News 24

What amuses me most about xkcd's latest is not so much the sentiment (which is very amusing), but more the fact that the phony made-up news organisation in the comic is the very real one that used to be the rival of the one I worked for, and is now (somehow) part of the massive media conglomerate that now owns my soul.

Tube

Absurdity, advertising, creativity, reinvention... It's a list of what's missing from some floundering publications, but it's also a list – published here at Wired – of the secrets of YouTube's stellar success.

Read, learn, repeat. Or even better: read, learn, do it differently... and better.

Sierra

I spent waaay too much of my childhood happily playing Sierra adventure games on the computer. Kings Quest, Kings Quest III (I never got around to the second one), Police Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest For Glory II... They don't make 'em like they used to.



Actually, they make them even better now. The incredible designers at AGDInteractive Studio and Infamous Adventures are painstakingly recreating those old Sierra games, room by room and screen by screen. About five years ago I played IA's remake of Kings Quest III, and it was even more fun than I'd remembered. Now I'm gearing up for ADGI's Quest For Glory II remake.

Man, I'm such a nerd...

Lights Out

I'm loving this Energizer ad campaign they're running in (of all places!) Venezuela.

AVP

OK, so it may be one of the worst movies you'll ever see, but at least Alien vs Predator gave us this: a very funny ad campaign for Sky TV. I can only imagine what they'd have done with Joe vs The Volcano.

Webby

Looking for some new websites to go visit? Look no further than the Webby Award nominees. Sure, the awards are a bit passé... but there are some really great sites here.

It's Absolutely True

If ever you've had the misfortune of reading the Brit tabloid The Daily Mail*, you'll love this little ditty.


* Ordinarily I'd include a link to the Daily Mail's site, but as a service to you, I won't.

The Facebook

Is your mom on Facebook? Don't fell bad about it. Even hard rockers have to put up with it...

Celebs

Go take a look at New York magazine's slideshow of the Best and Worst of March's Celebrity Photographs in US magazines. There's good stuff there from Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, Vogue... all the places you'd expect to find great portraits.



It is a Best and Worst, though, so be warned: the pics range from the sublime to whatever the opposite of sublime is.

Hindsight

Slate have a great story up on How To Suss Out Bad Tech Predictions.

The piece was inspired by an old Newsweek article (from the carefree days of 1995), which included this pearl: " The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

Back in '95, that made perfect sense. Today? Not so much.

Edit.

Great clip at SlateV on the five films that've been nominated for Best Film Editing at this year's Oscars.




And no, I didn't know what film editors did either until I watched this.

Pirates

Here, via Lifehacker, via some guy, is yet another reason why copying a pirated DVD is a more attractive option than shelling out hard-earned dosh for a proper one at the shops. Hard to argue...

Up In Smoke

The good things about the ban on cigarette advertising are obvious and numerous and there's no point repeating them here. But there's one bad thing about it: the culture is missing out on great vintage advertisements like this:



And this:



And, of course, this:



Who thought the day would come that I'd actually lament the lack of cancer-stick commercials?

Drivers Wanted

It's a beautiful, poignant work of art. And it's a car commercial. Ultimately, though, this VW Cabrio ad is proof that advertising can actually be beautiful.

Here's How You Do It

Smart: publishing Paste magazine.

Smarter: publishing Paste magazine in both print and online editions, thereby allowing cheapskates (or – and here's an audience every publisher forgets – people who live outside of the magazine's distribution area) to read the entire magazine, consuming both the edit and the ads, for free.

Sure, they've lost the $5.95 I would've spent (if, of course, my local newsstand stocked the mag) buying the product. But they've saved whatever they would've spent printing the mag, and they've just added one more person to their circulation. Like I say: smart.

Flash! Ah-hah!

It sounds like the plotline of a superhero mystery. Actually it's the premise of a fascinating Slate piece: Is Apple killing Flash?

Famous

The lengths we go to in order to get our work published...

Similar

Looking to mix up your regular list of websites? Try SimilarSites.com – its smart engine takes your favourite URL and suggests similar ones that you may (or may not) like.

(If that all sounded like an advertisement, it's probably because I've been writing below-the-line ad copy at work. That's how the rot starts...)

You're Next

Here's a sobering post from Photoshelter: it's a list of the 10 Things All Staff Photographers Must Do Right Now... and what's really scary about it is that it works for anybody in my industry.

Or, quite possibly, in yours.

Metered

So the New York Times - undaunted by Apple's new tablet, are going for a metered online payment model. Way it'll work is this: you register as a user on the site, and you get X amount of free content every month. Use more than your allowance, and you have to start paying to read their content.

Maybe I'm crazy, but it sounds like a fair deal to me.