Facebook app for the Iphone caused a stir when he said he was done developing for the iPhone platform, due to Apple’s crazy policies. Here’s his statement.

The Republican National Committee makes a move that makes them look like the Democrats on a bad day. Apparently if you worked for the RNC, your insurance policy allowed for coverage of an abortion. Not any longer.

The latest Gillmor Gang takes on the Droid vs the iPhone, among other things, and gives new life to the Crunchpad, which surely needs it.

The Ballad of Windows 7.

Don’t You Wish You Could Do This?

I used to have these amazing dreams in which I could, for all intents and purposes fly by leaping from point to point, or just launching myself in a direction. I remember realizing about 18 months ago that they stopped. Don’t have any idea what that means, but here is an amazing and humbling video of Oli Lemieux practicing on Cirque du Soleil’s trampoline wall. Ah, if only.

 

Via Gizmodo

NASA Says Significant Amout of Water Found on the Moon

So, we bombed the Moon with LCROSS, and NASA says the experiment worked, throwing up enough debris into the atmosphere that photo analysis shows that there is a "significant amount" of water buried/present/existing on the Moon.

I'm guessing we're going to see a new space race to claim all that water here shortly. Soon thereafter that we'll start seeing bottled water from the Moon on store shelves.

Girl Sneezes 12,000 Times a Day

This just sounds painful. I say that because I'm both a prolific and very loud sneezer. I've been known to stop traffic and also sneeze myself lame. But nothing like this. This poor young girl came down with a cold and began sneezing. Except when she falls into deep sleep she can't stop. She's sneezing roughly 20 times a minute or 12,000 times a day as her parents and doctors try to figure out how to bring her some relief. She's had to stay away from school and can't stop sneezing enough to eat well.

I really feel for her.

Via The Daily Mail

Google Street View Captures Us Outside Wayside Theatre

I guess it isn’t surprising that Google’s Street View captured me and our two costume designers out front of out place of business, Wayside Theatre. When the weather is nice, heck, even sometimes when it isn’t, we frequently have discussions outside. This shot is obviously from last fall. A larger view of the theatre shows that it was after our renovations were complete. The flower beds don’t have the current foliage of this year. Thus, the WVPT banner means it was taking place during the run of The Mousetrap, a show that WVPT sponsored. And the American flag indicates that it was on Veteran’s Day last year which was one year ago today. Our town places flags up and down Main Street for all national holidays.

So, there you have it, me and our two lovely costumers talking about something important. Well, at least I hope it was important now that it is memorialized. Interesting that the address is wrong though.

Defining Daunting Challenges

I saw this picture on a post about laws in Japan about being overweight. Moving beyond that, it defines so much when you think of any challenge.

Bacon Jam?

Who knew there was such a thing as Bacon Jam. Yes, you can spread it on.

Via ambivalence

Sunday Morning Reading

Some Sunday morning reading to share.

Paul Carr at TechCrunch has some good analysis on real time (intriguingly without mentioning real time) news, social media, etc… in the wake of the Fort Hood tragedy. My view, real time is real chaos. But so is life.

Looking very much forward to see The Men Who Stare at Goats, even though I’m sure it won’t live up to the book.

Gizmodo’s Android and How It Will Take Over the World. Good stuff here.

Comcast’s approach, We Need to change Customer Behavior Not Our Business Model, tells me they’ve been watching too many Direct TV commercials.

The things going on behind the scenes with copyright and the Internet are quite scary. If you think the DMCA was bad….

The Democrats passed their version of the health care bill on Saturday night. Great political theatre. That’s about it. Great political theatre. Watching bits and pieces of the debate keeps raising the question: Is this the best we can come up with in terms of leaders in this country?

I can’t wait to read Free For All, an oral history on Joe Papp and his legacy.