Punked

Balloon boy, all a big hoax, it seems…

Old Versus New Media: Food Writer Edition

Cook’s Illustrated editor Chris Kimball has thrown down the gauntlet!

If you haven’t been following this food blogger versus professional writer battle that’s been simmering, it started when Kimball wrote a fairly silly op/ed in the Times, bashing both the so-called amateurish writing of bloggers, as well as the larger movement of participatory culture that is happening in all areas of media, where “regular people” have been given a voice through social media. When it comes to food writing, Kimball doesn’t seem too keen on this at all:

…in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up.They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers.

Bloggers have hit back; in particular, Adam Roberts, over at the Amateur Gourmet, has a great response:

The derision and condescension in this statement is baffling. Every food writer—from MFK Fisher to Ruth Reichl herself—started at the bottom and worked their way up. Kimball, at the end of his column, invokes Julia Child, a cook who didn’t start her food career until much later in life. If she’d had a blog documenting her time at Le Cordon Bleu (and maybe she would have, if she’d been born a few decades later), would Kimball complain that she hadn’t spilled enough blood in the kitchen yet? That “inexperience rarely leads to wisdom?”

It’s naïve to think that all food writing on the web is created equal, that the “million instant pundits” are all valued the same. The truth is that there are, indeed, an enormous number of food blogs out there, but it’s still a meritocracy: only the good ones gain traction. The most popular food blogs are popular because of their quality; in many ways, their content is better than much of what you’ll find in actual food magazines, including Kimball’s.

Kimball comes across here as elitist, an old guard fighting off the new. If he doesn’t read food blogs, he’s missing out on a diverse world of recipes and ideas and perspective on food. His notion of an “anonymous Twitter comment” is also strange — while we may not see each other on Twitter, the people I talk to there are hardly strangers. And yes, if someone I follow (and trust) on Twitter makes a recipe or restaurant recommendation, I’ll surely be paying attention.

In any case, perhaps looking to settle this (or cash in on the controversy, more likely!), Kimball has upped the ante, challenging any recipe found on a wiki to one of his from the Test Kitchen:

So, I am willing to put my money, and my reputation, where my big mouth is. I offer a challenge to any supporter of the WIKI or similar concept to jump in and go head to head with our test kitchen. We will jointly agree on a recipe, on the rules, on a time frame, etc. At the end, we will ask a panel of impartial judges to make and test the recipes and declare a winner.

It’s a fantastic idea, and should be lots of fun.

Let the games begin!!!

If You Printed The Internet

More here.

Lindsay Graham’s Handrubsave

Via TPM:

I Love You Man

Wow was that an awful movie.

Parasitic Media: Butcher Edition

A good example of parasitic media, this time involving, well, butchers.

What’s significant here, though, is there’s not a blogger in sight: New York mag writes a story, copied by the Times, copied by Nightline.

New York details the, um, “borrowing,” here.

Netroots and Politics

Within Henry Farrell’s review of two new books about the netroots, there is some excellent analysis:

The netroots are neither genteel nor interested in nuance. They want to aggressively confront a right that they see as dangerous and an establishment that they see as at best semi-corrupt. Their combativeness can be a problem. The fights over Hillary Clinton’s candidacy were so bitter because members of the netroots used debating tactics against each other that they had previously reserved for external enemies. But they also potentially provide a model for a politics that can actually engage citizens. As political scientists such as Theda Skocpol and Nancy Rosenblum have argued, vigorous political contention mobilizes people and gets them involved in civil society.

The netroots may help to create a more participatory American politics. If they do succeed, however, it will be the result of their long-term effects in building political movements, not their short-term effects in an election like that of 2008, when they were not especially consequential.

The important overall point I think he makes is there is no absolute answer to whether or not the netroots “matter” in politics. It’s not a “good” or “bad” thing, and it’s likely still too early to really tell how significant the last few years of the active blogosphere have been. Political change is a very slow thing…

The whole piece is well worth reading.

The Materiality of Netflix

Netflix seems like magic. You click a few clicks on your web browser, and in a couple days, a movie appears in your mailbox.

Like Amazon, Zappos, and the other businesses thriving in the doc-com world, Netflix is a business that keeps hidden from its customers all the messy physicality fueled by our mouse clicks. Point and shoot retail.

Broadly speaking, in fact, the net — by design — hides the materiality of information. Terms like virtual communities, cloud computing, and software as a service are devices of obfuscation. Click the mouse, and things just happen.

But things actually just don’t happen in the world; they happen somewhere. Bits and bytes cannot remain hidden forever, and eventually reveal, or manifest, themselves. In the world of Web 2.0, this manifestation usually happens in a data center — a security-hardened, temperature-controlled facility filled with very few people, but many, many racks of computers. The Times recently foregrounded this largely unknown world of the data center, with an excellent piece on Microsoft’s computer storage facilities:

For companies like Google, Yahoo and, increasingly, Microsoft, the data center is the factory. What these companies produce are services. It was the increasing “viability of a service-based model,” as Ray Ozzie, now the chief software architect at Microsoft, put it in 2005 — portended primarily by Google and its own large-scale network of data centers — that set Microsoft on its huge data-center rollout: if people no longer needed desktop software, they would no longer need Microsoft. This realization brought new prominence to the humble infrastructure layer of the data center, an aspect of the business that at Microsoft, as at most tech companies, typically escaped notice…

Netflix, on the other hand, might be a service, but because they are not software-only like Microsoft or Google, there is a greater materiality at hand, contained in a factory-like setting of the Netflix warehouse. Only what is produced here is the packaging and repackaging of the same DVDs, over and over.

The process begins in an undisclosed location:

Its biggest secret remains the warehouses themselves…Indeed, one of the few things about the building that suggested it was not a meth lab was that, at sunrise, the parking lot was full — shifts begin at 3 a.m. The busiest time is around 7 a.m., but as I entered, the first thing I noticed was how silent it was. No one was chatting. The second thing I noticed was how, for a Web-based business, there were few computers — maybe seven in the building, which has towering white walls and a concrete floor. Every Netflix warehouse looks like every other Netflix warehouse, down to the same flat, bright wattage of its light bulbs. It’s not attractive, which might explain the hasty mismatch of promotional posters taped to its walls like college dorm decor — a poster for “Atonement” alongside a poster for the direct-to-video “Dr. Dolittle: Tail to the Chief” alongside a horror flick poster.

There’s no there there, by design.

No computers — Netflix runs on manual work, with employees flipping through each DVD one by one:

…at the 28,500-square-foot warehouse, from which more than 60,000 discs are shipped daily in the Chicago area alone, cartons are placed at the feet of employees, who glance in two directions — down (to pick up an envelope) and up (to look at the disc), and that’s about it. This is the first, and least automated, stage of the process, performed mainly by women, including a seemingly disproportionate number of local grandparents; they have full medical benefits and a 40-hour workweek.

They inspect each returned disc. They rip open each envelope, toss it, pull the disc from its sleeve, check that the title matches the sleeve, inspect the disc for cracks or scratches, inspect the sleeve for stains or marks, clean the disc with a quick circular motion on a towel pulled tight across a square block of wood, insert the disc into its sleeve, and file the disc in one of two bins. The bin to the right is for acceptable discs, the bin to the left is for damaged discs or discs not in the proper sleeve.

To a casual observer, this all seems to happen in a single motion, a flurry of fingers.

The image of a Netflix worker, inspecting thousands of individual DVDs for scratches and cracks, dispels the utoptian notion of cyberspace, where all of our disembodied minds are floating around the net. In typical Web 2.0 rhetoric, our second lives leave our first lives behind; the truth is, though, even our second lives have to run somewhere.

There is a there there. Just no escaping it.

Kurzweil BS’s Facebook

In an otherwise worthwhile interview with Ray Kurzweil, there is this:

Is Facebook helping people live longer?

Facebook is enabling us to share knowledge and achieve the wisdom of crowds. By being able to harness the wisdom of 250 million people, now on Facebook, we can ferret out the truth of what’s going in the world very quickly. We can see this in recent political events. From a practical perspective, it enables somebody with a new idea or new insight to share that, for it to spread virally through these kinds of knowledge-sharing sites.

It really does foster freedom and democracy, and not just on the political level but even things like health and medicine. Patients are going to their doctor’s office, armed with the latest knowledge. By being part of the community of people who have their condition, they’ll be more knowledgeable than the doctor. [This] changes the nature of the relationship.

Kurweil is a futurist, and no dummy. I think he was simply being courteous here — Facebook might be many things, but it ain’t helping people live longer.

That aside, I simply cannot wait for Kurzweil’s version of the future to happen:

There are early prototypes of where I think computing is going. To make devices smaller and smaller, they are more and more convenient, but we actually don’t want to look at a tiny screen. We’d like to actually have full immersion screens that we sort of live in. We are going to put these devices in our eyeglasses. We can just create a virtual screen that’s large and hovering in air that’s high resolution. Electronics will be just woven in your clothes or your belt buckle. The display will be augmented reality, and we’ll be online all the time.

Cool. Just like Manfred Macx.

Unethical

That’s the only word I can think that properly describes this.

I would like to understand why it’s not unethical, and how it could be considered proper journalism.