Enraptured

Apture might just be the new killer blog app. It's a small plugin that allows you to easily integrate multimedia into your blog posts. I'll start with a simple link to the Apture website. I can easily throw in a video demo right off their site including some related media:




Interested in visiting their office in person? Boom:



Basically Apture lets you search the web within the app itself for any kind of media - video, sound, images, websites, files - and create a link or embed the actual media right in the post. It can be pretty cumbersome to do Google searches and collect, say, an album cover image, a link to a band's page, a sound clip, and maybe a photo from a concert for a music review - Apture lets me accomplish all that within one app without leaving my blog post in an easy, streamless app.

Here's a little Dispatch for your listening pleasure, just because it's been in my head for the last couple weeks.

Locating and integrating all the above diverse media into this post took me far less time than it would have without using Apture.

Really excited about this.

Toxic Garbage Island

You need to watch this.

Then watch the rest of the series.

Highly disturbing.

On a broader note, VBS TV appears to be the awesome - brainchild of Spike Jonze (Creative Director, i.e. Schtonk Captain) - it's a bunch of young peeps taking it to the streets straight up - Mexico City, the Pacific Ocean Trash Gyre, Jamaica - music, culture, eco-awareness, and a whole assload of upper-level schtonk mixed up in there.

Check it out.

Seriously, though, watch the TGI series.

Equal Opportunity Employer?

Methinks Beckett probably weighed in on this latest hire by NESN.

Good job, everybody!

Is Simon Misguided?

A bit of a counterpoint to Simon's indirect railing against the decline of the American newspaper in The Wire. More info from Simon's point of view here.

The Wire: Writing a City

Make no mistake, David Simon is doing something bold, ambitious, and remarkable in his five-season HBO drama The Wire. The show is a veritable novel onscreen; Simon is building the narrative of a city quite literally from the ground up. From the street-level war on drugs in the First Season through the loss of blue-collar livelihood in Season Two; to the political machine in Season Three; to the deplorable state of the public school system and the Baltimore youth in Season Four; to the current, final season's emphasis on the role of the media in reporting on society's moral failings. For Simon, an ex-reporter at The Baltimore Sun, this is social commentary that is also a very personal story. This post was inspired by this over at Wax Banks' humble abode, along with the following great pieces:

An excellent, lengthy New Yorker piece on the show which has several tidbits revealing just how true-to-life The Wire is.

Another fairly lengthy Columbia Journalism Review piece which does a good job providing both sides of the debate of the media's role - i.e. Simon vs. his old Sun bosses.

Simon in Esquire talking about what journalism means to him, and what is happening to ink-and-paper media in this country.

Interesting pieces all, providing some background, legitimacy, and even a bit of criticism of Simon's moral quest. I will blatantly rip off Wax here by quoting, as he does, the closing of the CJR piece, because really, it's just so damn perfect:

Simon, like [current Sun editor Tim] Franklin, wants his portrayal of Baltimore to be judged against the future, but his idea of the future is darker. The Wire, he says, is about the decline of the American empire. It might have sprung from a journalistic impulse, but he says he has moved beyond simple reportage. “Consider it a big op-ed piece,” said Simon, “and consider it to be dissent. What I saw happen with the drug war, a series of political elections, and vague attempts at reform in Baltimore….What I saw happen to the Port of Baltimore, and what I saw happen to the Baltimore Sun—I think it’s all of a piece.” Should his premonition of the American empire’s future—more gated communities and more of a police state—come to pass and were someone to say he didn’t know it was coming, Simon said, it will at least be possible to pull The Wire off the shelf and say, “‘Don’t say you didn’t know this was coming. Because they made a fucking TV show out of it.’” 

Read it all. And enjoy the remainder of The Wire.

NFL TV - Syndicated!

I was going to post a few well-thought out musings on the news that the NFL Network will simulcast this Saturday's game between the New England Patriots and the New York Football Giants, but Chris already did so over at A Large Regular. He makes a few good points, as per usual. Drop him a few good wishes on his traumatized back if you make a stop over there, will you?

History will be made, ladies and gentlemen. And now everybody gets to see it!

Google Is Awesome

For the record, I just want to state that Google is awesome. For a while I've been quasi-using Bloglines and/or the Google Reader to check on blog updates, but I don't really like reading the entries in the window format. Lacks the personality of each blog. So normally I end up clicking through all my friends' blogs and other regularly read blogs for updates. I've got a lot of blogs now that I enjoy checking frequently, but I hate jumping around to each one and checking the Reader feed just doesn't appeal to me that much.

However, Google Reader has a neat little feature called the "Next" bookmark. Go into the Reader's Settings and under the Goodies tab, you can throw up the Next bookmark (as well as a one click Subscribe bookmark). What this does is it goes to each new item in your feed, just as if you went to the page yourself. Awesome! Now I can not only check out all my updates quickly and easily, but I can also gaze lovingly upon the various little spots that each of my favorite bloggers inhabits in the Blogosphere. It's a simple little tidbit but I love it already.

Also, to add: Google's whole suite of free Web apps is just fantastic. Gmail, calendar, the iGoogle Homepage (played with this for the first time today - very customizable), Web Analytics, the Chat - it's just awesome.

Thanks, Google. I *heart* thee unabashedly.

The Future of Media?

A fascinating faux-documentary on the "history" of media. It's interesting up until the present, and once it gets into the "future" of media it gets a little freaky. Some very compelling stuff in here. Food for thought at any rate. A point to Mean Rachel for posting it; she is a blogette on the cutting edge of the nouveau-internets.

This especially interests me because in my industry (marketing) we are currently talking a lot about this Web 2.0 stuff, the up-and-coming Social Media Optimization (just like Search Engine Optimization has been and still is what everyone wants), and the shift from traditional media to newer forms in general. For example, in our last new business meeting, we were actually discussing "the blogosphere." This is pretty incredible when I think back to even a few years ago, when I first started blogging - when we used to joke about getting paid to blog.

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On a related note, there's an article here which breaks down an experiment contrasting the standard pay-per-click online advertising structure (Google AdWords) with paying someone ($10/hr.) to optimize the social media network for the four sites in the experiment; basically paying someone to blog, follow links, engage in discussions, comment on other blogs, etc. - in essence creating along business lines that which so many of us have already established for mere social/entertainment purposes with our Weblogs, Facebook and MySpace pages, and any number of social networking or personal "online presence" vehicles.

The experiment is of great interest to anyone in marketing (or indeed, anyone who owns a business or wishes to generate increased Web traffic), but I think it's of more general interest considering this exploding "prosumer" network that we now have on the internets. Pretty interesting stuff, and makes one's head spin a bit.

P.S. Can you link me on your blog? Thanks!