The 2.D’oh! Weekly Round-Up: Vol. II

As we head into another weekend, let’s take a look at some of the more curious, conniving and craven developments in 2.0ville we’ve seen over the past week.

Sign Here–or Not

Now that online job listings have stolen nearly all the business from newspapers, they need to steal business from each other. This may explain why Monster.com has launched JOBsign, a masterfully twisted viral goof that invites people to answer a series of odd questions that ultimately cast them as one of eight well-known work types: The Low-Flier, the Bossling, the Cockroach, etc. [This will date me terribly, but the graphics and sound recall an ancient CD-ROM (remember when we called them that?) titled Freak Show. Or Myst, maybe.] Oddly, there is no category for Unfocussed Time-Wasting Cube Dweller, which may be the most fitting tag for folks who e-mail this to their friends.

Unsettling Media Trend of the Week

Women 45-54 will watch a total of 1,142 hours of TV, DVDs and movies in the theater in 2007, according to the Center for Media Research. Do the math, and that’s over a month and a half of 24/7 viewing. Women in that age group are the highest consumers of such media. Their teenage daughters will watch about only about a month of TV, DVDs and in-theater movies, the report states.

Newser Than What?

As part of a Wayback-Machine countershift to human-powered content-filtering (see also the dirty-hands search engine Mahalo), a site called Newser presents the events of the day as filtered by those with opposable thumbs. It hopes to become the first “real” news site native to the Web–news without newspapers (or broadcasters). The news seems to pass through some sort of algorithmic colander, after which humans pluck and digest selected reports into text blocks the size of playing cards. Click for a longer summary or the article itself; keep clicking to get related stories. At this early point the news picks seemed odd: Everywhere I clicked I felt like I was seeing that damn story about the French President visiting New Hampshire. (You call it news, I call it August filler.) Some of the headlines were so mundane they almost read like Onion satire:  Foreign cars outsell American models. Negin to Feds: Cut Red Tape. Bush Aide Stonewalls Senators. Truth told, the automated news feed from AP riding the right rail was far more interesting, with good follow-up reports on the Minneapolis bridge disaster. And I swear I am not making this up: As I was viewing the site it featured an article titled “Newspaper Editor Assassinated.” 

Running 2.0

RunnerPlus is a great example of a social network that has nothing to do with teens, geeks, predatory shagmongers or venture capitalists. It’s handsome and clean and lets runners post their training logs, shout encouragement, form clusters and so on. The crowd is international and at this point does not seem infected by product pimps. Coolest bit of tech: the runners’ logs. Click on the slider at the bottom for some pointlessly cool but understated animation.  

And finally, our weekly Noted Without Comment feature

http://www.brickfish.com/fashion/corsetdesign 

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