infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

I didn’t see this news until now, but I have a few thoughts on Yahoo!’s decision to shut down the Yahoo! Photos service and migrate users to Flickr. The TechCrunch post has an interesting line graph charting the relative traffic of the two sites. Yahoo! Photos has been on a downward trend, while Flickr’s traffic has grown, exceeding Y!P in March. While I would agree that Flickr is certainly a more pleasant and interesting service, I wonder if this difference in traffic has more to do with the affordances of Flickr, rather than raw traffic. Flickr is designed as a social, public-facing site. Bloggers can use the site to host photos, and users are encouraged to explore friends’ and strangers’ photos through tags, search, and “interestingness.” In contrast, Y!P seems to be largely designed to host personal, not public, photos. The article says Y!P has over two billion hosted photos, while Flickr has about 500 million. The relative ages of the sites could account for this, but I think the kinds of traffic are different as well. If I were, for example, a parent who primarily wanted to share photos of children and daily life, I’m not sure Flickr would be an appropriate solution for me. While Flickr is not MySpace, the purpose of Flickr seems to be public identity construction, whether you’re a serious amateur photographer, a wannabe a-list blogger, or a hipster.

I’ve talked about this in school, but I don’t think I’ve shared this idea here. I think Web 2.0 applications depend on particular kinds of cultural capital for their functioning. In particular, tagging sites like Flickr and del.icio.us require the user to understand how tagging works if photos or links to be discoverable. One only needs to look at the misapplication of tags on YouTube to see how a lack of user knowledge can break a system. (I’m not saying YouTube is unsuccessful, but I think the tag system is useless.) I wonder how proficient the n00bs from Y!P will be in tagging, or if misapplied tags will pollute the folksonomy. Moreover, I do think knowing how to use the privacy settings (setting photos Friends-only for example) requires a cultural capital not all users are aware of and may only learn after a distasteful experience.

It should be interesting to see how this transition plays out. I don’t imagine that Y!P users are the kind of sophisticated Web users who will blog their experiences with the transition, but watching a qualitative sense of “tag quality” might reveal an awkward transition from Y!P.

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Valleywag has a pretty interesting item about a new trade magazine that just launched. While the blog takes a snarky approach in its coverage of Blogger and Podcaster, pointing out the irony of a print magazine about the online media that are supposedly supplanting traditional journalism. While one of the comments points out that trade magazines offer the potential for greater revenue, if not profits, than blogs, I’m still kind of suspicious of the viability of this “book.” When I worked for technology trades, gosh, half-a-decade ago the most profitable properties in the company were the email newsletters that served as an adjunct to the print magazines. Granted, I left in 2002, at the bottom of the tech bust, but the low costs of email publication and the reliable advertisers made purely online properties more attractive. The demise of InfoWorld as a print product only confirms my suspicions that IT trade reporting will increasingly move to the ‘net.

This isn’t to say that I don’t think there are advertisers for a book like Blogger and Podcaster. About six months ago, I wanted to write a post about my bemusement of “podcasting” packages from audio vendors like BSW. I wondered if the podcasting phenomenon was sufficiently large for creating specialized bundles, but I do imagine that podcasting has opened up a new customer base for audio vendors, and persons who want to do DIY audio production might do well with one of these bundles. (I’d say the same thing for vlogging and video, but I think consumers are more apt to already have some kind of video setup.) Of course, magazines and particularly trade magazines are driven by advertising niches, rather than reader demand, so I suspect that Blogger and Podcaster is an effort to sell advertising to vendors like BSW who are comfortable with print advertising and want to sell their wares to an emerging group of customers.

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I’m a little late in posting this, but I wanted to remark on Bravo’s purchase of TV message board, Television Without Pity. TWoP’s message boards offer lively discussion of television programming, often with an anti-establishment bent. As Time TV critic James Poniewozik points out, media conglomerates like Time Warner and General Electric don’t expect their products to speak with a unitary voice – just think of the way “30 Rock” consistently lampoons the culture at GE. However, Poniewozik contends that the ownership structure may make things a little tricky for TWoP, since the Bravo organization will own the message board directly. With this arrangement, it seems more likely that Bravo might shepherd the content and discussions in ways that are favorable to its programming.

For its party TWoP says it will remain independent. In an announcement, TWoP said “We’ll still provide snarky recaps, and you’ll still be able to visit the virtual water-cooler of the forums” but partnering with Bravo will allow it to expand its offerings of content. I’m not much of a TWoP reader, so I’ll take their word for it, and let others follow the changes.

My problem with this arrangement is not so much about Bravo influencing content on TWoP, but the issue of users owning their own writing. If I were a loyal contributor, I would think that I would resent having my work be used for a major media conglomerate. Granted, I’m a user of the Yahoo!-owned Flickr and del.icio.us, but I balance their ownership with how useful I find the services. On the other hand, there are plenty of places online where people can discuss television (like a blog) and the design of TWoP’s message boards are not particularly innovative. What TWoP offers is a community with an independent spirit, and I do wonder if the site is betraying the people who created the community by turning an indie site into a shill for Bravo.

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Here are two sites that look really interesting, and I’d like to explore, but I don’t have the time to really check out.

• dotherightthing.com is a bubbler with a social-justice focus, which Jason Kottke compares to Digg.
• NewsTrust is a reputation system where users evaluate what they perceive to be a story’s accuracy. The site features both stories from the mainstream media, and “Independent Sources” like blogs and lefty journals.

I suppose it makes sense that “crowdsourcing” designs would enter the political sphere, but I’m skeptical of how useful voting and mobbing will be in addressing political issues on the Web. The latent Habermasian in me thinks these site don’t promote reasoned discourse as much as gaming and competition. If anyone has seen any insightful articles or blog posts on these sites, please post them in the comments.

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This Screenhead piece about the hardest novels to film reminds me of a game I’ve played with other Radio-TV-Film graduate students. Instead of adapting novels to film, we ask what movies would make bad Broadway musicals. While some films like The Lion King and, of course, The Producers lend themselves to the middlebrow stage, other movies probably should just stay movies. The student who introduced the game contends Agnes of God would make an awful musical. I don’t disagree, but my nominations were Nanook of the North and Derek Jarman’s Blue. One of my professors pointed out that Nanook might actually lend itself to a Disney-style musical. It would be a spectacle of otherness with Inuits and polar creatures dancing in the snow. I do think that you would have to be pretty ingenious to adapt Blue to the stage.

I’ll point out that I would have thought Tristam Shandy would be darn-near impossible to adapt into film, but I’ll put novels aside, and ask readers what films they think would make terrible Broadway musicals.

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I watched a special on CNN earlier tonight that purported to give a behind-the-scenes look at the “Man of the Year” selection process at Time magazine. As a former magazine editor, I found the representations of story meetings fairly interesting, but what caught my attention was the use of one of my least favorite phrases “user-generated content.” The editors were mulling over naming content-generating users “persons of the year,” and the end of the show revealed Time’s Person of the Year is You.

I’ll probably pick up a dead-tree copy of the magazine, but I read the lead story online, and it somehow manages to elevate Web 2.0 to a even greater level of hype. One graf states “Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.” A later graf hedges its bets a bit and reminds the reader “Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary,” but the article maintains that Web 2.0 sites like YouTube are leading to new social formations.

I guess the timing of my Web 2.0 paper was perfect; hopefully more than a handful of people at the Cultural Studies Association conference will have heard of the Web 2.0 concept, thanks to the Time story. I learned this week that my panel is at 9am on the last day of the conference, so I imagine attendance will be light. Maybe the hype will roust people out of bed to hear me talk about Web 2.0.

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I don’t think many media-studies folks read this blog, but I thought that I would pose a question that’s troubled me for a while. What do you call a cable content operation like CNN or ESPN? In television studies, “network” generally refers to a content operation that distributes content to a system of local affiliates, which are either independently owned or, increasingly, separate business units. “The Networks” almost always refers to CBS, NBC, ABC, and sometimes FOX, while the CW and PAX are also networks that aren’t part of “The Networks.” In contrast, cable content operations like CNN have a different business arrangement where their content is licensed to local cable operators, so they’re not really “networks” in the sense that NBC is a network.

Both of my readers are probably rolling their eyes right now at this distinction, but it’s both historically important (I’m working on a paper for “Post-Network Television”.) and relevant to the political economy of television. The words “operator” and “provider” refer almost exclusively to local system operators, and my fallback “channel” is just lame. I suppose the solution is to use the “cable” modifier, so CNN is “cable network,” but it would be nice if there was a precise term for these organizations.

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Much of the blogosphere is understandably outraged at Universal Music Group’s decision to send cease-and-desist letters to a variety of parties over a hilariously lame adaptation of U2’s song “One.” Produced by Bank of America managers, the adaptation celebrates BoA’s acquisition of student credit shark retail bank MBNA and replaces lines like “You act like you never had love” with banalities like “do you like the Yankees?”

I agree with the blogs that Universal is being ridiculous and that the leaked video is more of an embarrassment to the bank than it is any kind of viral marketing campaign, as the media conglomerate asserts. However, this blogger found something else about the blog-event to be grumpy about. I saw two blogs point to a cover of the BoA adaptation performed by comedian David Cross and guitarist Johnny Marr. Public Knowledge identifies Marr as “the guitarist from Modest Mouse,” and WMFU’s Beware of the Blog also identifies him as the Modest Mouse guitarist.

I’m probably the least hip guy in the blogosphere, but I associate the name Johnny Marr with the groundbreaking 1980s postpunk band The Smiths, as well as Electronic and The The. “Could there be two Johnny Marrs?” I thought, “One known for literate indie pop and one in Modest Mouse.” Of course, I queried Wikipedia for Johnny Marr, and the disappointing article on Marr revealed that the guitarist joined Modest Mouse earlier this year. While I suppose it is factually true that Marr is now a member of the veteran act, wouldn’t it be better to identify him as a member of The Smiths, which is surely one of the most influential bands of the 1980s? I imagine that the policy dorks and NPR listeners who read these blogs are more familiar with The Smiths (and perhaps even The The or Electronic) than Modest Mouse.

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I’ve seen a few blogs link to this formally interesting Dove soap video which uses rapid jump cuts to depict the transformation of a fairly ordinary-looking woman into a hottie billboard model. The video shows the woman sitting down at a makeup chair, then quickly-edited shots show artists doing her hair and makeup. The video then shifts to a photo-editing application where her image is further touched up, finally transitioning to the woman’s image on a billboard. The meaning of the video seems to be intentionally ambiguous. On one hand it suggests that beauty is quite literally constructed: it takes a team of hairdressers, make-up artists, and designers to make a woman into a beauty ideal. On the other hand, it suggests that all women have the potential to conform to beauty norms, if they use the right products and techniques. Like much of Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” it does a dance with feminist critiques of beauty ideals and promoting a consumer product.

Writing about the Dove campaign last year, Stay Free’s Carrie McLaren said, “he only reason Dove’s campaigns have caused such fervor is because advertisers have ignored feminist critics for decades and continued to parade the same bony skeletons with such uniformity that simply using non-anorexic models is enough to cut through the clutter.” I tend to agree with Carrie; it’s difficult to see how the campaign is motivated by an interest in changing general cultural attitudes when the benefit for Dove to differentiate its brand is much more immediate. (I think also of the use of breast cancer charities in earlier “pinkwashing” marketing campaigns.) Despite the appropriation of feminist thought for advertising purposes, perhaps these ads are still useful to feminists. For example, Jill/txt says she is showing the video to her daughter. Although some people may complain about the co-optation, it’s nice to have someone shell out the budget for a nicely designed media product that reflects your politics.

…or maybe not. The video is clearly an effort at viral marketing, harnessing feminists to email the video to their friends or post it to their blogs. To the right of the video, is a link that enables viewers to “tell a friend about this film.” (The film student in me cringes at the thought of calling the grainy, compressed video a “film.”) And while there’s no buttons to bookmark the site on del.icio.us or code to cut-and-paste on MySpace, the video engages the viewer in a different way. The call-to-action is not to buy the Dove beauty bar, but to get involved in the Campaign for Real Beauty. I’m unsure if any viewers would regard the campaign as a genuine grassroots effort, but passing off branding as political action seems to only reinforce the power of advertising in our culture. Rather than engage in true community organizing, this astroturf effort takes away time to promote a product and its attending discourses.

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According to Austinist, the Alamo Village is hosting screenings of cult-favorite TV shows this semester TV season. Fans of series like “Veronica Mars,” “Battlestar Galactica,” and “The Office” can head to Anderson Lane for one of the “TV Parties¹ and have beer and pizza delivered to the comfort of their seats.

Most of these events start a half-hour after the shows air, allowing the Alamo to screen them commercial-free. Not that I’m particularly invested in the continued prosperity of the corporate media, but I wonder about the legal status of these events. TV producers have long guarded their intellectual property, to the extent it’s difficult for universities to maintain libraries of historic TV programming. (DVD has changed this somewhat, but I personally prefer watching the commercials if a show is five years or older.) Alamo is making money by selling food and drinks (but not tickets) at these parties, so I could how copyright holders might object to the events. I know first-hand many bars show football games on Saturdays for the enjoyment of their patrons, but using a TiVo to redact the commercials and hosting an event takes it one step further. Does anyone know if bars pay a license fee (like an ASCAP or BMI license) to show TV? Are the rules different for theaters? I’m a little surprised the Alamo would be so bold in using a TiVo.

1. It strikes me as a little strange the Alamo would appropriate the title of Black Flag’s anti-TV classic for a series of events where patrons actually watch TV. But I’ll just hope they have a screening of “That’s Incredible” and “Hill Street Blues.”

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