smart links

---Wired's 7 essential skills:

"There are more writing opportunities than ever, but they require skills that Strunk and White never dreamed of. This course will teach you how to Photoshop images to create a narrative, edit a 20-second YouTube video, compress your thoughts into 140 characters (or clarify them into a PowerPoint presentation that won’t put your audience to sleep), write a wiki entry that encourages other people to edit and adapt it, and ensure your work goes viral, turning readers into vectors for your ideas.Technical skills, however, are not enough. Writing successfully requires knowing how to attract niche audiences with depth and detail. To demonstrate this, we’ll contrast The New York Times Magazine’s profile of Yankee pitcher Mariano Rivera with the accompanying Web video of the nearly 1,300 pitches Rivera threw during the 2009 baseball season.

The role of the writer is also changing. In the age of objectivity, writers kept their personalities out of their work. But now, the author’s identity is paramount; readers have to believe you offer a unique—and trustworthy—perspective. Tone and personality are once again central to writing, not something to be smoothed and scrubbed. We’ll study the work of The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, who built a blog empire with an informal voice that makes readers feel as if they are accessing his unvarnished thoughts; New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin, who encourages reader loyalty by posting long passages from the emails that they send him; and director Kevin Smith, who recounts sex with his wife in lascivious detail to keep his 1.7 million Twitter followers hitting Refresh.

Writing today also means mastering metatext, the cues and context that determine how, where, and if your words get read. We’ll learn that winning links depends on appealing to the unique tastes of different social networks. Each link will help you attract your most influential audience—the algorithms that determine where your story ends up in Google’s search results. As we optimize our writing for this cyborg readership, we’ll also learn the new tenets of writing well: Be conspicuous, be entertaining, and leave space for others to talk."

---Maria Popova's "Journalism in the Age of Data"

---Milton Glaser's "Ten Things I Have Learned"

---celebrity awkwardness: Katherine Heigl and Chris Noth

---Jeffrey Sconce examines Disney's imperialist ideology:

"In How to Read Donald Duck (1971), Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart examined how Disney comic books export imperialist ideology to the children of Latin America. As befitting a Marxist analysis of a lowly comic title aimed at kids, much of their discussion focuses on curious displacements and troubling absences (like the fact that there are very few direct relatives in the Disney-verse, only endless cousins, nephews, uncles, etc.) One feature of Duckland, however, is less than subtle in promoting First World dominion over the developing nations: Scrooge McDuck, already the richest of all ducks, remains relentless in his pursuit to own everything of value in the entire world (apparently so that he might covert all his wealth to cash to stock his decadent ski-vault). Often, McDuck's greed is the impulse that kicks off an adventure for Donald, Huey, Dewy, and Louie, sending them to some remote and more "primitive" part of the globe in search of diamonds, gold, oil, and other valuable commodities. As Dorfman and Mattelart point out, these stories often take the form of McDuck simply swindling the local population, buying up rare and precious resources from the "natives" who have no idea how much these items are actually worthy."

---Spike Jonze's new short I'm Here

---Mayhill Fowler discusses why she had to leave The Huffington Post:

"The dignity pay confers upon work. I think this about sums it up. So let this be a warning to you, citizen journalism enthusiasts. In the end, what you are doing really is enhancing somebody else’s bottom line. And think for a minute what it means when you throw yourself into working for a place, as I did, without first walking into the company’s human resources office to sign some paperwork that legally binds you and your employee to a relationship. In my book Notes from a Clueless Journalist, which not too many have read (I may have been a bit ahead of the curve on publishing only for Kindle and cell phone), I go into the consequences here in a much darker way. I’m not going to repeat any of that now, because in some sense what happened to me post-Bittergate and the way in which The Huffington Post did not have my back was a unique situation. Although, now that I think about it, the scenario would make a movie: citizen journalist gets a great story, but the poohbahs for whom she is writing don’t know her from Eve and can’t decide, first, whether to believe her or not, and then, second, as things get complicated whether, because of conflicting loyalties, to support her. It is very much a story about class and hierarchy and relationship, about bias and trust and instinct—and maybe only a Tom Wolfe could write it."

---Malcolm Gladwell's "Why the revolution will not be tweeted" and some dissenting views

---24 trailers

---Stanley Kubrick considers his life and work

---Stan Vanderbeek's The Cinema Delimina (thanks to Mike Everleth)

---scenes from China (including anti-suicide nets)

---"Nothing else needs to be said"

---The Browser's Facebook links:

"The defining idea of the coming era is actually the loss of an idea we never had to worry about losing before. It is the decay of belief in the specialness of being human.

Decay in the belief in self is driven not by technology, but by the culture of technologists, especially the recent designs of antihuman software like Facebook, which almost everyone is suddenly living their lives through. Such designs suggest that information is a free-standing substance, independent of human experience or perspective. As a result, the role of each human shifts from being a "special" entity to being a component of an emerging global computer.

This shift has palpable consequences. For one thing, power accrues to the proprietors of the central nodes on the global computer. There are various types of central nodes, including the servers of Silicon Valley companies devoted to searching or social-networking, computers that empower impenetrable high finance (like hedge funds and high-frequency trading), and state-security computers. Those who are not themselves close to a central node find their own cognition gradually turning into a commodity. Someone who used to be able to sell commercial illustrations now must give them away, for instance, so that a third party can make money from advertising. Students turn to Wikipedia, and often don't notice that the acceptance of a single, collective version of reality has the effect of eroding their personhood."

---smart dance moves: The Charleston and Donna Loren (thanks to @cinebeats)

---Catherine Grant (@filmstudiesff) supplies the night of the living links

---Best for Film's guide for film journalists

---@CraigatPorlock examines Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

---Trevor Hogg's David Fincher profile and an interview

---lastly, Johnny Knoxville looks for the positive in Detroit