Tag: Internet

Just in time for the new movie opening Friday, any Veronica Mars fan can legally write and sell their own stories starring Veronica, Logan, Wallace, and any of the characters or plotlines from the cult classic TV show starring the titular high-school-outsider-turned-PI. In Creator Rob Thomas’s words: “Veronica Mars’ fans are amazingly loyal and anything we can do to give them more access to her world and that of her character is great…I’m looking forward to seeing what new worlds and characters are created by fans and Kindle Worlds writers.”

Early signs are that the ploy seems to be working. Tara McGuinness, a Whitehouse communications advisor tweeted that FunnyorDie.com, the site which hosted the video, “is the #1 source of referrals to HealthCare.gov right now”. And the official Twitter account of Healthcare.gov – the site where people can enrol for insurance – has said it received almost a million visits on Tuesday, up 40% from the previous day. The decision to make the appearance will have been carefully weighed up by Obama’s team, and “rooted in data which proves that these things work”, according Alec Ross, a former digital advisor to Hillary Clinton.

The problem isn’t the idea of aspiration itself, or of dedication and perseverance, or of inspirational quotes. The problem isn’t the belief that relentlessly pursuing one’s dreams can lead to success, though it should be approached with the recognition that it takes a lot of good fortune and the right opportunities, and the empathy to understand that those who never have those breaks should not be figures of contempt or object lessons in failure. The problem isn’t even the idea that people of unshakable will can change the world, though this should be tempered with the recognition of a moral context: the unshakable will of Gandhi to change the world had a very different endgame than the equally unshakable will of Hitler to change the world. The problem is that none of these are being presented honestly. They are, instead, being presented in the form of marketing, in the form of advertising. They are not personal messages of achievement and inspiration; they are commercials. They are meant only to sell you something, whether it’s trinkets for a particular charity, or treatment at a particular hospital, or the idea that you should give up on such quaint notions as job security and benefits in our bold new digital economy. Whatever they’re specifically selling, they are commercials, and commercials are never to be trusted, especially when the message delivered is one of contempt for the ordinary man, the average citizen, the person who could be you if you weren’t so unique and special.

Here is the more serious point: journalists are way under-rated as influencers. They are at the center of interesting discussion. And that will continue to be the case, even in a discussion environment which seems to challenge the traditional definition of the profession.

Thanks to Meow Mix®, today is that lucky day for cat fans across the country with the launch of the new interactive website, Meow Mix Catstarter SM.

The team is on the prowl to produce the next great cat-tastic invention and is asking cat owners for their vote/help. Now through April 11, cat aficionados across the country are given the power to vote for a project that will benefit their cat, as well as sign up to become the first generation to actually own it.

Martin Clarke expects to be turning £100 million plus in digital revenue in three to five years. Clarke once also described mailonline as “journalistic crack”. He said it like a man who has watched about two and a half seasons of The Wire, thinking it all seemed like fun and assuming that things will probably turn out quite nicely for the crack dealers.

As anyone who has seen the series can attest, crack-dealing is not the sort of business in which you can really make three to five year forecasts. Neither is banner ad-based journalism.

Getty Images is dropping the watermark for the bulk of its collection, in exchange for an open embed program that will let users drop in any image they want, as long as the service gets to append a footer at the bottom of the picture with a credit and link to the licensing page. For a small-scale WordPress blog with no photo budget, this looks an awful lot like free stock imagery.

It’s a real risk for the company, since it’s easy to screenshot the new versions if you want to snag an unlicensed version. But according to Craig Peters, a business development exec at Getty Images, that ship sailed long ago. “Look, if you want to get a Getty image today, you can find it without a watermark very simply,” he says. “The way you do that is you go to one of our customer sites and you right-click. Or you go to Google Image search or Bing Image Search and you get it there. And that’s what’s happening… Our content was everywhere already.”

A recent study found that many Americans are lost when it comes to tech-related terms, with 11% saying that they thought HTML — a language that is used to create websites — was a sexually transmitted disease.