ABC News: Online news, breaking news, feature stories and more: ABC News is afraid of scrolling, and took the 16:9 ration a bit too literally across product lines.

MTV Labs: The New HTML MTV.com: who’d have thought that an entirely Flash site wasn’t a good idea?

Barenaked Ladies: If I had a compulsory blanket music license
: a very good rundown of where I THINK the industry is headed.

Implementing Random ID Generation | Rants of a Jester…: anyone remember Spectra? Spectra was an interesting product, in that it treated content as atomic entities independent from relational data. Basically, content existed in serialized form (WDDX objects), and searchability was done through an index table that bound a value, the type of value and meta-data about that value to the GUID for the atomic object. I mimicked this in my pStruct project. The cool thing about this? One, its scalable. Extremely so. Your index table is loosely bound to content, and one table can handle sequencing, searching and relations. As well, because every content object is atomic and GUID based, its agnostic to hosting and completely isolated from the infrastructure of the server. In fact, with WDDX, Spectra was a web-services model before those existed. I’m very happy Earnest and the Firebright guys remember Spectra, as I think implementation or migration of the node model in Drupal to a system like Spectra would be huge.

Flektor to Launch Amazing MySpace Mashups : Flash certainly has had its second act come up. The widget looks interesting and could work well for people like us (WBR) who like to aggregate the spread of a brand.

70 Reasons to Love Jack Nicholson | Film School Rejects: Five reasons Top X lists suck: 1) Your opinion is typically fragmented into multiple points for the sake of filling content without meaningful discourse 2) your Top X points usually are uninformed or regurgitation of false summations or pithy quotes gleaned from other sources of dubious quality 3) Its Digg bait, and has ruined that site for a great many people 4) If you can fill 70 points about Jack Nicholson (most of which are stupid), why couldn’t you string this discourse together into a good article that contributed as content rather than as a diversion as empty as air and as quickly forgotten? and 5) You are ruining Digg. Oh, and the propensity that exists in this content form for filler and repetition.

I’m wondering if the whole User Generated Content meme is getting played out?

Modest Mouse, and now Brett Ratner are getting in on the whole “if the populace does it for us, its UGC and we’re viral and hip!” train. Is it really UGC is all the User is doing is generating content as a way of offsetting cost and onsetting “hipness” through the proxy of adoption of an organic concept by what in the end are marketing departments at big companies (and I do understand the intentional irony here, being where I work and all)?

The whole concept behind “User Generated Content” as a means of describing content created by and for the People is flawed in that it simultaneously is presupposing a hierarchal difference — subjugating the “User” as a different class — as its maintaining this hierarchy by virtue of a disingenuous altruistic elevation of said content to that of Corporate under the guise of Marketing.

We like Users so much, they can replace us (but only if we control it)!

Here’s the thing: the best of what we now call UGC, and I choose to call GOOD FILM/VIDEO came from subversive desire and goals, as well as the desire for uninhibited creative expression outside of the confines of economics and hierarchy which define the media industry.

I refer to:

Superstar - the Karen Carpenter Story
Spin - the film by Brian Springer
The Barbie Liberation Organization

The movement of UGC is caused by three distinct things: Flash video, broadband market penetration and the default ability of new computers to edit video digitally. Thats it.

However, its presented a threat to the media elite in that the hierarchical differentiation that was defined by the concepts of Quality and Distribution cease to be a factor. Flattening of media hierarchy, and the removal of morphology as a means of quantifying the difference between two forms of media has in the end brought the worst McCluhan-esque, Media-Theory-101-at-college-in-the-70’s fears (which ironically were once idealistic hopes, until money entered into the equation) to life for those with the big, mahogany desks.

I love the fact that cell phones, digital video cameras and Final Cut Pro have created a movement of “take back the media.” I’m slightly worried and bothered that we (as the collective) use these tools only to bolster the ideologies of the very old-school media empires these devices have threatened.

So here’s a proposal to you all:

Take back the media! Do not partake in systems meant to enforce hierarchy, and instead embrace those that seek to diminish and eliminate it.

Remember: nothing stands between the quality or distribution of you and the media companies except the cost of the toys. The quality is not quantifiably different, neither is access.

The Aura, as it were, is not there anymore at any stage in the production flow.

Walter Benjamin is dead.
Long live mechanical reproduction, and may the work of art be free.