Secrets make the world go 'round. Uncovering those secrets is the lifeblood of intelligence services and journalists alike.
As Amy Davidson points out in the announcement of The New Yorker's new digital dead drop, the magazine has been accepting leaks from whistleblowers since the first issue in 1925.
This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity. It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own post, including Swartz’s role and his survivors’ feelings about the project. (They approve, something that was important for us here to know.) The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented.
Follow the link above for the full infographic of how Strongbox works.
Later this month a documentary on the mother of a dead drops, WikiLeaks, will go into limited release. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks will look at that site and it's scandals.
The world is open, if we want it.
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A version of this story aired on NPR’s Morning Edition.
The online video sharing site YouTube is this generation's MTV. Artists like Gotye and Psy have found mainstream success when their videos go viral. Yet the site is dominated by amateurs covering other people’s songs – from toddlers chirping The Beatles to teens tackling Led Zeppelin.
Between those two extremes is an alternative universe of aspiring professional musicians who use their versions of cover songs on YouTube to build fan bases of their own.
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It's a little bit freaky to think that blockbuster movies can be broken down into an algorithm. That's how most folks–yours truly included–took the recent New York Times article about data based script consultant Vinny Bruzzese.
In a post by Nicole Laporte at Fast Co.Create Bruzzese counters that perception:
“It’s consulting; it’s an evaluation of playability. It isn’t cookie-cutter, and it’s not an algorithm,” he says, describing how he and his colleagues judge aspects of a screenplay–themes, narrative arcs, character traits–based on how movies with those same traits have performed in the past. For instance, bowling scenes “tend to pop up in films that fizzle,” according to the article. (The Big Lebowski is apparently a big exception.)
Then Bruzzese goes on to give four reasons that Iron Man 3 works better than Iron Man 2and, gosh darnit, he sounds perfectly reasonable. Read 'em and nod your head.
So much for hyperbole, y'all.
(I will point out that The Big Lebowski was a flop at release, and only achieved cult status in the years that followed.)
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It was hinted at earlier in the week, and now it is our grim, streaming reality. YouTube has begun offering up paid subscriptions as an option for some of their partners:
Starting today, we’re launching a pilot program for a small group of partners that will offer paid channels on YouTube with subscription fees starting at $0.99 per month. Every channel has a 14-day free trial, and many offer discounted yearly rates. For example, Sesame Street will be offering full episodes on their paid channel when it launches. And UFC fans can see classic fights, like a full version of their first event from UFC’s new channel. You might run into more of these channels across YouTube, or look here for a list of pilot channels. Once you subscribe from a computer, you’ll be able to watch paid channels on your computer, phone, tablet and TV, and soon you’ll be able to subscribe to them from more devices.
The model is fairly similar to what you can already find on iTunes. Individual episodes can be purchased for streaming, if the channel so chooses, or a monthly pass can be purchased. The National Geographic Kids channel, for example, offers up subscriptions at $3.99/month or $29.99/year while UFC clocks in at $5.99/month.
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The New York Times has done the reporting here:
This week YouTube, the world's largest video Web site, will announce a plan to let some video makers charge a monthly subscription to their channels. There will be paid channels for children's programming, entertainment, music and many other topic areas, according to people with knowledge of the plan, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they had been asked by YouTube not to comment publicly yet. Some of the channels – there will be several dozen at the outset – will cost as little as $1.99 a month.
Riddle me this: are we really ready for à la carte video subscriptions? Specifically are we ready for à la carte video served up via YouTube's rather anemic video player?
Let's face it: YouTube may be the most ubiquitous video player, but it is also one of the worst. They've made great strides in the years since they launched, and the arrival of rivals in the ecosystem like Vimeo have certainly lit a bit of a fire under the engineering team… but it's still lame.
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First off: when did AOL get into the quality online video business in a big way? How did I miss that memo?
More to the point: how are they managing to be so forward thinking as to make author/comedian/entrepreneur/Twitter wit extraordinaire Baratunde Thurston the front man for a show about crowdfunding?
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The University of Sourthern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism is firing up a new project that seeks to measure the impact of media. From theNew York Times:
With $3.25 million in initial financing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the college’s Norman Lear Center is about to create what it is calling a “global hub” for those who would measure the actual impact of media — journalistic, cinematic, social and otherwise.
This is about something more than counting pageviews and "likes". The researchers are going to develop new metrics to gauge how much real world impact–related searches for information, politcal action, etc.–a given piece of media generates.
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This is exactly what we needed: an app that lets people react emotionally to a newscast and let everybody know about it:
The idea, as conceived in a beta product called Social Soundtracker, allows users to stream a speech by, say, President Obama, sign in using Facebook, and register emotions by clicking on five emoticons — clap, boo, laugh, gasp, and aww — in the app.
ABC News is pushing this brilliant idea that will surely save the Republic by creating a feedback loop of instantaneous response so powerful that no politician will dare do anything untoward ever again.
No word if there will be a sarcastic eye-roll button added in future updates.
Image via The Hollywood Reporter
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Greedhead Records founder @Himanshu put this call out on Twitter yesterday:
Hi! My names HIMA! I like rap and Queens where im from and India where my parents from. What do you like?
What followed was a stream of retweets from his fans who answered that question. Eliminating the noise words, others that appeared most frequently included “girls,” “rap,” “pizza,” “music,” “art,” “weird,” and “witchy.”
Here’s a snapshot.
Not many surprises there, I know…though I guess I thought there’d be more Dadaism.
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Gawker Media relaunched their flagship site yesterday with a new comment/publishing system and a dedication to the motto:
"Honesty is our only virtue"
On that note: a new Gawker layout/philosophy is like a new iPhone. They come along every year, but have they fundamentally changed our relationship to anything since they launched the first time?
Although the new comment system Kinja is… well it's slightly different. Something the family of sites seems to have been reaching towards for years.
Here's the big question for Gawker: can they regain the clout they've lost to BuzzFeed without relying on the sheer volume of meme-pander that Buzzfeed does? Or are they stuck with the choice of dumbing down further or reaching for relevance and losing readers?
Let us be honest: the blogosphere is kinda lame these days, y'all.
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Now streaming: the archive of our Google Hangout On-Air with Jesse Vigil of Psychic Bunny, one of the designers of the new audio adventure game FREEQ (iOS/Android).
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We’ve featured dancer Matt Luck’s work before.
I first encountered Sifteo Cubes back at IndieCade last October, and spent some time playing around with the little blocks which I first mistook for iPod Nanos.
Over the weekend I was having a conversation about the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum that’s been announced.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and promise you that this will be the first of two posts on Present Shock, the Douglas Rushkoff book that has been getting a mountain of attention in the tech press since it was released earlier this month.
