Incessant Expressions

Digg dumps AdSense for some Microsoft love. This is an interesting business move by the web’s most loved/hated Mac fanboy Kevin Rose. Apparently Google just can’t deliver the goods — or monetization — that he wants. And in a double whammy decision Microsoft the AdeCEN advertising platform this week. Coincidence?

Jill from the University of Wisconsin reports that more teens and young adults know more about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan than they do about current national news. I would have never had guessed, neither would anyone else over the age of 21. The current MTV generation is far more concerned with who’s sleeping with who, who’s doing what drug(s), or what the latest reggaeton song is than who the current Presidential candidates are. This is not by chance, it’s by design, partly due in fault to the popular media itself. Since I was younger, I noticed a slow trend on cable channels such as MTV where they were moving away from their core audience of music lovers and onto molding their key demographics into robots. More adolescents watch MTV and read gossip magazines/sites than they do their school textbooks and the major news outlets are now aiding this along by making the latest celebrity scandal “breaking news” rather than the gossip column fodder it was merely 10 years ago. I can walk into the Town Center Mall and approach any male or female between the ages of 10 and 24 and almost all of them will know more about pimped out cars, lascivious celebs and the latest fashion of the day than they will know about Charlie Crist, our state’s governor or what the FCAT really measures.

Astronauts are now gettin’ crunk before shuttle missions. I guess this gives a whole new meaning to the term DUI.

Telstra, Australia’s biggest ISP, bans Facebook from corporate networks. For once, I say good for them. This isn’t the first time Facebook has been banned from offices — or had employees banned from it — because it’s a huge time sink hole. Sites like Facebook and Myspace are banned from our company’s network because everyone, from top to bottom, wastes half their day futzing about instead of working.

IPTV mogul Joost, started by the same guys behind Skype and KaZaA, boasts 1M beta users (I saw this analyzed on about 10 different sites, I couldn’t link them all) but how true are these numbers? They’re definitely gaming the analytics system by saying they have 1M user accounts signed up in a “private” beta but honestly, how many of those users continually use the service? My guess — I am not an analyst — is probably less than 10% and more than likely closer to 5%. This could be seen as a falsification of market penetration and user reach by simply going on the numbers alone and has bitten other social media networks before.

And in a last minute “out of left field” appearance, “secret” web sites such as 4chan and 7chan hoard the vast nameless hacker group called Anonymous. They do it for the “epic lulz” and this almost made me fall out of my chair with laughter. I troll 7chan regularly and this whole piece was definitely full of “lulz” and “win” and the tipster who went to the news channel is lambasted on Encyclopaedia Dramatica — which is fueled by the people he used to call “/b/rothas” — and is quite funny. I cannot fathom how slow of a news day it must have been for them to not only cover 4/7chan but to actually use the word “lulz” more than twice. It’s a fine piece of fear-mongering and extreme disinformation. (Most Anonymous, myself included, really do not care to hack your computer/MySpace/Facebook/Photobucket/email. We prefer lolcats (cat image macros), flaming furries and weeaboos, and an endless stream of memes to keep us occupied. Those profiled actually fit far more into /i/nvasion idiots and ra/i/ders than the typical fare of /b/tards (the appropriate name of those who frequent /b/).)

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