Bloggasm

1.The Final Days: NYT magazine profiles Coast to Coast, the late-night radio show that focuses on conspiracy theories, UFOs, ghosts, and other mysterious subjects. They’ve been focusing a lot on the Mayan calendar recently and whether the world will end in 2012.

2. Universal in Dispute With Apple Over iTunes: “The Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world’s biggest music corporation, last week notified Apple that it will not renew its annual contract to sell music through iTunes, according to executives briefed on the issue who asked for anonymity because negotiations between the companies are confidential.

Instead, Universal said that it would market music to Apple at will, a move that could allow Universal to remove its songs from the iTunes service on short notice if the two sides do not agree on pricing or other terms in the future, these executives said. ”

3. The Six Stages of E-Mail: I’m not linking to this because it’s any good, but rather because of how unfunny it is. Shouldn’t this have been written sometime in the 90s when it might have at least been giggle-worthy?

4. All the News That’s Fit to Print Out: “When news broke on May 8 about the arrest of a half-dozen young Muslim men for supposedly planning to attack Fort Dix, alongside the usual range of reactions — disbelief, paranoia, outrage, indifference, prurience — a newer one was added: the desire to consecrate the event’s significance by creating a Wikipedia page about it. The first one to the punch was a longtime Wikipedia contributor known as CltFn, who at about 7 that morning created what’s called a stub — little more than a placeholder, often just one sentence in length, which other contributors may then build upon — under the heading “Fort Dix Terror Plot.” A while later, another Wikipedia user named Gracenotes took an interest as well. Over the next several hours, in constant cyberconversation with an ever-growing pack of other self-appointed editors, Gracenotes — whose real name is Matthew Gruen — expanded and corrected this stub 59 times, ultimately shaping it into a respectable, balanced and even footnoted 50-line account of that day’s major development in the war on terror. By the time he was done, “2007 Fort Dix Attack Plot” was featured on Wikipedia’s front page. Finally, around midnight, Gruen left a note on the site saying, “Off to bed,” and the next morning he went back to his junior year of high school.”

***

Related posts: Holy shit this is awesome