Kassia Krozser

I know this guy who has hundreds of friends on the Facebook. I know another guy who’s trolling for his thousandth friend on the MySpace. I know authors by the score who talk about how many friends they have on this social network or that (LinkedIn geeks, anyone?). Musicians who have built entire careers on their friends list. What if Facebook disappeared tomorrow? Poof! Into the ether. Gone without a trace.

Taking all your friends with it.

Could happen. Could happen at any point. Could happen in a way that you don’t expect. Like, maybe the site doesn’t disappear, but there’s this weird database glitch and 90% of your friends are lost to you. Let’s say this happens, oh, about an hour before you send out a message touting your latest project.
[Read more…] about Possession: Not Just 9/10ths of the Law

Since I was running short of things to worry about, I turned my attention to fact that today’s youth are not learning something called “executive function”. Far as I can tell, this is child psychologist-speak for what we used to call self-control. Okay, self-control mixed with internal dialogue.

Back in my day — when I organized a cadre of easily swayed youth into digging storm tunnels to prepare for an eventual tornado (knowing, of course, even at that tender age, that tornadoes are highly uncommon along the Central Coast of California) as part of ongoing game loosely based on the “Little House on the Prairie” books (in addition to serving as commander-in-chief of the tunnel diggers, I also held the exalted position of being the only one who had read all the books) — kids went wild with the imagination and free play. We built elaborate games, either for single players or groups, with sets of rules and roles.
[Read more…] about Everybody Can Save The World

I’m having an “argh” moment. Hulu.com long rumored, long in beta, has finally launched. Hurray! The company has lined up most of the majors and has a good library of content (though, 200 premium titles doesn’t really seem like that much; apparently, there’s a good selection of back catalog now and coming online soon). However, will all good things, a little rain must fall.

Let’s forget for a moment that Hulu has built a business model that doesn’t offer choice. If you choose Hulu, you choose advertising. Sure, you get lots of content choice, but, well, advertising. As the iTunes store has proven, people will pay for content. Why not offer a choice? Why not mix up the business model to reach the widest range of customers.
[Read more…] about Killing Hulu From the Inside

Bill St. Arnaud says:

. . . My personal interpretation on David’s comments is that cablecos and telcos have entered into a contract with users to provide access to the “Internet”. The Internet is not a product or service developed by exclusively by the cablecos or telcos for use and enjoyment by their customers, as for example traditional cell phone service. Since the Internet is a global service with its own set of engineering principles, guidelines and procedures, implicit in providing access to the Internet is, in essence, an unwritten contract to adhere to those recognized standards such as the end2end principle. No one questions the need for traffic management, spam control and other such services, but they should be done in way that is consistent within open and transparent engineering practices that are part and parcel of the contract with the user in providing access to the global Internet.

• Bill St. Arnaud on David Reed at FCC (could find a direct link to the original source, so here’s a link to the quote via another source. Say that three times fast.)

The Director’s Guild of America has reached an accord with the AMPTP and, depending on the side you’ve taken, this is the straw/camel thing coming to life…or it’s enough to make the writers even angrier. Put another way, there’s some good, some bad in the deal. After all, directors have different needs that writers.

The question on the table now is: will the writers fall in line and will the actors accept the same terms? While the DGA has, again, chosen to go maverick, they’re not the only guild in town. The deals struck today will be in effect for a very long time. Three years is the standard terms for these agreements, and I think we can all agree that three years from now, we will live in a different (technological) world.

I am thinking that Steve Jobs must terrify Hollywood types. Once upon a time, ads and press releases touted “units shipped”. Units shipped — be they CDs, DVDs, or books — don’t represent real sales. I like to think of units shipped numbers as ego stroking devices: my number has more zeroes than yours. These numbers obscured actual sales. One thing that is certain about the Internet is that actual, true sales can be reflected.
[Read more…] about That Old Man DGA, Just Keeps On Settlin’

As a writer, I am keenly interested in protecting my ownership rights for my work. It is no small irony that pretty much everything I’ve written in the past several years is freely available on various websites, easily copied by anyone who chooses to do so. And, yes, I have been plagiarized (rather crudely, if you want my opinion). I thank fair use every day for my personal success. Fair use extends the discussion beyond my limited corner of the universe.

Copyright is a Constitutionally-protected right(Article I, Section 8, Clause 8). This means, of course, that the government is entrusted with the responsibility to balance the rights of the content owner with the rights of the public. The fact that copyrights are to be protected for a “limited time” indicates that this balance was considered long before Mickey Mouse edged up to entering the public domain. I still shake my head at the idea that the company that made so much money off the public domain refuses to give back to that community.
[Read more…] about The Decline of Fair Use

If I were a consumer who’d invested in the HD DVD format, I’d be fighting, suing mad right now. If I were a studio head who’d placed my company’s future in HD DVD, I’d be panicking right now. And if I were a shareholder in a motion picture company that “chose” the HD DVD format, I’d be starting a management ouster.

As announced on Friday (word spread through the motion picture industry — or at least my little part of it — much faster than the rain we were told was coming), Warner Brothers has decided to go all Blu-Ray all the time. Since only two majors — NBC Universal and Paramount (plus Dreamworks Animation) — remain in the HD DVD camp, industry wisdom has declared that format dead.

[By the way, those of you who truly want to understand why the newspaper industry is dying? When I searched for “dvd format war” on the latimes.com site, the number of search results returned? Zero. The headline of the article is “DVD format war appears to be over”. Luckily, Google came through.]
[Read more…] about Funeral Dirge For HD DVD

It’s entirely possible that I’m not the best ‘loper to speak on this topic, but, well, that’s never stopped me. It’s not like my thoughts will stop the best ‘loper from speaking. We’re opinionated that way. And when a major corporation like CBS does something stupid, it requires team coverage.

For a few months there, we here at Medialoper HQ were thinking that maybe — just maybe — CBS might actually get how this whole Internet thing works. That maybe — just maybe — they might understand the importance of brand and discovery.

Luckily, we are not as gullible as the mainstream media, though, frankly, we gnashed our teeth at the latest lame CBS news: in the waning days of 2007, right before, oh, Christmas, CBS has let the entire StarTrek.com editorial team go. Effective immediately. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
[Read more…] about CBS Reverts To Form, Begins Destruction Of Startrek.com