Interesting legacy blog post on the controversy and popularity of Mesothelioma in the CPC arena.  No surprise that black hat SEOs continue to do very well in the mesothelioma space because the average cost-per-click remains so high and there are so many smarmy attorneys wanting to rank for that one word.

Hey, this highly hyped contest of microblogging egos is more fun than reading through Google's first-quarter earnings report.  I would actually be pleasantly surprised if Ashton Kutcher overtakes CNN  to be the first Twitter user with a million followers.  Looks like Oprah is the next to enter the fray now while Britney Spears continues to shoot for the million mark as well.

Mickey Rourke rightfully seems like a shoo-in for best actor this year in The Wrestler.  Hard to imagine anyone else lending such verisimilitude and viscera to the role of Randy "The Ram" Robinson.  

Which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere - tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.

-Trevor Butterworth, The Financial Times

 

We are now forced to determine if our idea is worth a book or an article or a Twitter - just as poets once chose between an epic, a sonnet, a haiku or that crinkled Xeroxed pamphlet that old guy tries to hand you outside the Coffee Bean.

- Joel Stein, L.A. Times

According to comScore, MySpace has a U.S. audience of 73 million but it will still miss its $1 billion revenue target this fiscal year.  The culprit in the shortfall is clearly an inability to adequately monetize social networks.  As the International Herald Tribune reports:

During a conference call last month, the News Corp. chief operating officer, Peter Chernin, moderated the once-grandiose expectations for social networking advertising and acknowledged that selling spots on profile and group pages was far from easy.

Meanwhile, Marc Andreessen is moving forward with Ning, the MySpace-like social networking startup he co-founded in 2004.  According to the latest issue of Business Week, "Ning has been valued at $500 million and is growing in popularity, with page views rising by 10% each week."  Can Andreesen strike gold again amidst fierce competition from FaceBook, Bebo, LinkedIn and MySpace?  More importantly, what is the real advertising value (if any) of social networks?

According to the 24-country, 24,000-people survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, the American people continue to be viewed more positively than their country.  Majorities in 14 of 23 countries have a favorable opinion of Americans, including at least 70% of those surveyed in South Korea, Lebanon, Poland and Britain.

Favorable views of the United States have increased modestly since 2007 in 10 of 21 countries where comparative data are available:

California currently has a $17 billion budget deficit and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is seeing his popularity plummet according to NPR's Richard Gonzalez.  In a recent interview with Schwarzenegger on the radio program All Things Considered, the Governor clearly states:

I don't want to win a popularity contest, I just want to fix the problems.  That's why the people have sent me to Sacramento.

Nonetheless, only two of every five voters believe he's doing a good job. In addition, 75 percent of the voters surveyed in NPR's Field Poll say California is headed in the wrong direction.  Hey, at least the weather is still nice in the Golden State...

I have to give Joel Stein credit - lots of credit actually.  Here is what he wrote in a recent column regarding the thespian otherwise known as Rob Schneider:

If Rob Schneider had been born a decade later, he'd be our greatest YouTube star instead of a studio money pit. 

Yes, Joel Stein is talking about the Rob Schneider who is currently playing Adam Sandler's Palestinian sidekick in You Don't Mess with the Zohan.  Sadly, Rob Schneider is the comedy tax in most Adam Sandler productions and Zohan has been consistently described as Schneider's "most relentlessly unfunny appearance under heavy makeup since his uncredited role in 'Chuck & Larry' as an Asian wedding coordinator."  As one critic glumly put it in his review of Zohan:

We have reached the point that we always must in a review of a Sandler movie: How much Rob Schneider do we get?

Apparently, way too much.  Hard to imagine anything more unfunny than Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo or The Hot Chick but Zohan might just surprise all of us.  My  bet is that  Kung Fu  Panda easily beats out  Adam Sandler at the box office this weekend.  Stay tuned!

While most folks were at LACMA recently to check out Rauschenberg's work in the new Renzo Piano designed galleries at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, what really caught my eye was the Chicano art show titled, "Phantom Sightings:  Art After the Chicano Movement."  According to the organizers, this is the largest exhibition of Chicano art ever presented at LACMA and includes over 125 works encompassing everything from installation art and sculpture to video and photography.  Perhaps the most thought provoking of the entire collection were the simple hand-scrawled cardboard signs by New York artist, Alejandro Diaz, which sported enigmatic messages such as:

Wet Back By Popular Demand

Food To Gogh

Mexican Wallpaper

Looking for Upper East Side Lady With Nice Clean Apt. (Must Have Cable) 

This Product Was Made With The Use Of Inner-Child Labor

By Disappointment Only

Please Don't Feed The Supermodels

Straight Man ~ Trapped In Gay Man's Party

The Filet Mignon Of Affordable Conceptual Art

Unhappy At Last 

Apparently, Alejandro Diaz occasionally dons a dapper white suit and hangs out in front of Tiffany's on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan selling his minimalist cardboard creations.  Only in New York!

In the current issue of Time, Samantha Power explains how technology can actually narrow our worldview and shield us from "inconvenient knowledge":

By visiting a website like The New York Times and only clicking on the stories that are "most  e-mailed" and "most blogged" and "most searched" , Samantha is admittedly "catching a magic carpet ride on someone else’s taste."  Rather than dipping her toe into The Long Tail of diverse content that abounds online, she is instead opting to go Top 40 and join the cookie-cutter ranks of the popularity culture.  As Lee Gomes, of The Wall Street Journal aptly puts it:

Far from being cultural rugged individualists, most of us are only too happy to have others suggest to us what we'd like.

BBC Television's HardTalk with Stephen Sackur is easily one of the best interview programs out there.  Unlike Larry King Live, no softball questions are permitted as Stephen Sackur puts the thumbscrews to various personalities each week.  Yesterday, I had the chance to catch his one-on-one with outspoken author and social critic, Gore Vidal.  Despite appearing in a wheelchair at an advanced age of eighty-three, Mr. Vidal wasted no time in springing to action.  Within minutes, he eagerly heaped condemnation on the Bush administration, William F. Buckley, Truman Capote and John McCain (not necessarily in that order).  Of Truman Capote, Vidal quipped that he was the most illegitimate figure America had ever produced.  He then added that Capote "was also a consummate liar."  Regarding John McCain, Vidal likened the presidential hopeful to the myopic cartoon character, Mr. Magoo.  He also reminded us that the recently deceased William F. Buckley was not the beloved figure the media would have us believe.
 
While I was not surprised by Vidal's mordant wit and trademark vitriol, I was amused by his self congratulatory outburst about six minutes into the interview.  When pressed by Stephen Sackur as to whether his contentious views might appeal to only to a fraction of the American people, Vidal got defensive about his own popularity:

I've got to warn you about something.  I am very popular.  Just get over it that I am some sort of aberrant who's going around saying unpleasant things about who happens to be the President.  Unfortunately, I have to occasionally and that is how we are going to try to find out where we are in the world.

About ten minutes later, Stephen Sackur again hinted that Vidal's point of view on America might be out of touch and considered by some critics to be anachronistic.  Here is Vidal's response:

No, it's not.  I reminded you a little earlier not to forget that I am popular.  They read my books out there.  And you can't pretend that I'm unpopular.

Huh?  No wonder Norman Mailer head-butted Vidal in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 and then went on to actually punch him at a soirée years later.  Too bad William F. Buckley is not around to repeat the act.  Then again, Buckley would never punch a guy in a wheelchair even if he were Gore Vidal basking in the reflection of his own popularity.

I finally got around to reading the latest Pew Internet report on "Writing, Technology & Teens" which was accomplished in conjunction with the National Commission on Writing.  The comprehensive 83 page PDF version of the report is well worth downloading if you have any interest in how teens view formal writing (essays, short stories and school assignments) versus informal e-communication (e-mail, instant messaging, social network posts, texting, blogging).  The impact of technology on teen writing behaviors is certainly fascinating as some parents and educators worry that casual digital communication is corrupting "the basic unit of human thought - the sentence."

Even the Librarian of Congress, James Hadley Billington, is personally irked by the carefree spelling, lax punctuation,  poor grammar, and acronym laden shortcuts (WTF) inherent to electronic communications.  I suppose the act of exchanging e-mails and fast-paced thumb choreography on cell phones does not constitute real writing according to Mr. Billington.  I'm also going to take a wild guess and assume that the Librarian of Congress (he's had the same job since 1987!) doesn't like emoticons much.  8-)

But seriously, language purists and grammarians who stand on ceremony have an uphill battle on their hands.  As the Pew Report clearly indicates, teens are spontaneously drawn to the informality and unceremonious nature of the Web:

As highly interactive online activities such as blogging and social networking have grown in popularity, accessing the Internet has become more and more a daily activity for teens - nearly two thirds of teenage Internet users (68%) now go online daily, and more than a third (35%) of online teens use the Internet multiple times a day.

Even more illuminating is the fact that blogging and social networking are most popular with girls:

Girls dominate the teen blogosphere and social networks - 66% of girls have an SNS profile compared with 50% of boys, and 34% of girls (versus 20% of boys) keep an online journal or blog.

The chart below just scratches the surface of what is available in the Pew report:

Deep down we all know that success is not necessarily relative to quality.  Sadly, we also know that people tend to like what other people like.  Of course, I thought the Net was supposed to free us from this "lockstep conformity imposed by television, advertising, and corporate propaganda" but apparently not.   Thanks to the mushrooming popularity of the Social Web and sites like del.icio.us, Digg and StumbleUpon, we all seem to be recommending, bookmarking, blogging, tagging, commenting, and collaboratively filtering each others recycled crap.  So much for the "new dawn of individuality" and all the feel good  Internet rhetoric embracing authenticity and a genuine point of view.  Whether you are on FaceBook, Twitter or Yelp (whatever contrived web based social system you choose,) the tyranny of popularity applies more than ever.  Sociology professor, Duncan Watts, sums up this exact sentiment when he writes about his infamous Music Lab experiment:

What this means for the social web - the links, songs, videos and slideshows that win out are not necessarily the best. Often they are ones that are liked by the first few users for some random reason, setting trends in place for later users. On the one hand, the web is democratic making it possible for anyone to participate. On the other hand, the network effects and other social phenomenon lead to the rich get richer effect and unpredictability in the system and making it harder for latecomers to have the same type of popularity.

What Duncan is essentially telling us here is that despite the infinite bounty of the Internet, most of us  favor "herd thinking" over original choices.  Given the opportunity to unearth new territory, we instead choose to ignore "the long tail" and embrace a "lifeboat economics" world view.  Rather than risk rediscovering esoteric 80's musical gems on YouTube we instead opt for the "videos being watched right now" or "featured videos" category.  Never mind the gulf between popularity and merit. Did Mariah Carey really surpass Elvis Presley for the most No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100?  Did you catch the celebrity endorsement on Tom Hanks MySpace page?  I wonder what words and phrases are the most frequently searched by NYTimes.com readers today?  Honestly, who the fuck (WTF) really cares what other people are watching, listening to, or reading?

Just take a look at  the mechanism behind Yelp, a popular online aggregator of user-generated reviews for local businesses.  Rather than dig too deep and waste time actually visiting any of these local establishments, you can simply tap into Yelp's de-facto recommendation system and mindlessly go where  the  members  who are the most popular, respected, and prolific suggest.  Even better, you can screen for people whose interests and taste choices exactly mirror your own thus alleviating the danger of ever straying too far from your personal comfort zone.  Much better to be snugly sealed in our own private feedback loop than to run the risk of experimenting with something unpopular. As Lee Siegel cleverly notes, "Web culture is not a gigantic onset of variety, randomness, and individuality."  Instead, it is often an "exaltation of popularity" where we have simply traded "culture for the masses" with "culture by the masses".  I'll have to remember that next time I hear someone crowing about "crowdsourcing". 

According to Dr. James Kellaris, we each have our personal demonic tunes that get stuck in our heads.  These "sticky" songs or "earworms" (as the Germans refer to them) are like mental broken records that loop endlessly in our mind.  Interestingly enough, one Web site has actually developed software to "maim that tune" and help those poor souls plagued by "Stuck Tune Syndrome"  Some scientists have even argued that catchy songs work by causing a "brain itch" that can only be scratched by repeating the tune ("repetunitis").  In my particular case, melodymania has struck in the form of "Popular!" - the Stephen Schwartz composed hit song from "Wicked": 

Musical: Wicked
Song: Popular

Popular!
You're gonna be popular!
I'll teach you the proper ploys
When you talk to boys
Little ways to flirt and flounce
I'll show you what shoes to wear
How to fix your hair
Everything that really counts

To be popular
I'll help you be popular!
You'll hang with the right cohorts
You'll be good at sports
Know the slang you've got to know
So let's start
'Cause you've got an awfully long way to go:

Don't be offended by my frank analysis
Think of it as personality dialysis
Now that I've chosen to become a pal,
A sister and adviser
There's nobody wiser
Not when it comes to popular -
I know about popular
And with an assist from me
To be who you'll be
Instead of dreary who-you-were, well, are
There's nothing that can stop you
From becoming popu-ler. LAR!

La la la la
We're gonna make
You popular

When I see depressing creatures
With unprepossessing features
I remind them on their own behalf
To think of
Celebrated heads of state or
Specially great communicators
Did they have brains or knowledge?
Don't make me laugh!

They were popular! Please -
It's all about popular!
It's not about aptitude
It's the way you're viewed
So it's very shrewd to be
Very very popular
Like me!

Marshall McLuhan once famously observed that “The future of the book is the blurb.”  Media prescience aside, McLuhan might also have added that the future of public discourse is the sound bite.  Defined by William Safire in a 1988 New York Times piece as “a snippet of film that catches the rhetorical highlight of a speech” or “a quotation that is bright, snappy and memorable,” the sound bite has since acquired a considerably insidious connotation.  In The Dictionary of Bullshit, Nick Webb riffs rather enjoyably on the pejorative prominence of the sound bite:

Now the sound bite rules.  It’s an art at which politicians train as joylessly as Olympic athletes.  Avoid that stripy tie, it strobes.  Look sincerely to camera, pause (so the editor has a cue for the cut), deliver some resonant snippet of bullshit, pause again (for the next cut).  Your neatly packaged thirty seconds is much more likely than any complex message to make it to the TV news.

Motivated by the vitriol surrounding the current democratic presidential primary, Susan Jacoby lashed out against the sound bite in the Los Angeles Times this past Sunday:

A vast public laziness feeds the media’s predilection today to distill news through polemicists of one stripe or another and to condense complex information into meaningless sound bites.

Fellow weekly columnist at the Los Angeles Times, Meghan Daum, had this to say about Obama in her Saturday op-ed piece:

He offers up ideas that don’t lend themselves to sound bites but require some sustained attention.

According to Meghan, “we’ve become not only impatient with but downright opposed to the kinds of ideas that can’t be reduced to a line on a screen crawl or a two-sentence blog entry.”  Rather than subject ourselves to “irrelevant details”, our bumper sticker mentality is more suited to juicy sound bites, superficial headlines, bright color graphics and 15 second film clips (YouTube).  Spare us the unabridged description and bring on the elevator pitch, speed dating and quick-hit quotes instead.  The authors of Unreliable Sources explain it this way:

Stuffed with celebrity gossip and other bite-sized light items, the innards of many newspapers largely resemble fluffy bon-bons.

We’ve learned to live on a diet of empty media calories, apparently surprised every time we collapse from information malnutrition.  We’ve all become addicted to McNews thanks to USA Today and CNN Headline News.  Somewhere along the line we lost the collective desire to dig deeper, to know more.

Nancy Miller also touches on this penchant for "media snacking" in her Minifesto for a New Age:

Music, television, games, movies, fashion: We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips - in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture - and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive).

Of course, all is not lost.  A recent example of purported journalistic endeavor includes The Page.  Launched by Mark Halperin and described as “a concise collection of up-to-the-minute political news”, The Page apparently traffics mainly in “small scoops” rather than sound bites.  Yeah, right!  I love the editorial semantics here folks but it still sounds like "information tidbits" and "snack-o-tainment" to me.  ;-)

A couple recent articles in the L.A. Times shed light on the declining popularity of the once vaunted media critic.  In particular, Patrick Goldstein writes rather persuasively in his "Big Picture" column that “critics today are viewed as cultural dinosaurs on the verge of extinction”.  Goldstein then succumbs to a bit of editorial nostalgia:

There was a time when critics were our arbiters of culture, the ultimate interpreters of intellectual discourse…Critics gave art its context, explained its meaning and guided us to new discoveries.

Arguably, the demise of the professional critic can be blamed on the Internet which is fashioning a new type of media ecosystem.  As Goldstein illustrates, the Internet “has promoted a democratization of opinion in which solo bloggers can outstrip mammoth news organizations.”  Fellow chief pop-music critic at the L.A. Times, Ann Powers, agrees when it comes to the waning influence of the context mafia (snarky label for reviewers):

Critics at established publications sweat the bloggers who beat them to the punch.  Writers’ recommendations or pans seem irrelevant anyway, since advance streams and limited-time free downloads abound.  Fans can parse the music on their own.

Even industry trade publications like Broadcasting & Cable magazine are sounding off on the unpopularity of the anachronistic TV critic:

In the past two years, more than one-dozen longtime critics at major-market dailies -- including the Dallas Morning News, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, New York Newsday, New York Daily News and Houston Chronicle -- have been either let go, shunted to different beats or been forced to take the ubiquitous buyout proffered by bean-counting corporate bosses.

Depending on who you listen to, we are either living in the Information Age, the Post-Information Age, the Connected Age, the Recommendation Age or the Bio-Intelligence Age .  Just to be contentious, one could also argue that we are living in the "Popularity Age" (a Wikipedia search for this term yielded no results).

Author, Lee Siegel, touches on this very notion in one of his sharp-tongued critiques of the Internet.  Lee maintains that "talent, expertise, and originality have been replaced by popularity" and that "genuine knowledge has been crowded out by information overload".  In an interview with Jeff Trachtenberg, Book Publishing Reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Lee expands on this concept:

Popular culture used to draw people to what they liked. Popularity culture which is Internet culture draws people to what everyone else likes. You have for the first time now in newspapers "most e-mailed", "most popular", "most blogged".  People are not drawn to articles on the basis of what they are interested in.  Instead, they are drawn to what other people are interested in and editors are under increasing pressure to publish the most popular articles rather than the articles that have the most intrinsic interest.

Ian Ayres, author of the book Super Crunchers, confirms this view:

Nowadays people are looking for Internet guidance drawn from the behavior of the masses. Some of these "preference engines" are simple lists of what's most popular. The New York Times lists the "most emailed articles." iTunes lists the top downloaded songs. Del.icio.us lists the most popular Internet bookmarks. These simple filters often let surfers zero in on the greatest hits.

By "preference engine", Ian is referring to the recommendation mechanism that kicks into place when you search for a book on Amazon:  "customers who bought items you recently viewed also bought these items".  As Yochai Benkler explains, the Amazon recommendation function is simply "a mechanical means of extracting judgments of relevance and accreditation from the action of many individuals.”  Brent Sampson has a more succinct description.  “A recommendation engine analyzes the purchase affinities between buyers and looks for buying patterns.”

While some people find “preference engines” incredibly helpful, Daniel J. Solove finds these “aggregate knowledge” devices mildly creepy:

Amazon can keep track of every book or item that a customer browses but does not purchase.  With a click, I can see dozens of books that Amazon.com thinks I'll be interested in.  It is eerily good, and it can pick out books for me better than my relatives can.  It has me pegged.

On YouTube the same algorithmic strategy is at work.  “With democratic authority, viewers determine popularity and relevance” Ben McConnel explains.  YouTube then awards videos with honors, the most popular of which is "most viewed".

Even in the “irreverent” blogosphere, popularity is of primary concern.   “Many A-list bloggers” according to Paul Gillin, author of The New Influencers, “said they haven't taken a real vacation in years because they're concerned about their popularity ranking.”

Naturally, Yahoo is cashing in on the popularity trend as well.  Just last week, they launched Yahoo! Buzz.  This community based news article website is similar to Digg in that top-rated news  stories are determined by “people like you.”  According to the Yahoo! Buzz website:

A story is ranked based on its Buzz Score. The score is derived from search term popularity, the number of times a story is emailed from Buzz, and the number of votes a story receives.