Jay Smooth On The Fall of Mass Media Reductionism

Jay Smooth is the creator of the Hip-Hop Music Blog, and video blogging site IllDoctrine. In 1991, he founded what has become New York’s longest running hip-hop radio show, WBAI’s Underground Railroad. Here he talks about the decline of mass media’s influence on the perception of cultures generally and on the perception of young black men, specifically.

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Chris Anderson On Freemium Content

Wired editor and best-selling author Chris Anderson used humor and a child’s game to again warn print publishers that they need to embrace the jarring concept of a freemium online business model.

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Live HD Video Streaming Technology

Livestream’s new Livepack bundle has the feel of the first commercial cell phones, bulky, blocky, unwieldly. Still, you can see where it’s going and it continues the trend toward democratizing media and journalism. The technology pack enables wireless HD-quality streaming.

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Marshall Simmonds Talks Traditional Media Efforts Online

For offline publishers, one of the biggest online problem areas is headlines. As Marshall Simmonds of The New York Times and Define Search Strategies points out, some journalists have been specifically educated to write captivating headlines. While those headlines appeal to audiences passing by newsstands and street corners, they do not achieve the same success on the Web.

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Stickiness 2.0: Toolbars Are The New Frames

Toolbars are not really new–Google & Yahoo have offered software that installs their toolbar as a browser add-on for years–but we are increasingly seeing toolbars pop-up that need no installation and are part and parcel of a given Web site or service. They are, in effect, the new HTML Frames.

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Book Review

Book Cover: Tribes by Seth Godin

Seth Godin’s Tribes is an easy read once you get used to Godin’s scattershot prose. It is also a good primer on the idea of tribes: A group of people who connect with one another based on a shared interest or idea.

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