As seen on Gawker this morning: Mailing label fail! To me, this sums up everything that’s currently happening in the magazine industry. Using gimmicks in a desperate attempt to stem the losses of subscribers and advertisers but then getting gummed up (sorry) by old-media elements like mailing labels.
First, NASA debunks 2012 end of the world theories with calm, reasoned arguments like:
“Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012.”
And now The Discovery Channel shoots holes (sorry) into the theory that the Large Hadron Collider will create miniature black holes that will consume the Earth.
What a bummer. The Earth won’t be destroyed in a particularly cinematic fashion worthy of Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich. That is, of course, unless they are lying to us while they set up their Himalayan arks or colonies on Mars for the rich and elite…
Esquire is getting some good press for their augmented reality issue. Personally, “augmented reality” to me means something William Gibson’s Virtual Light
Gimmicks are what the print world is about this month – just look at the Marge Simpson Playboy cover. For some bizarre reason the big media players are desperate to sell print copies even at the cost of the digital initiatives. I know of several magazine publishers, both large and small, who have cancelled their digital projects because “they just can’t deal with it right now.” Can’t deal with the very thing that could save their business, based on how it saved some of their early adopting competitors.
I wonder how long before the RIAA sues Libox out of existence. In fact, I’m surprised they haven’t already been sued for the music and movie sharing capabilities. Otherwise, it seems like just an FTP server that uses software to manage the sync setups and a third party server to facilitate connections to get around the dynamic IP addresses most people have. Better than using something like Gnutella that shares it with the entire world, I guess.
This afternoon I was out for a walk and listening via my BlackBerry to the All Tech Considered segment on recharging personal electronics by walking when, lo and behold, my phone’s battery reaches the critical point where it automatically shuts off the transceivers. If only I had one of those new-fangled rechargers I could have heard the rest of the segment about new-fangled rechargers!
Is it really November already? Has it really been over two weeks since the last entry? I wish I had been more productive this month… well, at least as far as this blog is concerned. I’ve been somewhat productive in other areas, however. Among other things, I’ve been helping a friend of a friend to restore his custom PHP-based CMS after a hard drive failure wiped it out and the last working backup was from early August 2009.
I’m posting this via the WordPress app for BlackBerry, let’s hope this works.
