When Nintendo first unveiled Metroid Prime, fans were skeptical (if not downright apeshit). For a 2D adventure game based on exploration, how could it possibly work in first person? Long story short, Metroid Prime was pretty much universally loved upon release, and now that the Metroid Prime trilogy has gone on to become something of a classic series, all is forgiven. And when Nintendo announced that it had handed off development of the latest Metroid game, Metroid: Other M to Team Ninja, many fans were, once again, walking around with clenched fists. But it was working so well in first person! And early videos showed the game looking much more action oriented. And Samus actually talks in the game. Why would Nintendo let this happen! Thankfully, things have calmed down since Nintendo has shown off more of the game, and the Other M’s 2D to 3D gameplay, along with a weird-yet-interesting NES/pointer control scheme — sans Nunchuk — seems to be whetting appetites something fierce. (Mine, anyway.)

In a talk with IGN, Metroid producer Yoshio Sakamoto talked more about the NES style control and lack of Nunchuk integration, saying that “…with the team I’ve been working with, we’ve been making the Metroid series in 2D up to this point. Even though we’ve been looking for a way to control Samus in 3D, we wanted to achieve the feeling that you had when Samus was in 2D. We decided that the traditional D-pad for movement plus jumping and shooting on buttons was the most appropriate control scheme for this direction. The second reason, and let me preface this by saying I don’t think bad games use the nunchuk because there are a lot of great games that do, there’s a certain image created with the nunchuk, it’s a bit of a barrier in accessibility because it’s a “different” control. The nunchuk I think is more appropriate for core audiences. At the same time, I feel that showing people a 3D game where you can control it using the remote really does stir the imagination, they’ll think “How’s it possible to control the character using the sideways remote in 3D?” I also think it’s attractive to those who grew up playing games using this kind of control.”

In some ways, this does seem like the logical evolution of the series: blending its 2D roots with some of the innovations of the Prime saga. Hopefully, they can pull it off. But I have one request: Please, Metroid Other M, tell me mid-game if I haven’t done or explored enough to get a good ending. I can’t invest another 20 hours in a Metroid game just to see the back of Samus for 0.37 seconds and then watch the credits roll.

If I had to come out swinging for anything at SXSW, it would have to be Simon Rumley's (The Living and the Dead) new film, Red, White & Blue (review). It's far and away my favorite of the fest thus far, which is odd because usually I don't assign a favorite label to things that make me feel physically battered and emotionally bruised afterwards. But I can't help but respect a film that can pull that off without ever being outright exploitative. So, if you're at SXSW, keep an eye out for it. If not, know that we here at Cinematical will definitely be keeping an eye out for news on the distribution front.

Cinematical: When you were first coming up with Red, White & Blue, what was your sales pitch, so to speak, to producers and friends wanting to know about it?

Simon Rumley: I guess when I first wrote it, I was looking to do a specific story about this girl who used her body as a weapon. I did a few drafts of that and it didn't really work, so I thought that if it was going to work, it would have to be a character study first and foremost. And then once we have sympathy for the character, you can take it other places. So once I had that worked out myself, it became a bit more clear in my mind how it would progress and then the structure came.

By the time I had finished writing the script, in my own mind it was a slacker-revenge movie. The first half is very much a Richard Linklater / Larry Cohen film and then the second half becomes a lot harder and more extreme. So that's actually how I ended up selling it to people, as 'slacker-revenge'. And some people would say, 'slasher-revenge? What's so cool about that?' and I was going, "No, Slacker!" and they'd go, 'Oh, that's interesting.' Really I figured there aren't any other slacker-revenge films around, so I took two elements from stuff I like in films and put them in one.

Filed under: Horror, Independent, SXSW, Interviews

Continue reading SXSW Interview: 'Red, White & Blue' Director Simon Rumley

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"In this article, the authors investigate the impact of DRM restrictions on the demand for music downloads. [A new model] estimates the impact of DRM on consumers' willingness to pay for songs (both favorites and nonfavorites) and on the producer revenues and profits. Based on two studies of more 2000 college students, the results suggest that despite the potential advantages offered by some DRM restrictions, on balance the elimination of DRM has a net positive impact on producer revenue, profit, and consumer welfare."

"In this article, the authors investigate the impact of DRM restrictions on the demand for music downloads. [A new model] estimates the impact of DRM on consumers' willingness to pay for songs (both favorites and nonfavorites) and on the producer revenues and profits. Based on two studies of more 2000 college students, the results suggest that despite the potential advantages offered by some DRM restrictions, on balance the elimination of DRM has a net positive impact on producer revenue, profit, and consumer welfare."

Bring in your music to be reviewed by our panel of Music Industry Veterans. Here's a valuable opportunity to receive direct constructive feedback from the varying perspectives of Music Producers, Radio Programers, and Songwriters.

**Rules for Demo-Listen Derby:

* Bring in submissions between 12:30 - 1pm
* One track per personband only. Indicate which track to be played.
* All submissions will be drawn randomly at the Schmooze event.
* We will review as many submissions as time will allow.

Panel:

Doug Romanow - Toronto-based producer and owner of Fire Escape Recording. His production work has won numerous awards including Juno-nominations and Best Producer awards for Michael Pickett, an ECMA nomination for Pop Record of the Year for Erin Crosby, and an Artist of the Year award for The Satallites at the National Reggae Awards. Douglas produced the debut album for Isobelle Gunn, a Hamilton trio performing at the 2009 Canadian Country Music Awards

Dulce Barbosa - db Promotions & Publicity. Past and present clients include: Roch Voisine, Olivia Newton John, The EarthTONES, Carlos Morgan, Shobha and many more.

Joe Chisholm - President and founder, IndieCan Radio the XM syndicated highly acclaimed hit podcast.

BONUS!! - Get a free copy of Canadian Musician Magazine when you attend this Schmooze!

Date: Sat. March 27th 2010
Time: 1pm - 3:30
Where: 935 Bloor St. West, Long & McQuade Music Store (upstairs in big seminar room)
How Much? $10.00 or $Free with Schmooze Membership (register for your free membership now at www.bigschmooze.ca)

www.bigschmooze.ca

.

Paper and card, food, garden waste and plastics on proposed list of items that would have to be recycled

Black bins for household waste could become a thing of the past under proposals to be published tomorrow to ban almost everything thrown away by households from being sent to landfill.

Paper and card, food, garden waste and plastics are all on a list of items that would have to be recycled, composted, or burned for energy. The move would represent a transformation in England and Wales, where about half of what people put in the bin at home or at work ends up in holes in the ground.

The announcement – to be put out for a 12-week consultation – is likely to raise fears about how difficult it will be for householders to manage their bins, and how councils might enforce the new rules, especially following claims that council officials have searched bags and fined people for mixing the wrong items.

Tonight, Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said the ban would have both financial and environmental benefits. It would cut greenhouse gas emissions from landfill sites and from manufacturing new products such as cans and bottles from virgin materials.

It would also save councils money on the landfill tax charged for every tonne of waste, and allow them to make money from selling recycling materials. As existing landfill sites fill up, there is also a looming problem of finding new locations.

Recycling rates have increased dramatically over the last decade or so, from about 8% to more than one third, but the rate of growth has slowed in the last two years.

"We have made good progress, but we can go further," said Benn. "We're sending a lot of waste currently to landfill which really doesn't make sense, one because it's costing money because of the landfill levy, two because it produces emissions ... and three, there are people out there prepared to pay you for materials."

Bans on most items could be introduced in five years, with food waste taking longer, perhaps 10 years, said Benn, who cited the success of similar policies in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria.

Councils appeared concerned about how a strict ban on items going to landfill could be met. While various methods are being developed to separate "dry" items such as glass or plastics, the question of who will pay and how to separate out food waste seems to be a particular worry.

"[The government] needs to think carefully about where the money to pay for a landfill ban will come from and how the ban will be policed," said Gary Porter, chairman of the Local Government Association environment board. "Councils do not want to be put in a position where they have to fine people for putting their leftovers in the wrong bin."

Under the proposal published tomorrow [THUR] , the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will propose a ban on sending a list of common items to landfill: paper and card; food; textiles; metals; wood; garden waste; glass; plastics; and electrical and electronic equipment. Together those items represent 84% of waste collected, said the government's waste advisers, Wrap.

Earlier this week,Wrap published its biggest-ever study of what should be done with waste, following claims that households were wasting their time separating their rubbish because many items were sent to landfill, exported, or were a waste of energy to recycle. It found that in more than 80% of cases recycling was the best option, followed by incineration, and composting and anaerobic digestion.

The Conservative party has pledged to "work towards zero waste", using policies including a voluntary arrangement with producers to cut back on the production of waste and improve its disposal, setting a minimum price "floor" under the landfill tax to give businesses long term certainty to invest in new forms of waste disposal, and encouraging councils to reward families that recycle.

• Waste
• Recycling
• Incineration

Juliette Jowitguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

San Bruno, Calif. - Google's (NASD: GOOG) YouTube has launched a new program for independent artists looking to make advertising dollars from their music videos and live performance footage. Artists may apply now to join the Musicians Wanted program, a spin on the existing YouTube Partner Program that lets producers whose videos reach a certain level of popularity to share in monetization.

read more

Fair, thorough, enterprising and in context - that's what we're looking for in the journalism we read, isn't it? At a time when shallow ranting takes up so much space in public discourse, a new media evaluation technology offers hope, inspiration and is a lot of fun to use.

NewsTrust is a media technology organization funded by the Omidyar Network and MacAurthur Foundation. Yesterday it launched a personalized news filtering tool called MyNews. The tool helps users review the quality of journalism from all over the web and discover high-quality content they and their friends might enjoy. A light-weight, crowd-sourced, personalized recommendation engine that adds value on top of existing content? Sounds like our kind of app!

Sponsor

When reading content from around the web through NewsTrust, the user is presented with a well-designed interface through which to review the quality of journalism in question. Users are prompted to evaluate stories based on things like how well they were sourced, whether both sides of a controversy were explained and how enterprising the story was. Short and long reviews are supported and it's easy to review a story in less than 30 seconds if you feel so inclined.

The ability to post links to Twitter and Facebook with a single click means that users who already share articles around social networks have an opportunity to pause briefly and add another layer of value by using NewsTrust.

The new MyNews product released yesterday leverages that network of reviewers to draw in a stream of high-quality links from around the web, on particular topics. In addition to NewsTrust reviewers, the service also delivers stories discovered and vetted algorithmically and it pulls links shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter into the NewsTrust ecosystem. It's one thing to get a vote of apparent approval from friends sharing links on social networks, it's another to peruse those links through a lens of community grading for journalistic quality.

The end result is a personalized news reader populated with generally high-quality topical stories that have been reviewed by other readers. It's a useful product and one that would work well as a mobile app, where browsing through lots of content of variable quality is less appealing.

NewsTrust and MyNews aren't for everyone, though. Only so many people will be interested in a news consumption interface so closely wedded to review activities. Many people will, no doubt, bristle at the prospect (or reality) of amateurs reviewing the quality of professional journalistic product. Some will find the site too left-leaning for their tastes. (Though it tries hard not to be.)

Many people will enjoy MyNews, though, and we suspect everyone who follows social software in general will find this project particularly interesting. Projects like this may or may not be able to change the way news producers operate, but the news consumers who use it will likely find MyNews a helpful way to enrich their time on an otherwise all-too often low-quality web of news content.

Discuss

If you’re seeking a job in social media, we’d like to help out. For starters, Mashable’s Job Lists section gathers together all our resource lists, how-tos and expert guides to help you get hired. In particular, you might want to see our articles on How to Leverage Social Media for Career Success and How to Find a Job on Twitter.

But we’d like to help in a more direct way, too. Mashable’s job boards are a place for socially-savvy companies to find people like you. This week and every week, Mashable features its coveted job board listings for a variety of positions in the web, social media space, and beyond. Have a look at what’s good and new on our job boards:

Mashable Job Board ListingsSenior SEO Strategist at Infuse Creative in Santa Monica, CA

The Senior SEO Strategist and Provider develops and provides effective Search Engine Optimization strategies for client websites, with the goal of generating increased targeted Web traffic and higher lead generation.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Intermediate-Senior Social Media Specialist at Infuse Creative in Santa Monica, CA.

An Intermediate Social Media Marketing Specialist works with our search marketing and optimization senior leads and teams as well as client agencies, support people, and in some cases the clients themselves.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Community Manager at BBMG in New York, NY.

BBMG is seeking a high energy and creative Community Manager to lead, moderate and engage BBMG’s online community.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Product Manager at Zynga in San Francisco, CA.

Zynga is looking for a Product Manager who can help drive the creation of new features on some of Zynga’s top games

Read more about this opportunity here.

Account Executive at Converseon in New York, NY.

Our ideal candidates will have at least two years experience in a marketing/new media agency or similar experience.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Social Media Interns at TheStreet.com in New York, NY.

TheStreet.com, a digital financial media company, is seeking web-savvy, innovative social media interns to aid our Audience Development team.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Website Project Manager at TIG Global in Chevy Chase, MD.

As a result of continued growth and expansion, we are currently seeking a Website Project Manager – a highly organized individual that can manage multiple interactive efforts in a fast-paced ever-changing environment.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Social Media Analyst at TIG Global in Chevy Chase, MD.

As a result of continued growth and expansion, we are currently seeking a Social Media Analyst.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Sr. New Media Manager at Citrix Online in Goleta, CA.

The Sr. New Media Manager role serves as a coordination point for all corporate social activities.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Online Community Director at Share our Strength in Washington DC.

Share Our Strength is currently seeking an Online Community Director to lead all aspects of the organization’s web-based activism and constituent engagement.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Web Producer at Share Our Strength in Washington DC.

Share Our Strength is currently seeking a Web Producer to manage all online production tasks relating to the organization’s online presence.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Author Community Manager at Eleven Learning in Cambridge, MA.

Now we’re searching for someone with both textbook industry experience and a familiarity with social media who can help us design and run our next product: a social network for textbook authors and adopters.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Senior Web Developer at Gravit in Park City, UT.

We are looking for an exceptional front-end web developer/designer.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Senior Ruby on Rails Developer at Gravit in Park City, UT.

We are looking for an experienced software engineer with a strong background in Ruby, Rails, and Javascript to help design and develop a web application that supports heavy traffic.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Email Marketing/Social Media Coordinator at Bear in Bar in Boston, MA.

Looking for a new email marketing/social media coordinator for a private Back Bay consultancy.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Social Media Online Marketing Manager at Media Storm in New York, NY.

As a Social Media Online Marketing Manager, you will lead the development of strategies and objectives for building and executing year-round brand engagement via social media.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Social Marketing Strategy Manager at IMRE, LLC in MD.

IMRE, an agency of marketing experts in the Healthcare, Home & Building and Financial Services industries is seeking a dynamic and fearless Social Marketing Strategy Manager to join our growing team.

Read more about this opportunity here.

PHP Problem Solver at Interspire in Austin, TX.

We’re looking for excellent technical support engineers to provide email and phone-based support to customers from our Austin, Texas office.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Vice President, Trade Sales and Marketing at Nolo in Berkeley, CA.

Nolo, the nation’s leading provider of self-help legal, business and consumer information is looking for a Publicist for Trade & Online PR

Read more about this opportunity here.

Freelance/Contract Drupal Programmers at TMG in Washington DC.

TMG, a leading custom media firm based in Washington, D.C., seeks several expert drupal programmers.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Marketing Intern at TMG in Washington DC.

Responsibilities include research, assistance with graphics and promotional initiatives, lead generation, creating new business presentations and proposals, and more.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Director/VP of Sales and Business Development at Comedy.com in Santa Monica, CA.

Comedy.com, the “guide to what’s funny right now,” is looking to hire a Director (or VP depending on experience level) of Sales and Business Development in its Santa Monica office.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Sales Consultant at Meltwater Buzz in Chicago, IL.

The position offers complete account responsibility from first contact to end negotiations, and account management.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Digital Manager at Anjunabeats in London, UK.

Anjunabeats, one of the UK’s leading independent dance labels, is recruiting for a Digital Manager (Technical).

Read more about this opportunity here.

Community Manager at Anjunabeats in London, UK.

One of the UK’s leading independent dance labels is recruiting for a Community Manager.

Read more about this opportunity here.

Mashable has a variety of web 2.0, application development, business development, and social networking job opportunities available. Check them out at Mashable’s Job Board.

Got a job posting to share with our readers? Post a job to Mashable today ($99 for a 30 day listing) and get it highlighted every week on Mashable.com (in addition to exposure all day every day in the Mashable marketplace).

Tags: career, careers, jobs

Sometimes it's hard enough to make a list of favorite movies, let alone favorite scenes from favorite movies. But that's just what a handful of filmmakers have done for writer Philip French for a new article in The Guardian. French kicks things off with an appreciation of Psycho (the shower scene of course) and a few other favorites. Then we get down to business. Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson and Sugar) chooses the great chase sequence in The French Connection. "It was the kind of thing that you just would never get away with these days," he says.

Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley) is next, and chooses the bicycle scene from Jules and Jim: "It evokes what you imagine to be the perfect French vacation." Oscar winning animator Nick Park ("Wallace & Gromit") chooses the skeleton scene in Jason and the Argonauts. "Disney films didn't make me want to go home and do it myself because it was shrouded in mystery and technique. But when I saw the skeletons in Harryhausen's film I wanted immediately to do it myself, because you got a sense of how it might be done," says Park.

Our favorite grindhouse-lovin', movie-crazy English director Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz) also chooses a scene. So does the brilliant Claire Denis from France, as well as filmmakers Beeban Kidron, Stephen Poliakoff, and producer Stephen Woolley, but I'll leave their choices for you to discover. Meanwhile, I'll submit a favorite choice of my own: the swimming pool scene from Cat People (1942), with the shimmery lights on the wall, and the echoing screams creating a kind of mysterious terror nearly unequaled in movies.

Your thoughts/choices, dear readers?

Filed under: Fandom

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Two VBS.TV producers spend Mothers' Day at a retirement hope for prostitutes in Mexico. One in her 80s now sells candy. Another in her 60s wants to keep turning tricks. Watch them tell their stories.

Two VBS.TV producers spend Mothers' Day at a retirement hope for prostitutes in Mexico. One in her 80s now sells candy. Another in her 60s wants to keep turning tricks. Watch them tell their stories.

Sound Forge Pro 10 software efficiently and reliably provides audio editors and producers complete control over all aspects of audio editing and mastering. Whether in the studio or field, its the ultimate all-in-one production suite for professional audio recording and mastering, sound design, audio restoration, and Red Book CD creation. New features in Sound Forge Pro 10 include precise event-based editing, integrated disc-at-once CD burning, musical instrument file processing, and pristine audio conversion and time stretching.

Manual transmission.

EA has announced a 14th May release date for Skate 3 in the UK.

The game's in development at Black Box for PS3 and Xbox 360.

Skate 3 aims to bring friends together online in teams. Jason DeLang, senior producer, reckons this will be "the most connected, accessible and social skateboarding experience yet". But then he would say that.

Read more...

Court system continues to defy copyright holders, ruling once again that noncommercial file-sharing in the country is legal, and also that links to infringing material is as well.

For some time now Spanish judges have consistently ruled in favor of file-sharers, finding over and over that noncommercial P2P – file-sharing without motivation of profit – is legal in that country.

As far back as 2006, Spanish judges have ruled that since the there is “no talk of money or any other compensation beyond the sharing of material available among various users” that “no offense meriting penal sanction has been committed.”

Raul N. Orejuda Garcia, Magistrate Court judge of Mercantile number 7, then ruled last year that P2P transfers are not one of the “clear and specific behaviors that the law forbids, in particular reproduction, distribution and public communication without authorization.”

Fast forward to a few days ago and the same judge, Raul N. Orejuda Garcia, Magistrate Court judge of Mercantile number 7, reaffirmed his earlier ruling.

The case case was part of a suit brought by a local music industry group, SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores) against eD2K website elrincondejesus for alleged copyright infringement on the site. The owner of the site, Jesus Guerra Calderon, rightly pointed out that it only provided links to content much like Google or any of the other search engines out there.

“As you know Elrincondejesus.com never had advertising (or has now),” he said at the time. “I’m innocent and the only thing that I have done is provided links to other sites, like thousands of search engines in the world.”

Judge Garcia once again agrees.

“The system of links constitutes the very basis of the Internet and a multitude of sites and search facilities (such as Google), allowing the technical possibility of doing precisely what this procedure is trying to prohibit, which is linking P2P networks,” he said in his ruling.

He added that the owner “does not receive any money directly or indirectly related to the service offered” because the website was open to all, free and no advertising.

Judge Garcia determined that the country’s Copyright Act ultimately discusses the legality of the source not the access “so that most users of these P2P networks acted legally because they have concluded a lawful and valid contract for a fee to a service provider network.”

In the long run it may not matter, at least for file-sharing-related websites like Calderon’s. The govt approved new anti-piracy legislation back in January that will allow a judge with the National Audience, the country’s federal court, to close or block websites accused of facilitating copyright infringement within 4 days as compared to the current year-long process.

However, the law is still still dramatically different from other countries like France and South Korea in that it targets P2P sites and not users.

In fact, Joan Navarro, head of the Coalition of Industries and Creators of Content, previously referred to this effort as a “positive step.”

“They are going after the producers of the piracy, those who spread works without permission from the authors,” she said at the time. “Not the users, which is the case in France and the UK”

So all in all Spanish file-sharers are still in quite an enviable position.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

[Hat Tip]

Several China-based producers of solar-grade polycrystalline silicon wafers have raised their quotes by 16.7-18.6% from US$2.95-3.0 per 6-inch wafer in early first quarter of 2010 to US$3.5 for the second quarter, according to sources with Taiwan's solar cell makers.

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz recently reported that some "Fox journalists" believe that colleague Glenn Beck "uses distorted or inflammatory rhetoric that undermines their credibility." Nevertheless, Fox News' reporters and "news" programs have routinely promoted and echoed Beck on stories such as the 9-12 Project, tea party protests, ACORN and former White House officials Van Jones and Anita Dunn.

Kurtz: Some "Fox journalists" worried Beck "undermines their credibility"

From Kurtz's March 15 Washington Post column:

In just over a year, Glenn Beck's blinding burst of stardom has often seemed to overshadow the rest of Fox News.

And that may not be a good thing for the top-rated cable news channel, as many of its staffers are acutely aware.

With his celebrity fueled by a Time cover story, best-selling books, cheerleading role at protest rallies and steady stream of divisive remarks, Beck is drawing big ratings. But there is a deep split within Fox between those -- led by Chairman Roger Ailes -- who are supportive, and many journalists who are worried about the prospect that Beck is becoming the face of the network.

By calling President Obama a racist and branding progressivism a "cancer," Beck has achieved a lightning-rod status that is unusual even for the network owned by Rupert Murdoch. And that, in turn, has complicated the channel's efforts to neutralize White House criticism that Fox is not really a news organization. Beck has become a constant topic of conversation among Fox journalists, some of whom say they believe he uses distorted or inflammatory rhetoric that undermines their credibility.

[...]

Friction between opinionated cable personalities and journalists has also flared occasionally at MSNBC. But Beck has caused such anguish at Fox that some of its journalists celebrated the failure of last week's interview with embattled ex-congressman Eric Massa, which Beck pronounced a waste of time.

[...]

One thing is beyond debate: Beck provides a strong lead-in for the network's evening lineup. "The significance of Beck to Fox's bottom line cannot be underestimated," says Tyndall, the industry analyst. "Getting an audience that size at 5 p.m. is absolutely unheard of."

But that growth has come at a price, at least for those at Fox who believe that Beck is beginning to define their brand. Glenn Beck is a media phenomenon married to a phenomenally successful network, but away from the cameras, theirs is a troubled relationship.

The New York Times reported on October 11, 2009, that Fox News claims its news hours are objective and defined as "9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays." Those weekday hours include America's Newsroom, Happening Now, America Live, Studio B, Special Report, and The Fox Report. America Live replaced Live Desk in early 2010.

"News" division takes cues from Beck on ACORN tapes

Beck brings ACORN videos to Fox. On the September 9, 2009, edition of his Fox News program, Beck previewed an "exclusive" that would air on his program the next day, which he claimed would make "things change a lot for those in power." Beck later aired snippets of a video from James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles in which they entered the Baltimore office of ACORN. Beck suggested the video was the "exclusive stuff" that he predicted the media would be "talking about" instead of health care. On September 10, Beck interviewed Giles and credited Andrew Breitbart with starting the story. On September 15, Beck again hosted O'Keefe for a "one-hour special." Beck continued pushing subsequent ACORN videos from O'Keefe and Giles in the following months. Investigations later found significant problems with the ACORN tapes and cleared ACORN of criminal wrongdoing.

Fox "news" programs follow Beck's lead, seize on ACORN videos. Following Beck's "exclusive" preview, on September 10, 2009, through 7 p.m., Fox News dedicated at least 17 segments to the ACORN video. Fox "news" programs covering the video included: America's Newsroom; Happening Now; Live Desk; and Special Report.

Fox "news" programs hype Beck-promoted San Bernardino ACORN tapes. On September 15 and 16, 2009, Fox "news" programs devoted significant programming to O'Keefe and Giles' video of their interactions with an ACORN worker in San Bernardino, CA, who claimed that she murdered her husband and gave advice on how to run a brothel. The worker stated after the video was released that she hadn't murdered her husband -- which was confirmed by police -- and was attempting to "shock them as much as they were shocking me." Live Desk teased the video, with co-host Martha MacCallum stating: "We can now tell you that you are going to see yet another big development in the ACORN story. Another tape is expected to come out tonight after 5 p.m." -- a reference to Glenn Beck's program. At 5 p.m., Beck devoted a "special program" to the San Bernardino video. Following Beck, Special Report and America's Newsroom ran reports on the video.

Fox News Sunday devoted 18 minutes, over two consecutive broadcasts, to ACORN controversy. In September, Fox News Sunday devoted a total of 18 minutes of programming time on two consecutive broadcasts to covering the ACORN tapes. During his September 20 broadcast, host Chris Wallace conducted an interview with ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) to discuss the story. During the September 27 broadcast of the program, Wallace aired a segment on O'Keefe, in which he advanced several of O'Keefe's claims without noting that they are contradicted by readily available evidence and labeled O'Keefe the "Power Player of the Week."

"News" division follows Beck's lead on bogus Dunn controversy

Beck pushed concocted story that Dunn "worships" and "revere[s]" Mao Zedong. Throughout his October 15, 2009, program, Beck claimed that then-White House communications director Anita Dunn "worships" and "idolizes" "her hero" Mao Zedong. As evidence, Beck aired a video in which Dunn cited two of her "favorite political philosophers," Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa during a speech to high school graduates. However, Dunn offered no endorsement of Mao's ideology or actions -- rather, she spoke of Mao and Mother Teresa as two of her favorite "political philosophers," and based on short quotes from them, she offered the advice that "you don't have to follow other people's choices and paths" or "let external definition define how good you are internally." Indeed, admiration" for Mao and that President Obama has "surrounded himself with Mao supporters."

Special Report followed Beck's lead in highlighting Dunn's "Mao" comments. On October 19, 2009, Fox News' Special Report aired a truncated clip of Dunn's Mao quote, and Fox News contributor Brit Hume responded: "Well, she also said that this is the two people she turns to most. This doesn't sound like it was a one-off attempt to make a joke and imitate the Republican strategist Lee Atwater."

"News" division follows Beck's campaign against Van Jones

Beck led the charge against Van Jones. Beck repeatedly attacked then-White House green jobs adviser Van Jones. Beck has falsely accused Van Jones of being a "convicted felon," misleadingly stated that Jones' place in the Obama administration "says that the president has an agenda that is radical, revolutionary, and in some cases, Marxist." A September 6, 2009, New York Times article stated that "[c]hief among those keeping the story alive was Glenn Beck, the conservative host of a Fox News Channel program. Mr. Beck began criticizing Mr. Jones in July, first in segments on his syndicated talk radio show and then, on July 23, on his Fox News program, said Christopher Balfe, the president of Mr. Beck's production company."

"News" division picks up Jones "controversy." On September 3, 2009, America's Newsroom, Live Desk, and Special Report ran segments on the "controversy" over Jones. Fox News dispatched at least two reporters, Molly Henneberg and James Rosen, to the Van Jones story. For instance, America's Newsroom's Megyn Kelly said Jones has a "somewhat radical and sometimes racially-charged past," and asked Henneberg if Jones "described himself as a communist." Kelly further wondered how Jones became a "czar." From America's Newsroom:

Live Desk covered Jones' past remarks with Rosen and promoted the results of a non-scientific poll finding that 97 percent of Fox News viewers aren't "satisfied with Van Jones' apology" for past remarks:

On Special Report, host Bret Baier introduced a report by Rosen by stating that there's a "troubling pattern of behavior by one of the president's top advisers [Jones]" and later concluded, "We'll see if the national hoo-rah develops" over Jones.

Van Jones resigns; Beck and Fox "stories" receive credit. On September 6, 2009, Jones resigned, citing that he "cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past." The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim noted that "[b]efore Beck mentioned Jones in the last few weeks on his Fox News television show, Jones remained an obscure figure in the administration. After Beck mentioned him, protesters at town hall meetings made Jones a staple of their complaints." In an October 28, 2009, speech (retrieved from the Congressional Record) on the House floor, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) said: "Fox reports the stories that the national media ignore. For example, without Fox News, you might not have heard about the recent ACORN scandal. You might not have heard about the troubling political associations of the President's former green jobs czar, which eventually led to his resignation."

Wallace: It is "certainly the case that Van Jones had a history as a radical, as a self-professed communist." In a panel discussion about Jones' resignation on the September 6, 2009, edition of Fox News Sunday, Wallace stated that "it certainly is the case that Van Jones had a history as a radical, as a self-professed communist, and also, the fact that is -- that he signed a 2004 petition suggesting that there be an investigation of whether or not the government had a role in 9/11."

News division continues to track Jones post-resignation. Fox News' Special Report has continued to discuss Van Jones despite his White House resignation. Since Jones' resignation, according to Nexis, Special Report has mentioned Van Jones on February 25, February 24, October 19, October 6, September 28, September 16, and September 10.

"News" division promotes Beck's 9-12 special and rally

Beck started conservative 9-12 Project, whose members helped organize 9-12 protests. On March 13, 2009, during his "You Are Not Alone" special, Beck announced the launch of his 9-12 Project, whose members helped organize and turn out participants to a protest on September 12, 2009. Beck routinely implored his audience to attend the Washington, D.C. rally on his Fox News show. Beck then aired a special edition of his television show live from 1 to 3 p.m. ET on Fox News on September 12.

Happening Now promotes Beck's original 9-12 Project special. On March 13, 2009, Happening Now hosted Beck to promote his special. From Happening Now:

Live Desk promotes Beck's original special as "the place to be." On the March 13, 2009, edition of Live Desk, co-host Trace Gallagher started a countdown to Beck's special and said Beck's show is "gathering steam across the country." Co-host Martha MacCallum added that Beck's special is "the place to be this Friday night." Gallagher said that Beck's first principle is "America is good and we seemed to have forgotten that." Gallagher interviewed Beck live outside Fox News' offices while he and Fox News graphics repeatedly promoted the special:

Wallace: "I'm a big Glenn Beck fan." On the March 13, 2009, edition of Fox News' Studio B, while discussing Beck's special, Wallace said he sensed that Fox News host Shepard Smith was "begrudging" Glenn Beck and that he himself is a "big Glenn Beck fan" and is "on the Glenn Beck bandwagon."

Fox News heavily promoted the Beck-fueled 9-12 rally. Fox News heavily promoted the 9-12 Tea Party rally and the Tea Party Express tour, whose last stop was on September 12 in Washington. For instance, during the August 23, 2009, edition of America's News HQ, host and reporter Shannon Bream said, "We want to let folks know" the Tea Party Express' schedule so "they can be a part" of the events. And on August 28, 2009, Fox News dispatched reporters Griff Jenkins and William La Jeunesse to the Tea Party Express kickoff in Sacramento, California. Jenkins also reported from the 9-12 rally for Beck's special; a Fox News producer was caught encouraging the crowd to cheer during Jenkins' report.

"News" division heavily promotes April 15 Tea Parties -- featuring Glenn Beck

Beck promotes, hosts a "FNC Tax Day" Tea Party. While discussing the April 15, 2009, Tea Party protests on his April 6, 2009, program, Glenn Beck suggested that viewers could "[c]elebrate with Fox News" by either attending a protest or watching it on Fox News. Beck stated that in addition to himself, hosts Neil Cavuto, Greta Van Susteren, and Sean Hannity would be "live" at different protests. While Beck spoke, on-screen text labeled those protests as "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties." In the lead-up to April 15, Beck repeatedly promoted the tea parties and urged viewers to attend them.

Like Beck, Fox "news" programs repeatedly urged attendance at tea parties. In the lead-up to the April 15, 2009, tea parties, Fox's "news" programs and anchors frequently aired segments publicizing and encouraging viewers to get involved with the protests. For instance, Special Report host Baier noted the URL of TaxDayTeaParty.com and stated that the protests have been "largely ignored by the mainstream media," while America's Newsroom frequently hosted tea party organizers and posted on-screen organizing information, such as protest dates and locations. Host Bill Hemmer also repeatedly directed viewers to the show's section on the Fox News website, which posted a list of tea party protests. The following are some of the graphics America's Newsroom aired to promote the April 15 tea parties:

Hemmer promotes Beck's appearance at the Alamo. While guest-hosting the April 12, 2009, edition of Fox News Watch, news anchor Hemmer promoted Beck's appearance at the Alamo tea party, stating:

HEMMER: While the mainstream is ignoring the tea party movement, here at the Fox News Channel, we're gearing up to bring you special coverage of the events all across the country. Sean Hannity is in Atlanta. Glenn Beck is at the Alamo. Where else would he be? San Antonio. Neil Cavuto is live in Sacramento and Greta is in Washington, D.C.

Can't get to a tea party? Fox Nation hosts a virtual tea party. You can check it out on the site for the location of a tea party in your area. Again, that is Wednesday, the 15th of April.

Editor’s note: Big Data has been around for a long time between credit card transactions, phone call records and financial markets. Companies like AT&T, Visa, Bank of America, Ebay, Google, Amazon and more have massive databases they mine for competitive advantage. But lately, Big Data is finding its way to the smallest startups. The Web and cloud computing brings Big Data everywhere. But what exactly is pushing Big Data forward?

To answer that we brought in an expert, Bradford Cross. Bradford is the Co-Founder and Head of Research at FlightCaster. FlightCaster is backed by Y Combinator, Tandem Entrepreneurs and Sherpalo Ventures. The company analyzes large data sets to predict flight delays. Bradford is chair of the Dealing with Big Data track at Cloud Connect this week.

We are in a Renaissance for computer science, engineering, and learning from data right now. The scale of data and computations is an important issue, but the data age is less about the raw size of your data, and more about the cool stuff you can do with it. Now that there is so much data, it is time to unlock its value. Really neat things are happening already—like the way the people of the world can educate themselves on all manner of issues and topics, or the way data and computing serves as leverage in other scientific and technical endeavors. There will be lots of amazing stuff on the web, but innovation will come in other domains as well.

The recent big data trend is about the democratization of large data more than its growth. In articles like the Economist’s recent piece on the data deluge, we hear about big data everywhere. We hear about what big data and the cloud mean for the enterprise, but they have had big data for a long time. eBay manages petabytes in its Teradata and Greenplum data warehouses. Sophisticated startups extracting value from big data is also nothing new—it has been happening at least since the days of Yahoo! and Google, and they have done it without the data warehousing folks.

Now focused early stage startups can get up and running faster than ever. Less technical analysts at companies like Facebook and Twitter can access massive amounts of data easily. Even individuals can undertake cool projects with big data, such as Pete Skomoroch of Data Wrangling did with trending topics for Wikipedia.

Why Now?

We do not have to build all our own hardware and software infrastructure anymore.

Pioneers such as Amazon have given us the cloud, where we have the capability to run very large server clusters at a low startup cost. Pioneers like Google have paved the way for open source projects like Hadoop and HBase, that are backed by big company contributors like Facebook.

The combination has paved the way for a new class of data driven startup like Aardvark (just acquired by Google) and Factual, it has reduced both cost and time to market for these startups, as we showed with Flightcaster. And, it has allowed startups that were not necessarily data driven to become more analytical as they evolved, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many others.

So we have big data, the cloud, and open source facilitating new data-driven startups. I like to break this trend down from the technical perspective into three chunks; storing data, processing data, and learning from data. I define “learning from data” to mean data mining, AI, machine learning, statistics, and so on.

Supersize my data. Oh wait, I’ll just have a Medium.

The first time I heard the “Medium Data” idea was from Christophe Bisciglia and Todd Lipcon at Cloudera. I think the concept is great. Companies do not have to be at Google scale to have data issues. Scalability issues occur with less than a terabyte of data. If a company works with relational databases and SQL, they can drown in complex data transformations and calculations that do not fit naturally into sequences of set operations. In that sense, the “big data” mantra is misguided at times. For instance, a GigaOm article about big data in the cloud states:

What is becoming increasingly clear is that Big Data is the future of IT. To that end, tackling Big Data will determine the winners and losers in the next wave of cloud computing innovation.

The big issue is not that everyone will suddenly operate at petabyte scale; a lot of folks do not have that much data.

The more important topics are the specifics of the storage and processing infrastructure and what approaches best suit each problem. How much data do you have and what are you trying to do with it? Do you need to do offline batch processing of huge amounts of data to compute statistics? Do you need all your data available online to back queries from a web application or a service API?

Once your data and its processing are large enough to require distributing the data and the work among machines across network boundaries, things get a lot harder. You have to deal with distributed computing and make tradeoffs like a real computer scientist.

Big Data & The Cloud: Viral Buzzwords 4.0!

The cloud, and hosted services, present very interesting opportunities. One of the greatest is that people can leverage the a la carte economics of elastic computing to do things that were prohibitively expensive due to the requirements of building and maintaining their own hardware infrastructure. The interesting parts about the current cloud are its lack of entrance friction and elastic cost efficiency, the speed with which new entrants can set up, and the elastic capability to run 100 machine clusters for 1 hour if that is what is needed.

We started Flightcaster almost a year ago, and it is a good example of how startups can leverage cloud compute and storage resources, mix some open source like Hadoop with some data mining, and create interesting new technologies with relatively low capital upfront.

The cloud is not cheaper in general. Once people scale to a certain point, they move off the cloud onto dedicated hardware—not the other way around. That may change, and better hosted services may play a role in the transition, but that will take a while. In the meantime, the interesting part of the cloud is the use of elastic resources and the ability to get up and going quickly. The interesting part is the freedom it gives startups to try things they would never otherwise do.

Another notable thing about the cloud is the new architectures emerging as a result of economic and resource tradeoffs.

Storage of large amounts of data in the cloud is much cheaper with blobstores like Amazon S3 than it is to maintain an always-up cluster for a distributed datastore. If you do mostly offline batch processing and you do not need bulk storage to be online, then it is an attractive setup.

Storage and NoSQL

Taking another glimpse from the future of big data in the cloud.

A Big Data stack…will also need to emerge before cloud computing will be broadly embraced by the enterprise. In many ways, this cloud stack has already been implemented, albeit in primitive form, at large-scale Internet data centers, which quickly encountered the scaling limitations of traditional SQL databases as the volume of data exploded. Instead, high-performance, scalable/distributed, object-orientated data stores are being developed internally and implemented at scale…large web properties have been building their own so-called “NoSQL” databases, also known as distributed, non-relational database systems (DNRDBMS).

There are several misguided points here. First, there is not going to be a big data or cloud stack. Distributed systems are about making trade offs and a move toward problem-specific solutions rather than one-size-fits-all stacks. Second, enterprises already have their solution—expensive data warehousing and consulting support. Will open source projects like Hadoop supported by people like Cloudera take a chunk of the business? Sure. But as I mentioned earlier, the most interesting part about big data and the cloud is not cheaper alternatives for the enterprise, it is the opportunities it facilitates for data-driven startups.

There is a lot of talk about the NoSQL movement. The big idea here is that distributed systems are hard, require tradeoffs, and sometimes we are better off with data storage and processing that are specific to what we are doing with the data. Sometimes even with a small amount of data on a single node, there are better alternatives to SQL queries and relational databases—time series data has long been a good example.

Processing and Hadoop: The Elephant In The Room

There is a broad range of needs for processing large amounts of data. These range from simple needs like calculations for log analysis that just need to occur at scale, to middle of the road needs like BI, to complex needs like scalable modern machine learning and retrieval systems.

There are a different approaches one can use to service specific needs. Again, we see the pattern of moving away from one-size-fits-all stacks, and toward building for your needs. That said, there are very generic abstractions like Map-Reduce that work well for a lot of use cases. Distributed systems are hard to get right, so when something like Hadoop gets a lot of momentum, it retains that momentum until alternatives have the time to mature enough to solve the hard problems with fault tolerance, performance, and so forth. Not everyone is Leonardo da Vinci, so people should not attempt to create these systems on their own unless they really know what they are doing. In that sense, the cloud and big data are facilitators of open source.

An important aspect of processing at scale is abstraction. Writing complex or even simple computations in raw Map-Reduce is verbose for programmers and intimidating for others who might want to play with the data. Abstractions over Map-Reduce like Pig and Hive make simple things easy, and abstractions like Cascading make hard things possible. The Map-Reduce paradigm, and Hadoop in particular, have been a big success. That said, Map-Reduce is not the only important piece of compute infrastructure. Message queues serve as the backbone of a lot of compute architectures – implementations of AMQP, such as rabbitmq, are a prime example. You can accomplish a lot with producers, consumers, and a messaging system. Distributed storage and processing systems can also be very tricky to configure and deploy, requiring a pretty deep understanding of the system – hence the business case for folks like Cloudera.

Learning from Big Data

Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, recently said,

The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians... The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it

Unfortunately for those of us working on these problems in real life, it is not so simple. The archetypal data-renaissance man is mathematician, statistician, computer scientist, machine learner, and engineer all rolled into one. There are opportunities where you can lack some of these skills and work with a team that supplements your weak points—a startup is not one of those.

Now that we can store so much data, it is attractive to do previously unimaginable things with it. We are sure to see cool applications in fields from the internet to biotechnology to nanotechnology and fundamental materials science research. Almost all advances in every field of science and technology are now heavily dependent upon data and computing. Machine learning is serving a fantastic role as a bridge between mathematical and statistical models and the worlds of AI, computer science, and software engineering. We are exploring applications in learning from text, social networks, data from scientific experiments, and any other data sources we can get our hands on.

The data renaissance does present some difficult issues. There are not many places one can recieve a good education on working on these problems at large scale. Scaling our modeling and optimization algorithms is hard. We need to figure out how to partition and parallelize, or sometimes trade speed and scale for approximately correct calculations. Another issue is that we are often using simplistic models, albeit with pretty good results in many cases. We would like to move toward a deeper approximation of real intelligence.

But the data renaissance is here. Be a part of it.

CrunchBase InformationBradford CrossFlightCasterClouderaInformation provided by CrunchBase

The American Film Institute (AFI) informed its supporters late last week that it will put its Digital Content Lab on hiatus, effectively ending a long-running program that matched up broadcasters and studios with software and device vendors, as well as designers and UI experts, to develop prototypes for online television and other forms of digital media. AFI Senior Vice President of Media & Technology Nick DeMartino told me during a phone conversation that the institute was forced to this step due to a lack of funding.

AFI will still hold another DigiFest in November of 2010, and DeMartino told me that he is committed to bringing back the Digital Content Lab at some time in the future. However, it most likely won’t be quite the same as it was, as different approaches to technology will force AFI to adopt as well. Said DeMartino about the Lab: “It was a moment in time that doesn’t fit the world anymore.”

The Digital Content Lab was originally founded as the Enhanced TV Workshop to explore the possibilities of interactive television. The Lab adopted a unique approach to R&D that combined designers with developers and content producers with technologists to dive into a specific project under the guide of an experienced mentor.

Reuters teamed up with Microsoft as well as various outside designers to develop a mobile news client, AOL played with the idea of a live talk show production environment within its AIM client and Bravo got together with Cisco and Ogilvy Interactive to develop ideas for viral advertising  in the age of the DVR. All of these projects would be developed in a time frame of three to six months, after which the result was presented to the public, even if it still was an early-stage prototype. All in all, more than 90 of these prototypes were built during the Lab’s twelve years of existence.

As a reporter covering this space, I have to admit that I’ve long had a soft spot for the Digital Content Lab. One of the very first stories I wrote for NewTeeVee in early 2007 was about a showcase of the Lab’s projects that included a brilliant extension of PBS’s Design: e2 series onto the cell phones, web browsers and TIVOs. I was later invited to an internal design roundtable event to give a team working on a different PBS project some feedback on its ideas and wire frames, and I always enjoyed the fact that representatives of different companies would work together on these ideas without expecting any immediate pay-off.

Of course, the fact that most of these projects never saw the light of day may also have made it harder to win sponsors. “There’s always been the tension between the blue sky and the deployable,” admitted DeMartino, who founded the Lab in 1998. However, he also defended the approach as appropriate to get both Hollywood and Silicon Valley to participate. “The distance between mainstream filmmaking and technology was pretty large,” DeMartino said about the early days of the Lab, adding: “That’s not true anymore.”

The same goes for the willingness to experiment. The idea of open prototyping was fairly novel when the Digital Content Lab started, but nowadays even studio-owned video platforms like Hulu have their prototype playgrounds to try out new things. Of course, something like Hulu Labs is much more about actually commercial deployment, and less inclusive towards other companies in the industry.

So how do you keep the spirit of cooperation going while securing new avenues of funding? DeMartino told me that one possibility currently under consideration is a more academic model. How that could look like isn’t entirely clear yet, but one thing is: “The Lab will return,” DeMartino promised, adding that the AFI is still committed to technological innovation.

Related content on GigaOm Pro: Did We Really Learn Anything From the Dotcom Crash? (subscription required)

At the occasion of MIX10, which is currently taking place in Las Vegas, I'd like to announce Sesame Data Browser.
Sesame will be a suite of tools for dealing with data, and Sesame Data Browser will be the first tool from that suite.

Today, during the second MIX10 keynote, Microsoft demonstrated how they are pushing hard to get OData adopted. If you don't know about OData, you can visit the just revamped dedicated website: http://odata.org. There you'll find about the OData protocol, which allows you to publish and consume data on the web, the OData SDK (with client libraries for .NET, Java, Javascript, PHP, iPhone, and more), a list of OData producers, and a list of OData consumers.
This is where Sesame Data Browser comes into play. It's one of the tools you can use today to consume OData.

I'll let you have a look, but be aware that this is just a preview and many additional features are coming soon.
Sesame Data Browser is part of a bigger picture than just OData that will take shape over the coming months. Sesame is a project I've been working on for many months now, so what you see now is just a start :-)

I hope you'll enjoy what you see. Let me know what you think.

Writer and satirical "Fake Steve Jobs" blogger Dan Lyons will team with Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Larry Charles to develop a new half-hour sitcom set in Silicon Valley with an Apple-inspired name: "iCon."

C'est un retour sur un peu particulier qu'on vous propose aujourd'hui, puisque nous allons en effet vous inviter à revenir sur le jeu The Conduit de High Voltage Software, un jeu qui avait beaucoup fait parler de lui en juin dernier à l'occasion de sa sortie. A l'occasion d'un entretien avec le Producer du jeu, on en apprend plus sur les leçons apprises par le studio avec ce projet, l'occasion donc pour nous de reparler du jeu, dans un premier temps, avant de voir ce que le studio divulgue dans cette nouvelle interview, le jour même où l'on entend parler d'un The Conduit 2 !

Producer/Director Nathan Williams informs us that his latest BBC documentary, Battle for North America, used Blender for all it’s graphics! Nathan writes: I’m a producer director who... [read the full article on blendernation.com]

Anthropologist Roxanne Varzi came to our UCLA working group Culture, Power, and Social Change last week and spoke and showed a courageous and wise reflexive ethnographic film “Plastic Flowers Never Die” on the religio-statist support of martyrdom in Iran. I asked a question about how to theorize the role of digital ‘texts’ in the present era of ubiquitous self-publishing and social broadcasting. I was thinking about jihadi videos that are shot and distributed on online video portals as advertisement, recruitment tools, or celebrations of religio-military success. According to the IntelCenter, jihadi videos can be categorized as operational, hostage, statement, tribute, training, and instructional videos.

Essentially antagonistic with technoprogressive modernity while exploiting the simplicity, freedom, and access that comes with new media, these videos can be described as vanguard, counter, resistant, or subversive to capitalistic modernity while using the forefront of the sociotechnical tools of that capitalist technocracy. Our models of user-generated labor, from Shirkey and Benkler’s celebrations of social production to Terranova’s Marxist perspective on exploitative and ‘free’ labor, might not fit this un-capitalist media production practice. It is going to take a mix of something new to get it. But what?

I asked Varzi about jihadi videos: “These strike me as a rich source of information about a culture that is otherwise inaccessible to anthropologists: jihadi martyrs. How would you go about developing a critical anthropological methodology to reading these video texts?” Correctly but dangerously she stated she wouldn’t do it without an ethnographic component. I thought to myself: Let me get this right. I gotta hang out, like, deeply, with jihadi terrorists? As an anthropologist I cannot make a statement about jihadi video production practices without having first squeezed my way into their schedule and shared a few meetings over tea with my local jihadist? I’d love to, frankly, but I doubt I can network into their cliques. Are we going to let these remarkably reflexive, vocal “weapons of the weak” go unnoticed? If we can’t talk about these videos we are losing our disciplinary focus on subcultural expression and resistance and an opportunity to expand our methodological repertoire.

Jihadi video producers and new media firms, my focus, share little but extreme privacy. The similarities end there, but the problems for the ethnographer of either are identical: gaining access. My subjects are powerful. They have ideas that are worth millions in venture capital. Their lawyers are all about intellectual property. They live comfortable lives. They don’t need my cultural capital. They don’t need me around. Infrequently and for whatever reason, they invite me into their world. The Frontline documentary Behind Taliban Lines is a rare example that follows a single video journalist into the operations of the Taliban attempting to blow up a US convoy. This rarely happens in every context where a researcher wants access. Though our own Rex thinks our focus should be on the subtle and not the savage, he’ll be happy to know that anthropologists usually are gutsy enough to pursue such inaccessible subjects.

What if I couldn’t meet these wealthy entrepreneurs in person? What if they were so private that participant observation was impossible? I would be forced to construct something anthropological through their public representations. Thankfully, my subjects produce a lot of media. They socially broadcast on Facebook and Twitter and have scheduled relations with the public at conferences. (Except for TED, which at $6000 a weekend excludes most.) But with or without ethnography, this project, like a hypothetical investigation of jihadi video producers, needs to happen. If we have to begin-and probably end-with texts, what will we do? We’ll need to first develop an anthropologically specific way of reading these video texts and other public media artifacts.

The time is now to revisit our present anthropological theories about the role of textual studies. Finding its most useful expression in reconstructive indigenous and postcolonial historiographies, texts have long been an essential part of our field. But have we fully fleshed out a spectrum of specific theories for each type of text? I am not interested in adjudicating the validity or truthfulness of this text versus that. Colonial documents, biographies, and census records need to be differentially theorized not as statements of fact or fiction but as culturally situated texts. What I am fishing for is a debate on whether the new digital documents can find a home in contemporary anthropological theory. What differentiates paper-based from Web 2.0 personal documents and text from video? Most importantly, how can we take a culturally distinct but necessarily distant visual text of war and conflict, consider its technical and productive online existence, not defer to speculation on auteur intentionality, be mindful of the artifacts that appear on screen, and extrapolate back to the producer’s culture?

More broadly, we need to ask ourselves how to do an anthropological study of ethnographically inaccessible objects: leadership of corporations, governments, terrorist cells, elite institutions. Anthropologist Jane Weddell’s recent book, The Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market” is a fine example. Ethical problems abound in all these projects. Just as Nancy Scheper-Hughes prospered, so will the anthropologist of video culture of martyrdom and other inaccessible objects.