Subject:

National Public Radio

  • Blogs

    April 25, 2013

    Telekinesis Shines in the Intimate Environs of Bottom of the Hill, 4/24/13

    Telekinesis Mount Moriah Paparazzi Wednesday, April 24, 2013 Bottom of the Hill Better than: Watching Ra Ra Riot outgrow small clubs. "How many of you have heard of Telekines?" It's a weird question to hear at a Telekinesis show, especially three-fourths of the way through a set. But Michael Ler ... More >>

  • Blogs

    March 18, 2013

    Black Prairie Leads a Joyous Music Lesson at Bottom of the Hill, 3/15/13

    Black Prairie Ashleigh Flynn Friday, March 15, 2013 Bottom of the Hill Better than: Your class field trip to the symphony Everyone looks for certain things in a show. Maybe you want to see extreme technical skill, or perhaps showmanship and spectacle are more your thing. There's also dancing, sing ... More >>

  • Blogs

    November 8, 2012

    Prop. 34: California Keeps Death Penalty, Once Again Shows It's Not as Liberal as Some Think

    California: that big blue state that handed President Obama 54 free electoral college points and gave his campaign more money than any other state. The state that is on the brink of Democratic supermajorities in both the state House and state Senate and contains a voting population in which register ... More >>

  • Blogs

    October 15, 2012

    Treasure Island 2012: The xx, M83, and Public Enemy Compete With Gorgeous Views and Weather

    Treasure Island Music Festival Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 13 and 14, 2012 Treasure Island, San Francisco Better than: Getting an October sunburn anywhere else this weekend. It was around sunset on Sunday evening when Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino sang what everyone at Treasure Island Music Festiva ... More >>

  • Blogs

    October 9, 2012

    Hepcat Michael Wolff: Facebook is 'Square'

    When you're trying to decide what's hip and what's square, there's really only one place to look: Michael Wolff writing in USA Today. Wolff is a serial Internet failure who is nevertheless a highly successful self-promoter. The two don't go together at all, especially considering that he promotes h ... More >>

  • Blogs

    August 14, 2012

    It Ain't Easy Being Google

    As the dominant search engine, Google inevitably finds itself in the position of deciding for the world which information is important and which information is less so. Just as inevitably, this leads to controversy, and tough choices being forced on the Internet's dominant search engine. The latest ... More >>

  • Blogs

    July 24, 2012

    Google Goes to Washington

    During the SOPA debate, many opponents of the anti-piracy bill often tried to portray Google and the rest of the tech industry as a champion for all that is good and true as opposed to what it really is: an increasingly powerful, self-interested industry like any other. This happened particularly in ... More >>

  • Blogs

    July 17, 2012

    Viacom's Insane Move to Yank Shows From The Web

    Viacom's decision to yank its programming from the Web last week as a tactic in its dispute with DirecTV was absolutely insane. The last people to realize this fact were Viacom's executives. As of Tuesday, the company had restored The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Since it's the middle of summe ... More >>

  • Blogs

    June 26, 2012

    Facebook's E-mail Hijack Is Part of a Pattern of Arrogance

    If it wasn't clear before, it should be now: Facebook doesn't think much of you. Or of me, or of any of its (supposedly) 900 million users. We are products, not customers. The customers are the people who buy the incredibly cheap, often sleazy ads that Facebook sells. The latest datapoint supportin ... More >>

  • Blogs

    June 12, 2012

    Bear Seduction and the Copyright Conundrum

    This will probably stand as the best story of the week: Ars Technica reports that Matthew Inman, creator of the web comic "The Oatmeal" has raised $100,000 from his fans to counter a lawyer's demand that he fork over $20,000 to a fifth-rate Website that Inman had complained was stealing his work. N ... More >>

  • Blogs

    May 29, 2012

    Facebook Ads and Spam: What's the Difference?

    People who don't closely follow the online media/advertising business might wonder: How can Facebook be such a great business, commanding a $100 billion valuation when it went public, when it's filled with cheesy, lowbrow ads that are just this side of spam? Those people will be glad to know that s ... More >>

  • Blogs

    May 15, 2012

    Drifting Away from Twitter, Toward Reality

    I've been known to strongly defend Twitter, which some people have found surprising because of my default digital skepticism. But of course, I was skeptical of it at first (if nothing else, because of the name, which is stupid), until I started using it. It really can be used for quite practical pur ... More >>

  • Blogs

    May 1, 2012

    Joyless Comic Strip's NYT Parody Falls Flat

    There seems to be a wide and growing divide between people who appreciate healthy portions of meaty journalism and those who prefer a media diet of bite-sized snark snacks full of empty calories. In this context, "old media" outlets like The New York Times can never win, no matter what they do. Even ... More >>

  • Blogs

    April 17, 2012

    Seeking a Path to Riches

    Oh, good. More "sharing." The mobile social-app company Path (yes, the one that found itself in the middle a big privacy controversy not long ago) announced on Monday that it had landed another $30 million in venture financing from some top-tier firms, making its total valuation $250 million. Hey, t ... More >>

  • Blogs

    April 10, 2012

    Oakland Garage-Pop Outfit Bare Wires Breaks Up After Disastrous SXSW, Tour Cancellation

    Bare Wires, the Oakland trio whose lean, gritty power-pop made it one of the best of a recent class of Bay Area garage bands, broke up recently after melting down onstage at South By Southwest and cancelling the remainder of its national tour, according to frontman Matthew Melton. The band still ha ... More >>

  • Blogs

    April 10, 2012

    Are People Finally Getting Bored with the Tech-Blog Circle Jerk?

    At this point, I have to believe that all the people in the Pando Daily-TechCrunch-Uncrunched-whatever micro-universe have consciously incorporated their onanistic little circle jerk into their collective business model. You can almost picture it just that way: Michael Arrington, Sarah Lacy, MG Sieg ... More >>

  • Blogs

    March 27, 2012

    Music Labels Make Life Tough for Spotify

    ​Patrick Carney of the Black Keys is not a fan of Sean Parker, to say the least. Parker is an "asshole," Carney told NME.com on Monday. It's hard to blame Carney, though his rage might seem a bit misdirected -- or maybe just too concentrated on one person. Parker of course was the guy who brought ... More >>

  • Blogs

    March 20, 2012

    Mike Daisey's "Truthiness"

    ​This week's episode of This American Life is both fascinating and painful to listen to, as many of the show's best episodes are. I came away from it still enraged at Mike Daisey and his lies, but also a bit sympathetic toward him. The show made it clear, without saying so, that he's dealing with ... More >>

  • Blogs

    March 16, 2012

    SXSW: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band Rock ACL Live

    By CRAIG HLAVATY Bruce Springsteen's Thursday started with a keynote speech in one of the big ballrooms at the Austin Convention Center, and ended with a mythic three-hour set at ACL Live across town, in front of a few thousand people cooing "Bruce!" The keynote and the show went hand in hand. If ... More >>

  • Blogs

    March 13, 2012

    Debates over the Internet Bring Out the Inanity

    ​The Internet conundrum is so difficult that it, like all difficult problems, has tended to attract people who don't want to address it, but to oversimplify it and then fight full-tilt for whatever far-end-of-the-spectrum "side" they've chosen. This is true of all complicated matters of public c ... More >>

  • Blogs

    February 23, 2012

    Sea of Bees on Her Music Videos, True Love, and Being Labeled "Queer"

    Gabriella Clavel​ The women of the Bay Area music scene are breaking rules and defying expectations. Lass Out Loud is a new column exploring their lives and work. Julie Ann Baenziger, aka Sea of Bees, has one of the most compelling and unique voices I've heard in years. Her indie folk-pop evo ... More >>

  • Blogs

    February 7, 2012

    Facebook Just Keeps Getting Worse

    ​Over the years, whenever Facebook has made changes, people have inevitably complained --  on Facebook -- about the changes Facebook made to Facebook. "I'm leaving Facebook," those people would declare, on Facebook. Of course, few of them ever actually left Facebook. Until recently, I have ... More >>

  • Blogs

    January 17, 2012

    PandoDaily: Just What We Needed, Another Tech-News Site

    ​Really? Seriously? Another site devoted to technology news? Yep, 'fraid so. This one, PandoDaily, will be written by, among others, some of the people who had previously made TechCrunch so awful: Sarah Lacy (who runs it), Michael Arrington, MG Siegler, and Paul Carr. These are people who believe ... More >>

  • Blogs

    January 3, 2012

    Rupert Murdoch on Twitter: Insipid and Pedestrian

    ​It's sort of hard to believe after all this time, but I still regularly see people making fun of Twitter as if it's just a bunch of morons saying moron things. Okay, it is mostly that when taken as a whole. But I see very little of that kind of thing because I generally don't follow morons. Twitt ... More >>

  • Blogs

    December 27, 2011

    GoDaddy's Wall-to-Wall Awfulness

    ​Every time GoDaddy makes the news, as it has over the past week by supporting the widely reviled Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), the question naturally arises: Waitaminute, this is a domain registrar, right? Right. GoDaddy is in perhaps the dullest business this side of term life insurance, and ... More >>

  • Blogs

    December 20, 2011

    The RIAA Responds Lamely to Claims of Piracy Advocates

    ​TorrentFreak, a news site that basically supports illicit downloading, last week used a half-assed ISP-lookup service to conclude that employees of both the Recording Industry Association of America and the Department of Homeland Security had downloaded illicit copies of various copyrighted works ... More >>

  • Blogs

    December 13, 2011

    Wikipedia: Should it Go Dark to Protest the Stop Online Privacy Act?

    ​Should Wikipedia shut itself down to protest the bizarrely clueless anti-piracy measures Congress is considering? As with many things about Wikipedia (such as whether an encyclopedia that anybody can edit is a good idea), it's not an easy question to answer. Would it even be effective? It's har ... More >>

  • Blogs

    December 6, 2011

    India Wants Facebook to Prescreen User Content

    ​Sometimes it's hard to refrain from going libertarian. Okay, not really, but whenever governments try to pass or enforce absolutely clueless, sledgehammer-blunt laws governing the Internet, it's a challenge not to simply give up hope that enough politicians will ever understand the basic concepts ... More >>

  • Blogs

    December 5, 2011

    San Franciscans Are Not Googling "the N-Word"

    Hey Barry! Guess what my constituents haven't been Googling!​In 2008, Barack Obama was the rising tide that buoyed all San Francisco ships -- at least the ones that floated a bit to the left. A massive turnout for "Hope" and "Change" -- 84 percent of a swollen turnout voted for Obama -- also led t ... More >>

  • Blogs

    November 22, 2011

    Facebook Fumbles Its Way Toward a Phone

    ​Facebook is building a phone, the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital is reporting this week in a series of posts. Facebook basically has to do it if it wants to stay in competition with Apple and Google as the go-to online destination -- or platform, or "ecosystem." Lots of people make Fa ... More >>

  • Blogs

    November 15, 2011

    The Perils of Policing Facebook Pages

    ​First it was the Islamic extremists. Now it's Mark Zuckerberg who is repressing Salman Rushdie. On Monday, Rushdie took to Twitter to complain that not only had Facebook shut down his page, apparently thinking it wasn't really his, but that the company then told him he couldn't use the name und ... More >>

  • Blogs

    November 1, 2011

    Copyright Fight the Subject of Juvenile Flamewars

    ​To the uninitiated, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce might sound like a larger version of local chambers of commerce: something like the Elks or the Rotary Club, where dull businesspeople get together for dull meetings to eat rubber chicken and to "network." But the U.S. Chamber is the largest lobb ... More >>

  • Blogs

    October 18, 2011

    What Exactly Is a Tech Company?

    ​Fast Company has published what might be the best, clearest look at the how the contours of the tech landscape are shaping themselves, and how that landscape has come to be dominated by four companies. I was alerted to the article via a tweet by Chronicle tech reporter Casey Newton who characte ... More >>

  • Blogs

    October 11, 2011

    Nick Lowe Charms the NPR Crowd at Great American Music Hall

    Nick Lowe at Great American Music Hall last night​ Nick Lowe J.D. McPherson Oct. 10, 2011 The Great American Music Hall Better than: What Lou Reed has chosen to do with his later career, by far. Although many original punk and new wave musicians delved into American and roots rock later in t ... More >>

  • Blogs

    October 6, 2011

    R.I.P. Steve Jobs, an Insanely Great Capitalist

    ​As I write this, many of my Facebook friends are expressing their profound sadness, and actually issuing "thanks" to Steve Jobs, who died on Wednesday. I'm feeling the same way. It is astonishing that such sentiments can be felt, at this moment in history, about the CEO of any American corporat ... More >>

  • Blogs

    October 4, 2011

    TechCrunch: Rewriting Press Releases, Gonzo-Style

    ​A lot of people love (or until recently, loved) TechCrunch. These seem to be people who want to know every last bit of news about the technology business, no matter how trivial, as soon as it breaks; entrepreneurs looking for financing; or venture capitalists looking for startups to invest in. A ... More >>

  • Blogs

    September 27, 2011

    Facebook's Newest Blight: The Ticker

    ​Recently, to check to see whether my keyboard was working, I randomly slapped some keys. I happened to have Facebook open at the time and I ended up entering what I typed -- "jmjyttyj"-- into its people search. I got three hits. There is no member named jmjyttyj, but Facebook helpfully pointed me ... More >>

  • Blogs

    September 20, 2011

    Netflix Chief, Please Stop Talking

    ​Netflix CEO Reed Hastings should be applauded, I suppose, for trying to communicate with his customers directly -- apparently in an attempt to add the personal touch. But he's no good at it, and he should never do it again. On Sunday, Hastings posted what was ostensibly an "apology" for the ... More >>

  • Blogs

    August 9, 2011

    How Google Ended the 'Browser Wars'

    ​Today is the 16th anniversary of Netscape's initial public offering. It occurs to me that many of you might be only vaguely aware of Netscape, and of what it meant to us in the mid-'90s. That's because many of you were toddlers, or perhaps not even born yet. That's depressing and mindblowing ... More >>

  • Blogs

    August 2, 2011

    Judge Halts Weird Online Movie Service Zediva

    ​In March, Zediva, a really weird online movie-rental service, told Wired that "it doesn't expect legal trouble over its service," which allows users to watch actual DVDs, played on actual DVD players, via the Internet. A couple of weeks later, the Motion Picture Association of America sued Zediv ... More >>

  • Blogs

    July 19, 2011

    Why Are Tech Journos Suddenly Interested in News Corp. Scandal?

    ​When I was a staff editor at the tech-news site CNET News.com in the late '90s, one of the top editors there used to insist that we "localize" big news events by writing about how they were being covered and discussed on the Internet. So, for example, the death of Princess Di and the impeachment ... More >>

  • Blogs

    July 12, 2011

    Massive Job Cuts Coming at Cisco

    ​Cisco Systems is planning to cut up to 10,000 jobs, Bloomberg News reported late Monday. That's obviously a huge number, but it seems even huger if you think of it this way: It represents more than half the number of jobs the entire U.S. economy created in June.​The numbers will be large en ... More >>

  • Blogs

    June 28, 2011

    Lindsay Lohan Shills for Pump-and-Dump Stocks on Twitter

    ​To get an idea of just how classy those "sponsored" celebrity tweets can be, take a look at what Lindsay Lohan tweeted last night. "Have you guys seen food and gas prices lately?" she asked. Yes, we have, Lindsay. Have you? Then her tweet took a weird turn, into economic analysis: "U.S. $ will so ... More >>

  • Blogs

    June 14, 2011

    Unpacking Pandora's 'Risk Factors'

    ​Every time a company offers stock to the public, it must submit a form called an S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The form must provide a prospectus, which includes financial information as well as the risks potential investors would face in buying shares. Because lawyers and accoun ... More >>

  • Blogs

    May 24, 2011

    Foursquare: The Silliest Thing Ever Invented

    ​Before I started using Twitter a couple of years ago, I, like many people then and now, assumed it must be the silliest thing ever invented. The stupid name didn't (and doesn't) help. Mainly, I thought people used it for telling the world what they had for lunch, but I then looked into the matter ... More >>

  • Blogs

    May 3, 2011

    No, Twitter Hasn't Replaced CNN

    ​It's become perfectly predictable: Every time there's a major news event, people spend several days talking about how Twitter and Facebook are replacing traditional news organizations -- the (sigh) "MSM." Even if the word "replacing" isn't used, that's often the implicationIn the present case -- ... More >>

  • Blogs

    March 16, 2011

    Tonight: St. Patrick's Day for Grown-Ups

    dead redhead/Flickr​Irish California: An Evening with the California Historical Society Collection Where: California Historical Society, 678 Mission (at Annie), 357-1848 When: Tonight, Mar. 16, 5:30-7:30 p.m. Cost: $4 suggested donation The rundown: You're over St. Patrick's Day, we get i ... More >>

  • Blogs

    March 3, 2011

    Holcombe Waller Eloquently Overshares at Swedish American Hall

    ​ Holcombe Waller @ Swedish American Hall Thursday, March 3, 2011 Better than: Waller's inevitable 2015 VH1 Storytellers episode Portland-via-Frisco troubadour Holcombe Waller's voice is his strongest asset -- it's a lithe, soaring, faraway thing that breathes equally convincing life into somber ... More >>

  • Blogs

    January 10, 2011

    Newsom Did the Most Work in his Last Seven Days as Mayor?

    A Moderate Win​Gavin Newsom, who is this afternoon is departing his post as mayor, is leaving Room 200 with his prints all over it.As Former Supervisor Aaron Peskin -- a Newsom critic --  pointed out this morning on NPR: If Newsom's last seven years in office had been anything like the last s ... More >>

  • News

    March 28, 2007

    Fair and Balanced — Almost

    Media criticism done wiki-style.

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