July 6th, 2009, No Comments »
As I mentioned, I’m revising the video chapter of our book, and so I was happy to discover this recent Slate article. For a month, Chris Wilson monitored the performance of 10, 000 newly uploaded videos. Here are the results:
After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 views—that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That’s the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.
An site called, uh, Rubber Republic ran a similar study (PDF), and found that 10% exceeded 1000 views, and 1% received 500,000 views.
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April 1st, 2008, No Comments »
A couple of weeks ago, I tore something out of the newspaper. It’s been floating around in my possession since then, and I’ve finally gotten around to excerpting it here. It’s from a restaurant review by Giles Coren in The Times of London. He has this to say on his pollo marsala:
It is revolting. It is ill-conceived, incompetent, indescribably awful. A dish so cruel I weep not only for the animal that died to make it, but also for the mushrooms. Ms Workman said it was inedible but, to be honest, as it sits before me, congealing quietly, I cannot leave it alone but return to it every few minutes with the grim fascination of a toddler mesmerised by a pile of its own faeces, nibbling at it, gurning with revulsion, then nibbling some more. If you’ve ever sniffed your finger after scratching your arse, and then done it again, then this dish may not be entirely wasted on you.
I thought that was a very entertaining paragraph of prose. I almost never read food writing. I did, however, read a piece about food writing in Slate last fall:
The food writing that’s in vogue today consists chiefly of a bellow of bravado. It’s a guy thing, sure, but (with a few honorably hungry exceptions) these scribblers mostly ignore what’s on the plate. They view themselves as boy hunters and despise sissy gatherers, thrive on the undertow of violence they detect in the professional kitchen, and like to linger on the unappetizing aspects of food preparation. The gross-out factor trumps tasting good as well as good taste.
The tone of Coren’s piece reminded me of this eloquent defense of old-school food writing.
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December 14th, 2007, 6 Comments »
There are lots of things to hate about the U.S. electoral system. However, the Americans do one thing right: they get real characters as candidates. I mean, the Democrats are going to choose a woman or a African-American (er, Halfrican-American?) as their presidential candidate! How cool is that? And the Republican side is full of nutty dudes like Giuliani (who kind of reminds me of Gollum) and Mormon Mitt Romney.
Canadian politics feels so staid by comparison. Hello, Frozen Nation! Which French-Canadian middle-aged white guy will we elect as Custodian in Chief this year? I’m not sure why that is, but I wish our elections had a little more attitude and a lot more diversity.
To learn about the election (and that nutty American electoral system), I’ve started listening to the Slate Political Gabfest podcast. It’s chock full of over-educated liberal elitists, but I’m nearly all those things, so I don’t mind (plus, I’ve developed a bit of a crush on Emily Bazelon).
The Slate podcast is a well-moderated round table conversation among professional writers and pundits. It covers a lot of ground, but it’s fairly compelling and continues to inform my limited knowledge of American politics.
I would, however, like to find an analogous podcast for the Republican side of the election. Ideally, it should be professional, well-moderated and the level of required knowledge should be, at best, intermediate. Similarly, I’d like to find a Canadian political podcast that meets those requirements.
Does anybody have recommendations for equivalents to the Gabfest?
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December 10th, 2007, 16 Comments »
I was just listening to one of Slate’s excellent podcasts, and it opened with a new promo for Land Rovers. The voice-over actor has a British accent which sounds a little peculiar to me. I wouldn’t definitely say it’s fake, because my ear isn’t good enough, but it sounds a little odd.
Give it a listen:
Does that sound legit to my British readers? Or anybody else who has an ear for accents?
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November 21st, 2007, 5 Comments »
Google recently announced its foray into the telecommunications space with Android, an operating system and software developer kit for mobile devices. I watched the video, which was fairly dry (and Sergey, you can afford a shirt with a collar), but I was missing the context and meaning of this announcement.
Over at Slate, Tim Wu has written a readable overview of what Android might mean to the staid telecoms industry in the US.
Nor is the problem of retailing Android phones trivial. Anyone with an Internet browser can use Google search or Gmail, but in the American mobile world the main barrier to market entry is reaching consumers. Today, more than 90 percent of Americans buy their wireless devices from their carriers. It is true, again, that Google has T-Mobile and Sprint provisionally on its side. But if only some outlets will sell a Gphone, fewer people will buy them.
Incidentally, I wasn’t super-interested in the subject matter, and abandoned it after a few episode, but I learned a lot about the early days of the telephone industry from Cory Doctorow’s reading of Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown.
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November 15th, 2007, 2 Comments »
I read a recent article in Slate about the growing trend towards cremation instead of burial. This was no surprise to me, but some of the reasons behind the trend were. They include cost (cremations are roughly half the price of burials), a more mobile population (less connection to a particular town and its graveyard) and the one I’d expected, land use:
Third, concern over land use is helping tip the scales in favor of cremation. “The idea of taking up space in cemeteries when it could be used for other purposes is contributing to people’s decisions,” Nicodemus says. Some of the highest cremation rates are in ecofriendly coastal states like Hawaii (66 percent) and Washington (64 percent). In California, where SCI has a significant presence, more than half of 2005 deaths resulted in cremations.
It’s also interesting how much cremation rates differ across the US. They’re as high as 65% in Nevada, and as low as 10% in put-dem-in-da-ground-like-a-good-Catholic Mississippi.
Speaking of getting old and dying, Steve pointed to an interesting article discussing the assumptions we make about retirement.
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September 17th, 2007, 14 Comments »
I recently finished the fascinating, sad and encouraging The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Coincidentally, I also read a Slate article by Daniel Engber examining one of Weisman’s recommendations for saving the planet–the single-child policy:
Let’s cut the birth rate to one child per couple, for a few generations at least. The population would dwindle by about 5 billion people over the next century, he says, ensuring the habitability of the Earth for the 1.6 billion who remained. At that point, they could all reap the rewards of a more spacious planet, sharing in “the growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful.”
I tell you, the graph in the book is a pretty impressive bell curve, and nearly mirrors current population estimates of 9.2 billion Earthlings by 2050.
Weisman’s Dream
One of the things that gives me hope for humanity’s future is Japan’s aging population. If we somehow manage to survive the crush of another 3 or 4 billion humans, and continue to improve the lives of the average Asian and African, then eventually many countries on the planet might develop to the point where populations shrink instead of grow. Weisman’s dream of a population of a couple billion might not happen by 2150, but it could happen.
If you enjoy Engber’s article, you might want to read the transcript of his online chat with readers which is both argumentative and insightful.
I wrote about a similar yet more radical proposal back in January. In the comments, somebody pointed out that the most effective way to go green is to commit (an environmentally-friendly) suicide. Somebody makes the same point to Engber, and I liked his reply:
I’ve gotten a bunch of e-mails asking me if I favor euthanasia, murder, genocide, etc. But I don’t think that’s the logical extension of my argument. If I told you I favored a Prius over a Hummer, would you then ask me if I thought we should walk everywhere?
Here’s a related bonus link: Michelle Tsai writes about Russia’s peculiar attempts to increase its population.
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September 11th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Yesterday I read this anxious cautionary tale from Emily Bazelon, warning people of the perils of reclining your seat in a moving vehicle. She did so, and was injured in an accident:
I’ve recovered nicely, thank you. But the more I thought about my accident, the more I wondered whether I’d inadvertently done myself in by tilting my car seat back—as I do on just about every long drive…The carmakers have argued that it is “common sense” that an upright seat is much safer than a reclining one. In other words, everyone knows, or should know. Maybe I’m the only clueless one out there, but I don’t think so.
I’m going to have to go with ‘clueless’ on this one (and the discussion forum associated with the article seems to mostly agree with me). I’m not sure if my parents told me not to do this, or that it was simply self-evident, but I’ve known for as long as I’ve sat in the front seat that it was a bad idea.
Bazelon calls for the the government and automakers to do a better job of warning the public of this lurking menace. She cites a number of medical studies and legal decisions, but fails to establish two essential facts:
- How many people don’t understand the risk of reclining your front seat in a moving car?
- How many accidents result from this behaviour each year?
Any sound argument for action surely must include these two numbers. Otherwise, Bazelon’s only got anecdotes and hysteria, and that only leads to litigation and ‘Hot’ labels on coffee cups.
UPDATE: Speaking of unnecessary warning labels, I was reminded of this Saturday Night Live sketch poking fun at such disclaimers by Yes But No But Yes.
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June 29th, 2007, 9 Comments »
Unless you’ve been living on the backside of one of Neptune’s moons for the past couple of years, you know that video is big on the web. There’s a major trend toward transforming text-only sites to text plus video and audio sites.
To change gears for a moment, back in 2005, I wrote this about podcasting:
you need the talent. Everyone learns writing in school, so the barrier to entry is pretty small. However, nobody (or very few) learns how to be a radio broadcaster. Like it or not, that takes ability, practice and, ideally, a great voice. I try not to read poorly-written blogs, and I don’t have the patience for dead air and mumbling…
Over the past week, I’ve had the opportunity to watch several short videos, hosted by big formerly-text-only sites and presented by writers. They are:
Take a couple of minutes and watch those. I’ll wait.
A. O. Scott is rigidly reading off cue cards through the bottom part of his bifocals. Emily Yoffe looks stiffer than her headboard (note the incredibly awkward nod to her dog). Walt Mossberg prefaces every sentence with ‘uh’.
These folks are all good writers who I admire. The operative word there is ‘writers’.
Presenting is a Craft All Its Own
Much as we like to take cheap shots at news anchors, being an effective presenter takes skill and practice. There’s an art, I suspect, to appearing natural on camera. People go to school for this, and usually spend years honing their craft before we ever see them on national television or radio.
Most writers aren’t presenters. They don’t know how to do it. They’re just victims of online content trends, and have been thrown to the video wolves by their managers, editors and publishers.
It’s odd that Slate would make this mistake. For the past two years, they had the wonderful Andy Bowers (who has a background in radio) reading articles written by other writers on their podcast. June Thomas usually does the Explainer podcasts (a podcast I skipped today because writer Michelle Tsai recorded the last two), but she never wrote them. Yet, when Slate went to video, they’ve thrown out the middleman and turned the camera on the poor writers themselves.
Back in 2005, I also wrote:
This issue is only going to be multiplied when video blogs, or vlogging becomes popular. Amanda Congdon is charming, smart, cute and has a great formula, but she’s not a professional newscaster. Maybe that doesn’t matter to you or me, but it matters to average humans who are accustomed to watching professionals.
I was wrong about that. Amanda Congdon is a great presenter. She’s natural, charming and charismatic on camera.
These media giants ought to hire people like Amanda to present their content. Let the writers write.
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