| | Issue #20.24 :: 06/13/2007 - 06/19/2007 | The Sopranos Sleeps with the Fishes
Also: YouTube is Fifth Most-Visited Web Site in the U.S.
| BY DAN COOK
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The Sopranos is dead! Long live The Sopranos! The popular and highly acclaimed HBO mob-family series ended its extraordinary six-season run on Sunday, and Associated Press writer Jocelyn Noveck reports that the series’ end already has fans divided into two factions. “One [group] was muttering bitterly into its morning coffee at the open-ended conclusion of the epic series,” she writes. “The other was lavishly praising the iconic HBO drama for capturing life’s essential ambiguity and disorderliness.” Regardless of one’s take on the series’ end, interest was unprecedented: HBO reported that its site crashed because of high traffic — 364,000 page views per second at one point. Despite the frustration of some fans at the series’ inconclusive end, television analyst Robert Thompson said that, in this case, creator David Chase knows best. “Every critic says this is one of the greatest works of art ever made for the small screen,” Thompson, of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, tells the AP. “You can’t second-guess the artist.”
Want to get literate on media issues? Look no further than local media education consultant Frank Baker, who has just been given a national award recognizing his innovative contributions to media literacy. Awarded by Cable in the Classroom in partnership with the National PTA, the Media Literacy Education award goes to “a leader who has advanced the teaching and learning of media literacy concepts and skills to children and youth.” (Media literacy is defined as “the ability to access, understand, evaluate and create media messages on television, the Internet and other outlets.” The award was given to Baker on June 6 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., who received it along with 14 other media leaders in the Cable’s Leaders in Learning Awards. To see Baker’s award-winning Media Literacy Clearinghouse, visit www.frankwbaker.com.
Why does everything have to be about YouTube? Because the video-sharing site is an ever-expanding cultural phenomenon, that’s why. (Alexa.com ranks it as the fifth most-visited web site in the United States.) In the latest evidence of the 2008 election cycle being affected by YouTube, CNN is partnering with YouTube and Google to present a Democratic presidential debate in Charleston on July 23. The debate promises to present the candidates with user-generated questions and videos, though the exact format is still unclear. Oh, and while we’re talking about YouTube, the site is also in the news because: (1) Country music publisher Cal IV Entertainment, which owns the copyrights to songs by Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, is suing the site for copyright infringement, (2) YouTube might be available on mobile phones by next year, according to co-founder Steve Chen, and (3) Thailand’s communications minister blocked access to the site in April because users had posted videos denigrating that country’s king. “YouTube is not a very essential Web site,” Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom told the International Herald Tribune, then asking, “Is it?”
Computer security company McAfee released a report June 4 that says AOL is the safest search engine around and Yahoo is the riskiest. The study looked at both search results and sponsored links, and it gave Yahoo the poor rating because of its sponsored links, a small percentage of which it found “are associated with spam, online scams, Web attacks, and risky downloads.” When looking at search results only, however, Yahoo was deemed safest, “returning risky links just 2.7 percent of the time,” according to an Infoworld.com article on the study. So, what’s the link between online liberty and security? AOL offers plenty of security, but its walled-off approach to the Internet is woefully short on liberty. If you value the freedom to surf your own way — and decide for yourself which sites are worthwhile and which are risky — then you’re better off getting good security software and using one of the so-called dangerous search engines — Yahoo, Google, MSN or Ask.com.
Media Madness is a column exploring web sites, TV, video games, blogs, books, media industry news and anything else in the media universe that strikes our fancy. | |
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