Here are a few items that I meant to get to this morning. Actually, a few were from yesterday morning or earlier. Does that really matter?
A lot of times, we content programming types worry that a story has gone stale, even if it's only been out for a day (sometimes less). This is because we're always online and watching the news, looking for the next story. No one wants to be seen as covering old news (unless you're doing some in-depth analysis or think piece, which doesn't happen all that much when you're writing for a broad audience). This is especially true because we're really sensitive about the relatively limited inventory of promo space on main screens.
Even in places where I don't have to worry about promo space limitations, like this blog, I still don't want to waste a lot of my own time trying to go in-depth on something that's already been done to death, by people with specialized knowledge or specific insights.
Then again, if I can quickly cover something, why not? If you've already read about it, you can just always just skip ahead, and if you haven't, it's like that NBC summer reruns promo: "If you haven't seen it, it's new to you!"
Anyway, that was a longer-than-planned intro for a few quick hits:
* 9,305 Years Wasted Watching YouTube Videos: This was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday -- columnist Lee Gomes "scraped" some publically-available data off the YouTube social video-sharing site and did some number crunching -- in addition to some other figures and anecdotes, he says people have spent a total of 9,305 years watching YouTube videos since it started last year.
That's a heck of a lot of Star Trek/Simpsons-theme theremin/synth mashups right there.
* The Katie Couric Diet Plan? -- Right on the heels of my entry on how photo retouchers alter reality, we find out that a magazine's photo of Katie Couric was digitally altered to make her look slimmer.
* Memo to CNN Anchors About Wireless Mikes: During President Bush's Katrina Anniversary speech on Tuesday, CNN Anchor Kyra Phillips forgot to turn off her wireless mike during a trip to the ladies' room, so you could hear her talking smack about her sister-in-law (among other things).
Many have remarked that the next family reunion should be interesting.
* More Fun at CNN: I actually saw this live earlier today, though I didn't give it much thought at the time -- a link on the CNN.com main page to a story about a speech President Bush gave today read, "Bush 3.0 releases patch for Iraq war."
The phrase "Bush 3.0?" is used as a sub-header in the story, so the headline writer extended the software metaphor with the patch-release thing.
I also note that it looks like the CNN.com folks rolled out a slight redesign of their article pages today.
* Political Sock Puppetry? A City Council member and mayoral candidate in Rochester, Minn. has been anonymously posting extremely complimentary things about himself in the comments area on the Post-Bulletin newspaper's Web site.
If he were identifying himself, this would be a very different story (probably not even a story), but it's a whole 'nother ballgame because he's essentially pretending to be someone else by referring to himself in the third-person.
This last item is from Backstage at Newza da Weird, which is the blog companion to the great News of the Weird newspaper column/Web site done by Chuck Shepherd. It's apparently been around since April, and I want to know why I wasn't informed. Needless to say, it's going into my daily reads list.
Was any of this "new to you"? Let me know what you think of these (or any other) links I feature.
Thanks -- Joe
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