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The Merchants of Cool
With their piercings, tattoos, giant shoes and sagging jeans, they're just
wacky-looking kids to you, but America's teens are walking dollar signs,
spending $100 billion each year on what's cool - and it's a moving target.
PBS' Frontline web site, Merchants of Cool, exposes how marketers track the
next big thing that will snare the teen dollar through interviews with
teens, media executives and market researchers and close looks at the role
of media giants like MTV to show how teens manipulate and are manipulated
by their own buying power. Go on a videotaped "Cool Hunt," join a
discussion or tour the landscape of cool. Then send your kids on the trip,
so they can watch for the culture vultures.
pbs.org
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Thinking in the Trenches
Technology, culture and the interactions between them, all delivered by a
community of people who like to think. That's what Kuro5hin is about, with
a tolerance for everything but garbage, mind noise and Microsoft "bug"
stories.
Hosts Rusty and Inoshiro write many of the pieces. The rest are written by
"people who are on the ground in the modern world and who sometimes look
around and wonder what they have wrought." Organized like a newspaper with
Op-Ed, Features, Culture, Media and News sections, stories are submitted by
readers to an open queue to be rated and sent into either expression or
oblivion. The site's motto tells it all: more "Freedom" and less "FreeDumb."
kuro5hin.org
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Breakthrough Books
Looking to stimulate your gray matter with something weightier than USA
Today in the new year? Check out Lingua Franca's Breakthrough Books, which
asks experts to recommend books that have defined a particular area of
thought.
The site covers broad territory, from aesthetics to neglected fiction, and
here the focus is on books about the media recommended by five academic
experts. No Danielle Steele in the list, the titles can be daunting, like
Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media - but you want a challenge, right? The entire archive of Breakthrough
Books is going online, and tempting titles can be ordered directly through
a link to Barnes and Noble.
linguafranca.com
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Old Computers
Think you've got the oldest computer on earth? Now you can find out - and
feel a little better about that upgrade you've put off. Old-Computers.com
depicts and describes over 500 computers, categorized by year, manufacturer
and alphabet.
The site traces personal computers from their introduction in 1973 with the
Micral, the first microprocessor-based computer, to around 1994. Anyone
remember the Apricot, or the 1980 SuperBrain? A message board forum
connects collectors and an online javachat helps visitors link to others to
discuss such topics as emulation and computer museums. Finally, a Fun
section shows goofy old computer ads, quizzes and the Hall of Nerds.
old-computers.com
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Source: tricksandtrinkets.com |
