I never knew

Murphy’s law: Whatever can go wrong, will.

In other words; when you come back home around lunch time, wondering what you can do during this unexpectedly sunny afternoon, if you decide to set up outside and paint the Ikea table you bought months ago, you can be absolutely certain that huge clouds will roll in when you get at exactly 50% of the table. You will hurry up, perhaps missing spots.

2 hours later, when you think you might be ok after all, no mistakes, clouds seem to be going, it will start raining, leaving you no choice but to bring indoors the toxic smelling nausea inducing table to let it dry until the next day.

Oh yeah, Murphy’s my very best pal.

Recruit, The (7.0)

First time I’ve heard about this, Metacritic is a web site that;

…compiles reviews from respected critics and publications for film ,video/dvd ,music and games . Our unique Metascores® show the critical consensus at a glance by taking a weighted average of critic grades.

Lately I’ve been trying to keep “radio silence” on reviews so has not to go into a movie with preconceptions of what I’ll find so I’m not sure how much I’ll use it. Sounds good though, great idea.































































































































(via kottke)

MediaSavvy and Doc searls on fcc deregulation, media concentration, convergence;

People’s use of media is changing. Newspapers are in a steady decline before they drop off the cliff of an inflection point. The networks are living on borrowed time. The recording industry is circling the wagons. And radio is in chaos.

and

Instead my hope is with the Net. I want regulation to protect the end-to-end nature of the Net, which will allow any of us to broadcast whatever we please to anybody else who cares to watch and listen.

Whatever way the fcc decision goes, I’m looking forward to seeing what the media landscape will be like in 5 years.

Je visite le site unjourdanslavie.org depuis quelque temps déjà et certains jours c’est pas fort fort mais ca arrive que quelqu’un offre de brilliantes photos, comme hier, vraiment bonne idée de suivre la création d’une peinture. En plus, c’est un gars de Montréal!

Convergence was a popular word a few years back, computers, tvs, vcrs, stereos will merge and become…. more. Tivo and various other products have been bringing that concept closer but the new PSX from Sony looks like we’re almost there; PS2 games, tv tuner, dvdr, 120mb hdd for video recording and ethernet (why not WiFi directly?). Some people already do all of that with iMacs or PCs but one box that easily connects to everything could bring it to the masses, too bad it’s based on PS2 and not PS3, by the time it gets to North-America and Europe will consumers be waiting for PS3 and skip PSX?

Rion, un de mes photobloggers préféré est à (ou est passé par) Montréal et offre deux belles galleries.































































































































[Le lendemain] Une troisième, la meilleure selon moi.

AdBusters Epiphany winners, I especially like; Branding, funny and makes it’s point very well. Human Branding, also straightforward and reminded me of some ad/media saturation shots in Minority Report.































































































































[Later] The guy who made Branding as some fantastic stuff on his website and I love the technique he uses for the videos.

The Tipping Point

I’m a week late on this but there is an interesting article on Microdoc News about how stories evolve in the Blogosphere. Some pretty good points and facts, well worth a read. I dont think I’ve written a whole lot of particularly brilliant stuff worth recognition (if any) but nonetheless, this caught my attention;

Voters and reaction bloggers tend to be native bloggers of other languages, such as German, French, or Spanish. However, some foreign language bloggers who blog in both English and their common tongue, are often opinion writers who get little recognition from the main bunch talking about the story.

Too bad they dont really offer an explanation as to why this happens. I think for an idea to get recognition it needs either (or ideally both) to be brilliant thus making itself a must read or for the blog to already be judged as being of value. By that I mean some A-listers and/or a lot of readers have been following it and come to it with a positive opinion of the post even before reading it simply because they know some quality content as come from there before. That makes it easier to jump from being read to being linked and quoted.

I think that positive approach is probably harder to build for “foreign language” bloggers. Not as many people visit regularly (or subscribe to their feed) because they sometimes dont write as well in english or include a lot of content in their native language and so arent as interesting to the “english only” masses. To take from a book I’ve just finished, The Tipping Point (yeah I know, that’s so 2 years ago), they arent as sticky as an equivalent english only blog and so might not get the attentive readers that might bring their ideas to the forefront.

Of course, like the article, that theory refers only to the Blogosphere, the one that encompasses all blogs and is composed of a majority of english speakers. “Foreign language” blogs are foreign and less sticky only to english speakers, some stories become important and largely linked to in thousands of smaller Blogospheres everyday. Writing in two or more languages is stickier for some, for example I like finding english/french blogs, I’m sure there are a lots of italian/english or portugese/english or japanese/english readers out there who feel the same.

Like all such stories, after appreciating and absorbing the ideas they contain, I always try to put them in perspective, to keep in mind that they reflect only a certain aspect of a much larger, more complex and varied whole.