Culture Institutions Go After the Short-Attention-Span Crowd

Around 3,000 people, seemingly all in their 20s and 30s, attended the first Takeover at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

New York Times

$200 gPC launches at Wal-Mart

PC maker Everex rolls out a budget desktop PC today that costs $200 and combines the Ubuntu Linux kernel with Google applications and open source software.

The Everex gPC, goes on sale tomorrow at Wal-mart and is being touted by the company as a close collaboration between the PC maker, the open source community and Google that is intended to "bring Linux to the masses."

The machine uses a 1.5GHz Via C7-D processor, Via UniChrome Pro IGP graphics core, and comes equipped with 512MB of memory, an 80GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, and has built-in Ethernet.

But the real secret sauce is a software suite that begins with what the company calls its "gOS," which turns out to be a customized Ubuntu Linux kernel. The software bundle includes open source desktop applications highlighted by OpenOffice, GIMP photo software, the Xing DVD and video player, and Rhythmbox music management software.

PC World

She’s Famous (and So Can You)

Tila Tequila’s grasp of the marketplace proves brilliant.

TILA TEQUILA turned 26 on Wednesday, and the reader is advised to do whatever is necessary to forget that useless fact. Wipe it, as the metaphor goes, from the hard drive. Try also to obliterate the knowledge that Tequila is not, oddly enough, her real name (Nguyen is); that she is what Wikipedia — in an entry only slightly less extensive than that on Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian novelist and 1928 Nobel laureate for literature — refers to as an “American glamour model”; that she is a former performer on the Fuse cable TV show called “Pants-Off Dance-Off”; that she is the centerpiece of a hit MTV television series “A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila,” which made its debut early on Oct. 9 and was immediately, as the Hollywood Reporter noted, No. 1 in its time period in the network’s target demographic of people 18 to 34; and that the signal reason for this breakout success may also be the basis for Ms. Tequila’s unconventional fame, her boast that she has 1,771,920 MySpace friends.

Dispose of the information. You won’t need it for long.

How, one may ask, is it possible for a personality who great hunks of the citizenry never imagined existed to build up a social network more populous than Dallas? How can Tila Tequila have become enormously famous having done little of note beyond appearing as Playboy’s Cyber Girl of the Week? When exactly in the Warholian arc of fame did we arrive at a point where we create celebrities of people so little accomplished that they make Paris Hilton look like Marie Curie?

Who says any longer that one must be able to sing or dance or emote in order to attract an audience or, anyway, a batch of new friends in the ether? Who says that only winners win? As reality TV, with its durable affection for flame-outs, car wrecks and actual losers, has made abundantly clear, even after the tribal council has voted you off their tropical island, you’re still welcome in our homes.

When Jake Halpern set out to write “Fame Junkies,” his book about what is now a universal obsession with celebrity, he was surprised to uncover studies demonstrating that 31 percent of American teenagers had the honest expectation that they would one day be famous and that 80 percent thought of themselves as truly important. (The figure from the same study conducted in the 1950s was 12 percent.)

“Obviously people have been having delusions of grandeur since the beginning of time, but the chances of becoming well known were much slimmer” even five years ago than they are today, Mr. Halpern said. “There are an incredibly large number of venues for becoming known. Talent is not a prerequisite.”

New York Times

Don't Fear Big Beer: The Long Tail is Nothing New

Garrett Oliver, Brooklyn Brewery Brewmaster, writes an interesting Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. Coming off the recent merger of beer giants SABMiller and Molson Coors, forming MillerCoors, he writes about how, as a "craft-brewer" he isn't worried about his business in the face of this new super-brewery.

His example of the beer industry has obvious parallels to the growing trend of locally grown produce, small batch production etc. With all the talk about the revolutionary "Long Tail" economy, it is interesting and refreshing to hear this much hyped "small is beautiful" trend spoken of in terms of "a return to normalcy" after one generation's aberration rather than a wholly new phenomena.

New York Times

High Impact: Impact Jackets (a.k.a. Wearable Airbags) Finally Make It to the US, and Are Immediately "Tested"

Impact Jackets, originally designed to save Japanese construction workers from long falls by inflating prior to impact, have finally made it to the United States. Only instead of construction workers, it's our motorcyclists that seem to be reaping the benefits. And it didn't take too long to see some results.

Gizmodo

Does Your Building Need A Social Network? Why Not.

New York-based LifeAt wants to create a social network around your residential building. Do you need one? Nope. But maybe you’ll use it anyway. And perhaps you’ll even get to know some of your neighbors.

TechCrunch

"Anti-Social Networking" Sites Mock Web 2.0 Trends

Two parody sites, Enemybook and Snubster, mock what they see as the superficiality and cheerfulness of online social-networking sites like Facebook.

Wired

73 and Loaded With Friends on Facebook

It's no secret that Facebook, which started as a networking playground for college kids, is graying.

New York Times

Green = Modern

A carbon-neutral green-development zone in Libya may serve as a model for environmentally friendly design.

New York Times

The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life

Huge amounts of advertising money are flowing out of the traditional media and into alternatives — even as ad budgets in general are growing.

New York Times

After Years of Being Out, the Necktie Is In

Necktie sales may have foundered since the words “casual Friday” entered men’s vocabularies, but in the last year or two, stylish men in their 20s and early 30s have embraced the old four-in-hand as a style statement.

New York Times

In India, a $2,500 Pace Car

Automakers in India, one of the world’s fastest-growing car markets, are racing to respond to Indians’ desire for small and inexpensive cars, some as cheap as $2,500.

New York Times

Bandwagonesque: Open source bands, flavor of the moment or full on revolution?

Some of the music industry’s biggest names are considering offering their music free online following the success of the experiment by the band Radiohead to let fans download their new album without charge.

The band’s website topped the chart of music websites with an 11-fold increase in internet hits after the announcement, according to internet monitoring agency HitWise.

Now Jamiroquai and Oasis, two major names that are not contracted to a record labels, are rumoured to be considering following Radiohead by offering work for free, according to industry sources.

The Telegraph

(Note from Adam: And why exactly would I pay for an Oasis or Jamiroquai album anyway? :) )

Millionaires turn to psychologists

BOSTON (Reuters) - The surge in the number of millionaires in the world is spawning a fast-growing industry -- wealth psychology.

full article at reuters

Boomers Get Expensive Hobbies

A recent New York Times Article raised what I thought was an interesting point. The article is about people getting high-tech, $100k plus observatories put on their houses. While I am sure this particular fad is probably a limited one, what is interesting is that with boomers retiring, flush with money and, on the whole, more active than retirees from previous generations we are likely to see an increase in the popularity of expensive, equipment intensive hobbies. Let's see where this one goes, but maybe there will be a growing market in products that go along with these hobbies, and services linking like-minded boomers.