Five years ago, Rupert Murdoch sat down at his computer and spent a few minutes watching a movie made by two journalism students. When he rose, he proclaimed that “he and his fellow newspaper proprietors risked being relegated to the status of also-rans if they did not overhaul their internet strategies.”

Then he bought MySpace and the WSJ. He also bought a locket with Matt and Robin’s picture inside.

But now, instead of following the clear lesson of that movie – that is, merging these two properties to make WallSpace? MyStreetLiveJournal? – he just might out-grey-lady the Grey Lady by contending to become King Cash on Paywall Mountain.

I wrote about Joshua Glenn’s new schema for generations a year ago – basically, Glenn’s MO is to toss out distended categories like “Generation X” for tighter, single-decade groupings with names like “Hardboileds” or “The Net Generation.”

That was at Brainiac, the blog for the Boston Globe. But at Hilobrow, Glenn’s still working back, decade by decade, which is especially awesome for 1) people who are geeks for the nineteenth-century, like me, and 2) all of us, who have a much less intuitive sense of generational changes or continuities the longer we look beyond living memory.

For example, consider the generation born between 1854 and 1863. Glenn calls them “the Plutonians“:

Pluto is the god of the underworld, and members of this generation

Some great ideas are sparking here, helped along by Robin’s notion of a “Starbucks API.” Noah Brier calls it a “physical API” (see also the smart comments) and Kit Eaton at Fast Company extends the concept (tongue-in-cheek) to Microsoft, Apple, and Twitter. But I like Drew Weilage’s proposal at Our Own System the best:

The idea: create a “physical API”… of the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic. Copy their entire way of doing business and paste it into hospitals around the country. In a nicely wrapped package deliver their systems for decision-making, integration, coordination, and expertise. Include their human resources practices, innovation efforts, and technology. Import their employment model, their bargaining power, and of course brand recognition. This is a beta release so if anything is left out, it can be included in a later version.

Mix with water. Implement. Poof! Great health care!

Just think about it, Local County Hospital, powered by the Mayo Clinic or Our Lady Health Care System, supported by the Cleveland Clinic; it’s a definite brand extender.

Seriously — this has, potentially, amazing public policy implications. My dad, who’s worked in the government for-practically-ever in Wayne County/Detroit (first at the jail, then in public health, then in lots of places), always used to stun his bosses, co-workers, everybody, because whenever they ran into a persistent problem or one they couldn’t solve, he would get on the phone to people he knew in Oakland County, or Chicago, or Denver, to see how they handled it, who would in turn refer him to other people, etc.

You can get these information bottlenecks even when there’s no competing interests, and nothing proprietary — it’s just hard (without an API) for people to know where or how to look.

Read more…

I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff; Regina Schrambling praises vintage stoves:

So many other essentials in life are clearly improved in their latest incarnation: Phones are smaller and portable; stereos are downsized to ear buds; cars are safer and run on less fuel. But stoves are a basic that should stick to the basics: The fewer bells and whistles, the less need for bell-and-whistle repairmen. Motherboard is not a word that should ever be associated with the kitchen—put computer technology in a stove, and you’re asking for a crash. Google “I hate my Viking” these days, and you get a sense of how many things can go wrong with techno-overload. Some of these ranges combine electric and gas elements, which is a recipe for trouble, as is microwave or convection capability. This kind of overdesign is what killed combination tuner/turntables—one goes, and the other dies from neglect.

I get kind of excited about things like self-updating blenders and coffee makers that I can control from my Blackberry, but there’s also, sometimes, something to be said for saying, “You know, I think we’ve kind of figured this out. Maybe we’ll work the kinks out on what’s next in another few decades, but until then, let me have my dumb appliance.”

This sort of dovetails with Michael Pollan’s essay about Julia Child and food TV — there’s something about the convergence of cooking with electronics that transformed it into entertainment, that elevated it into something harder than most people could or would do at home, that left us with celebrity chefs and high-powered gadgets and a vastly reduced proportion of us actually cooking anything on them.

Which in turn makes it harder for technology to help us – we’d have to actually KNOW what we were doing to actually make a better (as opposed to shinier, or more convenient) device.

I hadn’t really been following much news behind the Peter Jackson/Neill Blomkamp project District 9, but this is intriguing:

When its extraterrestrial passengers emerge, they are sequestered to a sprawling shantytown and shunned by even the lowest strata of human society. Amid an effort to relocate the creatures to a new camp, a corporate bureaucrat (played by Sharlto Copley) is infected with a virus that begins turning him into an alien, forcing him to confront his prejudices and his loyalties while he runs for his life.

If it all sounds like a science-fiction parable for South Africa

Now I don’t remember who pointed me to this; it’s been abandoned in a tab all day. Best NYT infographic I’ve seen in many a day: a visualization of how Americans spend their time, hour by hour.

Update: Just looked at my RSS reader, and now I remember who pointed me to this … everybody in the world. Geez.

Also from my I ♥ the Internet file, Kottke alerts us that the entirety of Paris Is Burning is available on YouTube, for the time being at least. It’s probably fair to say this documentary changed my life. Somehow, confronted with a culture too rich and enormous for the ghetto it’s been relegated to, the film manages not to gawk or exoticize or judge. Jennie Livingston takes the world of voguing and drag balls completely on its own terms, no small feat at the pinnacle of the AIDS epidemic in GLBT America. For a post-adolescent gay boy fresh out of Christian school, this was a revelation. I can’t imagine that most people wouldn’t find a completely different and equally valuable story in it.

We already know how much I love Final Fantasy IV and its immortal score. So even though this appeared on MeFi weeks ago, it’s clear that it would find its way here eventually:

The geniuses over at OverClocked ReMix have given FFIV the full OCReMix treatment — an entire album of Final Fantasy songs, re-imagined in something other than midi. My first love, the “Red Wings Theme,” has been transformed into “Full of Courage.” (Incidentally, I think “Full of Courage” is a very valiant attempt, but it sadly neglects the song’s longing in favor of its bombast; it’s like John Williams’ take on Nobuo Uematsu.)

The album’s available as a free download, natch. Let me say it again: I LOVE the Internet.

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading about autism lately, so this NYT piece on a slate of forthcoming movies featuring characters with autism or Asperger’s syndrome caught my attention.

But isn’t the great book/movie about autism really Watchmen? One character after another — savants, to be sure — driven by their obsessions, unable to make lasting emotional connections with other people, despite their best efforts to connect and identify with humanity?

From the NYT:

Lots of people seem to think Starbucks’ new “stealth stores” are creepy…

A Seattle outlet of the 16,000-store coffee behemoth is being rebranded without visible Starbucks identifiers, as 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea.

Two other stores in Starbucks’ native Seattle will follow suit, each getting its own name to make it sound more like a neighborhood hangout, less like Big Coffee, a Starbucks official told The Seattle Times on Thursday.

…but imagine that this was playing out differently:

What if Starbucks was offering up a Starbucks API—a set of hooks into a vast, efficient coffee shop support system with incredible economies of scale? You, the local coffee shop owner, simply plug in, and wham, your costs drop by thirty percent because you’re leveraging Starbucks’ insanely optimized supply chain. You can use as much or as little as you want.

The NYT cites the Huffington Post…

You can imagine where this un-branding campaign could lead. A little neighborhood burger place run by McDonald’s? A little neighborhood hardware store owned by Home Depot? A little neighborhood five-and-dime operated by Wal-Mart?

…and I find myself thinking, uh, yeah, wouldn’t that be cool? Swap out “run” and “owned,” and put in “powered” and “supported.” Wal-Mart’s back-end is as innovative and important as its front-end. Why not offer it up to indie retailers?

I know it’s a stretch, but consider the analogy: Amazon’s web services have been absolutely transformative in the startup world. You can store files and spin up servers without buying, or committing to, anything. It’s easy to try things and cheap to fail. The notion of plug-in infrastructures just as flexible for other businesses—real-world businesses—run by other goliaths isn’t unsettling. It’s exciting.

And yes, I realize that’s not what Starbucks is doing here. But it’s what they should be doing!