I detect rising butthurt on the twitters and internets over Facebook’s heavy-handed attempts to monetize the various plots that Facebooks share-croppers have worked hard to clear, plant, cultivate.
I think this means I’m a conservative now. Still gonna vote for Barry on Tuesday.
Speaking of Them, I loved the recent Jon Stewart interview with Pete Townshend (you can find the extended version of the Daily Show web site.) Pete is still smart, quick, and hilarious at 75.Report
Tony Comstock’s “magnum opus” of media and social criticism at The Atlantic was based on paralleling the period of 1968-1975 with 1999-2006; examining them through the lens of Climax Ecology and classing both periods of disruption as “clearing events” akin to a forest fire.
My understanding is Pete Townshend was not impressed with what he saw at Woodstock in 1969. By contrast, I was very caught up in (as Tim Wu puts it) the utopian promise of the early internet. Quite possibly I was just rolling around in the mud.Report
I knew some people who, around 1996, signed for for an ISP that promised them free web access forever. When, about eighteen months later, it admitted that their business model hadn’t worked and they were going to have to start charging, they felt betrayed, as if they were worse off than people who hadn’t gotten a year and a half of free service.Report
Here’s Pete covering one of his (and my) favorite pop songs:
http://youtu.be/7hKOdHMh3FoReport
Always important to remember:
When it comes to free online services, you are not the customer, you are the commodity. This is why I pay a modest sum for my email service and for my online photo storage.Report
What? Are you all saying there’s no such thing as a free lunch? Where have I heard that before?Report
Of course there is such a thing, you just need the gov’t to tax someone else, preferably those rich folks that don’t pay their fair share, for the money.Report
By rich people, talking to poor people, on their way to an expense-account-covered three-martini lunch.Report
You won’t see any more three-martini lunches on the ol’ corporate expense account anymore. That stuff is denied.Report
You know the game. The Exec VP and plain old VP go together. The VP signs for it and the EVP approves it.Report
Not a new thing. The same thing’s true to an extent of cable, where you provide eyeballs for the advertisers – which is why the networks can afford to let me watch my favourite shows on TV with a few ads now that I don’t have cable.
I’m fine with sidebar ads as the price of good free content. It’s only when companies start gathering information on me and selling it that I get leery.Report
Yes but if you agree to let the corp. gather the info that changes things, doesn’t it?Report
Who said we agreed to anything?
And there’s plenty of times that I’ve wanted to disagree, but that my medical care has been held hostage to “sign on the line.”Report
You may not remember but to had to agree to certain terms of service when you joined Facebook.Report