I am not the most popular journalist among the so-called Mac faithful. I’ve written some tough stuff about Apple over the years, and most of my analyses proved right long after my public lynchings. One of my posts from summer 2009 set off John Gruber, aka “Daring Fireball.” The blog post was a personal challenge to Apple chief executive Steve Jobs to return to work and do well.
Yesterday, I raked Mashable’s Ben Parr for his assertion that Apple’s then yet unannounced mobile advertising platform posed a credible threat to Google. Now that Apple has announced iAd, and seeing how Ben’s rumor reporting was right about it coming, I circle back for a postmortem. Simply stated: I stand by my assertion that his sourcing was weak and that he didn’t support bold assertions that Apple’s still unreleased mobile ad platform is way ahead Google’s.
Who spiked Ben Parr’s coffee with Apple “reality distortion field” Kool-Aid? The Mashable co-editor is gushing about Apple’s rumored mobile advertising platform and how it poses a credible threat to Google. Based on what? Among his other talents, Ben writes science fiction. Perhaps he confuses fact with fiction? Did he have a flashforward, another scifi concept, and see the future?
It’s a question I’ve pondered for some time, and I’m inclined to answer affirmative. The subliminal cultural impact of television is too easily overlooked, although the New York Times took a politically charged look in March 26 story “For ‘24,’ Terror Fight (and Series) Nears End“. The Times’ perspective is different than one I present here, but worth noting for what’s there and what is not.
Am I the only one to see the irony? March 31st New York Times post “The Rising Stars of Gossip Blogs” begins with a story about “a 25-year-old Village Voice gossip blogger and University of Utah dropout named Foster Kamer” breaking a big scoop about Business Insider: Fallen dot-com Wall Street analyst and risen dot-com media mogul Henry Blodget had fired John Carney, managing editor of the Clusterstock blog.
University of California Professor Robert Reich isn’t glowing over March employment figures, and neither am I. Positive stories about the figures ignore fundamental information.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU]
While checking RSS feeds yesterday, I came across one of John Gruber’s many cuss posts. By cuss post I don’t mean bad language but his cussing out something or someone, often with one word and link to source. John used “What a turd” to describe a video comparing Nokia’s N97 promo video against supposedly real world experience (Post title: “Nokia N97 Promotional Video vs Real Life”).
It’s April Fools’ Day, and I’m not joking. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun, by comparing and contrasting Apple old with Apple new. 🙂 Last night I posted to Betanews: “What 1984 Macintosh marketing reveals about iPad,” which is based in part on my April 2006 post “When Magazines Mattered,” about Apple buying all the ad pages—39 of them—in the Newsweek 1984 election issue. Magazines mattered to Apple for promoting Macintosh during its launch year. Now iPad matters to magazines, for which some publishers hope to turnaround sagging readership (and ad revenues). Ha, who’s paying whom now?
The ‘media’ is a freakin’ train wreck these days. You’re all a bunch of desperate panhandlers willing to sensationalize crack lint if you thought it would advance your readership. Commenter aduffbrew How could I disagree?
For the most part, blogging is not journalism. That’s my response to the longstanding debate about whether bloggers are journalists. Bloggers who don’t apply good standards of journalism shouldn’t be offered the same privileges as journalists. Similarly, journalists who fail to apply the same good standards should be stripped of privileges and prestige.
The most civilized place I’d ever been. Everybody would get a little bottle of milk on their doorstep, and no one would steal each other’s milk. It was very good milk. Rupert Murdoch hadn’t bought the Times yet, so it still published with the beautiful old typeface.
Anorexia was in. We lived in a nice little neighborhood, with the Forum ABC movie theater on the corner and a little Turkish restaurant called the Baghdad, where they’d play Neil Young music and sell you a joint. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven.
Iggy Pop
He answers question: “Almost 40 years ago, you recorded ‘Rave Power’ in England with David Bowie. What was London like?”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-8PBx7isoM] Photographer Carl Rytterfalk summited this video in response to my Nov. 5, 2009, post about about him. This is exceptional marketing—the kind of video people just won’t remember; they can’t forgot it.