Posts tagged Justin
Google Currents is to Social Media as Justin Bieber is to the Beatles
Dec 8th
Google Currents is a new tablet app launched today that makes reading of syndicated web content easier, faster and more enjoyable than almost any other interface you can imagine. It’s like Flipboard but for RSS feeds. People are going to love it. That’s the nice way to describe it.
You could also call it the sterilization of the social web. Just like today’s new Twitter redesign makes things nice and pretty for non-technical users – Google Currents is infinitely friendlier and more accessible than any RSS reader – even Google’s own Reader. Unfortunately, in the current application that ease of use comes at a great cost: Google Currents does away with many of the best parts of the social web. It sings a catchy tune, but there’s far less life inside the experience. It’s not just a bummer, either – it’s a threat to what’s great about blogging.
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Back in the good old days, when you were reading a blog – it would often link to one or more other blogs that made a good point or had published a good article. You could click over to that new blog and check it out. If you liked what you’d just discovered, and you weren’t scared of orange icons, you could subscribe to receive every new article that new blog ever published in an inbox called an RSS reader. It was like magic – your universe could be exploded with new people and sources of information.
Google Currents doesn’t let you do that. If you’ve got a Google Reader account from the hard old days you can add one subscription at a time to Currents, but if you discover something new out on the web at large – clicking the RSS icon does nothing. It’s like an empty smile – not a portal into a world of potential learning and fun – just a dead link. It’s a violation of an important universal law to kill an RSS link, but that’s what Google Currents has done. Those feeds, promises of new relationships easily entered into so easily, were awfully messy anyway weren’t they? Surely you’d prefer one of the hand selected recommended feeds back in the safe confines of the Currents interface.
Above: The horrible face of raw information. Hide the children, something must be done if this is ever going to catch on.
Those untamed pioneers who subscribed to RSS feeds in a feed reader (and shaved their face with a wagon wheel) sometimes swam in what was called a river of news. A River of News is a beautiful thing. Let’s say you were reading the fabulous group blog on humanities Crooked Timber (one of my early favorite blogs and still going strong!) and you looked at the sidebar of the page. There you’d find what was called a Blogroll, where bloggers would link freely to other blogs that they liked. There is no place for such frivolity in Google Currents, of course, you will read the stripped down primary content and nothing else.
Back in the old days, all that clicking around, free subscribing, commenting and reading comments – that was the stuff that gave new little blogs a reason to live.
You might click on a link in the blogroll, heck you might click on every link in the blogroll, and you might find one, two or twenty other humanities blogs you found inspiring. Then you’d click on the orange RSS icon (not anymore! not in Currents!) and you would enter a sacred but lightweight pact to have delivered to you every article that those blogs published in the future. You wouldn’t have to visit their pages and see if they published anything new – you’d just open up your feed reader (a messy, noisy, unpretty thing) and be exposed to The River of News. The newest posts from every blog you’d ever subscribed to, all in a stream, in the order they were published in, with the very freshest article at the top.
You cannot do that in Google Currents.
Maybe in your feed reader you’d put all those Humanities blogs in a folder titled “Humanities.” Maybe you’d click around and discover other blogs about Finance, Argentina, old movies, new movies, fast cars, loud-talking women – whatever the case was, one blog would link to another blog and another and you could, with a click, fill up your universe with birds of many feathers.
Then you could open up your feed reader and say “Universe! Show me the latest deep thoughts from the world of Finance! From my favorite sources on Argentina! From 5 loud-talking women I’ve never met but have grown to love because I never fail to receive their latest blog posts inside my precious feed reader!”
Maybe that day you’d meet a new one and you’d subscribe.
Then one day you’d read an article inside a feed that made you want to post a comment. You’d click through to the web page and you’d pour out your thoughts and feelings. And you’d read the considered perspectives of other people from all around the world who posted comments.
Not in Google Currents you don’t. At least when reading the approved sources (called “Editions”) you cannot click through to the websites the articles have come from. You cannot read comments, you cannot post comments, you can only swipe fruitlessly at your iPad wishing you could find a place to engage in the community that is a blog but instead finding that another discussion-free article from the same source has slid into your field of vision. You might feel disoriented, you might feel alone, you might feel like someone who grew up in a broadcast media world who once was no longer rendered silent and alone but who now is so again. You might cry a little, or start to scream for help. (I wouldn’t blame you.)
You might try to bookmark an article with Delicious, but you cannot – there is only Pinboard. You might see the section titled “User Generated” and run there with high hopes – but you’ll find that it’s just a bunch of professionally produced video content posted to a site cynically named “You Tube.”
Back in the old days, all that clicking around, free subscribing, commenting and reading comments – that was the stuff that gave new little blogs a reason to live. You could have ten readers and if they posted comments and new people came around sometimes and sometimes stayed – that is like the breath of life for new bloggers. Take that away from them and just put the best big blogs in a pretty box and what have you got? The death of blogging is what you’ve got. You’ve got some bloggers like me today who will have thousands of silent readers enjoying this blog on their iPads – but you won’t have as many bloggers like me 7 years ago, finding my first small communities online in the network of independent blogs and their comments. That means fewer voices, less diversity, less discourse and democracy, less vigorous debate, less defense of and dignity for the formerly voiceless.
It’s not all bad, of course. When you look at a trending topic there is an “About” tab, offering up expository content about current events. It’s a much friendlier way to read content than RSS readers, which for some sad reason scared away most of the world.
I’ve got some respect for Justin Bieber – I watched his movie in 3D and learned that he’s a seriously talented musician. When someone dulls their capabilities in order to reach a larger audience, though, you have to wonder what that means for the message that could have been communicated by full-throated exploration of what’s really possible.
It is awfully clean looking though, isn’t it?
Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is one of many launch partners of Google Currents and thus has a financial interest in being uncritical of the project that will deliver us more readers.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Justin Bieber Tries to Stop FreeBieber.org
Oct 27th
If the “illegal streaming bill” becomes law, kids like Justin Bieber could be convicted of a felony just for singing copyrighted songs and posting them to YouTube. So why does Justin Bieber want to take down FreeBieber.org?
The background is this, if you haven’t seen it already. An organization called Fight For the Future is trying to draw attention to Senate Bill 978, commonly known as the “illegal streaming bill.” Because trying to draw attention to intellectual property legislation is usually difficult, the group tried a different approach: FreeBieber.org.
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The site uses Bieber to illustrate a point: Under the legislation, posting a video that contains a copyrighted work would be a felony with penalties up to five years in prison. And the site has been pretty effective – more than 42,000 people have “liked” it on Facebook, for instance. The site may be wildly popular… but not with Bieber’s lawyers. In trying to defend Fair Use rights, Fight For the Future is having to defend its Fair Use rights.
According to Bieber’s lawyers, the site violates Bieber’s publicity rights and intellectual property rights. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), however, says it’s well within the Fight For the Future’s First Amendment rights:
The right of publicity usually prohibits the unauthorized use of a person’s name, likeness, voice, or other identifiable characteristic for a commercial purposes. However, the law is clear that an individual’s right to control uses of his or her name and likeness must be weighed against important free speech rights. The First Amendment protects transformative uses (like the ones at freebieber.org), especially those that do not intrude on a celebrity’s market for her own identifiable characteristics. So it’s hard to believe that Bieber’s lawyers really think he can prohibit this lawful (and effective) use of his image. More likely they, like so many others, were just hoping to scare Fight for the Future out of exercising its free speech rights.
It seems pretty absurd that Bieber’s lawyers would even bother with a cease and desist here, but maybe they think that they’ll get lucky. More than likely, all they’ll do is trigger the Streisand effect. In trying to have the site taken down, they’re probably just going to draw more attention to it.
Which might not be a bad thing. I’d really hate to see the “illegal streaming bill” make it to law, even if it might get Justin Bieber off the streets.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga Visit Rebecca Black at Twitter for Google on Behalf of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (Video)
Apr 1st
Pop singers Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber visited Internet singing sensation Rebecca Black at Twitter‘s headquarters in San Francisco today for Google, on behalf of Facebook. Indicating the social media is seldom seen so tranquilizer freedom, Bieber indicated his Lady Gaga fans held up Twitter as the most frequently Googled site from Facebook.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg applauded the concatenation.
“Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber performed Rebecca Black‘s song at our campus and I Twittered it on Google.”
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“I love Rebecca Black’s song ‘Friday,’” Bieber said to Lady Gaga, during the duo’s trip to Twitter on behalf of Google for Facebook, Zuckerberg reported.
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Justin Bieber and I are going to do a duo,” Lady Gaga said. “It’s a song that Facebook‘s Mark Zuckerberg wrote with Rebecca Black and that we heard at Twitter when we were visiting Google.”
“So I was at Twitter once with Mark Zuckerberg from Google, no, Facebook,” said Black, “and Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber were really nice.”
Miley Cyrus photograph by Alex Loves Mikey
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Review: Justin Bieber. 3D. Madison Square Garden. SEO Heaven. – Cache Valley Daily
Feb 12th
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Review: Justin Bieber. 3D. Madison Square Garden. SEO Heaven.
Cache Valley Daily By HitFix Staff, HitFix.com Until I walked into the theater tonight, I had never heard a single note of a Justin Bieber song. I'd never seen him in motion. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Review: Justin Bieber. 3D. Madison Square Garden. SEO Heaven. – HitFix (blog)
Feb 11th
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Review: Justin Bieber. 3D. Madison Square Garden. SEO Heaven.
HitFix (blog) Until I walked into the theater tonight, I had never heard a single note of a Justin Bieber song. I'd never seen him in motion. I knew still photos of him … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google Releases Zeitgeist 2010: Justin Bieber To Chatroulette & iPad To Haiti
Dec 9th
Google has announced their Zeitgeist, the popular and fastest rising queries from 2010. Google published it over here and for the first time has included an “interactive HTML5 data visualizations” to page in order for you to see how hot a particular query was across the globe. Here is a…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
Black Hat SEO Campaign Poisons Justin Bieber Search Results – Softpedia
Aug 18th
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Black Hat SEO Campaign Poisons Justin Bieber Search Results
Softpedia Security researchers from Panda have intercepted a new black hat search engine optimization (BHSEO) campaign, which poisons search results related to teen … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Justin Timberlake Releases Facebook Movie Trailer: “The Social Network”
Jul 15th
The full length trailer for the social saga based on Facebook debuted on JT’s official blog and Yahoo Movies earlier today:
The full length movie is scheduled to be released in early October, bringing the story of Facebook’s rise to fame to the big screen. From the trailer, it looks like we’ll see quite a bit [...]
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
SPL Justin vs Movie 2009-07-19 @ Heartbreak Ridge
Apr 30th
Map: Heartbreak Ridge Justin (Terran) – Name: 원종서 (Won Jong Seo) – Team: hite vs Movie (Protoss) – Name: 진영화 (Jin Young Hwa) – Team: CJ League: 2008-2009 Shinhan Bank Proleague Date: 2009-07-19 More on TLPD: www.teamliquid.net
SPL Justin vs Kwanro 2009-07-18 @ Andromeda
Apr 30th
Map: Andromeda Justin (Terran) – Name: 원종서 (Won Jong Seo) – Team: hite vs Kwanro (Zerg) – Name: 한상봉 (Han Sang Bong) – Team: CJ League: 2008-2009 Shinhan Bank Proleague Date: 2009-07-18 More on TLPD: www.teamliquid.net
