computers-R-stupid

The ideal online world is slow, contemplative, ad-free, and revenue-neutral. You read a text and think about it; you look at a picture and save it to your drive for future study; you click a link and music plays; you watch a TV episode, mull it over, and perhaps watch another episode tomorrow.

In the real online world you receive content from "platforms" chock full of ads and interactive bells and whistles. For information, instruction, and entertainment, you watch videos. You are encouraged to "binge."

If you inhabit anything close to the "ideal" scenario above, this Columbia Journalism Review article The Secret Cost of Pivoting to Video may seem like pure babble: 1200 words of intense jargon and industryspeak, meaningful only in the context of a few nanoseconds of history. Nevertheless it's worth a read. Apparently a significant number of online publishers fired writers and switched to video because Facebook lured them with the promise of ad dollars. They lost money because (i) Facebook was "likely" pulling a "bait and switch" to get them to pay to search-optimize their own product (an accusation carefully hedged by CJR) and (ii) many of the publishers lacked the skills to make "good" videos (defined by CJR as "addictive, bright, and fast"). Fascinating. Or not.

Meanwhile, in the slow lane, bloggers are giving themselves extended unpaid vacations and pivoting to jpegs.

Blogger-turned-mainstream-pundit Josh Marshall writes a long editorial alternately excoriating and sucking up to [Eric Schmidt's company] in the wake of the Barry Lynn defenestration. Apparently he doesn't know that this person named Snowden and certain other critics demonstrated that [Eric Schmidt's company] crossed the "evil" line quite some time ago. Thus TPM, Marshall's magazine, is still dependent on ad revenues and email services from [Eric Schmidt's company]. From the concluding paragraph:

So we will keep using all of [Eric Schmidt's company]’s gizmos and services and keep cashing their checks. Hopefully, they won’t see this post and get mad.

He's joking but not really. Even if you don't take their money or use their cruddy email, they can punish you by denigrating your search cred. Some blogs won't even mention [Eric Schmidt's company] by name. Is this bad? Yes.

Those hoping that Facebook might actually die have assumed it would happen because "the kids" moved to another platform, as happened with MySpace. Ten years later, here we all are...
Financial pundit Mark St. Cyr thinks it might happen for a different reason -- advertiser disillusionment. He compares turn-of-the-millennium AOL with present-day Zuckerland and sees many similarities on the ad-oversell front.

Facebook is, for all intents and purposes, an advertising tool for advertisers only. It derives nearly all its revenue from advertisers. i.e., If there’s no advertisers buying on Facebook – there’s no Facebook. Regardless of how many free “users” sign up.

Pretty simple construct, but imperative to truly contemplate because it’s not that FB provides anything that people truly need. It’s just an outlet connecting eyeballs. And it is those “eyeballs” which are the product. And as soon as advertisers begin regarding 2 Billion eyeballs as being not worth more than two-red-cents, because nobody is buying? That’s when $Billion dollar valuations begin to plummet.

"Plummet" is a word that looks nice in proximity to "Facebook." Hey, we can dream, can't we?

Wikipedia's entry on French composer Hector Berlioz contains a footnote (note 16) to support the statement that Berlioz's parents "disapproved" of his abandonment of medical studies in favor of music.

The footnote link takes the reader to a Wayback Machine-archived page on Berlioz from Karadar.it, a quasi-encyclopedic entry with no sources given.

What is Karadar.it? A website formerly run by the Karadar Bertoldi Ensemble, a piano and violin duo based in Italy. A bio of the violinist, Sibylle Karadar, appears on another site.

At least one critic satirically complained that Karadar.it was scraping content on classical music from all over the web and passing it off as original. See Brief Outline of How to Steal, by Karadar

Karadar.it eventually migrated content to Karadar.com. Karadar.it is now a parked domain with a fake blog in Italian; Karadar.com is a portal page for people interested in auto accessories ("car radar" -- get it?).