I've been meaning to look into whether there were any consistent criteria for "most e-mailed" articles. Lots of media sites must have large datasets by now. I'd like to see an analysis of them.
I did find this article from Slate in which some thinking is slapped on the question. It's focused on only one story and the tone is thuddingly cynical (which is saying something coming from me), but it's interesting.
Are you like me: fascinated by the idea of reality tv but bored by the shabby, false, poorly acted melodrama it's turned out to be? When I first heard about Big Brother, I thought it was an interesting idea. It's just that it's not worth watching.
Now I get my daily dose of "No he did-n't!" from Phil Gyford's wonderful realtime minus 343 years posting of Samuel Pepys' diary. Each entry is heavily annotated, not just with historical explanations but with the same kind of personally invested commentary on "Sam's" daily life that you'd normally find in the letters section of People magazine:
Sure, Pepys was doing some impression management. But the sheer amount of trivial, unselfconscious detail he presents, the historical setting and the knowledgeable, emotional annotations of what you'd have to call his "fans" create a dense network of story much more interesting and real, even 343 years later, than anything John De Mol has come up with.
At the risk of blaspheming the father, the son and the holy ghosts, I was disappointed by the "new" Beatles album, Love. Maybe it's not surprising given that it was built primarily as a Cirque du Soleil backing track rather than a self-standing album, but the mixes are so conservative that, with a few lovely and promising exceptions (like "Sun King" played backward fading into the intro of "Something") there's nothing revelatory or insightful about it, which is what a great remix should be. Love just feels less interesting than it ought to given the interestingness of the elements the Martins had to work with. It's as if they were asked to dj rather than produce. (Admittedly a vanishingly fine line these days.)
But maybe the richness of the elements was actually part of the problem. So many Beatles songs, even individual parts from songs, are so familiar and interesting that you can't help hearing echoes of the original version, and all those echoes mixed together may make a mess in the mind of the listener. At a certain point, interesting + interesting ≠ more interesting, but confusion. (Kind of like what happened to the show Lost.)
But why not try it yourself and see? A demo version of Live, the best music-mixing-mashing-making software in the world, is available here for free. You can spend months digging into its creative possibilities, but you can also start making interesting mixes of your own pretty quickly. Of course, Live won't make you a great composer/producer/arranger/musician like Sirs George, Paul et al., but it can help you to become a more creative dj. And we're all dj's now.
Having spent three days stuck in airports the past week, I've had a lot of opportunity to observe crying babies in their natural habitat, and you know what? Babies love mobile phones.
I began to suspect this a few months ago when I saw two normally friendly babies in a hilarious knockdown, dragout fight over a Sony-Ericsson that was the same model owned by both their mothers. My sister no longer even bothers looking for her mobile, but simply asks her 2-year old where it is. So after I saw the third harried mother in the airport wordlessly hand over her mobile to quiet a screaming toddler, I figured I should start writing the Nature cover story. But I can't find anything on the web about the phenomenon except videos and toys confirming its basic truth. So it falls to me to make up an entertaining explanantion.
I suspect that babies love mobiles for a number of reasons: interactivity, good hand (and mouth) feel. But toy phones also have those qualities and I've never seen a baby willing to trade a Nokia for a Hasbro. In fact, it has to be mommy or daddy's Nokia, which indicates that the main attraction isn't physical or perceptual, but social. Babies see the intimacy and emotion that their parents pour into their phones and they want to extract it. They are soothed by the love with which the phone is impregnated. That's my stuck-in-O'Hare-at-3AM theory, anyway.
I was cleaning up my iPhoto library when I rediscovered this picture of my friend Steve with his sons Camden and Brady (hidden) at the Van Gogh museum on their visit to Amsterdam last spring. We were all thrilled to find this video message wall in the lobby because Steve's wife Melanie wasn't able to make the trip and they could send her a 15 second video greeting for free.
What a great idea. I wonder why it isn't more widespread.
Meeting via MMOGs like World of Warcraft is a lot like dating. It's always better to have something else to do on a date besides just sit and talk. Having a straightforward, explicit shared goal like painting a room or storming a castle takes the pressure off the interacting part of the encounter. It provides a framework for socialization. It can also inspire ideas. It gives you a reason to be together so that you can just be together.
Business meetings should be more like dates in that way. Someone should start creating virtual worlds designed specifically to facilitate business interaction (if they haven't already).
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