Thanks to the CW Network, blogging has officially entered the mainstream consciousness. Though we’ve been living with Gossip Girl and its anonymous author/narrator for a year, it’s been rather a passive relationship. With each fantastic plot twist the characters move further away from living underneath the Gossip Girl’s watchful keyboard. Or perhaps they simply don’t care, and the writers offer a subtle message through all the Chanel, leather, and lace: none of this actually matters. (Perhaps this is one of the many reasons the late-20s & up demo digs Mad Men? Remembering a world without an Internet [or barely any civil rights and social advancements] is perhaps the greatest escapism of all.)

Though Gossip Girl seems largely unconcerned about the impact of blogs, last night’s series debut of the revamped 90210 tows a harsher party line on the medium. In between the obvious and typical moral messages found in all teen programming (”Don’t do drugs!”, “Cheating is bad!”, “Be honest with yourself and others!”, all of which I might add are important, so don’t mistake this as snark.), it seems that blogging has joined the Greek chorus, though with mixed messages. In one subplot, Silver, who runs a Gossip Girl-meets-Perezhilton.com blog, eviscerates the new student on their first week, and a former friend on Week Two. And though that character seems be coming to terms with the realities of her online decisions, we’ll have to keep watching to see if she gives up the ghost.

If Silver’s blog is the bane of a 90210ers existence, why are the few parents seen in the series more up in arms about term papers than internet bullying? I get it though, why writers might want to paint negative portrayals of blogging and other uses of social media — cyberbullying happens, and we’ve seen some pretty grim examples of it, more recently the case of Megan Meier — TV is still strangely the dominant medium, a place where we take our cues from. It would be boring TV after all, if West Beverly Hills High opted to value a unique skill such as Silver’s and promote it as an equally positive value as singing in a musical (which they did), or playing on a sports team (and they did that too).

A couple of quick thoughts on the demise of Pandora and Muxtape… One’s a streaming suggestion service, the other’s a streaming personal mixtapes generated by user-uploaded tracks. Whether you agree with copyright laws, the impending royalty increases or not, the red flags were raised from the get-go. Apologies if this sounds jaded, but how could anyone be surprised by either?

Both services were curtailed so close together, so I’m stuck here thinking about other programs/services that allow people to discover music, and what choice actually means in the online world. Pandora promises discovery, but simply placates. You might walk away from the service with a song or artist that’s new to you, but it’s been channeled by whatever parameters a company musicologist may have assigned. So it’s “choice” based on the amount of times you’ve clicked thumbs up or thumbs down.

Muxtape attempts to mirror the intimacy of mixtape making. The workload is placed on the listener, and in the age of on demand everything [1], I’ve been pretty surprised by how the service has been embraced by folks. While the user might have more freedom in choosing whatever tape they want to listen to, the austere graphic interface of the site makes these tapes indistinguishable from one another, so the user is basing their choices off very little contextual information — so is a less informed choice actually a choice to begin with?

Maybe losing these services is a good thing, in a strange way, because it might provoke developers to design programs where the concept of choice is more fleshed out, and the final decision might actually rest in with the user. Didn’t Devo tell us we had a freedom of choice, or something like that?

[1] That’s a funny phrase, “on demand”, as if to suggest that we are entitled to all of this stuff.

I love to check the spam filter. Here’s three I found particularly hilarious today, causing tears of laughter that could only be stopped after 5 minutes:

Subject: Jesus Christ To Star In Next Series Of Batman
Message: Polar Bear Finds Yoga Great For Flexibility, But Murder On The Balls

Subject: Release Of The Nancy Pelosi Sex Dvd Causes Mass Erectile Dysfunction In Us
Message: Old Man Dies Inside Paris Hilton

Subject: Madonnas Former Home Destroyed By Jesus
Message: Bush Down to 8 Friends on Myspace

Really. This image might top the dream I had about my friend Dominic booking a concert with Steely Dan, Jandek, and Robyn.

I gotta give a small shout-out to the Gdowiks — without these people, Philadelphia wouldn’t be half as fun as it can be at times. My amazing friend Trishy, has entered the blog world again with Cities In Pixie Dust. As she puts it, “This project aims to be a visual storybook documenting cities — and the lifeforce and people who make them alive. The agony and the ecstasy. The beautiful, the mundane, the silly and the bizarre.” You might remember her old site, Groovelingo, which was one of the first sites in town covering music & arts in a quasi-blog form.

Trishy’s brother, Steve, runs Too Drunk To Blog, and it’s just as fun as the Dead Kennedys tune it references. Wii! Karaoke! Who needs to drink when you can do it vicariously through Steve?

This is a top notch post. Note to self: I need to post my interview with Sharkey and Chuck Meehan The Legend on here, like, tonight.

I think people are getting really stressed out about their “Best of 2007″ lists. Totally understandable — how exactly do you ordinate a year’s worth of experience? (If you’re anything like me and thought this year was a total wash, then it’s more difficult.) So I give you two choices to de-stress: WPRB DJ Jon Solomon’s “Enter Snowman” column or Crystal Vibrations. Both are win-win.

When I look at these, the first thing to spring into my mind is the Evolution Control Committee’s infamous “Rocked By Rape”.

From my pal Herbie (of Brown Recluse Sings):

vote here!

this is seriously one of the most hilarious things the internet hath produced recently. greenpeace put up a voting thing on their site to name a whale. and all the names are lame like ‘means “fighting warrior” in japanese’. the OBVIOUS choice is mister splashy pants.

please post this around! it’s already been on all the msgboards i post on … get it out there some more!

VOTE OR DIE, BITCHES. PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRAZY.

If Philadelphia’s as bad as we make it sound, why weren’t we placed higher in the new “Most Dangerous City” rankings? This what happens when questionable data is made available….

Experts say ‘most dangerous city’ rankings twist numbers

DETROIT, Michigan (AP) — In another blow to the Motor City’s tarnished image, Detroit pushed past St. Louis to become the
nation’s most dangerous city, according to a private research group’s controversial analysis, released Sunday, of annual FBI crime statistics.

The study drew harsh criticism even before it came out. The American Society of Criminology launched a pre-emptive strike Friday, issuing a statement attacking it as “an irresponsible misuse” of crime data.

The 14th annual “City Crime Rankings: Crime in Metropolitan America” was published by CQ Press, a unit of Congressional
Quarterly Inc. It is based on the FBI’s September 24 crime statistics report.

The report looked at 378 cities with at least 75,000 people and their per-capita rates for homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and auto theft. Each crime category was considered separately and weighted based on its seriousness, CQ Press said.

[...]

“Every year this organization sends out a press release with big, bold lettering that labels a certain city as Most Dangerous, USA,” Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings said in the release.

“It really makes you wonder if the organization is truly concerned with evaluating crime or increasing their profit,” said Bully-Cummings, who noted the complete report is available only by purchase. “With crime experts across the country routinely denouncing the findings, I believe the answer is clear.”

The mayor of 30th-ranked Rochester, New York — an ex-police chief himself — said the study’s authors should consider the harm that the report causes.

“What I take exception to is the use of these statistics and the damage they inflict on a number of these cities,” said Mayor Robert Duffy, chairman of the Criminal and Social Justice Committee for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The rankings “do groundless harm to many communities,” said Michael Tonry, president of the American Society of Criminology.

“They also work against a key goal of our society, which is a better understanding of crime-related issues by both scientists and the public,” Tonry said.

Critics also complain that numbers don’t tell the whole story because of differences among cities.

“You’re not comparing apples and oranges; you’re comparing watermelons and grapes,” said Rob Casey, who heads the FBI
section that puts out the Uniform Crime Report that provides the data for the Quitno report.

The FBI posted a statement on its Web site criticizing such use of its statistics.

“These rough rankings provide no insight into the numerous variables that mold crime in a particular town, city, county, state, or region,” the FBI said. “Consequently, they lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents.”

Read on for the whole article, as well as CQ’s defense of their report. Additionally, I’m just terribly amused that there’s a city police chief with the name “bully” — that must make for some hilarious local headlines.