Business: July 2007 Archive Page

Similar sites have captured the imagination of ordinary users with a so-called "citizen" brand of journalism, but NowPublic is gaining attention for the size of its fast-growing army of 118,000 members who write and post news stories, cellphone camera pictures, and videos from 3,600 cities in over 140 countries.

"Think of us as a new kind of wire service that has eyes and ears all over the world," said CEO and co-founder Leonard Brody in an interview. "When the cyclones broke in Oman a few weeks ago, AP's bureau chief in Saudi Arabia couldn't get there. By the time he left his driveway, we already had eight photos and stories filed." --Joanne Lee-Young --News site secures landmark capital funding (Vancouver Sun)

NowPublic makes money in part by charging mainstream media for access to its citizen reporters. Do we have a scorpion-on-the-back-of-the-tortoise situation here?

Now, I love black backgrounds more than anything else in the design business, and yet I was still very surprised to acknowledge how dark theatrical posters are and that, specifically, in this context, the top 25 grossing movies of all time across all ages didn't run a very wide gamut. Only at the tot level did color start to play a real role. And while the psychological and emotional explanations of what colors mean are too varied to take any which one as authoritative, it is nonetheless telling that black is the color of choice in movie posters. --Chris Eichman
--Dark and Fleshy: The Color of Top Grossing Movies  (Under Consideration)

The top of the image represents NC-17 posters, while the bottom represents G movies.

Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn't much to do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden's in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex. On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM's Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke's Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27. --Frank Rose --How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life (Wired)

I recall scratching my head in puzzlement last year when the Second Life stories started appearing in the media. Didn't the VR hype fizzle out with the 90s?

But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: "How do you like 'Harry Potter'?"

Of course, it's not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it's an invitation to recite the loyalty oath. And you'd better answer correctly. Start carrying on like Moaning Myrtle about the repetitive plots, the static characters, the pedestrian prose, the wit-free tone, the derivative themes, and you'll wish you had your invisibility cloak handy. Besides, from anyone who hasn't sold the 325 million copies that Rowling has, such complaints smack of Bertie Bott's beans, sour-grapes flavor.

Shouldn't we just enjoy the $4 billion party?

[...]

Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy "The Deathly Hallows" on a single day. There's something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves -- without a movie version or a set of action figures. Through no fault of Rowling's, Potter mania nonetheless trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide. --Ron Charles --Harry Potter and the Death of Reading (Washington Post (will expire))

I have sampled the books, but as much as I enjoy the setting and the characters, I find nothing on any given page that stands out to me as being good writing.

My nine-year-old is reading the books on his own.

Born July 24, 1914, Mirvish took over his father's grocery store at 15 and eventually came to amass an enterprise that includes Mirvish Village, the Princess of Wales Theatre, the Royal Alexandra Theatre and the Old Vic Theatre in London. --Entrepreneur and theatre impresario Mirvish dead at 92 (Canada.com)

Honest Ed's was a Toronto landmark, well worth the walk from the University of Toronto. His store was tackier than the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, but he invested hugely in the local theatre district, and had a self-deprecating "regular guy" image.

If I'm working on a project, it's my dream. I'm not toiling away in a dank quarry, hauling blocks across miles of boiling sand to build someone else's pyramid. If you're going to grind your life away in a masochistic profession - and make no mistake, game development is unadulterated masochism - I say to you this: make it mean something. Spend your life making meaning. Create things that excite you, which get you out of bed early in the morning and keep you up late at night. Create experiences that will set minds on fire and inspire, in turn, to create experiences for others. We all have a reason for wanting to create games and, at some level, it boils down to an experience we had playing someone else's creation, their dream. What was that game for you? --Swink --The Teaching Game: Part One - Transitioning (Game Career Guide)

An interesting feature from a games industry professional who got tired of the grind and gave it up. I'm a little worried that Swink is romanticizing the teaching profession as much as he had previously romanticized the games industry, but this is still a good read.

The Goldmans own the copyright, media rights and movie rights. They also acquired Simpson's name, likeness, life story and right of publicity in connection with the book, according to court documents.

The Goldmans want to rename the book "Confessions of a Double Murderer" and plan to shop it around, Cook said. --Victim's family buys rights to O.J. Simpson book (CNN | AP)

An interesting twist in the story. This is the book that had been titled If I Did It.

I won't be stuck standardizing verb tenses in business documents my whole life. One day, I will copyedit the Great American Novel.

"Sure," you say, "along with every other detail-oriented grammarian in the country." Yes, I know how many idealistic young people dream of taking a manuscript that captures the spirit of 21st-century America and removing all of its grammatical and semantic errors. But how many of them know to omit the word "bear" when referring to koalas? How many know to change "pompom" to "pompon"? --Someday, I Will Copyedit The Great American Novel (The Onion (Satire))