Tearjerker of the day.

How We Work: When was the last time you saw Scott McNealy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Chuang-tzu on the same list? “We’re interested in the habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done.”

Every few months it seems like there’s a news story about a new perverse level of advertising: Fox “photoshopping” out MLB ballparks’ stadium ads with their own, actors paid to go to bars and show off their cool digital cameras, etc. So what’s so perverse about average people interspersing endorsements into their daily interactions with friends and acquaintences? They’re unpaid.

Maureen has more.

We’re watching Charlie Brown right now. All I want is…

Laura Miller: ‘Recommendations most often go wrong when the person who says ”You’d love this book” really means something like ”I love this book and I wish I weren’t the only person I know who does.”’

The shortcomings of algorithmic news aggregation like Google News are well-known (and often comic). But as I sort of alluded to in my post on RSS last night, I’ve been hoping for a while for some sort of news source that 1) aggregates— and ideally interprets— duplicate sources of the same story and 2) gives background to the story.

News stories suffer from the fact that each 5 paragraph story tends to contain 1-2 background paragraphs which assume you know nothing whatsoever about the issue, and 3-4 more assuming you know exactly how this most recent update advances the progressing story. Well, if you haven’t been following a story, it’s almost possible to follow what the update means, and how it fits into the overly general background in the story.

Well, the Wikimedia Foundation comes to the rescue.

[via Slashdot]

I discovered Blogshares yesterday evening, and am now addicted. It’s a fantasy stock market game, in which real blogs are treated as imaginary companies with shares you can buy and sell. Everybody starts out with $500, but there seem to be lots of bazillionaires. I must do something about my blog’s pathetic valuation ($1000) and my relative poverty (B$944.72 right now).

Just what it sounds like. Hooked with “An Algonquin Round Table Christmas (1927)”, charmed by the time I got to “Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas”, laughing out loud by “Bob & Carol & Ted & Santa (1973)”.

I feel like I might not have to plug this, but if you don’t use an RSS reader, you really should consider it.

You’d think a tool that lets you keep updated on 10x as many news sites and blogs as you can by browsing alone would make your reading experience more shallow, but my experience has been the opposite. I can easily see stuff that one source has picked up that is not just a reprint of an AP story. I can easily read 3 different takes on the same story to get a more multifaceted perspective.

You’d think a tool that makes it easy to only see what you want to see would narrow the range of things you learn about. But that’s also not been my experience. I see tons of stuff I would never have seen otherwise. It’s delivered to my desktop, so I don’t have to go out and look for it. Also, the cost of following a link that might turn out to be a dud is lower, so I have less reason to be stingy with my clicks, so I click on a lot of stuff I don’t think I’m interested in at first.

I currently use NewzCrawler, but I’m warming up to FeedDemon. Someday I’ll get a Mac again, and will use neither of those.

Oh, and Firefox, which I can’t recommend enough, comes with modest RSS abilities built-in.

Of course, you should subscribe to this blog, Terri’s blog, and for bonus voyeurism, our flickr photo feed.

I don’t think or comment on much on Reality TV— it seems like such an easy target, and everything you can say about it is either obvious or pointless. But I did have an idea for cross-promoting a reality show and a sitcom, which is going to be my first 2005 prediction (though for all I know it’s happened already). I’m predicting that some network (probably Fox, though any of them would do it) will air a sitcom episode where a popular character appears on a reality show, and then air the reality show with that actor appearing, in character. So, I’m officially on record now, and when it happens, you all get to congratulate me, and then weep for The Culture.

Speaking of predicting perverse TV, this Washington Post story mentions how Terry Southern, the guy who brought you Easy Rider and Dr. Strangelove, wrote a novel about a billionaire who stages elaborate pranks to see how much people will degrade themselves for money.

I actually did watch The Apprentice with my family over the Thanksgiving weekend. It really was a pretty degrading experience, even to watch. Basically, everybody is loathesome, both the aspirants and Trump, and it has nothing to do with how businesses really work. It would even be degrading to satirize.

And any time I start thinking about the limits of what satire can do, I think about this interview with Tom Lehrer from last year:

“The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be.”

His favourite quote on the subject is from British comedian Peter Cook, who, in founding the Establishment Club in 1961, said it was to be a satirical venue modelled on “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”.

Interesting bit in Slate on how something that’s non-news (in this case, the recent Supreme Court “decision” to ignore the Massachusetts gay marriage decision) gets blown into news.

Happy December 1! Here are some early holiday items for your slacking pleasure. These are both candidates for antagonists in some sort of holiday special— you know, the ones who are trying to ruin Christmas for everyone, but finally have some turnaround when Santa comes and they get the bunny they wanted when they were 3.