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The Media

Submission + - Newsday Gets 35 Subscriptions to Pay Web Site

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "In late October, Newsday put its web site behind a pay wall, one of the first non-business newspapers to take the pay wall plunge, so Newsday has been followed with interest in media circles anxious to learn how the NY Times own plans to put up a pay wall may work out. So how successful has Newsday's paywall been? The NY Observer reports that three months into the experiment only 35 people have have signed up to pay $5 a week to get unfettered access to newsday.com. Newsday's web site redesign and relaunch reportedly cost about $4 million and the 35 people who've signed up have earned Newsday about $9,000. Still publisher Terry Jimenez is unapologetic. "That's 35 more than I would have thought it would have been," said Jimenez to his assembled staff, according to five interviews with Newsday employees. The web project has not been a favorite among Newsday employees who have recently been asked to take a 10 percent pay cut. "The view of the newsroom is the web site sucks," says one staffer. "It's an abomination," adds another."
Games

Game Endings Going Out of Style? 190

Posted by Soulskill from the to-be-continued dept.
An article in the Guardian asks whether the focus of modern games has shifted away from having a clear-cut ending and toward indefinite entertainment instead. With the rise of achievements, frequent content updates and open-ended worlds, it seems like publishers and developers are doing everything they can to help this trend. Quoting: "Particularly before the advent of 'saving,' the completion of even a simple game could take huge amounts of patience, effort and time. The ending, like those last pages of a book, was a key reason why we started playing in the first place. Sure, multiplayer and arcade style games still had their place, but fond 8, 16 and 32-bit memories consist more of completion and satisfaction than particular levels or tricky moments. Over the past few years, however, the idea of a game as simply something to 'finish' has shifted somewhat. For starters, the availability of downloadable content means no story need ever end, as long as the makers think there's a paying audience. Also, the ubiquity of broadband means multiplayer gaming is now the standard, not the exception it once was. There is no real 'finish' to most MMORPGs."

Comment Re:Whining about folk-art webpages... (Score 1) 231

by zokuga (#30641976) Attached to: Jaron Lanier Rants Against the World of Web 2.0

I just pulled myself facebook, I got sick of all that faceless and meaningless interaction. I had nearly 300 friends and I informed everybody I would be leaving so they could give me their details and we could meet up in real life. Out of those 300 people, only 2 people gave me their details. That says a lot to me as it turns out nobody was really bothered, human interaction has become passive activity (when it should be much more important) and probably with a lot of people I was just a number.

I think Facebook is more paltable when you accept that for the majority of your acquaintances, you *are* a number, with or without Facebook. Before FB, did you really think you had the time in your daily life to have meaningful interaction with even just 20 people spread throughout the world? I don't claim to have close interactions with any but a dozen of the 12 out of 500-some FB contacts I have...but that's the way it would've been in real life too. So I do lose some time, maybe 10-15 min writing quick comments and voyeurstically checking out people who, without Facebook, I may not have given any thought to. But the tradeoff is that once in awhile I do make a valuable contact...say a long-absent acquaintance decides to move to my city...that would've only been knowable through Facebook. Sure, you can take the nostalgic-oldfashioned view that if that friendship was really worth something, that acquaintance would've put in the legwork to find my contact info and reach out to me when moving to the city. But that's like trying to argue that the old-fashioned way of meeting a girl by chatting her up at the bar or coffee shop is somehow more inherently meaningful and successful that Match.com. It is not necessarily so.

Comment Re:Sorry, but this is stupid (Score 5, Insightful) 95

by zokuga (#30494414) Attached to: Google In Talks To Buy Yelp

500 million for a very simple website that has people reviewing restaurants and shit? Half the people on Slashdot would be able to clone that website in a couple of months (working alone!), and the user base is *not* worth half a billion (BILLION!!!).

What is this world coming to?

Or, what am I missing? Is yelp.com offering something other than people subjectively reviewing things like food?

Yelp is the first place I go to when I want to find a new place to eat...it is extremely useful in a big city where there is no way that any other site or publication has reviewed all of the eateries. The tech behind Yelp isn't revolutionary, but it's a pretty slick site to use. more importantly, it basically owns the market for local reviews. Saying that a couple people could clone the site is like saying a couple people could come up with a Gatorade-like drink over the weekend...the response to which would be...So?
Businesses

Submission + - McAfee Founder's Net Worth Fell From $100M to $4M (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by
zokuga
zokuga writes: "In a New York Times story about how the era of more people getting super rich, John McAfee, who founded the anti-virus company that bears his name, is featured as one of the wealthy businessmen now finding that they have to make sacrifices.

Mr. McAfee will soon auction off his last big property because he needs cash to pay his bills after having been caught off guard by the simultaneous crash in real estate and stocks. "I had no clue," he said, "that there would be this tandem collapse."

"
Government

Submission + - $18M Contract For Transparency Website Blacked Out (propublica.org) 2

Submitted by
zokuga
zokuga writes: "The U.S. government recently approved an $18 million contract for Smartronix to build a website where taxpayers could easily track billions in federal stimulus money, as part of President Obama's promise to make government more transparent through the Internet.

However, the contract, which was released only through repeated Freedom of Information Act requests, is itself heavily blacked out. ProPublica reports:

After weeks of prodding by ProPublica and other organizations, the Government Services Agency released copies of the contract and related documents that are so heavily blacked out they are virtually worthless.

In all, 25 pages of a 59-page technical proposal — the main document in the package — were redacted completely. Of the remaining pages, 14 had half or more of their content blacked out.

Sections that were heavily or entirely redacted dealt with subjects such as site navigation, user experience, and everything in the pricing table.

The entire contract, in all its blacked-out glory, is here"
Government

Submission + - Secret Listserv of APA-Torture Published (propublica.org)

Submitted by
zokuga
zokuga writes: "In 2005, after reports that psychologists may have been complicit in detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American Psychological Association started a listserv for its "Psychological Ethics and National Security" task force to hash out an official policy on whether psychologists should take part in military interrogations. Several of the task force's psychologists were consultants the military. The task force eventually decided on a policy that condemned torture but also stated that it was "consistent with the APA Ethics Code for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national security-related purposes." The 219-page batch of internal off-the-record emails was obtained by news organization ProPublica and published. Ars Technica's Jon Stokes writes "the APA in general has learned a painful lesson of the Internet age: if you want to keep it secret, don't hit 'send.'""
Idle

Submission + - The Appalachian Auto-Shotgun Toting Robot Army (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by
zokuga
zokuga writes: "This week's issue of the New Yorker has a fascinating story about Jerry Baber, a 74-year-old engineer and master gunsmith from Virginia whose revolutionary shotgun may kickstart the robotic army revolution. The article (subscription required, blog post here) starts off with how Baber developed a virtually recoil-free automatic shotgun (this popular YouTube video shows a petite woman on heels easily firing it on full-auto) that was so deadly the US military shunned it. So Baber believes the shotgun can be popularized by equipping small robots with them (this video shows a miniature-wheeled robot and a mini-copter firing the shotgun). He's worked with the makers of the vacuum robot Roomba (who later decided they wanted to focus on unarmed robots), and is now, strangely enough, working with a robotics company founded by someone who worked on Teddy Ruxpin, the talking teddy bear from the 80s. The Pentagon, according to the New Yorker, is now testing Baber's automatic shotgun with its own robots."

Comment At least NYT is embracing open source (Score 2, Interesting) 206

by zokuga (#26440567) Attached to: Saving Journalism With Flash and Java
Say what you want about the NYT as an old media organization, but I can't think of any other media group (ALL media, not just journalistic) that has been so open to creating APIs for their collections of data (campaign money, movie reviews, etc), and I think they are putting out a few open-source projects too. Their blog about "open source technology" (their words): http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/

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