For some reason I can’t find an embeddable version of this video where idiots in a focus group give their suggestions for how to improve “The Wizard of Oz.” But you can watch it here on Gawker. The really funny thing is that these comments aren’t so far-fetched. I spent 18 months working on a TV show in Hollywood and got comments like this all the time. Worse yet, these “notes” weren’t coming from focus group members. They were coming from network executives. We had to pretend to listen to them. Sometimes we even had to take a stab at accommodating them. I was told that this is par for the course in the TV business. Good times! I look back on the whole experience like a bad...
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Yesterday I wrote an article about Robert Scoble trying to follow in the footsteps of Michael Arrington and go from blogging to angel investing. Scoble is crying foul and calling this a “drive-by shooting.” He’s ranting about the horrible old “mainstream media,” of which I am a member, and he now refers to me as a “journalist,” in quotes, which I’m guessing is meant to be derogatory. He’s also rushing around, blasting out sound and fury everywhere, posting stuff on his blog, on other blogs, on Google+. He’s an impressive one-man band, and it’s a clever strategy: you fill the air with smoke and noise and loads of anti-aircraft flak, and maybe you can distract people, or make this into a story about me rather than a story about him. First off, this is not some fight between me and Scoble. I like Scoble, and if he can find a way to get rich off his blog, good for him. The great opportunity of blogging has always been that, for the lucky few, a big payday awaits. Furthermore, while Scoble may be one of the world’s most relentless and shameless self-promoters, he is also, by all accounts, a genuinely nice guy. Nor is this some argument between mainstream journalists...
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Yeah. Good grief. Fucking Scoble. I just posted an article about it here on the Daily...
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Prompted in part by the back-and-forth that started with the “Hit men” article on this blog last week, Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times asks, “Are Silicon Valley tech bloggers truly objective?” You can maybe guess the answer but I don’t want to spoil it for you. Hiltzik talked to Michael Arrington and Sarah Lacy and got their perspective, which is that this is the new normal, at least in Silicon Valley. Hiltzik’s money quote comes in the last paragraph: It would be unfair to suggest that tech bloggers aren’t earnest about trying to produce good reporting on Silicon Valley. They haven’t exactly sold their souls by taking money from the people they cover. But what they have sold was worth a lot more than the money they got for it. It’s a great article but it makes one mistake, which is to think that these guys are journalists, and that they care about things that journalists care about. They’re not, and they...
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That’s the headline my latest article for the Daily Beast about the alarming rise in mobile malware, particularly on the Android platform. This is based on a new study by Juniper Networks, which sells anti-malware software. You can find the article...
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