Line

Creator David Milch was notorious for working on scripts until the last minute, which meant "it was a foregone conclusion we wouldn't be able to learn our lines," the character actor Stephen Tobolowsky wrote in an essay for Backstage magazine earlier this year. "Ian McShane told me to keep looking at him, stay in character and just call out 'Line.'" The scene became a "standoff of two actors saying, 'Line'" — with the prompts edited out of the final product.
 

Hilarious. I'd love to see some of these outtakes. From an article documenting all the various ways actors memorize their lines.

Not surprisingly, there's an app for that. Rehearsal is an app for the iPhone, and Rehearser is a free app for Android, both of which help you to memorize a script.

Take Shelter

Something 80's-ish about Years and Years brand of dancy synth-pop. For a week or so, my “headphones at work” zone-out background music.

Tech tidbits

1. Researchers have developed a type of chemical iris that could enable photographers to select apertures on really tiny cameras (think camera phones) in the future. Maybe someday we'll get to shoot wider open on camera phones, enabling us to get the type of shallow depth of field which is the one piece of a photographer's toolbox that's most noticeably absent on the most popular camera now, the smartphone.
2. Netflix signs Chelsea Handler for a new talk show. They're going to keep re-investing their profits in original programming. Imagine if HBO didn't have one particular house style for original programming but instead tried to target programs even more segments of viewers. What number of subscribers could they sign up? That's what Netflix is setting out to do.
3. Viacom and about 60 small cable operators representing about 900,000 households went to war over carriage fees. In what is a notable first, the two sides decided to part ways rather than settle. Supposedly most households didn't care and the cable operators lost less than 2% of subscribers, much lower than the 10% churn they were bracing for. Not entirely surprising consider Viacom's target viewership is less represented in the flyover states, and most of the generation that watches Viacom programming can likely find that stuff online. This next generation of kids have never paid for cable and probably never will. There remains just one channel that every cable operator in the country would have to suck it up and pay for just about any price, and that's ESPN, which not surprisingly demands the highest carriage fee (by a wide wide margin) in your cable channel lineup.
4. The Oxford Mail is experimenting with letting WhatsApp users follow them to get occasional news alerts tailored to their interests. This is a small test but an important one as it may signal WhatsApp is finally moving to become a platform like its Asian peers LINE, WeChat, and KakaoTalk. Those chat services have corporate or celebrity accounts you can follow to receive broadcast text messages, much like following a celebrity or corporate account on Twitter.

Jonah Peretti

This Felix Salmon interview with Jonah Peretti is terrific. Tracing Peretti's broad and meandering background gives many hints as to how he has come to be the reigning king of viral content, and his interdisciplinary explorations play no small part in his pattern recognition.

[I had no idea until I read this interview that Peretti's sister is Chelsea Peretti (most recently of Brooklyn Nine Nine fame). I saw her open for Sarah Silverman at the Largo in Los Angeles a few times.]

On the origin of the Huffington Post:

“I knew that Arianna’s friends, who were on television but not on the Internet, were going to create a sensation if they blogged. You remember when celebrities first started tweeting? Everyone freaked out: “Oh, I can’t believe a celebrity’s tweeting.” Blogging at that time was all about people in their pajamas, the person who couldn’t be on TV, the little guy who finally has a voice. I knew that people would freak out if Larry David or Tina Brown or a senator or a congressman started to blog. We knew we could make that happen. We already had all these people committed, from Alec Baldwin to Larry David and Tina Brown—all going to blog for the first time for us on Huffington Post in the first week that we launched.

I knew that that would create a sensation, that some people would hate it, and that some people would love it, but that it would be an incredibly exciting development that every blogger would have to watch, and be excited to watch, and want to form an opinion on. That was what would generate the viral spike. The question was, all my previous projects did a spike and then crashed.

So I was like, “What keeps people there?” One of the stickiest sites on the Internet was the Drudge Report. With always-fresh headlines and splashes and things like that, people would come back every single day. That site was built over a really, really, long period of time, and had the Lewinsky scoop and other things that drove its usage. Tons of people have created clones that never took off, because they’re sticky but not contagious.

There were these two models that we just kind of bolted together. One was to make the site itself viral, which was celebrities blogging. I was very focused on making sure that they used the default blogging tools of the Internet. I think that everyone expected us to have some Flash site that wasn’t a real blog. I went to Ben and Mena Trott, who had started Six Apart. We used Movable Type, which at the time was the premiere blogging platform. We modified it a lot in order for it to work, but it had permalinks it was reverse chronological. It had all the things that blogs were supposed to have so that people who knew about blogging would see it and say, “Oh, Larry David is blogging.” Not, “Larry David’s doing some weird new thing that Arianna Huffington invented.”

We knew that was the piece that was going to make it take off and be contagious. Then Andrew posting links and headlines that were constantly updated would be the thing that made it sticky. You’d come to see the celebrities blogging, you’d say, “Wow, what does this mean? That blogging has evolved in this different way.” And then you would say, “Oh, there’s a good link here. There’s a good link here.” And you would just keep coming back every day. Even if Larry David didn’t blog again for three months, you’d be checking the site because you’d have great links to content around the web. That was sort of the idea.”

On reality TV:

“JP: One of the reasons reality TV became so dominant was because people looked at time as being the metric. And the reason that reality TV works well for time is that the classic reality TV formula, in the beginning, was the tribal council and somebody getting eliminated. So you could have 50 percent of the show being boring filler and you’re kind of wanting to change the channel but you’re like, “Oh, but I wonder if my favorite person’s going to get eliminated.” So you have to watch to the end to see the elimination. In a way, that was a way of gaming time. You could look at that and say, “Oh, they spent an hour watching this show, including the commercials. That means it must be a really high quality show.” But it also might just mean that they figured out a hook that incentivizes you to watch to the end and then did a lot of mediocre content in the middle.”

On headlines:

FS: John Herrman [then of BuzzFeed, now of The Awl] wrote that piece about headlines.

JP: John wrote a piece saying the Internet provides many headlines for every article, sometimes better than what the author wrote, and that there just shouldn’t be headlines on articles. Headlines are generated on Twitter and all these different places and it is something that we think a lot about. What do people add to a story when they share it? In some cases it’s better than the headline that our team wrote and in some cases shows why content matters to them. Because you say, “I’m sharing this” and explain why you’re sharing it.

Miscellany

1. Fewer Harvard MBA's took jobs in finance this year than last. That might be a good sign for the stock market according to one theory.
2. Don't like the idea of the Miami Heat's Big Three taking pay cuts to lure in Carmelo Anthony to form a Big Four super team? Perhaps the solution is a radical one: remove the ceiling on individual player salaries. There is no small measure of poetic justice that the a team in which its top three stars took a discounted salary to allow their owner to sign other strong players (the Spurs) just defeated a team in which the top three stars took the maximum salary possible, leaving the rest of their roster very undermanned (the Heat).
3. We're living in an art market boom. I'm saving up for my first Jeff Koons'. I may have to settle for stealing a kleenex after he blows his nose in it.
4. The wonderful economic test beds that are multiplayer video games. “A multiplayer game environment is a dream come true for an economist. Because here you have an economy where you don't need statistics. And elaborate statistics is what you use when you don't know everything, you're not omniscient, and you need to use something in order to gain feeling as to what is happening to prices, what is happening to quantities, what's happening to investments, and so on and so forth. But in a video game world, all the data are there. It's like being God, who has access to everything and to what every member of the social economy is doing.”