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'Art of Participation' Connects Viewers, Artists
Published on 16 December 2008 08:00

1913

: Photo: Brita d'Agostino/Wired.comSAN FRANCISCO — The new S.F. Museum of Modern Art exhibit The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now turns the typically quiet gallery walk into a hands-on interactive experience. The pieces in the retrospective exhibit show how artists have dabbled in two-way communication with viewers over the past 60 years. The refreshingly self-reflexive exhibition draws on a rich history and examines the relationships among museums, artists and the public. The show explores "how the public relates to the museum and vice versa," says Rudolf Frieling, the museum's curator of media arts. "Art frames you as a participant and art is framed by the museum." Click though the slideshow to sample the historic and contemporary work in the show, along with visitors' interactive reactions to the exhibition or interactive art. The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now runs through Feb. 8 at SFMOMA. Left: Museum visitors examine a contemporary version of German artist Hans Haacke's News, first shown in 1969. Haacke's original used a telex machine to print a news stream from German press agency DPA. In the updated work, a printer in the gallery spews out news reports obtained from RSS feeds of several online news sources, bringing events of the outside world into the gallery in real time. The printed news spills onto the gallery floor, creating a sculptural representation of virtual information — a tangible material archive of global news — throughout the duration of the exhibition. : Photo: Brita d'Agostino/Wired.com Amber Isbilen and Kevin Johnson, both of San Francisco, use their breath to create abstract, colorful images on a television set in this 1998 version of Nam June Paik's Participation TV. Known as the "founding father of video art," Paik designed a series of these manipulated televisions in the 1960s to be "played like instruments." "It's like bringing a microorganism to life," Isbilen said. : This image is a video still of American composer John Cage surrounded by onlookers in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as he performs what became his most famous and controversial conceptual composition, 4'33". The piece consists of four minutes and 33 seconds during which no notes are played. With the absence of music coming from the perceived performer, the ambient sound created by audience members and the environment becomes the music. First performed in 1952 by pianist David Tudor at the Benefit Artists Welfare Fund concert in Woodstock, New York, the piece initially angered audience members who expected a conventional concert. "They haven't forgotten it 30 years later," Cage said. "They're still angry." You can catch a live performance of this seminal work live at SFMOMA as part of the Art of Participation exhibition. Bring your sense of humor. Image: Video still from Nam June Paik's A Tribute to John Cage (1973, 1976)/Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Camille W. and William S. Broadbent Fund : Another example of re-creating a historically innovative work, American artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz's black-and-white video projection Hole-in-Space uses documentary footage of their 1980 "public communication sculpture." The original, unannounced public event utilized satellite technology to connect pedestrians at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City with pedestrians at Century City Shopping Center in Los Angeles for two hours each day from Nov. 11 to 14, 1980. People at each location could see and converse with pedestrians on the other side of the country in real time. Once word got out, friends and family members from the two cities were able to arrange meetings with loved ones on the opposite coast. In the museum installation, footage from the two locations is projected on two separate, parallel walls that face one another — "a formal reference to the windows at the original sites" that displayed the projections, according to the artists. Photo courtesy Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz : Photo: Brita d'Agostino/Wired.com Californians Diana Meehan (left) of Napa and Jann Nunn of Oakland eyeball each other in a re-creation of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark's Diбlogo: Oculos, or "Dialogue: Goggles," originally created in 1968. One of Clark's "propositions," the piece invites viewers to try on goggles that have been modified with mirrors to alter perception. Meant to be shared with a partner, the goal is to rediscover the meaning of a routine gesture. Other "propositions" by Clark featured in The Art of Participation include: Diбlogo de Mгos or "Hand Dialogue," Rede de Elбstico or "Elastic Net," and Mбscaras Sensoriais or "Sensorial Masks." : For Life2 (2006), San Francisco Bay Area artist Lynn Hershman Leeson worked with the Stanford Humanities Lab to create a virtual archive of her historic project The Dante Hotel that can be explored and altered by avatars in Second Life. Hershman Leeson's historic project, which Life2 revisits, existed in a residence hotel room in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. For a period of nine months from 1973 to1974, visitors could get a key from the front desk any time and check in on the fictional occupants. The hotel room is re-created in Life2, along with artifacts from the original installation. Life2 can be viewed in the museum using pre-existing avatars on two different computers, and from your own computer. Screenshot courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art : In Ant Farm Media Van v.08 (Time Capsule), a 1972 Chevy C-10 displays video and collects a digital archive of random media from visitors who share images, videos and music files from their personal electronic devices. The viewers' files, uploaded through a console called the media hookah, will become part of a digital time capsule available for access in 2030. Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier of historic multimedia-art collective Ant Farm teamed up with Bruce Tomb to create the piece, which was commissioned by the museum. The piece is based on a 1971 journey that Ant Farm took across the United States in a van customized with media equipment, interacting with the public along the way. The video displayed in Ant Farm Media Van v.08 (Time Capsule) is documentation from the 1971 Media Van project. Photo: Ian Reeves/Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art : Photo: Brita d'Agostino/Wired.com Pauline Andrie of Boston tries out Edwin Wurm's Keep a Cool Head, modeling her pose on the artist's instructional drawing. Wurm's One-Minute Sculptures, several of which are featured in The Art of Participation, invite the viewer to "perform" a temporary sculpture by following the artist's often-absurd instructions on how to use everyday objects — in this case, a modified refrigerator. For Andrie, this piece was "all in the name of fun." Of the overall show, she said: "I've never seen anything like this before." : Photo: Brita d'Agostino/Wired.com Tomo Saito of Japan and Adrien Segal from Oakland, California, attempt large-scale origami using two sheets from Felix Gonzalez-Torres' mass-produced, poster-size prints stacked on the gallery floor (Untitled 1992-1993). The stack of prints is replenished by the museum as often as necessary, and visitors are welcome to take them home. In the background is John Baldessari's painting Terms Most Useful in Describing Creative Works of Art (1966-68). Commenting on the unconventional dynamics of The Art of Participation, Saito said the "audience has more power than the artist." : Like Edwin Wurm, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer also asks museum visitors to perform. His interactive installation Microphones (2008) uses modified 1930s Shure microphones that contain hidden speakers and circuit boards connected to a network of computers invisible to the participant. A participant who speaks into the microphone is illuminated and audio-recorded. Immediately afterward, the microphone plays a recording of a previous participant. Photo: Ian Reeves/Courtesy SFMOMA : Photo: Brita d'Agostino/Wired.com Gallery attendant Francisco Montero rocks the mike in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's installation Microphones. An artist himself, Montero said he likes to encourage visitors who are timid to participate with show's interactive pieces. : Set up on a computer in the gallery and accessible from anywhere you can get online, Communimage is a web-based piece by c a l c (the pan-European collective casquiero atlantico labortorio cultural). The work encourages participants to upload an image of their choice along with basic meta-information to a grid system to create a "virtual, collective sculpture." Communimage was created in 1999, before the explosion of sites like Flickr and YouTube that thrive on user-generated content. Screenshot courtesy c a l c and Johannes Gees : Recognize your picture in this detail from Communimage? Communimage and Life2 aren't the only internet-based works featured in the show: SFMOMA's website has a full list of online artwork from The Art of Participation. If you are artistically inclined and itching to exhibit at SFMOMA, you can bid on eBay for the chance to exhibit in a designated room in the museum as a part of the 1st Public White Cube, conceived by artists Blank & Jeron and Gerrit Gohlke. Reflecting the collaborative spirit of The Art of Participation, you must contend with an artist's work that is already set up in the gallery. The next auction starts Jan. 1. Screenshot courtesy c a l c and Johannes Gees : In his piece The Gift, German conceptual artist Jochen Gerz utilizes the museum as both exhibition space and production studio. His work invites the public to sit, with an open expression, for a digital photographic portrait taken by a young artist. The portraits are then printed and framed in the museum and displayed in rotation along a wall in the gallery. The whole creative process is on view: the subjects, the production (including the printing and framing), the exhibition and finally the distribution of the work. The portraits can also be viewed online at The Examiner. The studio is open Mondays, and Thursday through Saturday. Screenshot: The Examiner : On the last day of the show, the artist will randomly redistribute portraits from The Gift to participants. The expectation is that the portrait each participant receives, most likely of a stranger, will be exhibited as a work of art "on permanent loan" from the museum. This image is from the end of a previous installation of the piece at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporain in Tourcoing, France. "Reality is a great teacher," artist Jochen Gerz said in an interview. "Art should distribute itself.... The artist should disappear." Photo courtesy Gerz Studio --- For more information on the show, check out the excellent book The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now that accompanies the SFMOMA show. The exhibit runs through Feb. 8, 2009. Read more...

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Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records for Free
Published on 12 December 2008 08:00

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If you want to search federal court documents, it's not a problem. Just apply online for an account, and the government will issue you a user name and password. Through the postal service. And once you log in, the government's courthouse search engine known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records or PACER, will charge you 8 cents a page to read documents that are in the public domain — a fee that earned the federal judiciary $50 million in profits in 2006. With its high cost and limited functionality, critics call the system an absurdity in the era of Google, blogs and Wikipedia, where information is free and bandwidth, disk space and processing power are nearly so. "The PACER system is the most broken part of our federal legal mechanism," says Carl Malamud, who runs the nonprofit open-government group Public.Resource.Org ."They have a mainframe mentality." Now Malamud is doing something about it. He's asking lawyers to donate their PACER documents one by one, which he then classifies and bundles into ZIP files published for free at his organization's website. The one-year-old effort has garnered him 20 percent of all the files on PACER, including all decisions from federal appeals courts over the last 50 years. The project is important, he says, because court filings are a part of the fabric of a democracy, and should be freely available to average citizens. "We are going after all primary legal materials in the U.S.," Malamud says. "That's part of America's OS, and we think it should be open source." [Disclosure: Wired.com nurtures a hefty PACER bill]. Malamud is a man accustomed to finding ways to provide free and easy online access to government documents. Back in 1995, the Securities and Exchange Committee decided to put corporate filings online only after Malamud essentially shamed them into doing so. For two years he operated a free site that published the filings, then abruptly pulled the plug and directed angry users to the SEC. He's since won battles freeing the nation's catalog of copyrights, Oregon's book of state laws, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark database. Now, he's after congressional-hearing videos, expensive but copyright-free building codes, and the Code of Federal Regulations, in addition to all the court filings in the PACER database. While Malamud's budget is only about $1 million annually, he has a matching grant from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's philanthropy group and help from influential tech friends like Tim O'Reilly, Paul Vixie and Larry Lessig. Malamud dreams of a day PACER's legal documents are free, so that academics and entrepreneurs can create custom search engines and new tools to make the information available to American citizens. But that's what PACER does now, counters U.S. Courts spokesman Richard Carelli. "PACER is the greatest technological achievement in the court system in the last 20 years," Carelli says. The search system has already revolutionized access to court records, Carelli submits, by preventing time-consuming trips to federal courthouses and undercutting photocopy fees. PACER is also experimenting with making digital audio recordings of cases available online, and — at least during the pilot — a copy of an audio file costs just 8 cents, regardless of length. What's more, PACER already gives its 900,000 users free access to judicial opinions, and citizens don't have to pay if they look at less than $10 worth of filings a year, Carelli says. Indeed, PACER is both revolutionary and cheap when compared to the state and local courts that have no electronic records at all, or charge $5 just to run a record search, even if it comes up empty, as in the case of Los Angeles Superior Court. But PACER's interface feels like something designed for the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the system lacks any way to search the text of legal documents. Interested in finding all cases alleging music piracy, or in discovering how often Steve Jobs is mentioned in a court filing? Want to be e-mailed when there's a new filing comes in a specific case? How about an RSS feed of a certain court's decisions? You'll find no help from PACER. Who wants information like that? Tim Stanley, the CEO of Justia.com, for one. After Stanley sold his legal-information company Findlaw to one of the nations' top legal-publishing concerns, West Publishing, he started a profitable web-design house for law firms. He uses the revenue to give away legal documents through the legal search engine Justia.com. "West makes billions of dollars selling stuff we want to give away for free," Stanley boasts. Justia now lets academics and journalists follow cases of interest for free, and publishes some case files online for everyone to see. His company purchased and digitized all the Supreme Court decisions, put up the first free search engine for them, and donated them to PublicResource.org. Now Justia's working with Cornell University to throw some Web 2.0 tools into the mix, including wiki pages for decisions, automated tracking of citations to decisions, and tools to track what briefs a particular attorney has written. Other efforts include AltLaw.org, a free legal search engine created by law professors Tim Wu and Paul Ohm, and Ed Walter's comprehensive Public Library of Law, which covers state courts as well. Some issues have surfaced as old court files migrate online and then get spidered by Google and other search engines. Malamud says he's been contacted by people shocked to find an old lawsuit in which they were named suddenly popping up in search results on their names; he's currently blocking search engines from indexing his PACER files through robots.txt. Malamud says that there are also massive privacy violations lurking inside some court filings, since clerks, judges and lawyers aren't adhering to rules about what can and can't be in legal filings. Public.Resource.org used some primitive software tools to search for social security numbers in court filings from 32 district courts. The results: 1,700 confirmed documents, including one from a Massachusetts court that had a 54-page list of the names, medical problems, Social Security numbers and birth dates of 353 patients. The fix for these glitches is more sunshine, Malamud argues, not less. "Public interest groups and the public in general, when given access to these public records, are able to provide the kind of feedback that leads to the correction of these privacy issues," Malamud recently told administrators at U.S. courts. "If we want to be serious about personal privacy, we can only do so if we are also serious about public access." But the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has already experimented with making PACER free to the public, and it found the concept lacking. In 2007, the office launched a trial at 16 libraries around the country that allowed unlimited free access from library computers. The trial was suspended last September, after Malamud encouraged volunteers to visit the libraries and download large numbers of cases to USB drives and donate them to the commons. Carelli won't say why the trial was suspended, or if Malamud's "Thumb-Drive Corps" was a factor in the decision. Malamud won't discuss it either, but noted in a letter to the courts last October that the abortive trial "was run with no written or oral guidelines on appropriate use." Malamud says he's looking forward to the day he doesn't have to game the system. "If I had $10 million, I'd make a copy of all the documents and be done." Read more...

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Henry Blodget: Financial-Industry Scapegoat Reinvents Himself as Financial Reporter
Published on 04 December 2008 08:01

1998

Henry Blodget has never gotten used to the chorus of hate that follows his every move. He's merely learned to live with it. When he started his personal blog in 2005, the comments dripped with disgust. "You are a boldface liar," a reader wrote. "Give me one reason why I should believe what you are writing," said another. And that was just in response to Blodget's innocuous first entry. During his years as a star Wall Street analyst, his pronouncements were welcomed and celebrated; now he couldn't say hello without getting savaged. Just last August, TechCrunch mentioned that Blodget would be one of more than two dozen tech celebrities judging a contest for startups. Blodget knew what was coming, even if his hosts didn't. "Blodget is scum.... He is no longer the arrogant prick we saw in the '90s, but he's still scum," someone wrote. "A lot of people lost money listening to this dirtbag." "Blodget is a Web 1.0, bubble-creating has-been." "He is unethical." "He's as crooked as they come." I meet Blodget at the offices of his new business, a year-old site called Silicon Alley Insider, shortly after the TechCrunch beat-down. Alley Insider is one of many tech business blogs that feed news, earnings info, and rumors to investors and corporate insiders. But Alley Insider has one thing that others don't. Blodget. He's smart, he's skeptical, and he's got the kind of self-assured voice that sells well in the blogosphere. As the market sinks, his opinions are even more in demand, though he's still hated by a large portion of his prospective audience. The site shares two floors of a Manhattan office building with programmers and business staff for some of Alley Insider's sister companies, all of which were started by former DoubleClick CEO Kevin Ryan. Blodget works in a double-wide cubicle near a window, separated by a low wall from the site's two other editors. They spend their days crawling Twitter and RSS feeds, calling sources, and pumping out about a dozen daily takes on the business world, most with Digg-friendly headlines (no easy accomplishment with bone-dry business stories). "Is Facebook Distracting Us From Porn? No" is typical, or "Google's Ginormous Food Budget: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million a Year." Blodget tells his team to think of the site as talk radio: He wants readers to feel compelled to check in several times a day to get the Alley Insider view on everything going on in their world. For privacy, we duck into a small conference room, and Blodget, tall and skinny, sinks into a ridiculously deep leather chair. His floppy dirty-blond hair gives him a youthful, almost carefree air, but the deep circles that ring his eyes tell a different story. He's managing a 24-hour news startup. It's midday and he's been posting since 5 am. And then there's the burden that comes with being Henry Blodget, digital punching bag. "There are obviously a lot of folks who say, 'Now wait a minute, isn't that the guy who....'" He lets the thought trail off. He's legally barred from talking about the incidents that led to his vilification. "To them, I'm that Henry Blodget. There's not much more I can say. I still can't address specific points. So it's like, 'OK, here's my face. Throw the fruit. When you want to stop throwing the fruit, if you want to listen, great. If you don't, fine.'" It's been almost a decade since the impulse to greet him with rotten mangos first struck. Back in 1998, as a 32-year-old analyst with investment bank CIBC, he declared that the stock price of Amazon.com would nearly double to $400. Three weeks later it did, and Blodget was a hero. Soon he packed up his spreadsheets — he's never more comfortable than when he is lining up numbers in rows and columns and teasing out their secrets — and moved to Merrill Lynch. Investors followed the new oracle's every utterance, and bankers wanted Blodget to bless the stocks of companies they were hoping to do business with. The lines on his graphs always seemed to point one way — steeply up and to the right. He wasn't just predicting profits, he was selling a revolution: The old metrics didn't apply. Blodget may have counseled people to own only a small percentage of Internet stocks — 10 percent at the most — but nobody listened. Launched in 2007, Silicon Alley Insider is gaining on some of its established rivals. Source: Compete Then came the crash. Five trillion dollars in wealth vaporized in 24 months, leaving behind unquantifiable amounts of rage among the masses of day traders who had believed briefly that they, too, were market savants. When the bubble burst, so did Blodget's aura. Still, it wasn't the crash alone that crushed him. It took Eliot Spitzer to turn Henry Blodget into that Henry Blodget. Spitzer, then New York's crusading attorney general, investigated Merrill in 2001 for conflicts of interest. He discovered a clutch of emails from the young analyst showing that while talking up certain stocks to clients, he was trashing them internally. Companies like 24/7 Media, Excite@Home, and InfoSpace — firms Merrill was publicly cheering — in private were deemed by Blodget to be "shit," "crap," and "junk" (respectively). According to Spitzer's findings, Blodget would have pulled in $12 million in 2001 — quadruple his earnings in 1999 — if he hadn't accepted a buyout that year. In 2003, Merrill's boy genius agreed to pay a $4 million fine and accepted a lifetime ban from working in the securities industry. Public disgrace usually drives a person into hiding, or at least into a different career. Jerry Levin, the brains behind the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, today runs Moonview Sanctuary, his wife's spa; Spitzer, forced to resign as governor last summer, is currently discovering the joys of real estate management; Health South CEO Richard Scrushy, while on trial for accounting fraud, became a televangelist. Not Blodget. One former colleague says Blodget spent the months when he was being investigated trying to grasp why he was singled out for something that was commonplace in the industry. He figured the controversy would blow over once the public realized his conduct was not unusual. "He was incredulous that the investigation got traction; he said it was silly," a friend says. But there was too much anger in the wake of the bubble, and Blodget's embarrassing emails made him an easy scapegoat. Later, when he was inclined to argue his case, the settlement terms prevented it. So Blodget did what came naturally. He began writing about the companies he used to cover, first for Slate, then on his own blog, Internet Outsider. Was this journalism — or was it therapy? Rather than hide, he started saying in public what he had once said only in private, using the same brutally frank voice that got him in trouble with Spitzer. He marketed his notoriety to a new Web readership hungry for smart, independent analysis. When Ryan, an Internet Outsider reader, approached him about starting an industry news site, Blodget jumped at the prospect of a bigger stage. Before working on Wall Street, he'd been a freelance writer; now he could combine the two vocations, borrowing freely from both journalism and equity research. Through Alley Insider, Blodget is trying to erase, post by post, Spitzer's portrait of him as a duplicitous, money-grubbing shill for big business. Blodget has always believed that the Internet changed everything, so naturally he believes it has the power to change the world's perception of him. The venue offers all Henry, all the time (and even when his other writers are posting, it's clear they're channeling him). The result is a unique blend of x-ray analysis and tech evangelism. As we talk, Blodget gets up from his chair, antsy to return to his laptop. I ask him if he understands what he's up against. If the hate has lasted this long, why expect it ever to fade away? "If all I knew about me was what I read during that period," he says, "I'd probably have the same reaction." On a late summer morning, Blodget waits in the lobby of the Nasdaq building in midtown Manhattan. He's all banker today: blue suit, red tie, black cap-toed Oxfords, his shirt so deeply pressed there are creases down the sleeves. It's 10 am and, ready for his second breakfast, he pries open the plastic case of a turkey and Swiss sandwich and starts wolfing it down. In a few minutes he is supposed to conduct a video interview for Yahoo's Tech Ticker finance site. As soon as Blodget started appearing as a regular host in February, the Furies reemerged. "Did you not find any other decent, credible guy than Henry Blodget?" one of the first comments read. "Why spoil this new feature with such a scum and spoil the Yahoo reputation?" As producers prepare to tape the show, Blodget wipes his crumbs off the table. He explains the guiding vision behind Alley Insider. "We don't want to do things we don't care about," he says. "It's nice to say theoretically we're the judge of what's important and what's not, but come on, give readers credit. They'll tell you immediately what they want, and that drives coverage. People are fanatically interested in Apple, Google, Microsoft. It wasn't a tough call to know what to write about." Blodget's focus on content is matched by his apparent indifference to the look of the site. Alley Insider employs a cookie-cutter template of scrolling headlines and thumbnail photos dragged off the Web. But design limitations notwithstanding, by September the site was getting nearly 500,000 visitors a month, rivaling AllThingsDigital.com, the Wall Street Journal blog edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Since the beginning of the year, traffic to the site has more than doubled, and Blodget's words now carry surprising weight. When he reported early this fall that Steve Jobs may have been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack — citing an anonymous (and, as it turns out, fraudulent) post on a minor user-generated news site run by CNN called iReport — Apple's stock dropped nearly 10 percent. Critics blamed Alley Insider. "I read The New York Times, The Economist, and Alley Insider," says Scott Galloway, head of investment equity firm Firebrand Partners, who is best known for his successful public fight to get on the board of The New York Times. "Henry takes a no-mercy, no-malice approach to Web business and media." Valleywag recently called him "the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to." The team at Silicon Alley Insider (left to right): senior editor Dan Frommer, COO Julie Hansen, cofounder Kevin Ryan, and editor in chief Blodget. Photo: Mike McGregor For all the success today, it took Blodget & Co. some time to figure out a winning formula. When Ryan, a New Yorker, launched the site in 2007, he wanted to cover the local startup and media scene. Blodget signed on as CEO and editor in chief, bought a minority stake, and hired Forbes journalists Peter Kafka and Dan Frommer to help him develop content (Kafka was later hired away by AllThingsD). The first few weeks, the site read like a tourist's guide to spotting B-list Internet companies in the big city, with each firm's location prominently announced: "NoHo-based Meetup has quietly launched a Facebook application"; "Flatiron-based YellowJacket Software has raised $1.25 million." Blodget branched out, taking on the bigger names himself — Apple, Dow Jones, NBC, JP Morgan. It quickly became clear to him that New York's tech industry was too small an arena to contain the ambition of the site. And nearly half the readers were in California anyway. Alley Insider soon dropped its Silicon Alley focus but stuck with the moniker. And Blodget began to draw more heavily on his research experience. He created financial models of the companies he was talking about and posted the spreadsheets as Google docs so anyone could download and toy with them. He analyzed the potential revenue YouTube could bring to Google, mapping out his assumptions about viewership and ads watched, and offering a clear bottom-line conclusion. Readers weighed in with their critiques, which Blodget used to sharpen the model. He figured he wouldn't just write about Wall Street, he would also usurp part of Wall Street's business by providing high-quality research, the kind brokerage customers used to prize. But visitors to the site wanted more than analytics. They also craved the edgier Henry of the Spitzer emails. Blodget obliged. In one post, Blodget declares New York Times economics columnist Ben Stein to be either "an idiot" or possibly just "delusional." He suggests that the anonymous sources cited by archrival TechCrunch in its reporting on Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo "must have been drunk." And in November 2007, when E-Trade lost $9 billion in value as its risky mortgage bets turned to dust, Blodget offered only one piece of advice to the company's shareholders: "Cry." "On Wall Street, I'd consistently submit a report that would say, 'This is going to be roadkill,' and it would come back rewritten as 'We see some weakness,'" Blodget says. "Now I can say, 'It's going to be roadkill.' That's very satisfying." But even as he delights in railing against corporate giants, he's still disciplined enough to run the underlying numbers — Blodget loves the drama, but he loves the spreadsheets just as much. One post about craigslist should have been something only an accountant could love: a complex set of assumptions and analyses to determine what the company might be worth. Yet Blodget wrote the whole exercise as if it were a mystery plot, parceling out details and stringing the reader along until the very end. When Yahoo announced this summer that it had hired Bain & Co., a consulting firm usually brought in when a company is about to start swinging the ax, Blodget sharpened his own pencil. "We're mad as hell ... especially now that Yahoo's wasting millions on Bain." He offered his own, free advice (spreadsheet attached) cataloging how many people Yahoo should fire in each division — 1,804 from its "positively obese" sales and marketing arm alone — in order to goose operating margins to a "more respectable" 20 percent from its current 7 percent. "He pushed us early on to ask, 'What does this mean for profits? How does any news affect a company's numbers?'" Frommer says. "It's great if it makes a company look bad or look good, but is this really going to affect the numbers?" Blodget is also trying things that no mainstream-journalism-trained blogger like Swisher or GigaOm's Om Malik would ever dare. He makes serious-sounding offers to buy companies that he wants to demonstrate are significantly undervalued. It's pure showmanship, but with Blodget's background in finance and his ties to folks up and down Wall Street, no one knows just how far he will take the joke. His first target was CNET. With the slightest of winks, he wrote post after post explaining how he'd purchase the company. At first he proposed a sort of reverse merger, with CNET buying Alley Insider for $50 million in stock, at which point Blodget's team would take over every aspect of the company. Then he detailed the operational changes he would make. Ryan got nervous about Blodget's new direction. Blodget's deal with the government forbade him from giving individual research advice, but it didn't say anything about jumping into the private-equity space. Still, there might be legal issues. "Look, why don't we run this by a lawyer just to make sure, because we're getting into securities stuff here," he said to Blodget. When the lawyer asked them "Is this a real offer?" there was a brief silence. For the first time the two really thought about it. "You know, yes," Ryan replied. "If they said yes, we would accept $50 million at that time to buy them. So it is a real offer. But we're actually asking them to buy us." The lawyer signed off on the convoluted reasoning. After Blodget's taunting posts went up, investment firm JANA Partners announced a hostile takeover attempt of CNET. It failed, but by spring 2008 CBS stepped in to buy the company for $1.8 billion. For one CNET executive, memories of Blodget's unwanted attentions still rankle. "The way you make a big name for yourself on the Web today is to make, for lack of a better word, ridiculous statements," says Zander Lurie, former senior VP of strategy and development at CNET and now CFO of CBS Interactive. Lurie found himself reassuring employees who sent him Blodget's postings and wondered whether their company was at risk. "Everyone knew there was nothing in the offering: He didn't have the capital, the expertise, or any specific insight into our business," Lurie says. "He makes the ridiculous statement and it gets sent all around, and then he claims credit when there's an event the following year, which obviously he had nothing to do with. Less than zero to do with. We all have reputations. And his track record is well known." Blodget has been waging another half-serious acquisition fight, this time for the New York Times Company. All he wants is the Web site — the print side is dead, he says. He thinks the paper needs to cut about 80 percent of its costs, at which point it would be the perfect size to be the digital paper of record for a long time to come. "It's a serious offer from our perspective, but it hasn't been taken seriously," Blodget says. In the wake of Wall Street's latest meltdown, Blodget finds himself in even greater demand. He's doing regular TV appearances and is posting again on Slate. When NPR wanted someone to talk about the Wall Street culture of greed, they brought in Blodget. The reporter introduced him by pointing out that Merrill is now gone, "and Henry Blodget is gone, too; he's banned from Wall Street after being charged with fraud." "Thanks," Blodget said, stuttering for a second, "especially for that horrific introduction." They both laughed. But by the end, the host was treating Blodget like an elder statesman. Recently Blodget has been expanding his franchise. He and Ryan have launched two sister sites: Clusterstock, which will compile and analyze Wall Street research on a much wider range of industries, and the Business Sheet, which will focus on corporate scandals. A third is in the works. For each new site, Blodget provides the bulk of the early posts, seeding the new enterprise with the Blodget touch. Blodget is broadening beyond tech to get ready for what he sees as a coming shakeout in the news-blog industry. He says he might even start making acquisitions if the price is right. Ryan's suite of companies has raised $50 million in the past few years, possibly enough to buy out some other interesting small blogs. The winning formula for this new kind of business remains elusive: It's a matter of finding the balance between gossip and analysis, between aggregating news from other sources and doing original reporting. Revenue models that go beyond basic advertising have also been slow in coming. "If you look at the development of every new medium, there's been a new form of journalism that has been made possible by it, and there has always been this period of transition," Blodget says. "There is collective experimentation as people figure out what works and what doesn't, and usually you have some very important publications that are built." Another way to expand is to sell to a larger media company. Blodget says he'd consider an offer, but Alley Insider is still defined almost entirely by one man. If he left, the value would plummet. Also, some media institutions — the grayer, stodgier ones — may find Blodget's unique baggage unacceptable. The endless barrage of comments, the angry mob that seems to follow him everywhere, may be too much for the sensitivities of some management teams, even in these freewheeling days of media transformation. When Blodget wrote a few small items for The New York Times, the newspaper's ombudsman went haywire. "The Times luster may help Blodget," he wrote last year, "but some of his taint rubs off on the Times." It's just the sort of comment Blodget has come to expect from, well, everyone. That may change, but only if this latest reinvention succeeds in burying his past forever. In which case, he will have been right: The Internet really does change everything. Senior writer Daniel Roth (daniel_roth@wired.com) wrote about the future of the electric car in issue 16.09. Read more...

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Playlist: Colbert's War on the War on Christmas, Natural Disaster RSS, Left4Dead Zombie-Palooza
Published on 26 November 2008 08:00

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: A Colbert ChristmasNation, we offer a tip of the hat to Stephen Colbert for declaring war on the war on Christmas. Our hero is trapped in his mountain cabin by a bear (what else?), unable to get to New York to film A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!, so the musical special comes to him. The self-styled broadcasting legend nails duets with dope-smoking wise man Willie Nelson, Hanukkah evangelist Jon Stewart, authorized prayer technician Feist, and Dickensian busker Elvis Costello. Don't miss the stocking stuffers: a video Advent calendar and book-burning Yule log. Take that, "Happy Holidays.": Hurricanes in the Caribbean, earthquakes in Asia, wildfires in California — Mother Nature's can of whup-ass is set to stun, and it's hard to keep track of where her blows are landing. Which is why this comprehensive natural disaster RSS feed from the New Zealand Herald is such a welcome port in the storm. An exhaustive stream of global devastation is the perfect way to sate our rubbernecking receptors.: Now playing at the new California Academy of Sciences Morrison Planetarium, Fragile Planet provides a fresh perspective on our place in space. Starting in San Francisco and pulling back to the edges of the universe, narrator Sigourney Weaver shows us other worlds that are likely to support life. Exquisitely visualized by vets of ILM, Pixar, and Lucasfilm, the show is jacked into a NASA database, and its universe will be updated whenever a new planet is discovered.: Nonprofit group the Moth revitalizes the oral tradition with true stories told live—no notes allowed. Featuring fave authors like Neil Gaiman and unexpected confessors like ex-pickpocket O. T. Powell, the tales can be harrowing or humorous but always deliver satisfying epiphanies. Our own: What makes a good yarn is not necessarily the story but the storyteller.: Tired of loading podcasts onto your iPod before a trip? Try Lexy. The easy-to-use service sends news and entertainment "quikcasts" to your cell phone. Sign up for free at Lexy.com to build a playlist; use the Share voice command to shoot a clip to a friend. Highlights include NPR's Story of the Day, NASA Feature Stories, Slashdot Review, and, of course, Wired's weekly quikcast.: More art than advertisement, this Web video, directed by Acne Film for Chicago-based designer toy store Rotofugi, is a gem. In this quirky and magical piece, vinyl VIPs like Qee (designed by David Horvath), Gloomy Bear (Chax), and Smiling Malfi (Friends With You) flaunt their treasured "mint, in box" Homo sapiens. It was never released as an actual ad, but you can check it out at Acne.: Finally, a game that breathes new life into the festering cadaver that is the zombie-horror genre. The latest from Valve pits four scrappy humans against hundreds of hyperaggressive corpses. It demands teamwork and coordination and delivers thrills on par with 28 Days Later. Blasting through a zombie horde is pure awesome concentrate, but one killer game mode lets players enlist in the army of the undead. Mmmm, brains.: It's porn for LucasArts junkies. From the lenticular cover (Darth Vader morphs into Monkey Island's Guybrush Threepwood) to a collection of never-before-published Star Wars game logos, this fine-art-style book is manna for fans of the famous game developer. Flip through design documents from the early '80s, study storyboards and scripts for Star Wars: Rebel Assault 2, and preview concept art for the upcoming Indiana Jones game without leaving your basement lair. Power-up: The forward is by George himself.: Each fall, the American Photography organization compiles the year's most powerful editorial images into a single exquisite volume. With brilliant work by the likes of James Nachtwey, Brent Stirton, and Plamen Petkov (right), this one's no exception, but it's also a most stylishly produced visual time capsule. And we're not just saying that because it was designed by Wired creative director Scott Dadich. We really are into naked ladies and fruit.* * Other things we really are into: the nickname Captain Chaos, puerile Yule log jokes, hot rocket scientists.: The real reason "Live Your Life" is the freshest jam off rapper T.I.'s Paper Trails isn't because of Rihanna's vocals or T.I.'s flow—it's the "Numa Numa" sample. Yep, the 2004 video virus of a pudgy 18-year-old lip-syncing to Moldovan boy band O-Zone has reinfected pop culture. No worries, though—this strain is benign. Ditching the original's Euro-rave vibe, producer Just Blaze tweaked the "mai ai hee" refrain into a midtempo "hey, oh!" party anthem we've had on repeat for weeks. Read more...

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Let Google's My Maps Be Your Geo Database
Published on 20 November 2008 00:01

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Store geolocations inside a My Maps mashup and access the data anywhere on the web. The RSS feed produced by Google can be read by other services, or on your own site with the Google Maps API. Read more...

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Intersquash Makes Any Website iPhone-Friendly
Published on 12 November 2008 20:00

1998

You can produce an elegant, iPhone-native version of any website with an RSS feed using a new web app called Intersquash. You'll get a unique address and a bit of code you can put on your site to send iPhone visitors directly to the version made just for them. Read more...

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FriendFeed's Live Updates Turn the Web Into a Giant Chat Room
Published on 17 October 2008 00:00

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Social web service FriendFeed adds the ability to follow your friends' activities online as they happen in real time. Subscribers can now see RSS feeds, Tweets and Diggs updated on their FriendFeed page as they happen, all without refreshing the page. Read more...

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Opera Update Delivers Improved Mail, Syncing Tools
Published on 08 October 2008 20:00

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A new version of the Opera browser has been released. Opera 9.6, which is available for all major operating systems, boasts enhancements to its built-in e-mail client and RSS reader, as well as improvements to its internal browser history search engine. Wired.com Read more...

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Alt Text: Camping Trip Reveals Joys of 'Data Isolation'
Published on 17 September 2008 04:00

1987

When I told my friends I was going camping, the most common reaction was bafflement. It was as if I had warned them that I was about to pupate. I was actually surprised by the news myself. When I try to remember the events that led to my agreeing to camp out, it's all echoes and shadows. I generally consider soft, insect-free beds to be one of the chief virtues of an industrialized society, just above a lowered infant mortality rate. Alt Text Podcast Download audio files and subscribe to the Alt Text podcast. Nonetheless, my girlfriend and I shoved as many artifacts of civilization as we could into the back of the Corolla and headed up the coast. Luckily for me, we had picked a beginner's campsite, the kind that you'd get if LeapFrog Enterprises landed a state park contract. Picnic table, enclosed fire pit, convenient parking mere feet from the camping space, that sort of thing. I was feeling pretty optimistic when I noticed a flier notifying us of ... something about the water. I still don't know exactly what it was trying to say; it seemed to be simultaneously trying to warn and reassure us. Roughly paraphrased, it went like this: WARNING: The water at this campsite does not meet safety standards for drinking. Nonetheless, it is safe to drink, unless you are the sort of person who should not be drinking unsafe water. We hope to upgrade our equipment in the near future to make this water, which is safe to drink, safe to drink. In the meantime, it is not necessary to boil this unsafe water before drinking it. My compromise was to drink the water mainly in the form of whiskey toddies. As surprised as I was to find myself camping, I was even more surprised to find myself enjoying it. In the decade or so since I was last dragged into the woods, technology has made camping much more pleasant, which is to say much less like camping. An inflatable mattress elevated me above the hard, life-sapping ground, some weird sort of drugstore napalm made lighting fires easier than putting them out, and one can never underestimate the soothing power of a Nintendo DS Lite when stuck nearly two miles from the nearest human settlement. The experience was refreshing and enlivening. Most people would credit this to the fresh air or the softly swaying greenery or perhaps the thug-like chipmunks that organized tactical assaults on our marshmallows. You know, nature. I don't think that was it, though. The real pleasure was something I'm going to call "data isolation." Entertainment and information used to be something you would seek out, library card or remote control in hand. We were, as it were, hunters and gatherers of data. Nowadays, though, data is something that seeps into my home from a dozen sources. E-mail and RSS feeds line up like Soviet-era bread-seekers, patiently awaiting my attention. TV shows and movies install themselves on hard drives or waft in with the daily mail. As a result, I've become an immoderate consumer of information. I watch television while browsing the web. I've been known to check my e-mail while playing World of Warcraft. Not just during the long flights from one area to another -- I actually read my mail in battle, while waiting for the 10-second cool-down on my Stormstrike power. I'm at the center of a data glut. So yeah, I brought a videogame with me to the woods, but at least when I played it I was only playing that specific game. When I read a book, I was reading that particular book. I was arguably closer to roughing it in terms of entertainment than I was in terms of physical comforts. I'm trying to figure out how to get that same sense of data isolation without having to sleep near insects. Unplugging the modem one day a week would be a start, but it wouldn't affect the data that's already made its way into my home. Maybe I could rig up all my electronics to one circuit for easy shutdown. I can probably find a way to do it on the web, assuming I don't get distracted. - - - Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjцberg eventually overcame these handicaps to reassure his guildmates that he doesn't do the e-mail thing during raids. Well, at least not during boss fights. Read more...

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120-Hz Hi-Def TVs Bring Onscreen Action to Life
Published on 30 August 2008 08:00

2329

Last year's TV buzz was 1080p. This year's is all about 120 Hz. That refers to the number of images a set displays each second to make your picture move; 120 is twice the norm, netting the smoothest pans since Teflon. Samsung LN52A750 $3,700, samsung.com This 52-inch Samsung chewed up stuttering 60-Hz video and spit out glass-smooth motion, leaving few visual artifacts. It sailed through most of our processing challenges, proving especially effective at recombining interlaced video. The set also delivered vibrant color — if a bit more saturated, and thus less natural, than the Sony's — after only minor calibration tweaks, which Samsung's simple menus made painless. The subtle, red-hued "touch of color" bezel imparts a reserved style — think Armani, not Elton John. Wired: InfoLink system displays news, weather, and RSS feeds via Ethernet connection. Side-mounted HDMI/USB ports make for easy gaming and photo viewing. Eight HD and three standard-def inputs. Tired: Room lighting + glossy screen = disco reflections. Only one color option, and it might not work for everyone. How We Rate .c2{padding-left:70px;} 1... A complete failure in every way. 6... A solid product with some issues. 2... Just barely functional — don't buy it. 7... Very good, but not quite great. 3... Serious flaws, proceed with caution. 8... Excellent, with room to kibitz. 4... Downsides outweigh upsides. 9... Nearly flawless — buy it now. 5... Recommended with reservations. 10... Metaphysical product perfection. Sony Bravia KDL-46W4100 $2,400, sonystyle.com We loved the color right out of this 46-incher's box, and the video processors aced our tests, removing jaggies and scrubbing noise — even from standard-def sources — with little loss of detail. Plus, the motion enhancer smoothed out movement while introducing fewer visual artifacts than any other TV in this batch. (Purists can turn it off for a true filmlike experience.) One gripe: With great features come overstuffed menus. Time to RTFM. Wired: Elegant silver and black bezel. Tons of video inputs — seven HD and five standard-def — plus distinct color profiles for each. Add-on lets you watch select clips via the Net. Tired: Internet add-on is $300! Attention Sony: YouTube is free; you can't charge three bills for an inferior version. PS3-style menus will appeal to gamers but may confuse others. Sharp Aquos LC-65SE94U $8,500, sharpusa.com This 65-inch monster "five-ups" the previous standard for a large LCD set, but you'll pay for bragging rights. Thankfully, that price buys more than just 5 extra inches of screen. The set produced very dark blacks and a picture bright enough to see even in strong sunlight. But it's time to join the 21st century with your interface, Sharp; we're running out of Atari jokes. Wired: Trumps your neighbor's 60-incher and cranks out enough lumens to let you watch football in the backyard ... just to rub it in. Great-looking narrow-bezel case — important when your TV takes up half a wall. Excellent default picture quality means you can have green Astroturf without taking a course in color calibration. Tired: No bonus features like USB pictures and music. The array of tiny, identical buttons on the remote probably spells "annoying" in braille. LG Scarlet 47LG60 $2,500, lge.com The bulky, shiny case and visible-from-space power button mark a bold departure from most manufacturers' minimalist styling. And while LG's TruMotion removes stutter, we saw more artifacts than on other LCDs we tested. Default settings produced harsh, oversaturated color — correctable using the bevy of adjustment options but disappointing for a TV of this price. Wired: Straightforward menus simplify navigation and configuration. Separate color adjustment for each input. This 47-inch set boasts one of the few alternatives to picture-frame bezels that isn't designed for a 14-year-old Japanese girl (cough cough, Hannspree, cough). Tired: You'll need expert help — or a lot of time — to dial in good color. No S-video jacks and only one composite input, so forget most of your non-HD sources. Read more...

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