As you may have heard, the government released numbers indicating that the unemployment rate dropped to 9.7% in January. Hooray! You may also have heard that the country lost 20,000 more jobs. Um, boo? Your natural reaction (as was mine) might be: how does that happen? How do we lose jobs, but still have reduced unemployment? It's not that swine flu, is it? Nope. As explained in this great blog post at NPR, the data come from two different surveys: one of employers (which gave us the 9.7% figure) and another of households (which showed the drop).  The differences between these two surveys are more fully fleshed out by a piece at FoxNews.com, which explains that while the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employers poll covers more people, the survey of households is statistically significant, covering over 100,000 homes. The truth, of course, lies somewhere beyond these approximations. December's employment figures, for example, were recently revised  downward from an estimated 85,000 jobs lost to a whopping 150,000. In other words, take a look at the numbers released today - but be prepared to revisit them in a month or two. Cross-posted from Jspot.org.

I came into the lobby of my building a few weeks ago, and stumbled upon 1974. There, in a brick cube about three feet per side, were the brand new Manhattan white pages. Just off the press, wrapped in plastic, sitting and waiting for people to spirit them away. Which, of course, no one did. It's 2010. It may as well have been a pile of typewriter ribbon or ticker tape. Even if the Internet didn't exist (which it does) (meta!), who has a landline any more? I haven't had a landline since I had to get one for my DSL - in 1999. (more...)

"Is that trouble or not?" That's the question posed by Florida optometrist Jack Moss, who captured this previously unseen footage of the 1986 Challenger explosion. Watching this video so many years later has been gripping, despite the fact that the Challenger launch was broadcast live, an images of the explosion have reached near-iconic status — it all looks familiar, but it's pieced together in a way you couldn't have imagined. (more...)

When I was a kid growing up in Rochester, New York, we took two newspapers - in the morning, the Democrat and Chronicle, and in the afternoon, the Times-Union. I was relatively indifferent to their contents, of course, save one page: the comics.

I took it for granted that everyday I'd work into my schedule of goofing around and melting G.I. Joes two five-minute stretches to peruse the funny pages. Which, of course, was a misnomer. The cartoons were almost never funny, and rarely even amusing. But who cared? They were entertaining. (With the exception of Family Circus.) While my parents read their sections, I read mine.

Being a kid, I assumed that the contents of the comics page were static and everlasting; that my parents in their youth had enjoyed the subtle Christianity of B.C. and the gentle depression of Ziggy. I believed that, I should say, up until my sister brought home from the library a massive tome called The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics for a school report. My eyes were opened; I renewed that book at the library every month for a year. (more...)

In 2002, Stewart Richardson, a widely respected eBay dealer, offered a slew of ceramic figurines for sale on the auction website. With over 6,000 positive reviews, customers lined up to bid, and Richardson took in over a quarter of a million dollars for the pieces. And then he vanished. Richardson saw an opportunity: having built up a great deal of goodwill and respect in the community, he had the opportunity to trade those commodities for a quick payday. He sacrificed the respect of the community, but he calculated that doing so was worth it. At least Richardson got money. For some reason, the Washington Post is making the same calculation, but the payoff for them is harder to decipher. (more...)

There's an interesting subtext to today's election in Massachusetts. The Senate's two best-represented demographics are facing off: a woman and a white man. When I say "best-represented", though, it's like the joke in Inglourious Basterds:

Lt. Aldo Raine: Well I speak the most Italian, so I'll be your escort. Donowitz speaks the second most so he'll be your Italian cameraman. Omar speaks third most, so he'll be Donny's assistant. Pfc. Omar Ulmer: I don't speak Italian. Lt. Aldo Raine: Like I said, third best.

In yesterday's Sunday's Arts section, the New York Times has an interesting piece about the role of graphic design in xenophobic public policy campaigns. It's a slightly wonky piece, the kind that appeals to those with blended interests in politics and design. Like myself. Unfortunately for the New York Times, I'm also a bit of a traditionalist, and I take the actual paper. So I was a bit surprised to see this: (more...)

In 2008, Governor Sarah Palin brought in $125,000 (not counting a clothes allowance from some friends). Last year, presumably about half of that.

This year, she could be on track for a whole lot more. For example, if she can keep landing cushy deals like her current cover photo for In Touch Magazine, which Page Six reports grossed her a flat $100,000. And we're only halfway through January! (more...)

On Wednesday night, while watching 360's earthquake coverage, I was taken aback by Anderson Cooper's stopping, in the middle of his reporting, to read a name off of a sheet of paper. (That report is at left.) He explained that it had been handed to him earlier that day, from a Haitian who wanted to let his family know that he was alive. So Anderson read his name out. (more...)

After the staggering volley fired by Team Conan this week, I scrambled to find data to back what I assumed intuitively - that a large part of the outpouring we saw online was the result of a fortuitous overlap between the users of Facebook and Twitter and Conan's natural audience. But I couldn't find it. Found a variety of ratings data, and a slew of often conflicting information about who uses which online tools. But I couldn't make my point.

That annoys me. I like to think that I'm a data guy. (more...)

The famous Google mantra, "Don't be evil," reflects a optimism born, like the company itself, in the idealism and energy of innocence. While climbing to the top of Internet power-brokers, Google has relied upon a simple philosophy predicated on providing access to all information for every citizen of the world. Today, an unusual admission: their optimism was misplaced. Like a community activist who finally gives up after encountering the most stubborn of cases, Google has announced that, barring some sort of miraculous turn-around on the part of the Chinese government, they're shuttering the Chinese version of their site and, in fact, their offices in that country. (more...)

You may have seen two maps circling the web over the past few weeks (for example, at Queerty or Gothamist). Created, it appears, by The New York Times (though I can't find an article in their archives), the maps are a compelling point in the debate over same-sex marriage. How is it that states that are perfectly comfortable with allowing first cousins to get hitched throw down the gauntlet over the same-sex variety? (more...)

review

3D is old news.

Yeah, it's coming to TV in real-time, and James Cameron seems to have an affinity for it.* Great. But the technology has been around forever. As in, since the 1890s. The classic image of people wearing 3D glasses at the movies is from the 1950s, after all - half a century ago.

What people are eager for, I offer, is 4D. (more...)

No iframes? View this map. This little yellow line, moving southwest to terminate in a small bulb, is 92.85 kilometers long, or about 57.69 miles. It's less than the distance between New York City and Philadelphia; slightly more than from San Francisco to San Jose. 57.69 miles won't even get you from Austin to San Antonio. That line, after hundreds of additions to our Mediaite Census map tracking people's moves between 2000 and 2010, also represents the net movement of our contributors. Moves of 17,000 kilometers from Great Britain to Australia and moves of less than two within a single city all combined to show the decade's total movement: less than an hour's drive southwest - albeit in a boat on the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere off the Delaware coast. (Want to know how this was generated?) (more...)

DeadMalls.com is celebrating a decade of recording the death rattles of American shopping malls. Chronicling the nasty and brutish lives of malls throughout the fifty states with pictures and anecdotes, the site launched in 2000 and celebrates its first ten years next month. It seems a remarkably appropriate tenure. (more...)

the aughts 2009 is probably feeling a bit abashed, counting down the minutes until the infant 2010 is born. Starting with John Updike's January death, it's been widely decried as the Year of the Celebrity Death. Well, what good is the Internet if not to second-guess the specious claims of people trying to sell newspapers? (Or blog ads?)

Those who are familiar with my pieces on Mediaite may have noticed that I'm a bit of a data nerd. So I took this analysis a step further, grokking every important death listed on Wikipedia and crunching the numbers. (more...)

the aughts Ten years ago today, I lived in a somewhat odd Melrose-style apartment building (with the pool in the middle that was never used, at least not for sexy young hipster soirees) in Northern California, where I'd lived for about five months. I was getting used to the climate, the city, and the fact that it wasn't going to snow, no matter how much I wished it would. I left there three years ago, another eternity in my life. I've lived multiple places in New York City since, and the thought of the young me, new to California, seems so foreign as to be imaginary. Ten years, in other words, is a long time. In ten years, bookmarked by two Censuses, millions move for millions of reasons. We thought, therefore, that the end of this year was a good opportunity to encourage reflection on those reasons and those moves. Below is a map, centered on the United States — but scalable and movable — that shows the moves of visitors to this website (you!). Feel free to add your own - just use the tool under the map to enter the city where you lived in 2000, and where you live now; optionally, you can tell a little bit about why you made the move. (more...)

Among many others, I picked up one particularly pernicious bad habit in college: shaving my hair to a quarter-inch length, by myself, using clippers. It saved money in more ways than one - few women accept dates from six-foot-tall eagle chicks. I stuck with the look longer than I really should have, transporting a 1950s style into the new millennium. Today, I look different. And, not coincidentally, am married.

Few of us, we are all pleased to report, look the same way we did ten years ago (with some notable exceptions). Likewise our favorite brands; the past ten years provided a surfeit of logo redesigns, each documented, critiqued, lambasted and praised on the internet. (more...)

the aughts This week, the New York Times Magazine was dedicated to their newly traditional Year In Ideas thinkpiece. It's always a fantastic collection of new discoveries, shifts in ways of thinking, and products that we're likely to hear more about in years to come. It tries, in many ways, to be predictive; to isolate still-germinating concepts that will shape the world. I thought, therefore, that it made sense to see how they did. In the spirit of the end of the decade, I looked back at their first Year In Ideas released in December of 2001. Heavy on concepts that emerged following the terrorist attacks (such as "American Imperialism, Embraced") and the Internet ("Populist Editing"), the series was born at a fascinating moment in American history. (more...)

the wayback machine A web developer and former Columbia student undertook a unique project: sketching the evolution of a New York City block, from 1795 to today. The resulting animation, dubbed "The Block" (specifically, Eldridge Street between Rivington and Stanton), is rough in its details but gives a good sense of the highs and lows of the street's history. The initial appearance of apartments, fires, neglect, urban improvement projects - all captured. (more...)

"...News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window." - From the Financial Times' look at the decline of MySpace, emphasis added. Yeah, no it isn't. "Ajax" is a term referring to functionality that allows a scripting language (Javascript) to load content without refreshing a webpage. It's no more a program than HTML is a program. How do I know this? Because I develop web sites. But if I didn't, its Wikipedia page is a Google search away. Who cares?, one might ask. The story, after all, isn't about arcane web protocols - it's about MySpace's inglorious descent into irrelevance. It's about how the News Corp. acquisition of the site transformed from a triumph to a debacle. It's true. It is about that, and it's a very good read (as Mediaite's Joe Coscarelli notes in his review). But the story of MySpace's decline is inextricably linked to the story of its failure to adopt technological changes. The assessments in this story miss crucial steps in Facebook's rise to prominence that were the knives in MySpace's spine. It's as though someone wrote a post-mortem of the American automobile industry without describing Japanese cars. Two examples. Friends' Activity Much is made in the article of Facebook's ability to automatically send invites to the friends of new users. What isn't mentioned is the real change that set Facebook apart, early on: the friends' activity timeline. Now common on social sites, the news feed of new relationships and profile changes was roundly criticized by users at launch. Many considered it invasive, since they were used to the more passive structure of other sites. That feature was added in September of 2006. Here's a chart of subsequent growth. Many of us sign up for a lot of new, interesting websites - but which do we use over the long term? What Facebook realized was that the social component would keep users engaged, spurring growth as they encouraged those they knew to join the network. It's standard logic now, but in 2006, it was groundbreaking. Facebook Connect What's happened since, as Slate's Farhad Manjoo notes in a great piece about Facebook's growth, is that Facebook has become infrastructural. The scope of people's engagement with the site yields exponential benefit to participants old and new. What was missing was only the ability to carry that social infrastructure to other sites. In December 2008, Facebook launched Facebook Connect, essentially a set of tools that allow any website to let users log in with their Facebook identity. The benefits work two ways: sites are given an easy way to not only provide access to site functionality, but are given access to social media's Holy Grail: the Facebook user timeline. Sign into Digg using Facebook Connect, and any links you add to Digg are posted on your Facebook timeline. And Facebook, meanwhile, extends its brand - and its role as the backbone of online interaction. (A quick aside: it's that ability to become infrastructural in a unique way that has allowed Twitter to grow quickly - and why Facebook considers it most threatening. It's also why, in my estimation, Foursquare will never become a long-term blockbuster.) Both of these technologically innovative moves by Facebook were critical in taking MySpace out of the game, the latter being the death blow. (MySpace is even rumored to be adopting Facebook Connect next year.) Neither was mentioned in the Financial Times article because the reporter, Matthew Garrahan, didn't understand the technology. Garrahan got right, it seems, that Murdoch's misstep in announcing a billion dollars in ad revenue in 2008 crippled MySpace's ability to innovate - but MySpace, even early last year, was already doomed by Facebook's tools and its own size. Business reporters need to understand the web and how it works. Merely visiting or using a website doesn't tell you everything you need to know about how it is doing - any more than driving a Chevy Cavalier would be enough to report on expected revenues for its parent corporation. A reporter doesn't need to be able to write Javascript, but they need to understand what they don't know about technology. The Financial Times told a good story about advertising revenue and News Corp.'s decision-making process. The nut of the story, though, was about web technology. And that, they got wrong.

If you have older relatives, and they have email accounts, I'd guess that you're pretty familiar with Snopes.com. It's likely that, for the first few months of their sending you urgent messages about free Applebee's dinners or gang members threatening people's lives, you dutifully found rebuttals from Snopes to pass on, intending to limit occasion for embarrassment when they send such things to others. (more...)

The Wayback Machine Carl Malamud, noted independent archivist and champion of making information from government agencies accessible, is sounding a call (wisely using the robust megaphone that is Boing Boing): public video should be public. A veteran of many institutions you've heard of (MIT Media Lab, Mozilla Foundation, Center for American Progress) Malamud notes that to view public domain video produced by the government, you have two choices: watch only a two minute preview, or buy it from Amazon. So he's developed a workaround - buying the DVDs from Amazon and, since it's public domain, ripping the videos and posting them to YouTube. (more...)

Everyone in the universe is excited about the Time, Inc.'s proposed tablet PC magazines. With some good reason - the demonstration video below, showcasing Sports Illustrated (and narrated with gusto by SI editor Terry McDonell) is pretty snazzy. Think of a Kindle that is in color. And can play video. And runs on a real computer. And that you probably shouldn't take in the bathtub. (more...)

This morning, TechCrunch stumbled across a time capsule: a brand-new video promoting Friendster, touting its upgrade that, it appears, makes it function like the MySpace of eight years ago. They miss, though, the Secret Hidden Message™ of the video. That being: Asians only, please. (more...)

The BBC is reporting (as noted by Dave Winer) that Google appears to have reached a deal to placate content providers: users accessing more than five articles via the search engine over the course of a day can be routed, directly from Google, to publisher payment or registration pages.

In a blog post by Google's Josh Cohen, the deal is explained further.

Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free. Now, we've updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing. If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher...in a day. (more...)

The good folks at Mashable today shared the story of perhaps the most insidious marketing campaign in the history of disposable-income-having twenty-somethings: Ikea used Facebook to sucker people into buying a new Figgjo. Here's how this evil tactic worked. A store manager uploaded a number of photos of showrooms to his Facebook account with a message: the first person to tag a piece of furniture with their own name got that piece of furniture. And the youngsters were off to the races. (more...)

One of the more appealing things about living in New York City is that the high number of pedestrians means that an archaic mode of communication remains viable: posters. (One of the less appealing things: that those posters occasionally advertise things like this.) Posters were our forefathers' billboards - but unlike those-that-shall-never-be-lovely-as-a-tree, posters are at eye level, encouraging closer examination and containing a richness of color and design that billboards lack. Posters, in summary, are keen, and seem to be trending online - in particular, historic examples. (more...)

If you've ever seen the television network Video Hits 1 (a.k.a. VH1), you're probably familiar with flamboyant Barney's creative director Simon Doonan and his one-man crusade to reintroduce the cravat into mainstream fashion. He's known for his typically catty comments on the I Love the series, where what follows the word "the" in the title is any number from 1915 to 2020.

In his real life, Doonan is the Creative Director of the New York department store Barneys, and is responsible for, among other things, the store's street-level window displays. Earlier this week, the store revealed its displays for the season the theme of which, in the grandest of holiday traditions, is Saturday Night Live. If you find that to be an odd choice, I'd guess you're not alone.

The displays are heavy on allusion to various characters, scenes and personalities from the series' 35 years - but deciphering each of those references is hindered by the primary mode of presentation, papier-mâché. (Or, as Americans say: paper mache. Barney's generally prefers the fancy French spelling.) I can't help but suspect that this medium was chosen primarily to evoke sympathy - after all, it's possible, if not probable, that they were actually made by a class of  fourth graders. If their teacher saw fit to distribute gold stars for their hard work, who could possibly mock them?

Well, me. (more...)

Soon, my friends - soon we will know who the Gods of Journalistic Objectivity have determined to be the "Person of the Year," as featured in Time magazine. You may have heard that the two people leading the pack right now are Mr. Twitter and Dame Economy. (more...)

The Aughts Rotten Tomatoes has unveiled what it deems its Worst of the Worst, those movies of the past decade that received the worst reviews.

Not surprisingly, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever was the number one worst movie, with a grand total of 0% good reviews. The cast was promising: - Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu - so why so bad? Do you really want to see it to find out? That goes pretty much for all the movies on the list — from Glitter to Swept Away to The Hottie And The Nottie. Which prompted a natural follow-up question: what directors and actors had the worst results on Rotten Tomatoes from 2000-2009? Thanks to computers, we have the answer. (more...)

The Awl, the oddly named progeny of Choire Sicha and Alex Balk (who are the oddly named progeny of Gawker), hit the targeted marketing jackpot with an innocent post detailing much sought-after knowledge: how to draw Asian women.

Say what you will about Google Ads - they are right on point in this case.

I don't envy those who have to redesign the website for a museum - balancing institutional structure and needs with the requirement that it reflect the appropriate aesthetic. Moreover, the process of transitioning a sensibility to the web in itself requires decisions about what the organization represents - a staid, classical collection would justifiably be nervous about embracing an open engagement of the general public.

The Metropolitan Museum, for example, probably won't be holding a contest on YouTube any time soon. Its website, which looks like it was created by a medium sized corporation in 2002, is staid, muted, and tucked behind a splash screen. The Museum of Modern Art's website, by contrast, is, well, modern, with a palette and structure that would bore Mies van der Rohe. It's the Obama of websites - so cool, it's dull. Late last night, the Whitney Museum of American Art, known for its modern and contemporary exhibitions and its Biennial, unveiled the latest example from this world. It's a great improvement over what was there yesterday, though that's a low hurdle to conquer. Yesterday, the site was a card catalog. Today, it's a website. (more...)

Veteran's Day My grandfather served in the Philippines during World War Two. My father was drafted into the Army during Vietnam, but ended up working as a reporter in the Panama Canal Zone. My father-in-law followed his father into the Navy, enlisting in the early '60s and ending up in the Mekong Delta and patrolling the South China Sea. What's remarkable about my family's history is that it is unremarkable. Nearly every family in America - and Canada, and Europe - can relate similar tales of family members called to war. For many, these stories end tragically; for the lucky, they end in relief. (more...)

I'll be honest: I didn't read the Health Care bill. I didn't attend a Tea Party or or a Town Hall. On any given day, I couldn't tell you the state of the public option or Sarah Palin's views on death panels. In many ways, therefore, I'm a regular voter. Most people, even accounting for inflation, weren't involved in protests over health care, and didn't make calls for Obama. Most people didn't watch C-SPAN all day yesterday. Most people don't pay attention, but get their information tangentially. With the exception of the C-SPAN thing, that's me. And, as a regular voter, not a Capitol Hill wonk, it's hard for me to see the House vote on health care as anything but a massive victory for President Obama. (more...)

On Broadway, in Lower Manhattan, the sidewalk is regularly interrupted by embedded plaques which memorialize each of the city's ticker tape parades along the so-called "Canyon of Heroes." Over 180 parades have been held, recognizing everyone from Albert Einstein to Miguel Alemán Valdés. (He was President of Mexico, as you no doubt recall.) The first ticker tape parade, legend has it, was a spontaneous affair in honor of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. It caught on - for a while anyway.

Since the parade honoring the 1969 Mets, who, believe it or not, actually won the World Series, there have been, counting today's, nineteen parades. Of those 19, one was for the Pope, one for Nelson Mandela, one for released hostages, one for astronauts, three for veterans - and 12 have been for athletes or teams. In fact, since 1991, John Glenn and crew have been the only non-athletes to earn a parade. In that time span, the Yankees have had five. (more...)

The Wayback Machine There are times that having the last name "Bump" is advantageous. Most of said times occur post-elementary school. But the name is memorable, it's easy to spell - although you might be surprised how often people ask me to spell it. Most of all, though: it's uncommon. Uncommon enough, in fact, that Bumps can generally trace the path back to their arrival in America - in the person of Edouard Bompasse, who landed in 1621 at Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the Fortune, the first boat after the Mayflower. "Bompasse," primarily for the sake of convenience, it seems, became Bump, Bumpus, and a few other things. My ancestors eventually migrated west, all the way to New York, where they got tired and took a rest for a few hundred years - 388, as of November 10th. (WhitePages.com, of all places, has a keen tool that maps last name distribution across the United States. The map at right is mine. To see yours, simply click the link and search for "Cohen." If that's not your last name, enter your last name. If it is - I bet you got a little spooked, didn't you?) (more...)

As a white male, aged 18 to 35, I watch Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network. For the past week or so, my obligatory Judge/McFarlane quotient has been interrupted with ads like this, about Zap News App. (Sorry, embedding is turned off.)

For those too busy or important to click the link, the ad purports to be from two guys (pictured here) from Muncie, Indiana, whose iPhone app idea, Zap News, was stolen by CNN. These ads don't show any features of their or CNN's app but then, why should they? Everyone knows what news apps do; i.e., nothing special. Elsewhere on the web, the wronged duo demand that CNN "remove the app from the iTunes App Store and issue a public apology to us, then give us $100,000 and massages. And call our parents and tell them the truth."

Right about now, you should be thinking to yourself, "Well, this is obviously a viral marketing campaign. The gentleman writing this column, in addition to reinforcing various stereotypes, must be some sort of dimwit." You are correct to think that, at least the first sentence - that was my reaction, too. The question, though, becomes: viral marketing for what?

The obvious answer is: CNN's iPhone app.  (more...)

After weeks of teases from Twitter power players, in the last 48 hours Twitter rolled out its Lists feature to the bulk of its users. So what does this mean for you, Mr. or Mrs. Average Twitter User? What does it mean for the web? What are these things, anyway?

Allow us to answer these suddenly popular questions. (more...)