My friend and co-worker Jake who is also the most vocal advocate of Microsoft technologies I know of, starts blogging – Jake on IT. Welcome to the world of blogging Jake!
What is genius? It is difficult to define but one thing for sure is that it is out of the ordinary. I just saw the movie Borat. And I found it humourous, shocking, gross and annoying, at various points throughout the movie and sometimes simulatneously. You might end up hating it or liking it – I am somewhere in the middle but it is still a good movie because it is different from everything else we are used to watching.
In an era where even reality shows are almost completely staged it is refreshing to see a movie in which almost all of the scenes are unscripted and all the characters except the central 4 characters are unaware that they are being filmed for a satirical (?) movie. Almost throughout the movie I felt that the participants did not know they were being filmed but I thought that it was just the way the movie was filmed and narrated and that like all movies the actors were indeed acting. A quick check on Wikipedia (Borat on Wikipedia) confirmed that I was wrong and that most of the movie was unscripted and that the participants were asekd for their permission only post-event.
This movie might come across as being anti-American, making fun of various things American at various stages in the movie. However if anything I think it shows America as being an extremely tolerant and accomodating culture. Think of Borat’s high-society dinner where he insults and offends the host and the guests again and again and only at the very end is he kicked out. He would have been kicked out for things much less offending in most Indian settings I can think of Think of the car dealer who spends an hour or more trying to sell him a Hummer costing 50+ grand but eventually sells him a $700 ice-cream truck. Think of the etiquette consultant who maintains a straight face even when she was being shown nude pics of Borat’s son. And there are many such instances throughout the movie.
Brilliant. Genius. Stuck in your head kinda movie. This is not a movie you would want to see with your parents or your kids but this is definitely a movie you should see sooner or later.
Feed a block of text or a URL to wordle.net, tweak a few options (words layout, font, colours etc.) and voila! you have a cool looking frequency-based cloud of the words in that block of text. Click on the thumbnail below to see it in action, the input being the URL to this blog. Cool, isn’t it? This is not just a good tool to play around with but can also be used to generate graphics for presentations, documents etc.
Since ages technology has kept on making it easier to share information. From Gutenberg’s press to current day blogs it has become easier to record something and share it with others. The Internet is especially powerful in this regard. The Internet in general and Web 2.0 in particular have made it easier for content creators to become content publishers. However safeguards, both hard and soft, that exist in traditional media are non-existent or weak in the real world.
10 years ago it was probably more difficult for a photographer to share his work with the world. But this automatically made it more difficult to copy his work. Today any photographer, even a super-amateur, point-and-click, smile-please, photographer like me can have a dedicated Flickr stream But with the ease of sharing also comes the ease of copying.
Case in point – the great Times of India using Twilight Fairy’s picture without her permission. And when she brings this up with the editor no apology is forthcoming, the discussion about compensation stops at the low figure of Rs 1500 and Twilight Fairy is asked to sue or shut up. Nice going TOI!
By its very nature online media is more “free”, more free than traditional media in the sense that creating content, publishing content, accessing content, all are much easier (cheaper) than traditional media. Preventing plagiarism, technically, is usually not possible and all schemes will fail sooner of later. The only way to reduce plagiarism is for at least the biggies to be ethical and for the law and government to make it easier to prosecute and penalize copyright violators.
Sigh. TOI used to be my favourite daily around 10 years ago. But is has been steadily going downhill ever since, so much so that I stopped reading it years ago.
Think of the car dealer who spends an hour or more trying to sell him a Hummer costing 50+ grand but eventually sells him a $700 ice-cream truck. Think of the etiquette consultant who maintains a straight face even when she was being shown nude pics of Borat’s son. And there are many such instances throughout the movie.
But with the ease of sharing also comes the ease of copying.
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