slantback.: Archive

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So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?

The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.

” —After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday’s Web Site | The New York Observer

Jan 27, 20103 notes

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Actual football played in a 60-min NFL game: about 11 minutes.

So what do the networks do with the other 174 minutes in a typical broadcast? Not surprisingly, commercials take up about an hour. As many as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps.

” —Gridiron time

Jan 27, 20102 notes

Jan 27, 20103 notes

Jan 26, 20101 note

“Great design doesn’t feel “intuitive”. It feels inevitable.” —Twitter / Steve Marmon: Great design doesn’t feel …

Jan 26, 20101 note

Jan 25, 2010

“Beyond the data, which van Quaquebeke and Giessner assert show that taller players are called for more fouls, they conducted experiments with fans in which they were shown photographs of a smaller and a taller player running side by side, pictures in which no actual fouls had been committed. Generally, the results show that participants are more inclined to anticipate the taller player to foul the smaller. The subjects anticipated a foul by the taller player, and, told that the taller player was on the ground in subsequent photos, believed that he had taken a dive, but when the smaller player was shown on the ground the subjects assumed he had been fouled by the bigger player.” —Refs Are Gunning for Tall Guys, New Report Asserts - Goal Blog - NYTimes.com

Jan 25, 2010

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A spokeswoman for Nielsen Media Research pointed to a study the company released last year that cited the peak hours for DVR playback. The late-night hours showed the highest percentage of playback outside the prime-time hours, with about 7.6 percent of playback taking place from 11 p.m. to 12 a.m.

…

Add to all the other issues the fact that Mr. O’Brien’s young fans did not really have to watch television to see him. His shows were made available later on Web sites like Hulu. And his best comedy bits would frequently be posted on other sites — and passed around by fans — shortly after they appeared.

” —Conan O’Brien’s Undoing Reflects Media Choices of Young - NYTimes.com

Jan 25, 2010

“will you have a jukebox in your diner? you pay a fee for public music. will you have “elevator music” in your supermarket? you pay a fee for public music. will you allow dancing in your establishment? if the answer is “yes” then you will pay an even HIGHER fee.” —?uestlove: all who want an explanation of the world of walk on music enter this post

Jan 25, 2010

Jan 25, 201079 notes

“I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” —Saul Bass (via marco) (via brocatus)

Jan 25, 2010283 notes

“Giving people a sample is a great way to hook people and encourage them to buy more,” said Suzanne Murphy, group publisher of Scholastic Trade Publishing, which offered free downloads of “Suite Scarlett,” a young-adult novel by Maureen Johnson, for three weeks in the hopes of building buzz for the next book in the series, “Scarlett Fever,” out in hardcover on Feb. 1. The book went as high as No. 3 on Amazon’s Kindle best-seller list.” —With Kindle, Publishers Give Away E-Books to Spur Sales - NYTimes.com

Jan 23, 2010

Jan 22, 20101 note

“Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends’ doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.” —MIT researcher David Dalrymple’s answer to the question, “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” (via chrbutler)

Jan 22, 201026 notes

“People started using Twitter and Facebook for direct messages instead of E-mail because they require less physical manipulations to send a message. Future web designers will focus less on surface design but on speeding up processes by cutting reducing physical manipulations. The best way to learn about speedy interfaces is to study everyday interfaces as doorknobs, drawers, shampoo bottles. Web designers need to learn more from traditional product designers.” —What’s Next in Web Design? (via iamdanw)

Jan 22, 201013 notes

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The ringtone business is beginning to slide, research firm IBIS World reports that Americans are going to spend $131 million less on cell phone ringtones this year than they did in 2007.

The culprit? Text messaging. Over the past two years the average number of text messages sent has increased by 266%.

” —Rise of Texting Leads to Fall of Ringtones | MobileBehavior

“Maintaining enough distance to permit a decisive break now requires more discipline than many people can muster, and a familiar category of relationship has become more widespread: those that one can never wholly embrace, but never finally refuse. This is wireless co-dependency, and the recovery movement potent enough to cure it (without insisting that its members unplug from the grid) has yet to come into being.” —The Sex Diaries - A Critical Reading of New Yorkers’ Sexual Habits & Anxieties — New York Magazine

Jan 18, 20101 note