Rebooting the News today at noon

From scripting.com.

Here’s the MP3.

Inside Job wins Best Documentary

From scripting.com.

I watched the Oscars last night, of course. A dull show, compared to years-past, made completely evident by a tribute to Bob Hope and a brief appearance by Billy Crystal. I like Anne Hathaway, and James Franco is okay. But they sucked as Oscar masters of ceremony. I’ll take Alec Baldwin or Steve Martin, Whoopie and Robin. This will be the long-forgotten Oscars. And it was a fairly forgettable year at the movies, as well. Imho of course.

I was glad to see The King’s Speech win so many awards. And was equally pleased to see The Social Network not win. The former was a surprisingly good story, and while they say it wasn’t historically accurate — the same can be said of Social Network. Seems relatively harmless to get the story of a long-dead royal wrong. But not so harmless to tell the wrong story of how software is developed, and what it’s like to be a developer. That’s the world we live in now, and the software stars are the new royalty. But we’re not rock stars. Software is hard work, requires enormous dedication, focus and intellect and a drive to win. None of that came through in the movie about Facebook. They focused on Zuck’s geekish weirdness with girlfriends and conference rooms full of lawyers and university administrators. BFD. Since when do lawyers matter? Seriously.

But the Oscars got one thing right — if you haven’t seen Inside Job, you must — now.

You don’t understand anything about the world you live in until you understand that the bankers are every bit as depraved as they appear to be. The media has not told the story about their bosses. Not a big surprise there, I guess. There was a moment when our political leaders were outraged, and spoke up. It’s there in the movie. But we’ve gone back to sleep. We’ll wake up again, that’s for sure, and it’ll be worse next time through the loop.

You can buy Inside Job on Amazon today, for delivery next week. Go get it now. It’s a wonderful movie. With it we get back to a tradition of telling ourselves the truth. We need a lot of that to dig out of the mess we’re in.

Box.net raises $48 million

From scripting.com.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that number.

What could a startup do with $48 million?

It’s an incomprehensibly large number of dollars.

I was reminded of a similar investment I heard about a long time ago. A company named Firedrop, that had a product that looked like a loser (it was, in fact a loser) raised something like $90 million from Kleiner, Perkins, which was then the leading venture capital firm.

It didn’t make sense until I realized that KP had raised a fund of over $1 billion. How could they explain that to their investors? Where would they find companies to use that much money? So (I guess) they parked big buckets of money in several of their startups, with no plans to spend it or invest it. I don’t know if that theory was correct, but the fund, the investor and the company are long-gone.

It would be really interesting to get some ideas of what a company like Box.net will do with so much money.

Twitter is down

From scripting.com.

Normally I would tweet this and link to something that explained.

This is what communication was like before Twitter.

That, and maybe it will be once again.

PS: Often when I post a note like this, Twitter immediately comes back.

PPS: At 10:10AM Eastern it’s back.

Media observations

From scripting.com.

Two quick mini-posts in one, both about media.

1. Reading Keith Richards’ autobiography, just starting it, but already there’s been a huge payoff. Something I had never thought about. Before vinyl records there was no way to mass-exchange music between people. The new medium made it possible for Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Jerry Lee Lewis, all Americans, to influence two British teens, Richards and his co-Stone, Mick Jagger. He says that’s why we saw an explosion in music in the 50s and 60s. Before that it was all Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Richards ought to know, he was a part of the explosion. And the book is an eye-opener because I, like others, assumed Richards was kind of a stoner idiot savant. Quite the opposite, he’s a hacker — a brilliant one.

2. I watched a video with David Carr and AO Scott of the NYT. Carr said the TV networks love shows like the Oscars because of the realtime connection. I know what he means. I am a huge fan of movies, and am rooting for and against a bunch of movies that are up for awards tonight. He says the Grammys had record viewing this year because of social media. I certainly experience that, I don’t know if I’ve ever watched the Grammys, but I did this year because of all the interesting back and forth on Twitter among my cohorts. I will of course watch the Oscars. TV and realtime networks go really well together. Glad the TV guys now see that. (And don’t let Al Jazeera sweep up the whole net-based news thing while you guys are pretending it’s the 90s in your news departments.)

My Oscar picks

From scripting.com.

Best picture: King’s Speech.

Best actress: Hailee Steinfeld. (Nominated in Supporting Actress.)

Best supporting actress: Helena Bonham Carter.

Best actor: Colin Firth.

Supporting actor: Geoffrey Rush.

Best documentary: Inside Job.

Here’s a list of all the nominees.

PS: I’d love to get a list of people live-blogging the Oscars. I want their feeds to turn into a river.

My Oscar picks

scripting.com:

Best picture: King’s Speech.

Best actress: Hailee Steinfeld. (Nominated in Supporting Actress.)

Best supporting actress: Helena Bonham Carter.

Best actor: Colin Firth.

Supporting actor: Geoffrey Rush.

Best documentary: Inside Job.

Here’s a list of all the nominees.

PS: I’d love to get a list of people live-blogging the Oscars. I want their feeds to turn into a river.

Media observations

scripting.com:

Two quick mini-posts in one, both about media.

1. Reading Keith Richards’ autobiography, just starting it, but already there’s been a huge payoff. Something I had never thought about. Before vinyl records there was no way to mass-exchange music between people. There was no way for Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Jerry Lee Lewis, all Americans, to influence two British teens, Richards and his co-Stone, Mick Jagger. He says that’s why we saw an explosion in music in the 50s and 60s. Before that it was all Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Richards ought to know, he was a big part of the explosion. And the book is an eye-opener because I, like others, assumed Richards was kind of a stoner idiot savant. Quite the opposite, he’s a hacker — a brilliant one.

2. I watched a video with David Carr and AO Scott of the NYT. Carr said the TV networks love shows like the Oscars because of the realtime connection. I know what he means. I am a huge fan of movies, and am rooting for and against a bunch of movies that are up for awards tonight. He says the Grammys had record viewing this year because of social media. I certainly experience that, I don’t know if I’ve ever watched the Grammys, but I did this year because of all the interesting back and forth on Twitter among my cohorts. I will of course watch the Oscars. TV and realtime networks go really well together. Glad the TV guys now see that. (And don’t let Al Jazeera sweep up the whole net-based news thing while you guys are pretending it’s the 90s in your news departments.)

Twitter is down

scripting.com:

Normally I would tweet this headline and link to something that explained.

My only comment is that this is what communication was like before Twitter.

That, and maybe it will be once again.

Radio UserLand serialnum

From scripting.com.

I’ve been keeping a copy of Radio 8 running on one of my servers so I can easily do prior art research.

I had been running it for more than 30 days, so I got a message saying my Trial Version had expired and I should enter a serial number. If I didn’t have one I could purchase one at the UserLand store.

Of course, the store is long-gone, so what to do?

Well it turns out I was organized enough to keep a serialnum, in the place where I would expect to find it.

U800-3V32-6705

There it is. In case anyone needs one, that should work.

PS: I uploaded the last versions of the apps to a static folder.