Share buttons and prompts to “read more” treat readers like idiots who don’t know how to do basic tasks; meanwhile, a huge amount of faith is put in technology, which fails constantly. Embedded social media posts don’t load properly, videos expire, and the pre-populated tweet mangles the text. If there are high-res photos, they are often too large to display on a standard laptop screen, so one first looks at a face and much later scrolls to see a body. Should the poor reader decide to navigate the site’s categories via the drop-down menu, they must maneuver the mouse like a tight-rope walker, lest the proper choice vanish before they can click on it.

Enablers. “If you didn’t hear, yesterday Charlie Sheen joined Twitter. Today he very well may reach 1 million followers (as I type he’s already passed the 900K mark). How did it happen? Why all of a sudden did he wake up and decide it’s Twitter time? And how was it that Charlie Sheen went from non-twitterer to hardcore twitterer overnight? Short answer: he got a lot of help from a team of experts at Ad.ly, a small Beverly Hills start-up that focuses on celebrity endorsements via Facebook and Twitter.”

The always-great Matt Thompson on why episodic news content isn't as helpful as laying a contextual groundwork for a story and then letting readers know about events that happen in that framework.

Basically: Publishing solves a problem that no longer exists, and we don't need newspapers; we need journalism. Amen.

Eric Harvey on point as usual: "Access to technology ≠ access to actual creative skill that people want to watch, not which is just dumb enough to drive people to iTunes."

The head of a company that makes videos go viral explains exactly how it's done. The commenters go crazy. Very interesting in the specific sense, but even more so in the overall evolution of media.

Explanation and perspective on the looming screenwriters' strike from John August, a screenwriter.

Trent was an Oink user and regrets its disappearance. The Reznor-Williams collaboration, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!, a mind-boggling fusion of genres," will be released for free on the internet. "Ghetto gothic?"

Excellent videos!

Facebook as a foundation.