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    Local TV Stations Rally to Oppose Media Transparency : Columbia Journalism Review

    Early in TV’s history intellectuals realized the immense power of a national broadcast outlet. Some nations such as Canada and Britain partially nationalized their networks (CBC, BBC) to have greater assurances that it would be used for the public good and not be co-opted by the yellow journalism barons (such as the Hearst print empire).

    The US privatized its networks (PBS is a non-profit, not public as in publicly funded like a library) and instead gave them “public interest obligations” as a part of their licensing. But now local networks are resisting transparency with regards to those obligations. Oops.

    Posted on Friday, January 27th 2012

    The Internet and the Commodification of Culture

    Sketching out a thought dealing with the commodification of culture and how the internet helps 1) break the boundaries that once allowed for the evolution of unique local environments and subcultures and 2) allows one to intuit a template for replicating and buying into those cultures. Yet I’m thinking less about the classical market angle (packaging of cultures to be sold).  For demand to be generated awareness must occur, and that’s a media/comms phenomenon.

    A past worry was mass media homogenizing culture, but the internet broke that stranglehold.  Only it didn’t. Now we sync up globally, not nationally, and at a much faster pace.  For example, “hipsters” as a culture could be thought of similarly to dogs as a species: found worldwide, varying from large to small, long haired to short haired, with or without tails, yet still clearly recognizable as fitting into a particular species.

    Anyway, open source thought development.  Another internet enabled phenomenon.

    Posted on Thursday, January 26th 2012

    In addition to Lana del Rey, here’s my other prediction for princess of 2012: Iggy Azalea

    Posted on Wednesday, January 25th 2012

    Twitter Bots Create Surprising New Social Connections - Technology Review

    MIT Tech Review sums up a fascinating research paper on social bots. Not spambots, but more like weak-link facilitators. 

    In network theory weak links serve as bridges between more clustered network sets. For example, not everyone in SF has friends in NYC, but some folks do and serve as bridges (weak links) between the local clusters of strong links (people who see each other regularly).

    With Twitter being a sometimes intentional open cluster governed by the usual power law whereby some users are immensely popular where most are normal, coud social connector bots help increase interaction and discovery through algo-based introductions?

    Posted on Tuesday, January 24th 2012

    Anyone in CA D8 (San Francisco) want to work together?

    My call for support.

    SF is a unique place, on one side fiercely progressive but also fiercely capitalistic and business minded with all the startups and big tech companies in town. I think there’s a natural blend of optimism and pragmatism here, and a great place for the No Labels movement to get some solid members.

    It’s already happening - big name venture capitalist Ron Conway (Google, PayPal, Twitter, many more) is a founding member of Govern for California, aiming to do in CA what No Labels hopes to do on a national level.

    http://www.governforcalifornia.org/

    Add to that the tech world’s coming of age in the arts of politics with SOPA/PIPA and other tech-related issues, as well as 2012 being an election year, and we have an area that is primed for action. OWS/99% tried and failed, because as open minded as we are Bay Area folks are we’re not blindly idealistic. We love disrupting businesses and industries with our innovative thinking, now it’s time to apply that politically.

    So who wants to do something great? Get in touch.

    Posted on Monday, January 23rd 2012