The Rage Diaries

Shine on, crazy website

Do you gravitate toward online portals targeted to the ladyfolks?

Yahoo launched a portal for women aged 25-55 called Shine (no, it's not an April Fool's joke) with above-the-fold content like "Fancy Lingerie You Can Afford" and a "cheat sheet" of the day's news including

1. Al Gore launches a $300 million climate change campaign
2. Rich men behaving badly: how the super-rich just don't care
3. She's baa-aaaack: Kathie Lee Gifford to join the Today Show as host
4. Reports of March Madness affecting worker productivity are bogus
5. "The View" tackles racism, Whoopi declares " this is a racist country"

Can you spot a theme in these headlines? Other than "Hey, there's nothing there about the Treasury secretary's proposed overhaul of the Fed"?

Brandon Holley -- whom media types will recognize as a longtime ladymag editor -- writes of Shine:

[W]e wanted to avoid all of the buckets that advertisers or marketers tend to put us in. We didn’t want to be a site just for moms or just for single or working women, or any specific demo- or psychographic. We wanted to create a smart, dynamic place for women to gather, get info, and connect with each other and the world around them.

I guess "women" isn't really a bucket then?

This new entry into the women's-portal business is interesting if only because current ladysites like Oxygen and iVillage are still casting about for cultural relevance or dominance:

NBC is hoping that [Bravo head Lauren Zalaznick] will devise some kind of Bravo-style leap for the Oxygen channel, where ratings have grown in the last year but still has a negligible profile among most viewers.

“Oxygen viewers have not settled into adult growth patterns,” Ms. Zalaznick said.

[...]

The iVillage franchise remains a trouble spot. Since NBC Universal paid — most analysts say overpaid — $600 million for the site in 2006, it has struggled to forge an identity within the company, even though iVillage’s online revenue has improved.

-- "Bravo's Chief Reaches Out to the Prosperous Urban Woman," NYT, Mar 31, 08

(This, by the way, swings from a lede that talks about how Bravo has become a magnet for the ladyviewers. I will admit, I do dig some of Bravo's programming, but I was unaware that my enjoyment of Shear Genius was in any way tied to my ovaries. I had thought it was tied to my enjoyment of watching skilled professionals compete in their chosen field. And also, I kept hoping Tabitha would ritualistically kill Tyson and eat his heart. What? Is that reason not gendered enough?)

Anyway -- do you find value in sites that are visibly and aggressively branded for one gender over another? Are men from Deadspin and women from Jezebel? And are you too tired to be outraged that once again, a "work and money" channel for women prominently features an idea to make a note holder from a pretty fork and tips on reducing your grocery bill, instead of a primer on recession-proofing your investing and and "everyday economics" tutorial on what hit your 401(k) will take if you drop out of an employer-matching program for a few years?

Fiscal fitness -- returning to the issues of time and money

How far will you go for a bargain?

My mom's grocery techniques involved a morning-long slalom course between no fewer than three different places on a good day. Mom's list didn't stick to the staples -- it had comparison pricing, an estimate of whether the savings would mitigate the gas used in driving around, plus coupons. Buy milk at Food Lion when it was cheaper at Shopper's Food Warehouse? Unthinkable!

Isn't that divine? Jungle red!

Last summer, our contractor's assistant broke my bottle of I'm Not Really A Waitress all over our bathroom. I've mentioned that our bathroom has a white tile floor, right? Anyway, he did a great job of cleaning up but I haven't gotten around to replacing the nail polish, reasoning that every salon in America should have it. Right?

Well, every salon except the one I regularly frequent for pedicures. Every time I walk in, I remember, Ah, yes -- I meant to go buy a bottle of nail polish. And then I forget until my next visit.

Anyway, two weeks ago, my friend Erin and I went for pedicures and I was briefly reunited with my one true red nail polish. I was staring happily at my toes and wondering if it was normal to be so emotionally attached to a specific nail polish.

Answer: yes. And I know this because I have now viewed a site that examines nail polish with the exacting ardor of the true aficionado. I give you All Lacquered Up, which is pretty much the only site you will ever need to visit if you are at all interested in nail polish. Michelle does fantastic product reviews and her scope of coverage is positively breathtaking.

I am always interested in people who feel passionately about something and develop expertise in it -- both what they know and how they approach their inamorata. If you love seeing enthusiasts in their element -- comparing 1000 different bottles of nail polish to explain how one line's new releases fit into their world, for example -- you have to visit this site.

Such a wasted opportunity

So the chance to pop on over to Hawai'i's big island has presented itself, and I'm super-excited about it, and one of the ways I am keeping my spirits up through the always-depressing month of February is by planning the trip. I am sort of familiar with Kaua'i, but I've only ever been to the big island once before and I can guaran-damn-tee you, we will not be staying at the Mauna Kea this time, so I'm sort of starting from scratch.

Although Bigisland.org has been very helpful, I am also looking for recommendations in re: specific beaches and what not, and I thought, "Hey, didn't Samantha Brown do a series, Girl Meets Hawaii, where she hit all the islands? Would not the Travel Channel website have links and information on this?"

Answer: the Travel Channel would not. If you use their internal search engine, you get nothing. I had to find the Girl Meets Hawaii page via an external search engine. And then, I just sort of admired the layout, because clicking on any of the links gives you a 404.

What is even more interesting -- albeit frustrating, if you, like me, have watched any of Samantha Brown's previous shows* and thought, "Hmm, I must follow that up online" -- is that the Travel Channel seems to be deep in denial that they've ever aired anything beside Passport to Latin America. I very distinctly remember Samantha Brown's Passport to Europe series. So did the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, what with them giving Samantha Brown an Emmy for the series. Yet if you go to the Travel Channel and type in "Samantha Brown Europe" in their search engine, all the results lead to you video clip links ... that redirect to a general video portal. I had to go to the Samantha Brown entry in Wikipedia, then to the cites at the bottom, to find this well-hidden guide to the series.

Sadly, the Wikipedia savants were unable to unearth similar gems for Girl Meets Hawaii. I went to see when -- or if -- the show was on, and the listings were, shall we say, less than useful. Also, they're inaccurate: a set for the new Michael Palin show Across the Iron Curtain was listed as Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.

The reason I'm so cheesed about this: because the Travel Channel is really screwing up an opportunity to grab loyal customers who will tune in to their shows and haunt their web sites. I think many food shows do it right. For example, if you're watching Good Eats on Food Network, you can then go to the site and easily find the recipes referenced in a specific episode. Watching hooks you; web-surfing keeps you coming back again and again. You begin to rely on the brand because you know it will deliver what you need when you need it.

For something like travel, it works similarly: watching gives you the enticing visual invitation, and web-surfing should give you the information you need to follow up and learn more. (Or book your trip.) Instead, the Travel Channel seems to offer very little support to its shows, and you end up with third-party destination guides that are nothing like what you saw on TV.

I know that different shows are created by different production companies. What I don't understand is why someone at the Travel Channel hasn't managed to get corporate buy-off on the idea that all its shows, past and present, should have some sort of uniform web presence. I don't understand why the Travel Channel hasn't managed to make "a well-supported show site" part of a standard contract with any production company. As of now, the haphazard travel information linked to the shows, the rotten search tool and the poorly-maintained legacy links only make me less likely to ever consider the Travel Channel's site as a resource.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to unwind by watching some Big Island web cam footage. I'll get my recommendations later.

Hot properties

So a few weeks ago, when the Simpsons did a parody of Noah Kalina's "Everyday" and used Carly Comando's theme for the movie, I was really excited for about twelve hours. A TV show! Using works generated online! What a great thing for people who have been creating and publishing on the Web!

Until, that is, I read about how the show had used the music without compensation. Within a few hours of Kalina posting this little tidbit on the Web, the matter was presumably on its way to being remedied but it still had me wondering, "Do some professional content creators think the Web's where you go when you want the work but you don't want to pay?"

If you read today's "Hey, Isn't That ...?" in the WaPo, you'll see that the answer is sometimes, "Yes." Here's the most intriguing part of the article for me:

[Lessig] says average individuals are increasingly thinking of themselves as artists, whose work has value -- or at least deserves respect. Lessig predicts that as the average Joes have their own material appropriated, it will eventually result in better behavior from both individuals and corporations.

I wonder if this will actually lead to a recalibration of expectations among professional content providers.  A lot of very smart companies will often buy a start-up because it's more cost-effective than investing the resources and time to develop a product themselves. I'm waiting for more newspapers and ad agencies to start striking deals with bloggers, video makers and Flickr prodigies who'd be making this stuff anyway.

Devaluing the word "literati" since 2007

I don't know if y'all have this weekend's plans set in stone already (hey -- maybe some of you have already had long weeks. It could happen!) or what, but if you're in the Bay Area and you're casting about for a way to spend your Saturday, come on out to the Alameda Literati book fair and writer's conference.

Extra bonus: you can see me in action. I'll be speaking on an 11 a.m. panel titled "The Blab on Blogging: How to Get Started and Where to Go Next." My co-panelists are Matt Holohan of I Fought the Law; Dan Brodnitz of Cecil vortex; and John Knox White of Stop, Drop & Roll. It promises to be an interesting mix, what with a smart lawyer, a vibrant artist, a civic activist and, um ... me.

This is going to be like the panel I did at last year's Flow conference, I know it. There, we had a boatload of PhDs and -- again -- me. And all of them were saying these fantastically insightful and penetrating things about HBO's role in the business and pop culture landscapes of television, and when it was my turn to talk, the first words out of my mouth were, "I'm just here because somebody has to stick up for Real Sex."

So come on -- you know you don't want to miss the sequel to that!

On a related note: there are other Alameda bloggers who don't appear to be speaking at the event but should be called out anyway. You've seen Lauren Do in the comments recently -- she writes Blogging Bayport Alameda. Ayse Sercan writes Casa Decrepit, which is a fantastic reno blog and an inspiration for my own gardening. And finally, two of the three bloggers over at the Oakland As blog Catfish Stew are Alamedans: Ken Arneson and Philip Michaels. So our tiny island is simply packed with bloggers. Awesome!

A first look at Second Life

Zo ...

Like any Gen X nrrd worth my [collection of O'Reilly books/1.0 Palm Pilot/sheaf of InterNIC registrations going back to the first Clinton administration], I read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and William Gibson's Sprawl series and some of Dennis Danvers' books (Circuit of Heaven, End of Days and The Fourth World). And over the last decade, I began to think that maybe, the point to VR wouldn't be that we would forsake the meatworld for the consensual pixellated one. The point would be that we use our online personae and activity to mediate the offline world.

So what to make of these articles?

In "Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?" (WSJ, Aug 10, 07), Ric Hoogestraat is devoting hours to his Second Life career, social life and virtual marriage to the exclusion of his life in Arizona. In "Even in a Virtual World, 'Stuff' Matters" (NYT, Sep 9, 07), people are recreating the consumer culture you can find offline anywhere (one person's acquired 31,540 digital items in 18 months -- it's a tidy industry, as profiled in the WSJ's Sep 22, 06 " Now, Virtual Fashion").

And then there's Good magazine's Nov 07 feature, "Get a Life," which gloomily notes, "The paradox of a virtual world is that it adds human interaction to the online experience, while at the same time making sure you never have to actually interact with anyone. Now, instead of merely buying a book on a website, you can browse a virtual bookstore along side other virtual patrons, without ever leaving your home."

I am sure there's more to Second Life than these three articles encapsulate. But they point back to my larger question: will virtual reality ever succeed as an alternative to the physical, face-to-face worlds we all mediate on some level? Or can we already be said to be living in virtual reality in the way we use blogs, mailing lists and forums to extend our social lives, in the way we shop online for offline goods, in the way we look for reactions online to process events all over?

"Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it."

This is one of the best pieces I've seen on why people stop blogging: "The Death of Blogs" (Christianity Today, Sep 25, 07). Then again, the guy who wrote it does the CT's blog, so he's more than familiar with the reasons people start and stop weblogging.

A lot of it resonates with me personally, especially these parts:

What tired bloggers are increasingly discovering, however, is that it's not necessarily the quality of their blog posts that matter. It's matching their quality with frequency.

[...]

When Catholic blogger Amy Welborn shut down Open Book in August to focus on writing books, she wrote: "I want to do good, and I want to do lasting good — the kind of good that people carry around, share, put on their bookshelves and reflect on — rather than the kind of good that sparks a momentary flash until we surf to the next website and the next and the next."

I don't view this weblog as doing good, per se (I feature occasional fixations on chocolate and monkeys, for cry-yi) but I do meditate on how to use a weblog as a means to a more lasting end, instead of making the blog the end in itself.

Oh, foodbloggers, a lucrative niche market awaits

Every Saturday, Phil and I head to the farmer's market and plan our menu for the week ahead. I use the word "plan" very loosely -- it's pretty much limited to conversations like "Look! Bok choy! Let's have that Thai beef salad we both like" or "I'm in a cauliflower frame of mind. How about that with some chicken? It'll be like the White Album, only on a plate." Then we head home with our produce and I feel like we're running an actual household like actual adults, and that feeling lasts through the inevitable mid-week working day when we drag in the door after 7 p.m. and realize, Oh, crap. Phil still has to make dinner.

I imagine it's this realization, multiplied times a few thousand -- that dinner must be made, not that Phil has to do it -- that has fueled a few interesting new business markets. Someone has to make dinner, so someone has to figure out what we're having, then prep and cook it. And it would be nice if said dinner was based in some part on ingredients that are not actively trying to kill you.

One attempt to meet this demand is the bulk prepare-ahead franchise. (See "Cooking Out, Eating In," CSM, Aug 19, 05; "Meals That Moms Can Almost Call Their Own," NYT, Mar 26, 06;  "Some Assembly Required," SF Chronicle, Jul 12, 06; "Make It and Take It," WaPo, Jul 20, 06;  "Putting a Trend to the Test," WaPo, Aug 30, 06) You still do most of the work, but you do it ahead, you see. And someone else has done much of the tedious zen-like prep work for you. Then you just defrost and cook things as needed. What you're paying for is someone else to come up with the recipe, do the ingredients shopping and knock off some of the tedious zen-like prep work.

I haven't been to one of these places, but it seems like the real allure is that these centers turn cooking prep into a social exercise: you can grab a few girlfriends, go make chicken casserole and gab, and a few hours later, you've managed to get some me-time in without an accompanying side order of guilt. The efficient Teuton in me thrills to the multitasking, even while the third-wave feminist wants to make sure that everyone's clear on how assembling meals with your girlfriends doesn't cancel the need for independent social activity outside the domestic sphere.

Anyway, the second market approach to time-crunched hungry people -- which I am simply fascinated by -- is the online meal-planning service.

According to what I just read in "Taking the Fuss Out of Meal Planning" (WSJ, Sep 20, 07), you can subscribe to a site and they'll send you menus and shopping lists for the week. You still have to do the ingredients shopping, the tedious zen-like prep work and the actual cooking. 

I can see where this would come in handy for someone who likes food but doesn't have the time or inclination to leaf through cookbooks to compile their own weekly recipe round-up and attendant shopping list. For the curious, the sites reviewed are: Relish!; Dinner Times; The Six O'Clock Scramble;  Dine Without Whine; and Meal Mixer.

What I'm wondering about -- mostly because I haven't looked -- is whether food bloggers have begun launching more tightly targeted meal-subscription services. You could do local-eating menus by region (or in cahoots with CSAs), or meals aimed at families dealing with different food allergies, or meals for vegetarian families, or slow-cooker meals, or ... well, you get the idea.

Living dolls

One summer in middle school, I chanced upon a Reader's Digest condensed books volume that contained a treatment of Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives. All you highbrow readers may not know this, but the RD condensed-books treatment not only slices-and-dices chunks of text, it adds in art, just in case you like your chapter books with pictures.

For the Stepford Wives, someone had done a little photography and created before-and-after human-to-mannequin heads for all the women who were killed and replaced with robots. It was nicely creepy, and obviously made an impression on me, because in the past week, I've seen two real-life photography efforts that seem to mirror the desire to replace warm humanity with commoditized perfection.

The first was covered last week in Salon's chick blog with the post "Airbrushing the Baby." I swung by Pageant Photo Retouching to see exactly what all the fuss was about, and got my answer on this page. I prefer the natural look but clearly, there is a market for people who want photos of their children to resemble those ads for dolls that run in the USA Weekend supplement.

Then this morning, I was looking at Valerie Belin's untitled 2003 series, in which she photographed living models to resemble mannequins. Again -- a little frisson of unease when I checked out the pictures. I suspect that Belin's making a statement about the artificiality of "beauty" and how commoditized our definitions are, how ultimately dehumanizing.

But what ultimately strikes me about both is how very female the photo subjects in both sets of prints are. We don't see little boys being retouched to look less human; we don't see male mannequins. In the case of the latter, I would hazard a guess that it's because most people don't regard men as sales accessories to the same degree that women are. It seems that ultimately, to be female in the Western world is to learn how to deal with the fact that your natural appearance is not publicly/industrially permissible in a way that men's natural appearances are. It will be up to you to decide how to deal with that.